A good, old-fashioned crisis of capitalism – a disruption that rocks the whole system – produces one salutary result: wiser heads, serious students begin to re-examine widely held assumptions and popular theories of political economy. For those few, this may mean dusting off old copies of the works of Keynes, Schumpeter, or Minsky, and – only too rarely – Marx. For the honest observer, the crisis is an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the capitalist mechanism and its direction.
But others cling to the comforting views of infallible markets and perfect rationality that prevailed until recently, while amending their theories with warning labels touting the current crisis is a special case falling outside of the economic canon. Most economists, pundits, and policy makers fall into this latter category. They got it wrong and they continue to get it wrong. They have too great of an investment in the ideologies, careers, and honors of the past.
There is now a long list of books and papers offering explanations, in part or wholly, of what went wrong with the global economy. The worst of these offer simple and immediate answers: evil bankers, irrational borrowers, lax regulators, etc. The best offer longer and deeper views that locate problems in the evolution of capitalism and its inner mechanisms. They contest the too human urge for simple answers and easy solutions. Zoltan Zigedy
Joseph Stiglitz is one of the few courageous enough to peek beyond the curtain of official dogma and smugness. Though a prominent and celebrated economist, he has dared to challenge many of the assumptions of the neo-classical model dominating his profession, thus, earning our measured respect. He is deservedly an “outsider”.
In a recent article in the London Review of Books (“The Non-Existent Hand”), Stiglitz has much to say about the causes of the crisis and those who failed to see it coming. He reminds of his own work in debunking the infallibility of markets. He and others (such as Akerlof and Shiller) have demonstrated what should not have needed demonstration: markets are often not efficient, not self-correcting, nor rational. Despite its euphoric embrace over the last thirty years, the perfection of markets never earned the theoretical or empirical right to be elevated to a timeless truth rather than a fervent faith. Nevertheless, it was.
For Marx, commodity exchange – the human relationship that stands behind what we call “markets” – may well be to some extent efficient and rational on the level of individual interactions, far from determinant of social efficiency and justice and collective rationality. There is no reason to expect that the profit-optimizing behavior of individual capitalist enterprises in the market will in any way optimize social or collective interests (including the health of the capitalist system). I think Keynes would agree.
If only Stiglitz were right: “The present crisis should lay to rest any belief in ‘rational’ markets.”
Stiglitz quickly dismisses those who hope to account for the crisis by distinguishing between “risk” and “uncertainty”. He correctly points out that the difference is really a slippery slope, the actors indeed believed they were possessed of statistical models that promised low risk, and they were drawn by high expected outcomes. Yet he misses the larger point – the fallacy of aggregation – that allows that what might be of reasonable risk for one actor, may not be a reasonable risk for the system if all the actors take on that risk. Aggregating all the risk-taking that individual enterprises take may well multiply the risk to the system beyond that of the seemingly sensible risks undertaken by each and every of the enterprises comprising that system. Stiglitz cannot escape the limits of neo-classical economics that rigidly assumes that all system-wide behavior is simply and coherently reducible to the behavior of the individual units.
Stiglitz perceptively focuses on one of the anomalies of the current crisis and its supposed recovery: the intractability of high unemployment (“why the usual laws of supply and demand, which should result in full employment, have failed to work.”). He elaborates: “Standard economic theory - the theory of demand and supply that is taught in classrooms around the world – says that if prices… are fully flexible and markets function as they should, then… there should be full employment.” This challenge to standard theory grows more apparent with the expansion of production and GDP, beginning in 2009. With the standard view, the crisis would reduce the costs of labor (which it did), resulting in a strong incentive, with recovery, to utilize labor over other factors of production. But no such expansion of employment has occurred.
This is only an anomaly if one fails to assign a central role to profit and exploitation in one’s economic theory. Capitalists are only pragmatically interested in the theory of supply and demand; their real interest is in maximizing profit and their behavior reflects this fixation. Consequently, they follow the path that produces gain regardless of the intuitions of academic economists. As I have written, perhaps ad nauseam, the explosion of exploitation measured by unprecedented increases in labor productivity since early last year has resulted in strong, persistent, and almost unprecedented profit growth. Why would a capitalist hire more workers with profit expanding?
Moreover, those countries that have protected employment as a matter of policy – enforcing labor market rigidity – have often weathered the crisis as well or better than those with “flexible” labor markets, a point that Stiglitz concedes. And there has been little employment growth since the bottom of the crisis in any country, regardless of whether it had a relatively rigid labor market – like Germany – or a flexible labor market – like the US. Unemployment remains high independently of private sector regulation or stimulus. The hard lesson of the Great Depression that the public sector must take up the slack in employment during a severe crisis has apparently been spurned today.
Of course conventional neo-classical economics permits of productivity increases as a source for growth, but it finds no reason to distinguish between productivity gains that are exploitative and those that are not. But the capitalist certainly does.
The neo-classical economist has a problem beyond the current intractability of unemployment in the US – the entire decade since the “dot-com” crisis has been one of a “jobless recovery” with employment recovery drastically trailing production and GDP growth. In short, profit growth has decoupled from employment growth in this last period, replaced by super-exploitation and the concentration and rationalization of production.
Stiglitz does offer an explanation for the anomaly of persistent unemployment, an explanation that has been conventional since the era of Keynes. At the end of the day, he argues, unemployment persists because of an insufficiency of aggregate demand; there is simply too much productive potential to be absorbed by those able and willing to buy. A corollary of this lack of demand is the decline of investment opportunities; the capitalist finds fewer and fewer avenues for pursuing profits.
Stiglitz locates the lack of aggregate demand in two factors: savings on the part of developing countries (to protect them from the onerous policies of the IMF and the banks of developed countries!) as well as reserves accumulated by oil producing countries (for insurance against price fluctuations) and, secondly, the “huge increase in inequality, which in effect redistributed money from those who would spend it to those who didn’t…” The last point hints at the systemic problem facing capitalism.
Stiglitz is right, but only partially right. The problem of “savings” was, in reality, a problem of declining profitability throughout the capitalist system. I wrote in November of 2005 (“Capital Surplus, Marx, and Crisis”) of “the world economy awash in accumulated money, an enormous pool desperate to accumulate even more capital… the ability to make further money is now impeded. Capitalists are finding fewer and fewer investment opportunities. And when they find them, they offer at best modest returns.” I cited the Wall Street Journal, quoting Gerd Hausler of the IMF: “The search for yield has been the defining factor in financial markets for roughly the last two years.” In my view, this was a harbinger of a possible crisis of capitalism, an instantiation of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline, the touchstone of Marx’s theory of crisis.
For Stiglitz, the lack of investment opportunity demonstrated by the “Great Recession” was circumstantial, an extraordinary event brought on by contingent events in the world economy; in my view, and I believe from an understanding of Marx, the glut of capital in search for investment returns was inherent in the capitalist system and one that would lead unerringly to a crisis. One can thus understand the frenzy that led to sub-prime mortgages, exotic investment instruments, insider trading, and market manipulation as desperate and risky attempts to restore a higher rate of profit.
The word “profit”, and even its euphemisms “yield” and “return”, is curiously missing in Stiglitz’s account. In only one instance does he employ the word “profit”: “The objective of a speculative attack is to generate profits for the speculators, regardless of the cost to society.” Surely he understands that this is the objective of all capitalist enterprises! From Goldman Sachs to Nike, from AIG under government guidance to bailed-out GM, the goal is to generate profits “regardless of the costs to society.” Otherwise, how does one explain the millions of laid-off workers and the enormous bail-outs directed to executive bonuses and mergers and acquisition? I’ve yet to see a “cost to society” in the balance sheet of a monopoly-capitalist corporation.
In passing, Stiglitz offers the following interesting comment about the state of matters today: “The Hooverites – the advocates of the pre-Keynesian policies according to which downturns were met with austerity – are having their revenge. In many quarters, the Keynesians, having enjoyed their moment of glory just a year ago, seem to be in retreat,” While there was little difference between the late Hoover policies (NCC and RFC) and the early New Deal (just as there is a continuity between late-Bush and Obama’s first year), he is sadly correct. The progressive and left movement has lost the initiative to the oracles of neo-liberalism who scream “Deficits!” at every opportunity. Lethargy and unwarranted faith in the Obama administration has robbed the left and progressive forces of a rare opportunity to move decisively beyond the neo-liberal model. We are, in too many ways, back where we started.
Stiglitz closes with the following – no doubt sincere - reflection: “Keynes great contribution was to save capitalism from the capitalists… Keynes insights are needed now if we’re to save capitalism once again from the capitalists.”
But facing another wave of capitalist excess, why do we want to save capitalism at all? May I suggest that saving humanity from capitalism is a far more urgent and proper demand?
This is the first of a series of articles discussing the important contributions of liberal, progressive, and left commentators on the economic crisis.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
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Monday, April 19, 2010
Sunday, April 11, 2010
When Does an “Accident” Become a Crime?
“…waiting at the gate, we are waiting at the gate…while the miners’ kids and wives wait at the gate…” Woody Guthrie
From 1900 until 1950, over 95,000 US workers were killed in coal mines, nearly as many as died in World War I and exceeded only by military deaths in the Civil War and World War II. Millions more were injured in this period. While records were not required, a conservative claim by the Bureau of Mines estimates that 140,000 miners were injured in 1914 alone, roughly 18% of all miners employed. Millions more went undiagnosed with black lung disease and severe arthritis. As recently as the 1990’s, over 21,000 injuries occurred annually in coal mining, despite far fewer employed at that time in the industry.
Outside of the war-time military, no occupation has suffered nearly the rate of fatalities and injuries as has coal mining, including law enforcement. Yet there are no national memorials to mourn those losses.
Throughout this period, annual coal mining deaths averaged between two and eight a day. Yet there are no national days of remembrance.
During the early decades of the twentieth century, coal mine employment drew thousands of newly arrived immigrants speaking little or no English – mainly from Eastern Europe and Italy – who were drawn to rural coal mining towns throughout the US. They account for more than their share of those killed and maimed in the mines. Often the native-born were promoted to working above ground, replaced underground by newly arrived immigrants. This brutal story is lost in the current debates over immigration, a debate smothered by the same crude bigotry suffered by the immigrant miners of the twentieth century. Sadly, too many of the descendents of these immigrant miners have joined the chorus of vulgar nationalism that pollutes the discussion.
US coal operators were notorious for their callous disregard for safety and abuse of workers. Despite employing 40% more miners, the British coal industry experienced half as many fatalities in 1914 – a fairly typical year for fatalities in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The rate of deaths per thousand workers in the US was higher that year than that in the Union of South Africa, where workers were virtual slaves.
While the industry has changed dramatically, underground mining remains the most dangerous occupation, made especially dangerous by the relentless drive for production and profits by the coal operators and their corporate masters. The recent death of 29 miners at Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia reminds us again of how little regard owners and managers have for the lives of coal miners. The Upper Big Branch mine is a non-union facility owned by Massey Energy whose CEO is an out-spoken supporter of right-wing causes, an opponent of environmental protection, and notorious for “buying” the Supreme Court of West Virginia. He ranks with the most profit-crazed and corrupted coal baron of the past century.
The mine was cited 458 times last year for safety violations, 50 of them severe. The US Mine Safety and Health Administration closed the mine 61 times since the beginning of 2009. Workers were required to work in four feet of water and suffer other “aggravated conduct” on the part of the operator. Clearly, the Massey Energy subsidiary had no regard for safety, only production and profits.
The media speaks of an accident, a tragedy where they should be condemning a crime. But the crime rests not only with the operator, but with politicians, regulatory agencies, and opinion-makers who take little interest in the conditions and safety of working people. When the curtain of neglect is occasionally pulled back by some dramatic loss of life, our leaders wring their hands in remorse. At all other times, they are blind to the tens of thousands of injuries suffered by those working everywhere from Wal-Mart to auto production.
While discussing the deaths at Upper Big Branch, my sister reminded me of the fear for her father’s safety that entered her mind every night at bed time, dreading the mine whistle or a phone call; he worked twenty-seven years in the mines and left with black lung and crippling arthritis. She reminded me of our grandfather’s death in the mine and his daughter’s hearing from a passerby: “Your dad was killed today in the mine.” He had to work until he was 67 - past retirement age - because of his activism.
For most of the twentieth century the most militant, class-conscious miners called for nationalization of the mining industry. Without the brutal, life-crushing drive for profits, tens of thousands of miners might have lived to enjoy their grandchildren.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
From 1900 until 1950, over 95,000 US workers were killed in coal mines, nearly as many as died in World War I and exceeded only by military deaths in the Civil War and World War II. Millions more were injured in this period. While records were not required, a conservative claim by the Bureau of Mines estimates that 140,000 miners were injured in 1914 alone, roughly 18% of all miners employed. Millions more went undiagnosed with black lung disease and severe arthritis. As recently as the 1990’s, over 21,000 injuries occurred annually in coal mining, despite far fewer employed at that time in the industry.
Outside of the war-time military, no occupation has suffered nearly the rate of fatalities and injuries as has coal mining, including law enforcement. Yet there are no national memorials to mourn those losses.
Throughout this period, annual coal mining deaths averaged between two and eight a day. Yet there are no national days of remembrance.
During the early decades of the twentieth century, coal mine employment drew thousands of newly arrived immigrants speaking little or no English – mainly from Eastern Europe and Italy – who were drawn to rural coal mining towns throughout the US. They account for more than their share of those killed and maimed in the mines. Often the native-born were promoted to working above ground, replaced underground by newly arrived immigrants. This brutal story is lost in the current debates over immigration, a debate smothered by the same crude bigotry suffered by the immigrant miners of the twentieth century. Sadly, too many of the descendents of these immigrant miners have joined the chorus of vulgar nationalism that pollutes the discussion.
US coal operators were notorious for their callous disregard for safety and abuse of workers. Despite employing 40% more miners, the British coal industry experienced half as many fatalities in 1914 – a fairly typical year for fatalities in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The rate of deaths per thousand workers in the US was higher that year than that in the Union of South Africa, where workers were virtual slaves.
While the industry has changed dramatically, underground mining remains the most dangerous occupation, made especially dangerous by the relentless drive for production and profits by the coal operators and their corporate masters. The recent death of 29 miners at Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia reminds us again of how little regard owners and managers have for the lives of coal miners. The Upper Big Branch mine is a non-union facility owned by Massey Energy whose CEO is an out-spoken supporter of right-wing causes, an opponent of environmental protection, and notorious for “buying” the Supreme Court of West Virginia. He ranks with the most profit-crazed and corrupted coal baron of the past century.
The mine was cited 458 times last year for safety violations, 50 of them severe. The US Mine Safety and Health Administration closed the mine 61 times since the beginning of 2009. Workers were required to work in four feet of water and suffer other “aggravated conduct” on the part of the operator. Clearly, the Massey Energy subsidiary had no regard for safety, only production and profits.
The media speaks of an accident, a tragedy where they should be condemning a crime. But the crime rests not only with the operator, but with politicians, regulatory agencies, and opinion-makers who take little interest in the conditions and safety of working people. When the curtain of neglect is occasionally pulled back by some dramatic loss of life, our leaders wring their hands in remorse. At all other times, they are blind to the tens of thousands of injuries suffered by those working everywhere from Wal-Mart to auto production.
While discussing the deaths at Upper Big Branch, my sister reminded me of the fear for her father’s safety that entered her mind every night at bed time, dreading the mine whistle or a phone call; he worked twenty-seven years in the mines and left with black lung and crippling arthritis. She reminded me of our grandfather’s death in the mine and his daughter’s hearing from a passerby: “Your dad was killed today in the mine.” He had to work until he was 67 - past retirement age - because of his activism.
For most of the twentieth century the most militant, class-conscious miners called for nationalization of the mining industry. Without the brutal, life-crushing drive for profits, tens of thousands of miners might have lived to enjoy their grandchildren.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
Monday, March 29, 2010
Marxist Fundamentalism
As much as things have changed since Karl Marx’s time, his fundamental insights about the nexus of labor, exploitation, and profit remain the best guide to understanding capitalism and capitalist crisis. Theorist have come and gone, spinning elaborate revisions or alternatives based upon concepts of under consumption, over production, imbalance, disequilibrium, etc. Many have found in changing features of capitalism - like monopolization, automation, vertical integration, de-centralization, chip and robot innovation, globalization, financialization, etc - the altering of the logic of capitalist production and its inclination to dysfunction. Still others have seen changes in ownership and management relations as changing the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. While all of these reflect truths and useful perspectives, they miss or obscure the engine that drives all capitalist processes: the pursuit of profits through the exploitation of labor by the capitalist enterprise.
For Marx, the expression of this engine and its propensity to misfire lies in the struggle to maintain profits against its intrinsic tendency to decline. Call me a fundamentalist, but I believe this was, and remains, the best, if not only, road to understanding capitalist crisis, including the current deep downturn.
Exploitation, Profits, and Wages
I have written often and emphatically of the rise in the US rate of exploitation in the aftermath of the severe economic decline. I have pointed to the explosion of labor productivity driven by mass unemployment, weak organized resistance, and government complicity. The official numbers are staggering and beyond any recent precedent (see Exploitation Soars, Unemployment Jumps! and The Class War: Where Things Stand). And the reports of this radical restructuring of the relations between labor and capital continue to mount, though of little notice in the labor and left press.
The Commerce Department reports that fourth quarter 2009 pretax corporate profits rose nearly 30% over the prior year and 8% over the prior quarter (the third quarter increase was 10.8% over the second quarter). The US economy has not seen such an annual increase in pretax corporate profits since 1984 during the Reagan administration. Clearly labor productivity and the rate of profit are moving in lockstep. This is further evidence that profits are growing from an intensification of the labor process – on the backs of workers.
Should further data be necessary, the Commerce Department also reports that personal income dropped in 42 of 50 states last year at a cumulative rate of 1.7%, unadjusted for inflation. It must be noted that this report lumps together wages, dividends, rent, retirement income, and government benefits, underestimating the impact upon the working class.
Of course not all profits were generated directly through exploitation at the point of production. Half of the explosion of profits was generated through the financial sector. With the financial sector, workers were, however, exploited indirectly through the massive bailout, the assumption of cancerous assets, and the extension of essentially risk and interest free loans. Some estimate this burden - to be collected on future taxes and the slashing of common, public assets and social programs – to total $14 trillion. Some estimate even more.
I would concede that US organized labor is showing some gumption in the electoral arena, prodding the Administration and Democrats to show a bit of backbone on behalf of programs benefiting working people. Nonetheless, the legacy of complicity in the destruction of class- struggle unionism in the early stages of the Cold War saddles current labor leaders with a timid, class collaborationist approach that fails to mount even a modest resistance to this brutal class offensive.
Growth, the Safety Net, and the Class Struggle
Thanks to stronger, more militant labor movements, oppositional formations, and genuine left political parties, there has been much resistance in the European Union to any US-style surrender to a solely capitalist recovery constructed on the backs and from the pockets of working people. In a rare departure from past practices of reserving ideological rants to the back pages, The Wall Street Journal offered a front-page lecture to the EU: “Europe’s Choice: Growth or Safety Net” (3-25-10). The WSJ writers take up the cause of high unemployment among young people in Europe, but oddly fail to see any connection with the failings of capitalism. Instead they fault pensions, benefits, job protection, and the other elements of Europe’s historic social democratic safety net. Odd, indeed. They note that “…many economists say: chip away at the cherished ‘social model.’ That means limiting pensions and benefits to those who really need them, ensuring the able-bodied are working rather than living off the state, and eliminating business and labor laws that deter entrepreneurship and job creation.” This prescription might have counted as an enticement for the US-model when the US economy was perking along, but it invites contempt in the face of massive US unemployment, under funded and non-existent pensions and benefits, criminally inadequate health care, home foreclosures, increased hunger, etc. It is no wonder that the writers comment “Even in the best of times, Europeans are loath to move toward a US-style model.” And well they should be.
The trenches of this battle for the future of the European working class are in the traditionally poorer countries – Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland – that borrowed extensively to maintain an economic pace and standard of living on a par with their richer neighbors: keeping up with the Joneses on a national scale. Now the stronger EU members want to punish them for their debt – debt on a scale not far from that of the US or UK. The more powerful states are insisting on budget cuts that will drastically slash incomes, pensions, and benefits while also stifling any potential for growth. This is simply imposing the US model by fiat.
In Greece, in particular, the working classes are vigorously and determinedly resisting these draconian changes, led by a fighting labor movement and the Greek Communists. They deserve our solidarity and serve as an example to our own labor movement.
Debt and the Class Struggle
Debt is a two-headed monster. At the depth of the crisis, the debt-burden incurred by irresponsible financial institutions was readily and undemocratically shifted from the private to the public sector through massive bailouts. Their debt problem is now our problem. Zhu Min, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China put it well: “The governments tried to put every burden from the financial sector unto their own children.” But now with those burdens on the shoulders of working people, these same governments alarmingly call for debt reduction. Not surprisingly, they closely follow the EU strategy by demanding reductions in social programs. In the case of the US, the debt diet prescribes trimming the “waste” from social programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Of course there is no talk of reducing the immensely costly military budget or raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy. The debt issue is calculated to be another weapon in the assault on the living standards of working people.
Lessons must be drawn from this intense offensive against workers. In the US, the Democratic Administration and its Congressional troops have done little or nothing to side with working people in the class struggle. Rather, they have urged measures that have intensified exploitation, heaped debt on the working class, and threatened its safety net. The leaders of the labor movement have achieved little by lobbying, cajoling, and coddling; they have failed to take the struggle to the workplace and the streets.
The capitalist crisis is far from over. The financial monstrosities that sparked the crisis are once again fat, unregulated, and in hot pursuit of new risky ventures that will accelerate their rate of profit. There is every reason to believe that they will run aground again. We had an opportunity to stop this mad cycle with nationalization, but our economic leaders chose to reward the banks and encourage them to press on with their madness. Non-financial firms are swelling with profit from intensified exploitation, but lacking markets or consumption growth that would justify investment, expansion, or further employment, a situation that promises further pressure on their rate of profit. Of course they can further put the screws to workers, but hopefully we will take a lesson from our Greek comrades and join them in the streets.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
For Marx, the expression of this engine and its propensity to misfire lies in the struggle to maintain profits against its intrinsic tendency to decline. Call me a fundamentalist, but I believe this was, and remains, the best, if not only, road to understanding capitalist crisis, including the current deep downturn.
Exploitation, Profits, and Wages
I have written often and emphatically of the rise in the US rate of exploitation in the aftermath of the severe economic decline. I have pointed to the explosion of labor productivity driven by mass unemployment, weak organized resistance, and government complicity. The official numbers are staggering and beyond any recent precedent (see Exploitation Soars, Unemployment Jumps! and The Class War: Where Things Stand). And the reports of this radical restructuring of the relations between labor and capital continue to mount, though of little notice in the labor and left press.
The Commerce Department reports that fourth quarter 2009 pretax corporate profits rose nearly 30% over the prior year and 8% over the prior quarter (the third quarter increase was 10.8% over the second quarter). The US economy has not seen such an annual increase in pretax corporate profits since 1984 during the Reagan administration. Clearly labor productivity and the rate of profit are moving in lockstep. This is further evidence that profits are growing from an intensification of the labor process – on the backs of workers.
Should further data be necessary, the Commerce Department also reports that personal income dropped in 42 of 50 states last year at a cumulative rate of 1.7%, unadjusted for inflation. It must be noted that this report lumps together wages, dividends, rent, retirement income, and government benefits, underestimating the impact upon the working class.
Of course not all profits were generated directly through exploitation at the point of production. Half of the explosion of profits was generated through the financial sector. With the financial sector, workers were, however, exploited indirectly through the massive bailout, the assumption of cancerous assets, and the extension of essentially risk and interest free loans. Some estimate this burden - to be collected on future taxes and the slashing of common, public assets and social programs – to total $14 trillion. Some estimate even more.
I would concede that US organized labor is showing some gumption in the electoral arena, prodding the Administration and Democrats to show a bit of backbone on behalf of programs benefiting working people. Nonetheless, the legacy of complicity in the destruction of class- struggle unionism in the early stages of the Cold War saddles current labor leaders with a timid, class collaborationist approach that fails to mount even a modest resistance to this brutal class offensive.
Growth, the Safety Net, and the Class Struggle
Thanks to stronger, more militant labor movements, oppositional formations, and genuine left political parties, there has been much resistance in the European Union to any US-style surrender to a solely capitalist recovery constructed on the backs and from the pockets of working people. In a rare departure from past practices of reserving ideological rants to the back pages, The Wall Street Journal offered a front-page lecture to the EU: “Europe’s Choice: Growth or Safety Net” (3-25-10). The WSJ writers take up the cause of high unemployment among young people in Europe, but oddly fail to see any connection with the failings of capitalism. Instead they fault pensions, benefits, job protection, and the other elements of Europe’s historic social democratic safety net. Odd, indeed. They note that “…many economists say: chip away at the cherished ‘social model.’ That means limiting pensions and benefits to those who really need them, ensuring the able-bodied are working rather than living off the state, and eliminating business and labor laws that deter entrepreneurship and job creation.” This prescription might have counted as an enticement for the US-model when the US economy was perking along, but it invites contempt in the face of massive US unemployment, under funded and non-existent pensions and benefits, criminally inadequate health care, home foreclosures, increased hunger, etc. It is no wonder that the writers comment “Even in the best of times, Europeans are loath to move toward a US-style model.” And well they should be.
The trenches of this battle for the future of the European working class are in the traditionally poorer countries – Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland – that borrowed extensively to maintain an economic pace and standard of living on a par with their richer neighbors: keeping up with the Joneses on a national scale. Now the stronger EU members want to punish them for their debt – debt on a scale not far from that of the US or UK. The more powerful states are insisting on budget cuts that will drastically slash incomes, pensions, and benefits while also stifling any potential for growth. This is simply imposing the US model by fiat.
In Greece, in particular, the working classes are vigorously and determinedly resisting these draconian changes, led by a fighting labor movement and the Greek Communists. They deserve our solidarity and serve as an example to our own labor movement.
Debt and the Class Struggle
Debt is a two-headed monster. At the depth of the crisis, the debt-burden incurred by irresponsible financial institutions was readily and undemocratically shifted from the private to the public sector through massive bailouts. Their debt problem is now our problem. Zhu Min, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China put it well: “The governments tried to put every burden from the financial sector unto their own children.” But now with those burdens on the shoulders of working people, these same governments alarmingly call for debt reduction. Not surprisingly, they closely follow the EU strategy by demanding reductions in social programs. In the case of the US, the debt diet prescribes trimming the “waste” from social programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Of course there is no talk of reducing the immensely costly military budget or raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy. The debt issue is calculated to be another weapon in the assault on the living standards of working people.
Lessons must be drawn from this intense offensive against workers. In the US, the Democratic Administration and its Congressional troops have done little or nothing to side with working people in the class struggle. Rather, they have urged measures that have intensified exploitation, heaped debt on the working class, and threatened its safety net. The leaders of the labor movement have achieved little by lobbying, cajoling, and coddling; they have failed to take the struggle to the workplace and the streets.
The capitalist crisis is far from over. The financial monstrosities that sparked the crisis are once again fat, unregulated, and in hot pursuit of new risky ventures that will accelerate their rate of profit. There is every reason to believe that they will run aground again. We had an opportunity to stop this mad cycle with nationalization, but our economic leaders chose to reward the banks and encourage them to press on with their madness. Non-financial firms are swelling with profit from intensified exploitation, but lacking markets or consumption growth that would justify investment, expansion, or further employment, a situation that promises further pressure on their rate of profit. Of course they can further put the screws to workers, but hopefully we will take a lesson from our Greek comrades and join them in the streets.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
Sunday, March 14, 2010
A Political Conundrum
Sixteen months ago, political commentators and analysts felt they had a handle on the mood of US citizens. All saw the election of Obama and the sweep of Congress as a powerful rejection of the politics of the Bush era, including a repudiation of the extreme-right agenda associated with it. Roughly 20-25% of the electorate still tenaciously embraced the bizarre brew of religious zeal, rabid nationalism, racism, and social retardation, but polls – like the detailed, twenty year survey of “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes” conducted by The Pew Research Center – showed a decided tilt towards more socially progressive, government-directed policies on the part of the US population. Some pundits even spoke of a sea-change in US politics: the emergence of a new democratic and progressive era as potent as the so-called “Reagan Revolution”.
That moment has passed. Today, the political stage is not dominated by progressives or even tepid liberals, but by a motley, but dynamic group dubbed the “Tea-Party Movement”. While still a minority movement, its intense activism is amplified by the media, both the partisan right of Fox and talk radio as well as the “mainstream”. Today’s Father Coughlin’s – Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck – nursed the stirrings against Obama’s health care plan into a national campaign knitted together around hatred for Obama and anti-government grievances. It is worth noting that no similar media courtesy has been extended to any left or liberal formations by the more moderate media. Indeed, the “mainstream” has shown a curious fascination - a sensational fixation – that has helped to propel the Tea-Party movement forward.
Of course this movement did not spring from nothing. The elements have been there for years, if not decades. Arguably, this political formation was even larger and more influential during the years of extreme anti-Communism, the era associated with the antics of Senator Joe McCarthy. Again, rightwing extremism forced itself center stage behind the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in the sixties. And, of course, it returned with a vengeance with the election of Ronald Reagan.
In most cases it attached to the Republican Party for its political expression. In most cases, it found a happy home with Republican leaders who were able to marshal the movement’s energy and press some of its demands without surrendering any of the Party’s commitment to a corporate-coddling agenda.
That is not to say there were not times when the extreme-right could not be contained within the bounds of the two-party system. The Wallace-LeMay campaign of 1968 drew nearly 10 million votes (13.5% of voters) to a virulently racist, belligerently war-mongering program outside of both major parties. But generally, the extreme right sees the Republican Party as a natural haven. Likewise, Republican leaders find extreme-right ideology as a handy weapon or ready diversion against liberal-left ideas that might slow or stop the rapacity of capital. They have succeeded in wedding “free enterprise”, anti-regulation, anti-tax principles to the racist and nationalist intolerance and conservative values of the historical extreme-right. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the bond cementing this wedding was anti-Communism.
Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer (LBO #125) takes a stab at describing the social composition of the Tea-baggers, the current crop of extreme-right foot soldiers: “Though no one has done the rigorous sociological work, they look to be a movement of middle managers, professionals, and retirees – the petite-bourgeoisie, to use the old language.” I think Henwood is substantially correct, though “petite-bourgeoisie” is both a broader and more precise category than he suggests while still eminently useful despite its age. Those who answer polls by identifying with the wealthy few because they mistakenly believe they are the rich or soon will be instantiate this class or, at least, this mentality. Further, I think this class has historically always provided the fertile ground for extreme-right views. The shrillness and threatened violence of the extreme-right’s actions are clearly rooted in fear and the threat to petit-bourgois illusions from the economic crisis.
Tea-baggers and Fascism
It is a facile and immediate response to label all extreme-right movements as “fascist”. The term has been wrenched from its precise meaning in a particular historic period applying to particular historic developments and particular social movements as to lose all meaningfulness. Its common use today is more as an expletive rather than a helpful explanatory term. Nonetheless, it is useful to locate extreme-right movements in relation to historical antecedents. Thus, we understand the Tea-Party movement better by uncovering its common features and differences with the fascist social movements of the 1930’s and 1940’s.
As Henwood points out, the Tea-Party movement is predominantly petit-bourgeois in social composition. It shares this feature with the earlier fascist movements which drew heavily from the upper-middle and middle strata. These strata – in pre-war Germany, but also Italy – feared the loss of a comfortable and formerly stable way of life. Then and now, that life-style was seriously threatened by an economic crisis. Assumptions about values and world-views were and are challenged by the crises.
For the most part, fascist movements were responsive to a left and working class movement growing in power and influence. While that is not true today, the Tea-baggers have constructed an imaginary left by drawing on Cold-War imagery and crudely pasting that imagery on a President perceived by them as alien. If indeed history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, the Tea-bagger fears of the left are surely farcical – labeling policies aiding corporations and the wealthy as “socialist”.
Like their fascist predecessors, the Tea-Party groups operate somewhat independently of the established political parties. Previously, the extreme-right found a comfortable home inside the Republican Party. And to a great extent, the cynical, corrupted leaders of the Republican Party exercised a control, even manipulation, of the fundamentalist zealots, racists, libertarians, etc. that nested in that party. But the new movement challenges those reins on many counts, generating some consternation among Republican big-wigs.
Recently, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a trusted member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, chastised Sarah Palin in an op-ed piece (2-18-10) for Palin’s recent endorsement of Rand Paul – libertarian Ron Paul’s son. Paul, the younger, “holds views on national security and defense that have much in common with those of the far left.” She notes that Paul, the elder, has “said repeatedly that the United States had given Osama bin Laden good cause to attack us…” In addition, Rand Paul “stands opposed to the Patriot Act and he wants to cut defense spending.” Rabinowitz is warning Palin, the Paul’s, and others in the Tea-Party movement that any deviation from the Republican pro-corporate, pro-imperialist agenda will not be tolerated. The defense procurement and supporting industries are among the most generous and loyal components of the Republican fund raising apparatus. Moreover, imperialist aggression is the policy that drives the growth of these industries.
Twelve days later, Gerald F. Seib, The Wall Street Journal’s influential Capital Journal columnist emphasized the dangers of a renegade Tea-Party movement with an article “Tea Party Holds Risks for GOP” (3-2-10). “In particular,” he writes, “Republicans’ courtship of the Tea Party movement threatens to pull the party away from its moorings on two crucial and emotional issues: the war on terror and immigration.” One can translate this to mean that Republicans are fearful that this movement will alienate its corporate sponsors in the defense industry and challenge Republican efforts to recruit voters from the ranks of Hispanics. Seib cites many examples of Tea-Party leaders opting for a libertarian slant on civil liberties over the repressive, police state Patriot Act – further signs of a distance from a corporate agenda. His closing comments reveal the danger perceived by the two-party system insiders: “The problem with those independent movements is that they are exactly that – independent.”
Some on the left confuse this independence with a spark of progressivism, taking attacks by Tea-baggers on the current health care reform initiative, the bailouts, and the stimulus package to be anti-corporate populism. In fact, they are rabidly and solely anti-government. The fact that there is virtually no popular understanding of the fusion of government and monopoly corporations in contemporary capitalism– state-monopoly capitalism – feeds this confusion. This same confusion creates a false and diversionary political divide between those who are pro- and anti-government. The truth is that government and big business are joined at the hip and any serious, progressive movement for change must tackle both.
A Conundrum
For those who cry wolf at the activities of every right wing movement on the political stage – easily recalling the rise of European fascism in the twentieth century – something resembling the real deal may now escape them. For generations, the extreme right has been nourished and groomed by the leaders of the Republican Party. Our current incarnation was courted by Ronald Reagan and his successors to serve as electoral troops for the Republican Party. In return, Republican leaders gave gestures and symbols to hold their attention while relentlessly pressing a corporate, wealth-coddling course. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was sacrificed from that course to hold the extreme-right in place. The raw meat of prayer, flag waving, charter schools, government funding for religious charitable work, anti-abortion posturing, gun rights, etc. cost the corporate world nothing, while cheaply satisfying right-wing zealotry.
Yet in the last few years –especially with the exposure of the callowness, cynicism, and corruption of the Bush administration – the movement has taken on a new life, fueled by Fox News, talk radio, unabashed racism, and economic uncertainty to make demands upon the Republican Party often out of step with the larger goals of the Party leaders, corporate board rooms, and our ruling class. The tail is beginning to wag the dog.
I believe this evolution of the organized extreme-right towards independent action accounts for the near unanimous Republican opposition to the TARP bailout – an event that found candidate Obama offering unconditional support for this blatant gift to the financial sector. Likewise, the Republicans fought hard against a stimulus package that Herbert Hoover could have endorsed in 1932. Republican intransigence towards the final Congressional health care proposal – a plan that had substantially won the support of the health care and pharmaceutical industry – counts as another example of the political weight of the extreme-right’s new found independence. In my view, it is this departure from the capitalist program that has Republican leaders – and mouthpieces like Rabinowitz and Seib – so frenzied over the Tea-bag movement. They – like their bourgeois antecedents in the nineteen thirties and forties – are trying to tame a tiger that has its own appetites.
Missing from this discussion are liberals, the left, and the Democratic Party. And therein lays the problem: they are missing. I begin with an account of the promise – both emotionally and objectively – of the election of 2008. If no other lesson can be drawn from the Tea-Party phenomenon, it is that an independent political movement, even a minority one, exercises inordinate influence upon the direction of US politics. As Seib points out so well in the above quote, independent movements pose serious problems to the corporate dominated two-party system, problems that bend the parties away from the trajectory preferred by the US ruling class. This is an old lesson – one that many of us drew from the mass upsurges of the thirties that shaped the programs of a cautious, relatively conservative President into the show pieces of the New Deal. The independent militancy of labor and the left prodded Roosevelt into becoming the icon of liberalism that he is today.
Many are wringing their hands and crying “betrayal”, blaming Obama for the failure to bring any significant change to the political landscape. This is silly. Anyone paying attention would recognize Obama as a mainstream corporate Democrat sensitive to the moment, but - left to his own devices - inclined to support the call of monopoly capital. I have written often of his career and the parallels with other Democrats who have been publicly ordained with messianic qualities. I have pointed to the strong corporate sponsorship – especially from finance capital – of his candidacy and warned of any easy dismissal of what that might mean. Those who fostered such illusions have only themselves to blame for the disappointment of the last fourteen months.
Facing an interim election in eight months, it is likely that little will be accomplished legislatively after the spring. Few politicians will want to take any risks and campaigning will begin in earnest. Still it will be a great opportunity to press an independent progressive agenda on vote-hungry, promise-happy politicos seeking support in November. It will be a chance to build a counter-force preparing for the legislative battles to come after the elections. Support for independent candidates – many Green Party candidates are projecting effective campaigns – will scare the pants off of complacent Democrats, much as the Tea-Party advocates frighten Republican leaders. There is much to do to put some spine into labor leadership and rekindle the anti-war movement. All of these steps will move us closer to creating a left-oriented third-party that can consistently influence our political course. Its time to lose the defensive posture of the last period and mount an offensive against those offering two flavors of the same poison. And we won’t have to explain the puzzling fact that the people are hungry for progressive change while the political winds are blowing rightward.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
That moment has passed. Today, the political stage is not dominated by progressives or even tepid liberals, but by a motley, but dynamic group dubbed the “Tea-Party Movement”. While still a minority movement, its intense activism is amplified by the media, both the partisan right of Fox and talk radio as well as the “mainstream”. Today’s Father Coughlin’s – Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck – nursed the stirrings against Obama’s health care plan into a national campaign knitted together around hatred for Obama and anti-government grievances. It is worth noting that no similar media courtesy has been extended to any left or liberal formations by the more moderate media. Indeed, the “mainstream” has shown a curious fascination - a sensational fixation – that has helped to propel the Tea-Party movement forward.
Of course this movement did not spring from nothing. The elements have been there for years, if not decades. Arguably, this political formation was even larger and more influential during the years of extreme anti-Communism, the era associated with the antics of Senator Joe McCarthy. Again, rightwing extremism forced itself center stage behind the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in the sixties. And, of course, it returned with a vengeance with the election of Ronald Reagan.
In most cases it attached to the Republican Party for its political expression. In most cases, it found a happy home with Republican leaders who were able to marshal the movement’s energy and press some of its demands without surrendering any of the Party’s commitment to a corporate-coddling agenda.
That is not to say there were not times when the extreme-right could not be contained within the bounds of the two-party system. The Wallace-LeMay campaign of 1968 drew nearly 10 million votes (13.5% of voters) to a virulently racist, belligerently war-mongering program outside of both major parties. But generally, the extreme right sees the Republican Party as a natural haven. Likewise, Republican leaders find extreme-right ideology as a handy weapon or ready diversion against liberal-left ideas that might slow or stop the rapacity of capital. They have succeeded in wedding “free enterprise”, anti-regulation, anti-tax principles to the racist and nationalist intolerance and conservative values of the historical extreme-right. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the bond cementing this wedding was anti-Communism.
Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer (LBO #125) takes a stab at describing the social composition of the Tea-baggers, the current crop of extreme-right foot soldiers: “Though no one has done the rigorous sociological work, they look to be a movement of middle managers, professionals, and retirees – the petite-bourgeoisie, to use the old language.” I think Henwood is substantially correct, though “petite-bourgeoisie” is both a broader and more precise category than he suggests while still eminently useful despite its age. Those who answer polls by identifying with the wealthy few because they mistakenly believe they are the rich or soon will be instantiate this class or, at least, this mentality. Further, I think this class has historically always provided the fertile ground for extreme-right views. The shrillness and threatened violence of the extreme-right’s actions are clearly rooted in fear and the threat to petit-bourgois illusions from the economic crisis.
Tea-baggers and Fascism
It is a facile and immediate response to label all extreme-right movements as “fascist”. The term has been wrenched from its precise meaning in a particular historic period applying to particular historic developments and particular social movements as to lose all meaningfulness. Its common use today is more as an expletive rather than a helpful explanatory term. Nonetheless, it is useful to locate extreme-right movements in relation to historical antecedents. Thus, we understand the Tea-Party movement better by uncovering its common features and differences with the fascist social movements of the 1930’s and 1940’s.
As Henwood points out, the Tea-Party movement is predominantly petit-bourgeois in social composition. It shares this feature with the earlier fascist movements which drew heavily from the upper-middle and middle strata. These strata – in pre-war Germany, but also Italy – feared the loss of a comfortable and formerly stable way of life. Then and now, that life-style was seriously threatened by an economic crisis. Assumptions about values and world-views were and are challenged by the crises.
For the most part, fascist movements were responsive to a left and working class movement growing in power and influence. While that is not true today, the Tea-baggers have constructed an imaginary left by drawing on Cold-War imagery and crudely pasting that imagery on a President perceived by them as alien. If indeed history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, the Tea-bagger fears of the left are surely farcical – labeling policies aiding corporations and the wealthy as “socialist”.
Like their fascist predecessors, the Tea-Party groups operate somewhat independently of the established political parties. Previously, the extreme-right found a comfortable home inside the Republican Party. And to a great extent, the cynical, corrupted leaders of the Republican Party exercised a control, even manipulation, of the fundamentalist zealots, racists, libertarians, etc. that nested in that party. But the new movement challenges those reins on many counts, generating some consternation among Republican big-wigs.
Recently, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a trusted member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, chastised Sarah Palin in an op-ed piece (2-18-10) for Palin’s recent endorsement of Rand Paul – libertarian Ron Paul’s son. Paul, the younger, “holds views on national security and defense that have much in common with those of the far left.” She notes that Paul, the elder, has “said repeatedly that the United States had given Osama bin Laden good cause to attack us…” In addition, Rand Paul “stands opposed to the Patriot Act and he wants to cut defense spending.” Rabinowitz is warning Palin, the Paul’s, and others in the Tea-Party movement that any deviation from the Republican pro-corporate, pro-imperialist agenda will not be tolerated. The defense procurement and supporting industries are among the most generous and loyal components of the Republican fund raising apparatus. Moreover, imperialist aggression is the policy that drives the growth of these industries.
Twelve days later, Gerald F. Seib, The Wall Street Journal’s influential Capital Journal columnist emphasized the dangers of a renegade Tea-Party movement with an article “Tea Party Holds Risks for GOP” (3-2-10). “In particular,” he writes, “Republicans’ courtship of the Tea Party movement threatens to pull the party away from its moorings on two crucial and emotional issues: the war on terror and immigration.” One can translate this to mean that Republicans are fearful that this movement will alienate its corporate sponsors in the defense industry and challenge Republican efforts to recruit voters from the ranks of Hispanics. Seib cites many examples of Tea-Party leaders opting for a libertarian slant on civil liberties over the repressive, police state Patriot Act – further signs of a distance from a corporate agenda. His closing comments reveal the danger perceived by the two-party system insiders: “The problem with those independent movements is that they are exactly that – independent.”
Some on the left confuse this independence with a spark of progressivism, taking attacks by Tea-baggers on the current health care reform initiative, the bailouts, and the stimulus package to be anti-corporate populism. In fact, they are rabidly and solely anti-government. The fact that there is virtually no popular understanding of the fusion of government and monopoly corporations in contemporary capitalism– state-monopoly capitalism – feeds this confusion. This same confusion creates a false and diversionary political divide between those who are pro- and anti-government. The truth is that government and big business are joined at the hip and any serious, progressive movement for change must tackle both.
A Conundrum
For those who cry wolf at the activities of every right wing movement on the political stage – easily recalling the rise of European fascism in the twentieth century – something resembling the real deal may now escape them. For generations, the extreme right has been nourished and groomed by the leaders of the Republican Party. Our current incarnation was courted by Ronald Reagan and his successors to serve as electoral troops for the Republican Party. In return, Republican leaders gave gestures and symbols to hold their attention while relentlessly pressing a corporate, wealth-coddling course. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was sacrificed from that course to hold the extreme-right in place. The raw meat of prayer, flag waving, charter schools, government funding for religious charitable work, anti-abortion posturing, gun rights, etc. cost the corporate world nothing, while cheaply satisfying right-wing zealotry.
Yet in the last few years –especially with the exposure of the callowness, cynicism, and corruption of the Bush administration – the movement has taken on a new life, fueled by Fox News, talk radio, unabashed racism, and economic uncertainty to make demands upon the Republican Party often out of step with the larger goals of the Party leaders, corporate board rooms, and our ruling class. The tail is beginning to wag the dog.
I believe this evolution of the organized extreme-right towards independent action accounts for the near unanimous Republican opposition to the TARP bailout – an event that found candidate Obama offering unconditional support for this blatant gift to the financial sector. Likewise, the Republicans fought hard against a stimulus package that Herbert Hoover could have endorsed in 1932. Republican intransigence towards the final Congressional health care proposal – a plan that had substantially won the support of the health care and pharmaceutical industry – counts as another example of the political weight of the extreme-right’s new found independence. In my view, it is this departure from the capitalist program that has Republican leaders – and mouthpieces like Rabinowitz and Seib – so frenzied over the Tea-bag movement. They – like their bourgeois antecedents in the nineteen thirties and forties – are trying to tame a tiger that has its own appetites.
Missing from this discussion are liberals, the left, and the Democratic Party. And therein lays the problem: they are missing. I begin with an account of the promise – both emotionally and objectively – of the election of 2008. If no other lesson can be drawn from the Tea-Party phenomenon, it is that an independent political movement, even a minority one, exercises inordinate influence upon the direction of US politics. As Seib points out so well in the above quote, independent movements pose serious problems to the corporate dominated two-party system, problems that bend the parties away from the trajectory preferred by the US ruling class. This is an old lesson – one that many of us drew from the mass upsurges of the thirties that shaped the programs of a cautious, relatively conservative President into the show pieces of the New Deal. The independent militancy of labor and the left prodded Roosevelt into becoming the icon of liberalism that he is today.
Many are wringing their hands and crying “betrayal”, blaming Obama for the failure to bring any significant change to the political landscape. This is silly. Anyone paying attention would recognize Obama as a mainstream corporate Democrat sensitive to the moment, but - left to his own devices - inclined to support the call of monopoly capital. I have written often of his career and the parallels with other Democrats who have been publicly ordained with messianic qualities. I have pointed to the strong corporate sponsorship – especially from finance capital – of his candidacy and warned of any easy dismissal of what that might mean. Those who fostered such illusions have only themselves to blame for the disappointment of the last fourteen months.
Facing an interim election in eight months, it is likely that little will be accomplished legislatively after the spring. Few politicians will want to take any risks and campaigning will begin in earnest. Still it will be a great opportunity to press an independent progressive agenda on vote-hungry, promise-happy politicos seeking support in November. It will be a chance to build a counter-force preparing for the legislative battles to come after the elections. Support for independent candidates – many Green Party candidates are projecting effective campaigns – will scare the pants off of complacent Democrats, much as the Tea-Party advocates frighten Republican leaders. There is much to do to put some spine into labor leadership and rekindle the anti-war movement. All of these steps will move us closer to creating a left-oriented third-party that can consistently influence our political course. Its time to lose the defensive posture of the last period and mount an offensive against those offering two flavors of the same poison. And we won’t have to explain the puzzling fact that the people are hungry for progressive change while the political winds are blowing rightward.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
Monday, February 22, 2010
Ukraine: Five years after the “Orange Revolution”
Five years ago, my colleague, Louise Michel, and I posted several articles on MLToday divulging the intrigues behind the Ukraine Presidential elections. Michel placed the celebrated “Orange Revolution” in the context of the other orchestrated “color” revolutions organized and encouraged by NGO’s funded by EU governments and the US. Michel and I “sought to expose the enormous amount of money and resources flowing into these countries from such noble sounding institutions as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), and many others”. “It was apparent to [me]” she wrote, “that these ‘popular risings’ were far from spontaneous, but rather highly manipulated, and compatible with US foreign policy objectives”. She recounted “AP reporter Matt Kelley's revelations about more than $65 millions worth of US influence peddling in the Ukraine…” Michel argued persuasively that the contested election and the subsequent new election were more properly viewed as a coup, rather than victory for democracy. She cited a New York Times writer, C.J. Chivers, who “exposes some of these machinations… [T]he Times article really chronicles how the Ukraine government's decision to halt the highly orchestrated, well funded opposition demonstration in Kiev were thwarted by the surreptitious, behind-the-scenes maneuvers of high ranking security and military officials within the government. They used their influence to undermine the government response.”
Michel’s careful scrutiny of the mainstream media dug up another suggestive revelation of the phoniness of the “democratic” revolution:
Soon after the new President took office, the “democratic” victory had become a colossal farce. I wrote: “The showdown with Russia over establishing world market prices for natural gas was portrayed widely as a victory for the Western-friendly President Yushchenko. Apparently, the Ukrainian people disagree. Buoyed by poll figures leading up to the March parliamentary elections that show the formerly elected and then unelected Presidential candidate’s bloc leading over both of the "Orange" stars, the current parliament voted 250 to 50 to fire the Prime Minister and his cabinet.” The script written by Western powers was not setting well with the Ukrainian people.
And a year after an election result agreeable to Western imperialist powers, Yushchenko, chastened by confrontation with Russia over natural gas prices, proposed an approach embarrassing to his Western sponsors. I wrote:
The hypocrisy is blatant on all sides. Imperialism intervened in Ukraine’s internal affairs, engineering a coup masking as a democratic revolution. And the designated “liberators” proved to be incompetent, corrupted, and unpopular.
Now, five years later, The Wall Street Journal makes a candid admission. In a front page feature, writer Richard Bourdeaux exclaims that “Rent-a-crowd entrepreneurs find people fast to cheer or jeer for $4 an hour.” This is the face of the new Ukrainian democracy. “’We’ll do business with any political party. Ideology doesn’t matter to us’ says the 21 year-old web design major at Kiev Polytechnic Institute. ‘It matters less to most students’, he adds grinning. ‘They have become tired of politicians. They will rally only for money.’”
As comrades at the City of Future paper (www.stbudg.ucoz.ru) in Kharkov point out, Simonenko, the candidate of the Communist Party of Ukraine received 22.4% of the presidential vote in 1999, but only 5% in 2010. With the privatization of the state sector, public ownership has been reduced to 12% of economic enterprises (the state sector accounted for 90% of enterprises in 1990) and the role and influence of money in determining outcomes, the corruption of political life, and the distortion of democracy has increased dramatically. Contrary to media mythology, the ascent of capitalism stifles democracy. Today in Ukraine, a candidate for president must post roughly US$300,000 to even run for office. Following the US model, candidates must gather signatures to achieve ballot status, regulations that effectively undermine minority party candidacies. The massive 2004 intervention in Ukrainian political life by Western imperialist powers has produced its intended result – not an infusion of democracy, but a decided shift to the right. Even much of the left has shifted rightward in a response the new rules of the political game. Rather than promoting democracy, foreign intervention – expressed through the “Orange revolution” – has shaped a sham, money-driven pseudo-democracy dominated by powerful elites.
Ironically, matters have come full circle. The once demonized Victor Yanukovych won election in 2010, defeating the former darlings of Western imperialism. Julia Tymoshenko – a caricature of vulgar nationalism and Sarah Palin-style populism – held out her concession, hoping for another Western-backed, manipulated challenge to the elections. This time it didn’t come.
As I promised four years ago, “[w]e continue to hold Ukraine under our Marxist microscope…” in order to expose the cynicism of Western “democrats” and the degradation of democracy by capitalism.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
Michel’s careful scrutiny of the mainstream media dug up another suggestive revelation of the phoniness of the “democratic” revolution:
How deeply did this corruption and perfidy go? Very deeply, if a recent communication in the New York Review of Books (2/10/05) is to be believed. Peter Savodnik — identified as the political editor of The Hill newspaper in Washington, DC — writes to "share with your readers a story I've come across here in Washington that may be of interest."
And indeed it is.
"Last month", he goes on, "between the first and second rounds of voting in the Ukrainian presidential election, Lytvyn [the powerful speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament and former chief of staff for Kuchma] made a brief, low profile trip to Washington, where he met with Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Senators Richard Lugar and John McCain, and Representative Henry Hyde…"
"In any event, the Americans apparently thought Lytvyn might be able to help Viktor Yushchenko win some key support in the Rada.... Interestingly, on December 1[2004], Lytvyn permitted the Rada to hold the no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Yanukovich's government [Yushchenko's opponent]; this proved to be a critical development that was soon followed by the Supreme Court's ruling that the runoff was invalid because of fraud."
Soon after the new President took office, the “democratic” victory had become a colossal farce. I wrote: “The showdown with Russia over establishing world market prices for natural gas was portrayed widely as a victory for the Western-friendly President Yushchenko. Apparently, the Ukrainian people disagree. Buoyed by poll figures leading up to the March parliamentary elections that show the formerly elected and then unelected Presidential candidate’s bloc leading over both of the "Orange" stars, the current parliament voted 250 to 50 to fire the Prime Minister and his cabinet.” The script written by Western powers was not setting well with the Ukrainian people.
And a year after an election result agreeable to Western imperialist powers, Yushchenko, chastened by confrontation with Russia over natural gas prices, proposed an approach embarrassing to his Western sponsors. I wrote:
Today’s news (January 14, 2006) brings the latest desperate move on the part of puppet-President Yushchenko: faced with the ominous threat to his power spawned by the natural gas fiasco, he now proposes nuclear power as an alternative to the countries dependency upon Russian natural gas. "We must change our ... policy on the use of uranium for peaceful purposes.... We must cooperate with international allies on a serious political and economic level, so that we can have a full cycle of processing and production of nuclear fuel ..." stated Yushchenko on national TV. Of course this is exactly the policy that has created hysterical Western threats to the DPRK (North Korea) and Iran. As Yushchenko spoke, Bush was declaring Iran a "grave threat" because it announced the resumption of its nuclear reactors and its own nuclear enrichment program.
The hypocrisy of allowing Ukraine to develop a nuclear program while threatening Korean and Iranian programs was apparent even to Western news services who noted: "Mr. Yushchenko’s call could put his Western allies in an awkward position as they seek to balance the desire to help Ukraine shed Russian influence with concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation and their campaign to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions" (cited on www.post-gazette.com/nationworld).
The hypocrisy is blatant on all sides. Imperialism intervened in Ukraine’s internal affairs, engineering a coup masking as a democratic revolution. And the designated “liberators” proved to be incompetent, corrupted, and unpopular.
Now, five years later, The Wall Street Journal makes a candid admission. In a front page feature, writer Richard Bourdeaux exclaims that “Rent-a-crowd entrepreneurs find people fast to cheer or jeer for $4 an hour.” This is the face of the new Ukrainian democracy. “’We’ll do business with any political party. Ideology doesn’t matter to us’ says the 21 year-old web design major at Kiev Polytechnic Institute. ‘It matters less to most students’, he adds grinning. ‘They have become tired of politicians. They will rally only for money.’”
As comrades at the City of Future paper (www.stbudg.ucoz.ru) in Kharkov point out, Simonenko, the candidate of the Communist Party of Ukraine received 22.4% of the presidential vote in 1999, but only 5% in 2010. With the privatization of the state sector, public ownership has been reduced to 12% of economic enterprises (the state sector accounted for 90% of enterprises in 1990) and the role and influence of money in determining outcomes, the corruption of political life, and the distortion of democracy has increased dramatically. Contrary to media mythology, the ascent of capitalism stifles democracy. Today in Ukraine, a candidate for president must post roughly US$300,000 to even run for office. Following the US model, candidates must gather signatures to achieve ballot status, regulations that effectively undermine minority party candidacies. The massive 2004 intervention in Ukrainian political life by Western imperialist powers has produced its intended result – not an infusion of democracy, but a decided shift to the right. Even much of the left has shifted rightward in a response the new rules of the political game. Rather than promoting democracy, foreign intervention – expressed through the “Orange revolution” – has shaped a sham, money-driven pseudo-democracy dominated by powerful elites.
Ironically, matters have come full circle. The once demonized Victor Yanukovych won election in 2010, defeating the former darlings of Western imperialism. Julia Tymoshenko – a caricature of vulgar nationalism and Sarah Palin-style populism – held out her concession, hoping for another Western-backed, manipulated challenge to the elections. This time it didn’t come.
As I promised four years ago, “[w]e continue to hold Ukraine under our Marxist microscope…” in order to expose the cynicism of Western “democrats” and the degradation of democracy by capitalism.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The Class War: Where Things Stand
The singular contribution that Marxism offers to the theory of the working class movement is the idea of exploitation as well as a way to gauge its intensity. Prior to the pioneering efforts of Marx and Engels, those sympathetic to the miserable conditions of working people brought on by the rise of industrialization pointed to the grinding poverty and short, brutal lives of employees and urged reforms and relief. They failed to locate these conditions in the very logic of capitalism. They failed to find the source of these conditions in the relation between capital and wage-labor.
Marx and Engels brought the concept of exploitation to the fore as both a rich and robust moral concept and as an objective, measurable centerpiece of working class political economy. Exploitation, in its most intuitive and simplified sense, is the appropriation of the product of labor by those not engaged directly in producing those products. Stealing, of course, is a kind of appropriation as well, and a kindred notion to exploitation, but exploitation differs by existing in a socio-economic system that permits and even encourages its practice. A clear and transparent example of exploitation is the extraction of coal from a tract of land. The workers produce the end product, but the owner of the land, by virtue of the institution of private ownership, appropriates that product in its entirety, paying the workers the least amount adequate to coax them to take the risk and supply the effort. In such a pure example, it is apparent that the compensation of the workers is largely independent of their necessity and sole role in creating a useful product. It is equally clear that the owner may very well add no effort to the product’s creation though commanding its disposition – possessing the product – solely by virtue of a contingent social relationship: ownership of land. The amount paid to workers is determined independently of their role in production; the less the owner pays for the production of a given quantity of commodities, the greater the rate of exploitation.
The Mechanism Unveiled
While the complexities of a modern capitalist society tend to obscure the relations of exploitation, a deep capitalist crisis serves to expose these relations. With growth slumping, investment meager, and wages and benefits stagnant, the unquenchable thirst for profits requires an intensification of exploitation to restore the system’s health. If profit is the life blood of the capitalist organism, exploitation is its nutrient. We see the rising rate of exploitation in the current US economy with the dramatic growth of labor productivity. Beginning early in 2009, worker’s output per man hour accelerated dramatically, advancing by 5.1% in the fourth quarter over the previous year. Nearly all of this increase can be attributed to layoffs, resulting in fewer workers producing as much or more than in the prior year. The mass layoffs of the last two years retarded and reversed the declining productivity of 2008 and spurred an explosion of productivity growth in 2009.
The rate of exploitation, as expressed today in productivity growth, serves as the best indicators of the condition of the working class and its prospects. Increasing exploitation reflects capitalist aggression, the failings of the labor movement and the politicians it sponsors, and the unlikelihood that any great effort to improve employment is forthcoming. Political leaders and corporate managers are reluctant to deny the market economy the one lever that has successfully restored profitability and corporate health. A glance at the last recession earlier in the decade reveals the same pattern: economic decline followed by layoffs and a jump in labor productivity, restoring profitability. Commentators then wrote of the “jobless” recovery. Today we are experiencing the same process in a far deeper recession. As long as layoffs remain the mechanism for gains in productivity, profit restoration and corporate recovery, unemployment will remain high. Only a new level of labor militancy and anti-corporate fight back will install a recovery for the people ahead of a recovery for capitalism. The bankruptcy of shoring up capitalism to promote the people’s needs – the ideology of social democracy and labor-management cooperation - has been demonstrated over the last decade.
The Other Side of the Coin
Exploitation is equally intensified by paying less in wages and benefits for the same effort, a process made easier by labor capitulation and the fear of job loss. In late January, Ford announced that it will hire 1,200 union workers, many at “at significantly reduced wages” (The Wall Street Journal, 1-26-10). The 2007 contract with the UAW allows the Big Three domestic automakers “to fill jobs vacated by older workers who leave or retire with new hires earning a little more than $14 an hour, about half what veteran workers are paid. Newer workers also get reduced benefits”. The “second tier” workers will have a 401(k) retirement plan rather than a traditional pension. Bob King, the heir apparent to the UAW Presidency, confirmed that “[t]here will be new people hired at Ford.” Since the 2007 UAW contract gives existing workers priority, the hiring of new, entry-level employees is retarded by desperate workers laid off around the country, but willing to uproot and relocate where jobs are available. Nonetheless, industry experts expect the mass hiring of low wage workers to be a significant factor in employment by 2015.
The same depression of wages and benefits – an increase in exploitation – is ravaging the public sector. The Chicago Transit Authority secured concessions from the unions in 2007, but are back again with even greater demands upon the workers. The CTA threatens to layoff more than 1,000 workers unless deep cuts in wages and benefits are made. A transport workers’ concessionary proposal has been ignored by management. The Chicago Sun-Times (1-29-10) reports that Chicago Federation of Labor President, Dennis Gannon, has urged the transport unions to accept in whole the management proposal to “save 1,100 jobs…” Once again, the long standing philosophy of labor-management cooperation proves ineffective and thwarts the fight back to rally workers and the public to defend living wage jobs.
This failure to marshal a resolute and militant struggle against corporate aggression – a legacy of the destruction of labor’s left in the Cold War – is confirmed by the latest Labor Department figures. In the last twelve months, inflation adjusted wages and benefits in the private sector fell by 1.3%, the worst performance since the government began to record data in 1983. At the same time, US corporations succeeded in reducing 2009 health care cost increases to the second lowest yearly figure in the decade by cutting their contribution or shifting workers to less comprehensive health plans.
Can a capitalist economy recover without forcing the burden of recovery on the backs of working people? At a time when corporate profits are improving and management salaries are exceeding historic levels is it inevitable that workers must endure great sacrifices for the economy to bounce back?
Another Way
On January 18, 2010, The New York Times reported that the French government – led by the conservative President, Nicolas Sarkozy – demanded that the firm Renault “maintain employment at its French factories.” Meeting with the head of Renault, Carlos Ghost, Sarkozy extracted a commitment that “Renault is a French company, a socially responsible citizen, attached to its industrial and technological roots.” Of course the French car companies do not want to do this; they would prefer to shift production to low-wage countries and layoff French workers. Nor does Sarkozy, an avowed fan of the US neo-liberal, free market model, want to make these demands upon the industry. But all know that any retreat from guaranteed employment will bring French workers into the streets and into occupancy of the factories. They know that the public will rally around the French workers.
Renault, like Peugeot-Citroen, received government bailout money from the French people under the condition that they would maintain employment; “The companies pledged in return to protect French jobs.” The industry minister stressed that “The state will have its say. When a French car is destined to be sold in France, it should be made in France.” This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the US President, allegedly a progressive and friend of labor, whose policies dictated that US auto companies would close plants and layoff workers in exchange for bailout money. The difference, quite clearly, is the militancy and class consciousness of labor. French unions, unlike their US counterparts, have consistently and without relent, refused class collaboration.
Politicians, media pundits, industry experts, and the EU competition commissioner have cast dire predictions that supporting employment, wages, and salaries in France will result in a weak, uncompetitive economy. Ironically, France showed the best economic growth of all EU member states in the fourth quarter of 2009.
We Can Do Better
Weakened by years of close and servile collaboration with management, most US unions and the AFL-CIO hierarchy are in a difficult position. The atrophy of labor militancy has backed leadership into the corner of choosing concessions or job loss. Labor’s political “friends” have betrayed labor’s cause without retribution to the point that they no longer fear labor’s still significant strength. The only way out of this corner is mobilizing the membership, the unemployed, and its many allies in a determined campaign to stand up to the corporate offensive and expose the political charlatans who pose as friends. As always, this begins with bringing people to the streets.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
Marx and Engels brought the concept of exploitation to the fore as both a rich and robust moral concept and as an objective, measurable centerpiece of working class political economy. Exploitation, in its most intuitive and simplified sense, is the appropriation of the product of labor by those not engaged directly in producing those products. Stealing, of course, is a kind of appropriation as well, and a kindred notion to exploitation, but exploitation differs by existing in a socio-economic system that permits and even encourages its practice. A clear and transparent example of exploitation is the extraction of coal from a tract of land. The workers produce the end product, but the owner of the land, by virtue of the institution of private ownership, appropriates that product in its entirety, paying the workers the least amount adequate to coax them to take the risk and supply the effort. In such a pure example, it is apparent that the compensation of the workers is largely independent of their necessity and sole role in creating a useful product. It is equally clear that the owner may very well add no effort to the product’s creation though commanding its disposition – possessing the product – solely by virtue of a contingent social relationship: ownership of land. The amount paid to workers is determined independently of their role in production; the less the owner pays for the production of a given quantity of commodities, the greater the rate of exploitation.
The Mechanism Unveiled
While the complexities of a modern capitalist society tend to obscure the relations of exploitation, a deep capitalist crisis serves to expose these relations. With growth slumping, investment meager, and wages and benefits stagnant, the unquenchable thirst for profits requires an intensification of exploitation to restore the system’s health. If profit is the life blood of the capitalist organism, exploitation is its nutrient. We see the rising rate of exploitation in the current US economy with the dramatic growth of labor productivity. Beginning early in 2009, worker’s output per man hour accelerated dramatically, advancing by 5.1% in the fourth quarter over the previous year. Nearly all of this increase can be attributed to layoffs, resulting in fewer workers producing as much or more than in the prior year. The mass layoffs of the last two years retarded and reversed the declining productivity of 2008 and spurred an explosion of productivity growth in 2009.
The rate of exploitation, as expressed today in productivity growth, serves as the best indicators of the condition of the working class and its prospects. Increasing exploitation reflects capitalist aggression, the failings of the labor movement and the politicians it sponsors, and the unlikelihood that any great effort to improve employment is forthcoming. Political leaders and corporate managers are reluctant to deny the market economy the one lever that has successfully restored profitability and corporate health. A glance at the last recession earlier in the decade reveals the same pattern: economic decline followed by layoffs and a jump in labor productivity, restoring profitability. Commentators then wrote of the “jobless” recovery. Today we are experiencing the same process in a far deeper recession. As long as layoffs remain the mechanism for gains in productivity, profit restoration and corporate recovery, unemployment will remain high. Only a new level of labor militancy and anti-corporate fight back will install a recovery for the people ahead of a recovery for capitalism. The bankruptcy of shoring up capitalism to promote the people’s needs – the ideology of social democracy and labor-management cooperation - has been demonstrated over the last decade.
The Other Side of the Coin
Exploitation is equally intensified by paying less in wages and benefits for the same effort, a process made easier by labor capitulation and the fear of job loss. In late January, Ford announced that it will hire 1,200 union workers, many at “at significantly reduced wages” (The Wall Street Journal, 1-26-10). The 2007 contract with the UAW allows the Big Three domestic automakers “to fill jobs vacated by older workers who leave or retire with new hires earning a little more than $14 an hour, about half what veteran workers are paid. Newer workers also get reduced benefits”. The “second tier” workers will have a 401(k) retirement plan rather than a traditional pension. Bob King, the heir apparent to the UAW Presidency, confirmed that “[t]here will be new people hired at Ford.” Since the 2007 UAW contract gives existing workers priority, the hiring of new, entry-level employees is retarded by desperate workers laid off around the country, but willing to uproot and relocate where jobs are available. Nonetheless, industry experts expect the mass hiring of low wage workers to be a significant factor in employment by 2015.
The same depression of wages and benefits – an increase in exploitation – is ravaging the public sector. The Chicago Transit Authority secured concessions from the unions in 2007, but are back again with even greater demands upon the workers. The CTA threatens to layoff more than 1,000 workers unless deep cuts in wages and benefits are made. A transport workers’ concessionary proposal has been ignored by management. The Chicago Sun-Times (1-29-10) reports that Chicago Federation of Labor President, Dennis Gannon, has urged the transport unions to accept in whole the management proposal to “save 1,100 jobs…” Once again, the long standing philosophy of labor-management cooperation proves ineffective and thwarts the fight back to rally workers and the public to defend living wage jobs.
This failure to marshal a resolute and militant struggle against corporate aggression – a legacy of the destruction of labor’s left in the Cold War – is confirmed by the latest Labor Department figures. In the last twelve months, inflation adjusted wages and benefits in the private sector fell by 1.3%, the worst performance since the government began to record data in 1983. At the same time, US corporations succeeded in reducing 2009 health care cost increases to the second lowest yearly figure in the decade by cutting their contribution or shifting workers to less comprehensive health plans.
Can a capitalist economy recover without forcing the burden of recovery on the backs of working people? At a time when corporate profits are improving and management salaries are exceeding historic levels is it inevitable that workers must endure great sacrifices for the economy to bounce back?
Another Way
On January 18, 2010, The New York Times reported that the French government – led by the conservative President, Nicolas Sarkozy – demanded that the firm Renault “maintain employment at its French factories.” Meeting with the head of Renault, Carlos Ghost, Sarkozy extracted a commitment that “Renault is a French company, a socially responsible citizen, attached to its industrial and technological roots.” Of course the French car companies do not want to do this; they would prefer to shift production to low-wage countries and layoff French workers. Nor does Sarkozy, an avowed fan of the US neo-liberal, free market model, want to make these demands upon the industry. But all know that any retreat from guaranteed employment will bring French workers into the streets and into occupancy of the factories. They know that the public will rally around the French workers.
Renault, like Peugeot-Citroen, received government bailout money from the French people under the condition that they would maintain employment; “The companies pledged in return to protect French jobs.” The industry minister stressed that “The state will have its say. When a French car is destined to be sold in France, it should be made in France.” This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the US President, allegedly a progressive and friend of labor, whose policies dictated that US auto companies would close plants and layoff workers in exchange for bailout money. The difference, quite clearly, is the militancy and class consciousness of labor. French unions, unlike their US counterparts, have consistently and without relent, refused class collaboration.
Politicians, media pundits, industry experts, and the EU competition commissioner have cast dire predictions that supporting employment, wages, and salaries in France will result in a weak, uncompetitive economy. Ironically, France showed the best economic growth of all EU member states in the fourth quarter of 2009.
We Can Do Better
Weakened by years of close and servile collaboration with management, most US unions and the AFL-CIO hierarchy are in a difficult position. The atrophy of labor militancy has backed leadership into the corner of choosing concessions or job loss. Labor’s political “friends” have betrayed labor’s cause without retribution to the point that they no longer fear labor’s still significant strength. The only way out of this corner is mobilizing the membership, the unemployed, and its many allies in a determined campaign to stand up to the corporate offensive and expose the political charlatans who pose as friends. As always, this begins with bringing people to the streets.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Looking Back and Going Forward
One year ago, President Obama took office. His assumption of the highest executive office was met with relief by most (nearly 80% of citizens polled in October 2008 thought the country was heading in the wrong direction) and high expectations by many.
Quite naturally, those who opine on the big national media stage used the occasion of the anniversary to record an assessment of the first year. Judgment was heightened by the result of the special election for the Senate seat in Massachusetts of the deceased incumbent, Edward Kennedy, a result that, by all accounts, was an ominous and severe setback for the Democratic Party.
With equal vigor, the Democratic Party mainstream, uncomfortable with anything even vaguely threatening to corporate interests, points to a non-existent leftish tilt as responsible for their failings. Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, ever anxious to speak for Party moderates, decried the Democrats “overreach” and failure to find consensus “with independents and moderates”. With all the seriousness that a scolding Democratic Leadership Council icon can muster, he warns of a “catastrophe of biblical proportions” unless Democrats mend their ways. Like so many of his Party colleagues, Bayh is more comfortable with sermons than realistic or effective policy proposals. He advocates a “positive populism” that will miraculously create jobs and prosperity while reducing government spending, a prescription akin to advocating diets for the starving. In his world this makes sense, only emphasizing the irony of his remark that “Washington is out of touch with mainstream America” as expressed to The Wall Street Journal (1-26-10)
But this seems to be the message that Obama and his team are hearing, given his emphasis on reducing the deficit. Not only will he freeze non-defense related federal spending, already eviscerated during the Bush years, but he will enact a stealth budget slashing strategy recently rejected by the Congress. A commission – to be established beyond the bounds of democratic engagement or transparency - would make wholesale recommendations for spending cuts and present them as a package to Congress to be voted up or down. With little debate and no possibility of amendment the package-strategy would provide cover for those politicians
facing potential outrage in their home states or districts. They will argue that they had no choice but to accept or reject the whole policy even with some unpopular aspects. There is no question that the ultimate target of this devious strategy is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We find here an example of the Obama pattern – now a finely honed tactic – of “faking left and going right”.
Despite Obama’s best rhetorical flourishes, there is absolutely to connection between deficit austerity and job creation. Every economist concedes this point. In fact, most would recognize an inverse relationship between reduced government spending and improved employment. Indeed, the great lesson of the last profound and persistent struggle against unemployment – The Great Depression – demonstrates the utter folly of a policy of deficit reduction in the face of mass job loss. Roosevelt’s drive for a balanced budget in 1937 sent the economy into a sharp descent while sharply reducing employment. It took a return to massive public employment to stabilize the US economy. That lesson is lost on an Administration dogmatically committed to private, market-based solutions.
Rather than listening to Evan Bayh, his corporate cronies, and the baying hounds of the know-nothing media, Obama and his team might consult with the people. He might begin with the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll (1-20-10).
Around 57% of US citizens think the economy will stay the same or decline over the next 12 months. This is hardly an endorsement of the policies crafted by Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, and the rest of the Obama economics team. If Obama were listening to the people, they would be gone. Nonetheless, the DC political cabal is hanging tough with Bernanke and Geithner. Since June, 2009, the percentage of people confident in Administration economic goals and policies has steadily declined, settling at about 35% in January. This should come as no surprise given policy makers’ near total neglect of the 16 million under or unemployed in the US while urgently rendering life support to the unappreciative financial sector.
In October of 2008, before Obama’s inauguration, only a bit more than one in ten US citizens felt the country was going in the right direction, a reflection of the overwhelming disgust with the Bush era. Immediately after the inauguration, that number rose to over 40%, bolstered by the great hope and faith that so many had placed in Obama and the Democrats. In January, 2010, the number had dropped to the mid-thirties, reflecting growing disappointment with the Administration.
Contrary to the wide spread, media induced belief that the country is being overrun by wild-eyed, Obama haters, 72% of the poll respondents found Obama to be “likeable and easygoing”, 59% “inspirational and exciting”. This result demonstrates the vast exaggeration of the tea-bagger movement as representative of the attitude of most US citizens. It further suggests to what extent the corporate media was complicit in pumping up the phenomena. On the other hand, the poll does show a decided unhappiness with the direction Obama has taken: only 38% agree with position on issues and 40% believe he will achieve his goals. Less than a third believe he is “changing business as usual in Washington”.
Despite the symbolic impact of the election of the first African-American President, 78% of those polls believe that race relations in the US have stayed the same or gotten worse.
Lest it appear that disappointment with Obama translates into support for Republicans, one need only turn to US attitudes towards health care reform: 55% of respondents disapprove of Obama’s handling of the issue, while 64% disapprove of the Republican approach! Clearly neither party offers the answers to health care that the people want. Of the options available – including the popular single-payer solution- both parties chose a course out-of-step with the people’s desires and, I might add, the people’s needs.
It should be even more obvious that both parties are trapped in a box dictated by corporate interests, a box that allows only limited policy options, failing both the test of popular desires and needs. Obama’s recent, extraordinary meeting with Republican bigwigs seems a calculated attempt to rally the other party to defend that box. When he stated: “I know many of you individually. And the irony, I think, of our political climate right now is that, compared to other countries, the differences between the two major parties on most issues is not as big as it's represented”, he spoke a truth that defined his own approach as well as the basis for the crisis in the two-party system. It is precisely this identity of outlook and interest that Obama persistently and enthusiastically pursues with his tiresome, ineffective, but dogged call for “bi-partisanship”.
It fails, and it will fail, because the Republican Party is under constant and unrelenting pressure from its right. The evangelicals, the anti-immigrant cabal, the anti-abortion crowd, the anti-gay fanatics, the racists, the war-mongering nationalists, and, yes, the tea-baggers are organized, vocal and independent of the Party leadership. They make nearly non-negotiable demands on the Republican Party. And the party complies.
This lesson has escaped liberals, progressives, and many on the left who consistently work and support Democratic candidates who neither share nor swear to a progressive agenda. Moreover, they refuse to call out politicians in the Democratic Party who stray from a progressive course out of some perverse sense of loyalty or twisted appeal to unity. In my view, this is unprincipled and opportunistic. But even if some see this as too harsh of a judgment, surely this past year demonstrates that complacent trust is ineffective. The dynamic of Obama’s first year shows that one cannot simply work for the election of a “better” candidate and put aside the critical activism that can shape that candidates political course. We would do well to study the strategic approach of the demonic right. We’d do even better putting our energies into building a left-of-center third party.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
Quite naturally, those who opine on the big national media stage used the occasion of the anniversary to record an assessment of the first year. Judgment was heightened by the result of the special election for the Senate seat in Massachusetts of the deceased incumbent, Edward Kennedy, a result that, by all accounts, was an ominous and severe setback for the Democratic Party.
With equal vigor, the Democratic Party mainstream, uncomfortable with anything even vaguely threatening to corporate interests, points to a non-existent leftish tilt as responsible for their failings. Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, ever anxious to speak for Party moderates, decried the Democrats “overreach” and failure to find consensus “with independents and moderates”. With all the seriousness that a scolding Democratic Leadership Council icon can muster, he warns of a “catastrophe of biblical proportions” unless Democrats mend their ways. Like so many of his Party colleagues, Bayh is more comfortable with sermons than realistic or effective policy proposals. He advocates a “positive populism” that will miraculously create jobs and prosperity while reducing government spending, a prescription akin to advocating diets for the starving. In his world this makes sense, only emphasizing the irony of his remark that “Washington is out of touch with mainstream America” as expressed to The Wall Street Journal (1-26-10)
But this seems to be the message that Obama and his team are hearing, given his emphasis on reducing the deficit. Not only will he freeze non-defense related federal spending, already eviscerated during the Bush years, but he will enact a stealth budget slashing strategy recently rejected by the Congress. A commission – to be established beyond the bounds of democratic engagement or transparency - would make wholesale recommendations for spending cuts and present them as a package to Congress to be voted up or down. With little debate and no possibility of amendment the package-strategy would provide cover for those politicians
facing potential outrage in their home states or districts. They will argue that they had no choice but to accept or reject the whole policy even with some unpopular aspects. There is no question that the ultimate target of this devious strategy is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We find here an example of the Obama pattern – now a finely honed tactic – of “faking left and going right”.
Despite Obama’s best rhetorical flourishes, there is absolutely to connection between deficit austerity and job creation. Every economist concedes this point. In fact, most would recognize an inverse relationship between reduced government spending and improved employment. Indeed, the great lesson of the last profound and persistent struggle against unemployment – The Great Depression – demonstrates the utter folly of a policy of deficit reduction in the face of mass job loss. Roosevelt’s drive for a balanced budget in 1937 sent the economy into a sharp descent while sharply reducing employment. It took a return to massive public employment to stabilize the US economy. That lesson is lost on an Administration dogmatically committed to private, market-based solutions.
Rather than listening to Evan Bayh, his corporate cronies, and the baying hounds of the know-nothing media, Obama and his team might consult with the people. He might begin with the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll (1-20-10).
Around 57% of US citizens think the economy will stay the same or decline over the next 12 months. This is hardly an endorsement of the policies crafted by Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, and the rest of the Obama economics team. If Obama were listening to the people, they would be gone. Nonetheless, the DC political cabal is hanging tough with Bernanke and Geithner. Since June, 2009, the percentage of people confident in Administration economic goals and policies has steadily declined, settling at about 35% in January. This should come as no surprise given policy makers’ near total neglect of the 16 million under or unemployed in the US while urgently rendering life support to the unappreciative financial sector.
In October of 2008, before Obama’s inauguration, only a bit more than one in ten US citizens felt the country was going in the right direction, a reflection of the overwhelming disgust with the Bush era. Immediately after the inauguration, that number rose to over 40%, bolstered by the great hope and faith that so many had placed in Obama and the Democrats. In January, 2010, the number had dropped to the mid-thirties, reflecting growing disappointment with the Administration.
Contrary to the wide spread, media induced belief that the country is being overrun by wild-eyed, Obama haters, 72% of the poll respondents found Obama to be “likeable and easygoing”, 59% “inspirational and exciting”. This result demonstrates the vast exaggeration of the tea-bagger movement as representative of the attitude of most US citizens. It further suggests to what extent the corporate media was complicit in pumping up the phenomena. On the other hand, the poll does show a decided unhappiness with the direction Obama has taken: only 38% agree with position on issues and 40% believe he will achieve his goals. Less than a third believe he is “changing business as usual in Washington”.
Despite the symbolic impact of the election of the first African-American President, 78% of those polls believe that race relations in the US have stayed the same or gotten worse.
Lest it appear that disappointment with Obama translates into support for Republicans, one need only turn to US attitudes towards health care reform: 55% of respondents disapprove of Obama’s handling of the issue, while 64% disapprove of the Republican approach! Clearly neither party offers the answers to health care that the people want. Of the options available – including the popular single-payer solution- both parties chose a course out-of-step with the people’s desires and, I might add, the people’s needs.
It should be even more obvious that both parties are trapped in a box dictated by corporate interests, a box that allows only limited policy options, failing both the test of popular desires and needs. Obama’s recent, extraordinary meeting with Republican bigwigs seems a calculated attempt to rally the other party to defend that box. When he stated: “I know many of you individually. And the irony, I think, of our political climate right now is that, compared to other countries, the differences between the two major parties on most issues is not as big as it's represented”, he spoke a truth that defined his own approach as well as the basis for the crisis in the two-party system. It is precisely this identity of outlook and interest that Obama persistently and enthusiastically pursues with his tiresome, ineffective, but dogged call for “bi-partisanship”.
It fails, and it will fail, because the Republican Party is under constant and unrelenting pressure from its right. The evangelicals, the anti-immigrant cabal, the anti-abortion crowd, the anti-gay fanatics, the racists, the war-mongering nationalists, and, yes, the tea-baggers are organized, vocal and independent of the Party leadership. They make nearly non-negotiable demands on the Republican Party. And the party complies.
This lesson has escaped liberals, progressives, and many on the left who consistently work and support Democratic candidates who neither share nor swear to a progressive agenda. Moreover, they refuse to call out politicians in the Democratic Party who stray from a progressive course out of some perverse sense of loyalty or twisted appeal to unity. In my view, this is unprincipled and opportunistic. But even if some see this as too harsh of a judgment, surely this past year demonstrates that complacent trust is ineffective. The dynamic of Obama’s first year shows that one cannot simply work for the election of a “better” candidate and put aside the critical activism that can shape that candidates political course. We would do well to study the strategic approach of the demonic right. We’d do even better putting our energies into building a left-of-center third party.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
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