Beyond Jeremiads: Fighting Racism

It was inevitable that capitalism would commodify anti-racism. That is what capitalism does with everything.

 

Anti-racism had fallen out of fashion with the election of Barack Obama. While our small, radical left continued to see racism as a scourge on an historically oppressed people, the media celebrated the individual successes of some Blacks as a sign that the barriers to progress were largely removed and we were entering what they wanted us to believe was a post-racial era.

The arming of witnesses with high-resolution smartphone cameras forced anti-racism back into the national conversation. Lurid, graphic videos of police violence against Black youth brought disgust into living rooms, as it did over fifty years earlier with television exposure of the horrors of the war in Vietnam. Consequently, anti-racism experienced a revival, with millions of people across the country and across many demographics raising their voices in protest.

Yet, some saw an opportunity to be seized, a chance for a career, for advancement in a newfound industry of antiracism.

Academic lust for attention-- for the “new” -- birthed the concept of “microaggressions,” the notion that the subtlety of manners, body language, and casual speech carry the germ of racism, indeed, foster racism. 

But microaggressions are to the “macroaggressions” of premature death, poor health care outcomes, grinding poverty, and the super-exploitation facing Black people as headaches are to terminal cancer.

The champion of microaggressions, the leading merchant of the commodification of anti-racism, is unquestionably Robin DiAngelo. Despite no outstanding history in the anti-racism movement, DiAngelo exploded on the national scene with her number one New York Times bestseller, White Fragility. Her book got her unlimited invites on the talk show circuit. And she promptly monetized her fame through lectures and consultancies. Her con was a variation on the “we are all sinners” motif of the holy rollers. Like the stolid burgher in the first pew who must be embarrassed into seeing his or her sinful ways, DiAngelo forces the most racially sensitive liberal or progressive to examine his or her record of awkward moments, verbal stumbles, and clumsy locutions to find that “we are all racists.” She is quick to point out that her exorcisms of microaggressions do not lead to redemption, but must be repeated again and again interminably.

I have written about Robin DiAngelo before, unapologetically excoriating her book, her sanctimony, and her vulgar commercialization of her bogus anti-racism. Now she has a new book, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People perpetuate Racial Harm, and is again making the rounds of the talk shows. Her recent interview on CBS This Morning was typically cringeworthy, citing racial social etiquette as though it were on a par with lynching. She recounts a story of a dinner 30 years ago in which she clumsily sought to impress African American guests with her own racial sensitivity, a gambit that she elevates to a major act of white supremacy.

Matt Taibbi tells us (Our Endless Dinner with Robin DiAngelo) that the new book is simply a plagiarizing of White Fragility, though I wouldn’t know since I refuse to add to the DiAngelo phenomenon by buying the book. Taibbi performs a neat piece of gonzo journalism on the book, mocking her self-righteousness and superiority with his usual sarcastic wit.

However, there is a problem with our shared disgust with DiAngelo’s hucksterism.

It is not enough to simply call her out. Racism is real. DiAngelo’s popular pseudo-anti-racism shields millions of people from an authentic confrontation with the raw ugliness of racism; it leads people to believe that the barriers to racial justice have been overcome, excepting interpersonal relationships; it spotlights feelings, emotions, sensitivities over the hard evidence of racial oppression. In short, Robin DiAngelo deflects attention away from the heavy material burden that racism actually places on Black people.

Unfortunately, Taibbi and others who correctly criticize DiAngelo’s peddling of anti-racism often fail to affirm the actualities of racism, the material consequences of white supremacy.

In the last few weeks, articles have surfaced documenting the scandalous consequences of material racism.

The New York Times ran an article on June 28 with the odd, provocative title Black Workers Stopped Making Progress on Pay. Is It Racism?. The heading was odd because the article actually documents that the gap between Black male and white male earning has actually widened in the last 50 years! When was there progress?

Black men, on average, earned 56 cents for every dollar earned by their white counterparts in 2019 when adjusted for unemployment rates, according to The New York Times. 

The pay gap has persisted for generations, despite the fact that African Americans have dramatically reduced the education gap. Liberal ideologues have long argued that differences in wealth and income are driven by educational differences. But that excuse for racism evaporates in the face of the facts: “While African Americans lag behind whites in educational attainment, that disparity has narrowed substantially over the last 40 years. Still, the wage gap hasn’t budged.”

The seemingly intractable wage gap of 20% for all Black workers when compared to their white counterparts has a name. It is “structural racism.” “Racism,” because it damages its victims profoundly and with long-term consequences. “Structural,” because it super-exploits Black workers, enabling a pattern justifying lower wages for all workers and to the benefit of capitalist enterprises. 

It might be asking too much for a white “progressive” like Robin DiAngelo to bring these facts before the audience that allegedly brings her three-quarters of a million dollars a year in lecture fees. Evidence of decades of cheating Blacks of fair compensation surely deserves as much attention as regretted words over a dinner at a nice restaurant in a nice neighborhood.

Perhaps DiAngelo also overlooked the life expectancy numbers that came out in the wake of the pandemic from both the CDC and The BMJ (associated with the British Medical Association). Not surprisingly, US citizens, in general, lost more life expectancy from our failing, for-profit health care system than did our counterpart countries with national or single-payer systems (“8.5 times the average decrease in 16 comparable countries..”).

But the dramatic difference between whites and Blacks (and Latino y Latinas) is a national disgrace. Where The BMJ claims that the average white person in the US lost 1.4 years of life expectancy at birth between 2018 and 2020, the average life expectancy of Blacks dropped 3.25 years (and Latino y Latinas by 3.9 years)!

Quoted by NBC News, Steven Woolf, who led The BMJ study and is director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, said “What I didn’t anticipate was how badly the U.S. would handle the pandemic… These are numbers we aren’t at all used to seeing in this research; 0.1 years is something that normally gets attention in the field, so 3.9 years and 3.25 years and even 1.4 years is just horrible,” Woolf said. “We haven’t had a decrease of that magnitude since World War II.”

Life expectancy for Black men is now just below 68 years (68.3 in CDC data for 2020). That means that the average Black male will pay into Social Security and Medicare and see little or none of the benefits, a cruel consequence of the racism built into a dysfunctional social welfare and health care system.

The gap in life expectancy between Blacks and whites is now 5.81 years! Whether it is racialized health care or impoverishment or some other inequality that accounts for this gap, the result is a national scandal.

But more significantly, these numbers underscore outcomes that are baked into US institutions and do demonstrable harm to African Americans. The US socio-politico-economic system systematically produces and reproduces material deprivations on Black people, guaranteeing a second-class citizenship for generations to come.

Television interviews, self-help books, book club readings, sermons, and jeremiads have little impact on these obstacles to racial justice. Shaming, cajoling, or sensitivity training will not break the grip of racism on the material condition of Black People in the US.

Instead, we must impose racial justice on our institutions. We must insist upon workplace representation that reflects our multinational, multi-ethnic society. Popular notions of education reform, elevating role models, promoting inspirational talks, or leaving justice to the market have shown that they will not work.

Every past effort to rectify the economic inequalities imposed by racist practices-- from forty acres and a mule to workplace affirmative action-- has been met with resistance from wealth and power. When the discussion turns to reparative racial justice, the DiAngelos of the world and their corporate promoters stare at their shoes. They would rather talk about racism than incur the economic costs that would come with restorative change. That might cost their bottom line.

Less of Robin DiAngelo’s hustle, more affirmative action!

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Whither the Democratic Party?

Thomas Piketty is widely regarded as the leading academic expert on income and wealth inequality. He is the best-known face of the participants in the World Inequality Lab, a far-reaching project tracking inequality broadly and historically. 

His book, Capital, brought him fame, based on a set of well-demonstrated ideas largely marginalized since the setbacks to Communism. For those who had been intellectually seduced by those setbacks, the notion advanced by Piketty that income and wealth inequality were produced and reproduced by capitalism, with rare, atypical exceptions, surely came as a shock. 

To the rest of us, it was not news, but good to see it stated in such a popular book. Usefully, Piketty backed his conclusions with massive data, both widely across geographical differences and deeply over historical periods.

Piketty’s book forced some liberals and leftists to lift their heads from the sands of reformism and identity-construction to face the reality of class and disparate class interests, though Piketty preferred quintiles to classes.

His research is empirically useful to the Marxist left, though analytically and theoretically thin.

Since Capital, Piketty and his colleagues have set out to restore the social democratic project, largely by proposing utopian tax regimens that have absolutely no hope of being advanced by existing social democratic parties.

Most recently, they have sought to apply their empirical studies and data analyses to understanding changes in the voters who support the various political parties and alignments. In a May 5th paper entitled Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages: 1948-2020, Amory Gethin, Clara Martinez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty argue that the traditional post-war left (non-Communist left) supplemented by new formations, principally Greens, have experienced a shift in support from lower educated, lower income voters to higher-educated elites (the so-called “Brahmin Left”).

The right, on the other hand, continues consistently to be based upon “higher-income elites.”

They see these changes as productive of “multi-elite party systems” in our time, replacing the older “class-based party system.” The fall in the voter-participation of the less-educated, less-affluent is seen as a sign that “socially disadvantaged voters understand that the parties have become elite parties”:

One possible interpretation of our findings is that left-wing parties have gradually developed a more elitist approach to education policy, in the sense that they have increasingly been viewed by less well-off voters as parties defending primarily the winners of the higher education competition.

The new political players (Greens and “anti-immigration” parties) draw upon the higher educated and the lower educated voters, respectively, according to the researchers.

In addition, they maintain that the new cleavages correlate highly, with a “‘socio-cultural’ axis.” Through education (“the key variable”), this axis “appears to be related to a large set of policy issues, including the environment, migration, gender, education, and merit.” “Western democracies seem to have shifted to new forms of identity-based conflicts in recent decades…”

To simplify the academic jargon, the policy changes seen in recent decades accompanying the development of multi-elite political parties are based on socio-political values and not economic inequality (Piketty would remind us that socio-political values have distributive consequences, but they are not driven by those consequences):

Conservative emphases include categories such as political authority, positive evaluations of traditional morality, or negative attitudes towards multiculturalism; liberal emphases cover issues related to environmentalism, the protection of underprivileged minority groups, or favorable mentions of multiculturalism.

The Transformation of the Democratic Party

Whatever else one might say about the World Inequality Lab (WIL) study, it is a refreshing departure from the hackery typified by the pundits in the capitalist media. It is certainly a step away from the skirmishes in the cultural wars, the cheap appeals to patriotism or the Founding Fathers or our shared humanity, the overbearing cultural smugness, and the other irrelevancies that substitute chatter for analysis.

However, Gethin, Martinez-Toledano, and Piketty provide only the fixings for a nourishing meal. As Piketty did with Capital, they persuasively expose trends in today’s political landscape, but present little explanation of their origins or meanings. They show that these same changes are afoot in 21 different countries, but offer a slender historical or socio-economic context for understanding or addressing those changes.

In the case of the US, those changes in the modern era have a history rooted in the contradictions of the two-party system and the crises generated by state-monopoly capitalism.

From its consolidation after the Civil War, the two-party system resisted change by appropriating the trappings of third-party challengers and cobbling together unusual, often contradictory coalitions. Negotiating the changing political and economic terrain while ensuring two-party dominance required deft shifts in class allegiance and party programs.

The Democratic Party response to The Great Depression demanded an unholy alliance between Southern conservatives, States Rights segregationists, urban liberals, the labor movement, and small farmers. Roosevelt’s success in keeping this unlikely coalition together, the ensuing myth that he “solved” The Great Depression, and the significant, but moderate reforms achieved before World War II gave birth to what became known as the “New Deal Coalition.” Its origins lie in reaction to crisis and the ensuing pressure of mass movements, though the Democratic Party reaped acclaim and unparalleled popularity. 

In Piketty’s vernacular, the Democratic Party became perceived as the left element in a “class- based party system.”

The contradiction between the progressive and liberal constituents of the New Deal coalition and the reactionary segregationists reached crisis proportions in the Cold War. The hypocrisy of US human rights sanctimony and a militant movement for racial justice strained the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition. 

The Democrats, under enormous pressure from an independent popular movement, resolved the contradiction by enacting legislation that broke with institutional segregation, a long step towards completing the bourgeois revolution in the US. However, the action cost the Democrats the loss of their Southern coalition partners.

The seventies brought defeat in Vietnam, an intractable crisis of inflation and stagnation, and a serious undermining in confidence in US institutions springing from the Nixon Watergate debacle and revelations about the CIA and the FBI. In this cauldron of instability, the Democratic Party sought to construct a new coalition. They chose James Carter, a Southern politician, as a presidential candidate, with the hope of winning back some of the lost Southern support. 

At the same time, the “New Deal” wing of the Party imposed one of the most progressive platforms on the Party since the Roosevelt administration. It was to be their last hurrah.

Carter won in 1976, but not because Southerners returned to the Democratic Party in droves; rather, because middle-strata and petty-bourgeois suburban voters joined the traditional urban base to move beyond the ugly image of the Nixon/Agnew/Mitchell era. The Democratic Party had found its new coalition partner in affluent, educated, largely white voters. 

The shift was a shearing away of voters who were formerly attracted to moderate Republicanism, but were appalled by the extremism of the Watergate era. At the time, commentators dubbed them “socially liberal, but fiscally conservative,” an apt description that fit their interest in civility without wealth redistribution.

From the 1976 campaign forward Carter repudiated the New Deal platform, and began the first steps of deregulation that became the signature of the Reagan administration. His notion of social welfare reform took shape as market-based, a foretelling of the future bi-partisan approach. And his attention to marijuana reform, gay rights, environmental concerns foretold the shift in Democratic Party policies away from “class-based,” economic equality issues towards “socio-cultural,” values-based issues.

By the mid-1980s, New Deal liberalism and its answers to inequality were virtually expunged from the Democratic Party. The 1986 Party document, New Choices in a Changing America, signaled the entrenchment of market-based solutions, competitiveness, priority of the private sector, job training and education, choices, and movement away from the redistributive, social program, welfare-economics approach associated with the New Deal. 

The faction carrying this forward was the well-funded, aggressive Democratic Leadership Council. This very neatly tied in with the new “elite” element in the Democratic Party coalition-- the well-educated, affluent, middle and upper-middle strata, courting and courted by the Party.

Traditional elements historically wedded to New Dealism-- labor and African Americans-- had nowhere else to go in a two-party system. And the Democratic Party leadership treated them accordingly. The Jesse Jackson primary challenges of the 1980s, though unsuccessful, sought to shock the Democratic Party into attending to the interests of the unprivileged, but most historically loyal constituencies of the coalition.

The Clinton Presidency-- dominating the 1990s-- put the Party’s new approach into action and represented the complete victory of markets, private over public solutions, and liberal social values within the Democratic Party.

Ruy Texeira and John Judis, two tenured members of the Democratic Leadership Council, with their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), assured the Democrats that demographic changes would redound to Party success, as former “minorities” would swell into a majority with time. And they clearly stated what had long been unstated: women, minorities, and the educated, affluent elites would constitute the ideal Democratic Party coalition and carry the day going forward.

The transformation of the Democratic Party was consummated with the election of Barack Obama. Consequently, the Democratic Leadership Council dissolved.

The realigned Democratic Party pays lip service to a shrinking trade union movement that has lost its political weight in retail politics, granting celebrity access to the leadership and spinning Labor Day homilies.

The realigned Democratic Party recognizes the growing importance of Black and Latina and Latino votes, along with the recognition of an ever-growing list of self-styled, non-traditional identities, emphatically patronizing, placating, and pacifying groups with tokenism and sanctimony. 

“Responsible” leaders are showered with position and respect, while the masses are ignored, their social and economic plight frozen in the grip of market forces and the false hope of moral uplift from “rising tides lifting all boats.”

The realigned Democratic Party fully recognizes the economic and political power of the upper-middle and upper strata-- the petty bourgeoisie. Democratic Party leaders vie for their votes by guaranteeing economic and social stability, personal safety, and the sanctity of property rights.

Where welfarism, poverty amelioration, and modest wealth-and-income leveling characterized the long-gone New Deal coalition, today’s Democratic Party coalition rallies around the interests of urban and suburban elites, what witty leftish liberals call the PMC (the professional managerial class).

In a study published in June of 2016, Stephen Rose found that a stratum, determined by income, that he called the US Upper Middle Class (UMC) had grown remarkably from 12.9% of the population in 1979 to 29.4% of the population in 2014 (and commanding 63% of all income!). This stratum is roughly coextensive by occupation with the PMC mentioned often by liberal critics of the Democratic Party. But, as I point out in an article from July of 2016, neither income nor occupation is determinative of class; rather ownership and relations to ownership of capital determine class position.

Nonetheless, both occupation and income correlate significantly to class position. Moreover, the important finding to note is the direction or tendency of income, occupation, and class composition. Clearly, the petty bourgeoisie has grown dramatically in size and economic power since 1979, a very ripe plum for the Democratic Party to pursue!

Where Piketty et al find fascinating correlations leading to interesting generalities, we now have the why and how that a study of history (the science of Marxism!) turns up. Together, they allow us to understand, predict, and critique the behavior of the Democratic Party, not as a random, unexpected left or right turn, but as a result of the logic of the two-party system and the maturation of state-monopoly capitalism.

Conclusion

The Democratic Party is not a progressive, liberal, people’s party that has drifted away from its moorings, as some would have it. It is not a political party that has been momentarily hijacked or diverted, as others see it. It is not a vessel ready to return to course under a new captaincy.

More than fifty years of devolution toward a party dominated by the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie does not suggest a reversible trend.

Instead, the Democratic Party has been transformed by the contradictions inherent in its construction into something entirely new. Within the context of the evolution of US capitalism, it has undergone a profound rebuild no longer capable of serving the interests of those who formerly found hope in its success.

Understanding this transformation explains why elements of the old coalition feel betrayed by the modern Democratic Party, choosing to chance a vote for newcomers, charlatans, and poseurs. 

Understanding this transformation explains why US politics are increasingly bitter, violent, and polarized. 

And understanding this transformation accounts for the negativity of Democratic Party campaigns: Democrats run against the evils of instability, change, and radicalism, not for anything.

Will the Democratic Party respond to popular movements in the future?

Of course. An opportunistic institution is nothing, if not resilient.

But it will resist change vigorously to keep its realignment intact and to continue on the same course, absorbing new movements and establishing internal stability.

With an understanding of its history and the confines of a two-party system, finding a road to social justice for working people in the Democratic Party is an improbable, if not impossible task.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Fight for the Truth on an Uneven Playing Field

Marx very truly said that the greater the development of the contradiction between the growing productive forces and the existing order, the more does the ideology of the master class become imbued with hypocrisy. The more the falseness of this ideology is revealed by life, the more elevated and virtuous does the language of that class become. (Fundamental Problems of Marxism, p. 88, G. Plekhanov)



It bears noting that the last time that the media and officialdom have taken unidentified flying objects (UFOs) seriously was at the height of the 1950s Red Scare. With batches of military screen shots of objects flying at hyper-speed, darting mysteriously, and astounding experienced pilots, and with the habitually sober and circumspect former President Obama endorsing the sightings, something similar to the mass hysteria of the Anti-Communist inquisitions may be afoot today.

In the post-war period, UFO sightings were a barometer of gullibility. But more importantly, for the sponsors of the Cold War against Communism, accounts of UFOs, movies about space invaders, tales of aliens among us, and a variety of other-world threats offered near-perfect counterparts to the fears mustered about the Red threat. Moreover, they served to gin up fear and hostility to the novel, the different, the “alien.” Whether the “alien” was extraterrestrial or ideologically different, an atmosphere of anxiety, distrust, and terror ensued. The return of Marvel “superheroes” signals a similar return to the “good versus evil” mindset.

Without International Communism as an immediate threat, the purposeful manipulation of fear for political ends becomes a greater challenge to the US ruling class and its elite circle of influencers. Nonetheless, it has managed to draw on fear of Islam throughout the early decades of the twenty-first century, abandoning their erstwhile fundamentalist allies in the twentieth-century Cold War against the Soviet Union, particularly in the war to thwart the Soviet effort to defend a progressive, secular regime in Afghanistan.

Turning on a dime, US rulers unleashed the same crazed religious zealots who were painted as terrorists after September 11, this time in Syria and Libya, painting the mercenaries as freedom fighters. Thousands of these mercenary zealots sit idly in camps in Syria guarded by another opportunistic US ally, the Kurdish self-styled Syrian Defense Forces, awaiting the call to destabilize another independent, secular country.

Today, Chinese efforts to neutralize similar fundamentalist attacks on their secular state are portrayed as oppression of an entire population, the Uighurs.

Through the twists and turns, the massive and powerful US propaganda apparatus shows its mettle. It is easy to underestimate the power concentrated in the monopoly capitalist media and its dedication to a narrow, uniform set of ideas, especially regarding any and all challenges to the smooth operation and dominance of its corporate counterparts (See John LaDue’s insightful video).

Despite the realities of FBI, NSA, and CIA mischief, the media corporations create a fictionalized picture of youthful idealism, diversity, and devotion to justice through television and film. Network television offers the masses a host of shows depicting dedicated public servants relentlessly pursuing evil-- a picture that whitewashes the truth of ruthless service to capital and empire. In the US, an entertainment curtain effectively descends over the truth.

Of course, flipping the truth is nothing unusual for US opinion makers. The news factories line up dutifully behind the campaigns to make heroes out of marginal dissenters in distant lands that dare to defy the US. The US security services honed these skills by enlisting liberal academics to elevate dissatisfied Eastern Europeans to martyr status throughout the Cold War.

Alexi Novalny, a Russian now well known in the West, enjoys this special status, despite the fact that the vast majority of Russians pay little attention to him. Yet if upper-middle class US liberals bemoaning his treatment would steal an hour from listening to NPR and search the internet, they would find that Novalny’s actual political views are most illiberal, the kind of views that would end their brunches in a shouting match.

Roman Protasevich, the hero of the Belarus “resistance,” has an even more sordid biography. His penchant for violating his “journalistic” facade and joining with Ukrainian fascists is well established, though largely unmentioned in Western hagiography.

It’s a curious oversight; Western admirers never ask how it is that these persecuted figures are able to travel extensively, maintain staffs, organize, and establish “independent” media sites, though they have no discernable means of support. Could it be that Western media, should they be interested, might be embarrassed to discover where the money comes from?

If UFOs and superheroes signal a new Cold War, there is no question who US rulers are targeting. The fact that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) escaped both the capitalist crisis of 2007-2008 and the pandemic relatively unscathed and now challenges or exceeds the US economically, has not gone unnoticed by the guardians of US capitalism. As the PRC economy surges ahead and the US economy is plagued by serious imbalances, the machinery of demonization churns out more and more outrageous charges.

Of the many absurdities-- technology theft, spying, aggression, human rights violations-- none shout hypocrisy more than the Great Covid Origin Turnaround. When the media sought to mock Trump’s outlandish claims, there was unanimity around Covid’s natural arrival; nearly all authorities attested to an animal-to-human transference of the virus. Trump was written off as a conspiracy theorist.

But with Trump gone, his “outlandish claim” has become a certainty; the US and its servile allies have now concluded that PRC irresponsibility, even perfidy, have created the Covid virus and endangered the whole world.

The mighty megaphone of elite propaganda can only engineer such a total turnaround in opinion by undermining the public’s capacity for independent, evidence-based thought. That they have done so is proven by the wild swing in popular attitudes towards the PRC. From 2002 to 2020, negative views of the PRC have shifted from 35% to 73% of those polled! In only three years (2018-2021), respondents who “feel ‘cold’ toward China” have leaped from 46% to 67% (Pew Research)! Cold War hysteria has successfully been reproduced.

Shamelessly, the liberal media denounce the sharp rise in anti-Asian hate, a product that they pretend they did not encourage.

Yet the ideological armor constructed by the media has weaknesses. Without Trump to embrace or despise, cable news television has suffered a collapse. May figures show that in the critical 25-54 demographic, Fox News fell 38%, CNN dropped 51%, and MSNBC slid 39% from a year ago. As former CBS CEO Les Moonves giddily said “It [the Trump phenomena] may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Consequently, media executives are trying to rekindle interest in Trump (he has his pants on backwards) or promote a new provocation.

One day, historians will recall, with some amusement and even greater disappointment, an image of Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, returning from a meeting with Elizabeth MacDonough. Ms MacDonough, a pleasant, youngish former Justice Department attorney, had just told the powerful Senate leader that the Democrats could not use a maneuver to bypass the archaic filibuster process and enable a straightforward vote to secure passage of the President’s tepidly progressive legislative agenda. 

Ms. MacDonough, the Senate “parliamentarian,” was never elected by the people; she bore no powers guaranteed by the Constitution, nor certified by the “Founding Fathers;” yet she could forestall one of the two or three most powerful leaders in the US and its highest legislative body from a democratic vote on a bill “...because it would change the culture of the institution…”

The media greets this outrage with a shrug, continuing to hail “our democracy.” As Marxist Eric Hobsbawn noted, the US is the only country in the world to make a fetish of the “Founding Fathers.” But the Founding Fathers never gave an iota of power or recognition to a parliamentarian. Instead, they granted the legislature the right to set (or change) their internal rules at will.

The picture of Schumer dejectedly accepting a decision by a petty bureaucrat would be hilarious, if not so tragic.

The fight against hypocrisy is an unequal fight, but a fight we must wage.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Chile, after nearly fifty years of despair

On May 15 and 16 of this year, the people of Chile began a process to overturn the nearly 50-year interruption of the nation’s social and economic development. With the election of a representative body to a forthcoming Constitutional Convention, Chilean voters may finally break away completely from the nightmare imposed by the military-fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet.

The Chilean military’s coup in 1973 broke what was then the longest streak of formal parliamentary rule in any South American country. The international left viewed the Popular Unity coalition government, led by the Socialist and Communist Parties and elected in 1970, as an experiment testing the viability of the parliamentary road to socialism. The Chilean ruling class and the US government also saw it the same way and were determined to crush it.

With the socialist experiment destroyed by the coup and fascist rule installed, Chile became a laboratory for the most aggressive policies of market fundamentalism: privatization, deregulation, and the absolute administration of economic life by profitability. Under the direction of the so-called Chicago School of political economy, Chile became the dream of die-hard free-marketeers: a veritable Hobbesian state-of-nature.

The experiment failed, by bourgeois measures and even more so as measured by every misery index of the people's well-being.

Tragically, the debt incurred in unwinding the worst aspects of the disastrous policy exceeded the debt incurred by the Allende government in expanding the social benefits of the people in 1970-1973.

Since Pinochet’s departure, Chile has been in a limbo between the restraints on change imposed by the undemocratic 1980 Pinochet Constitution and the pressure for democracy and social advance pressed by the social movements.

Finally, with the May 15-16 election of a Constitutional Assembly, and the opportunity to construct a new, progressive Constitution and move beyond the 48 years of retarded development and backwardness, the future of Chile appears brighter. Especially significant in this election was the strong showing by the coalition led by the Chilean Communist Party, garnering the second-most delegates to the convention.

While this is a step forward, one must never forget the costs to the Chilean people of nearly half a century of the effects of fascist repression and unfettered economic exploitation. 

And one must never forget the ugly, brutal role of the US government in destroying the Popular Unity experiment, a role that the US continues to play in undermining independent developments in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and virtually every other country in the Americas. 

Recently, a reminder of the sweeping, decisive, and unconscionable intervention of the US government and US institutions in Chile came from the records of a partisan of Chilean democracy, a first-hand observer and victim of the machinations of the shameful servants of US imperialism. 

Geoffrey Fox joined eleven other Chicagoans, including trade unionists Abe Feinglass, Ernie DeMaio, and Frank Teruggi, Sr (his son, Frank Jr was murdered by the Pinochet junta) on a fact-finding visit to Chile in February of 1974.  

Cramming interviews, meetings, and even clandestine contacts, the group experienced the full horror of the Pinochet butchery. As one military officer told them: “We have moved from the stage of mass slaughter to the stage of selective slaughter.” 

Upon his return, Fox penned a detailed, first-hand report of the findings. A vice-president of his own American Federation of Teachers (AFT) local, he naturally thought that the national union’s publication, The American Teacher, would be a ready recipient for an article chronicling the harsh fate of teachers under Pinochet.

And indeed, he was right. The editor, a long-standing defender of labor rights, David Elsila, gladly received Fox’s article and pressed for its publication. The article was typeset and all but printed.

But Fox and Elsila underestimated the reach of the Cold War anti-Communist consensus, from its core in the upper reaches of government through the security establishment, the educational system, the media, and the labor union leadership. The Cold War chill brought all of these institutions into compliance with US foreign policy goals (imperialist designs!). 

After purging the left from trade union work and expelling the left-led unions, the center-right labor leadership agreed to an unholy alliance with the US ruling class. In exchange for slavishly following, even promoting, US foreign policy, the labor chiefs sought to achieve an era of cooperation between capital and labor. It was a small price to pay for capital to grant nominal increases in wages and benefits, while getting labor subservience in quelling labor insurgencies in other regions of the world. Militancy and solidarity were surrendered for labor peace, a result satisfactory to both complacent labor leaders and the guardians of capitalism, but a shameful betrayal of the international working class.

No one personified this betrayal more than the assistant to the president of the AFT, Alfred Max Loewenthal. Nearly every AFL-CIO union and the Federation maintained gatekeepers to deny even a hint of radical ideology or militant action to appear within its bounds. More often than not, they were ex-Communists or Trotskyists, who bore extraordinary grudges against the Communist Parties and their left associates. They could be relied upon to vigilantly veto even a whisper of criticism of US imperial policy.

Most notorious of those was Jay Lovestone, an ex-Communist who parlayed his anti-Communism into the leading foreign policy advisor to the center-right in the labor movement and who constituted its conduit to the CIA. It is no exaggeration to view him as the leading Cold War organizer of the US labor movement’s role in its complicity with the CIA in resisting leftist labor movements throughout the world.

The AFT had its own gatekeeper in Al Loewenthal. He came into the labor movement as the leader of an anti-Communist local in the militant United Electrical Workers Union (UE). When a rival, anti-Communist union (IUE) was established to raid UE in the Cold War, Loewenthal enthusiastically joined, rising in the IUE hierarchy before escaping scandal and moving to AFT. 

Loewenthal became an important part of the AFL-CIO anti-Communist, pro-imperialist architecture, serving the notorious CIA collaborating AIFLD.

When Elsila dared to print Fox’s report in the AFT paper, Loewenthal was on it like the rabid watchdog that he was. 

In denying publication to the Fox report on the ruthless repression in Chile, Loewenthal explained:

In essence, what I have written is a criticism-- perhaps also a protest--using the Fox article as a glaring example of the injection of an ideology into A.T. [The American Teacher] which is at variance with AFT and AFL-CIO policy on a current matter.... Even worse, its publication would have made the A.T. the dupe of a Communist strategy on Chile and opened AFT to ridicule.

Elsila mounted an admirable defense, though to no avail. Anti-Communist hysteria always won out in the eviscerated, post-war, Cold War labor movement, as it often does today. He wrote in his appeal:

Fox is a reputable sociologist who has written studies on Latin America; he speaks Spanish fluently; and his trade union credentials include having been elected vice president by his AFT local. The goal of the committee was to determine to what extent workers are suffering under the junta and to report its findings. The commission’s report and Fox’s article are based on interviews with the US ambassador to Chile, junta officials, trade unionists, rank-and-file workers, and others. It is about as comprehensive a report on the status of things today in Chile as one can get.

Of course, none of that mattered to staunch Cold Warriors. Thus, the AFT joined, unknown to its members, in propping up a fascist dictatorship and in taking a stand on the wrong side of the history of the workers’ movement. The members could not be trusted to make up their own minds on the butchery in Chile. 

In place of a report urging solidarity with workers in another land, AFT members got another Cold War saga about Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident. Years later, after Solzhenitsyn was no longer useful to the security services, we learned of his ultra-conservatism, his disdain for democracy, and his anti-Semitism. Truth was sacrificed in the interest of US imperial objectives.

Fox and Elsila fought the good fight. Elsila soon left AFT to edit Solidarity, the newspaper of the United Auto Workers (UAW), a union with its own unpleasant Cold War legacy, but a touch more tolerance. Fox continued teaching and writing about Latin America and addressing other progressive themes: his novel on the Paris Commune will be out later this year.

Their story is more than an anecdote about the Cold War. It is not a reminder of the past; rather, it exposes the unseen mechanisms that constantly mesh and turn, burnishing a false depiction of US foreign policy while undermining the bonds of our common humanity. The same institutions that surrendered their independence, sold their integrity for acceptance in ruling circles, and stained international solidarity operate today in enabling US rulers to undermine social progress from Venezuela to Afghanistan and many places in-between and beyond. 

The dishonesty and ideological corruption that drove Loewenthal to serve the forces destroying Chile after 1973 are still infecting the media, the NGOs, the CIA-funded front organizations, the public intellectuals, the security services, the foreign affairs establishment, and, sadly, the labor movement.

The cost to Chile has been incalculable.

Now, maybe, the Chilean people can move forward again.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Sacrificed at the Altar of Democratic Party Fealty

The COVID pandemic called into question many of the deeply held, foundational beliefs of twenty-first century capitalism. “Universal truths” like the efficacy of just-in-time production, the sanctity of fiscal restraint, the necessity of balanced budgets, and the sin of direct cash handouts were either shattered or unceremoniously discarded. For those able to think beyond the reformist box, the global pandemic challenged the very legitimacy of capitalism.

But perhaps the greatest myth-busting consequence of COVID was the mirror it held up to the US healthcare system or, more accurately, the US health consumer/insurance industry. 

Of course, most US citizens have long expressed a preference, when properly asked, for a universal system shorn of private insurance, like the original Medicare or a publicly financed, executed, and administered system like the Veterans Administration healthcare system.

It is no secret that, despite widespread support, the US public has been denied its choice by politicians shamefully influenced by the campaign contributions, the intense lobbying, and out-and-out graft of profit and “non-profit” networks, insurance and drug companies, and the political heft of others parasitic on a profit-driven system. While the public surely deserves better, it is mired in a system of increasing complexity, blind, confusing choices, and unfettered cost increases. 

The hucksters of private initiative, competition, and choice never explain that profit-seeking always produces and reproduces deception, consumer uncertainty, and unequal outcomes. They have argued persistently against reform because it would reduce the choices available to the “consumer.” This free-market hocus-pocus remains the default argument of the healthcare industry. But they curiously abandon their commitment to real choice when it comes to the Medicare-for-All option. That choice is foreclosed.

So, when the COVID virus struck the US, the ensuing rapid spread of cases, the shortage of hospital facilities, staff, and equipment, and the obscene rise in deaths exposed the lack of a comprehensive, universal, people-first public health system. States scrambled to find individual solutions to common problems; political calculations overrode human suffering; finger-pointing abounded; and states, municipalities, and systems hoarded scarce resources. Waves of new infections overwhelmed the patchwork, disorganized, and incoherent free-market approach.

Thus, a great opportunity was presented by the catastrophic COVID response of the richest country in the world, an opportunity to popularize the advantages of alternatives to an unpopular, failed system clung to by corrupted politicians and profiteers. 

Indeed, many in the single-payer, Medicare-for-All movement seized this tragic, but instructive moment. Many wrote, spoke, and organized around the devastating failure of private, competitive, profit-driven healthcare options. If anything good could come out of an embarrassing systemic failure, they argued, it would be that it underscored the need to move to a national system of universal and comprehensive healthcare delivered equally to all.

But political opportunism infected far too many who saw a chance to link the COVID catastrophe solely to Donald Trump, rather than lay it at the doorstep of a failed system. Of course, it is possible to heap some blame, a lot of blame on Donald Trump while indicting the system as well. Unfortunately, the crushing imperatives of the two-party system and the emotionally unhinged determination to eliminate Trump at all costs came at a price: the systemic failure of the existing, profit-before-people model and its needed replacement were pushed to the neverland of empty promises. The failure to combat COVID was firmly attached to Donald Trump. 

Blind loyalty to the Democratic Party has overshadowed any commitment to principle. Similarly, the fetish of personality, of form over content, has disabled the advancement of issues. Insofar as Trump was a creep, it was more important to heap blame on him for any and every failure of the system. The movement for single-payer was one of many casualties of this everything-and-everybody up against Trump. 

It is a lazy opportunism to attribute long-standing policy failures, like that of the Rube Goldberg US healthcare system, solely to an unhinged blowhard like Donald Trump. A conventional Democrat (like Andrew Cuomo) would (and did!) fare little better within the disastrous US model. 

Thus, any momentum gained by the COVID catastrophe’s discrediting of the US health-service industry is lost to the exigencies of the Democratic Party. We’ve gotten rid of Trump, but we’re stuck with a President who has declared that there will be no change to a universal system on his watch.

Meanwhile, capitalism’s champions are tirelessly carrying forward the fight to defend the for-profit system. Niall Ferguson, the popular conservative public intellectual known for his staunch defense of the British Empire, has written an essay published in The Wall Street Journal, arguing that had only the politicians taken the same tact as their counterparts did with the 1957 “Asian” flu, the US would have had far better outcomes (Ferguson is famous or infamous for his counterfactual histories).

Buried among a barrage of seemingly disconnected data and slippery comparisons is his thesis: “In 1957, the U.S. rose to the challenge of the ‘Asian flu’ with stoicism and a high tolerance for risk, offering a stark contrast with our approach to Covid-19.” 

Ferguson’s recipe of benign neglect (“Eisenhower did not declare a state emergency. There were no state lockdowns and… school closures.”) stands in stark contrast to his detailed touting of the speedy, efficient development of a vaccine in 1957. He feels no logical discomfort in hailing personal risk-taking and institutional diffidence while, at the same time, praising the government’s speedy, effective vaccine development as significant for success in 1957!

We learn that the hospital-beds-per-thousand-people ratio was at an all-time high (9.18 per 1000) in 1957, over three times greater than in 2020. Ferguson also credits this far-greater capacity decisively to the ‘success’ of 1957. Yet he surely knows that it was his beloved Thatcher (and Reagan) who fueled the market fundamentalism behind the shrinkage of available hospital beds in the interest of capitalist ‘efficiency’ and profit. 

Bathed in nostalgia for the fifties (Elvis, teenage boomer affluence, the Beat generation), Ferguson constructs an idealized world of minimal government, stolid Republican leadership, Cold War smugness, and ethnic hierarchies fearlessly confronting a pandemic and offering an alternative (counterfactually) to our own COVID experience.

If Ferguson’s fantastic, idealized model for confronting a deadly pandemic is the best that the left has to fear, then it has little to fear from his conservative ideological corner.

But the opportunism of the center-left is a huge barrier to securing a rational, universal healthcare system. Indeed, crass calculation infects the behavior of the ‘practical’ left on all issues. By answering every call of the Democratic establishment to put aside a burning issue in order to secure the victory of a ‘winning’ candidate, they guarantee that the burning issue becomes a forgotten issue.

Understandably, mass sentiment may run counter to majority interests, given that the masses are constantly bombarded with fast-food news and conformist commentary on media networks. But there is nothing understandable about liberals and ersatz socialists who willingly defer pressing vital initiatives to the service of a soulless Democratic Party. 

With Trump, it was the politics of tone that captured the attention of the center-left and drew its scorn. Beneath his outrageousness and his dismissive violation of political etiquette, there was little more than another pamper-the-rich tax scheme and bilious rhetoric. The ship of state continued on course, serving the rich and powerful, overfeeding the military-industrial complex, and terrorizing any country that defies US dominance. 

And now with Biden, the ship continues with a new pilot, but essentially on the same course. Certainly, there are adjustments, less bluster, less vulgarity. But that only boosts the politics of tone.

Yes, Biden has projected some ambitious, useful, and large-scale initiatives, but with the condition that he must achieve agreement from some of his Republican counterparts. The belief in such a rapprochement is either naive or a calculated ruse. As fear of inflation mounts, the retreat from ambitious action will accelerate. Biden is the new Obama, not the new FDR.

Allowing the Democratic Party to hold good, power-shifting, life-changing initiatives hostage to electoral success is a strategy that has not and will not work for the good of the people. 

History teaches many lessons; we can’t afford to continue to ignore them.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com