Nine into Two: The Failure of the US Two-Party System

When the so-called “Founding Fathers”-- the elites who constructed the US republic-- unfolded their unique vision of republicanism and political decision-making, they went long on stability and continuity and short on broad participation and social change.

Accordingly, most of them opposed political factions or parties, but very soon after the new government came into existence, major differences arose, leading to factions and swiftly into parties.

Predictably, the break in unanimity came with the formation of two parties, in the US, a Federalist and an anti-Federalist party.

But what is truly remarkable is that subsequent political differences in the US have been contained by only two parties for over two centuries. In most countries that embrace a parliamentary system, political parties emerge with the development of social classes and distinctive social strata. 

Further, as social classes generate internal differences, they too spawn new parties. In addition, religious, regional, and economic differences have generated distinctive political parties.

This is the pattern that exists throughout the advanced capitalist countries, creating multi-party parliaments as a commonplace. But not in the US.

Where there have been emergent third or fourth parties, the two parties have either placed insurmountable obstacles in their way or absorbed their political identity.

Stunted class consciousness, illusions of social mobility, perceived opportunities afforded by an expanding frontier, and entrenched loyalties are among the many factors securing a two-party system. The distractions of wars and conflicts, demanding unity and stability, have also played a role in preserving the two-party system.

In truth, the US ruling class has won a remarkable achievement in maintaining an electoral vessel filled to overflowing with diverse, incompatible interests. When will that vessel fracture?

A Pew Research Center study enlisting over 10,000 respondents in a political typology study, the most robust of those conducted by Pew since 1987 suggests a possible answer. What they found bears directly upon the validity and viability of the-two party system. In the words of the study, “...the gulf that separates Republicans and Democrats sometimes obscures the divisions and diversity of views that exist within both partisan coalitions – and the fact that many Americans do not fit easily into either one.”

Researchers found clusters of political attitudes that define independent voter perspectives that are hard to coexist comfortably in the two existing parties. They identify the following clusters and their respective percentages of the population:



It should be noted that these clusters are constructed from answers to questions that were posed to those participating in the survey. Thus, they are biased by the researchers' preconceived notions of the issues that they believe divide the US. Nonetheless,they do identify potential factions that coexist uneasily in both parties.

So we find that Pew identifies eight significant factions-- four that tend to vote Democratic and four that vote Republican (with stressed sideliners representing disinterested, disgusted, less frequent voters)-- funneling their votes into two electoral vehicles that cannot possibly represent them all adequately!

Moreover, the conventional illusion that each of the two parties represent a consistent, shared ideology obscures the many possibilities of creating useful coalitions or alliances in moving politics out of the stagnation and ineffectiveness of the US system.

Just to mention one of the insights to be drawn from the Pew study: [Members of the] "...Populist Right hold highly restrictive views about immigration policy and are very critical of government. But, in contrast to other parts of the GOP coalition, their criticism extends well beyond government to views of big business and to the economic system as a whole: 82% say that large corporations are having a negative impact on the way things are going in the country, and nearly half support higher taxes on the wealthy and on large corporations." In addition, more than any other group, they believe that they have been left behind. They also share with the left, the view that profits are too high.

While they share many left views that might be the basis for a tentative or calculated alliance with left forces, any such approach has been hysterically denounced by the liberal media, political purists, and smug elitists as consorting with evil, those who Hilary Clinton famously called "the deplorables".

If we were to burrow even deeper than the Pew topology and examine class differences-- and even more tellingly, various class ideologies-- it would become apparent that the two-party framework would fail abysmally in giving voice to the broad spectrum of political opinion characteristic of a modern, advanced capitalist state. In that regard, the two-party framework is a hindrance to democracy and neither a vehicle for nor exemplar of democratic decision-making.

Apart from its failure to capture ideological diversity, the two-party system encourages conformity on issues that are easily susceptible to patriotic or nationalistic zeolatry-- foreign policy, the military, loyalty, etc. Politicians in a two-party system dare not allow the other party to challenge them on these matters.

Consequently, we have two-party conformity on the “evils” of such diverse nations as Russia, PRC, Iran, DPRK, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, and others, who share only one common feature-- they are made a target by our two-party dominated government. 

Nor do politicians of each party dare to question the glory or budgets of the military, the FBI, the CIA, etc. for fear that they will be called out by zealots in the other party-- again, a demonstration of the surfeit of democratic debate in a two-party parliamentary system.

Pepsi or Coke, Yankees or Blue Jays, ketchup or mustard are frivolous, but harmless choices. Democrat or Republican-- in the crises before us-- too often becomes frivolous as well, but increasingly harmful.

Unfortunately, too many people have invested heavily in their respective parties, succumbing again to empty, cynical promises like Obama’s risible “hope and change” slogan in our day. No amount of disappointment can seemingly separate the act of faith that cements voters to the two-parties. The prior investment in the Democratic and Republican parties generates what economists call the “sunk cost fallacy”, the idea that too much has been expended on the respective parties to jettison them now.

But it is a fallacy and until we learn to break away from the irrationality of the two-party charade, the Democratic Party will be an obstacle to the kind of changes that we desperately need to make.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

When Have We Seen this Before?

Fifty years ago, global capitalism came to a crossroads. The enormous costs of the US’s long, costly Asian war produced great debt and pressure on the gold-backed US dollar. The imperialist alliance with Israel brought a disruptive, unprecedented boycott on the part of the oil-producing nations resisting Israel’s occupation of Arab territories. Intense competition between the dominant US economy and the resurgent Euro-Asian economies was shrinking profit margins. Traditional macroeconomic tools failed to meet the challenges of this new situation. The ensuing crisis came to be called the era of stagflation-- stagnant economic growth coupled with persistent, intractable inflation.

Stagflation persisted through most of the decade and ended with shock therapy-- a radical dose of deregulation, privatization, and market fetishism, a regimen of austerity now prescribed by all mainstream parties.

The crisis of the 1970s bears some similarities with today’s turmoil.

The pandemic, like the oil crisis, has shocked the global economy. The US economy and subordinate economies have been running on the fumes of fiat money and central bank stimulation, exposing remedies that are losing their effectiveness. Despite the lack of even phantom existential threats, the US has conjured costly foreign adventures and an extraordinarily wasteful and large military budget and “security” spending, crowding out social spending and amplifying national indebtedness. Commodity scarcity generates rising prices. And both slow growth and inflation are now reappearing and promise to continue.

Does this mean that we are bound to relive the crisis of the 1970s? Are we seeing a replay?

Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. But we would be foolish not to study the 1970s to distill the lessons that might apply to today.

Despite the admonitions of the central bankers and financial gurus, inflation seldom self-corrects. It rarely runs its course. Instead, inflation tends to gather momentum because all the economic actors attempt to catch up and get ahead of it.

In the 1970s, it was popular with the capitalist media to blame workers who were demanding cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to ward off inflation. “Greedy” unions, welfare, senior, and disability advocacy organizations were claimed as the causes of inflation’s persistence and deepening.

Cynically, all were asked to sacrifice equally, while it was monopoly corporations that were raising the prices that constituted the core of inflation. They were using “catching up” as an opportunity to “profit up.” Under the guise of responding to inflation, dominant corporations raised prices beyond their growing costs to expand their profit margins.

Unlike monopoly corporations, small businesses were limited in their ability to raise prices because of intense competition. They were caught in a profit squeeze between their need to remain competitive and the grinding increases in their costs of doing business. They are especially victimized by inflation.

At the same time, inflation cheapened the value of debt, especially corporate debt, while choking new consumer debt with high interest rates.

Today, rising prices are eating up workers’ gains just as they did in the 1970s. Let the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) explain it: “From April 2020 to March 2021, the 12-month changes in real average earnings were all increases, between 4.0 percent to 7.4 percent. Prior to that, from January 2017 until March 2020, the over-the-year change in real average weekly earnings ranged from −0.5 percent to 2.0 percent.” But: “Real average weekly earnings of employees on private nonfarm payrolls decreased 1.6 percent from October 2020 to October 2021. In every month from April 2021 to October 2021, the 12-month changes in real average weekly earnings have been decreases, ranging from −0.8 percent to −2.6 percent” [my emphasis].

In other words, real average weekly earnings exploded with the labor shortages induced by the pandemic, but they were wiped out by the five months of over 5% inflation culminating in the 6.2% rise in October, a 31-year high.

It is not workers’ wages that are driving inflation, but something else.

In a revealing article, The Wall Street Journal exposes the real cause of escalating inflation. Inflation Helps Boost Profit Margins: Companies seize rare opportunity to increase prices and outrun their own rising costs [print edition] tells that “[n]early two out of three of the biggest U.S. publicly traded companies have reported fatter profit margins so far this year than they did over the same stretch of 2019… Nearly 100 of these giants have booked profit margins-- the share of each dollar of sales a company can pocket-- that are at least 50% above 2019 levels” [my emphasis]. The authors note: “Executives are seizing a once in a generation opportunity to raise prices…”

It is apparent from this candid article that monopoly capitalism is leading this profiteering. And it is important to recognize that this profit-taking has and will continue to fuel inflation. Once again, the commanding heights of the US economy-- the monopoly corporations-- are using the excuse of catching-up to profit-up.

If history’s repeat is not to be farcical, the workers’ movement must avoid the mistakes of the 1970s. It must fight against monopoly price increases and not join the purveyors of common sacrifice, like the silly WIN (Whip Inflation Now) campaign of that period.

The workers’ movement must not follow its false partner, the Democratic Party, down the road of wage and benefit restraint. The inflation-directed restraint of the 1970s gave way to the give-backs of the 1980s and 1990s.

Workers must understand that inflation is not a self-inflicted wound, but a feature of the capitalist system, especially in its finance-dominated, monopoly stage. And it must be contained by attacking the profit-taking that spurs the inflationary spiral.

Further, the working class must bring this understanding to the frightened petty bourgeoisie who feel threatened and are threatened by the scourge of inflation, a stratum that otherwise turns in great numbers to the extreme right for answers.

Of course, this task would be made easier if we had a robust Communist movement in all of the capitalist countries.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Bad Ideas

History is a corrective of ideas, serving as a reality check on intellectual inflation. Sometimes it takes years, decades, even centuries for big, even not so big ideas to be properly deflated.

I remember fondly many heated arguments with the late Fred Gaboury, a former union logger from the Northwest, who became an organizer for Trade Unionists for Action and Democracy, editor of Labor Today, and World Federation Trade Union representative to the United Nations. Fred was a serious thinker in ways that many of his contemporaries missed.

When the Eurozone-- the European monetary union-- was about to be established, I argued that between nationalism and uneven European development, a common currency was not sustainable. Posthumously, I conceded to Fred. But, today, there is plenty more reason to doubt the Eurozone’s future sustainability. History has yet to speak definitively.

As a retired worker, Fred followed trends in production and distribution closely. Me, not so much. When business writers began to herald modularization and just-in-time inventory production, Fred saw it as the next big thing, a profit-driven structural adjustment set to change the course of global capitalism.

With my usual knee-jerk skepticism, I argued that it was just a passing gimmick, something for the TV pundits to talk about. In any case, I argued, it would prove to be unworkable and ultimately disruptive to the production process.

Decades later, it seems that I was both wrong and, possibly, right. 

Wrong, because just-in-time distribution became a dominant mode with global supply chains. Virtually all production and distribution organized by monopoly capitalist enterprises moves product through their processes with none of the traditional back-up supply. There are no full-to-capacity warehouses filled with widgets for “just-in-case” scenarios or unanticipated short falls. That thinking has been rendered obsolete.

For the most part, the system works well, saving monopoly capitalism billions in costs. It works… until it doesn't!

History is speaking.

The pandemic brought the “efficient” system to its knees, demonstrating just how fragile this big idea actually is. The disruptive factor of massive layoffs, consumption declines, volatile production, and unanticipated imbalances today make lean production and instantaneous distribution look like genuinely bad ideas.  

Just-in-time has been replaced with never-in-time, as bottlenecks, late arrivals, and displacements choke off consumption. 

Shortages abound. Capitalist markets respond to shortages with higher prices. But it is not only material commodities, but also labor “commodities” that are in short supply and commanding higher “prices.” Labor costs rose by 8.3% in the 3rd quarter of 2021 (reflecting a 2.9% increase in hourly compensation and a 5% decrease in labor productivity, due largely to longer hours from the existing workforce). 

Workers sent home over the pandemic have been reluctant to return to work, whether it is from fear of infection, withdrawal from the rat race, or a sophisticated understanding of the gains possible from the withholding of labor. The result is a competition for labor, with capital offering bonuses, benefits, and higher wages to entice a shrunken labor market.

Labor compensation is now breaking through imagined barriers that restricted hourly wages to near flat growth for nearly half a century in the US and sapped the political will to advance the minimum wage.

One can only hope that the complacent, risk-averse labor leadership will learn a valuable lesson about the advantages of workers withholding their labor, a grand idea that deserves to be revisited.

While it is true that union workers are also on strike for better compensation (though with a frequency and volume well below that of a few years ago), it is clear that labor’s top leadership is cheering union militancy from the sidelines. 

Despite the assurances of those who believe that inflation is a thing of the past, manageably through Central Bank manipulation, rising prices have returned, and returned with a vengeance. 

After a long period of rescuing deflated financial values with central bank purchases of overvalued assets, after a lengthy regimen of ultralow interest rates designed to provide nearly free money to reviving risky or marginal investments, funding mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, and open-ended SPACs, and generally overcoming post-crisis inertia, the central banks have seemingly overshot their targets.

They have overloaded a deflated and deflationary economy. October’s inflation rate of 6.2% reached a thirty-one-year high, topping 5% for the fifth straight month.

Put simply, the effort by central banks to energize a sluggish economy has created inflation, amplified by supply shortages and a labor force growing at a snail’s pace.

Those living below the highest quintile-- the home of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie-- are seeing any material gains from worker’s advantages in the labor market erased by higher prices. And, of course, those on fixed incomes-- the poor and elderly-- are hurt the most.

More bad ideas coming home to roost.  

It’s safe to say that the Democratic administration, through its own courtship of monopoly capitalism, finds itself caught between the sharp blades of a scissors. On one hand, the party has pledged to provide a constantly shrinking, minimalist, but sorely needed relief package to a major section of its base. 

On the other hand, promiscuous spending on managing the empire-- military and security services, foreign meddling, corporate giveaways, reflating or isolating capitalist flotsam and jetsam, and the tax coddling of the rich-- result in the risk of any future essential spending on human needs becoming inflationary. Crowding out relief for the masses while partnering with monopoly capital is the signature of state-monopoly capitalism.

The return of inflation has quieted the idealist-left’s infatuation with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the notion that spending on peoples’ needs could come at no cost to the bourgeoisie, its minions, and the bloated capitalist state.

Adherents saw the massive spending on resuscitating crisis-ridden capitalism with no apparent serious effect on prices and concluded that the same kind of spending could support social welfare programs with no inflationary consequences. 

They overlooked the context. Massive Federal Reserve spending took place to address a profoundly deflationary systemic crisis. 

From the MMT perspective, it is not necessary to curb insane military spending or tax the rich. Waving the magic wand of MMT will permit solving all of capitalism’s irrationalities and injustices, while meeting the people’s needs through deficit spending. Candide’s best of all possible worlds is in the MMT theorist’s grasp.

The harsh reality of inflation upends this utopian dream. Another bad idea dashed. 

If it seems like the US left is addicted to bad ideas, it’s because most of the think-tankers, academic gurus, and labor polemicists that influence the broad left deny that gains for the majority come from a zero-sum game-- the wealthy and powerful must lose for the rest of us to win. They pretend that there are roads to social justice that pass through regions of social harmony and equitable sacrifice, a long-held principle that keeps people in the Democratic Party orbit. They look for shortcuts that will avoid a direct confrontation-- class struggle-- while still challenging capitalism’s privilege to dictate human affairs. When, in fact, we must challenge its very existence.

This misguided approach guarantees that bad ideas steeped in idealism will dominate-- ideas that promise success, without pain or confrontation.

MMT will not magically solve the problem of inequality; a chain of coops will not defeat monopoly capital; and two-party theatrics will not establish real democracy.

We need bigger and better ideas for those tasks.

With a near future of a crippling price rise motivated by exploding profits, a do-little political stratum obsessed with fund-raising and securing the approval of the rich and powerful, and a murderous, gangster foreign policy motivated by service to global capitalism, we can’t afford the luxury of toying with bad ideas.  

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Rabble! An Exhilarating Novel of the Paris Commune

Karl Marx wrote about the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871: “Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society.”

This year, 2021, marks the 150th anniversary of that singular event. For far too many in our moment, the Commune remains only a harbinger and not a reality. The setbacks to Marx’s vision at the end of the last century continue to cast a gloomy cloud over the prospects for the new society.

Nonetheless, the inspiration of the Paris Commune, the daring example of working people taking power, the sacrifices and martyrdom of the most committed of the Parisian workers is one of those timeless stories that will again and again awaken the minds of working people to the possible.

Now we have that account retold in the impressive new novel by Geoffrey Fox, a US fiction writer, essayist, and union activist.

Rabble! A Story of the Paris Commune (Matador, 2021) is a twenty-first century screenplay waiting for a worthy producer and director. Fox recounts the events leading to the declaration of the Commune on March 18, 1871 through the bloody week ending the Commune two months later.

We see the events unfold through the actions of real Communards like Élisabeth Dmitrieff, Nathalie Lemel, Eugène Varlin, Jules Vallès, Louise Michel as well as through the eyes of credible fictional figures that carry the narrative forward. Fox principally employs the constructs of a young bookbinder, Étienne, in awe of Varlin, who he once saw speak, and his co-worker and partner, Rose. Various other fictional workers populate the account that Fox offers, adding dimensions and texture.

A thoughtful police commissaire, an aspiring singer, and an opportunistic journalist provide a political counterpoint to the awakening workers.

While Fox is clearly a partisan of the Commune, he neither patronizes nor romanticizes the story, highlighting both the heroics and the tragedy.

Most impressive is Fox’s command of details, creating a remarkably accurate picture of life in Paris in the 1870s: the process of bookbinding, the patois, the dress, the geography, etc.

While the Commune’s politics were varied, Fox underscores the vital role of both the Blanquistes-- the followers of the left Communist, Auguste Blanqui-- and the Internationalists-- the followers of the International Workingmen's Association (1st International). Both political tendencies advocated for a tight organizational approach and aggressive military action, though they were in the minority in the Commune’s leadership.

Rabble! captures a growing sense of the possible with the workers of Paris, without understating the uncertainty, fear, vacillation, and indifference of many. Revolution is not a choreographed romantic adventure, but an audacious leap into untrodden terrain, foretelling equally liberation or tragic failure.

In the case of the Commune, it was a tragedy, but a tragedy that continues to inspire many to cast off cynicism and defeatism, to seek even a small role today-- a perhaps, one day, forgotten role-- in la lutte finale.

Fox’s novel closes with the bloody week-- la semaine sanglante-- in which the overthrow of the Commune is capped by the ruthlessness of the victors, the retribution of France’s rich and powerful through the agency of its traitorous military.

One can dream that an imaginative, daring film producer would assign a sympathetic director-- of the integrity of Leigh, Sayles, or Loach-- to turn Rabble! into a wonderful movie. Given the cesspool that passes as the film industry today, that will likely remain only a dream.

In the meantime, a worthy option is encountering Geoffrey Fox’s intelligent novel, Rabble!

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Forty-Seven Trillion Dollars: Exploitation Writ Large

“Exploitation” is a word seldom encountered today. Its common usage roughly spans the heyday of socialist thinking, especially the era of Marx’s influence over socialist theory. It was and should still be the cornerstone of Marx’s critique of capitalism.

But the idea of labor exploitation-- capitalists taking uncompensated advantage of workers’ labor-- has largely disappeared outside of the Communist Parties. It is more common to find the word attached to sexual or animal abuse, cultural appropriation, or other sins outside the bounds of class. But class exploitation, the structural exploitation once fruitfully viewed as the centerpiece of capitalist relations of production, the basis for the era of capitalism, is out of fashion with today’s Western left.

That’s not to deny a concerted outrage over inequality of income and wealth; certainly, the broad spectrum of opinion from the center to the left decries the vast gap between the obscenely wealthy and those equally obscenely impoverished. But there is little attention paid to how that enormous chasm is produced and continually reproduced. Nor is there much imagination of life without it.

Hopefully that might change.

A recent article in Time magazine-- a popularization of a scholarly paper from the staid, ultra-conservative Rand Corporation-- declares dramatically in sensational headlines: America’s 1% Has Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%.

The Rand paper, Trends in Incomes From 1975 to 2018 argues with a great deal more nuance, but equal force, that if the thirty-year (1945-1975) trend of household income distribution had been maintained over the next forty-two years (1976-2018), the bottom 90% would have earned $47 trillion more over that period! 

Put another way, the bottom 90% would have received 67% more income than it actually did in the one year, 2018-- the final year of the study; those below the upper 10% threshold would share $2.5 trillion more than they actually received for their labor, $2.5 trillion in 2018 that went instead into the bank accounts of the highest 10% of earners.

As the authors of the Time article emphasize,
“This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation…”, but a rigorous conclusion based upon the premise that 1945 to 1975 was a period of relative stability of inequality. That is, in the thirty-year post-war period, the gap between the rich and everyone else grew little and declined little. The French elites celebrate a similar era in Europe with the expression “les trente glorieuse”-- the thirty glorious years of relative prosperity. The majority maintained its lower status, but lost little ground to the rich.

While the Rand authors, C. Price and K. Edwards, do not explain this ‘equilibrium’ of inequality, an explanation is readily at hand. The Western powers were in an intense, winner-take-all competition with socialism and its friends after World War II. The ruling classes made an unspoken compact with respective labor movements in Europe and the US that they would encourage the idea that labor’s income would move proportionally with increases in productivity, effectively “freezing” social inequality in place.

In return, labor was expected to accommodate, even participate in Cold War foreign policy and embrace capitalism. In the political sphere, this compact guaranteed that the urge to reform or change would be contained in the Democratic Party or the European Social Democracies. Where mass Communist Parties emerged, the securities services would go to any length to aid and abet the center-left in denying them access to power.

In the US, the informal compact produced the purging of the left in the labor movement, cultural and intellectual conformity, and entrenchment of the two-party system.

As Price and Edwards demonstrate, the stability of income distribution, of class-income differences, changed dramatically after 1975. Income distribution shifted sharply to the benefit of the top 10% and even more so to the top 1%. The shift was so great in the post-1975 period that the authors calculate that 90% lost $47 trillion by 2018. But, again, they have no clear and comprehensive explanation, beyond noting that the “rise in inequality has been attributed to many different factors including technological advancement, decline in union membership, and globalization.”

While these conventionally cited factors may well have played some role in the shift in income distribution, they were hardly sufficient to explain the extremely sharp turn that Price and Edwards show.

Rather, the reversal came with the profound economic crisis of the 1970s: the oil crisis and intractable stagnation and inflation, two conditions that conventional economics (then Keynesian-influenced) could not even conceive of as occurring together. The concurrent fall in the rate of profit forced a radical reexamination of policy on the part of the ruling class (in the US as well as Europe). Welfare policies and class accommodation were jettisoned for a raw, no-holds barred assault on the income and living standards of the 90%.

With the decline and disappearance of Soviet and Eastern European power, a decade or more later, the last elements of the post-war compact with labor and its allies were also jettisoned. The US ruling class perceived no need for any further accommodation with US working people. Capital mobility and the availability of an enormous new pool of skilled, but low-cost labor capped the period and placed enormous pressure on the incomes of Price and Edward’s 90%. Labor unions received this shock treatment and, without a militant left, struggled to respond. New logistical technologies smoothed the way for a sharp increase in global trade, investments, and job migration.

While Price and Edwards struggle with an explanation for the qualitative changes that occurred after 1975, Marxist theory offers a ready answer. Capital mounted a concerted offensive in the 1970s resulting in a massive increase in the rate of exploitation in response to a profound crisis and the failure of the policies of the immediate postwar era to answer that crisis. 

With the rate of profit under siege, the US ruling class unilaterally cast aside the Cold War compromises and ruthlessly attacked the income and living standards of the working-class majority. Wages have been essentially stagnant since the 1970s, while productivity and national product have grown, filling the coffers of the corporations and the bank accounts of the rich.

Characterizing this period as the rise of “neoliberalism,” as much of the left favors, obfuscates the deeper processes that spawned the dramatic shift in the rate of exploitation, the appropriation of an additional $47 trillion from one class to another in a forty-two year span. It wasn’t an intellectual victory in the policy wars, a spark of evil intent, the domination of the political right, or a temporary or contingent aberration of capitalism, but a strategic adaptation-- accepted by nearly the entire ruling class and its political minions-- in the appropriation of surplus value-- the exploitation of labor-- that accounts for the dramatic gains of the capitalist class and its hangers-on. 

Though they were agents in the change, Carter, Reagan, and Thatcher were only the faces of another stage in capitalism’s course correction. Those who think that the super-exploitation exposed by Price and Edwards can be tempered by a return to the “glory” of the immediate postwar period fail to understand the logic of capitalism. That period has long given way to a new dynamic. 

But the Price and Edward revelations succeed in exposing an important point. If the super-exploitation of the last forty-two years-- the appropriation of the $47 trillion-- is recognized as unjust, as the Time headline suggests, then the “ordinary” exploitation of the previous period is equally unjust since both lead directly to inequalities.

There is no escaping the conclusion that the economic inequality that more and more people are rejecting is itself deeply rooted in capitalism and its profit-generating, exploitative mechanism. Surely the scope of super-exploitation that Price and Edwards spotlight should challenge the legitimacy of capitalism, not only as it is today, but also how it was before it took a vicious turn. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Paid Pipers of Hypocrisy

Is there a word more abused by the monopoly media than the word “corruption”? For US journalists, corruption is the sin committed by bureaucrats, administrators, and politicians everywhere outside of the US and its closest allies. 

A glance at the map of corruption devised by Transparency International, an NGO favored by the capitalist punditry, shows a remarkable result: skin color and political independence correlate pretty closely with the magnitude of corruption in the eyes of the “scholars” at Transparency International. It seems that the darker-skinned people have a predilection to tolerate corruption, as do those people who fail to accept the leadership of the US and its Euro-Asian sycophants. Needless to say, poor Haiti-- both dark-skinned and unforgiven for its overthrow of colonialism-- is allegedly most cursed by corruption, as are Venezuela, Syria, DPRK, several African states, and some failed states wrecked by imperialism.

If this index, itself, seems curiously corrupted by bias, consider the exposure of what may be the most egregious, far-reaching corruption of recent years: the conflict of interest of US Federal judges. In a recent in-depth study of 685 cases heard before US Federal judges over the last decade, The Wall Street Journal found that 131 out of the 600 hundred or so Federal judges ruled on cases in which the judge or family members held interests-- securities-- in one of the litigants. In other words, almost one in five Federal judges bore a conflict of interest in the cases examined. 

This is, however, not simply a matter of bad judgement on the part of the judges, but a violation of a 1974 law that explicitly makes it illegal for Federal judges or their family members to hold investments in companies coming before the court:

Nothing bars judges from owning stocks, but federal law since 1974 has prohibited judges from hearing cases that involve a party in which they, their spouses or their minor children have a “legal or equitable interest, however small.” That law and the Judicial Conference of the U.S., which is the federal courts’ policy-making body, require judges to avoid even the appearance of a conflict. Although most lawsuits don’t directly affect a company’s stock price, the Supreme Court in 1988 said the law’s purpose is to promote confidence in the judiciary. (WSJ)

And yet no Federal judge has ever been charged, not to mention convicted, under this law. The Federal judiciary, a cornerstone of our three branches of national governance, is therefore riddled with conflicts of interest and, by any rational measure, corruption. 

The WSJ story, a powerful exposé of corruption at the highest level of the US government, immediately follows the late September announcement of the resignations of two Federal Reserve Presidents, who engaged in extensive security trades while the Federal Reserve was embarking on policy changes potentially advantageous to the trades. While both denied any wrongdoing, many commentators saw a rather blatant conflict of interest. The widespread suspicion of insider trading-- high level corruption-- likely prompted the resignations.

In both cases, attention sank like an anchor in the media maelstrom.

While a few major media outlets made matter-of-fact reports of the two cases, outrage was noticeable for its absence. The pundits who are scandalized by customs officials in developing countries accepting $5 bribes to expedite the shuffling of papers were strangely silent over Federal judges’ rulings in cases where they held financial interests and Federal Reserve officials profiteering. The politicians exclaiming the corruption of foreign leaders showed little interest in the shameful behavior of high officials appointed to decide matters of greatest import to the people of the US.

As author and law school educator, Dan Kovalik, points out regarding the Federal judges:

One might think that all of this would create a huge scandal, and maybe even a US Department of Justice investigation to root out corrupt judges to at least try to bring some fairness and equity to our legal system. But no such righting of the US system will come – not any time soon, anyway. Instead, the US, true to its long-standing practice of projecting its own sins on others so it doesn’t have to get to grips with its own, is focused on rooting out corruption – both real and fabricated – in other countries.

To guarantee that no one dwelled on rampant Federal corruption, four days after the WSJ article appeared in the print edition, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism, a well-connected Washington DC-based organization, released a brief summary of the so-called Pandora Papers, allegedly a massive anonymous dump of data on off-shore tax havens used by important people in numerous countries. Media outrage ensued. Pitchforks were sharpened. 

The ICIJ is an oddity. Created as a depository for leaked information along the lines of WikiLeaks, ICIJ has never received the kind of violent hostility visited upon WikiLeaks and especially its founder, Julian Assange. Instead, ICIJ’s “scandalous” findings have been met with media enthusiasm and official acceptance or, at worst, indifference. Since little that it reveals is actually illegal, ICIJ findings are essentially celebrity-shaming. 

Astute observers have pointed to several curiosities. Ben Norton noted that the Pandora Papers shames few prominent United States personalities, a blatant failing shared by the aforementioned Transparency International. Apologists have offered the ludicrous explanation that favorable US tax policy makes it unnecessary for the rich in the US to seek tax havens. 

Norton also chronicles the funding for ICIJ, the usual pack of US CIA fronts, collaborators, phony NGOs, and the ubiquitous Soros Foundation.

Which, of course, raises the question of the source of the data dump, billed as a “trove of more than 11.9 million confidential files…” Does any individual or organization beyond the CIA, NSA, or other counterpart intelligence agency have the resources to acquire the data released in the Pandora Papers? Or the other leaks that preceded it? The Panama Papers? China Cables? Paradise Papers?

Isn’t it odd that unnamed sources can, seemingly with ease, steal private data “troves” and pass them anonymously on to a group (“...the biggest [mainstream] journalism partnership in history…”) without revealing a hint of the chain of events that led to the disclosures? Even more bizarrely, no one in the media-- no “premier” investigative journalist-- seems in the slightest interested in discovering this pathway. It just happened. No interest on the part of the FBI. No charges of data theft. Of hacking.

Compare this to the intense media bonfires kindled by leaks ranging from the Clinton campaign revelations to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Apparently, the Pandora Papers, despite open questions over the legality of their acquisition, have the stamp of official propriety.

Maybe it has something to do with the media’s determination to spin the findings to embarrass Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad and other targets of US and EU policies.

Call it a conspiracy theory, but the Pandora Paper’s convenient release overshadowed stories that the media had already chosen to ignore. It served nicely as a distraction. Corruption at the highest levels of US governance never made the Britney Spears/Gabby Petito news cycle.

Some might argue that our channels of information, our chronicles of events, are broken and compromised. Some cynically see our media as a megaphone of officialdom. Certainly the evidence is there for both views.

The simple fact is that monopoly news is no news at all.

Postscript: Today’s WSJ (October 16, 2021) reveals that 61 of the 131 Federal judges cited actually traded stocks of litigants while they were adjudicating cases involving those litigants, a blatant basis for conflict of interest charges in violation of the 1974 statute! Corruption!

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com