Workers Vanguard No. 986
16 September 2011
The Revolutionary Newspaper
(Quote of the Week)
In one of his earliest writings, V.I. Lenin explained the crucial importance of the Marxist press in building a revolutionary workers party. The article was written for the fourth issue of Iskra, newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s revolutionary Marxist tendency, which would later develop into the Bolshevik Party.
The immediate task of our Party is not to summon all available forces for the attack right now, but to call for the formation of a revolutionary organisation capable of uniting all forces and guiding the movement in actual practice and not in name alone, that is, an organisation ready at any time to support every protest and every outbreak and use it to build up and consolidate the fighting forces suitable for the decisive struggle….
A newspaper is what we most of all need; without it we cannot conduct that systematic, all-round propaganda and agitation, consistent in principle, which is the chief and permanent task of Social-Democracy in general and, in particular, the pressing task of the moment, when interest in politics and in questions of socialism has been aroused among the broadest strata of the population….
The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser. In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour. With the aid of the newspaper, and through it, a permanent organisation will naturally take shape that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work, and will train its members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on the various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence those events.
—V.I. Lenin, “Where to Begin?” May 1901, Collected Works, Vol. 5
Showing posts with label VANGUARD PARTY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label VANGUARD PARTY. Show all posts
Monday, September 26, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
The Latest From “The International Marxist Tendency” Website
Click on to the headline to link to the latest from the International Marxist Tendency website.
Markin comment:
More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.
Markin comment:
More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.
Friday, September 09, 2011
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Capitalism in Crisis: Karl Marx Was Right-We Need an All New Ruling Class—the Workers!......And Markin Says Pronto!
Workers Vanguard No. 985
2 September 2011
Capitalism in Crisis: Karl Marx Was Right
We Need an All New Ruling Class—the Workers!
In 2007-2008, the world was plunged into an economic crisis unrivaled since the days of the Great Depression. The con men on Wall Street whose financial swindles were central to this collapse were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars. The working class, black people, Latinos, the poor, the sick and the aged have been made to foot the bill, losing their jobs, homes, pensions and virtually anything else that makes life remotely livable. Today, one in six people in the U.S. are unemployed, with the average time out of work close to ten months. Forty-five million people are on food stamps, an increase of 34 percent over the past two years. Those who still have a job are being sweated to work harder for lower wages. In racist America, it’s all the worse for black people and Latinos, who were among the main victims of the banks’ subprime mortgage scams. One-third of black and Latino households have no net worth, with many underwater in debt. The capitalist authors of this ruin have, in the meantime, made out like bandits.
During the “jobless and wageless recovery” of the past two years, corporate profits have broken all historic records. This comes on top of the enormous enrichment of the wealthiest 1 percent of the population, who more than doubled their share of the national income in the past three decades. The government’s “welfare for the rich” schemes have boosted financial speculation, artificially driving up the price of stocks, while the already rotting productive capacity of U.S. capitalism goes through the floor. With the U.S. economy overwhelmingly based on consumer spending—and with the vast majority having no money to spend—this whole house of cards is crashing down again as the economy spirals into a double-dip recession.
For over a month, the stock market has been on a wild roller-coaster ride of panicked buying and selling. Among the detonators of this panic were concerns that the Democratic president of the United States, Barack Obama, had lost control of the imperialist “ship of state” to a pack of deranged Republican Tea Party yahoos. Liberal Democrats and others raged that the Republicans were holding America “hostage” by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless they got trillions in spending cuts and no rise in taxes for the rich. But it was the Democratic Party president himself who manufactured the myth that the “world’s only superpower” was about to default on its debt like some impoverished Third World country. Even if they didn’t have the money—which they do, and plenty of it—they “can always print money,” as former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan put it.
Obama’s purpose in this charade was not much different from that of the Republicans, as he pushed for a “grand bargain” of massive austerity through slashing more than $4 trillion from so-called “entitlement” programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security over the next decade. His sop of closing a few tax loopholes for the rich was about all the Democrats could choke out to try to maintain the fraud that they are the “friends” of the little guy. And they even caved on that one.
Nonetheless, the recklessness of the Republicans has disturbed Wall Street and even their own party establishment. As Doug Henwood put it in his Left Business Observer (21 August): “Wall Street, the Fortune 500, center-right Dems, non-insane Republicans—who’ve been happy to let the Teabaggers promote the austerity agenda, would now like them to get out of the way. Not only are they undermining the blue-blood status of Treasury bonds, they’re making our political system look foolish on a world stage. But when you use odious and/or lunatic agents, there is always what the CIA types call a ‘disposal problem’.”
The madness of the Republican Party “Tea Baggers” is merely an extreme expression of the depravity of America’s capitalist rulers, who have no other way out of the economic crisis—a crisis of their own making—than to further starve the poor, bust the unions and drive down wages. As the political servants of the same capitalist class, the Democrats are increasingly incapable of even putting a phony “kinder, gentler” facade on the cruel inhumanity of imperialist rule.
It Is Desperately Necessary to Fight!
While Congress was gridlocked over the “debt ceiling,” the imperialist masters of the European Union (EU) were in emergency session to come up with another bailout of Greece—in reality, a bailout of the investments of French and German bankers on the backs of the Greek working class. Then it looked like Spain and Italy might go belly-up as rising interest on their government bonds was freezing them out of money to keep their economies afloat. After EU and IMF bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, the European Central Bank started spending tens of billions more to buy up the bonds of Spain and Italy and drive down interest rates, while the governments of those two countries announced even more savage austerity.
Meanwhile, Britain was exploding in anger ignited by the cop killing of a young black man (see article, page 16). From London to other cities, thousands took to the streets in an upheaval fueled by vicious spending cuts and job slashing. The London Guardian Weekly (19 August) warned: “Together, the global imbalances, the manic-depressive behavior of stock markets, the venalilty of the financial sector, the growing gulf between rich and poor, the high levels of unemployment, the naked consumerism and the English riots are telling us something. This is a system in deep trouble, and it is waiting to blow.”
In Europe, austerity has been met with strikes and protests, at times massive, in defense of workers’ livelihoods. But the workers’ struggles are hamstrung by their reformist misleaders, who accept the inevitability of capitalist austerity while merely pleading that the blows be softened.
In this country, tens of thousands of unionists and their supporters came out in protest early this year against Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker’s union-busting law tearing up the collective bargaining rights of public workers unions. With public workers unions everywhere threatened with obliteration, the Wisconsin protests inspired workers across the country who saw them as the beginning of a fightback against the one-sided class war targeting organized labor. But the bureaucratic misleaders of the AFL-CIO worked overtime to squelch any move toward actually using labor’s strike weapon, channeling the anger of the ranks into support for the Democratic Party with a petition campaign to recall Walker and a number of Republican state legislators.
The decades of betrayals by these labor fakers have encouraged the U.S. rulers in the arrogant belief that they can get away with doing anything to the working class, the poor and most everyone else without provoking any social struggle. But the rulers and their labor lieutenants cannot eliminate the class struggle which is born of the irreconcilable conflict of interests between labor and its exploiters. The same conditions that grind down the workers can and will propel them into battle against the capitalist class enemy. This was seen in the midst of the Great Depression, when, at a brief upturn in the economy, workers began to engage in hard-fought battles to organize industrial unions in this country.
The sit-down strikes, mass pickets and other actions that built the CIO were ignited by the 1934 San Francisco general strike and mass strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis the same year. All of those strikes were led by reds. It was to head off the threat that class battles would challenge capitalist rule that New Deal social programs such as Social Security were implemented. Following World War II, Cold War red purges in the unions drove out socialists and Communists, including the Stalinists who had channeled workers’ discontent into support for Roosevelt’s Democratic Party.
Today, there are no longer avowed socialists with a significant base in the unions. But even in the absence of militants inspired by such political convictions, radical leaders will arise and they will be no less militant. Renewed labor battles will lay the basis for reviving and extending the unions, with a new, class-struggle leadership coming to the fore. For the workers to prevail against their exploiters, they must be armed with a Marxist political program that links labor’s fight to the struggle to build a multiracial workers party that will do away with this entire system of wage slavery through socialist revolution. Fight, don’t starve! Those who labor must rule!
The Bourgeoisie: An Unfit Ruling Class
In the Communist Manifesto, written more than 150 years ago, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified the key contradiction of capitalist society, which lies at the root of repeated economic crises. On the one hand, under capitalism production is socialized. But the means of production remain the private property of a few, who appropriate the wealth that is produced by workers’ collective labor.
The boom-bust economic cycles are direct products of the capitalist system of production for profit. Capitalists invest in expanding productive capacity on the assumption that the additional output—autos, houses, etc.—can be sold at the existing rate of profit, at least. However, during periods of expansion the average rate of profit tends to fall. This situation eventually creates a crisis of overproduction, as capitalists produce more goods and services than can be sold at a satisfactory rate of profit. Thus there is the repeated spectacle of masses of workers losing their jobs and being thrown into destitution because too much has been produced. As described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:
“Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce…. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.”
Marx and Engels underlined that the rise of capitalism and the destruction of the feudal order represented a historic advance in the development of the productive forces—science, industry and technology. Yet capitalism in turn became a fetter on the further development of those productive forces. Out of the destitution and destruction produced by capitalism’s inevitable economic crises, the means of production came to be monopolized by fewer and bigger conglomerates. Their ever-growing need for investment funds and other financing led to the domination of finance capital, that is, of banking goliaths.
By the late 19th century, capitalism reached its ultimate, imperialist stage. The capitalists in the advanced industrial countries were driven to wage wars to redivide the world in order to plunder markets and secure spheres of exploitation in less-developed countries. In their competition for world domination, the imperialist powers engulfed the peoples of the world in the barbarism of World Wars I and II, as well as waging countless wars in colonial and semicolonial countries.
The utter irrationality of capitalism reached new depths in the epoch of imperialism. While industrial capitalists continued to concentrate on the production of goods for sale (commodities), the machinations of the giant financial institutions took on unheard-of proportions. As revolutionary Marxist leader V.I. Lenin explained in his 1916 study Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism:
“Although commodity production still ‘reigns’ and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialised production; but the immense progress of mankind which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit…the speculators.”
A case in point is the U.S. bourgeoisie, which for decades has shunned investment that would expand and modernize its decaying industrial capacity or repair the country’s crumbling bridges, roads, power lines and levees. Instead, it has squandered much of the economic surplus appropriated through the exploitation of labor on a succession of speculative binges. And in fact it was rampant financial speculation in the housing industry that triggered the current economic crisis.
In Europe, such financial swindles have sharply accentuated the contradictions inherent in the European Union, an unstable consortium of rival capitalist states. At the heart of the EU’s contradictions is the fact that the maintenance of a common currency requires a common state power. That is simply not possible under capitalism. The International Communist League long ago debunked the illusion that the EU could lay the basis for a capitalist United States of Europe. In a statement on the Maastricht Treaty, which laid the basis for the euro, the ICL wrote:
“Since capitalism is organised on the basis of particular national states, itself the cause of repeated imperialist wars to redivide the world, it is impossible to cohere a stable pan-European bourgeois state. A European imperialist ‘superstate’ can be achieved only by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht.”
—“For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!”
WV No. 670, 13 June 1997
Only the conquest of state power by the proletariat can lay the basis for a socialist United States of Europe and a rationally planned economy.
As proletarian revolutionary internationalists, we have always opposed the EU as an imperialist trade bloc. Dominated by capitalist France and Germany, the EU’s purpose is to increase their competitive edge against their imperialist rivals in the U.S. and Japan through the increased exploitation of the working class of the EU countries. As the price of entry, the weaker EU states were locked into the euro. Now they are going down, scrambling to meet their debt obligations by driving the working class into the ground. It couldn’t have been otherwise.
In 1848, Marx and Engels indicted the bourgeoisie as “unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society” because “it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery.” If the bourgeoisie of that time was unfit to rule, the imperialist rulers today have long passed their sell-by date.
An Empire in Decline
Beginning with the 1898 Spanish-American War, the capitalist rulers of the rapidly developing U.S. set out to conquer the world, seizing Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines for their own plunder. When they emerged as the dominant imperialist power following World War II, the U.S. imperialists boasted of the beginning of the “American Century.” But by the 1970s, they were seeing their dominance challenged by the rising economic might of Germany and Japan. With its treasury drained by the long, losing war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants, the U.S. was no longer the world’s undisputed capitalist powerhouse. This was signaled by the devaluation of the dollar on 15 August 1971.
To reverse its declining fortunes, the U.S. ruling class launched a campaign to increase profitability through the increased exploitation of the working class—closing auto and steel factories, moving production to low-wage plants in the “open shop” South and to neocolonies in Latin America and Asia, increasing productivity through speedup and the institution of “two-tier” wage and benefits packages for younger workers. A key turning point was the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981. It was Democratic president Jimmy Carter who drew up the plan to crush PATCO, which was implemented by his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan. The AFL-CIO bureaucrats let Reagan get away with it, crucially by refusing to call out other unions to shut down the airports. This defeat helped usher in a wave of broken unions and busted strikes.
Like Obama today, Reagan manufactured a debt crisis in order to destroy social programs. The “war on poverty” programs enacted to buy social peace in the inner cities following the mass ghetto upheavals of the 1960s were increasingly shredded. But it took Democratic president Bill Clinton to finally eliminate “welfare as we know it.” Acting on Reagan’s racist demagogy about black “welfare queens” living off the back of “hard-working taxpayers,” Clinton abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children for impoverished single mothers and their families.
Reagan had run a huge deficit spending program, slashing taxes for the rich while borrowing massively from Japanese and German bankers as well as oil-rich Arab sheikdoms. The overriding purpose was a huge military buildup for U.S. imperialism’s Cold War drive against the Soviet Union. Despite its bureaucratic degeneration under Stalin, the Soviet workers state continued to embody the main social gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The imperialists were determined to reconquer this vast territory—one-sixth of the planet—for their exploitation.
In 1991-92, the capitalists achieved their counterrevolutionary aim of destroying the world’s first workers state. Coming into office on the back of this “victory,” Clinton promised that the “peace dividend” would revitalize the economy by reducing the massive government debt. But the “dividend” was largely channeled into an orgy of speculative investment in telecommunications and Internet services, the so-called dot-com boom of the mid-late 1990s. That bubble burst in 2000-2001, ushering in another recession.
Clinton’s neoliberal Democrats were followed by the Republican neo-cons of the George W. Bush administration. These nuclear cowboys invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to send a message to the rest of the world that the U.S. remained militarily the top dog on the planet. These wars and occupations were financed through foreign borrowing, while the filthy rich got a tax cut that outdid even the free lunch they got under Reagan. Then the housing-price bubble of the early-mid 2000s burst in 2007-2008, touching off a global financial crisis. Today, we have Barack Obama lamely responding to Standard & Poor’s reduction of its AAA rating of U.S. treasury bonds by declaring that the U.S. has “always been and always will be a triple A country.” The stock market responded by taking a $2 trillion nosedive.
After the Soviet Union’s counterrevolutionary destruction, it appeared that the U.S. imperialists were successful in the quest they had begun almost a century earlier to be the masters of the world. But even as the U.S. has achieved unrivaled military supremacy, its domestic industrial base has continued to corrode. To some in the haughty U.S. ruling class, the decline of the country’s economic might is bereft of any explanation—besides being contrary to “God’s will.” In consequence, a wing of the American bourgeoisie has seemingly gone totally insane.
Even by the lights of their own party’s establishment, the current crop of Republican presidential candidates has gone off the deep end. On the campaign trail in Iowa, Texas governor Rick Perry accused the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, of treason for “printing more money to play politics,” threatening “we would treat him pretty ugly in Texas.” Perry, a dangerous reactionary, is here going after a Republican appointee of the Bush administration whose “soft money” policy has in fact been a boon for the bourgeoisie. By driving real interest rates down below zero, the Fed is essentially paying financial capitalists to borrow from the government—and then invest the money for a profit!
A week before Perry entered the race, he was the star of a 20,000-strong Christian fundamentalist revival meeting where he asked God to save the U.S. economy. Rival presidential candidate Michele Bachmann fervently believes that she and other good Christians are to be gathered in the air to sit at the right hand of God during what some call the coming “Rapture.” In their deranged worldview, Perry and Bachmann have much in common with the mad miracle monk Rasputin, who advised the Russian tsarina in the dying days of the brutal and rotted-out Tsarist Empire. Obama hopes to ride back into the Oval Office as the “sane” alternative, one who can more effectively implement a bipartisan drive to slash every remaining social program that reflects an impulse not to see masses of starving, homeless people in the streets.
There is no question that the current Republican candidates are lunatics. But their lunacy is the reflection of the dangerous irrationality of the U.S. imperialist order. Just as the decadent, crazed and corrupt court of the tsars was swept away by the Russian Revolution, we Marxists are determined to build the revolutionary internationalist party that can lead the workers in overthrowing the decaying rule of American capitalism.
For an International Socialist Planned Economy!
The reformist left pleads that the government “tax the rich” to provide the money for jobs, education, welfare for the poor and other beneficial programs. This refrain was recently taken up by multibillionaire Warren Buffett in a New York Times (14 August) op-ed column titled “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.” In response, a Fox TV business analyst denounced Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest financial profiteers, as a “socialist”! Actually, it is the fear that the masses might revolt that concerns Buffett, who opined: “Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.”
Amid a sea of millions of unemployed, the corporations and banks are sitting on mountains of cash. But you aren’t going to get your hands on it by appealing to the tax authority of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to guarantee and defend the interests of the bourgeoisie. To resolve their debt crisis, state and local governments are slashing pensions for retirees to pay off bondholders. To “make the rich pay,” the working class has to smash the rule of the bourgeoisie!
In an ideological climate conditioned by the imperialists’ proclamations that the destruction of the Soviet Union proved Marxism to be a “failed experiment,” the prospect of proletarian socialist revolution might appear implausible. But the collectivized economy in the Soviet Union worked! Despite its isolation in a world dominated by imperialism, the Soviet Union, arising from deep backwardness and the destruction of world war, civil war and imperialist intervention, became an industrial and military powerhouse.
Now, two decades after counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet degenerated workers state, many in Russia hark back to when they were guaranteed a job, education, housing, health care and vacations, regretting that they were taken in by the myth of capitalist “democracy.” What undermined the collectivized economy, and ultimately laid the basis for the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, was the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, which robbed the workers of their political power and vainly sought to appease the imperialists by selling out workers’ struggles in other countries.
Today, the deep economic crisis in the capitalist countries contrasts sharply with the situation in China, where the industries central to production are collectivized. At the same time that the U.S. and European governments have been bailing out the financial capitalists while making the workers pay, Beijing has massively channeled investment into developing infrastructure and productive capacity. Faced with a growing number of strikes and protests, the regime has increased the income of workers and peasants. However, China’s Stalinist regime undermines the social gains of the 1949 Revolution by conciliating imperialism and promoting “market reforms” that strengthen internal counterrevolutionary forces. In its “partnership” with world capital, the Beijing bureaucracy is subsidizing American imperialism through its huge investment in U.S. treasury bonds, which, among other things, are used to finance the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we understand that the defense and international extension of the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution require a proletarian political revolution to replace the Stalinist bureaucrats with a revolutionary internationalist leadership and a regime of workers democracy.
As we wrote in our article “Wall Street Nightmare Stalks Working People” (WV No. 921, 26 September 2008):
“You can solve a lot of problems with ‘domestic cash transfers’—make life livable for workers, blacks, Latinos, jobless, homeless, welfare mothers, drug users, etc. And we communists intend to do so. But you have to first smash the power of the bourgeoisie. For that you need to build a workers party, one that doesn’t ‘respect’ the property values of the bourgeoisie, a party that says to the exploited and oppressed: we want more, we want all of it, it ought to be ours, so take it. And when we have the wealth of this country, we will begin to build a planned socialist economy on an international scale. Then we can right some historical wrongs and crimes and pay off some debts left over by our rulers, like some tens of billions of dollars to the Vietnamese and others whose countries have been maimed under the passing treads of American tanks. As for ‘compensation’ to the people who have driven the United States to ruin, we can offer to those who don’t get in our way that they will live to see their grandchildren prosper in a truly humane society.”
2 September 2011
Capitalism in Crisis: Karl Marx Was Right
We Need an All New Ruling Class—the Workers!
In 2007-2008, the world was plunged into an economic crisis unrivaled since the days of the Great Depression. The con men on Wall Street whose financial swindles were central to this collapse were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars. The working class, black people, Latinos, the poor, the sick and the aged have been made to foot the bill, losing their jobs, homes, pensions and virtually anything else that makes life remotely livable. Today, one in six people in the U.S. are unemployed, with the average time out of work close to ten months. Forty-five million people are on food stamps, an increase of 34 percent over the past two years. Those who still have a job are being sweated to work harder for lower wages. In racist America, it’s all the worse for black people and Latinos, who were among the main victims of the banks’ subprime mortgage scams. One-third of black and Latino households have no net worth, with many underwater in debt. The capitalist authors of this ruin have, in the meantime, made out like bandits.
During the “jobless and wageless recovery” of the past two years, corporate profits have broken all historic records. This comes on top of the enormous enrichment of the wealthiest 1 percent of the population, who more than doubled their share of the national income in the past three decades. The government’s “welfare for the rich” schemes have boosted financial speculation, artificially driving up the price of stocks, while the already rotting productive capacity of U.S. capitalism goes through the floor. With the U.S. economy overwhelmingly based on consumer spending—and with the vast majority having no money to spend—this whole house of cards is crashing down again as the economy spirals into a double-dip recession.
For over a month, the stock market has been on a wild roller-coaster ride of panicked buying and selling. Among the detonators of this panic were concerns that the Democratic president of the United States, Barack Obama, had lost control of the imperialist “ship of state” to a pack of deranged Republican Tea Party yahoos. Liberal Democrats and others raged that the Republicans were holding America “hostage” by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless they got trillions in spending cuts and no rise in taxes for the rich. But it was the Democratic Party president himself who manufactured the myth that the “world’s only superpower” was about to default on its debt like some impoverished Third World country. Even if they didn’t have the money—which they do, and plenty of it—they “can always print money,” as former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan put it.
Obama’s purpose in this charade was not much different from that of the Republicans, as he pushed for a “grand bargain” of massive austerity through slashing more than $4 trillion from so-called “entitlement” programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security over the next decade. His sop of closing a few tax loopholes for the rich was about all the Democrats could choke out to try to maintain the fraud that they are the “friends” of the little guy. And they even caved on that one.
Nonetheless, the recklessness of the Republicans has disturbed Wall Street and even their own party establishment. As Doug Henwood put it in his Left Business Observer (21 August): “Wall Street, the Fortune 500, center-right Dems, non-insane Republicans—who’ve been happy to let the Teabaggers promote the austerity agenda, would now like them to get out of the way. Not only are they undermining the blue-blood status of Treasury bonds, they’re making our political system look foolish on a world stage. But when you use odious and/or lunatic agents, there is always what the CIA types call a ‘disposal problem’.”
The madness of the Republican Party “Tea Baggers” is merely an extreme expression of the depravity of America’s capitalist rulers, who have no other way out of the economic crisis—a crisis of their own making—than to further starve the poor, bust the unions and drive down wages. As the political servants of the same capitalist class, the Democrats are increasingly incapable of even putting a phony “kinder, gentler” facade on the cruel inhumanity of imperialist rule.
It Is Desperately Necessary to Fight!
While Congress was gridlocked over the “debt ceiling,” the imperialist masters of the European Union (EU) were in emergency session to come up with another bailout of Greece—in reality, a bailout of the investments of French and German bankers on the backs of the Greek working class. Then it looked like Spain and Italy might go belly-up as rising interest on their government bonds was freezing them out of money to keep their economies afloat. After EU and IMF bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, the European Central Bank started spending tens of billions more to buy up the bonds of Spain and Italy and drive down interest rates, while the governments of those two countries announced even more savage austerity.
Meanwhile, Britain was exploding in anger ignited by the cop killing of a young black man (see article, page 16). From London to other cities, thousands took to the streets in an upheaval fueled by vicious spending cuts and job slashing. The London Guardian Weekly (19 August) warned: “Together, the global imbalances, the manic-depressive behavior of stock markets, the venalilty of the financial sector, the growing gulf between rich and poor, the high levels of unemployment, the naked consumerism and the English riots are telling us something. This is a system in deep trouble, and it is waiting to blow.”
In Europe, austerity has been met with strikes and protests, at times massive, in defense of workers’ livelihoods. But the workers’ struggles are hamstrung by their reformist misleaders, who accept the inevitability of capitalist austerity while merely pleading that the blows be softened.
In this country, tens of thousands of unionists and their supporters came out in protest early this year against Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker’s union-busting law tearing up the collective bargaining rights of public workers unions. With public workers unions everywhere threatened with obliteration, the Wisconsin protests inspired workers across the country who saw them as the beginning of a fightback against the one-sided class war targeting organized labor. But the bureaucratic misleaders of the AFL-CIO worked overtime to squelch any move toward actually using labor’s strike weapon, channeling the anger of the ranks into support for the Democratic Party with a petition campaign to recall Walker and a number of Republican state legislators.
The decades of betrayals by these labor fakers have encouraged the U.S. rulers in the arrogant belief that they can get away with doing anything to the working class, the poor and most everyone else without provoking any social struggle. But the rulers and their labor lieutenants cannot eliminate the class struggle which is born of the irreconcilable conflict of interests between labor and its exploiters. The same conditions that grind down the workers can and will propel them into battle against the capitalist class enemy. This was seen in the midst of the Great Depression, when, at a brief upturn in the economy, workers began to engage in hard-fought battles to organize industrial unions in this country.
The sit-down strikes, mass pickets and other actions that built the CIO were ignited by the 1934 San Francisco general strike and mass strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis the same year. All of those strikes were led by reds. It was to head off the threat that class battles would challenge capitalist rule that New Deal social programs such as Social Security were implemented. Following World War II, Cold War red purges in the unions drove out socialists and Communists, including the Stalinists who had channeled workers’ discontent into support for Roosevelt’s Democratic Party.
Today, there are no longer avowed socialists with a significant base in the unions. But even in the absence of militants inspired by such political convictions, radical leaders will arise and they will be no less militant. Renewed labor battles will lay the basis for reviving and extending the unions, with a new, class-struggle leadership coming to the fore. For the workers to prevail against their exploiters, they must be armed with a Marxist political program that links labor’s fight to the struggle to build a multiracial workers party that will do away with this entire system of wage slavery through socialist revolution. Fight, don’t starve! Those who labor must rule!
The Bourgeoisie: An Unfit Ruling Class
In the Communist Manifesto, written more than 150 years ago, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified the key contradiction of capitalist society, which lies at the root of repeated economic crises. On the one hand, under capitalism production is socialized. But the means of production remain the private property of a few, who appropriate the wealth that is produced by workers’ collective labor.
The boom-bust economic cycles are direct products of the capitalist system of production for profit. Capitalists invest in expanding productive capacity on the assumption that the additional output—autos, houses, etc.—can be sold at the existing rate of profit, at least. However, during periods of expansion the average rate of profit tends to fall. This situation eventually creates a crisis of overproduction, as capitalists produce more goods and services than can be sold at a satisfactory rate of profit. Thus there is the repeated spectacle of masses of workers losing their jobs and being thrown into destitution because too much has been produced. As described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:
“Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce…. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.”
Marx and Engels underlined that the rise of capitalism and the destruction of the feudal order represented a historic advance in the development of the productive forces—science, industry and technology. Yet capitalism in turn became a fetter on the further development of those productive forces. Out of the destitution and destruction produced by capitalism’s inevitable economic crises, the means of production came to be monopolized by fewer and bigger conglomerates. Their ever-growing need for investment funds and other financing led to the domination of finance capital, that is, of banking goliaths.
By the late 19th century, capitalism reached its ultimate, imperialist stage. The capitalists in the advanced industrial countries were driven to wage wars to redivide the world in order to plunder markets and secure spheres of exploitation in less-developed countries. In their competition for world domination, the imperialist powers engulfed the peoples of the world in the barbarism of World Wars I and II, as well as waging countless wars in colonial and semicolonial countries.
The utter irrationality of capitalism reached new depths in the epoch of imperialism. While industrial capitalists continued to concentrate on the production of goods for sale (commodities), the machinations of the giant financial institutions took on unheard-of proportions. As revolutionary Marxist leader V.I. Lenin explained in his 1916 study Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism:
“Although commodity production still ‘reigns’ and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialised production; but the immense progress of mankind which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit…the speculators.”
A case in point is the U.S. bourgeoisie, which for decades has shunned investment that would expand and modernize its decaying industrial capacity or repair the country’s crumbling bridges, roads, power lines and levees. Instead, it has squandered much of the economic surplus appropriated through the exploitation of labor on a succession of speculative binges. And in fact it was rampant financial speculation in the housing industry that triggered the current economic crisis.
In Europe, such financial swindles have sharply accentuated the contradictions inherent in the European Union, an unstable consortium of rival capitalist states. At the heart of the EU’s contradictions is the fact that the maintenance of a common currency requires a common state power. That is simply not possible under capitalism. The International Communist League long ago debunked the illusion that the EU could lay the basis for a capitalist United States of Europe. In a statement on the Maastricht Treaty, which laid the basis for the euro, the ICL wrote:
“Since capitalism is organised on the basis of particular national states, itself the cause of repeated imperialist wars to redivide the world, it is impossible to cohere a stable pan-European bourgeois state. A European imperialist ‘superstate’ can be achieved only by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht.”
—“For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!”
WV No. 670, 13 June 1997
Only the conquest of state power by the proletariat can lay the basis for a socialist United States of Europe and a rationally planned economy.
As proletarian revolutionary internationalists, we have always opposed the EU as an imperialist trade bloc. Dominated by capitalist France and Germany, the EU’s purpose is to increase their competitive edge against their imperialist rivals in the U.S. and Japan through the increased exploitation of the working class of the EU countries. As the price of entry, the weaker EU states were locked into the euro. Now they are going down, scrambling to meet their debt obligations by driving the working class into the ground. It couldn’t have been otherwise.
In 1848, Marx and Engels indicted the bourgeoisie as “unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society” because “it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery.” If the bourgeoisie of that time was unfit to rule, the imperialist rulers today have long passed their sell-by date.
An Empire in Decline
Beginning with the 1898 Spanish-American War, the capitalist rulers of the rapidly developing U.S. set out to conquer the world, seizing Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines for their own plunder. When they emerged as the dominant imperialist power following World War II, the U.S. imperialists boasted of the beginning of the “American Century.” But by the 1970s, they were seeing their dominance challenged by the rising economic might of Germany and Japan. With its treasury drained by the long, losing war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants, the U.S. was no longer the world’s undisputed capitalist powerhouse. This was signaled by the devaluation of the dollar on 15 August 1971.
To reverse its declining fortunes, the U.S. ruling class launched a campaign to increase profitability through the increased exploitation of the working class—closing auto and steel factories, moving production to low-wage plants in the “open shop” South and to neocolonies in Latin America and Asia, increasing productivity through speedup and the institution of “two-tier” wage and benefits packages for younger workers. A key turning point was the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981. It was Democratic president Jimmy Carter who drew up the plan to crush PATCO, which was implemented by his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan. The AFL-CIO bureaucrats let Reagan get away with it, crucially by refusing to call out other unions to shut down the airports. This defeat helped usher in a wave of broken unions and busted strikes.
Like Obama today, Reagan manufactured a debt crisis in order to destroy social programs. The “war on poverty” programs enacted to buy social peace in the inner cities following the mass ghetto upheavals of the 1960s were increasingly shredded. But it took Democratic president Bill Clinton to finally eliminate “welfare as we know it.” Acting on Reagan’s racist demagogy about black “welfare queens” living off the back of “hard-working taxpayers,” Clinton abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children for impoverished single mothers and their families.
Reagan had run a huge deficit spending program, slashing taxes for the rich while borrowing massively from Japanese and German bankers as well as oil-rich Arab sheikdoms. The overriding purpose was a huge military buildup for U.S. imperialism’s Cold War drive against the Soviet Union. Despite its bureaucratic degeneration under Stalin, the Soviet workers state continued to embody the main social gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The imperialists were determined to reconquer this vast territory—one-sixth of the planet—for their exploitation.
In 1991-92, the capitalists achieved their counterrevolutionary aim of destroying the world’s first workers state. Coming into office on the back of this “victory,” Clinton promised that the “peace dividend” would revitalize the economy by reducing the massive government debt. But the “dividend” was largely channeled into an orgy of speculative investment in telecommunications and Internet services, the so-called dot-com boom of the mid-late 1990s. That bubble burst in 2000-2001, ushering in another recession.
Clinton’s neoliberal Democrats were followed by the Republican neo-cons of the George W. Bush administration. These nuclear cowboys invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to send a message to the rest of the world that the U.S. remained militarily the top dog on the planet. These wars and occupations were financed through foreign borrowing, while the filthy rich got a tax cut that outdid even the free lunch they got under Reagan. Then the housing-price bubble of the early-mid 2000s burst in 2007-2008, touching off a global financial crisis. Today, we have Barack Obama lamely responding to Standard & Poor’s reduction of its AAA rating of U.S. treasury bonds by declaring that the U.S. has “always been and always will be a triple A country.” The stock market responded by taking a $2 trillion nosedive.
After the Soviet Union’s counterrevolutionary destruction, it appeared that the U.S. imperialists were successful in the quest they had begun almost a century earlier to be the masters of the world. But even as the U.S. has achieved unrivaled military supremacy, its domestic industrial base has continued to corrode. To some in the haughty U.S. ruling class, the decline of the country’s economic might is bereft of any explanation—besides being contrary to “God’s will.” In consequence, a wing of the American bourgeoisie has seemingly gone totally insane.
Even by the lights of their own party’s establishment, the current crop of Republican presidential candidates has gone off the deep end. On the campaign trail in Iowa, Texas governor Rick Perry accused the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, of treason for “printing more money to play politics,” threatening “we would treat him pretty ugly in Texas.” Perry, a dangerous reactionary, is here going after a Republican appointee of the Bush administration whose “soft money” policy has in fact been a boon for the bourgeoisie. By driving real interest rates down below zero, the Fed is essentially paying financial capitalists to borrow from the government—and then invest the money for a profit!
A week before Perry entered the race, he was the star of a 20,000-strong Christian fundamentalist revival meeting where he asked God to save the U.S. economy. Rival presidential candidate Michele Bachmann fervently believes that she and other good Christians are to be gathered in the air to sit at the right hand of God during what some call the coming “Rapture.” In their deranged worldview, Perry and Bachmann have much in common with the mad miracle monk Rasputin, who advised the Russian tsarina in the dying days of the brutal and rotted-out Tsarist Empire. Obama hopes to ride back into the Oval Office as the “sane” alternative, one who can more effectively implement a bipartisan drive to slash every remaining social program that reflects an impulse not to see masses of starving, homeless people in the streets.
There is no question that the current Republican candidates are lunatics. But their lunacy is the reflection of the dangerous irrationality of the U.S. imperialist order. Just as the decadent, crazed and corrupt court of the tsars was swept away by the Russian Revolution, we Marxists are determined to build the revolutionary internationalist party that can lead the workers in overthrowing the decaying rule of American capitalism.
For an International Socialist Planned Economy!
The reformist left pleads that the government “tax the rich” to provide the money for jobs, education, welfare for the poor and other beneficial programs. This refrain was recently taken up by multibillionaire Warren Buffett in a New York Times (14 August) op-ed column titled “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.” In response, a Fox TV business analyst denounced Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest financial profiteers, as a “socialist”! Actually, it is the fear that the masses might revolt that concerns Buffett, who opined: “Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.”
Amid a sea of millions of unemployed, the corporations and banks are sitting on mountains of cash. But you aren’t going to get your hands on it by appealing to the tax authority of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to guarantee and defend the interests of the bourgeoisie. To resolve their debt crisis, state and local governments are slashing pensions for retirees to pay off bondholders. To “make the rich pay,” the working class has to smash the rule of the bourgeoisie!
In an ideological climate conditioned by the imperialists’ proclamations that the destruction of the Soviet Union proved Marxism to be a “failed experiment,” the prospect of proletarian socialist revolution might appear implausible. But the collectivized economy in the Soviet Union worked! Despite its isolation in a world dominated by imperialism, the Soviet Union, arising from deep backwardness and the destruction of world war, civil war and imperialist intervention, became an industrial and military powerhouse.
Now, two decades after counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet degenerated workers state, many in Russia hark back to when they were guaranteed a job, education, housing, health care and vacations, regretting that they were taken in by the myth of capitalist “democracy.” What undermined the collectivized economy, and ultimately laid the basis for the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, was the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, which robbed the workers of their political power and vainly sought to appease the imperialists by selling out workers’ struggles in other countries.
Today, the deep economic crisis in the capitalist countries contrasts sharply with the situation in China, where the industries central to production are collectivized. At the same time that the U.S. and European governments have been bailing out the financial capitalists while making the workers pay, Beijing has massively channeled investment into developing infrastructure and productive capacity. Faced with a growing number of strikes and protests, the regime has increased the income of workers and peasants. However, China’s Stalinist regime undermines the social gains of the 1949 Revolution by conciliating imperialism and promoting “market reforms” that strengthen internal counterrevolutionary forces. In its “partnership” with world capital, the Beijing bureaucracy is subsidizing American imperialism through its huge investment in U.S. treasury bonds, which, among other things, are used to finance the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we understand that the defense and international extension of the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution require a proletarian political revolution to replace the Stalinist bureaucrats with a revolutionary internationalist leadership and a regime of workers democracy.
As we wrote in our article “Wall Street Nightmare Stalks Working People” (WV No. 921, 26 September 2008):
“You can solve a lot of problems with ‘domestic cash transfers’—make life livable for workers, blacks, Latinos, jobless, homeless, welfare mothers, drug users, etc. And we communists intend to do so. But you have to first smash the power of the bourgeoisie. For that you need to build a workers party, one that doesn’t ‘respect’ the property values of the bourgeoisie, a party that says to the exploited and oppressed: we want more, we want all of it, it ought to be ours, so take it. And when we have the wealth of this country, we will begin to build a planned socialist economy on an international scale. Then we can right some historical wrongs and crimes and pay off some debts left over by our rulers, like some tens of billions of dollars to the Vietnamese and others whose countries have been maimed under the passing treads of American tanks. As for ‘compensation’ to the people who have driven the United States to ruin, we can offer to those who don’t get in our way that they will live to see their grandchildren prosper in a truly humane society.”
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- English Cities Erupt Over Racist Cop Killing, Austerity- A Post Riots Analysis
Workers Vanguard No. 985
2 September 2011
Capitalism Loots Wealth Made by Working People
English Cities Erupt Over Racist Cop Killing, Austerity
Free All Arrested for “Looting”!
LONDON—On 4 August, the cops shot and killed a young black man, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham, North London. Contrary to police disinformation circulated at the time, Duggan did not fire any shots. But that did not stop the press from branding the victim as a “gang member” killed in a “shootout” with police. The family of Mark Duggan, a father of four, were given almost no information about his death. Instead they were told to wait for the results of an inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, known among blacks as the police cover-up commission. Two days after Duggan was gunned down, his family members took part in a protest of some 300 people at a Tottenham police station demanding information, but none was given. Reportedly, police attacked a young woman demonstrator, knocking her to the ground.
There is a limit to the endurance of minority youth, who have been treated like criminals since the time they could walk. For black and South Asian youth in this country, degradation at the hands of the cops, including the relentless use of “stop and search,” is calculated to underline the message: you have no rights whatsoever. The killing of Mark Duggan was one atrocity too far. Anger exploded. Tottenham erupted in flames in scenes reminiscent of the riots in Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm housing project in 1985, which followed the police killing of a black mother.
Little of substance has changed in the lives of black people since that time. This time around, the revolt in Tottenham ignited a mass of social tinder at the bottom of British capitalist society. Rioting spread like wildfire to other areas of London and to parts of Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool. Black, Asian and white youth took to the streets to give the finger to the police, the government and a society in which they manifestly have no stake. For four days, riots by the impoverished and dispossessed swept cities and towns. Britain was exposed to the world as the racist, class-divided hellhole it is.
The arrogant rulers of decaying British capitalism have long regarded workers and the poor, and especially their black and Asian components, as merely an “underclass” deserving neither of education nor training, worthy only of state repression. In an attempt to deny that the cause of the riots is entrenched economic hardship, exacerbated by his government’s savage budget cuts, Conservative (Tory) prime minister David Cameron blamed the riots on “moral decay” and “criminality pure and simple,” insisting that they “were not about poverty.” Vowing to hunt down and jail “suspects,” Cameron seized the opportunity to massively strengthen repression. A vast police dragnet has so far arrested some 2,000 people, on any and every pretext, using information gleaned from trawling social networking sites and CCTV footage (and of course hacking phones). Television news has shown endless footage of gangs of cops brutally smashing down doors of people’s homes to arrest “suspects.”
Shredding any semblance of “due process,” the police are charging suspects before compiling evidence and opposing bail for the majority of those arrested. Cases involving minor offences that would normally result in a reprimand and would not even go to the lower magistrates’ courts are being referred to the Crown courts, which have greater sentencing powers. The vast majority of those arrested are being jailed, regardless of the alleged offence or of any previous convictions. Such a blanket policy of incarceration will vastly increase the numbers of people with criminal records which, for many youth, particularly blacks and Asians, is enough to ensure that they never work in their lives.
The draconian measures meted out in the aftermath of the riots are an escalation of the type of harsh repression meted out to students protesting against education cuts last year. The message from the capitalist rulers to the working class and the oppressed is clear: meekly accept the relentless attacks on jobs and living standards, or else! It is in the direct interests of the working class, especially the trade unions, to oppose these police-state measures and to demand that all charges be dropped against those arrested. We demand: Immediate release of all those arrested and jailed for “looting”!
Prominent politicians are calling for the use of plastic bullets and other weapons that the British state has historically deployed against the oppressed Catholics of Northern Ireland. The same capitalist ruling class that is brutally cracking down on dissent and opposition at home is engaged in imperialist subjugation abroad. Under the Labour Party government, British imperialist armed forces were in the forefront of the bloody occupations of neocolonial Afghanistan and Iraq. Under the present Tory-Liberal coalition government, British imperialism is playing a leading role in the NATO terror bombing of oil-rich Libya. Mocking Cameron’s lying claim that NATO bombs are “protecting civilians” and upholding “democracy,” Qaddafi’s deputy foreign minister urged Cameron to step down on the grounds that “violent repression of peaceful demonstrations by police” showed that “Cameron and his government have lost all legitimacy” (London Daily Telegraph, 11 August). At the outset of the bombing, the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) issued a statement calling on workers around the world to take a stand for military defence of semicolonial Libya against the imperialist attack (printed in WV No. 977, 1 April).
The flames that engulfed English cities lit up the grotesque class inequality and racist oppression that are endemic to British capitalism. While venal Conservative and Labour spokesmen pontificate against the evils of “looting,” everyone knows that the capitalist rulers are guilty of looting the country’s wealth. The City of London is an international citadel of finance capital whose gleaming office towers represent the opulence that is generated by the grinding exploitation of the working people. Not far from the City are some of the poorest districts in London, where a large percentage of minorities are concentrated. When boom turned to bust, the banks were bailed out (and the gigantic bankers’ bonuses were protected) at massive cost to the taxpayers. Now, at Cameron’s instigation, local councils have begun proceedings to evict families of “rioters” from public housing, while work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith proposed withdrawing benefits from those convicted.
“There Is Nothing Here for Us”
The rioting spread so dramatically because, on top of decades of grinding poverty affecting whites as well as blacks and Asians, the working people are being fleeced to pay for the current economic crisis. Nearly a million people aged 16 to 24 are unemployed. Youth joblessness overall has reached almost 20 per cent and is almost 50 per cent for black youth. Official figures for riot-affected areas such as Hackney, East London, show 44 per cent of children living in poverty.
A growing number of youth are being cast out of productive economic life and dubbed Neets—“not in employment, education or training.” The government tripled tuition fees in higher education and abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance, a small stipend that enabled poor youth to attend college, sparking militant student protests last December. Faced with cutting its budget by 75 per cent, Haringey local council, which covers Tottenham area, closed most of its youth clubs. One youth remarked, “At least we had somewhere to go. Now we walk down the streets, we get pulled over by police. There is nothing here for us” (London Guardian, 29 July).
There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!
In looking at the British “justice” system today, one does not have to be a Marxist to see what class it serves. No one has been arrested from the Metropolitan Police—truly one of London’s most dangerous armed gangs—which has been exposed for receiving hefty sums of cash (in plastic shopping bags) from the gang of Rupert Murdoch & Co. Intimately connected to these outfits, Tory and Labour politicians howl against the “criminality” of anyone who helped himself to a pair of sneakers or a bottle of water. The politicians’ hypocrisy is indeed rich in light of the recent scandal over Members of Parliament (MPs) making taxpayers shell out for the upkeep of their second homes, not to mention the cost of your “duck island” or cleaning out the moat at your country estate!
People accused of involvement in “rioting” are being thrown into prison on ludicrously trivial charges. Two white youths were sentenced to four years in prison for having (jokingly) summoned friends on Facebook to a “riot” that never happened. In Brixton, a black neighbourhood in South London, one person got a six-month sentence for stealing bottles of water worth £3.50. In Manchester an alcoholic who had just been released from prison and had only £4 in his pocket was sentenced to 16 months for taking a box of doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. The truth is that in poor neighbourhoods such as Tottenham, there isn’t much to steal.
The blatant class bias of capitalist “justice” in Britain today recalls the 17th-century English poem protesting the enclosure (i.e., theft) of common lands that were being privatised by the rising bourgeoisie:
“They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leave the greater villain loose
Who steals the common off the goose.”
Or, as Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto, aptly wrote in his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, the majority of offences against property arise from some form of want because “what a man has, he does not steal.” With the masses being driven to rioting by the increasingly abject conditions of their lives, the Spartacist League/Britain suggests, as an immediate measure, that the government give the “looters” £10,000 each and let them go!
Rioting, however, can do nothing to eliminate the grinding poverty of Britain’s working class. As the Spartacist League/U.S. wrote when Los Angeles exploded following the 1992 acquittal of the cops who beat black motorist Rodney King nearly to death, the looting there was “indeed understandable, but won’t do anything to eliminate the entrenched poverty of America’s inner cities…. The point is not to seize articles of consumption but to expropriate the means of production. And that takes a leap in consciousness and organization to do away with the capitalist order” (WV No. 551, 15 May 1992).
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), followers of the late Tony Cliff, ludicrously equates looting with the expropriation of the means of production—i.e., the seizure and collectivisation of industry, the banks, etc., by the proletariat. The SWP writes: “Karl Marx was exactly right when he talked about expropriating the expropriators, taking back what they have taken from us. That’s what looting by poor working class people represents and in that sense it is a deeply political act” (Socialist Worker, 13 August). The idea that looting offers a solution to the grinding poverty, racism and oppression besetting black and Asian communities shows that the SWP will mindlessly cheerlead for anything that moves, no matter how far removed from socialist consciousness it may be. But the bottom line for these reformists is to refurbish Labour’s image, which they do with calls to “Jail the Tories, not young people” (Socialist Worker, 20 August) and by hailing what they call a “rising against Tory Britain” (Socialist Worker, 13 August).
Riots are an expression of despair, often including ugly incidents of indiscriminate attacks on individuals. The killing of three young Asian men in Birmingham by a car driven straight at them is a heinous crime. The racial tensions between blacks and Asians during the riots were an outgrowth of the “divide and rule” policies the British rulers apply to divide the proletariat and weaken its struggles, as they did historically to maintain their Empire. In an effort to defuse those tensions, Tariq Jahan, father of one of the victims, courageously appealed for calm, saying, “I lost my son. Blacks, Asians, whites—we all live in the same community.” He added: “Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home—please.”
There is an urgent need for the working class and oppressed to struggle against the relentless attacks on their livelihoods. The question is how. The current deepgoing economic crisis is part and parcel of the normal workings of the capitalist system. There will be no end to the misery, poverty and repression that afflict the vast majority of the population short of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order and the establishment of rule by the working class. The SL/B seeks to forge a multiethnic revolutionary workers party—a Leninist-Trotskyist party—based on a programme for international socialist revolution.
Mobilize Workers’ Social Power!
Britain is the latest country in Europe to be swept by major unrest, reflecting seething anger among the working classes against relentless attacks on their living standards. Particularly in Greece, the working class has waged major class battles, including several general strikes in recent years, but the impact of these struggles has been undermined by the reformist misleaders of the working class, who accept the need for austerity as a solution to the economic crisis. In Britain, the fact that the pent-up fury against the government’s attacks on the working class is being dissipated in outbursts of rioting testifies to the low level of class struggle over the past two decades. This is due in no small part to the failure of the trade-union bureaucracy to mount any effective struggle against austerity and job cuts, allowing the capitalist rulers to ride roughshod over the working people.
Trade-union membership in Britain today is concentrated among low-paid workers in the public sector, with minorities heavily represented. The membership of the rail unions in London Underground and the national railway network, as well as the civil service and postal unions, is multiethnic. Together, these unions have considerable social power. Transport workers in London for example, have the power to bring the city to a halt, including its precious financial district. But mobilising that power requires a political struggle against the reformist trade-union bureaucracy, which is tied to the Labour Party and to the racist capitalist order.
It is through the intervention of Marxists into class and social struggles that a revolutionary workers party will be forged. Such a party would champion the interests of all the oppressed, fighting against racism and other manifestations of chauvinism. An integral part of building this party is the fight for a class-struggle leadership in the trade unions. In Britain today, such a leadership would appeal to disaffected youth by waging a fight for jobs, through demands such as a shorter working week with no loss in pay. A class-struggle leadership would demand union control of hiring and union-run job training and skills programmes to recruit minority youth into the workforce and into the unions. The task of a Leninist party is to bring about the necessary change in consciousness in the proletariat, leading to the understanding that a society run in the interests of the working people—with jobs for all and a decent standard of living—cannot be achieved within the framework of capitalism.
From the point of view of Britain’s working class and oppressed minorities, it makes little difference whether the government is Tory or Labour, historically the social-democratic vehicle that tied the working class to the capitalist order. When the riots erupted both parties (as well as the Liberal Democrats) vied to be seen as the best defenders of the police. Not a single Labour MP—neither the so-called “lefts” nor the handful of black MPs—condemned the cops who killed Mark Duggan. Far from it: Labour spokesmen attacked the government from the right, denouncing the planned cuts to the police budget. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband said, “Police on our streets make our communities safer and make the public feel safer” (BBC, 11 August).
Tottenham’s black Labour MP, David Lammy, ranted to the press about the “totally unacceptable” behaviour of the rioters, voicing only the mildest criticisms of the cops who gunned down Mark Duggan. Nevertheless, Lammy, who symbolises a very small layer of middle-class blacks, was subjected to an outrageous racist tirade by reactionary historian David Starkey on BBC television. Black MP for Hackney Diane Abbott, once regarded as a Labour “left,” chimed in with the “law and order” brigade, calling for curfews to help “regain control of the streets.” Labour’s backing for the racist cops is not new: When he was London mayor, Labour’s Ken Livingstone was unwavering in his support for the police who in 2005 brutally killed Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, deemed a “terrorism suspect.” Mark Duggan was killed under the Metropolitan Police’s “Operation Trident,” which supposedly targets “gun crime” among blacks. This operation was begun under Labour home secretary David Blunkett, in consultation with William Bratton, the former police chief of New York and other major U.S. cities whom David Cameron proposes to employ in London.
Minorities and the 1984-85 Miners Strike
The link between class struggle against the capitalist state and the fight against racial oppression seems remote today, but this was not always the case. It is not an accident that the last major assault by the state on Britain’s predominantly black and Asian inner-city areas took place in 1985, the same year as the defeat of the heroic miners strike. For more than a year of bitter class war, miners and their families had defended themselves against an army of police sent by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government to occupy the coalfields. In the course of the strike, powerful bonds were forged between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and black and Asian minorities. While blacks and Asians saw in the (predominantly white) miners union a powerful force battling against the state and became enthusiastic supporters of the strike, many miners became convinced of the importance of combating racial oppression.
The defeat of the NUM dealt a severe blow to the workers movement in this country, the effects of which—from accelerating deindustrialisation to gutting the unions—are still felt today. For minority communities, the strike’s defeat also had grave ramifications. In the space of a few weeks, the cops staged racist provocations that sparked explosions of anger in major black and Asian neighbourhoods. A police provocation in September 1985 in Birmingham’s Handsworth was followed weeks later by the police shooting of a black woman, Cherry Groce, in Brixton, sparking a revolt there. Shortly afterwards, Liverpool’s Toxteth area also erupted. When the police invaded Broadwater Farm on 7 October 1985 in the aftermath of the racist cop killing of Cynthia Jarrett, they got more than they bargained for. As residents defended their communities in a raging battle lasting several days, one cop was killed. For this, three innocent youth—Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite—served years in prison as the result of a police frame-up.
Following the revolts in Handsworth and Brixton, the SL/B noted that in the aftermath of the miners strike, Thatcher was intent on teaching a bloody lesson to the black and Asian population that had warmly supported the miners, warning that this would mean escalating racist attacks. The article stated:
“The Spartacist League has fought to tap the sense of unity between minorities and trade union militants kindled in the miners strike, as part of our perspective of building the multiracial revolutionary workers party which will be a tribune of all the oppressed. We have fought to mobilise the integrated Birmingham labour movement for defence of the Handsworth community against the cop terror. The same is needed in Brixton and elsewhere. Protest strike action by London’s heavily black and Asian Tube and bus workers, for example, could make the racist bosses put a halt to their reign of terror in Brixton. But that takes a political struggle against the racist, pro-capitalist labour misleaders.”
—Workers Hammer No. 73, October 1985
It wasn’t mainly the repression by the viciously anti-union Thatcher government that ensured the defeat of the miners strike. The Labour Party leadership under Neil Kinnock and the Trades Union Congress bureaucracy were openly hostile to the strike. Particularly responsible for the defeat were the “left” trade-union leaders who failed to strike alongside the miners. This includes the dockers union leaders, who sent their members back to work twice during the miners strike. A few years later, the dockers union itself was decimated. The trade-union “lefts” were wedded to the Labour Party, to “gradual change” through Parliament, and hence to the capitalist order.
When the black Labour leader of Haringey council, Bernie Grant, voiced the simple truth that the cops who invaded Broadwater Farm got “a bloody good hiding,” he was widely denounced, including by the Labour leadership. Grant later apologised, but he remained popular among blacks until his death in 2000. Although he was regarded as a troublemaker by the Labour Party leadership, Grant served Labour’s purpose, notably in 1993 when he helped prevent an explosion of rage from “getting out of hand” following the death of Jamaican woman Joy Gardner at the hands of cops who had seized her for deportation. Above all, Grant played his part in fostering illusions among black youth in Labour, the party that had introduced racist virginity tests for South Asian women entering Britain when it was in office in 1974-79.
The unfettered financial boom that characterised the Thatcher years went hand in hand with the destruction of manufacturing jobs, which continued throughout Labour’s years in office. Among those thrown onto the dole queues were the descendants of immigrants from former Caribbean and Indian colonies brought over to do low-paid work in times of labour shortage, particularly after World War II. Not only the former coal and steel producing areas but also the textile manufacturing towns of Oldham and Bradford, which employed thousands of Asian workers, became wastelands of chronic unemployment and poverty.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
Today Labour is lurching towards right-wing populism, which is inherently racist, competing with the fascist English Defence League (EDL) for the allegiance of backward white workers. In recent years, Labour leaders and trade-union bureaucrats have embraced the slogan “British jobs for British workers,” historically a rallying cry of the fascists that became prevalent during reactionary strikes against foreign workers on construction sites in 2009. The reformist Socialist Party (SP), section of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International, wholeheartedly supported these strikes. We categorically denounced these actions and underlined the need for defence of immigrant workers. We pointed out that a class-struggle leadership in the unions would start from an internationalist framework, organising immigrant workers into the unions and collaborating with workers across national boundaries.
In keeping with its long record of supporting the police and prison guards, the SP echoed the Labour leaders during the hoopla over the recent riots, sympathetically quoting a spokesman from the Metropolitan Police Federation bemoaning the low morale among cops due to the government’s intended cuts (socialistparty.org.uk, 8 August). Harassment by cops—lyingly depicted by the SP as fellow workers—has now reached the point where black people are 26 times more likely than whites to be stopped and searched by police in England and Wales, according to a study by London School of Economics and others.
The number of deaths, particularly of black people, in police custody is staggering. In March, reggae artist Smiley Culture (David Emmanuel) died during a police raid at his Surrey home, with the cops making the incredible claim that he stabbed himself to death. The same month, Kingsley Burrell Brown died from injuries sustained in the course of being committed to hospital under the Mental Health Act by police in Birmingham. Last month, 21-year-old Demetre Fraser supposedly “committed suicide” by jumping from the 11th floor of a high-rise block in Birmingham when confronted by police. In a single week in August, three people died at the hands of police: 27-year-old Dale Burns died in Cumbria when police subjected him to shocks from a Taser gun and pepper spray; black 25-year-old Jacob Michael died after being pepper sprayed in Cheshire; 53-year-old Philip Hulmes died in police custody in Bolton.
The racist backlash against “looters” has emboldened the EDL, which smelled an opportunity to mobilise vigilantes in some of the riot-hit areas. Under previous Labour governments, the EDL had drawn strength from the “war on terror” that primarily targeted Muslims, as well as from the relentless anti-immigrant campaigns. The EDL is a deadly threat to blacks as well as to Asians, against whom it has staged numerous racist provocations in the past and threatens to do again in East London on 3 September. And make no mistake: these fascists pose a direct threat to the entire working class, as potential shock troops to be deployed against rising class struggle. It is the task of the workers movement to stop them in their tracks.
As distinct from the liberals and reformists who lead Unite Against Fascism, we oppose calls on the capitalist state to “ban the fascists.” It is not hard to see why. In response to the planned EDL march in East London and an anti-fascist counter-demonstration, Home Secretary Theresa May has banned all demonstrations in five London boroughs for a period of 30 days. As Workers Hammer No. 209 (Winter 2009-2010) declared, EDL provocations “must be met with massive protest centred on the trade unions mobilised for defence of Muslims, immigrants and all the intended victims of the EDL scum.” The article continued:
“It is in the interests of the multiethnic working class as a whole to combat these racist terrorists. We call for trade union/minority mobilisations to stop fascist provocations. At the same time, as Marxists we make clear that the decaying capitalist system breeds the social conditions in which the fascists thrive and therefore the struggle against fascism is inseparable from the fight for socialist revolution.”
Out of the social struggles that will inevitably be waged by workers and minorities will arise a new generation of militant leaders. What’s needed is a party dedicated to the task of leading the working class to power. This requires socialist revolution to overthrow the entire capitalist order. Fundamental change in the interests of the working people can only come about through revolutionary internationalist class struggle, which must shatter the framework of capitalism worldwide. Socialist revolution will lay the basis for rationally planned economies based on production for need, not for profit, and for a qualitative development of the productive forces, opening the road to the elimination of poverty and the creation of an egalitarian socialist society.
2 September 2011
Capitalism Loots Wealth Made by Working People
English Cities Erupt Over Racist Cop Killing, Austerity
Free All Arrested for “Looting”!
LONDON—On 4 August, the cops shot and killed a young black man, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham, North London. Contrary to police disinformation circulated at the time, Duggan did not fire any shots. But that did not stop the press from branding the victim as a “gang member” killed in a “shootout” with police. The family of Mark Duggan, a father of four, were given almost no information about his death. Instead they were told to wait for the results of an inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, known among blacks as the police cover-up commission. Two days after Duggan was gunned down, his family members took part in a protest of some 300 people at a Tottenham police station demanding information, but none was given. Reportedly, police attacked a young woman demonstrator, knocking her to the ground.
There is a limit to the endurance of minority youth, who have been treated like criminals since the time they could walk. For black and South Asian youth in this country, degradation at the hands of the cops, including the relentless use of “stop and search,” is calculated to underline the message: you have no rights whatsoever. The killing of Mark Duggan was one atrocity too far. Anger exploded. Tottenham erupted in flames in scenes reminiscent of the riots in Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm housing project in 1985, which followed the police killing of a black mother.
Little of substance has changed in the lives of black people since that time. This time around, the revolt in Tottenham ignited a mass of social tinder at the bottom of British capitalist society. Rioting spread like wildfire to other areas of London and to parts of Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool. Black, Asian and white youth took to the streets to give the finger to the police, the government and a society in which they manifestly have no stake. For four days, riots by the impoverished and dispossessed swept cities and towns. Britain was exposed to the world as the racist, class-divided hellhole it is.
The arrogant rulers of decaying British capitalism have long regarded workers and the poor, and especially their black and Asian components, as merely an “underclass” deserving neither of education nor training, worthy only of state repression. In an attempt to deny that the cause of the riots is entrenched economic hardship, exacerbated by his government’s savage budget cuts, Conservative (Tory) prime minister David Cameron blamed the riots on “moral decay” and “criminality pure and simple,” insisting that they “were not about poverty.” Vowing to hunt down and jail “suspects,” Cameron seized the opportunity to massively strengthen repression. A vast police dragnet has so far arrested some 2,000 people, on any and every pretext, using information gleaned from trawling social networking sites and CCTV footage (and of course hacking phones). Television news has shown endless footage of gangs of cops brutally smashing down doors of people’s homes to arrest “suspects.”
Shredding any semblance of “due process,” the police are charging suspects before compiling evidence and opposing bail for the majority of those arrested. Cases involving minor offences that would normally result in a reprimand and would not even go to the lower magistrates’ courts are being referred to the Crown courts, which have greater sentencing powers. The vast majority of those arrested are being jailed, regardless of the alleged offence or of any previous convictions. Such a blanket policy of incarceration will vastly increase the numbers of people with criminal records which, for many youth, particularly blacks and Asians, is enough to ensure that they never work in their lives.
The draconian measures meted out in the aftermath of the riots are an escalation of the type of harsh repression meted out to students protesting against education cuts last year. The message from the capitalist rulers to the working class and the oppressed is clear: meekly accept the relentless attacks on jobs and living standards, or else! It is in the direct interests of the working class, especially the trade unions, to oppose these police-state measures and to demand that all charges be dropped against those arrested. We demand: Immediate release of all those arrested and jailed for “looting”!
Prominent politicians are calling for the use of plastic bullets and other weapons that the British state has historically deployed against the oppressed Catholics of Northern Ireland. The same capitalist ruling class that is brutally cracking down on dissent and opposition at home is engaged in imperialist subjugation abroad. Under the Labour Party government, British imperialist armed forces were in the forefront of the bloody occupations of neocolonial Afghanistan and Iraq. Under the present Tory-Liberal coalition government, British imperialism is playing a leading role in the NATO terror bombing of oil-rich Libya. Mocking Cameron’s lying claim that NATO bombs are “protecting civilians” and upholding “democracy,” Qaddafi’s deputy foreign minister urged Cameron to step down on the grounds that “violent repression of peaceful demonstrations by police” showed that “Cameron and his government have lost all legitimacy” (London Daily Telegraph, 11 August). At the outset of the bombing, the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) issued a statement calling on workers around the world to take a stand for military defence of semicolonial Libya against the imperialist attack (printed in WV No. 977, 1 April).
The flames that engulfed English cities lit up the grotesque class inequality and racist oppression that are endemic to British capitalism. While venal Conservative and Labour spokesmen pontificate against the evils of “looting,” everyone knows that the capitalist rulers are guilty of looting the country’s wealth. The City of London is an international citadel of finance capital whose gleaming office towers represent the opulence that is generated by the grinding exploitation of the working people. Not far from the City are some of the poorest districts in London, where a large percentage of minorities are concentrated. When boom turned to bust, the banks were bailed out (and the gigantic bankers’ bonuses were protected) at massive cost to the taxpayers. Now, at Cameron’s instigation, local councils have begun proceedings to evict families of “rioters” from public housing, while work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith proposed withdrawing benefits from those convicted.
“There Is Nothing Here for Us”
The rioting spread so dramatically because, on top of decades of grinding poverty affecting whites as well as blacks and Asians, the working people are being fleeced to pay for the current economic crisis. Nearly a million people aged 16 to 24 are unemployed. Youth joblessness overall has reached almost 20 per cent and is almost 50 per cent for black youth. Official figures for riot-affected areas such as Hackney, East London, show 44 per cent of children living in poverty.
A growing number of youth are being cast out of productive economic life and dubbed Neets—“not in employment, education or training.” The government tripled tuition fees in higher education and abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance, a small stipend that enabled poor youth to attend college, sparking militant student protests last December. Faced with cutting its budget by 75 per cent, Haringey local council, which covers Tottenham area, closed most of its youth clubs. One youth remarked, “At least we had somewhere to go. Now we walk down the streets, we get pulled over by police. There is nothing here for us” (London Guardian, 29 July).
There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!
In looking at the British “justice” system today, one does not have to be a Marxist to see what class it serves. No one has been arrested from the Metropolitan Police—truly one of London’s most dangerous armed gangs—which has been exposed for receiving hefty sums of cash (in plastic shopping bags) from the gang of Rupert Murdoch & Co. Intimately connected to these outfits, Tory and Labour politicians howl against the “criminality” of anyone who helped himself to a pair of sneakers or a bottle of water. The politicians’ hypocrisy is indeed rich in light of the recent scandal over Members of Parliament (MPs) making taxpayers shell out for the upkeep of their second homes, not to mention the cost of your “duck island” or cleaning out the moat at your country estate!
People accused of involvement in “rioting” are being thrown into prison on ludicrously trivial charges. Two white youths were sentenced to four years in prison for having (jokingly) summoned friends on Facebook to a “riot” that never happened. In Brixton, a black neighbourhood in South London, one person got a six-month sentence for stealing bottles of water worth £3.50. In Manchester an alcoholic who had just been released from prison and had only £4 in his pocket was sentenced to 16 months for taking a box of doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. The truth is that in poor neighbourhoods such as Tottenham, there isn’t much to steal.
The blatant class bias of capitalist “justice” in Britain today recalls the 17th-century English poem protesting the enclosure (i.e., theft) of common lands that were being privatised by the rising bourgeoisie:
“They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leave the greater villain loose
Who steals the common off the goose.”
Or, as Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto, aptly wrote in his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, the majority of offences against property arise from some form of want because “what a man has, he does not steal.” With the masses being driven to rioting by the increasingly abject conditions of their lives, the Spartacist League/Britain suggests, as an immediate measure, that the government give the “looters” £10,000 each and let them go!
Rioting, however, can do nothing to eliminate the grinding poverty of Britain’s working class. As the Spartacist League/U.S. wrote when Los Angeles exploded following the 1992 acquittal of the cops who beat black motorist Rodney King nearly to death, the looting there was “indeed understandable, but won’t do anything to eliminate the entrenched poverty of America’s inner cities…. The point is not to seize articles of consumption but to expropriate the means of production. And that takes a leap in consciousness and organization to do away with the capitalist order” (WV No. 551, 15 May 1992).
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), followers of the late Tony Cliff, ludicrously equates looting with the expropriation of the means of production—i.e., the seizure and collectivisation of industry, the banks, etc., by the proletariat. The SWP writes: “Karl Marx was exactly right when he talked about expropriating the expropriators, taking back what they have taken from us. That’s what looting by poor working class people represents and in that sense it is a deeply political act” (Socialist Worker, 13 August). The idea that looting offers a solution to the grinding poverty, racism and oppression besetting black and Asian communities shows that the SWP will mindlessly cheerlead for anything that moves, no matter how far removed from socialist consciousness it may be. But the bottom line for these reformists is to refurbish Labour’s image, which they do with calls to “Jail the Tories, not young people” (Socialist Worker, 20 August) and by hailing what they call a “rising against Tory Britain” (Socialist Worker, 13 August).
Riots are an expression of despair, often including ugly incidents of indiscriminate attacks on individuals. The killing of three young Asian men in Birmingham by a car driven straight at them is a heinous crime. The racial tensions between blacks and Asians during the riots were an outgrowth of the “divide and rule” policies the British rulers apply to divide the proletariat and weaken its struggles, as they did historically to maintain their Empire. In an effort to defuse those tensions, Tariq Jahan, father of one of the victims, courageously appealed for calm, saying, “I lost my son. Blacks, Asians, whites—we all live in the same community.” He added: “Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home—please.”
There is an urgent need for the working class and oppressed to struggle against the relentless attacks on their livelihoods. The question is how. The current deepgoing economic crisis is part and parcel of the normal workings of the capitalist system. There will be no end to the misery, poverty and repression that afflict the vast majority of the population short of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order and the establishment of rule by the working class. The SL/B seeks to forge a multiethnic revolutionary workers party—a Leninist-Trotskyist party—based on a programme for international socialist revolution.
Mobilize Workers’ Social Power!
Britain is the latest country in Europe to be swept by major unrest, reflecting seething anger among the working classes against relentless attacks on their living standards. Particularly in Greece, the working class has waged major class battles, including several general strikes in recent years, but the impact of these struggles has been undermined by the reformist misleaders of the working class, who accept the need for austerity as a solution to the economic crisis. In Britain, the fact that the pent-up fury against the government’s attacks on the working class is being dissipated in outbursts of rioting testifies to the low level of class struggle over the past two decades. This is due in no small part to the failure of the trade-union bureaucracy to mount any effective struggle against austerity and job cuts, allowing the capitalist rulers to ride roughshod over the working people.
Trade-union membership in Britain today is concentrated among low-paid workers in the public sector, with minorities heavily represented. The membership of the rail unions in London Underground and the national railway network, as well as the civil service and postal unions, is multiethnic. Together, these unions have considerable social power. Transport workers in London for example, have the power to bring the city to a halt, including its precious financial district. But mobilising that power requires a political struggle against the reformist trade-union bureaucracy, which is tied to the Labour Party and to the racist capitalist order.
It is through the intervention of Marxists into class and social struggles that a revolutionary workers party will be forged. Such a party would champion the interests of all the oppressed, fighting against racism and other manifestations of chauvinism. An integral part of building this party is the fight for a class-struggle leadership in the trade unions. In Britain today, such a leadership would appeal to disaffected youth by waging a fight for jobs, through demands such as a shorter working week with no loss in pay. A class-struggle leadership would demand union control of hiring and union-run job training and skills programmes to recruit minority youth into the workforce and into the unions. The task of a Leninist party is to bring about the necessary change in consciousness in the proletariat, leading to the understanding that a society run in the interests of the working people—with jobs for all and a decent standard of living—cannot be achieved within the framework of capitalism.
From the point of view of Britain’s working class and oppressed minorities, it makes little difference whether the government is Tory or Labour, historically the social-democratic vehicle that tied the working class to the capitalist order. When the riots erupted both parties (as well as the Liberal Democrats) vied to be seen as the best defenders of the police. Not a single Labour MP—neither the so-called “lefts” nor the handful of black MPs—condemned the cops who killed Mark Duggan. Far from it: Labour spokesmen attacked the government from the right, denouncing the planned cuts to the police budget. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband said, “Police on our streets make our communities safer and make the public feel safer” (BBC, 11 August).
Tottenham’s black Labour MP, David Lammy, ranted to the press about the “totally unacceptable” behaviour of the rioters, voicing only the mildest criticisms of the cops who gunned down Mark Duggan. Nevertheless, Lammy, who symbolises a very small layer of middle-class blacks, was subjected to an outrageous racist tirade by reactionary historian David Starkey on BBC television. Black MP for Hackney Diane Abbott, once regarded as a Labour “left,” chimed in with the “law and order” brigade, calling for curfews to help “regain control of the streets.” Labour’s backing for the racist cops is not new: When he was London mayor, Labour’s Ken Livingstone was unwavering in his support for the police who in 2005 brutally killed Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, deemed a “terrorism suspect.” Mark Duggan was killed under the Metropolitan Police’s “Operation Trident,” which supposedly targets “gun crime” among blacks. This operation was begun under Labour home secretary David Blunkett, in consultation with William Bratton, the former police chief of New York and other major U.S. cities whom David Cameron proposes to employ in London.
Minorities and the 1984-85 Miners Strike
The link between class struggle against the capitalist state and the fight against racial oppression seems remote today, but this was not always the case. It is not an accident that the last major assault by the state on Britain’s predominantly black and Asian inner-city areas took place in 1985, the same year as the defeat of the heroic miners strike. For more than a year of bitter class war, miners and their families had defended themselves against an army of police sent by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government to occupy the coalfields. In the course of the strike, powerful bonds were forged between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and black and Asian minorities. While blacks and Asians saw in the (predominantly white) miners union a powerful force battling against the state and became enthusiastic supporters of the strike, many miners became convinced of the importance of combating racial oppression.
The defeat of the NUM dealt a severe blow to the workers movement in this country, the effects of which—from accelerating deindustrialisation to gutting the unions—are still felt today. For minority communities, the strike’s defeat also had grave ramifications. In the space of a few weeks, the cops staged racist provocations that sparked explosions of anger in major black and Asian neighbourhoods. A police provocation in September 1985 in Birmingham’s Handsworth was followed weeks later by the police shooting of a black woman, Cherry Groce, in Brixton, sparking a revolt there. Shortly afterwards, Liverpool’s Toxteth area also erupted. When the police invaded Broadwater Farm on 7 October 1985 in the aftermath of the racist cop killing of Cynthia Jarrett, they got more than they bargained for. As residents defended their communities in a raging battle lasting several days, one cop was killed. For this, three innocent youth—Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite—served years in prison as the result of a police frame-up.
Following the revolts in Handsworth and Brixton, the SL/B noted that in the aftermath of the miners strike, Thatcher was intent on teaching a bloody lesson to the black and Asian population that had warmly supported the miners, warning that this would mean escalating racist attacks. The article stated:
“The Spartacist League has fought to tap the sense of unity between minorities and trade union militants kindled in the miners strike, as part of our perspective of building the multiracial revolutionary workers party which will be a tribune of all the oppressed. We have fought to mobilise the integrated Birmingham labour movement for defence of the Handsworth community against the cop terror. The same is needed in Brixton and elsewhere. Protest strike action by London’s heavily black and Asian Tube and bus workers, for example, could make the racist bosses put a halt to their reign of terror in Brixton. But that takes a political struggle against the racist, pro-capitalist labour misleaders.”
—Workers Hammer No. 73, October 1985
It wasn’t mainly the repression by the viciously anti-union Thatcher government that ensured the defeat of the miners strike. The Labour Party leadership under Neil Kinnock and the Trades Union Congress bureaucracy were openly hostile to the strike. Particularly responsible for the defeat were the “left” trade-union leaders who failed to strike alongside the miners. This includes the dockers union leaders, who sent their members back to work twice during the miners strike. A few years later, the dockers union itself was decimated. The trade-union “lefts” were wedded to the Labour Party, to “gradual change” through Parliament, and hence to the capitalist order.
When the black Labour leader of Haringey council, Bernie Grant, voiced the simple truth that the cops who invaded Broadwater Farm got “a bloody good hiding,” he was widely denounced, including by the Labour leadership. Grant later apologised, but he remained popular among blacks until his death in 2000. Although he was regarded as a troublemaker by the Labour Party leadership, Grant served Labour’s purpose, notably in 1993 when he helped prevent an explosion of rage from “getting out of hand” following the death of Jamaican woman Joy Gardner at the hands of cops who had seized her for deportation. Above all, Grant played his part in fostering illusions among black youth in Labour, the party that had introduced racist virginity tests for South Asian women entering Britain when it was in office in 1974-79.
The unfettered financial boom that characterised the Thatcher years went hand in hand with the destruction of manufacturing jobs, which continued throughout Labour’s years in office. Among those thrown onto the dole queues were the descendants of immigrants from former Caribbean and Indian colonies brought over to do low-paid work in times of labour shortage, particularly after World War II. Not only the former coal and steel producing areas but also the textile manufacturing towns of Oldham and Bradford, which employed thousands of Asian workers, became wastelands of chronic unemployment and poverty.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
Today Labour is lurching towards right-wing populism, which is inherently racist, competing with the fascist English Defence League (EDL) for the allegiance of backward white workers. In recent years, Labour leaders and trade-union bureaucrats have embraced the slogan “British jobs for British workers,” historically a rallying cry of the fascists that became prevalent during reactionary strikes against foreign workers on construction sites in 2009. The reformist Socialist Party (SP), section of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International, wholeheartedly supported these strikes. We categorically denounced these actions and underlined the need for defence of immigrant workers. We pointed out that a class-struggle leadership in the unions would start from an internationalist framework, organising immigrant workers into the unions and collaborating with workers across national boundaries.
In keeping with its long record of supporting the police and prison guards, the SP echoed the Labour leaders during the hoopla over the recent riots, sympathetically quoting a spokesman from the Metropolitan Police Federation bemoaning the low morale among cops due to the government’s intended cuts (socialistparty.org.uk, 8 August). Harassment by cops—lyingly depicted by the SP as fellow workers—has now reached the point where black people are 26 times more likely than whites to be stopped and searched by police in England and Wales, according to a study by London School of Economics and others.
The number of deaths, particularly of black people, in police custody is staggering. In March, reggae artist Smiley Culture (David Emmanuel) died during a police raid at his Surrey home, with the cops making the incredible claim that he stabbed himself to death. The same month, Kingsley Burrell Brown died from injuries sustained in the course of being committed to hospital under the Mental Health Act by police in Birmingham. Last month, 21-year-old Demetre Fraser supposedly “committed suicide” by jumping from the 11th floor of a high-rise block in Birmingham when confronted by police. In a single week in August, three people died at the hands of police: 27-year-old Dale Burns died in Cumbria when police subjected him to shocks from a Taser gun and pepper spray; black 25-year-old Jacob Michael died after being pepper sprayed in Cheshire; 53-year-old Philip Hulmes died in police custody in Bolton.
The racist backlash against “looters” has emboldened the EDL, which smelled an opportunity to mobilise vigilantes in some of the riot-hit areas. Under previous Labour governments, the EDL had drawn strength from the “war on terror” that primarily targeted Muslims, as well as from the relentless anti-immigrant campaigns. The EDL is a deadly threat to blacks as well as to Asians, against whom it has staged numerous racist provocations in the past and threatens to do again in East London on 3 September. And make no mistake: these fascists pose a direct threat to the entire working class, as potential shock troops to be deployed against rising class struggle. It is the task of the workers movement to stop them in their tracks.
As distinct from the liberals and reformists who lead Unite Against Fascism, we oppose calls on the capitalist state to “ban the fascists.” It is not hard to see why. In response to the planned EDL march in East London and an anti-fascist counter-demonstration, Home Secretary Theresa May has banned all demonstrations in five London boroughs for a period of 30 days. As Workers Hammer No. 209 (Winter 2009-2010) declared, EDL provocations “must be met with massive protest centred on the trade unions mobilised for defence of Muslims, immigrants and all the intended victims of the EDL scum.” The article continued:
“It is in the interests of the multiethnic working class as a whole to combat these racist terrorists. We call for trade union/minority mobilisations to stop fascist provocations. At the same time, as Marxists we make clear that the decaying capitalist system breeds the social conditions in which the fascists thrive and therefore the struggle against fascism is inseparable from the fight for socialist revolution.”
Out of the social struggles that will inevitably be waged by workers and minorities will arise a new generation of militant leaders. What’s needed is a party dedicated to the task of leading the working class to power. This requires socialist revolution to overthrow the entire capitalist order. Fundamental change in the interests of the working people can only come about through revolutionary internationalist class struggle, which must shatter the framework of capitalism worldwide. Socialist revolution will lay the basis for rationally planned economies based on production for need, not for profit, and for a qualitative development of the productive forces, opening the road to the elimination of poverty and the creation of an egalitarian socialist society.
The Latest From “The International Marxist Tendency” Website
Click on to the headline to link to the latest from the International Marxist Tendency website.
Markin comment:
More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.
Markin comment:
More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States-American Socialist Workers Party Leader James P.Cannon-"Campaign For A Labor Party" (1943)
Click on the headline to link to a James P. Cannon Internet Archives online copy of Campaign For A Labor Party 1943)
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
Saturday, August 06, 2011
The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States-Workers' Action- October 1970
Click on the headline to link to a an online copy of Workers Action, an early labor-oriented newspaper of the International Communist League's Spartacist League/U.S. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*******
Thanks to the Riazanov Library for their efforts in digitizing Workers Action. The works provided by the Riazanov Library are © copyrighted by the Riazanov Library in 2010 for the document formatting and editing as they appear here in their PDF format, on the ETOL. The actual content itself remains in the public domain pursuant to US and International copyright conventions.
*****
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1970, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle against the Nixon government around the effects of the cost of the Vietnam on the economic well-being of the American working class. This issue, as importantly, poses the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialist are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1970 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.
Another section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the ten point … And What We Stand For. With a an obvious need for some technical updating, like replace Vietnam War with Iraq and Afghan Wars, the thing reads as a very presentable program for a revolutionary labor party, or a caucus in a reformist labor party in a period of left-wing motion in 2011. The last section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, the lessons of organizing a union caucus. The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. This says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.
*******
Thanks to the Riazanov Library for their efforts in digitizing Workers Action. The works provided by the Riazanov Library are © copyrighted by the Riazanov Library in 2010 for the document formatting and editing as they appear here in their PDF format, on the ETOL. The actual content itself remains in the public domain pursuant to US and International copyright conventions.
*****
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1970, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle against the Nixon government around the effects of the cost of the Vietnam on the economic well-being of the American working class. This issue, as importantly, poses the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialist are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1970 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.
Another section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the ten point … And What We Stand For. With a an obvious need for some technical updating, like replace Vietnam War with Iraq and Afghan Wars, the thing reads as a very presentable program for a revolutionary labor party, or a caucus in a reformist labor party in a period of left-wing motion in 2011. The last section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, the lessons of organizing a union caucus. The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. This says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Debt Ceiling Roulette - by Stephen Lendman
Markin comment :
Agree or disagree, and mostly disagree on the solutions questions (nothing short of a workers government is going to make a dent, even a small dent in the systemic social problems we face today), I am always glad to put the prolific SteveLendmanBlog on this site. It gives me a feel for the pulse of the old-time (and vanishing) non-party (non-Democratic Party) progressives out there.
********
Debt Ceiling Roulette
by Stephen Lendman
Debt Ceiling Roulette - by Stephen Lendman
In this game, the house always wins. Bipartisan complicity stacked the deck against millions of working households, needing to know that political Washington is scamming them.
The end result is the banana republicanization of America. American writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter: 1862 - 1910) coined the term (his fictional Republic of Anchuria) in his book, "Cabbages and Kings."
It refers to a country (often politically unstable and/or repressive) where a small percent of the population has a disproportionate share or wealth and power, where ordinary people are exploited, often persecuted, and where profits are privatized while working households bear the burden of debt.
It's also a kleptocracy run by criminals, complicit with corporate thieves who bribe them to get their way. It's corrupt, rotten to the core gangsterism, run for personal gain, both sides profiting at the public's expense.
It's in plain sight in Washington, the heart of darkness, where bipartisan crooks are destroying personal freedoms, democratic values, and general welfare to grab everything for themselves and their corporate partners.
Previous articles discussed it, accessed through the following links:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/07/debt-ceiling-debate-charade-masks.
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/07/fix-is-in-washingtons-planned-soci
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/07/america-heading-for-tyranny-and.ht
Read them and weep, or better still, react by refusing any longer to put up with bipartisan corruption, stealing us blind for the Big Monied interests that own them. Obama was made president to play ball, a Democrat engineering what no Republican would dare, at the same time duplicitously claiming populist credentials.
As president, he's been hardline and neocon, advocating Democrat Leadership Council ideology, around since the mid-1980s until operations ended early this year, perhaps because too many caught on to its scam.
Ralph Nader called it "corporatist (and) soulless," ideologically hardline. Obama fits the mold. He's anti-populist, anti-labor, anti-welfare, pro-business, while at the same time militaristic and pro-war for unchallengeable world dominance. Nader explained that:
"To the DLC mind, Democrats are catering to 'special interests' when they (pretend to) stand up for trade unions, regulatory consumer-investor protections, a preemptive peace policy overseas, pruning the bloated military budget now devouring (the federal budget), defending Social Security from Wall Street schemes, and pressing for universal health care coverage. So right-wing is the DLC....that even opposing Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy....is considered ultra-liberal and contrary to winning campaigns."
Its ideology is indistinguishable from Republican extremism. It opposes rights for Blacks, Hispanics, Latino immigrants, Muslims, labor, the poor, consumer protections, populism, progressivism, environmental protection, peace and those for it, prosecuting corporate criminals, honest elections, and democratic governance.
It's for the privileged few at the expense of the many, the bipartisan cancer that's destroying America, Obama the point man in charge because who could imagine a Black president would dare. In fact, he was chosen for his commitment to wealth, power, global dominance, and grand theft at the expense of working Americans and ordinary people everywhere.
He's a fraud, a crime boss, a moral coward and serial liar, fronting for wealth, power and privilege. No wonder James Petras (weeks after his election) called him "the greatest con-man in recent history," comparing him to "Melville's Confidence Man."
"He catches your eye while he picks your pocket. He gives thanks as he packs you off to fight wars in the Middle East....He solemnly mouths vacuous pieties while he empties your Social Security funds to bail out the arch financiers who swindled your pension investments. He appoints and praises the architects of collapsed pyramid schemes to high office while promising" better times ahead he won't tolerate to assure powerful interests get it all, the public crumbs at best.
In July 2009, Kevin Baker's Harper's article headlined, "Barack Hoover Obama: The best and brightest blow it again," saying:
"Three months into his presidency," it's hard imagining the unthinkable that Obama will fail because he won't "seize the radical moment" to change a broken system responsibly.
Even then, some observers ludicrously compared him to Franklin Roosevelt. A better comparison is Herbert Hoover who faced a similar crisis, though doing so isn't fair.
In early 2009, plenty of evidence showed how destructive Obama would be, unlike Hoover who at least tried some ways to confront the great crisis, if inadequately. He established national voluntary initiatives to create jobs, provide charity, and create a private banking pool, but failed.
He also set up a dozen Home Loan Discount Banks to help people refinance mortgages to save their homes. In 1932, he established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), capitalized with $500 million with authorization to borrow another $1.5 billion.
In its first six months, it loaned banks over $800 million to no effect. Like today, they retained reserves and shunned lending. Moreover, public trust was absent because political leadership lacked courage to do more, hidebound by ways no longer working.
Roosevelt then streamlined RFC's bureaucracy, increasing its funding to recapitalize troubled banks and corporations. Despite understanding the problem, Hoover failed because he was part of a broken system he wouldn't change.
In contrast, Roosevelt confronted the crisis aggressively in first 100 days, enacting 15 landmark laws, including:
The Bank Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall), separating commercial from investment banks and insurance companies, among other provisions.
Streamlined the RFC with more capitalization and other measures to restore public trust, including by funding agencies like the Home Owners Loan Corporation, Farm Credit Administration, Rural Electrification Administration, Public Works Administration, and others, as well as emergency relief loans to states, something Hoover never did, let alone establish New Deal policies.
The Securities and Exchange Act of 1933, requiring offers and sales of securities be registered, pursuant to the Constitution's interstate commerce clause. Along with the 1934 SEC Act, it was to enforce federal securities laws, the securities industry, the nation's financial and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets, unknown in the 1930s along with derivatives and other forms of speculation.
It was also charged with uncovering wrongdoing, assuring investors weren't swindled, and keeping the nation's financial markets free from fraud. Nonetheless, its fulfillment fell short of its promise. Unlike today, however, it tried.
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to refinance homes and prevent foreclosures.
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to create jobs building roads, bridges, dams, developing state parks, planting trees, and various forestry and recreational programs for the Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Land Management, and Soil Conservation Service.
The Civilian Works Administration (CWA) to fund states to reduce unemployment.
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), establishing the National Recovery Administration to revive economic growth, encourage collective bargaining, set maximum work hours, minimum wages, at times prices, and forbid child labor in industry.
The Public Works Administration also established projects to provide jobs, increase purchasing power, improve public welfare, and help revive the economy.
So did the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that became the largest New Deal agency, employing millions in every state, especially in rural and western areas.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), providing navigation, flood control, electricity generation, and economic development, as well as promote agriculture in the depression-impacted Tennessee Valley area, covering most of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) that fell short by restricting production by paying farmers to reduce and/or destroy crops and kill livestock at a time millions were impoverished and hungry. The idea was to decrease supply and raise prices, at the worst possible time.
The Farm Credit Act of 1933 to help farmers refinance mortgages over an extended time at below-market rates, and by so doing, helped them stay solvent and survive.
The May 1933 Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, established during the time of the Dust Bowl, provided refinancing help for farmers facing foreclosure.
Despite its flaws and failures, FDR's New Deal accomplished much, if not enough. It helped people, put millions back to work, reinvigorated the national spirit, built or renovated 700,000 miles of roads, 7,800 bridges, 45,000 schools, 2,500 hospitals, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 1,000 airfields, and various other infrastructure, including much of Chicago's lakefront. It also cut unemployment from 25% in May 1933 to 11% in 1937.
However, (because victory was declared too early), it spiked to 19% in 1938 before early war production revived economic growth and sent it lower, heading for full wartime employment.
Later came the Wagner Act that, for the first time, let labor bargain collectively on equal terms with management. Today it's entirely lost.
The 1935 Social Security Act was to this day the single most important federal program responsible for keeping seniors and others eligible out of poverty. Obama plans to destroy it, perhaps first by letting Wall Street privatize it, what Bush failed to do.
Unemployment insurance was instituted in partnership with the states. By 1935, nearly all the unemployed got social benefit payments.
The so-called "Soak the Rich" Revenue Acts of 1934 and 1935 made high income earners pay their fair share. In contrast, Obama favors the rich over working Americans and the poor.
The Revenue Act of 1936 established an "undistributed profits tax" on corporations. Today, profitable corporations pay minimal taxes. Many get large rebates. Yet Obama wants even lower taxes, perhaps eliminating them for business altogether, so only the little people pay them.
The Revenue Act of 1937 cracked down on tax evasion. Today, it's practically de rigueur along with sanctioned speculative excesses and grand theft.
A minimum wage, 40-hour week, and time-and-a-half for overtime was guaranteed under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Labor rights today are being eviscerated and lost, Obama as committed to do it as Bush.
Roosevelt also established other initiatives to reform a broken system, put people back to work, and revive the sick economy. Nonetheless, it didn't happen until WW II because much more was needed, including incentives for business to invest.
Under Obama, however, corporate crooks take the money and run, rewarding themselves with generous bonuses, stock options and benefits, investing some abroad, and stashing the rest in offshore tax havens.
Moreover, Obama wants all New Deal/Great Society programs ended, returning America to 19th century or earlier harshness. George Bernard Shaw might have had him in mind when he said:
"Democracy (especially American-style) is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment of the corrupt few."
Promising change, he broke every key pledge he made, conspiring with Wall Street, war profiteers, and other corporate crooks to loot the nation's wealth, wreck the economy, and consign growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures.
His legacy is already written, explaining how he betrayed the public trust, looted the nation's wealth, waged war on the world, presided over a bogus democracy under a homeland security police state apparatus, and initiated the destruction of America's social contract, governing to the right of George Bush.
In his latest article headlined, "Obama's Ambush on Entitlements," Michael Hudson explained, saying:
He's scamming old people to believe his budget deal will save them. "It is a con. Obama has come to bury Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to save but kill them."
It was clear before he took office. His economic dream team appointees told all, including Trilateralist Paul Volker, Geitner at Treasury, Fed chairman Bernanke assured of reappointment in 2010, and Larry Summers responsible for financial market deregulation and massive fraud under Clinton, as well as others chosen for their fealty to wealth and power.
At the time, Hudson compared him to Boris Yeltsin - a giver who kept giving to "kleptocrats to whom the public domain and decades of wealth were given with no quid pro quo." In other words, a license to loot until they've got it all, hollowing out America in the process.
In his latest article headlined, "The Political Theater and the Debt Ceiling Crisis: Are We Being Had?" Paul Craig Roberts suggest a possible political theater/charade end game, saying:
If August 2 (the nominal deadline) brings no resolution, Obama may accept Boehner's plan he already favors but won't admit it publicly to hold his weakening base.
Why? To assure "the troops are not cut off from supplies, Social Security checks can continue to go out, and the dollar (is) saved. Having (rhetorically) opposed Republicans to the last minute," he can do what he does best - lie, saying "he had no other recourse."
In other word, who "wants the troops deserted on the field of battle and the elderly without groceries? Who other than the rich can stand the higher prices from dollar devaluation?"
It's the perfect scam "for getting rid of the New Deal and the Great Society, (using) money (wanted for) wars and bailouts and tax cuts for the rich."
Instead of using existing presidential directives and executive orders to declare a national emergency, suspend the debt ceiling limit, and keep issuing it to avoid default (perhaps Plan B), he can use his preferred option (Plan A), gutting America's social contract for the corporate bosses who own him.
Perhaps he'll do it by "cut(ting) Social Security, Medicare....education (and other social programs) loose from the federal budget, (so his) Wall Street (friends) can privatize them," ripping off recipients like they scam investors.
In fact, the entire scheme may have been cooked up in Wall Street board rooms years ago, awaiting the right time under the right president to spring it on millions unsuspecting beneficiaries and future ones, unaware of the subterfuge planned to defraud them.
Before he took office, Petras nailed Obama cold, calling him "the greatest con-man in recent history." Perhaps the greatest ever, given the stakes.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
This work is in the public domain
Agree or disagree, and mostly disagree on the solutions questions (nothing short of a workers government is going to make a dent, even a small dent in the systemic social problems we face today), I am always glad to put the prolific SteveLendmanBlog on this site. It gives me a feel for the pulse of the old-time (and vanishing) non-party (non-Democratic Party) progressives out there.
********
Debt Ceiling Roulette
by Stephen Lendman
Debt Ceiling Roulette - by Stephen Lendman
In this game, the house always wins. Bipartisan complicity stacked the deck against millions of working households, needing to know that political Washington is scamming them.
The end result is the banana republicanization of America. American writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter: 1862 - 1910) coined the term (his fictional Republic of Anchuria) in his book, "Cabbages and Kings."
It refers to a country (often politically unstable and/or repressive) where a small percent of the population has a disproportionate share or wealth and power, where ordinary people are exploited, often persecuted, and where profits are privatized while working households bear the burden of debt.
It's also a kleptocracy run by criminals, complicit with corporate thieves who bribe them to get their way. It's corrupt, rotten to the core gangsterism, run for personal gain, both sides profiting at the public's expense.
It's in plain sight in Washington, the heart of darkness, where bipartisan crooks are destroying personal freedoms, democratic values, and general welfare to grab everything for themselves and their corporate partners.
Previous articles discussed it, accessed through the following links:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/07/debt-ceiling-debate-charade-masks.
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/07/fix-is-in-washingtons-planned-soci
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/07/america-heading-for-tyranny-and.ht
Read them and weep, or better still, react by refusing any longer to put up with bipartisan corruption, stealing us blind for the Big Monied interests that own them. Obama was made president to play ball, a Democrat engineering what no Republican would dare, at the same time duplicitously claiming populist credentials.
As president, he's been hardline and neocon, advocating Democrat Leadership Council ideology, around since the mid-1980s until operations ended early this year, perhaps because too many caught on to its scam.
Ralph Nader called it "corporatist (and) soulless," ideologically hardline. Obama fits the mold. He's anti-populist, anti-labor, anti-welfare, pro-business, while at the same time militaristic and pro-war for unchallengeable world dominance. Nader explained that:
"To the DLC mind, Democrats are catering to 'special interests' when they (pretend to) stand up for trade unions, regulatory consumer-investor protections, a preemptive peace policy overseas, pruning the bloated military budget now devouring (the federal budget), defending Social Security from Wall Street schemes, and pressing for universal health care coverage. So right-wing is the DLC....that even opposing Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy....is considered ultra-liberal and contrary to winning campaigns."
Its ideology is indistinguishable from Republican extremism. It opposes rights for Blacks, Hispanics, Latino immigrants, Muslims, labor, the poor, consumer protections, populism, progressivism, environmental protection, peace and those for it, prosecuting corporate criminals, honest elections, and democratic governance.
It's for the privileged few at the expense of the many, the bipartisan cancer that's destroying America, Obama the point man in charge because who could imagine a Black president would dare. In fact, he was chosen for his commitment to wealth, power, global dominance, and grand theft at the expense of working Americans and ordinary people everywhere.
He's a fraud, a crime boss, a moral coward and serial liar, fronting for wealth, power and privilege. No wonder James Petras (weeks after his election) called him "the greatest con-man in recent history," comparing him to "Melville's Confidence Man."
"He catches your eye while he picks your pocket. He gives thanks as he packs you off to fight wars in the Middle East....He solemnly mouths vacuous pieties while he empties your Social Security funds to bail out the arch financiers who swindled your pension investments. He appoints and praises the architects of collapsed pyramid schemes to high office while promising" better times ahead he won't tolerate to assure powerful interests get it all, the public crumbs at best.
In July 2009, Kevin Baker's Harper's article headlined, "Barack Hoover Obama: The best and brightest blow it again," saying:
"Three months into his presidency," it's hard imagining the unthinkable that Obama will fail because he won't "seize the radical moment" to change a broken system responsibly.
Even then, some observers ludicrously compared him to Franklin Roosevelt. A better comparison is Herbert Hoover who faced a similar crisis, though doing so isn't fair.
In early 2009, plenty of evidence showed how destructive Obama would be, unlike Hoover who at least tried some ways to confront the great crisis, if inadequately. He established national voluntary initiatives to create jobs, provide charity, and create a private banking pool, but failed.
He also set up a dozen Home Loan Discount Banks to help people refinance mortgages to save their homes. In 1932, he established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), capitalized with $500 million with authorization to borrow another $1.5 billion.
In its first six months, it loaned banks over $800 million to no effect. Like today, they retained reserves and shunned lending. Moreover, public trust was absent because political leadership lacked courage to do more, hidebound by ways no longer working.
Roosevelt then streamlined RFC's bureaucracy, increasing its funding to recapitalize troubled banks and corporations. Despite understanding the problem, Hoover failed because he was part of a broken system he wouldn't change.
In contrast, Roosevelt confronted the crisis aggressively in first 100 days, enacting 15 landmark laws, including:
The Bank Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall), separating commercial from investment banks and insurance companies, among other provisions.
Streamlined the RFC with more capitalization and other measures to restore public trust, including by funding agencies like the Home Owners Loan Corporation, Farm Credit Administration, Rural Electrification Administration, Public Works Administration, and others, as well as emergency relief loans to states, something Hoover never did, let alone establish New Deal policies.
The Securities and Exchange Act of 1933, requiring offers and sales of securities be registered, pursuant to the Constitution's interstate commerce clause. Along with the 1934 SEC Act, it was to enforce federal securities laws, the securities industry, the nation's financial and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets, unknown in the 1930s along with derivatives and other forms of speculation.
It was also charged with uncovering wrongdoing, assuring investors weren't swindled, and keeping the nation's financial markets free from fraud. Nonetheless, its fulfillment fell short of its promise. Unlike today, however, it tried.
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to refinance homes and prevent foreclosures.
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to create jobs building roads, bridges, dams, developing state parks, planting trees, and various forestry and recreational programs for the Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Land Management, and Soil Conservation Service.
The Civilian Works Administration (CWA) to fund states to reduce unemployment.
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), establishing the National Recovery Administration to revive economic growth, encourage collective bargaining, set maximum work hours, minimum wages, at times prices, and forbid child labor in industry.
The Public Works Administration also established projects to provide jobs, increase purchasing power, improve public welfare, and help revive the economy.
So did the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that became the largest New Deal agency, employing millions in every state, especially in rural and western areas.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), providing navigation, flood control, electricity generation, and economic development, as well as promote agriculture in the depression-impacted Tennessee Valley area, covering most of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) that fell short by restricting production by paying farmers to reduce and/or destroy crops and kill livestock at a time millions were impoverished and hungry. The idea was to decrease supply and raise prices, at the worst possible time.
The Farm Credit Act of 1933 to help farmers refinance mortgages over an extended time at below-market rates, and by so doing, helped them stay solvent and survive.
The May 1933 Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, established during the time of the Dust Bowl, provided refinancing help for farmers facing foreclosure.
Despite its flaws and failures, FDR's New Deal accomplished much, if not enough. It helped people, put millions back to work, reinvigorated the national spirit, built or renovated 700,000 miles of roads, 7,800 bridges, 45,000 schools, 2,500 hospitals, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 1,000 airfields, and various other infrastructure, including much of Chicago's lakefront. It also cut unemployment from 25% in May 1933 to 11% in 1937.
However, (because victory was declared too early), it spiked to 19% in 1938 before early war production revived economic growth and sent it lower, heading for full wartime employment.
Later came the Wagner Act that, for the first time, let labor bargain collectively on equal terms with management. Today it's entirely lost.
The 1935 Social Security Act was to this day the single most important federal program responsible for keeping seniors and others eligible out of poverty. Obama plans to destroy it, perhaps first by letting Wall Street privatize it, what Bush failed to do.
Unemployment insurance was instituted in partnership with the states. By 1935, nearly all the unemployed got social benefit payments.
The so-called "Soak the Rich" Revenue Acts of 1934 and 1935 made high income earners pay their fair share. In contrast, Obama favors the rich over working Americans and the poor.
The Revenue Act of 1936 established an "undistributed profits tax" on corporations. Today, profitable corporations pay minimal taxes. Many get large rebates. Yet Obama wants even lower taxes, perhaps eliminating them for business altogether, so only the little people pay them.
The Revenue Act of 1937 cracked down on tax evasion. Today, it's practically de rigueur along with sanctioned speculative excesses and grand theft.
A minimum wage, 40-hour week, and time-and-a-half for overtime was guaranteed under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Labor rights today are being eviscerated and lost, Obama as committed to do it as Bush.
Roosevelt also established other initiatives to reform a broken system, put people back to work, and revive the sick economy. Nonetheless, it didn't happen until WW II because much more was needed, including incentives for business to invest.
Under Obama, however, corporate crooks take the money and run, rewarding themselves with generous bonuses, stock options and benefits, investing some abroad, and stashing the rest in offshore tax havens.
Moreover, Obama wants all New Deal/Great Society programs ended, returning America to 19th century or earlier harshness. George Bernard Shaw might have had him in mind when he said:
"Democracy (especially American-style) is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment of the corrupt few."
Promising change, he broke every key pledge he made, conspiring with Wall Street, war profiteers, and other corporate crooks to loot the nation's wealth, wreck the economy, and consign growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures.
His legacy is already written, explaining how he betrayed the public trust, looted the nation's wealth, waged war on the world, presided over a bogus democracy under a homeland security police state apparatus, and initiated the destruction of America's social contract, governing to the right of George Bush.
In his latest article headlined, "Obama's Ambush on Entitlements," Michael Hudson explained, saying:
He's scamming old people to believe his budget deal will save them. "It is a con. Obama has come to bury Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to save but kill them."
It was clear before he took office. His economic dream team appointees told all, including Trilateralist Paul Volker, Geitner at Treasury, Fed chairman Bernanke assured of reappointment in 2010, and Larry Summers responsible for financial market deregulation and massive fraud under Clinton, as well as others chosen for their fealty to wealth and power.
At the time, Hudson compared him to Boris Yeltsin - a giver who kept giving to "kleptocrats to whom the public domain and decades of wealth were given with no quid pro quo." In other words, a license to loot until they've got it all, hollowing out America in the process.
In his latest article headlined, "The Political Theater and the Debt Ceiling Crisis: Are We Being Had?" Paul Craig Roberts suggest a possible political theater/charade end game, saying:
If August 2 (the nominal deadline) brings no resolution, Obama may accept Boehner's plan he already favors but won't admit it publicly to hold his weakening base.
Why? To assure "the troops are not cut off from supplies, Social Security checks can continue to go out, and the dollar (is) saved. Having (rhetorically) opposed Republicans to the last minute," he can do what he does best - lie, saying "he had no other recourse."
In other word, who "wants the troops deserted on the field of battle and the elderly without groceries? Who other than the rich can stand the higher prices from dollar devaluation?"
It's the perfect scam "for getting rid of the New Deal and the Great Society, (using) money (wanted for) wars and bailouts and tax cuts for the rich."
Instead of using existing presidential directives and executive orders to declare a national emergency, suspend the debt ceiling limit, and keep issuing it to avoid default (perhaps Plan B), he can use his preferred option (Plan A), gutting America's social contract for the corporate bosses who own him.
Perhaps he'll do it by "cut(ting) Social Security, Medicare....education (and other social programs) loose from the federal budget, (so his) Wall Street (friends) can privatize them," ripping off recipients like they scam investors.
In fact, the entire scheme may have been cooked up in Wall Street board rooms years ago, awaiting the right time under the right president to spring it on millions unsuspecting beneficiaries and future ones, unaware of the subterfuge planned to defraud them.
Before he took office, Petras nailed Obama cold, calling him "the greatest con-man in recent history." Perhaps the greatest ever, given the stakes.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
This work is in the public domain
Political Washington Fiddles While Rome Burns - by Stephen Lendman
Markin comment :
Agree or disagree, and mostly disagree on the solutions questions (nothing short of a workers government is going to make a dent, even a small dent in the systemic social problems we face today), I am always glad to put the prolific SteveLendmanBlog on this site. It gives me a feel for the pulse of the old-time (and vanishing) non-party (non-Democratic Party) progressives out there.
****
Political Washington Fiddles While Rome Burns
by Stephen Lendman
Political Washington Fiddles While Rome Burns - by Stephen Lendman
With an approaching August 2 deadline, Paul Craig Roberts assessed the state of things accurately like he always does, saying in his new article headlined, "Disastrous Outcomes From An Orchestrated Crisis:"
"Americans need desperately to ask themselves why they put into political office such utterly irresponsible and incompetent people capable of creating such a totally unnecessary crisis loaded with such disastrous potential outcomes."
Michael Hudson's new article also covered important ground headlined, "The Debt Ceiling Set For Progressive Repealing," saying:
Obama's "blatantly empty threat (claims) there won't be money to pay Social Security checks next month (if Congress doesn't) 'tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform.' "
As always, Obama did what he does best. He lied. His threat "is not remotely true. But it has become the scare theme for over a week," and will be repeated until political Washington agrees on a deal destroying America's social contract, claiming it was done to save it.
In the end, of course, the debt ceiling will be raised as done routinely numerous previous times, including 10 times in the past decade and 74 times since 1962. Moreover, raised or not, no default will occur. Threatening otherwise is a lie. Failure to act, however, will lose America's AAA rating.
But that's virtually guaranteed anyway, given decades of reckless spending, largely on out-of-control militarism and handouts to Wall Street and other corporate favorites.
In contrast, America's entitlements are fiscally sound, needing only occasional tweaking to keep them steady-as-you-go for decades, maybe in perpetuity. But you'd never know it from bipartisan lying, regurgitated by managed new media deception.
America's Looming Debt Disaster
Worry also about financial expert/investor safety advocate Martin Weiss' assessment. Earlier he downgraded US debt to C-, the equivalent of S&P's BBB- or one notch above junk, heading for it eventually.
In doing so he said:
Regardless of the debt ceiling/budget debate charade outcome, "few will escape the far-reaching consequences of America's unfolding debt disaster."
Even if resolution is reached, "it could be just a dress rehearsal for the true tragedy of a nation unable to end its own financial decline any more effectively than a Greece, Ireland, or Portugal."
Why? "Among the 49 sovereign nations Weiss Ratings covers, the US has one of the heaviest debt burdens, the weakest international reserves, and the least stable economy."
More than any other nation, it depends on others for deficit financing, making up shortfalls by out-of-control money creation. The Fed, in fact, accumulated trillions on its balance sheet, making up for what foreign countries won't buy, plus trillions more in toxic debt, offloaded to them by Wall Street. Moreover, consumers are extremely debt dependent through mortgages, credit cards, and other ways they borrow.
Most dangerous, however, "America's largest banks have the greatest exposure to high risk derivatives - nearly 40% more today than during the debt crisis of 2008." They're a ticking time bomb able to explode anytime when least expected.
Today, in fact, "there are so many canaries in the coal mine, the din is deafening." Others include the nation's greatest ever housing depression with no end in sight, rising unemployment (much of it hidden and unreported), "skyrocketing" poverty (two or threefold the official rate), and many other deepening problems that won't quit. Moreover, the contagion is global.
Trends analyst Gerald Celente monitors it, offering Trend Alerts. On July 13, he headlined, "PIIGS, PRESSTITUTES AND THE GLOBAL MELTDOWN," saying:
Serious economic trouble keeps getting worse, highlighted by few jobs, and most around are low pay, low or no benefit ones, often temporary that workers can't count on for steady, reliable income.
As a result, "the more people out of work (or with too little income), the less they consume. And in (America) where consumer spending accounts for (around) 70% of GDP," less of it assures economic decline. Moreover, Europe is reeling under similar problems, and China faces a "ready-to-pop property bubble."
"And as goes the US, Europe and China, so goes the rest of the world....(N)o nation will escape the economic fallout and few will escape the political consequences."
No matter, major media scoundrels regurgitate lies, "cover(ing) for the politicians and financiers, the Presstitutes of the world - with their stable of 'well-respected' pundits - are accomplices in promoting" the Big Lie about recovery because they're well paid and secure to do it.
In fact, they're mindless of what ordinary people face - the greatest economic disaster in our lifetimes, worse than the Great Depression when a president actually focused on putting Americans back to work and reforming a corrupted system. Not perfectly but he tried.
Today, in contrast, despite a looming economic disaster, the combination of corrupt congressional leaders, a go-along majority in both Houses, and a cowardly, feckless president (the nation's worst by far) fiddles while Rome burns. Instead of governing responsibly, they're arranging an end game to rob people of their futures, while further wrecking a troubled economy heading south.
Representing Wall Street, not Main Street, they're arranging "to bury Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not save them," says Hudson, and he's right. It was planned long before Obama took office, but he jumped on it after his November 4, 2008 election. In fact, he set in motion what he didn't reveal, pretending he'd serve everyone equitably as America's first Black president. He lied, of course, and one led to another until every major pledge was broken.
That most of all highlights his tenure - a leader who promised one thing but did another, serving wealth, power and privilege, not millions counting on him for real "change to believe in." They're still waiting as the US ship of state sinks, its aristocracy safely offshore, plotting new ways to steal more.
A previous article explained that economist Arthur Okum began calculating America's Misery Index by adding the unemployment and inflation rates for a sense of public pain or lack of it in good times.
In May, it hit a record high, exceeding 25, surpassing the earlier June 1980 21.98 top, based on how both measures were calculated then, not today's methodology, distorted to hide painful truths.
However, it's currently approaching 30 based on 1980's formula, according to economist John Williams' calculations, putting unemployment at 22.7% and inflation at about 7%.
In fact, International Forecaster editor Bob Chapman estimates unemployment at about the same level with inflation at about 10%, heading for 14% by year end and still higher next year, explaining serious economic weakness getting worse.
A Final Comment
In August 1971, America's financial system unraveled when Nixon closed the gold window, ending the last link between gold, the dollar, and sound money. Thereafter, currencies floated, competing with each other in a casino-like environment, manipulated by Wall Street, powerful insiders, hedge funds, and governments.
Today, a new unraveling threatens because irresponsible politicians seek political advantage over what's best for the country and most people in it. As a result, the financial storm that struck in fall 2007 may turn out to be prelude to a catastrophic greater one coming.
International Forecaster editor Bob Chapman and others predict it, but it's anyone's guess precisely when. It may arrive by surprise when few people expect it. When it hits, however, it'll be with tsunami force, sweeping away everything in its path, except kleptocrats out of harm's way.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
This work is in the public domain
Agree or disagree, and mostly disagree on the solutions questions (nothing short of a workers government is going to make a dent, even a small dent in the systemic social problems we face today), I am always glad to put the prolific SteveLendmanBlog on this site. It gives me a feel for the pulse of the old-time (and vanishing) non-party (non-Democratic Party) progressives out there.
****
Political Washington Fiddles While Rome Burns
by Stephen Lendman
Political Washington Fiddles While Rome Burns - by Stephen Lendman
With an approaching August 2 deadline, Paul Craig Roberts assessed the state of things accurately like he always does, saying in his new article headlined, "Disastrous Outcomes From An Orchestrated Crisis:"
"Americans need desperately to ask themselves why they put into political office such utterly irresponsible and incompetent people capable of creating such a totally unnecessary crisis loaded with such disastrous potential outcomes."
Michael Hudson's new article also covered important ground headlined, "The Debt Ceiling Set For Progressive Repealing," saying:
Obama's "blatantly empty threat (claims) there won't be money to pay Social Security checks next month (if Congress doesn't) 'tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform.' "
As always, Obama did what he does best. He lied. His threat "is not remotely true. But it has become the scare theme for over a week," and will be repeated until political Washington agrees on a deal destroying America's social contract, claiming it was done to save it.
In the end, of course, the debt ceiling will be raised as done routinely numerous previous times, including 10 times in the past decade and 74 times since 1962. Moreover, raised or not, no default will occur. Threatening otherwise is a lie. Failure to act, however, will lose America's AAA rating.
But that's virtually guaranteed anyway, given decades of reckless spending, largely on out-of-control militarism and handouts to Wall Street and other corporate favorites.
In contrast, America's entitlements are fiscally sound, needing only occasional tweaking to keep them steady-as-you-go for decades, maybe in perpetuity. But you'd never know it from bipartisan lying, regurgitated by managed new media deception.
America's Looming Debt Disaster
Worry also about financial expert/investor safety advocate Martin Weiss' assessment. Earlier he downgraded US debt to C-, the equivalent of S&P's BBB- or one notch above junk, heading for it eventually.
In doing so he said:
Regardless of the debt ceiling/budget debate charade outcome, "few will escape the far-reaching consequences of America's unfolding debt disaster."
Even if resolution is reached, "it could be just a dress rehearsal for the true tragedy of a nation unable to end its own financial decline any more effectively than a Greece, Ireland, or Portugal."
Why? "Among the 49 sovereign nations Weiss Ratings covers, the US has one of the heaviest debt burdens, the weakest international reserves, and the least stable economy."
More than any other nation, it depends on others for deficit financing, making up shortfalls by out-of-control money creation. The Fed, in fact, accumulated trillions on its balance sheet, making up for what foreign countries won't buy, plus trillions more in toxic debt, offloaded to them by Wall Street. Moreover, consumers are extremely debt dependent through mortgages, credit cards, and other ways they borrow.
Most dangerous, however, "America's largest banks have the greatest exposure to high risk derivatives - nearly 40% more today than during the debt crisis of 2008." They're a ticking time bomb able to explode anytime when least expected.
Today, in fact, "there are so many canaries in the coal mine, the din is deafening." Others include the nation's greatest ever housing depression with no end in sight, rising unemployment (much of it hidden and unreported), "skyrocketing" poverty (two or threefold the official rate), and many other deepening problems that won't quit. Moreover, the contagion is global.
Trends analyst Gerald Celente monitors it, offering Trend Alerts. On July 13, he headlined, "PIIGS, PRESSTITUTES AND THE GLOBAL MELTDOWN," saying:
Serious economic trouble keeps getting worse, highlighted by few jobs, and most around are low pay, low or no benefit ones, often temporary that workers can't count on for steady, reliable income.
As a result, "the more people out of work (or with too little income), the less they consume. And in (America) where consumer spending accounts for (around) 70% of GDP," less of it assures economic decline. Moreover, Europe is reeling under similar problems, and China faces a "ready-to-pop property bubble."
"And as goes the US, Europe and China, so goes the rest of the world....(N)o nation will escape the economic fallout and few will escape the political consequences."
No matter, major media scoundrels regurgitate lies, "cover(ing) for the politicians and financiers, the Presstitutes of the world - with their stable of 'well-respected' pundits - are accomplices in promoting" the Big Lie about recovery because they're well paid and secure to do it.
In fact, they're mindless of what ordinary people face - the greatest economic disaster in our lifetimes, worse than the Great Depression when a president actually focused on putting Americans back to work and reforming a corrupted system. Not perfectly but he tried.
Today, in contrast, despite a looming economic disaster, the combination of corrupt congressional leaders, a go-along majority in both Houses, and a cowardly, feckless president (the nation's worst by far) fiddles while Rome burns. Instead of governing responsibly, they're arranging an end game to rob people of their futures, while further wrecking a troubled economy heading south.
Representing Wall Street, not Main Street, they're arranging "to bury Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not save them," says Hudson, and he's right. It was planned long before Obama took office, but he jumped on it after his November 4, 2008 election. In fact, he set in motion what he didn't reveal, pretending he'd serve everyone equitably as America's first Black president. He lied, of course, and one led to another until every major pledge was broken.
That most of all highlights his tenure - a leader who promised one thing but did another, serving wealth, power and privilege, not millions counting on him for real "change to believe in." They're still waiting as the US ship of state sinks, its aristocracy safely offshore, plotting new ways to steal more.
A previous article explained that economist Arthur Okum began calculating America's Misery Index by adding the unemployment and inflation rates for a sense of public pain or lack of it in good times.
In May, it hit a record high, exceeding 25, surpassing the earlier June 1980 21.98 top, based on how both measures were calculated then, not today's methodology, distorted to hide painful truths.
However, it's currently approaching 30 based on 1980's formula, according to economist John Williams' calculations, putting unemployment at 22.7% and inflation at about 7%.
In fact, International Forecaster editor Bob Chapman estimates unemployment at about the same level with inflation at about 10%, heading for 14% by year end and still higher next year, explaining serious economic weakness getting worse.
A Final Comment
In August 1971, America's financial system unraveled when Nixon closed the gold window, ending the last link between gold, the dollar, and sound money. Thereafter, currencies floated, competing with each other in a casino-like environment, manipulated by Wall Street, powerful insiders, hedge funds, and governments.
Today, a new unraveling threatens because irresponsible politicians seek political advantage over what's best for the country and most people in it. As a result, the financial storm that struck in fall 2007 may turn out to be prelude to a catastrophic greater one coming.
International Forecaster editor Bob Chapman and others predict it, but it's anyone's guess precisely when. It may arrive by surprise when few people expect it. When it hits, however, it'll be with tsunami force, sweeping away everything in its path, except kleptocrats out of harm's way.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
This work is in the public domain
America's Media: Dancing Around the Budget Debate Charade - by Stephen Lendman
Markin comment :
Agree or disagree, and mostly disagree on the solutions questions (nothing short of a workers government is going to make a dent, even a small dent in the systemic social problems we face today), I am always glad to put the prolific SteveLendmanBlog on this site. It gives me a feel for the pulse of the old-time (and vanishing) non-party (non-Democratic Party) progressives out there.
*******
America's Media: Dancing Around the Budget Debate Charade
by Stephen Lendman
America's Media: Dancing Around the Budget Debate Charade - by Stephen Lendman
Previous articles explained an Obama-led bipartisan conspiracy to destroy America's social contract, returning the nation to 19th harshness harshness. But you'd never know it from major media reports, op-eds and editorials, ducking the issue even when critical.
The debate charade's gone on for weeks, both sides concealing their basic agreement on major cuts for political advantage.
Republican strategy is attacking big government, excluding its biggest part related to defense spending, imperial wars, and one-sided support for corporate interests and America's super-rich.
Waging no holds barred class war, they echo Ronald Reagan's 1976 Chicago's South Side presidential campaign speech theme when he attacked "welfare queens" without calling them Black. Today, all working Americans are "Black" in terms of struggling more than ever to make ends meet, and needing political Washington's help, not greater planned trickle-up poverty.
Obama and congressional Democrats agree with Republicans but won't admit it. According to Washington Post writer Zachary Goldfarb, Obama's also gambling on winning the political center saying:
His "political advisers have long believed that securing an agreement (even by slashing entitlements) would provide an enormous boost to his 2012 campaign, according to people familiar with White House thinking. In particular, they want to preserve and improve the president's standing among political independents, who abandoned Democrats in the 2010 midterm election and who say reining in the nation's debt is a high priority."
Perhaps Obama needs new advisers, given clear evidence that Americans overwhelmingly oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare with good reason. Their payroll taxes pay insurance premiums to receive them.
Taking the money and running may jeopardize any politician's reelection, especially for high office. That said, Obama's strategists may, in fact, count on winning by default, given no viable Republican candidate opposing him. At least, not so far.
There's no ambiguity where Murdoch's Wall Street Journal stands, including in a July 30 editorial headlined, "The Debt-Limit Hobbits: The GOP fantasy caucus is empowering Nancy Pelosi," saying:
"The shame is that the debt-limit absolutists have weakened (Boehner's) hand in negotiating a final bill with Senate Democrats. At the most practical level, (his) plan is better than (Reid's)."
In other words, under orders from Murdoch in charge of editorial policy, scorched earth slash and burn social contract cuts should leave none of them in place even if it takes multiple steps over many months to complete it. Failure will make Republicans "not (look) like adults to whom voters can entrust the government."
The editorial omitted saying what "voters" they mean. For sure, not working Americans.
Like the Journal, The New York Times also supports cuts, at the same time playing off good guy Obama v. irresponsible Republicans, instead of exposing political Washington's dark side.
On July 29, after Boehner's bill passed in the House, it's editorial headlined, "It's Up to the Senate," saying:
Only the Senate can avoid default by "piec(ing) together a compromise that can pass with bipartisan majorities in both chambers. (Doing so) would eliminate the imminent threat of financial chaos."
In fact, the debt ceiling will be raised. Default won't happen and Times writers know it. They also know both sides agree on destroying America's social contract, but won't denounce it responsibly. Doing so would expose its one-sided support for wealth, power and privilege, while pretending to care about working Americans it never did and doesn't now. Only its rhetoric differs from positions Murdoch's Journal endorses.
On July 26, columnist Thomas Friedman, a shameless free market fundamentalist, headlined "Can't We Do This Right?" endorsing slash and burn cuts as long as by strategic planning, saying:
"Only after" constructing one can we say, "OK, given our current fiscal predicament, where should we cut spending and where must we raise new tax revenues so that we can bring our government back to solvency and, at the same time, reinvigorate our formula for growth and success."
He then quoted Johns Hopkins University Professor Michael Mandelbaum ("a foreign policy expert," he said) stating:
"Such a plan requires cutting, taxing and spending. It requires cutting because we have made promises to ourselves on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that we cannot keep without reforming each of them."
Mandelbaum may know foreign policy. Neither he or Friedman understand economics or they'd know and admit Social Security and Medicare are fiscally sound, needing only minor adjustments to keep them that way, not major cuts.
Moreover, Medicaid provides essential healthcare to society's poor who'd get none or too little without it. Only a heartless corporatist would support policies denying them. Perhaps Friedman and Mendlbaum do without saying so.
In a July 24 column, Friedman also endorsed the "radical center," even though "it sounds gimmicky," he said. He explained the idea earlier in 2007, suggesting that if Obama won the Democrat nomination, he "might want to consider keeping Dick Cheney on as his vice president."
Why? Because he'd be much more effective with a Cheney "standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm." For Friedman, in other words, mixing Obama's right wing politics with Cheney's is centrist. Maybe for zealots like himself, not for mainstream Americans, wanting better options they're denied.
On July 29, Times writer Jackie Calmes headlined, "That Aug. 2 Dealine? It May Be Impossible, Veteran Lawmakers Say."
Citing former Senator Tom Daschle as well as former Republican Reps. Tom Davis and Vin Weber's views in Calmes' words saying, "This time, be afraid. Be very afraid," instead of exposing the fraudulent debate, explaining the stakes responsibly, and endorsing what's best for all Americans. In addition, saying no deal is better than a bad one, causing irreparable harm to millions.
Instead Calmes also quoted a Chamber of Commerce headline, saying:
"Failure to Raise Debt Ceiling Could Turn the Economy Back Into a Recession." For Main Street, in fact, it's been in Depression since 2008, what neither the Chamber or Times writers will admit forthrightly. Instead, they shamelessly front for wealth and power, claiming it's for the good of the country.
In virtually all US managed news reports and opinions, supporting powerful interests at the expense of working Americans is standard policy, saying like a July 29 Washington Post editorial headlined, "Debt-ceilng sanity is now in the Senate's hands:
"(W)e continue to hope enough clear-thinking lawmakers will conclude that the time for compromise is now."
Unexplained was that any deal leaves working Americans in the cold, on their own and out of luck, especially after subsequent cuts eliminate what round one omits.
That's the ugly future no major media report will explain. That's why popular anger has to stop it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
This work is in the public domain
Agree or disagree, and mostly disagree on the solutions questions (nothing short of a workers government is going to make a dent, even a small dent in the systemic social problems we face today), I am always glad to put the prolific SteveLendmanBlog on this site. It gives me a feel for the pulse of the old-time (and vanishing) non-party (non-Democratic Party) progressives out there.
*******
America's Media: Dancing Around the Budget Debate Charade
by Stephen Lendman
America's Media: Dancing Around the Budget Debate Charade - by Stephen Lendman
Previous articles explained an Obama-led bipartisan conspiracy to destroy America's social contract, returning the nation to 19th harshness harshness. But you'd never know it from major media reports, op-eds and editorials, ducking the issue even when critical.
The debate charade's gone on for weeks, both sides concealing their basic agreement on major cuts for political advantage.
Republican strategy is attacking big government, excluding its biggest part related to defense spending, imperial wars, and one-sided support for corporate interests and America's super-rich.
Waging no holds barred class war, they echo Ronald Reagan's 1976 Chicago's South Side presidential campaign speech theme when he attacked "welfare queens" without calling them Black. Today, all working Americans are "Black" in terms of struggling more than ever to make ends meet, and needing political Washington's help, not greater planned trickle-up poverty.
Obama and congressional Democrats agree with Republicans but won't admit it. According to Washington Post writer Zachary Goldfarb, Obama's also gambling on winning the political center saying:
His "political advisers have long believed that securing an agreement (even by slashing entitlements) would provide an enormous boost to his 2012 campaign, according to people familiar with White House thinking. In particular, they want to preserve and improve the president's standing among political independents, who abandoned Democrats in the 2010 midterm election and who say reining in the nation's debt is a high priority."
Perhaps Obama needs new advisers, given clear evidence that Americans overwhelmingly oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare with good reason. Their payroll taxes pay insurance premiums to receive them.
Taking the money and running may jeopardize any politician's reelection, especially for high office. That said, Obama's strategists may, in fact, count on winning by default, given no viable Republican candidate opposing him. At least, not so far.
There's no ambiguity where Murdoch's Wall Street Journal stands, including in a July 30 editorial headlined, "The Debt-Limit Hobbits: The GOP fantasy caucus is empowering Nancy Pelosi," saying:
"The shame is that the debt-limit absolutists have weakened (Boehner's) hand in negotiating a final bill with Senate Democrats. At the most practical level, (his) plan is better than (Reid's)."
In other words, under orders from Murdoch in charge of editorial policy, scorched earth slash and burn social contract cuts should leave none of them in place even if it takes multiple steps over many months to complete it. Failure will make Republicans "not (look) like adults to whom voters can entrust the government."
The editorial omitted saying what "voters" they mean. For sure, not working Americans.
Like the Journal, The New York Times also supports cuts, at the same time playing off good guy Obama v. irresponsible Republicans, instead of exposing political Washington's dark side.
On July 29, after Boehner's bill passed in the House, it's editorial headlined, "It's Up to the Senate," saying:
Only the Senate can avoid default by "piec(ing) together a compromise that can pass with bipartisan majorities in both chambers. (Doing so) would eliminate the imminent threat of financial chaos."
In fact, the debt ceiling will be raised. Default won't happen and Times writers know it. They also know both sides agree on destroying America's social contract, but won't denounce it responsibly. Doing so would expose its one-sided support for wealth, power and privilege, while pretending to care about working Americans it never did and doesn't now. Only its rhetoric differs from positions Murdoch's Journal endorses.
On July 26, columnist Thomas Friedman, a shameless free market fundamentalist, headlined "Can't We Do This Right?" endorsing slash and burn cuts as long as by strategic planning, saying:
"Only after" constructing one can we say, "OK, given our current fiscal predicament, where should we cut spending and where must we raise new tax revenues so that we can bring our government back to solvency and, at the same time, reinvigorate our formula for growth and success."
He then quoted Johns Hopkins University Professor Michael Mandelbaum ("a foreign policy expert," he said) stating:
"Such a plan requires cutting, taxing and spending. It requires cutting because we have made promises to ourselves on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that we cannot keep without reforming each of them."
Mandelbaum may know foreign policy. Neither he or Friedman understand economics or they'd know and admit Social Security and Medicare are fiscally sound, needing only minor adjustments to keep them that way, not major cuts.
Moreover, Medicaid provides essential healthcare to society's poor who'd get none or too little without it. Only a heartless corporatist would support policies denying them. Perhaps Friedman and Mendlbaum do without saying so.
In a July 24 column, Friedman also endorsed the "radical center," even though "it sounds gimmicky," he said. He explained the idea earlier in 2007, suggesting that if Obama won the Democrat nomination, he "might want to consider keeping Dick Cheney on as his vice president."
Why? Because he'd be much more effective with a Cheney "standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm." For Friedman, in other words, mixing Obama's right wing politics with Cheney's is centrist. Maybe for zealots like himself, not for mainstream Americans, wanting better options they're denied.
On July 29, Times writer Jackie Calmes headlined, "That Aug. 2 Dealine? It May Be Impossible, Veteran Lawmakers Say."
Citing former Senator Tom Daschle as well as former Republican Reps. Tom Davis and Vin Weber's views in Calmes' words saying, "This time, be afraid. Be very afraid," instead of exposing the fraudulent debate, explaining the stakes responsibly, and endorsing what's best for all Americans. In addition, saying no deal is better than a bad one, causing irreparable harm to millions.
Instead Calmes also quoted a Chamber of Commerce headline, saying:
"Failure to Raise Debt Ceiling Could Turn the Economy Back Into a Recession." For Main Street, in fact, it's been in Depression since 2008, what neither the Chamber or Times writers will admit forthrightly. Instead, they shamelessly front for wealth and power, claiming it's for the good of the country.
In virtually all US managed news reports and opinions, supporting powerful interests at the expense of working Americans is standard policy, saying like a July 29 Washington Post editorial headlined, "Debt-ceilng sanity is now in the Senate's hands:
"(W)e continue to hope enough clear-thinking lawmakers will conclude that the time for compromise is now."
Unexplained was that any deal leaves working Americans in the cold, on their own and out of luck, especially after subsequent cuts eliminate what round one omits.
That's the ugly future no major media report will explain. That's why popular anger has to stop it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
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