With growing disillusionment in capitalist “democracy,” more and more people are looking towards alternatives to provide the answers they need. As Marxists, our role is to guide others out of the darkness of liberalism and toward the liberating path of Socialism. With that in mind, one of the first steps is to clear up the confusion, which mainly stems from propaganda and anti-communist movements, about a concept at the very core of our ideology: the dictatorship of the proletariat. I aim to be brief, clear, and accessible to all readers as I do my best to make understood the meaning of dictatorship and how it is not about oppression, but liberation of all people currently being oppressed.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is one of the more controversial topics within Socialist and Communist politics. The word ‘dictatorship’ strikes fear in the hearts of many, and can stoke the flame of a million skeptics with a single blow. Discussions of the dictatorship of the proletariat tend to fixate on the word ‘dictatorship’ while ignoring the class content—’of the proletariat.’ This superficial reaction, shaped by decades of propaganda, demands correction.

Marx, from the very first mention of the dictatorship of the proletariat, repeatedly clarified what exactly this meant, repeatedly fought against opportunism (that is to say so-called representatives of the working-class collaborating with the very forces that dominate us)–a term he knew would invite distortion. Yet, the opportunist still persists. Our struggle continues to fight against this, to guide people onto the path of proletarian dictatorship, to clear up all confusion and purposeful slandering of the truly freeing vision behind the term. In order to fight against those who weaponize this idea, one must first understand its conception, i.e., the material and historical womb from which it was born.

The Origins of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

…the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.

— Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, 1850, Marxists.org

Louis Auguste Blanqui, from whom Blanquism derives, was a revolutionary that was imprisoned for over thirty years. His ideology was heavily focused on the revolution itself, and not so much as to what society would look like after the revolution. Blanquists believe that a very small group should lead the revolution and establish a temporary dictatorship in order to redistribute wealth in a just manner. This marks a clear break from the class-conscious foundation of Marxist ideology, which sees revolution not as the task of a small elite, but of the organized working-class.

The first mention of proletarian dictatorship by Marx traces all the way back to 1850, to the early stages of his and Engels’ work. From its earliest days, Marxism has emphasized the necessity of proletarian dictatorship. The quote above from Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, is the earliest mention by Marx of proletarian dictatorship, and what is even more outstanding than its age in relation to Marxism is how fleshed out this necessary idea already is: “…the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally…”, from the first mention of it, Marx makes it very clear that proletarian dictatorship is necessary in abolishing all class distinctions and antagonisms entirely from society, i.e., in realizing Communism.

There is no revolution without a revolutionary change in who controls the state. From the minority using state apparatuses to oppress the majority to the majority building new state machinery as the mechanism for suppressing counter-revolutionism. This, in essence, is the dictatorship of the proletariat — power wielded by the hand of the majority for the first time in all the history of class society.

Proletarian vs Bourgeois Dictatorship

In order to inspire a change in society toward proletarian dictatorship we must first educate the masses, help them see that we already live under a dictatorship, dominated by the very rich who hold immense political power, on top of their inhumane amounts of wealth, and have control over every aspect of political, social, and economic life. Democracy is not a form of governance, but a measure of what class of people benefit from the government in charge. The control over the majority by a tiny minority is the essence of capitalism, i.e., bourgeois dictatorship, or, if you like, liberal democracy, the form of control and oppression that we’ve lived under and been subjected to for far too long.

The first step is to clearly expose the countless injustices perpetuated daily by the bourgeois dictatorship—those who claim to represent you and me while serving their own class interests. Let no travesty wither away in silence, let no misstep go unchecked, let no politicians consider themselves invincible. We must take on the role of the microscope in examining the current government and that of the megaphone in relaying their constant mistakes and wrongdoings to the people.

A workers’ government is one in which no official, no parliamentarian, no representative, officer, leader, etc. makes more than the average worker’s wage. The natural remuneration weeds out those who seek those positions for their wealth, privilege, influence, etc. This government brings to the forefront leaders who are dedicated in their service to the people with whom they share a class background, who know the struggles of the people and are better fit to deal with them than any politician born in the bourgeois cradle. This is the manifestation of proletarian dictatorship, which very clearly shows the striking differences between it and the dictatorship of the bourgeois class.

What we need is a government that is created by the working-class, for the working-class, and constituted of those who belong to the working-class. This government has the interests of the majority rather than current governments that exist to serve corporations and a handful of billionaires. A government made up of the people it governs is true representation.

A government of and for the people, that is proletarian dictatorship; a government not of the people, but for profiting off the suffering of the people, that is bourgeois dictatorship, that is capitalist government, that is your government, and that is my government.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not about oppression, but liberation—the transfer of power from the few to the many, the unlocking of the chains that hold us down. It is a necessary phase in building a world free of class domination.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Andrew Lehrer.

Some actions recommended in this playbook include: giving working people a raise, empowering workers to unionize, creating good union jobs through government spending, extending pathways into high-quality jobs, and more. This report also highlights some actions governors have taken in states across the country that governors in other states can look to as models of how they also can fight to strengthen the working class and boost their local economies.

“Working-class Americans have been struggling for decades. Governors have an opportunity to advance economic reforms that meet workers’ needs and create a contrasting vision to the Trump administration’s economic agenda that continues to favor billionaires at working class Americans’ expense,” said Karla Walter, senior fellow for Inclusive Economy at CAP and author of the issue brief. “Consistent and outspoken action on policies to rebalance power in the U.S. economy will demonstrate who actually stands with workers.”

Read the issue brief: “Governors Should Fight for an Economic Agenda to Improve the Lives of Working-Class Residents” by Karla Walter

For more information or to speak with an expert, please contact Sarah Nadeau at snadeau@americanprogress.org.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The new analysis reveals that people living in the top 1% of counties ranked by median household income live seven years longer, on average, than Americans living in the bottom 50% of counties.

“The massive income and wealth inequality that exists in America today is not just an economic issue, it is literally a matter of life and death,” said Sanders. “In America today, the bottom 50% of our population can expect to live seven years shorter lives than the top 1%. Even worse, Americans who live in working-class, rural counties can expect to die 10 years younger than people who live in wealthier neighborhoods across the country. The enormous stress of living paycheck to paycheck not only causes far too many Americans to die much quicker than they should, but also leads to higher levels of anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease and poor health. This is an issue that Congress must address.”

Here are the key findings from the report:

• Wealthy Americans live longer than the working class. People living in the top 1% of counties ranked by median household income live an average of 84.3 years, while people living in the bottom 50% of counties ranked by median household income live an average of 77.4 years – a difference of 7 years.
• Rural counties face the greatest disparities. Urban and suburban counties with a median household income of $100,000 have an average life expectancy of 81.6 years, while small rural counties with a median household income of $30,000 have an average life expectancy of 71.7 years – a 10-year gap.
• Geographic disparities persist. In Loudoun County, Virginia, the highest-earning county in the U.S., life expectancy is 84 years. Just 350 miles away, in McDowell County, West Virginia, one of the lowest-earning counties in the U.S., the life expectancy is 69 years – a 15-year difference.
• Higher incomes translate to longer lives. Among rural counties, a $10,000 increase in median annual household income is associated with an additional 2.6 years of life expectancy. Among lower- and lower-middle income populations in urban and suburban counties, the same income increase is associated with a 2.1-year gain in life expectancy.

Through a survey shared on social media, Sanders recently asked working people how stress impacts their lives. The response was overwhelming. Americans shared stories that paint a picture of daily hardship: the stress of affording health care, food, and gas; the anxiety of living paycheck to paycheck; and the feeling of hopelessness that comes from constant financial strain.

Here are just two of those responses.

Edwardo from Texas said: “We struggle to get sleep. Our diets fluctuate, and we get sick from spoiled food from the donation pantry. Working long hours I was recently injured and am struggling, unable to pay for care to help heal.”

Caitlan from Colorado said: “Stress isn’t just an inconvenience for me—it’s a direct threat to my heart. Living with a congenital heart defect and multiple mechanical valves means that every surge of anxiety, every sleepless night worrying about bills, isn’t just mentally exhausting—it physically wears on my heart. Stress triggers palpitations, spikes my blood pressure, and leaves me drained, knowing that too much of it could lead to serious complications. Managing it is a daily battle.”

The report released today also describes policy solutions that would support working Americans and make progress toward closing the life expectancy gap, including:

• Raising the minimum wage to at least $17 an hour to ensure workers can earn a living wage.
• Guaranteeing health care as a human right by enacting Medicare for All.
• Ending the international embarrassment of the United States being the only major country on earth not to guarantee paid family and medical leave.
• Making education from child care to trade school and graduate school available to everyone regardless of their income or ZIP code.
• Expanding Social Security and restoring defined benefit pension plans so that every senior in America can retire with dignity.

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This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

She made it clear in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, again at her televised debate with Donald Trump a few weeks later, and in all her interviews since.

Vice-President Kamala Harris, if or when elected the 47th United States president, will continue the centre-right policies of her recent predecessors, especially her current boss, President Joe Biden.

This likely means that efforts to address income equality and poverty, to abandon policies that beget violence overseas, and to confront the latticework of discrimination that affects Americans of colour and Black women especially, will be limited at best.

• READ MORE: Donald Trump ‘unfit to lead’ – vote for Harris, warns New York Times
• Other US presidential elections reports

If Harris wins today’s election, her being a Black and South Asian woman in the most powerful office in the world will not mean much to marginalised people anywhere, because she will wield that power in the same racist, sexist and Islamophobic ways as previous presidents.

“I’m not the president of Black America. I’m the president of the United States of America,” President Barack Obama had said on several occasions during his presidency when asked about doing more for Black Americans while in office. As a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris is essentially doing the same.

And as it was the case with Obama’s presidency, this is not good news for Black Americans, or any other marginalised community.

Take the issue of housing.

Blanket housing grant
Harris’s proposed $25,000 grant to help Americans buy homes for the first time is a blanket grant, one that in a housing market historically tilted towards white Americans, will invariably discriminate against Black folks and other people of colour.

Harris’s campaign promise does not even discern between “first-time buyers” whose parents and siblings already own homes, and true “first-generation” buyers who are more likely not white, and do not have any generational wealth.

It seems Harris wants to appear committed to helping “all Americans”, even if it means her policies would primarily help (mostly white) Americans already living middle-class lives. Any real chance for those among the working class and the working poor to have access to the three million homes Harris has promised is between slim and none.

Harris’s pledges about reproductive rights are equally non-specific and thus less than reassuring to those who already face discrimination and erasure.

She says, if elected president, she would “codify Roe v Wade”. Every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter has made such a promise and yet failed to keep it.

Even if Congress were to pass such a law, the far right would challenge this law in court. Even if the federal courts decided to upload such a law, the Supreme Court decisions that followed between 1973 and 2022 gave states the right to restrict abortion based on fetus viability, meaning that most restrictions already in place in many states would remain.

And with half the states in the US either banning abortion entirely or severely restricting it, codification of Roe — if it ever actually materialises — would at best reset the US to the precarity around reproductive rights that has existed since 1973.

Less acccess to resources
Even if Harris miraculously manages to keep her promise, American women of colour, and women living in poverty, will still have less access to contraceptives, to abortions, and to prenatal and neonatal care, because all Roe ever did was to make such care “legal”.

The law never made it affordable, and certainly never made it so that all women had equal access to services in every state in the union.

Given that she is poised to become America’s first woman/woman of colour/Black woman president, Harris’s vague and wide-net promises on reproductive rights, which would do little to help any women, but especially marginalised women, are damning.

Sure, it is good that Harris talks about Black girls and women like the late Amber Nicole Thurman who have been denied reproductive rights in states like Georgia, with deadly results. But her words mean nothing without a clear action plan.

Where Harris failed the most of all, however, is tackling violence — overwhelmingly targeting marginalised, sidelined, silenced and criminalised folks — in the US and overseas.

During a live and televised interview with billionaire Oprah Winfrey in September, Harris expanded on the revelation she made during her earlier debate with Trump that she is a gun owner.

“If somebody breaks into my house they’re getting shot,” Harris said with a smile. “I probably should not have said that,” she swiftly added. “My staff will deal with that later.”

Grabbing attention of gun-owners
The vice-president seemed confident that her remark would eventually be seen by pro-gun control democrats as a necessary attempt at grabbing the attention of gun-owning, centre-right voters, who could still be dissuaded from voting for Trump.

Nonetheless, her casual statement about the use of lethal force revealed much more than her desire to secure the votes of “sensible”, old-school right wingers. It illuminated the blitheness with which Harris takes the issue of the US as a violent nation and culture.

It is hard to believe Harris as president would be an advocate for “common sense” measures seeking “assault weapons bans, universal background checks, red flag laws” when she talks so casually about shooting people.

Her decision to treat gun violence as yet another issue for calculated politicking is alarming, especially when Black folk — including Black women — face death by guns at disproportionate rates, particularly at the hands of police officers and white vigilantes.

Despite Trump’s disgusting claims, Harris is a Black woman. Many Americans assume she would do more to protect them than other presidents. However, her dismissive attitude towards gun violence shows that President Harris — regardless of her racial background — would not offer any more security and safety to marginalised communities, including Black women, than her predecessors.

The assumption that as a part-Black, part-South Asian president, Harris would curtail American violence that maims and kills Black, brown and Asian bodies all over the world also appears to be baseless.

In repeatedly saying that she “will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”, Harris has made clear that she has every intention to continue with the lethal, racist, imperialistic policies of her Democratic and Republican predecessors, without reflection, recalibration or an ounce of remorse.

Carnage in Gaza
Just look at the carnage in Gaza she has overseen as vice-president.

Despite saying multiple times that she and Biden “have been working around the clock” for a ceasefire in Gaza, the truth is that Biden and Harris have not secured a ceasefire simply because they do not want one.

Harris as president will be just as fine with Black, brown, and Asian lives not mattering in the calculations of her future administration’s foreign policy, as she has been as vice-president and US senator.

Anybody voting for Harris in this election — including yours truly — should be honest about why. Sure, there is excitement around having a woman — a biracial, Black and South Asian woman at that — as American president for the first time in history. This excitement, combined with her promise of “we’re not going back” in reference to Trump’s presidency, and many pledges to protect what’s left of US democracy,  provide many Americans with enough reason to support the Harris-Walz ticket.

Yet, some seem to be supporting Kamala Harris under the impression that as a Black and South Asian woman, she would value the lives of people who look like her, and once elected, support marginalised people much better than her predecessors.

This is a delusion.

Just like Obama once did, Harris wants to be president of the United States of America. She has no intention of being the President of “Black America” or the marginalised. She made this clear, over and again, throughout her campaign, and through her work as vice-president to Joe Biden.

There is a long list of reasons to vote for Harris in this election, but the assumption that her presidency would be supportive of the rights and struggles of the marginalised, simply because of her identity, should not be on that list.

Donald Earl Collins, professorial lecturer at the American University in Washington, DC, is the author of Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (2004). This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent on at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled. He proposed to cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He attempted to put in place a requirement that poor parents cooperate with child support enforcement, including by having single mothers disclose their sexual histories, before they and their children could receive food assistance.

He tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips. And he did enact a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568 a year.

Trump and his vice presidential pick JD Vance have been running a campaign that they say puts the working class first, vowing to protect everyday Americans from an influx of immigrant labor, to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S., to support rural areas and families with children and, generally, to stick it to the elites.

Critics reply by citing Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a second Trump presidency that proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for lower-income families alongside more large tax breaks for the wealthy. But Trump, despite his clear ties to its authors, has said that Project 2025 doesn’t represent him.

Still, his views on working-class and poor people can be found in specific actions that he tried to take when, as president, he had the power to make public policy.

ProPublica reviewed Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 to 2021, as well as regulations that he attempted to enact or revise via his cabinet agencies, including the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, and also quasi-independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Social Security Administration.

We found that while Trump was in the White House, he advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.

“Trump proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low- and modest-income people than any other president ever has, including Reagan, by far,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime federal poverty policy expert who recently published a paper for the Brookings Institution on Trump’s first-term budgets.

No matter who wins the presidential election, ProPublica is planning to deepen its reporting on poverty issues, from housing to child support to Social Security benefits and Medicaid. We will be covering how the incoming administration handles federal poverty policy, as well as state and local social services agencies and private companies that profit off of the poor. Are you a current or former federal employee with insight into federal poverty programs? Are you someone with stories to pitch us on any of these topics? Reach out directly at Eli.Hager@propublica.org.

Trump was stymied in reaching many of these goals largely because he was inefficient about pursuing them until the second half of his term. According to reporters covering him at the time, he’d been unprepared to win the presidency in 2016, let alone to fill key positions and develop a legislative and regulatory strategy on poverty issues.

He did have control of both the House and Senate during his first two years in office, but he used his only shots at budget reconciliation (annual budget bills that can’t be filibustered by the opposing party) to cut taxes for the rich and to try to repeal Obamacare. By 2019, there wasn’t much time left for his cabinet agencies to develop new regulations, get them through the long federal rulemaking process and deal with any legal challenges.

Trump and his allies appear focused on not repeating such mistakes should he win the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress have said that this time, if they retake majorities in both chambers, they’ll use their reconciliation bills to combine renewed tax cuts with aggressive cuts to social spending. Meanwhile, Trump would likely put forward new regulations earlier in his term, in part so that legal challenges to them get a chance to be heard before a Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority he created.

If he relies on his first-term proposals, that would mean:

• Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, by billions of dollars.
• Rescinding nearly a million kids’ eligibility for free school lunches.
• Freezing Pell grants for lower-income college students so that they’re not adjusted for inflation.
• Overhauling and substantially cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining people with assets exceeding $2,250 as not being poor enough to receive aid and reducing the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
• Eliminating multiple programs designed to increase the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities.
• Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
• Shrinking Job Corps and cutting funding for work-training programs — which help people get off of government assistance — nearly in half.
• Restricting the collective bargaining rights of unions, through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.

Trump also never gave up on his goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves lower-income Americans. He cut in half the open-enrollment windows during which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA, and he cut over 80% of the funding for efforts to help lower-income people and others navigate the system. This especially affected those with special needs or who have limited access to or comfort with the internet.

As a result of these and other changes, the number of uninsured people in the U.S. increased in 2017 for the first time since the law was enacted, then increased again in 2018 and in 2019. By that year, 2.3 million fewer Americans had health insurance than when Trump came into power, including 700,000 fewer children.

President Joe Biden has reversed many of these changes. But Trump could reverse them back, especially if he has majorities in Congress.

Perhaps the main thing that Trump did with his administrative power during his first term — that he openly wants to do more of — is reduce the civil service, meaning the nonpolitical federal employees whom he collectively calls “the Deep State.”

This, too, would have a disproportionately negative impact on programs serving poor and working Americans. Agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provide disability and survivor benefits and housing assistance to lower-income families in times of need, rely heavily on midlevel staff in Washington, D.C., and local offices to process claims and get help to people.

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica about whether Trump wants to distance himself from his first-term record on issues affecting working-class people or whether his second-term agenda would be different.

Instead, she focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying that Trump protected those programs in his first term and would do so again. “By unleashing American energy, slashing job-killing regulations, and adopting pro-growth America First tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history,” Leavitt said.

One new ostensibly pro-worker policy that Trump, as well as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have proposed: ending taxes on tips.

Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that more federal spending on safety net programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people need to be less dependent on government aid and exercise more personal responsibility.

And working-class voters — especially white men without a college degree who feel that their economic standing has diminished relative to other demographic groups — have joined the Trump movement in increasing numbers. What’s more, some counties that have seen large upticks in food stamp usage in recent years continue to vote for him, despite his attempts to shrink that program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that said, Trump’s supporters are better off on average than the media often portrays them to be.)

Meanwhile, pandemic relief, including stimulus checks, did start during the Trump administration and helped reduce poverty rates. But those efforts were temporary responses to a crisis and were mostly proposed by Democrats in Congress; they were hardly part of Trump’s governing agenda.

Amid a presidential race that has at times focused on forgotten, high-poverty communities — with Vance repeatedly touting his Appalachian-adjacent roots — it is surprising that journalists haven’t applied more scrutiny to Trump’s first-term budgets and proposals on these issues, said Greenstein, the poverty policy expert.

Would Trump, given a second term, continue the Biden administration’s efforts to make sure that the IRS isn’t disproportionately auditing the taxes of poor people? Would he defend Biden’s reforms to welfare, aimed at making sure that states actually use welfare money to help lower-income families?

Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail or in debates or interviews, as the candidates and reporters covering them tend to focus more on the middle class.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

After Ohio Senator J.D. Vance makes his nomination official as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2024, we spend the show looking at his record. We begin with a discussion on Vance’s professed economic populism with independent journalist Zaid Jilani and The Nation's Chris Lehmann. Jilani argues Vance's pro-working class image is not only genuine, but that he may also hold enough sway to bring the Republican Party closer to the labor movement. “Big business does fear Vance to some extent,” he says. Lehmann counters, “I don’t see the Republican Party, at the end of the day, moving toward these … redistributive policies,” citing its hostility toward immigrants, who are a major driver of economic growth. “The forgotten working class is going to stay forgotten,” he concludes.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

"Federal watchdogs should hold the data broker accountable for abusing Americans' private information," he added. "And Congress needs to step up as soon as possible to ensure extremist politicians can't buy this kind of sensitive data without a warrant."

"That data brokers can track people visiting Planned Parenthood is terrifying enough. That law enforcement agencies can simply buy this type of sensitive data—rather than getting a warrant—is even worse."

Since the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court reversedRoe v. Wade with its June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, anti-choice state policymakers have ramped up attacks on abortion rights, elevating concerns about patient privacy.

Wyden explained in a Tuesday letter that his office launched an investigation after The Wall Street Journalreported last May that the Veritas Society, a nonprofit established by Wisconsin Right to Life, hired the advertising agency Recrue Media for an anti-abortion ad campaign targeting clinic visitors, whose locations were tracked by the data broker Near Intelligence.

As Wyden wrote to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler:

My staff spoke with Steven Bogue, the co-founder and managing principal of Recrue Media on May 19, 2023, who revealed that to target these ads, his employees used Near's website to draw a line around the building and parking lot of each targeted facility. On May 26, 2023, my staff spoke with Near's chief privacy officer, Jay Angelo, who confirmed that, until the summer of 2022, the company did not have any technical controls in place to prevent its customers targeting people who visited sensitive facilities, such as reproductive health clinics.

On a webpage that has since been taken down, but was saved by the Internet Archive, the Veritas Society stated that in 2020 in Wisconsin alone, it delivered 14.3 million ads to people who visited abortion clinics, and "served ads to those devices across the women's social pages, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat." The scale of this invasive surveillance-enabled ad campaign remains unknown, however, Mr. Bogue told my staff that the company used Near to target ads to people who had visited 600 Planned Parenthood locations in the lower 48 states.

Justin Sherman, who studies data brokers at Duke University, toldPolitico that "this is the largest targeting campaign we've seen to date against reproductive health clinics based on brokered data."

Wyden also highlighted Journalreporting from October about Near selling location data to defense contractors that resold it to U.S. Defense Department and intelligence agencies. He wrote that Angelo, the privacy officer, "confirmed that the company had for three years sold location data to the defense contractor AELIUS Exploitation Technologies."

"Mr. Angelo revealed that after joining Near in June of 2022, he conducted a review of the company's practices and discovered that the company was facilitating the sale of location data to the U.S. government that had been obtained without user consent," the senator continued, noting the removal of "misleading statements" from Near's website.

"The former executives that led Near during the period in which it engaged in these egregious violations of Americans' privacy are now under criminal investigation, according to a statement made by the company's lawyer during a December 11, 2023, bankruptcy hearing. But prosecuting those individuals for engaging in financial fraud will not address Near's corporate abuses," Wyden argued, urging the FTC and SEC to take various actions over the company's "outrageous conduct" that "recklessly harmed the public and investors."

Wyden's letter comes as the Republican-controlled U.S. House plans to take up the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, which would reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), spying powers temporarily extended late last year that agencies—especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—have abused.

Section 702 only allows warrantless surveillance targeting foreigners located outside the United States, but Americans' data is also swept up, and privacy advocates within and outside of Congress—including Wyden—have long been pushing for warrant protections, a key issue in this week's debates about the Republican-led reform bill.

Responding to Wyden's letter, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said Wednesday that "this is outrageous. Americans' most personal private health data is being bought and sold for politics. Major surveillance changes are needed. i.e. If Congress acts, reforms from our Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act must be part of a FISA reform."

Reintroduced by Lofgren, Wyden, and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers last July, that bill would require the U.S. government to get a court order compelling data brokers to disclose information as well as bar law enforcement and intelligence agencies from buying data on people in the U.S. and Americans abroad if it was obtained from a user's account or device, or deceptive practices.

Privacy rights campaigners and experts also responded to Wyden's letter with renewed calls for closing the data broker loophole.

"That data brokers can track people visiting Planned Parenthood is terrifying enough. That law enforcement agencies can simply buy this type of sensitive data—rather than getting a warrant—is even worse," said Ashley Gorski, senior staff attorney at the ACLU's National Security Project. "This Thursday, Congress must vote to close the loophole for law enforcement purchases from data brokers. The government shouldn't be able to buy its way around the Fourth Amendment."

The organizations Demand Progress and EPIC concurred in social media posts sharing Politico's reporting on the letter.

"The continued sale of our most sensitive information to and by shady data brokers not only fuels harmful surveillance advertising systems, but enables government agencies—from local police departments to state attorneys general to the FBI—to sidestep the Fourth Amendment," said EPIC counsel Sara Geoghegan in a statement. "We urgently need to rein in data brokers and enact comprehensive privacy rules to protect us from these grave harms in the post-Roe era we live in."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

This article is a transcript of a presentation for a panel on the subject, hosted by the International Manifesto Group, the Critical Theory Workshop, and the Midwestern Marx Institute, with other presentations from Gabriel Rockhill, Radhika Desai, Glenn Diesen, and Noah Khrachvik.

​The question we are exploring today, concerning the divorce of intellectuals and the working class, is fundamental for assessing the crisis we face in the subjective conditions for revolution. The first thing I think must be interrogated is what is presupposed in the formulation of the problem in such manner. When we say that there has been a split, a schism, between intellectuals and the working class, there is a specific type of intellectual that we have in mind.
​
The grand majority of intellectuals, especially within the capitalist mode of life, have had their lots tied to the dominant social system. They have functioned as a necessary component of the dominant order, those who take the ideals of the bourgeoisie – the class enemy of most of humanity – and embellish them in language which opens the narrow interests of the ruling class to the consenting approval of contending classes. In the same manner Marx describes the bourgeoisie as the personified agents of capital, the intellectuals have been the personified agents of capitalist ideology. They are tasked, as Gramsci taught us, with making these dispersed and unpopular bourgeois assumptions into a coherent and appealing outlook – one people are socialized into accepting as reality itself. Intellectuals have always, in a certain sense, been those groups of people that light the fire and move the statues which the slaves in the cave see as cave shadows embodying reality itself.

These intellectuals – the traditional intellectuals – are of course not the ones we have in mind when we speak of a schism between intellectuals and workers. We are speaking, instead, of those who have been historically able to see the movement of history, to make slits within bourgeois worldviews, and who have subsequently thrown their lot in with the proletariat and popular classes – those forces which present the kernel for the next, more human and democratic, mode of life. Marx and Engels had already noted that there is always a section of “bourgeois ideologists” that raise “themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and “cut [themselves] adrift [to] join the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” We are talking about the Duboises, the Apthekers, the Marinellos, the Parentis and others who, while coming out of the institutions of the bourgeois academy, would align their interests with working and oppressed peoples. They would become the theoreticians, historians, and poets which gave the working-class movement various forms of clarity in their struggle for power.

What has happened to this section of intellectuals and its relationship with working people? Have they lost their thirst for freedom? Has their capacity for trembling with indignation at the injustices waged on working and oppressed people dissipated?

It is important to note that any attempt to answer this question in this short timespan will always, by necessity, leave important aspects of the conversation out. I would love here to speak at length about the campaigns of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the formation of a fake anti-communist left, and the role imperialist state departments, bourgeois foundations, and other such outfits had in creating a left intelligentsia divorced from the real movements of working people, both within the imperial core and in the periphery. I know my colleagues here will be paying due attention to such monumental components of answering the question we have before us.

However, I’d like to instead focus on the practice of intellectuals; on the expectations and requirements set by the academy itself, which have already baked into its very structure the divorce of radical intellectuals from the struggles and movements of working and oppressed peoples. The first thing that must be noted is the following: We cannot simply treat this problem as one rooted in the intellectuals as a class, nor as one rooted in the subjective deficiencies of particular intellectuals. The Marxist worldview requires us to examine the system, the social totality, that produces such a split. We are tasked with exploring the political economy of knowledge production, if you will, which structures the relations of its mental workers through forms which insularize them to the structures and needs of the academy. As Gabriel Rockhill would say, it is a political economy of knowledge that systematically reproduces radical recuperators, compatible lefts, and pseudo-radical purity fetish outlooks that play an indispensable role in the reproduction of our moribund capitalist-imperialist system.

From the moment prospective radical scholars enter graduate school they are integrated into this system. Their lofty hopes of being active participants as intellectuals in a class struggle are castrated by the demands the academy makes upon them qua scholars. They’re told that their writing should take a distinctively academic tone, that popular vernacular is frowned upon, that hyper-referentiality, the practice of citing all the intellectual gods in the cosmos who have commented on a topic, is a sign of good work, of proper scholarship.

Truth and the struggle for human freedom are at best given a backseat, and that’s if they’re in the vehicle at all. Young scholars in the incubators of their careers are already indoctrinated in the aristocratic dogmas of writing for a select group of elite scholars, worshipping journal impact factors, and condescendingly dismissing those who use their intellectual capacities to work for the people, to actually, in proper Socratic fashion, engage in the radical quest for truth – those who seek to properly understand the world in order to work with the masses of humanity to change it.

Young scholars, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars accumulated in undergraduate studies debts, are told that even with a PhD they will have an extremely difficult time finding a job – at least one suitable for continued academic work that pays sufficiently enough to payback the accumulated debt. They are told – specifically those with radical sensibilities – that they should focus on joining academic associations, network with people in their fields, familiarize themselves with the work published in leading journals so that they too, one day, can join the publication hamster wheel aimed at advancing these slaves through the tenure ladder. They are told they must not waste their time writing for popular audiences, that doing broadcasts and media work that reaches infinitely more people than the readers of ridiculously pay-walled journals or university editorial books is a waste of time. Every attempt at rooting their scholarship in the people, in the real movements of our day, is shot down.

The gurus mediating their initiation into the academic capitalist cult ask: “do you know how this sort of work on your resume would look to hiring committees?” “Do you think the scholars in charge of your tenure advancement will appreciate your popular articles for Countercurrents, your books from Monthly Review, your articles in low impact factor, or impact factor-less, journals?”

At every turn, your attempts to commit yourself to the Socratic pursuit of truth, to playing a role in changing the world, is condemned as sinful to the Gods of resume evaluations. “Do you not want to finish your degree with the potential of obtaining gainful employment? Do you want to be condemned to adjunct professorialship, to teaching 7 classes for half the pay of the full professors who teach 3? Do you want to condemn your family to debt-slavery for the decades to come simply because you did not want to join our very special and elite hamster wheel? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend months writing an article to send it in to a journal that will reply in a year telling you, if you’re amongst the lucky ones, that it has been accepted with revisions rooted in the specific biases of the arbitrary reviewers? Doesn’t that sound fun? Isn’t this what philosophy, and the humanities in general, is all about?”

Eventually, material pressures themselves break the spirit of young visionary scholars. Reproletarianized and unable to survive on teaching assistantships, they resign themselves to the hamster wheel, with hopes of one day living the comfortable lives of their professors.

Their radical sensibilities, however, are still there. They need an outlet. They look around and find that the academic hamster wheel has a pocket of ‘radicals’ writing edgy things for decently rated journals. They quickly find their kin, those who reduce radical politics to social transgressiveness, those who are concerned more with dissecting concepts like epistemic violence than with the violence of imperialism.

Here it is! The young scholar thinks. A place where I can pad my resume and absolve myself of the guilt weighing down on my shoulders – a guilt rooted in the recognition, deep down, that one has betrayed the struggles of humanity, that one has become an agent of the forces they originally desired to fight against.

Their existence, their lives, will always be rooted in what Sartre called bad faith. Self-deception becomes their norm. They are now the radical ones, the ones enlightened in issues of language. The working class becomes a backwards rabble they must educate – and that’s if they come near them at all. What hope could there ever be in the deplorables? Sure, American capitalism could be criticized, but at least we’re enlightened, ‘woke’ to lgbtq and other issues. Those Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians, etc. etc., aren’t they backwards? What are their thoughts on trans issues? Should we not, in the interests of our enlightened civilization, support our government’s efforts to civilize them? Let’s go take them some of our valued democracy and human rights. I’m sure their people will appreciate it very much.

I have presented the stories which are all-too familiar to those of us still working within the academy. It is evident, in my view at least, that the divorce of radical intellectuals from working class people and their movements has been an institutionalized effort of the capitalist elite. This division is embedded, it is implied, in the process of intellectuals becoming what the system requires of them for their survival. The relations they occupy in the process of knowledge production presupposes their split with working people.

This rigidity of academic life has intensified over the last century. Yes, we do have plenty of past cases of radical academics, those who have sided with the people, being kicked to the curb by their academic institutions. But where have they landed and why? Doesn’t a blackballed Dubois get to teach at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School? Doesn’t Herbert Aptheker, following his expulsion from the academy, obtain a position as the full-time editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Political Affairs? Besides the aforementioned, what other factors make our day different from, say, 1950s US?

The answer is simple: what counter-hegemonic popular institutions we had were destroyed, in part by the efforts of our government, in part by the collapse, or overthrow, of the Soviet bloc. Although some, like ourselves, are currently in the process of attempting to construct them, today we have nowhere near the material and financial conditions we had in the past. The funding and aid the Soviets provided American communists is, unfortunately, not something provided for us by the dominant socialist states of our era.

Ideology does not exist in a transcendental realm; it is embodied materially through people and institutions. Without the institutions that can ensure that radical scholars are not forced to tiptoe the line of the bourgeois academy, the material conditions for this split will be sustained.

If I may, I would like to end with the following point. It is very easy to condemn the so-called radical academics we find in the bourgeois hamster wheel divorced from the people and their struggles. While condemnation might sometimes be justified, I think pity is the correct reaction.

They are the subjects of a tragedy. As Hegel notes, the essence of a tragedy is found in the contradictions at play between the various roles an individual occupies. Sophocles’ Antigone is perhaps the best example. Here a sister (Antigone) is torn between the duty she has to bury her brother (Polyneices), and the duty she has as a citizen to follow King Creon’s decry, which considers Polyneices a traitor undeserving of a formal burial. This contradiction is depicted nicely in Hegel, who says that “both are in the wrong because they are one-sided, but both are also in the right.”

Our so-called radical intelligentsia is, likewise, caught in the contradiction of the two roles they wish to occupy – one as revolutionary and the other as academic. Within the confines of the existing institutions, there can be no consistent reconciliation of the duties implied in each role. This is the set up of a classical tragedy, one which takes various forms with each individual scholar. It is also, as Socrates reminds Aristophanes and Agathon at the end of Plato’s Symposium, a comedy, since “the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also.”

The tragic and simultaneously comedic position occupied by the radical intelligentsia can only be overcome with the development of popular counterhegemonic institutions, such as parties and educational institutions akin to those sponsoring today’s panel. It is only here where scholars can embed themselves in the people. However, scholars are humans living under capitalism. They need, just like everyone else, to have the capacity to pay for their basic subsistence. These institutions, therefore, must work to develop the capacity of financially supporting both the intellectual traitors to the traditional bourgeois academy, and the organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself. That is, I think, one of the central tasks facing those attempting to bridge the divide we have convened to examine today.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlos L. Garrido.

This article is a transcript of a presentation for a panel on the subject, hosted by the International Manifesto Group, the Critical Theory Workshop, and the Midwestern Marx Institute, with other presentations from Gabriel Rockhill, Radhika Desai, Glenn Diesen, and Noah Khrachvik.

​The question we are exploring today, concerning the divorce of intellectuals and the working class, is fundamental for assessing the crisis we face in the subjective conditions for revolution. The first thing I think must be interrogated is what is presupposed in the formulation of the problem in such manner. When we say that there has been a split, a schism, between intellectuals and the working class, there is a specific type of intellectual that we have in mind.
​
The grand majority of intellectuals, especially within the capitalist mode of life, have had their lots tied to the dominant social system. They have functioned as a necessary component of the dominant order, those who take the ideals of the bourgeoisie – the class enemy of most of humanity – and embellish them in language which opens the narrow interests of the ruling class to the consenting approval of contending classes. In the same manner Marx describes the bourgeoisie as the personified agents of capital, the intellectuals have been the personified agents of capitalist ideology. They are tasked, as Gramsci taught us, with making these dispersed and unpopular bourgeois assumptions into a coherent and appealing outlook – one people are socialized into accepting as reality itself. Intellectuals have always, in a certain sense, been those groups of people that light the fire and move the statues which the slaves in the cave see as cave shadows embodying reality itself.

These intellectuals – the traditional intellectuals – are of course not the ones we have in mind when we speak of a schism between intellectuals and workers. We are speaking, instead, of those who have been historically able to see the movement of history, to make slits within bourgeois worldviews, and who have subsequently thrown their lot in with the proletariat and popular classes – those forces which present the kernel for the next, more human and democratic, mode of life. Marx and Engels had already noted that there is always a section of “bourgeois ideologists” that raise “themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and “cut [themselves] adrift [to] join the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” We are talking about the Duboises, the Apthekers, the Marinellos, the Parentis and others who, while coming out of the institutions of the bourgeois academy, would align their interests with working and oppressed peoples. They would become the theoreticians, historians, and poets which gave the working-class movement various forms of clarity in their struggle for power.

What has happened to this section of intellectuals and its relationship with working people? Have they lost their thirst for freedom? Has their capacity for trembling with indignation at the injustices waged on working and oppressed people dissipated?

It is important to note that any attempt to answer this question in this short timespan will always, by necessity, leave important aspects of the conversation out. I would love here to speak at length about the campaigns of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the formation of a fake anti-communist left, and the role imperialist state departments, bourgeois foundations, and other such outfits had in creating a left intelligentsia divorced from the real movements of working people, both within the imperial core and in the periphery. I know my colleagues here will be paying due attention to such monumental components of answering the question we have before us.

However, I’d like to instead focus on the practice of intellectuals; on the expectations and requirements set by the academy itself, which have already baked into its very structure the divorce of radical intellectuals from the struggles and movements of working and oppressed peoples. The first thing that must be noted is the following: We cannot simply treat this problem as one rooted in the intellectuals as a class, nor as one rooted in the subjective deficiencies of particular intellectuals. The Marxist worldview requires us to examine the system, the social totality, that produces such a split. We are tasked with exploring the political economy of knowledge production, if you will, which structures the relations of its mental workers through forms which insularize them to the structures and needs of the academy. As Gabriel Rockhill would say, it is a political economy of knowledge that systematically reproduces radical recuperators, compatible lefts, and pseudo-radical purity fetish outlooks that play an indispensable role in the reproduction of our moribund capitalist-imperialist system.

From the moment prospective radical scholars enter graduate school they are integrated into this system. Their lofty hopes of being active participants as intellectuals in a class struggle are castrated by the demands the academy makes upon them qua scholars. They’re told that their writing should take a distinctively academic tone, that popular vernacular is frowned upon, that hyper-referentiality, the practice of citing all the intellectual gods in the cosmos who have commented on a topic, is a sign of good work, of proper scholarship.

Truth and the struggle for human freedom are at best given a backseat, and that’s if they’re in the vehicle at all. Young scholars in the incubators of their careers are already indoctrinated in the aristocratic dogmas of writing for a select group of elite scholars, worshipping journal impact factors, and condescendingly dismissing those who use their intellectual capacities to work for the people, to actually, in proper Socratic fashion, engage in the radical quest for truth – those who seek to properly understand the world in order to work with the masses of humanity to change it.

Young scholars, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars accumulated in undergraduate studies debts, are told that even with a PhD they will have an extremely difficult time finding a job – at least one suitable for continued academic work that pays sufficiently enough to payback the accumulated debt. They are told – specifically those with radical sensibilities – that they should focus on joining academic associations, network with people in their fields, familiarize themselves with the work published in leading journals so that they too, one day, can join the publication hamster wheel aimed at advancing these slaves through the tenure ladder. They are told they must not waste their time writing for popular audiences, that doing broadcasts and media work that reaches infinitely more people than the readers of ridiculously pay-walled journals or university editorial books is a waste of time. Every attempt at rooting their scholarship in the people, in the real movements of our day, is shot down.

The gurus mediating their initiation into the academic capitalist cult ask: “do you know how this sort of work on your resume would look to hiring committees?” “Do you think the scholars in charge of your tenure advancement will appreciate your popular articles for Countercurrents, your books from Monthly Review, your articles in low impact factor, or impact factor-less, journals?”

At every turn, your attempts to commit yourself to the Socratic pursuit of truth, to playing a role in changing the world, is condemned as sinful to the Gods of resume evaluations. “Do you not want to finish your degree with the potential of obtaining gainful employment? Do you want to be condemned to adjunct professorialship, to teaching 7 classes for half the pay of the full professors who teach 3? Do you want to condemn your family to debt-slavery for the decades to come simply because you did not want to join our very special and elite hamster wheel? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend months writing an article to send it in to a journal that will reply in a year telling you, if you’re amongst the lucky ones, that it has been accepted with revisions rooted in the specific biases of the arbitrary reviewers? Doesn’t that sound fun? Isn’t this what philosophy, and the humanities in general, is all about?”

Eventually, material pressures themselves break the spirit of young visionary scholars. Reproletarianized and unable to survive on teaching assistantships, they resign themselves to the hamster wheel, with hopes of one day living the comfortable lives of their professors.

Their radical sensibilities, however, are still there. They need an outlet. They look around and find that the academic hamster wheel has a pocket of ‘radicals’ writing edgy things for decently rated journals. They quickly find their kin, those who reduce radical politics to social transgressiveness, those who are concerned more with dissecting concepts like epistemic violence than with the violence of imperialism.

Here it is! The young scholar thinks. A place where I can pad my resume and absolve myself of the guilt weighing down on my shoulders – a guilt rooted in the recognition, deep down, that one has betrayed the struggles of humanity, that one has become an agent of the forces they originally desired to fight against.

Their existence, their lives, will always be rooted in what Sartre called bad faith. Self-deception becomes their norm. They are now the radical ones, the ones enlightened in issues of language. The working class becomes a backwards rabble they must educate – and that’s if they come near them at all. What hope could there ever be in the deplorables? Sure, American capitalism could be criticized, but at least we’re enlightened, ‘woke’ to lgbtq and other issues. Those Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians, etc. etc., aren’t they backwards? What are their thoughts on trans issues? Should we not, in the interests of our enlightened civilization, support our government’s efforts to civilize them? Let’s go take them some of our valued democracy and human rights. I’m sure their people will appreciate it very much.

I have presented the stories which are all-too familiar to those of us still working within the academy. It is evident, in my view at least, that the divorce of radical intellectuals from working class people and their movements has been an institutionalized effort of the capitalist elite. This division is embedded, it is implied, in the process of intellectuals becoming what the system requires of them for their survival. The relations they occupy in the process of knowledge production presupposes their split with working people.

This rigidity of academic life has intensified over the last century. Yes, we do have plenty of past cases of radical academics, those who have sided with the people, being kicked to the curb by their academic institutions. But where have they landed and why? Doesn’t a blackballed Dubois get to teach at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School? Doesn’t Herbert Aptheker, following his expulsion from the academy, obtain a position as the full-time editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Political Affairs? Besides the aforementioned, what other factors make our day different from, say, 1950s US?

The answer is simple: what counter-hegemonic popular institutions we had were destroyed, in part by the efforts of our government, in part by the collapse, or overthrow, of the Soviet bloc. Although some, like ourselves, are currently in the process of attempting to construct them, today we have nowhere near the material and financial conditions we had in the past. The funding and aid the Soviets provided American communists is, unfortunately, not something provided for us by the dominant socialist states of our era.

Ideology does not exist in a transcendental realm; it is embodied materially through people and institutions. Without the institutions that can ensure that radical scholars are not forced to tiptoe the line of the bourgeois academy, the material conditions for this split will be sustained.

If I may, I would like to end with the following point. It is very easy to condemn the so-called radical academics we find in the bourgeois hamster wheel divorced from the people and their struggles. While condemnation might sometimes be justified, I think pity is the correct reaction.

They are the subjects of a tragedy. As Hegel notes, the essence of a tragedy is found in the contradictions at play between the various roles an individual occupies. Sophocles’ Antigone is perhaps the best example. Here a sister (Antigone) is torn between the duty she has to bury her brother (Polyneices), and the duty she has as a citizen to follow King Creon’s decry, which considers Polyneices a traitor undeserving of a formal burial. This contradiction is depicted nicely in Hegel, who says that “both are in the wrong because they are one-sided, but both are also in the right.”

Our so-called radical intelligentsia is, likewise, caught in the contradiction of the two roles they wish to occupy – one as revolutionary and the other as academic. Within the confines of the existing institutions, there can be no consistent reconciliation of the duties implied in each role. This is the set up of a classical tragedy, one which takes various forms with each individual scholar. It is also, as Socrates reminds Aristophanes and Agathon at the end of Plato’s Symposium, a comedy, since “the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also.”

The tragic and simultaneously comedic position occupied by the radical intelligentsia can only be overcome with the development of popular counterhegemonic institutions, such as parties and educational institutions akin to those sponsoring today’s panel. It is only here where scholars can embed themselves in the people. However, scholars are humans living under capitalism. They need, just like everyone else, to have the capacity to pay for their basic subsistence. These institutions, therefore, must work to develop the capacity of financially supporting both the intellectual traitors to the traditional bourgeois academy, and the organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself. That is, I think, one of the central tasks facing those attempting to bridge the divide we have convened to examine today.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlos L. Garrido.

C.F. Daubigny, “Steamboats,” from Voyage en Bateau, 1878. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Rock the boat

My wife, Harriet is a professional environmentalist. She has a degree from the University of London, worked in the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and then for the future King Charles. After moving to the U.S., she set up her own non-profit, Anthropocene Alliance in 2017. I’m A2’s co-founder and Director of Strategy. But my degrees are in all the wrong fields, I have no prior experience with environmental justice, and I only work on projects that suit me. In short, I’m an amateur.

To call somebody an amateur is to say they are unprofessional and lacking the skills required for the job. But the word has another meaning, too, which derives from the original Latin amare (to love) and the French cognate amateur (15^th C.) which means lover. Amateurs are people who do things out of love, whereas professionals act according to rules and to earn their pay. The urban theorist Andy Merrifield has described amateurs as people who “question professional authority [and] express concerns professionals don’t consider, don’t see, don’t care about. Thus, an amateur might likely be somebody who rocks the boat, who stirs up trouble, because he or she isn’t on anybody’s payroll—never will be on the payroll because of the critical things they say.”

To be fair, Harriet often questions authority, but she does so in a professional manner. I’m an amateur and unpaid, so my job (and my joy) is to ask unprofessional questions and make discomforting observations, without however undermining our whole enterprise. The dialectic is well expressed in the disco classic, “Rock the Boat”:

So I’d like to know where, you got the notion
Said I’d like to know where, you got the notion
To rock the boat (don’t rock the boat, baby)
Rock the boat (don’t tip the boat over)
Rock the boat (don’t rock the boat, baby)
Rock the boat”

– The Hues Corporation, 1973

The following is an amateur’s observations about the U.S environmental movement intended to rock the boat while not completely tipping it over. I’ll proceed by: 1) briefly describing past and present movements; 2) discussing one of the chief weaknesses of the current environmental movement – excessive inward directedness or “prefiguration”; and 3) concluding with some ideas about how to build a new, working-class movement grounded in politics and nourished by “necessity and desire.”

Past movements

Movements are collective drives for large-scale social or political change. Examples are the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the anti-(Vietnam) war movement, and the anti-nuclear (or nuclear freeze) movement. They engaged vast numbers of people, lasted many years, and had significant impacts, though none was fully successful according to their own measures or in retrospect. The abolitionist movement, for example, (combined with slave uprisings), ultimately ended chattel slavery globally, but the system of capitalist wage-labor that replaced it left most former slaves – and other laborers — powerless in the workplace and subject to the profit-maximizing behavior (greed) of employers.

The nuclear freeze movement in the 1980s (sometimes called a “campaign”), led to the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987) and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties I (1991) and II (1993), but these and other agreements have been violated by the U.S. and Russia, and the threat of nuclear conflict once again looms. Nevertheless, it was a remarkable success in its time, the result of a set of well-organized and ever-larger protests. I remember the thrill of being among more than a million people at the anti-nuclear rally in Central Park, NYC on June 12, 1982. One episode stands out: The 11-minute peroration by Orson Welles. Inspired by Marc Anthony’s speech from Julius Caesar, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” Welles alternately buried and praised then-President Ronald Reagan. He first condemned him as a “far-right” radical whose bellicosity cast a shadow over the whole planet but then praised him for recognizing the strength of the anti-nuclear movement and responding to it. Soon after that, Reagan undertook serious nuclear arms reduction negotiations with the Soviets. Welles’s speech helped me recognize the absolute necessity of nuclear disarmament for sheer survival, but his soaring rhetoric also stirred something closer to desire. I imagined how delightful would be a future without fear.

Global warming and environmental devastation are threats as terrifying as nuclear war, but there is today nothing comparable to the nuclear freeze movement. April 22, 1970, marked the first Earth Day, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of major U.S. cities. Nearly every successive Earth Day rally, however, has been smaller than the one before, and none had a significant impact on national politics. The emergence of the crisis of global warming, however, changed public perceptions of environmental vulnerability and seemed to ramp up organizational and grassroots activism.

The environmental industry

On September 20, 2019, days before the annual UN Climate Summit, some 5 million people in 150 countries – inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg — rallied to protest climate change. Many of the young participants in the Global Climate Strike also participated in school walkouts. But the very geographic breadth and diversity of the rallies and their lack of a leader (except for young Greta), made them hard to replicate. No follow-up was planned.

Instead of an environmental movement, we have an environmental industry. There are roughly 28,000 environmental organizations in the U.S. alone, employing 127,000 people with total assets of $68 billion. That’s a lot of turf to protect. The largest group is the National Wildlife Federation, with 5 million dues-paying members and an annual income of about $120 million. The NWF promotes hunting and fishing, activities that are incompatible with wildlife conservation and ecological restoration. It’s funded by members as well as large corporations including General Motors, Alcoa, and PSEG. System change is not part of NWF’s DNA.

The Nature Conservancy is the richest environmental organization in the world. It has a million members, over $7 billion in assets, and an annual income of about a $1 billion. Some of that wealth derives from selling bogus climate offsets to corporations including Disney, Blackrock, and J.P. Morgan Chase. TNC’s board of directors is drawn, unsurprisingly, from some of the same multinational corporations with which it does business, including Alcoa, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, General Mills, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Shell. Other large environmental non-profits with dubious corporate associations and shady dealings include the Audubon Society (national and state affiliates) and World Wildlife Fund. None of them are likely movement builders because they are so entrenched in the current economic and social order.

350.org, Sierra Club and the Sunrise Movement are just three of the dozens of other big players. 350 is a global organization founded in 2007, dedicated to reducing atmospheric carbon to 350 parts per million, the amount beyond which global warming is potentially cataclysmic. (We are now well past that threshold.) It’s been active in campaigns to pressure institutions to divest from fossil fuels and was engaged in the successful effort to halt the Keystone XL oil pipeline. In 2019, it was a sponsor of the Global Climate Strike. Like the Sierra Club and Sunrise Movement, however, 350 doesn’t have a very good record of movement building. Whereas successful movements – Civil Rights, Anti-War, Nuclear Freeze – proceed from success to success and from smaller to larger actions – these groups have lurched from action to inaction, and from triumph to quiescence.

The past summer of record heat and fires, following previous years of record heat and fires, would seem to offer enormous opportunities for organized protest. The hunger of young people – the foundation for any mass movement — is palpable. Yet the organizations with the biggest budgets, largest membership, and greatest potential for outreach, seem to be AWOL. None of them were involved, for example, in organizing or coordinating the September 17 March to End Fossil Fuels in New York City, which attracted a crowd of 75,000 that included progressive star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The U.S. Climate Action Network (USCAN) has almost 200 organizational members and seems well poised to exercise national leadership. But its activist Arm in Arm campaign has been suspended and the organization itself is undergoing retrenchment and restructuring.

Environmental groups have become too internally focused.

There’s a well-known Aesop fable called “The Fox and the Frog” about a frog who declares himself to be a talented doctor able to cure sick animals. All the beasts of the forest are seduced by his claims except one, the fox. How, the fox demands, can one so pale, thin, slack-jawed, weak, and spotty claim to heal anybody? “Physician, heal thyself!” he says.

Francis Barlow, “The Fox and the Frog,” The Fables of Aesop, London: Stockdale, 1793. (Photo: The author)

For the past decade, but especially since the national, racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, many educational, corporate, and non-profit organizations, including environmental ones, have undertaken self-reviews – sometimes under duress — to ensure they uphold principles of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusiveness (JEDI). Their motto appears to be: “Before helping others, heal thyself!” The problem with this principle, and with the fable, is that even imperfect organizations or physicians, can perform exemplary services. 350.org, the Sunrise Movement and the Sierra Club, three of the largest, intermittently effective environmental groups, have been roiled and even paralyzed by internal conflict over racial justice and other praiseworthy goals. The disputes in each case are too complicated to summarize, but generally entail charges of failure to recruit and hire non-white staff, tokenism, and lack of effective outreach to poor or marginalized communities. To avoid similar experiences, many businesses, universities, and non-profits have enlisted the help of professional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultants.

Investment in DEI reached $8 billion in 2020, though those numbers have lately begun to decline. Apart from any impact on equity, DEI programs – many institutions believe — pay public relations dividends. When Starbucks was accused of racism after an incident in 2018 in which police were called to a Philadelphia store after two Black men attempted to use the bathroom, the corporation immediately announced it would close all branches and conduct a one-afternoon course of racial bias training. In the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, DEI training was claimed to enhance “changeability,” according to the Harvard Business Review, meaning the capacity of a business to “be more dynamic, adapt in the moment, and sequence its actions.”

It’s to be expected that many corporations and non-profits undertake DEI initiatives with cynical motives. Nevertheless, most of us would be satisfied if they did the right thing for the wrong reason. In this case, however, there is little evidence that DEI training leads to better hiring and promotion practices, greater pay equity, a more diverse workforce, or improved delivery of programs and services. A recent meta-analysis concluded that: “While the small number of experimental studies provide encouraging average effects, details of these studies reveal that the effects shrink when the training is conducted in real-world workplace settings, when the outcomes are measured at a greater time distance… and, most importantly, when the sample size is large enough to produce reliable results.” Of even more dubious value are short-duration, intensive training sessions like the online courses now mandated by many businesses and universities.

The last time I participated in a DEI training was during my final year teaching at Northwestern University in 2021. The course was mandated by our dean as collective punishment for an un-named faculty member’s verbal indiscretion in a graduate seminar. The course was led by a pair of humorless young DEI trainers outfitted with the latest jargon. The consequences for department morale were nearly disastrous: faculty animosities blossomed into viral hatreds during and after the sessions. But university departments are resilient: A few retirements, relocations, raises, and new hires restored basic amity. The same resilience doesn’t characterize environmental non-profits that are dependent upon membership dues and foundation grants. Internal dissension and bad publicity can quickly prove fatal. That was nearly the case with 350.org, Sierra Club and Sunrise. And even in the absence of actual conflict, excessive internal directedness can be paralyzing. USCAN was so focused on prefiguration – establishing an internal order of justice that models the world it wants to create — that it has done little else for the last two years than draft new membership requirements and a “JEDI blueprint.” Now it must quickly devise a concrete strategy and funding mechanism to achieve its ambitious goal: accelerating the U.S. transition to a fossil-free future.

Recently, non-profits have edged away from DEI training and instead embraced “trauma-informed practice”. The purpose of TIP is to support individuals – whether clients or staff – who have experienced trauma, including accidents, disasters, violence, abuse, war, illness, racism, and discrimination. (A recent scholarly survey indicates that 82.7% of people in the U.S. have experienced some kind of trauma.) According to the National Institute of Health, trauma-informed practice is based on “the assumption that every person seeking services is a trauma survivor who designs his or her own path to healing, facilitated by support and mentoring from the service provider.” That means that organizations must shift from a “top-down, hierarchical clinical model to a psychosocial empowerment partnership that embraces all possible tools and paths to healing.”

Environmental justice organizations like the Anthropocene Alliance frequently partner with people who have experienced trauma. Homelessness, injury, and illness are often the consequences of floods, fires, toxics, and extreme heat. In addition, poverty is a co-indicator of trauma; it’s well-recognized that the poor and marginalized are more likely to experience climate and environmental disasters. (Surprisingly, racism is not predictive of trauma. 83.7% of white Americans report trauma exposure, while only 76.4% of Blacks, and 68.2% of Latinos do.) Contact with people exposed to trauma can itself be traumatizing, staff at environmental justice organizations report. Research indicates, however, that trauma-informed practice is no guarantee of successful community outreach or staff health.

More effective than DEI or TIP in building and maintaining a successful environmental justice organization and conducting useful outreach is simply the hard work of ensuring equitable workloads and salaries, and conscientiously seeking a large and diverse applicant pool for open positions. In addition, when working with community members or staff who have experienced trauma, patience, kindness, and compassion are the most important skills. If someone wishes to discuss personal, psychological, physical, or other trauma, staff must listen with attention and care, and be prepared to refer the person to clinical or social service providers, or therapists specially attuned to the environmental crisis.

Building a working-class environmental movement

The environmental crisis isn’t only climate change. It’s also species extinction, ocean acidification, loss of ecological diversity (including deforestation), depletion of fresh water, destruction of the ozone layer, nuclear contamination, microplastic poisoning, and disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles. Regulatory tinkering by the EPA or state agencies won’t be enough to solve these, and neither will technological fixes such as carbon capture and storage – time is too short, and the crisis is too large. What’s needed instead is a fundamental reallocation of U.S. productive capacity and wealth from the richest and most powerful corporations and individuals to everybody else, with the goal of establishing a just and sustainable society. The names for this proposed new order are unimportant: degrowth, un-growth, low-energy society, de-accumulation, or ecological socialism. What matters is that they are political initiatives – interventions into the domain of power — that can only be accomplished by the collective action of the American working class. That class, consisting of people who have no other assets (excluding homes) than their labor power, comprises at least 70% of the U.S. population.

The American working class has long been deeply divided. A liberal and multicultural segment, about 40% of the total, aligns itself with professionals, educators, scientists, and entrepreneurs. These workers seek and sometimes achieve a lifestyle of relative comfort, even if they remain vulnerable to economic shocks. Another, generally less educated group, also about 40% of the total, staggers under repeated economic blows, but maintains sufficient equilibrium to attack immigrants, non-whites, women, queers, and liberals. Their status and security, they believe, are based upon the subjugation of others. It isn’t so much that they are racist – though that’s a fair characterization in some cases — as that they have decided that racial justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion are antithetical to their practical interests.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have tried to unite these two halves or encouraged them to become a self-conscious class “for itself.” Doing so would weaken the capitalist order that empowers them. There are of course, exceptions, including a small number of “democratic socialist” U.S. senators and representatives who sometimes pursue unification, including Bernie Sanders, AOC and “the Squad”. That they fail to do so indicates the real divergence of interest between class factions; it can’t be overcome simply by rhetoric. But the climate and environmental crisis has the potential to lead to a fundamental restructuring of U.S. class and power if activists seize the opportunity.

Classic revolutionary theory by Marx and Engels and their 20^th Century followers, envisaged an industrial working class (“proletariat”) as the vanguard of revolution. Their congregation in factories, cities, and eventually union halls, meant they would grow to understand their commonality and begin to challenge the system of capital that exploited them. But because of changes in labor practices, concessions by capital, enrichment of a subset of workers, and the racial embitterment of others, that unity was not achieved in the U.S., except partially during the 1930s and 1960s. Today, however, that vanguard class is on the cusp of regeneration as what I would call an “environmental working class” unified by the shared necessity of protection from environmental calamity, and antagonism to corporations and wealthy individuals (“the billionaires”) responsible for their circumstances.

In the course of my work with the Anthropocene Alliance, I’ve learned that divisions in this new working class are not as great as those in the old one. Educated white people in Pensacola, Florida, for example, are just as concerned about rising sea levels, flooding, crushing insurance costs and possible displacement, as uneducated whites in southern Louisiana subject to the same threats. White folks living near a Chevron refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi are as worried about elevated cancer rates as Black people in Port Arthur, Texas, residing in the shadow of the nation’s largest oil refinery run by Motiva (a subsidiary of Saudi Aramco). Though the science-loving, semi-professionals among the American working-class embrace the science of climate change, and the uneducated white working class sometimes question it, both recognize that the weather is getting warmer, pollution is dangerous to their health, and that something must be done.

What the new, environmental movement needs therefore is relentless and skillful organizing of grassroots, working-class communities impacted by climate change and environmental abuse. That means helping existing community-based organizations and leaders acquire the means (practical and financial) to expand and establish partnerships with allied groups nearby and at a distance. It also means that non-profit organizations should not shy away from providing leadership to grassroots groups, while at the same time gratefully accepting from them the lessons and leadership they offer, based upon direct experience with environmental injustice and on-the-ground organizing.

Communities impacted by global warming and other environmental crises, already know the necessity of change. The wound of insecurity – for example, that a home may be flooded by a storm or burned by wildfire, and that a child may be damaged by airborne toxins or polluted water — is an everyday experience for millions of working-class Americans, and the numbers are growing. What’s less apparent to them, and what a vital environmental movement can help make clear, is that dismantling the fossil fuel, pro-growth economy, means enrichment as well as safety. Better housing, more satisfying employment, and greater opportunities for leisure, recreation and education are some of the benefits that will accrue from a de-growth, lower energy, ecologically resilient, economy and society. The work of organizing a new, working-class environmental movement, must therefore include the cultivating of desire, as much as responding to the sting of necessity.

The post We Need a Working-Class Environmental Movement appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen F. Eisenman.

I’m reposting this article about the Democratic Party five years after it was published because after re-reading it, I wouldn’t change a thing. In addition, the Democratic Party has become even more right-wing since it gained power in 2020. At the end of the article I will name the many ways it has gotten still worse.

How to Conceive of the Two-party System

Lesser of two evils

Among liberals and all the different types of socialists, when the subject of the Democratic Party comes up, there are at least two variations. One is the familiar liberal argument that the Democratic Party is the “lesser of two evils”. For them, the Republican Party is the source of most, if not all, problems while the Democratic Party is presented as shortsighted, weak and/or incompetent bumblers. Among some of the more compromising members of the Green Party, the lesser of two evils manifests itself when it implores its voters to “vote in safe states”

There are a number of reasons why I will claim that the Democratic Party is not the lesser of two evils. But for now, I want to point out that the lesser of two evils has at its foundation a political spectrum which is organized linearly with conservatives and fascists on the right. Along the left there are liberals, followed by social democrats, state socialists, and anarchists on the extreme left. All the forces moving from liberals leftward are broadly categorized as “progressive.” What this implies is that there are only quantitative differences between being a liberal and being any kind of socialist. In this scenario, being a liberal is somehow closer to being a socialist than being a liberal is to a being a conservative. However, there is an elephant in the room, and the elephant is capitalism.

What unites all socialists – social democrats, Maoists, Trotskyists, council communists and anarchists – is opposition to capitalism? What divides us from liberals, whether they are inside or outside the Democratic Party, is that liberals are for capitalism. In relation to the economic system, liberals are closer to conservatives than they are to socialists of any kind. So, the “lesser of two evils “argument is based on the expectation that socialists will ignore the capitalist economic system and make believe that capitalism is somehow progressive. It might have been possible to argue this case 60 years ago, but today capitalism makes its profits on war, slave prison labor and fictitious capital. Characterizing this as “progress” is ludicrous.

The parties are interchangeable

Most anarchists and various varieties of Leninists claim there is no difference between the parties. They say that capitalists control both parties and it is fruitless to make any distinctions. I agree they are both capitalist parties, but what most socialists fail to do is point out that, in addition to protecting the interests of capitalists as Republicans do, the Democratic Party: a) presents itself as representing the middle and lower classes; and (b)  stands in the way of the formation of a real opposition to the elites.

The second reason I disagree with the idea that the two parties are simply interchangeable is that it fails to make a distinction between the interests of the ruling and upper classes (Republicans) on the one hand, and the upper middle class (mostly Democrats) on the other. There are real class differences between elites that should not be dissolved.

The Democrats are the greater of two evils

The argument I will make in this article is that the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party for about 85% of the population. I make this argument as a Council Communist, and my argument in no way implies voting for Republicans, Greens or even voting at all. Before giving you my reasons for why the Democratic Party is worse for most people I want to give you a sense of how I came up with the figure of 85% .

Old money vs new money and the class composition in the United States

Sociologists have some disagreements over how many classes there are in the United States and what occupations cover what social classes. While some might have a bone to pick about my percentages, I am confident that I am at least in the ballpark. The ruling class constitutes the 1% (or less) of the population and the upper class another 5%. What these classes have in common is that they all live off finance capital and do not have to work. This is what has been called “old money”. This old money had its investments in extractive industries like oil, mining and the war industry. This is the stronghold of the Republican Party.

The upper middle classes consist of doctors, lawyers, architects, and senior managers who make a lot of money, but have to work long hours. It also includes scientists, engineers as well as media professionals such as news commentators, magazine and newspaper editors, college administrators and religious authorities Yet there are tensions between the elites and the upper middle class. The upper middle class represents “new money” and makes their profits from scientific innovation, the electronics industry, including computers and the Internet, among other avenues. This class constitutes roughly 10% of the population. The upper middle class is the stronghold of the Democratic Party.

A number of economists from Thomas Piketty to Richard Wolff have argued that for these social classes there has been an “economic recovery” since the crash of 2008. For all other classes there has been decline. The role of the Democratic Party is

1. To represent the actual interests of the upper middle class
2. To make believe it is a spokesperson for the other 85%

Far be it for me to say that the Republicans and Democrats represent the same thing. There is real class struggle between the interests of the ruling class and the upper class on the one hand and the upper middle class on the other. My point is that for 85% of the population these differences between elites are irrelevant. What the top three classes have in common is a life and death commitment to capitalism – and this commitment is vastly more important than where the sources of their profits come from.

Who are these remaining 85%? Poor people, whether they are employed or not, constitute about 20% of the population. When they are working this includes unskilled work which simply means no previous training is required. Working class people – blue and white collar – represent about 40% of the population. This includes carpenters, welders, electricians, technical workers, secretaries, computer programmers, and X-ray technicians. Middle class people – high school, grammar school teachers, registered nurses, librarians, corporate middle management, and small mom-and-pop storeowners – are about 25% of the population. Most poor people don’t vote and in a way, they are smart because they understand that the Democratic Party can do nothing for them. While many working-class people don’t vote, highly skilled working class people do vote, and many will vote Democrat. Middle classes are also more likely to vote Democrat with the exception of small business owners. In fact, research by labor theorist Kim Moody into the voting patterns of the last election showed that a high percentage of this petty bourgeois voted for Trump.

The Democratic Party has nothing to offer the middle class

When I was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, my father worked as a free-lance commercial artist about 40 hours per week. My mother stayed home and raised my sister and I. One income could cover all of us. My parents sent me to Catholic grammar schools and high schools, which were not very expensive, but they had to save their money to do it. They helped pay for part of my college education after I dropped out and then came back. They helped my partner and I with a down payment on a house in Oakland, CA. Today both parents in a middle-class family need to work and the work-week for middle class workers is at least 10 hours longer. As for savings, if a middle-class family buys a home, it is much more difficult to save for their children’s education.

In 1970 I was living in Denver, Colorado and had my own studio apartment for $70/month. I worked 20 hours a week at the library as a page and could afford to go to community college part-time. Twenty years later I tried to communicate this to my stepdaughter who was 20 years old and then compared it to her experience. She was working full-time as a waitress, had to live with two other people and could only afford to take a couple of classes without going into debt. Reluctantly and seemingly defeated she had to return home to live if she were to ever graduate from a community college. The Democrats did nothing to stem the tide of the decline of the middle class. Working class and middle class people may continue to vote for Democrats, but that doesn’t mean Democrats are delivering the goods. It just means these classes don’t want to face that:

1. a) They have no representation;
2. b) There is no alternative party and they do not live in a democracy.

Now on to why I believe the Democratic Party is worse that the Republican party for this 85% of the population.

The Democratic Party has nothing to do with being liberal

Most people who support the Democratic Party don’t really consider the party as it actually is, but how they imagine it should be according either to political science classes they’ve picked up in high school or college or from what they have picked up unconsciously through conversations. They have also gotten this from Democratic Party members themselves who talk about liberal values while in practice acting like conservatives. These voters think the Democratic Party is liberal. What do I mean by liberal? The term liberal has a long political history which I have traced elsewhere (Counterpunch, Left Liberals Have No Party) but let’s limit the term to what I call “New Deal Liberals”.

These New Deal liberals think that the state should provide essential services like pensions, food stamps, natural disaster relief as well as road and bridge construction. They also think the state should intervene to minimize some of the worst aspects of capitalism such as child wage work or sex slavery. These liberals think that Democrats should support the development of unions to protect the working class. This class deserves an adequate wage and decent working conditions. They also think – as it is in the American dream – that in order to justify their existence, capitalists should make profit from the production of real goods and services. These liberals think that the Democratic Party should support the development of science and research to create an easier life so that the standard of living for the American population should go up from generation to generation. These are the values of New Deal liberals. If the Democratic Party acted as if it supported these things, I could understand why liberals would say voting for the Democratic Party is the lesser of two evils. The problem is that these New Deal liberals are trapped in a 50-year time warp when the last real liberal Democratic president was Lyndon Johnson. The Democratic Party hasn’t been liberal in 50 years. This is one reason why the program of New Deal liberal Bernie Sanders had been so popular.

It does not take a Marxist to argue that the United States has been in economic decline since the mid 1970’s. It won’t do to blame the Republicans alone for this 50-year degeneration. The Democratic Party has had presidents between 1976 and 1980, in addition to eight years of Clinton, as well as eight years of Obama. They have had twenty years’ worth of chances to put into practice liberal values and they have failed miserably. Under the Democratic Party:

• The standard of living is considerably below the standard of living 50 years ago.
• The minimum wage bought more in 1967 than it does today.
• The standard of living for all racial minorities has declined since the 1970’s.
• Unions, which protected the working class, have dwindled to barely 10%.
• With the possible exception of Dennis Kucinich, no Democrat is prepared to commit to building infrastructure as a foundation for a modern civilization.
• The proportion of wealth claimed by finance capital has dwarfed investment in industrial capital compared to fifty years ago.
• The Democrats have signed off on all imperialist wars for the last 50 years.
• Science has lost respectably in the United States as it fights a battle against fundamentalism. Do Democrats come out unapologetically for science and challenge the fundamentalists and the New Agers? There are more people in the US who believe in astrology than they did in the Middle Ages. Does the Democratic Party, in the name of its claimed roots in the Enlightenment, rescue the public from these follies? Hardly.

Please tell me in what sense is this party liberal?

The Democratic Party is not an oppositional party: the Republicans play hardball; the Democrats play badminton

It is right about this time that a liberal defending the Democratic Party would chime in and say something about the Supreme Court. The line is “If we don’t get so and so elected, then the evil right-wing judge will get appointed and Roe vs Wade will be threatened.” This line has been trotted out for the last 45 years. What it conveniently ignores is that the Democratic Party has been in power for at least 40% of the time, whether in the executive or any other branch. It has had forty years to load the Supreme Court with rabid liberals so as to bury the right-to-lifers when they had the chance. An oppositional party would have done this. The Democratic Party has not.

Trump has been on a tear destroying what was left of US international diplomatic relations put into place by Kissinger and Brzezinski. His “policies” are consistently right wing “interventions”, whether they succeed or not. At the same time, domestically Trump has been consistently right wing on every issue from public schools, to immigrants to social programs. What he has done has destabilized international and domestic relations. Conservatives have been doing this kind of thing for 50 years, but with more diplomacy. If the Democratic Party were really an oppositional party, I would expect to find liberal interventions that are roughly the reverse of what Trump and the conservatives have done. There have been no such interventions.

Examples of what an oppositional party would look like

Under an oppositional Democratic regime we would have found a normalization of trade relations with Cuba. There would be scientists and engineers sent to Haiti to build and repair roads and bridges destroyed by natural disasters. There would be normalization of relations with Venezuela and bonds built with the social democratic parties of the Latin American left. Domestically the minimum wage would be restored to at least the standard of 50 years ago. After all, statistics show “productivity” has gone up in the late 50 years. Why wouldn’t the standard of living improve? Social Security and pensions would be regularly upgraded to keep up with the cost of inflation. Bridge and road repair would have been undertaken and low-cost housing would be built. A real liberal president might be so bold as to deploy US soldiers to build them since most of them would no longer be employed overseas. They might also have put forward bills implementing a mass transit system, one that is as good as those of Europe or Japan. Has the Democratic Party done any of these things?

This is “opposition”?

Internationally the Democratic Party’s policies have been indistinguishable from the Republicans. Obama did try to normalize relations with Cuba but that was in the service of the potential for foreign investment, not out of any respect for the social project of building the socialism Cuba was engaged in. The US Democratic regimes have done nothing for Haiti. Its attitude towards the Latin American “pink tide” has been hostile while supporting neoliberal restoration whenever and wherever possible.

Domestic Democratic regimes have done nothing to stem the tide of longer work hours and marginalization of workers as well as the temporary and part-time nature of work. Social Security and pensions have not kept up with the cost of inflation. The Democratic Party has had 20 years to repair the bridges, the roads and the sewer systems and what has it done? The Democrats had 20 years to build low-cost housing and get most, if not all, the homeless off the streets. What have Democrats done? Like the Republicans, the Democrats have professed to have no money for infrastructure, low cost housing or improving mass transit. Like the Republicans they have gone along in blocking Universal Health Care that virtually every other industrialized country possesses. But just like the Republicans they suddenly have plenty of money when it comes to funding seven wars and building the prison industrial complex. Time and again Democratic politicians have ratified increasing the military budget despite the fact that it has no state enemies like the Soviet Union.

In 2008 capitalism had another one of its crisis moments. Marxists and non-Marxist economists agree that the banks were the problem. The Democrats, with that classy “first African American president” did not implement a single Keynesian intervention to reign in the banks. No banker has even gone to jail. What a real Democratic opposition would have done is to tell the banks something like, “look, the public has bailed you out this time, but in return for this collective generosity, we require that you make your profits from undertaking all the infrastructural work that needs to be done, like building a 21st century mass transit system and investing some of your profits in low cost housing.” This is what an oppositional party would do. Notice none of this has anything to do with socialism. It’s straight New Deal liberalism.

In sum, the last 45 years have you ever seen a consistent left liberal intervention by Democrats that would be the equivalent of what Trump is doing now or any conservative regime has done in the last 50 years in any of these areas? Has Carter, Clinton I or Obama done anything equivalent in their 20 years of formal power that Republicans have done in their 30 years? No, because if they ever dreamed of doing such a thing the Republicans would have them driven from office as communists. When was the last time a Democratic candidate drove a Republican from office by calling them a fascist? The truth of the matter is that the Republicans play hardball while the Democrats play badminton.

The second reason the Democratic Party is not an oppositional party is because “opposition” is a relative term. The lesser of two evils scenario works with the assumption that parties are partisan: all Republicans vote in block and all Democrats vote in block. This, however, is more the exception than the rule. Most times some Republicans support Democratic policies and most times some Democrats support Republican measures. Many Republican policies would not have been passed had the Democrats really been an oppositional party. In 2004, when Ralph Nader ran for president, he was raked over the coals for “spoiling” the elections. Yet as later research proves, more people who were registered Democrat voted for Republicans than the total number of people who voted for the Green Party.

The Democratic Party is a party of the elites

Those politicians and media critics who inhabit the nether worlds between left liberal and social democracy such as Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders, Cornell West are tenacious in their search for the “soul” of the Democratic Party. They insist on dividing Democrats into conservative and liberals. The latest version is to call right-wing Democrats “corporate” Democrats as compared to some other kind of Democrat labelled “progressive”. The implication is that it is possible not to be bought hook line and sinker by corporations if you are in the Democratic Party. I am skeptical that any person can run as a Democrat candidate win an election and not make some compromises with corporations even at a local level, I am cynical this can be done at a state or national level. Corporations are ruling class organizations and they own both parties. There is a reason why Martin Luther King, Malcolm X never joined the Democratic Party.

If the last Democratic primaries in which Clinton II was handed the nomination over Bernie Sanders was not enough to make you leave the party, the World Socialist Website published two major articles on how the CIA is running its own candidates as Democrats this year. When a world terrorist organization runs candidates under a liberal banner, isn’t that enough to convince you that the Democratic Party is a party of the elites?

Earlier I stated that the upper middle class represents the Democratic Party and the upper class and the ruling class represent the Republican Party. While each may have interclass differences it is essential for all three social classes that their struggle be seen by the 85% as something this 85% has a stake in. It is important for the ruling class and the upper class that there is a party that appears to represent the unwashed masses (the Democrats). The ruling class and the upper class need the Democratic Party even if they have differences with the upper middle class, whom the Democrats represent. They need the Democratic Party to help create the illusion that voting is an expression of democracy. But the Democratic Party has as much to do with democracy as the Republican Party has to do with republicanism.

The Democratic Party’s presence is an obstacle to building a real opposition to elites

By far the greatest reason the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party is the way in which the presence of the Democratic Party drains energy from developing a real opposition to the elites and the upper middle class.

The Democratic Party attacks the Green Party far more than it attacks Republicans

While the Democratic Party plays badminton with Republicans, it plays hardball with third parties, specifically the Green Party. It does everything it can to keep the Greens off the stage during the debates and makes things difficult when the Greens try to get on the ballot. After the last election, Jill Stein was accused of conspiring with the Russians to undermine the Democrats.

If the Democratic Party was a real liberal party, if it was a real opposition party, if it was a party of the “working people” rather than the elites, it would welcome the Green Party into the debates. With magnanimously liberal self-confidence it would say “the more the merrier. May all parties of the left debate.” It would welcome the Greens or any other left party to register in all 50 states and simply prove its program superior.

The wasted time, energy and loss of collective creativity of non-elites

About 10% of the 40% of working class people are in unions. Think of how much in the way of union dues, energy and time was lost over the last 50 years trying to elect Democratic candidates who did little or nothing for those same unions. All that money, energy and time could have been spent in either deepening the militancy of existing unions or organizing the other 30% of workers into unions.

Think of all untapped creative political activity of working class people who are not in unions that was wasted in being enthusiastic and fanatical about sports teams because they see no hope or interest in being part of a political community. Instead of being on talk show discussion groups on Monday morning talking about what the Broncos should have done or could have done on Sunday, think of the power they could have if instead they spent their time strategizing about how to coordinate their strike efforts.

Think of all the immigrants and refugees in this country working at skilled and semi-skilled jobs that have wasted what little time they had standing in line trying to get Democratic Party politicians elected. That time could have been spent on more “May Days Without An Immigrant” as happened thirteen years ago

Think of all the middle class African Americans whose standards of living has declined over the last 45 years who wasted their vote on Democrats and put their faith in the Black Caucus. Think of the wasted time, effort and energy of all middle class people who often actively campaign and contribute money to the Democratic Party that could have been spent on either building a real liberal party or better yet, a mass socialist party.

For many years, the false promise that the Democratic Party just might be a party of the working people has stood in the way of the largest socialist organization in the United States from building a mass working class party. Social Democrats in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who should have known better continue to blur the line between a real socialist like Eugene Debs and left liberals like Bernie Sanders. With 33,000 members there are still factions of DSA that will not break with the Democrats.

Are there real differences between the neoliberal Democrats and the neoconservative Republicans? Are there differences between Soros and the Koch brothers? Yes, but these differences are not, as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Claire have said, “a dimes worth of difference”, especially compared to what the presence of the Democratic party has done for 50 years to 85% of the population. Their fake opposition has stood in the way of building a mass left political party.

The Democratic Party is a parasite on social movements

Can you remember a time when the Democratic Party had an innovative program of their own that was clearly separate from the Republicans yet distinct from any left wing social movements?

I can’t. What I have seen is a Democratic party that does nothing but sniff out the flesh and blood of social movements and vampirize them. I have no use for identity politics, but I can remember a time when the Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with it. Now it runs candidates based on identity politics. Black Lives Matter is now part of the Ford Foundation, a Democratic Party think tank. The Occupy Movement term “occupy” was taken as a name for a Facebook page sympathetic to the Democrats, Occupy Democrats, as if the Democratic Party could be occupied. The Democratic Party, which did nothing for feminism while it was attacked and marginalized by the right wing since the 1980’s, has suddenly “discovered” feminism in the Pink Pussy cats. This is an upper middle class party that sings “We Shall Overcome” fifty years too late.

What should be done?

Rather than focusing on the evil Republican Party, which makes the Democrats seem merely wishy- washy or inept, the policies of the Democratic Party should be attacked relentlessly while paying little attention to Republicans. In the election years, the Green Party should abandon its strategy of soliciting votes in “safe states”. Instead, the Greens should challenge those who claim to be “left-wing” Democrats to get out of the party as a condition for being voted for. In my opinion, there needs to be an all-out war on the Democratic Party as a necessary step to building a mass party. The goal of such a party should not be to win elections, but to use public opportunities as a platform for deepening, spreading and coordinating the commonalities of the interests of the poor, working class and middle class people.

How the Democratic Party Has Gotten Worse in the Last Five Years

• It has surrendered its foreign policy maneuvers to neocons Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan.
• It has aided, trained and supplied military supplies of fascist forces in Ukraine
• It has blown billions of dollars on the war in Ukraine (I thought the Republicans were the “War party”).
• It cannot compete with China or Russia in building infrastructure, providing raw material and goods so its solution is to make war on them.
• It failed to replace a head of state who is incompetent, incoherent and is incapable of any rhetorical debate while lacking in any power and backbone.
• Its profits are made on either destroying the productive forces (wars) or the creation of fictitious capital.
• It has exerted no control over the financial, insurance or real-estate sector while the manufacturing sector of the economy declines (this is Build Back Better?).
• The Fed solution to debt is to print more money not backed by gold.
• The Democrats have done nothing to stabilize the manic-depressive stock market.
• It has failed miserably to reform its domestic terrorist organizations, euphemistically referred to as “police departments”, where killing civilians has become normalized.
• It has failed miserably to attack the NRA and intervene effectively in regular mass shootings all over the country.
• It has done nothing to raise the minimum wage. People can work-full time and be homeless because their rent is higher than their income.
• It is does nothing to end the slave labor in prisons or reduce the numbers of people in prison.
• It has done nothing about the housing crisis where the number of vacant houses in this country are five times that of the homeless population.
• High school and grammar school education is in shambles. Yankee students cannot compete internationally.
• Primary and secondary educators are leaving the field. The Yankee state is hiring teachers at that level with no teaching experience or formal training.
• After all its promises it has failed to do anything to relieve student debt.
• It has failed to protect the Roe vs Wade decision making abortions legal.
• The party has a paranoid, conspiratorial explanations for its failures, beginning with the loss of Clinton to Trump in 2016. It used to be the Democratic Party made fun of conspiratorial people like Alex Jones. Today its conspiracies are its stock and trade explanation for its failure.

On the other hand the Democratic Party has embraced New Deal liberalism in the following ways….ummm…it’s okay, I’ll wait.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The post Memory Work and the Making of White Working-Class and Racial Identities appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Henry Giroux.

There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair.
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I will Never do Again, 1997

Leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and drink all the sac­ri­fi­cial ves­sels dry; it keeps hap­pen­ing; in the end, it can be cal­cu­lat­ed in ad­vance and is in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the rit­ual.
— Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms, 1931

This will constitute my end of summer report. Not that anyone commissioned an end of summer report, or even that there really is something called an end of summer report. But as an American in Norway, I have had to adjust (more than even in France) to this idea of an almost obligatory vacation somewhere in this period (brief in Norway) called summer. I think when David Foster Wallace wrote A Supposedly Fun Thing I will Never do Again (The Atlantic, 1997) he about covered the vulgarities of American culture on holiday. And he touched on the specific nature of packaged Ocean Cruises. So fast forward some 25 plus years and certain of the irrationalities of leisure time have shifted. That shift, though, is subsumed by the massive intensification of the war on the working class, and holiday and not. It was certainly there in 1997, but today it is naked. It is overt and even become a part of the marketing of tourist destinations. It is now the Kafka leopards in the temple.

Class was never Foster Wallace’s thing, and so while his instincts were keen, his politics were muddy.  Today, though, this assault on the working class (and underclass) is reaching, I think, unprecedented intensity and magnitude. Everything about the so called digitalization of life is actually a form of attack on workers and the poor. Literally everything. Since I did a lot of driving on this vacation I could not escape the weaponizing of parking costs. Everything to do with parking, the permits, the fees, the meters, the lack of spaces TO park, all of it is targeting those not driving expensive cars into reserved special spaces, spaces that are not for use except by them, the brahmins, the aristocracy. The rest of us can circle and circle and circle and circle and circle for shockingly long periods of time searching for an empty space. It is a cliche, of course, kids crying in the back seat, kids needing to use the restroom, not to mention the general atmosphere of hostility in what is supposed to be an escape from stress and anxiety. This, on a larger scale, is mirrored by the private jet industry vs commercial airline flights.

There  are never enough public toilets at amusement parks or resorts. They get by with the absolute fewest possible allowed by law. Nothing is free. N O T H I N G. The sense now is that those paying these extortionist level costs should be grateful. After all, you are one of the lucky ones, you got to come and suffer this assault on mind and body.

You can reserve a hotel room online, pay online and then check into said hotel, go to your room all without speaking to a single human being. There is a new feature in hotels involved this key-card system. To turn on lights you have to slip the card into the holder by the entrance. But at night, when you want to charge your phone or hearing aids, or computer, you can’t do it because the electricity is turned off when the lights go off.  The hotel is saving on costs, you see, anyway they can. And it’s always ‘green’. The excuse is always we must sacrifice for the environment.  One night we were awoken at 2 am by an emergency announcement to immediately leave the building because of fire. Of course, once outside, holding half asleep kids, in their underwear, it turned out to be, as the front desk put it, a computer malfunction. During this 8 day trip the news was mostly about ‘boiling earth’.  Turns out nearly all of it was exaggerated, fires in Greece were arson, the floods in Nova Scotia affected only a tiny part of the island, and reports of forty plus degrees in Lyon, Palermo, Wyoming, were all simply lies. But then everything today is a lie. And that begins with the climate change hysteria (fast on the heels of Covid and Ukraine).

Now I should add that all of these online and digital procedures, from reserving a hotel room, to buying a coke at the local pizza joint often don’t work. The platform or page is badly designed and there is, literally, nobody to ask for help. There is zero support. You have simply, sometimes, to abandon the idea of two nights at this hotel, or just leave the registration unfinished and go ahead anyway and hope for the best.

Everything must be pre-ordered. Nothing is spontaneous anymore. And this sense of determinism, as it were, dulls the excitement of the entire adventure, especially for the young. This, all this digital payment and reservation and ordering, is exhausting. For older people it is often impossible, and highly stressful. They stay home. And that’s the idea, really. For children, I suspect there is a lingering unconscious anxiety associated with ideas of ‘fun’, or rather with officially sanctioned organized ‘fun’. My children had a great time, but I suspect they noticed the adults were highly stressed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Steppling.

As Hollywood actors enter their fifth day on the picket lines and some 340,000 Teamsters working at UPS prepare to carry out one of the largest single-employer strikes in U.S. history, we speak with historian and labor organizer John Womack Jr. about his new book, Labor Power and Strategy, focused on how to seize and build labor power and solidarity. Labor actions around the world are gaining headlines this week. In Italy, over 1,000 flights were disrupted as airport and airline workers went on a two-day strike for higher wages and better benefits. Members of the Union of Southern Service Workers at a South Carolina Waffle House participated in a three-day strike protesting safety and pay conditions.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Since the start of the conflict in February 2022, billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the EU. By late February 2023, it had forwarded €3.6 billion worth of military assistance to the Zelensky regime via the European Peace Fund. However, even at that time, the total cost for EU countries could have been closer to €6.9 billion. 

In late June 2023, the EU pledged a further €3.5 billion in military aid.  Josep Borrell is the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EU Commission.  

Following this latest pledge, he stated on Twitter: 

“We will continue to double down on our military support on both equipment [and] training. For as long as it takes.”  

Great news for European and UK armaments companies like BAE Systems, Saab and Rheinmetall, which are raking in huge profits from the destruction of Ukraine (see the CNN Business report “Europe’s arms spending on Ukraine boosts defense companies“).

US arms manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are also acquiring multi-billion-dollar contracts (as outlined in the online articles “Raytheon wins $1.2 billion surface-to-air missile order for Ukraine” and “Pentagon readies new $2 billion Ukraine air defense package including missiles“).

And as for BlackRock, JP Morgan and private investors, they aim to profit from the country’s reconstruction along with 400 global companies, including Citi, Sanofi and Philips. 

As reported on the CNN Business website (“War-torn economy needs private investors to rebuild“), JP Morgan’s Stefan Weiler sees a “tremendous opportunity” for private investors.

At the same time, in “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land“, the Oakland Institute describes how financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests.

With Ukrainian forces struggling on the battlefield, it poses the worrying question: with so much money at stake for Western capital, just how far will the US escalate in order to prevent Russia from securing control over areas of the country?   

Meanwhile, away from the boardrooms, business conferences and high-level strategizing, hundreds of thousands of ordinary young Ukrainians have died.  

Irish MEPs Mick Wallace and Claire Daley have been staunch critics of the EU stance on Ukraine (see Claire Daley talking in the EU parliament about Ukraine burning through a generation of men on YouTube).  

Wallace recently addressed the EU Parliament, describing the heist currently taking place in that country by Western corporations. 

Wallace said:  

The damage to Ukraine is devastating. Towns and cities that endured for hundreds of years don’t exist anymore. We must recognise that these towns, cities and surrounding lands were long being stolen by local oligarchs colluding with global financial capital. This theft quickened with the onset of the war in 2014.

The pro-Western government opened the doors wide for massive structural adjustment and privatisation programmes spearheaded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the IMF and the World Bank. Zelensky used the current war to concentrate power and accelerate the corporate fire sale. He banned opposition parties that were resisting deeply unpopular reforms to the laws restricting the sale of land to foreign investors.

Over three million hectares of agricultural land are now owned by companies based in Western tax havens. Ukraine’s mineral deposits alone are worth over $12 trillion. Western companies are licking their lips.

What are the working-class people of Ukraine dying for?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

Since the start of the conflict in February 2022, billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the EU. By late February 2023, it had forwarded €3.6 billion worth of military assistance to the Zelensky regime via the European Peace Fund. However, even at that time, the total cost for EU countries could have been closer to €6.9 billion. 

In late June 2023, the EU pledged a further €3.5 billion in military aid.  Josep Borrell is the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EU Commission.  

Following this latest pledge, he stated on Twitter: 

“We will continue to double down on our military support on both equipment [and] training. For as long as it takes.”  

Great news for European and UK armaments companies like BAE Systems, Saab and Rheinmetall, which are raking in huge profits from the destruction of Ukraine (see the CNN Business report “Europe’s arms spending on Ukraine boosts defense companies“).

US arms manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are also acquiring multi-billion-dollar contracts (as outlined in the online articles “Raytheon wins $1.2 billion surface-to-air missile order for Ukraine” and “Pentagon readies new $2 billion Ukraine air defense package including missiles“).

And as for BlackRock, JP Morgan and private investors, they aim to profit from the country’s reconstruction along with 400 global companies, including Citi, Sanofi and Philips. 

As reported on the CNN Business website (“War-torn economy needs private investors to rebuild“), JP Morgan’s Stefan Weiler sees a “tremendous opportunity” for private investors.

At the same time, in “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land“, the Oakland Institute describes how financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests.

With Ukrainian forces struggling on the battlefield, it poses the worrying question: with so much money at stake for Western capital, just how far will the US escalate in order to prevent Russia from securing control over areas of the country?   

Meanwhile, away from the boardrooms, business conferences and high-level strategizing, hundreds of thousands of ordinary young Ukrainians have died.  

Irish MEPs Mick Wallace and Claire Daley have been staunch critics of the EU stance on Ukraine (see Claire Daley talking in the EU parliament about Ukraine burning through a generation of men on YouTube).  

Wallace recently addressed the EU Parliament, describing the heist currently taking place in that country by Western corporations. 

Wallace said:  

The damage to Ukraine is devastating. Towns and cities that endured for hundreds of years don’t exist anymore. We must recognise that these towns, cities and surrounding lands were long being stolen by local oligarchs colluding with global financial capital. This theft quickened with the onset of the war in 2014.

The pro-Western government opened the doors wide for massive structural adjustment and privatisation programmes spearheaded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the IMF and the World Bank. Zelensky used the current war to concentrate power and accelerate the corporate fire sale. He banned opposition parties that were resisting deeply unpopular reforms to the laws restricting the sale of land to foreign investors.

Over three million hectares of agricultural land are now owned by companies based in Western tax havens. Ukraine’s mineral deposits alone are worth over $12 trillion. Western companies are licking their lips.

What are the working-class people of Ukraine dying for?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

Since the start of the conflict in February 2022, billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the EU. By late February 2023, it had forwarded €3.6 billion worth of military assistance to the Zelensky regime via the European Peace Fund. However, even at that time, the total cost for EU countries could have been closer to €6.9 billion. 

In late June 2023, the EU pledged a further €3.5 billion in military aid.  Josep Borrell is the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EU Commission.  

Following this latest pledge, he stated on Twitter: 

“We will continue to double down on our military support on both equipment [and] training. For as long as it takes.”  

Great news for European and UK armaments companies like BAE Systems, Saab and Rheinmetall, which are raking in huge profits from the destruction of Ukraine (see the CNN Business report “Europe’s arms spending on Ukraine boosts defense companies“).

US arms manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are also acquiring multi-billion-dollar contracts (as outlined in the online articles “Raytheon wins $1.2 billion surface-to-air missile order for Ukraine” and “Pentagon readies new $2 billion Ukraine air defense package including missiles“).

And as for BlackRock, JP Morgan and private investors, they aim to profit from the country’s reconstruction along with 400 global companies, including Citi, Sanofi and Philips. 

As reported on the CNN Business website (“War-torn economy needs private investors to rebuild“), JP Morgan’s Stefan Weiler sees a “tremendous opportunity” for private investors.

At the same time, in “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land“, the Oakland Institute describes how financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests.

With Ukrainian forces struggling on the battlefield, it poses the worrying question: with so much money at stake for Western capital, just how far will the US escalate in order to prevent Russia from securing control over areas of the country?   

Meanwhile, away from the boardrooms, business conferences and high-level strategizing, hundreds of thousands of ordinary young Ukrainians have died.  

Irish MEPs Mick Wallace and Claire Daley have been staunch critics of the EU stance on Ukraine (see Claire Daley talking in the EU parliament about Ukraine burning through a generation of men on YouTube).  

Wallace recently addressed the EU Parliament, describing the heist currently taking place in that country by Western corporations. 

Wallace said:  

The damage to Ukraine is devastating. Towns and cities that endured for hundreds of years don’t exist anymore. We must recognise that these towns, cities and surrounding lands were long being stolen by local oligarchs colluding with global financial capital. This theft quickened with the onset of the war in 2014.

The pro-Western government opened the doors wide for massive structural adjustment and privatisation programmes spearheaded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the IMF and the World Bank. Zelensky used the current war to concentrate power and accelerate the corporate fire sale. He banned opposition parties that were resisting deeply unpopular reforms to the laws restricting the sale of land to foreign investors.

Over three million hectares of agricultural land are now owned by companies based in Western tax havens. Ukraine’s mineral deposits alone are worth over $12 trillion. Western companies are licking their lips.

What are the working-class people of Ukraine dying for?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday said President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party must do everything in their power to defend middle- and low-income people in potential budget negotiations, after the Republicans said they will raise the country's debt limit only in exchange for cuts to green jobs, food assistance, healthcare, and other social services that millions of Americans depend on.

Sanders spoke to CNN's "State of the Union" about the debt ceiling days after the GOP introduced the so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act, which would raise the country's borrowing limit to avoid an unprecedented default on its debt obligations and threaten the U.S. and global economies—but also includes cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Social Security Administration, and Internal Revenue Service funding meant to prevent tax-dodging by the richest Americans, among other programs.

Sanders noted that the GOP proposed cuts over the next decade to non-military spending, but nothing to reduce the Pentagon budget, which ballooned to $858 billion this year.

"I think we can move toward cutting military spending," said Sanders. "I'm certainly open to demanding that the largest corporations in this country and the wealthiest people start paying their fair share of taxes."

He added that he is willing to address "waste" within the federal government, Democrats should ensure the legislation won't "go to war against the working class of this country, lower-income people."

"Don't tell kids that they can't afford to go to college or cut back on public education in America," he said. "We have already too much inequality in America. Let's not make it worse."

He added that the Democrats "can start negotiating tomorrow," but reiterated the president's position that raising the arbitrary debt limit to protect against a default is non-negotiable.

Senator Bernie Sanders' Interview On CNN's State Of The Union(FULL)www.youtube.com

Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) on Saturday repeated Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's (D-N.Y.) statement that the package will be "dead on arrival" in the Senate, and said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is well aware that the proposal is "a joke" that was only passed out of the Republican-controlled House to drive Biden and the Democrats to the negotiating table.

Economists say lawmakers have until at least early June to hammer out a deal to avoid a debt default.

On CNN, Sanders suggested that fighting for working people and low-income households to keep their healthcare, food assistance, and other essential services could be the first step in ensuring Biden wins a second term "in a landslide" in 2024.

"What I do believe is, the Democrats and the president have got to be stronger on working-class issues," said Sanders. "They have got to make it clear that we believe in a government that represents all, not just the few, take on the greed of the insurance companies, the drug companies, Wall Street, all the big money interests, and start delivering for working-class people."

Biden announced he is running for reelection last week, and Sanders endorsed the president's run soon after.

"Look, it is no great secret—I ran against Biden," said Sanders on Sunday. "No great secret that he and I have strong differences of opinion. But... if you believe in democracy, you want to see more people vote, not fewer people vote, I think the choice is pretty clear, and that choice is Biden."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

In early March 2023, President Joe Biden embedded in his proposed 2024 budget to Congress revenue increases through tax measures that the rich and corporations do not like. Like his predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, he doesn’t really mean what he says.

Biden’s four proposed increases are significant because they would restore the corporate tax rate to 28% from Trump’s decrease to 21% in 2017, raise the top rate for income above $400,000 a year from 37% to 39.6%, raise the 1% excise tax on massive stock buybacks to 4% and get rid of the gaping super-rich private fund managers’ “carried interest” loophole, so as to tax such income at ordinary rates.

He even tossed in a proposal to tax capital gains at the same rate as income for households with more than one million dollars in annual income.

The citizenry doesn’t believe you are going to fight for your proposed corporate super-rich tax proposals. Why should they?

The restorative taxes on these affluent tax escapees, compliments of Donald Trump, George W. Bush and Congressional Republicans, are little more than a wink to the major donors that Biden is summoning to Washington the weekend after next to grease his re-election campaign.

Here are my suggestions to President Biden:

Mr. President: Like other Democrats’ verbal support for a $15 federal minimum wage and a public option added to Obamacare, the citizenry doesn’t believe you are going to fight for your proposed corporate super-rich tax proposals. Why should they? Your words on Capitol Hill are insufficient without the subsequent presidential and Democratic Party muscle to make these restorative increases credible.

For example, where is your presidential tour publicizing these necessary revenue increases? If you are really “Scranton Joe” you could start by going to Scranton, Pennsylvania and standing with blue-collar union workers to show the contrast in their federal tax rates compared to the plutocrats and the often zero-paying giant corporations. You could jar the sleepy Democratic National Committee to galvanize all Democratic members of Congress to barnstorm their districts to promote these overdue reforms during their numerous “recesses” back home.

You could make a major primetime address about redressing these deeply felt inequities, shouldered by liberal and conservative Americans alike, and urge your party to hold press conferences filled with examples and images that demonstrate serious resolve to make Capitol Hill shake from the electrified pressure back home.

Leading newspapers would print your op-eds on this subject. NPR, PBS and the Sunday talk shows would want to interview leading Democrats.

[The GOP budget proposal] is a historic and shameful example of Congressional Republicans’ beholdenness to crass corporatism.

Join with leading citizen advocacy groups to tap into the civic community, so long skeptical of Democratic Party rhetoric not producing determined actions.

You can reject prejudged defeatism by your Democratic colleagues who say the corrupt and cruel Republicans have the votes to block such legislation. The Democratic-controlled Senate Committees can hold powerful attention-getting public hearings. If the Democrats had really championed tax justice, the GOP might not have taken the House of Representatives in the last election. (See: winningamerica.net).

The benefits of generating real muscle would serve as a contrast to the Republicans’ just-released 300-page sadistic assault on the well-being of all Americans, misleadingly titled the “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023.” This legislation is a historic and shameful example of Congressional Republicans’ beholdenness to crass corporatism.

Don’t add to the pile of throwaway reformist lines. You need inspiring words to show the people that you are “Scranton Joe” and not “Delaware Joe” – from the notorious corporate state of weak laws relating to corporate power. (You might remember that in 1973 we published a book titled The Corporate State about DuPont’s enormous power over Delaware. DuPont then owned the two major newspapers in Wilmington and provided charitable contributions that were a fraction of its state and local tax concessions.)

A good start is to tell your visiting big donors that in their patriotic service to America, what is urgently needed is productive, paid-for public budgets. It is time for their tax holidays to end.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is calling for an American “divorce.”

She apparently sees herself as a modern-day John C. Calhoun, a demagogue who serves the interests of the white oligarch class and, in turn, receives their support, and the power and wealth that come with it.

She's started a secession propaganda campaign much like Calhoun and his buddies did when he left the White House as VP in 1833, the same year England outlawed slavery on British-territory plantations and talk of abolition in the US kicked into high gear.

It took Calhoun and his fellow traitors about 25 years to convince enough people in the South to go to war against America and try to replace our democracy with a fascist, race-based oligarchy.

But today—with electronic media providing instant communication and AR15s being much more efficient killing machines than the Confederacy had available—the heirs to Calhoun's sedition apparently think they can pull it off in a much shorter time.

Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie recently suggested the tipping point, the second American Civil War, will come when:

“[T]hirty to forty percent could agree that [the American government] was legitimate tyranny and it needed to be thrown off."

He then openly argued that American fascists should be sufficiently well-armed to take on the US Marines. Finishing that sentence, Massey—who tweeted a Christmas picture of his family (including his young children) each cradling an assault weapon—added:

“They [those trying to bring down the American government] need to have sufficient [fire]power without asking for extra permission. It should be right there and completely available to them in their living room in order to effect the change [of our form of government].”

Make no mistake about it: this is sedition. It's anti-American. It's pro-fascist.

Yesterday on my radio/TV program, Congressman Mark Pocan said Greene's comments were “almost treasonous."I'd drop the “almost.”

Greene even said out loud the part Republicans have been trying to not get caught saying for several decades now: she doesn't think Democrats should be allowed to vote if they live in Red states.

When a resolution came to the House floor last week condemning Putin's ally, Syrian dictator Assad, the only two “no"votes came from Greene and Massey.

Dictatorship good, democracy bad.

It's an old, old song for America that dates back to the 1840s.

Keep in mind that the Civil War wasn't just about slavery: it was primarily about preserving the wealth of the Southern oligarchs. While slavery was the source of their wealth, morbidly rich planters had so overtaken the political system of the South that it ceased to be anything close to a democracy—even for white people—by the 1840s.

That decade of the 1840s, in fact, was a key turning point for the effort to end democracy altogether in America. In just the ten years from 1840 to 1850, over 800,000 enslaved people were brought into the deep South.

Poor whites suddenly found themselves without work and pay generally collapsed across the region, while the plantation owner class became fabulously rich. It led to an internal abolition movement in the South, as white workers who didn't own slaves desperately tried to regain opportunities in the workplace.

As Southern abolitionist Hinton Helper wrote in his 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South:

“The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, but they are also the oracle and arbiters of non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated.”

The book became one of the biggest bestsellers in American history (even though you could go to prison for owning it in the South where it was banned), and sparked such a political crisis in 1860 that the House of Representatives was unable to elect a Speaker for almost two months. Sound familiar?

Abraham Lincoln didn't even advocate ending slavery until well into the Civil War: he was too busy fighting against Southern oligarchs who were hell-bent on ending democracy in America and replacing it with a white supremacist oligarchy. Lincoln's goal in responding militarily to Southern succession wasn't to free enslaved African Americans, it was to keep the country together and try to restore some semblance of democracy to the South.

On Aug. 22, 1862 (the Emancipation Proclamation would come exactly one month later), after more than a year of war, Lincoln wrote a letter to the New York Tribune pointing this out:

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

Here we are again, and once more the issue that's got working-class white people riled up is the intersection of economics end race.

Republicans pass laws against Critical Race Theory, teaching Black history, and complain about “woke"and “BLM,"but at its core it's all about distracting white people from their being ripped off by a white oligarchic class that promotes racial hatred to deflect anger from themselves.

As Marjorie Taylor Greene is essentially pointing out, just like in 1860.

The genesis of today's discontent began in the 1980s with the Reagan Revolution, as the Reagan/Bush administration opened America to “free trade"with the early stages of what became the World Trade Organization and negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which Bill Clinton signed on January 1, 1994.

Like the middle-class working white people in the South—who'd been about a third of that region's population prior to the 1840s when all those slaves were imported—the four decades since Reaganism began here have also seen the collapse of white working-class income and wealth.

When Reagan came into office in 1980 about two-thirds of white Americans were solidly in the middle class: today that number is around 45 percent and it requires two people working full time to pull even that off.

Meanwhile, the rich have gotten fabulously richer. Several of America's billionaires are today richer than any person has ever been in history. Richer than the pharaohs. Richer than the ancient kings of Europe. Rich enough to shoot themselves into outer space with their pocket change.

And where did that money come from? Just like the plantation owners in 1850, it came from rigging the system.

The past 42 years have seen over $50 trillion in wealth stolen from the homes and pockets of working-class people and deposited into the money bins of the morbidly rich through GOP tax-cut and union-busting policies.

In the past 42 years over 60,000 factories and 15 million well-paying union jobs have been shipped to Mexico and China, leaving working class whites (among others) literally out in the cold.

Just like in the 1850s, that's an explosive transition. And just like in the 1850s, it has brought out oligarch-funded political demagogues to tell white working-class people that their problems are all caused by Black people and their “woke"allies, and therefore the nation must divide itself.

Greene, Massey, and the rest of the sedition caucus in Congress are playing with fire. The people they're trying to crank up on behalf of America's rightwing oligarchs have already tried to murder the Governor of Michigan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Vice President of the United States.

As The Washington Post's Philip Bump noted this week:

“Over the past decade, 96 percent of incidents in which extremists killed someone were committed by people motivated by right-wing ideologies.”

The number of people murdered for political purposes over the past 25 years by SDS or Antifa or other anti-fascist or “left wing"ideologues? Zero.

And in promoting bloodshed in 2023 America, the seditionists among us aren't even subtle. Last December 10^th, Greene told a Young Republican group in New York:

“I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that [January 6^th insurrection and effort to murder Vice President Pence], we would have won. Not to mention, it would've been armed."

\u201cMarjorie Taylor Greene\u2019s January 6th comments at last night\u2019s New York Young Republican Club Gala:\n\n\u201cI got to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would\u2019ve been armed.\u201d\u201d

— PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 (@PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8) 1670799113

Pitting Americans against each other by race, geography, or even politics when simultaneously invoking bloodshed as a justified outcome is as anti-American as it gets.

It's why the 14^th Amendment says:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

If the seditionists within today's Republican Party had any goal other than to tear America apart and create an apartheid state run by and for the oligarchs who fund their campaigns and lifestyles, they'd be telling us about it right now. But are they?

Do they have anything to offer the working class of America?

So far, all we've heard is that they want to turn Social Security over to the New York banks and Medicare over to the big insurance companies. They're still fighting to keep the minimum wage at $7.25 an hour and deny union rights to workers.

Do they have anything to offer the women of America?

So far, all we've heard is that they want to send them to prison or administer lethal injection if they get an abortion.

How about climate change?

Republicans are still taking millions from the fossil fuel barons every year and denying climate change even exists, all while actively trying to sabotage any effort to move to a green economy.

Harmony between the races and the acceptance of our queer brothers and sisters?

Instead, they're doing everything they can to encourage hate and intolerance, up to and including codifying hate into law.

Or our children?

While America is now the only country in the world—in the entire world — where the leading cause of children's death is bullets, they instead want to “protect"our kids from books and drag queens. It would be funny if it didn't mean a child's body will be fatally torn apart by a bullet in America every 2 hours and 36 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for every day of this coming year.

The morbidly rich oligarchs who own the GOP—including their toadies on the Supreme Court—have no interest in doing anything about the crisis of the middle class, healthcare, climate change, women's rights, civil rights, or saving our children.

They're too busy making common cause with autocrats, oligarchs, and dictators around the world as they try to dismantle our democracy.

People like Greene and Massey don't just emerge out of nothing: there's a hand above these puppets, feeding their bellies and pulling their strings.

And as long as we ignore that hand and fight their phony “culture war"instead of raising taxes on billionaires and extending an absolute right to vote to all Americans, we're just helping them stuff another trillion dollars taken from working people into their money bins.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

This not the crux of the question, since I was a monogamous dater and monogamous husband. It’s more centered around the discordance and dissheveled nature of humanity in the Western world, which unfortunately is the litmus test for much of the world now, which is another conundrum for me: why the hell would Japan or Oaxaca or Istanbul give a shit about McDonalds, Disneyland, Top Gun and disposable diapers? How viral is Western consumerism and retail disease? How diseased are the people of the world to buy into a disposable culture, from the ketchup containers to the children to the old people?

Marketing, man, and that is a very sophisticated psychological end game. The end run around is the pervasive marketing of everything, and the fake quality of modern humans. All about selling or acting or putting on a show.

Yeah, I’m writing this on the heels of yet another attempt to have a job tied to some civil and social justice gig. I got the call for a 15 minute interview Tuesday, with the fair housing coalition of Oregon, working in four rural counties as an outreach-educator specialist, getting stakeholders (I despise that term) to get around a table, or in a room or on Zoom to understand the rights of renters, tenants, and home buyers.

Up my alley, and alas, I have worked around the housing “issue” for several decades, as an urban and regional planning grad student, and then with clients in Seattle, Spokane, Portland, Vancouver, and on the Oregon Coast.

Two people interviewed me, and one big question was what I thought of how poverty has come about. Oh how it all ties into Capitalism, about the Gilded Age, about the first Anglo Saxons coming to this “New World” and exploiting the Original peoples. Exploiting as in murdering. Stealing land. Polluting the land. Moving them off the land. Re-educating them. Turning the real people into savages. Enslavement and denigration. Haves and haves not. You know, workers, laborers, even the professional managerial class, at the whim of the One Percent and the Five percent. You need poor people to make a buck, and you need poverty to be rich. You know, toil and labor to make the gilded ones money.

But it is deeper, sort of like economic sanctions on countries like Cuba or Venezuela — sanctions against the majority of people in Capitalism to pay the fines, fees, tolls, poll taxes, taxes, add-ons, service fees, tickets, violations, late charges, penalties, and the mortgages.

All those millions working hard to stay afloat, and then some medical emergency, some run-in with a lawyer or insurance company or the law, and bam, the semi-stable household is put into a spin — economic, spiritual and existential spin.

There will always be a PayDay monster lurking in Capitalism. There will always be scammers and legions of thieves who get away with it in CAPITALISM. Poverty makes millions of people money — cops/pigs, courts, judges, schools, governmental program managers, workers in all those so called welfare divisions. You get it! Take a child out of a home, and you will find dozens of workers and managers managing that Child Protective Services intervention-destruction.

In any case, I got a second interview, this time in front of seven people and with an hour to dog and pony my self into their midst. Provide a seven minute Zoom teaching modality or Power Point. Also tell us what a strategy would be to undertake an outreach program in Clatsopo, Tillamook, Lincoln and Columbia Counties. One educator and outreach honcho, and what would you do and who would you engage to get this off the ground?

One hour equalled five hours or more of prep. I actually called county commissioners in two of the counties. I did much research on all the places that might be engaged with low income folk or people of color. The obvious thing is to get into the faith communities, with support services like work source and Department of Human services departments, and even school districts and landlord groups.

Here, what I was being asked to get ready for:

Here are some details about the interview.

• It will be about an hour long. The whole team will be there.
• One question for you to prepare in advance: Talk about how you would conduct an outreach campaign to raise awareness of fair housing in rural Columbia, Clatsop, Tillamook and Lincoln Counties. Who do you think would be most important to reach and what would your strategies be for reaching them?
• At the end of the interview, we will ask you to conduct a seven-minute training on any topic you like. We want to see what your facilitation style is like. We will make you a cohost on Zoom so if you have a PowerPoint to share, you can.

I talked to one woman originally from Michigan who was a county commissioner in Clatsop County. She had spent much time in Portland, and she told me that she had experienced living in Lansing, Michigan as a white woman who witnessed redlining and major discrimination against Black Americans in their attempt to get affordable housing.

She had that poster of Che on her wall.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

― Ernesto “Che” Guevara (“Venceremos: Speeches and Selected Writings of Che Guevara.”)

She gave me great insight into her county, and how the rural-urban divide has a crass and prejudice guiding mark — “These trust fund babies or super rich come into our Oregon Coast Communities and think that the IQ for our rural residents is 30 points lower than from their urban locales. Everyone comes here to be served and waited on, even for a couple of days. Everyone, even the struggling middle class, want that two or three days of pretending to be like the rich — fancy food, big hotel, and loads of beach fun and trinket buying.”

I even talked to the president of the Landords Assocation, and I interviewed another commissioner, with the eye toward their opinion on how an outreach campaign might work in their respective communities — counties with 27K, 50K, and 42K populations. Rich homes, arts, retired, and then the linen changers, the cooks, the medical technicians, the teachers, you know, coffee shop workers, bussers, cooks, even the simple laborers to keep those amenities and Martha Stewart homes, kitchens and decks prettified.

The lack of housing is huge, and affordable housing is few and far between. Of course I am a socialist, and these systems of oppression and exploitation have to go. Homes and apartments and mixed neighborhoods have to be run by us, the people, the new American government, and, sure a few can get in on building and designing, but there should never be a society where rents are artificial for investment and profits. A one bedroom apartment for how much in Seattle, Chicago, here? And what are those wages of the linen changers and hotel cleaners?

It will take so many tens of millions to strike against this super exploitative system, and we need a public commons, public utilities, public health, education and transportation. Housing has to be part of that, not some bogus HUD lie, which is predicated on which insane political party is in office. Safe, affordable housing. That human right!

Fact: In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), recognizing adequate housing as a component of the human right to an adequate standard of living.

• All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
• Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
• Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
• No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
• No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
• Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
• All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination. (source)

Oh, well, that job went the way of the Dodo, as many of my job applicatons have: “Hi Paul, Thank you so much for your time and energy today in the interview and the obvious passion you have towards social justice. We didn’t feel that you were the right fit for this position at this time and we are going to continue our search. Again, thank you for your time and energy. Sincerely, S…!”

There are those buzzwords — “energy” and “passion” and” social justice.” AND, “not the right fit.” I will not get into the errors of their ways, or the dynamics of being age 66 and being interviewed by all women except one, but all in 30 something age range, two hitting forty something. Spilt milk? Sour grapes? Come on, that missive-whatever-rejection-note tells me shit about the interview, what was missing, what I did right, about anything, really. Me thinks there is prejudice here, including age, gender and alas my white skin discrimination. I’m a communist, which I did not disclose, but certainly they might have Googled me, and then, you get the semi-half picture of me (right … little of what I write or how I express myself gives anyone doing a cursory search of men much to know about me — the real me).

Oh well, another interview bites the dust, another quippy essay in the can.

Note: For a Continuation of this diatribe around bandwagons and following the sheeple, go to Dissident Voice, “Let the Bandwagon Play On!”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

President Joe Biden took full advantage of his State of the Union address to celebrate his administration’s victories for hard-working U.S. families and set the tone for progress and possibility for the next two years.

While the country is still suffering from high but easing inflation and the effects of a brutal pandemic, Biden has still presided over historic investments in children and families, climate, health care, and infrastructure.

He’s created 12 million new jobs, including nearly one million in manufacturing, in just two years — and achieved the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years. Those numbers will only increase as more spending from Biden’s bills to manufacture computer chips, fund infrastructure projects, and invest in green energy kicks in.

Given the disconnect between his significant accomplishments and weak public approval numbers, Biden wisely used his platform to boast about these achievements — and to offer a clear vision for the future.

"In a divided Congress, Biden can’t simply throw up his hands and let lawmakers block progress. He must be prepared to use executive action wherever appropriate."

Two of his aspirational goals would be particularly effective in moving us toward economic equality: restoring the enhanced Child Tax Credit and instituting a billionaire income tax.

Biden’s expanded Child Tax Credit quickly cut child poverty in half. But in late 2021, conservatives refused to continue this highly effective anti-poverty measure — and child poverty immediately spiked. To renew the expansion would once again drastically reduce child poverty, a primary goal of any decent society.

It’s not like it would be hard to pay for.

Currently, billionaires pay an average of just 8 percent in federal income taxes, compared to nearly 14 percent for the rest of us. Biden’s proposed “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” would right that wrong and also raise $360 billion over 10 years.

That’s enough to fund many years of the enhanced Child Tax Credit and is really, really popular with voters, including a majority of Republicans. Similarly, Biden’s call to increase taxes on manipulative corporate stock buybacks would also reduce inequality.

Biden also called for Congress to pass immigration reform, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to address police violence, the PRO Act to protect workers’ rights to unionize, and the Equality Act to stop discrimination against LGBTQ people. And he asked Congress to codify Americans’ right to seek safe abortion care after the Supreme Court stole it away.

Along the way, Biden pointedly rejected conservative demands for painful cuts to social programs — including Social Security, Medicare, and much more — for fulfilling their obligation to pay America’s debts, which skyrocketed during the last administration. We must hold Biden to that promise.

What’s more, in a divided Congress, Biden can’t simply throw up his hands and let lawmakers block progress. He must be prepared to use executive action wherever appropriate.

Already, Biden’s executive actions canceled student loans up to $20,000 (although GOP lawsuits have stalled that in the courts), clarified protections for transgender Americans, lowered prescription drug costs, and secured greater access to reproductive health services, to name a few.

For example, he could get his proposals to slash junk fees and end non-compete agreements done through his regulatory power.

Biden should also call public health emergencies regarding reproductive health, the epidemics of gun violence and police brutality, and a climate emergency. That will open up more power for the executive branch to protect the American people when Congress won’t.

In a divided Congress, Biden will need more than fiery populist talk or calls for elusive unity. He will need to ensure equality and justice for all through his power as president.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Karen Dolan.

Cliff Carlton was the 10th of 11 children and one of three still living at home when his father, a coal miner, died unexpectedly at 67.

Only his dad’s Social Security benefits, along with vegetables from the family’s small farm in southwestern Virginia, kept the household afloat during the lean years that followed.

That battle for survival made Carlton a lifelong champion of Social Security and a tireless opponent of the Republicans in Congress who keep trying to kill this lifeline for the middle class.

“It’s not a gift. It’s money that we’re due,” explained Carlton, vice president of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) Chapter 8-UR2 and president of the Virginia Alliance for Retired Americans.

“We put money into it. We deserve it back,” continued Carlton, 70, a retired tire manufacturing worker and longtime member of the United Steelworkers (USW) who’s attended rallies and lobbied Congress on behalf of Social Security for 30 years.

“It's not something we’re going to give up without an extraordinary fight."

Republicans long hoped to privatize Social Security, preferring to gamble Americans’ futures on the stock market rather than force the wealthy to pay their fair share of the taxes needed to sustain the program. Fortunately, congressional Democrats, union members and other Americans torpedoed these schemes.

But now there’s a new threat. To secure enough votes to become speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy toadied to extremist Republicans whose demands for radical budget cuts once again put Social Security and Medicare at risk.

Pro-corporate Republicans openly plot to cut Social Security benefits and raise the retirement age, moves that would force millions of Americans to work longer and delay their retirements. Some Republicans even want to gut the current funding formula, slashing payments to Americans with other income, regardless of how much they pay into the program.

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare warns that this kind of con, called means-testing, would end Social Security as Americans know it and take benefits even from those with “very modest incomes.”

“If you lose something, you don’t ever get it back,” observed Carlton, who fears that Republican toying with Social Security will break seniors already living on the margins amid skyrocketing medical costs and mounting bills stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic.

In addition to providing a buffer against unexpected health crises, Social Security is the only resource many retirees have when they outlive the nest eggs they accumulated during their working years.

“My grandmother is 102 years old. She retired at the age of 65 the year I was born, so I’ve never known her except in a retired state. She still lives on her own,” said Mike Budd, 37, a Marine Corps veteran and member of USW Local 12775, who credits Social Security with enabling his grandma, a former bank teller, to maintain her independence and high quality of life for decades.

“In fact, that’s the reason I’m very passionate about keeping this program around,” said Budd, who works as a substation electrician at Northern Indiana Public Service Co. (NIPSCO).

Democratic President Joe Biden and the Democratic-controlled Senate will continue to protect Social Security—and Medicare—from the Republicans who narrowly regained control of the House in November. Still, the Republicans vow to stage a showdown over America’s debt and allow the nation to careen toward default in a reckless gambit to commandeer the spending cuts they want.

Ironically, many of the same Republicans bent on eviscerating Social Security have huge personal fortunes on top of congressional pensions and enjoy a level of financial security out of reach of most Americans.

“It’s certainly easy to tell people to make do with less when they have more,” noted Budd, chair of Local 12775’s Veterans of Steel Committee, who deployed to Iraq three times from 2004 to 2009 as an aircraft mechanic with Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron 14 (MALS-14).

“There were no millionaires deployed with me,” noted Budd, only “a lot of working-class people” who loved their country and believed in the American dream that Republicans now threaten.

Some Republicans attempt to soft-pedal their shenanigans by saying they won’t cut benefits for current recipients, only future retirees who would have “time to adjust” to the changes, likely by working longer.

That angers Budd, who’s been paying Social Security taxes since he was a 16-year-old with a summer job at an equipment rental company and expects the long-promised return on his ongoing investment.

He’s already laying the financial groundwork for his golden years, and those plans hinge on a robust Social Security program that will not only let him retire at a decent age but support him as well as it has his grandma should he also live to 102.

Instead of cutting essential programs, TJ Stephens said, he’d like to see Republicans agree to fairly tax uber-rich Americans who use dodgy loopholes to pay little or nothing now. And he’d like to see more wealthy tax cheats and deadbeats run to ground.

Stephens, a member of USW Local 9231 and an electrician at the Cleveland-Cliffs complex in New Carlisle, Ind., regards Social Security as America’s contract with working people—one as inviolable as the one he signed when he joined the Air Force at 19 and went off to serve as a satellite communications technician at Langley Air Force Base.

“Inhumane is the best word I can think of,” Stephens, 37, said of Republican plans to move the goalposts on those already paying into Social Security and force younger Americans to “work ourselves into the grave.”

Ultimately, Carlson predicted, public anger will stop the Republicans in their tracks. He’s planning to ratchet up his activism and get more retirees to join him.

“It makes a difference,” he said of Social Security. “It's not something we’re going to give up without an extraordinary fight.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Tom Conway.

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Thursday that he will give a major speech on the state of the working class in the United States next week as he continues to push his fellow policymakers to work in the interest of the vast majority of Americans who make up the lower and middle class, instead of powerful corporations and the wealthy.

The Independent senator from Vermont plans to take stock of the economic realities facing millions of households across the country as corporate profits soar and workers demand fair wages, benefits, and working conditions in a number of industries.

Working families across the U.S. are struggling to stay afloat "at a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality," said the senator ahead of the speech, which is scheduled to take place Tuesday, January 17 at 7:00 pm Eastern.

"Before we can effectively go forward in terms of economic policy, it's necessary to know where we are at," said Sanders. "And for working families in this country, the situation is not good."

While inflation slowed in December according to Consumer Price Index data released Thursday, food prices continued to rise. As Common Dreamsreported Wednesday, children across the country are once again struggling to pay for school meals months after Republicans blocked a proposed extension of pandemic aid that enabled school districts to provide universal free breakfast and lunch.

The Washington Postreported last summer that in at least 15 states, officials at shelters for unhoused people reported "a dramatic increase in the number of people, particularly single mothers, seeking services," with waitlists doubling or tripling "in a matter of months."

"Real inflation-adjusted weekly wages for the average American worker are lower today than they were 50 years ago," said Sanders Thursday. "Over 60% of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck, 85 million are uninsured or underinsured, nearly 600,000 are homeless, and millions are unable to afford housing, childcare, or higher education."

"Now is the time for Congress—Democrats, Republicans, and Independents—to have the courage to take on the lobbyists and powerful special interests," added the senator, "and show the American people that our government can work for them, and not just the 1%."

Sanders will give the speech at the U.S. Capitol visitor's center in Washington, D.C., and the event will be livestreamed on his Twitter and Facebook pages.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

U.S. rail workers and working-class allies are angry at President Joe Biden—the self-proclaimed "most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history"—and Democratic congressional leaders for betraying them this week.

"You can't be 'pro-labor' if you don't stand in solidarity with workers when they decide to strike. Period."

Biden on Friday morning signed a congressional resolution that, under the Railway Labor Act of 1926, theoretically averts an economically devastating national strike by forcing workers to accept a White House-brokered tentative agreement—which was backed by eight unions but rejected by the four that represent the majority of the U.S. freight rail workforce.

The president, who is now under pressure to require paid sick leave via executive order, called on Congress to pass such a resolution late Monday. While progressives tried to add seven sick days to the deal, 42 Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) blocked it—a move some critics say outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) should have anticipated and refused to allow, either by focusing on a single resolution with paid leave or not voting at all.

Instead, as Jacobin's Luke Savage put it: "Democratic leaders are, in effect, declaring their solidarity with the American working class while actively siding with the very business interests they say are exploiting it. It's a clear violation of fundamental labor rights and a concession to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has issued predictable pleas for Congress to intervene and prevent a strike ahead of the holiday season."

Workers, organizers, and labor reporters warn that growing criticism of how Biden and Democratic lawmakers chose to handle the rail industry dispute could have long-term consequences for the president, who is expected to run again in 2024, and his party.

"This is a grave mistake and I hope the craven fools behind it reap every rotten morsel of what they have sown next time they want unions or working-class voters to lift a finger for them," labor journalist Kim Kelly said of Biden's directive to Congress, which she called "cowardly and shameful."

"The actions speak for themselves," Ross Grooters, a railroad engineer from Des Moines, Iowa, who co-chairs the advocacy group Railroad Workers United (RWU), told USA Today earlier this week. "Don't tell me what you are. Show me what you are."

"He's not stepping up for workers in the way that he should be," Grooters said of Biden—whom others have blasted this week for effectively "saying that these essential workers have to suffer to preserve the profits of the railroad industry and its billionaire owners."

Freight railroad conductor Gabe Christenson worked to get Biden elected in 2020—when the Democratic former vice president successfully ousted then-President Donald Trump, who infamously refused to accept his loss and recently announced his 2024 campaign.

"I have shirts from me campaigning—blue-collar Biden shirts," Christenson told The New York Times earlier this week. "I knocked on doors for him for weeks and weeks."

Since Biden's move against rail workers on Monday, Christenson "has been besieged by texts from furious co-workers whom he had encouraged to support the president," the Times reported. The conductor said of his angry colleagues, "I'm trying to calm them down."

Christenson isn't alone, according to the newspaper:

Several union members and local officials said they had urged co-workers who had previously supported Donald Trump to back Mr. Biden, arguing that he would be friendlier to labor. They said that these co-workers had reached out to complain about what they saw as Mr. Biden's about-face since Monday, though it was unclear how many of these union members had voted for the current president.

"Many Trump voters calling me out for endorsing Biden," Matthew A. Weaver, a carpenter with rail maintenance employees union, said by text Tuesday night. Mr. Weaver previously worked as an official for his union in Ohio.

Meanwhile, RWU leaders on Friday took aim at Capitol Hill, with the group's general secretary, Jason Doering, declaring that "this one-two punch from the two political parties is despicable."

"Politicians are happy to voice platitudes and heap praise upon us for our heroism throughout the pandemic, the essential nature of our work, the difficult and dangerous and demanding conditions of our jobs," Doering added. "Yet when the steel hits the rail, they back the powerful and wealthy Class 1 rail carriers every time."

RWU organizer Ron Kaminkow similarly said that "we have been played for well over a century by politicians and union officials alike. The fiasco of recent months will show that perhaps the time has come for railroad workers to push for a unified and powerful labor organization of all crafts, together with a political party that will better serve the interest of not just railroad workers but all working-class people."

Willie Adams, head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, pointed out that "Congress talks about 'saving democracy' at the ballot box, but they just totally undermined workplace democracy by imposing a contract that workers voted to reject."

"It is wrong to impose a rejected contract, period. Congress had the option to allow more time for the railroad workers to negotiate better benefits with their highly profitable employers, and they had the option to add paid sick days," Adams added. "There's no excuse for taking away workers' collective bargaining rights. Congress failed America's workers today."

RWU Steering Committee Member Paul Lindsey, called out the carriers—whose trade group, the Association of American Railroads, opposed the effort to add seven paid sick days while supporting the resolution to impose the agreement on workers.

"The rail carriers are too powerful and are a scourge to the national economy," Lindsey charged. "They need to be taken into public ownership and run in the interest of workers, shippers, passengers, and the nation, not a handful of wealthy stockholders."

The Lever noted that "while opposing a plan that would have required them to spend $321 million to give workers seven paid sick days, the main railroad companies raked in more than $7 billion in profits and paid out over $1.8 billion in dividends, in a year where they and their lobbying groups have spent more than $13 million lobbying Congress—after railroad CEOs pocketed more than $200 million in compensation."

Tony Cardwell, president of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division (BMWED), one of the unions that rejected the agreement, told Politico that "what's frustrating is that the railroads know that their backstop is federal government intervening in a strike."

"The railroads would have come running to the bargaining table if they knew that we would have been able to go on strike. But they were reliant on the Congress stopping our strike, and therefore they bargained in bad faith," said Cardwell, one of the union leaders who spent this week on Capitol Hill, trying to convince lawmakers to vote in favor of seven sick days.

In a letter to lawmakers after the votes on Thursday, Cardwell thanked those who backed sick leave while sharing that the Senate's rejection of the seven-day proposal "leaves me baffled, exasperated, and deeply saddened."

Cardwell continued:

The federal government inserted itself into the dispute between the railroads and the railroad workers under the premise that it must protect the American economy. Yet, when the federal government makes that decision, its representatives have a moral responsibility to also protect the interests of the citizens that make this nation's economy work—American railroaders. That is, members of Congress were obligated to vote to pass paid sick leave for all railroad workers. The representatives were not obligated to protect the exceeding profits of the corporations. A number of members of Congress chose—yet again—to trample on the workers, in their rush to cozy up to the corporations.

It is shocking and appalling that any member of Congress would cast a vote against any sort of provision that raises the standard of living for hard-working Americans. In fact, such a vote is nothing less than anti-American, an abdication of their oath of office, and you are deemed, in my eyes, unworthy of holding office. I am resolved to shine a light on their votes over this issue, because all railroad workers deserve to know and need to know who will stand and fight with them for what is right and just. They also deserve to know and need to know those who are willing to put them in harm's way to save their own political and personal self-interests.

Noting that the House-approved sick day resolution would have been much closer to passage if the few Senate Democrats who didn't vote had been there "and Manchin wouldn't have screwed us," Cardwell concluded in his comments to Politico that "corporations won today and the working class lost."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

The Warnock/Walker Senatorial run-off election on December 6th seems to be “more of the same” campaigning and fundraising as occurred during the general election. “More of the same” with tens of millions of dollars spent on unimaginative TV ads is not smart if Warnock wants to win without a disputed razor-thin margin.

As Lincoln said, new challenges require “thinking anew.” This means Warnock’s closest advisors must take control of the campaign away from political consultants, conflicted with their corporate clients and 15% commission on huge TV buys, and focus on a more effective ground game. Refreshing his daily messaging is key. These changes can be made immediately.

Warnock has spent $20 million on TV ads charging that Walker has neither the competence nor the character to be a U.S. senator. Reaching saturation, spending more on what people have heard and seen ad infinitum generates diminishing returns and increases voter irritation. “What else is new?” many must be wondering. Stop the last stage dittoheading run by profiteering dittohead consultants.

Warnock should highlight the following very popular policies. Every one of these declarations can be backed up by facts and figures from the Georgia scene.

1. For the hundreds of thousands of low-income Georgia workers: “Go vote for a $15 federal minimum wage, it’s long overdue and you’ve earned it.”

2. For many low-income workers: “Go vote for getting Medicaid from available federal funds blocked by Republican politicians.”

3. Vote to preserve and expand Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Washington’s Republicans, led by Walker backer, super-rich former corporate crook Senator Rick Scott, who wants to sunset these and other essential people-protection laws long on the books. (See his misnamed report, “An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America”).

4. Vote to stop Republicans from harming and depriving children. The GOP blocked, in January, the extension of the $300 monthly child-tax-credit that went to 58 million children. Walker’s GOP buddies in Washington stopped it. The same Republican clique is blocking paid child and maternal care and paid family sick leave by not funding these vital protections (long available in other Western countries). At the same time, the GOP wants to keep Trump’s 2017 huge tax cuts for the super-rich and big corporations, whose restoration could have paid for these necessities.

5. How about cracking down on the big corporate crooks who are running over the people in this country? Imagine “pay or die” sky-high drug prices, ripping off people as consumers, cheating on government contracts, stealing from programs designed for the poor, the Covid sick, and blocking the rebuilding of public services. Stop the GOP-protected corporate crime wave with law and order for a change. “We the People” are all bleeding the same color!

6. Why do Republicans have trouble with respecting women, protecting their freedom, assuring equal pay for equal work and stopping gender discrimination in the marketplace? Today’s Republican Party is the cruelest GOP in history in its attacks on the health, safety and economic well-being of women and children. Republicans stand against these crucial interests but have no problem giving the super-rich and big corporations handouts and bailouts galore. Vote the GOP out.

7. Vote to protect your descendants from the fossil-fueled climate storms, fires, floods, heatwaves, droughts and related hellish disruptions of daily life. The Republicans want to protect the oil, gas and coal industries, not the life-sustaining rights of future generations.

8. Recognize the tens of thousands of Georgia workers on the midnight shift who keep the state running while we’re asleep. Commend these hospital and nursing home workers, the factory and all-night store employees and the fire, police and emergency laborers by widely announcing some all-night campaigning. Meet these workers, respect them, learn from them and let them feel that they are included in your campaign for all the people. Start at midnight before the shift change of a large hospital and continue with events that touch on these and other occupations.

Campaigns get tired and repetitive. The media becomes bored hearing the same rhetoric every day. These campaign messages and tactics will generate news for the Warnock campaign, enliven the campaign workers and come to the attention of more of nearly half of the voters planning to stay home.

For more quick usable material, see winningamerica.net.

A 51-49 Senate will allow the Democrats to have faster confirmation of judges and other officials, more productive legislative committees, and more public hearings with subpoena power.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Ralph Nader.

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown on Tuesday reminded Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell of the central bank's legal obligations to all Americans, particularly working-class people, amid a wave of recent interest rate hikes that critics say ignore the root causes of inflation.

"It is your job to combat inflation, but at the same time, you must not lose sight of your responsibility to ensure that we have full employment."

The Ohio Democrat, who chairs the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, sent a letter to Powell amid expectations that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will approve another rate hike at a meeting next week—despite mounting criticism of the approach.

Highlighting that the Fed "is charged with the dual mandate" under U.S. law, Brown wrote to Powell that "it is your job to combat inflation, but at the same time, you must not lose sight of your responsibility to ensure that we have full employment."

"For the first time in decades, we have seen historic job growth, and workers have begun to see wage gains, gains that your prior actions to stabilize the economy helped achieve," he noted. "Yet, many workers and their families are struggling under the weight of inflation."

Citing Powell's remarks last month about inflation impacting middle- and lower-income households, the senator stressed that "the Federal Reserve's tools work to lower inflation by reducing demand for economic activities sensitive to interest rates. However, a family's 'pocketbook' needs have little to do with interest rates, and potential job losses brought about by monetary over-tightening will only worsen these matters for the working class."

Given that higher-income families "are better able to protect their wealth during economic downturns," Brown explained, "inflation and recessionary job losses increase the gap between upper- and lower-income households and widen the divide between racial groups."

"While, for now, the labor market remains relatively stable, we are starting to see job openings decrease and unemployment claims rise," he continued. "We must stay focused on addressing the root causes of inflation without putting workers' livelihoods at risk."

The senator's letter also emphasizes some key drivers of inflation that aren't impacted by rate hikes, from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, to the fact that "big corporations in concentrated industries have exploited this inflationary environment, increasing consumer costs and earning higher profit margins than before."

While celebrating efforts by Congress to tackle some root causes of current conditions—including passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and ocean shipping reforms—the letter also flags that other central banks are increasing interest rates, which could ultimately worsen the global economic situation.

"Protecting the world's most vulnerable populations and avoiding disruption that further increases the global wealth gap requires your continued caution," Brown warned Powell. "For working Americans who already feel the crush of inflation, job losses will make it much worse."

"We can't risk the livelihoods of millions of Americans who can't afford it," the letter concludes. "I ask that you don't forget your responsibility to promote maximum employment and that the decisions you make at the next FOMC meeting reflect your commitment to the dual mandate."

The think tank Groundwork Collaborative welcomed the senator's letter.

"For months, Groundwork and our allies have been sounding the alarm that the Fed's aggressive rate hikes—the wrong tool to take on the root causes of today's inflation—will crush workers and harm families scraping to get by," the group tweeted.

Groundwork on Tuesday also collected some "strong reporting" on recent debates over how to fight inflation and critiques of the Fed's approach from various economists and progressives in Congress.

One of the featured articles, published by Marketplace earlier this month, featured a stark warning from Groundwork executive director Lindsay Owens.

"I think Powell's interest rate bender has us on the precipice of global recession," she said. "He is really going hard on rate hikes. And the consequences could be tremendous for so many."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Taking his recent call for Democrats to campaign on economic issues facing working Americans on the road, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday announced an eight-state tour for the final two weekends before the midterm elections on November 8, with the goal of energizing "young people [and] working-class people."

Starting on October 27, the Vermont independent senator will hold at least 19 events with grassroots groups MoveOn and NextGen America.

"They're going to have to respond to why they don't want to raise the minimum wage, why they want to give tax breaks to billionaires, why they want to cut Social Security. Those are the questions that I think these guys do not want to answer."

Sanders gave a frank assessment of the Democrats' current midterm strategy in an interview with The New York Times, saying, "I think they're doing rather poorly" at convincing working people who are concerned about the economy to support the party.

"It is rather amazing to me that we are in a situation right now, which I hope to change, where according to poll after poll, the American people look more favorably upon the Republicans in terms of economic issues than they do Democrats," Sanders told the Times. "That is absurd."

Sanders' tour was announced two days after the Times released new polling data showing that since September, voters have swung significantly toward Republican candidates, with a roughly three-point edge over Democrats. Just a month ago the same poll found more voters favoring Democratic candidates.

The poll also showed that voters who are most concerned about the economy and inflation—which has about a third of Americans struggling to pay their bills—are now leaning toward Republican candidates by a 2-to-1 margin.

Meanwhile, in addition to proposing a nationwide 15-week abortion ban and backing candidates who continue to spread the baseless lie that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election, Republicans have been explicit this year about their plans to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits. This week The Washington Post reported that the GOP aims to pass an extension of their 2017 tax cut package which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy.

Sanders told the Times that he plans to address those threats on his tour to states including Nevada, Texas, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

"They're going to have to respond to why they don't want to raise the minimum wage, why they want to give tax breaks to billionaires, why they want to cut Social Security," the senator said. "Those are the questions that I think these guys do not want to answer. And those are the questions I'm going to be raising."

Sanders and other progressives including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) have also called on Democrats to tout legislation that they could get passed if they gain seats in the U.S. Senate and keep control of the House, such as anti-price gouging proposals.

The upcoming tour "is about energizing our base and increasing voter turnout up and down the ballot," Sanders told the Times, adding that he is "concerned" about "the energy level for young people, working-class people."

"And I want to see what I can do about that," he said.

On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also announced that she plans to hold a rally this coming weekend at University of California, Irvine, where Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) is up for reelection.

"Democrats need to clearly say what more we'll do to fix the economy for working people if we hold on to Congress," said progressive organizer Max Berger. "I'm glad Bernie and AOC are on the case!"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

False choices, bad options, and mixed messages abound. Week after week, one news source claims that everything is great while another says that the economic forecast looks gloomy for the next decade. Economic concepts like inflation, interest rates, costs, prices, and unemployment are rendered in the most tortured manner over and over again, with different representatives of the rich constantly making unscientific and confusing claims about what is “the real problem” and how to “get us back on track.”

Anticonsciousness has produced a stubborn refusal on the part of the superfluous political and economic elite to provide a concrete and lucid description, explanation, and evaluation of what is actually unfolding, leaving people disinformed and marginalized. This tiny ruling elite is plagued with old ideas and concepts about the economy. It has no interest in consciously investigating phenomena and reaching warranted conclusions.

This August 21, 2022 headline from The Register-Herald from West Virginia is one of endless examples of the mainstream media failing to empower people:  “U.S. economy flashes signals of hope and concern in mixed data.” Like so many news items, this article leaves people riding the fence and unable to decipher real developments in the economy and society. This is usually done in the name of “balance,” which is really an attempt to conceal a multifaceted reality that can be grasped only when investigated consciously and objectively. One is left as powerless at the end of the article as when they started the article. Half-truths, incorrect information, hedging and waffling here and there—such common tactics leave people with no bearings or direction. It is not a serious approach.

Another confused source, The Nation, carries this headline: “Looming recession in 2023” (September 7, 2022). The article relies on capital-centered discourse with all its limitations. It provides no integrated coherent view on what is happening in the economy or why. It ignores the fact that the long depression started 12 years ago and that most economies have been running on gas fumes since then, if not before then. The “economic slowdown” started many years ago and will continue for years to come. Years later there is still no meaningful recovery and resilience in most countries, just worse living and working conditions for the majority year after year. Living and working standards are not rising in the U.S. and elsewhere. Endless chatter by the elite and their representatives about “recession” serves mainly to confuse and distract people. It seeks to embroil them in debates that do not serve their interests.

Conflating different concepts and trends, this September 1, 2022 headline from Bloomberg News, “Strong Economy Is Bad News for Fed’s Inflation Fight,” also leaves readers with no coherence about the economy. What “strong economy”? Why is a so-called “strong economy” a bad thing? And what about the fact that the Fed ran out of ammunition long ago and is only exacerbating things?

Other bizarre news headlines look like this one from the New York Times: “America’s Dueling Realities on a Key Question: Is the Economy Good or Bad?” (September 13, 2022). The presentation of the economy to the public in this irrational manner can be found everywhere today. Objectivity of consideration is absent and everything is reduced to what a handful of “registered voters” think. Everything is reduced to subjective interpretations, as if the economy does not exist independent of the will of individuals. On top of all this, the article openly admits that economists and journalists are bad at predicting economic phenomena. In other words, they are not scientific.

Many other examples of media disinformation on the economy can be given. Desperate attempts to find something positive in a dying and decaying economy are not going anywhere any time soon. Such efforts continue because the ruling elite are terrified of more people recognizing the illegitimacy, bankruptcy, and dysfunction of current arrangements and uniting with others to usher in a fresh new alternative.

Research and experience show that most Americans are very worried about the state of the economy. ¹ Millions feel insecure. Everyone knows we have a bad economy, whether you call it a recession or not. High prices are everywhere and interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world are only creating more problems. Today many people have to work two full-time jobs just to survive. Millions live pay-check to pay-check, including many who make six figures. On top of all this, price-gouging, bankruptcies, evictions, hunger, homelessness, inequality, debt, anxiety, and crime are increasing. The fact is that “Rising costs force millions of Americans to choose between paying health care and utility bills” (August 31, 2022).

Yet Jerome Powell, head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, recently promised “more pain” for millions. More agony and unemployment, we are told, is the way forward.

Why? How is this a responsible and acceptable approach in 2022? Why should there be more suffering for everyone centuries after the scientific and technical revolution made it possible to meet the needs of all several times over? Why more pain for everyone when objectively there is an overabundance of wealth in society produced by workers? Is the public to believe that the approach embraced by economic “leaders” is the only viable approach to the problems confronting the economy, society, and humanity? And whose economy are we talking about? There is nothing bright or human-centered about the approach, outlook, and agenda of the rich and their representatives, which is why they have not solved any major problems in decades.

It is clear that what the rich mean by “economy” bears no resemblance to what an economy actually is: the relations people enter into with each other in the course of reproducing themselves and society. For the rich, the economy is anything that makes rich people richer, including war, price-gouging, wage cuts, stock buy-backs, aggressive advertising, and wild speculation on the stock market. These are not things the producers of wealth in society support. Working people are interested in using socially-produced wealth to advance society, not narrow private interests.

The ruling elite and their representatives view the economy in the most narrow and distorted way. They do not see the economy as an integrated whole whose many parts are run by millions of working people that produce all the wealth of society. Major owners of capital look at the world from their own narrow private interests and protect their “own turf” as they compete intensely with other owners of capital to maximize their profit, regardless of how damaging this might be to the natural and social environment. They do not care about how the economy as a whole operates. They do not look at the parts in relation to the whole or strive to ensure the proper extended reproduction of society. Chaos, anarchy, and violence prevail in this outdated set-up in which greed is cynically normalized as a virtue.

From a capital-centered perspective, workers are not seen as the source of value. Their labor-time is not recognized as the source of new value. Workers are viewed instead as a derogatory cost of production, a liability, a loss, a burden, a nuisance, a negative consequence; something to be suffered or grudgingly tolerated. In reality, though, it is owners of capital, those who “legally” seize the surplus value produced by workers, that are a burden and liability to society. They are a historically-exhausted force that drags society backward. They are a block to progress.

In this fractured context it is also troubling that humans and citizens are constantly reduced to consumers, and consumerism is given as that which defines the modern human personality. Buying and subordinating oneself to objects, things, and commodities is given as the core of the modern individual—a phenomenon further exacerbated by social media.

Capitalist ideology turns reality upside down. It mixes up who exploits who. It conceals the irreconcilable antagonistic interests between workers and the financial oligarchy. It hides the fact that wage-slavery is the main mode of  profit maximization for owners of capital. It obscures severe contradictions between workers and the rich.

People can expect no clarity or guidance from the rich and their media, which is why they must rely on their own conscious acts of finding out and undertake their own efforts to disseminate information, analysis, and perspective.

There is no reason for today’s economies to be as chaotic, anarchic, and fragmented as they are. They must be brought under conscious human control and organized to advance the general interests of society, not a tiny ruling elite that uses its power to get richer while disinforming and marginalizing people.

1. See the 12-part series titled “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind“.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

Summary of Part I

In Part I, I argued that the relationship between political subordination and revolution is ill-conceived if framed in a dualistic way. We are either totally submissive or at the other extreme there is revolution. However, following the work of James C. Scott’s great book Domination and the Arts of Resistance I claimed that people don’t go from being subordinate to wanting to overthrow a government overnight. There is a spectrum of growing dissatisfaction in between. I presented three in between stages: thick submission, thin submission and paper-thin submission. Then I presented Scott’s three-dimensional theory of subordination: a) material, economic and technological; b) social-psychological; and c) cultural. I included examples in each dimension. Then I described three movements from submission to revolution. The first is the “public transcript” controlled by elites; second is a hidden transcript controlled by subordinates and the third is a public transcript controlled by subordinates on their way to becoming insubordinate. In Part I I covered the public transcript controlled by elites. These included parades and coronations, control of public discourse and use of language. They include body language, gestures and postures. In this second part I will describe what hidden transcripts are like and lastly, I will explain the process by which the hidden transcripts become public and controlled by the lower classes.

*****

The Hidden Transcript for Resistance

The hidden transcript requires two performances: a) performance of correct speech acts and gestures; and b) control of rage, insult, anger and violence in the face of the ruler’s appropriation of labor, public humiliations, whippings, rapes, slaps, leers, contempt, ritual denigration, and abuse of the children of the oppressed. When the public transcript is disrupted, it is difficult for the true feelings of subordinates not to surface. For example, in the twentieth century, the sinking of the Titanic was such an event. The drowning of large numbers of wealthy and powerful whites in their finery aboard a ship that was said to be unsinkable seemed like a stroke of poetic justice to many blacks. Here is a verse that was turned into a song:

All the millionaires looked around at Shine (a black stoker) say

“Now Shine, oh Shine, save poor me.” Say “We’ll make you wealthier than Shine can be”. Shine say, “you hate my color and you hate my race”

Say, “Jump overboard and give those sharks a chase”

Another example is the boxing victory of Jack Johnson over Jim Jeffries in 1910 and Joe Louis’ victories later in the 20th century. These were instances where black men took out their revenge on all whites for a lifetime of indignities. This was so disturbing to the local and state authorities that they passed ordinances against these victories being shown in local theaters.

But in order for hidden transcripts to take root, they need to be rehearsed backstage. Here is an example of a hidden transcript of slaves talking to each other after the master had left the kitchen:

That’s a day a-comin! That’s a day a comin’! I hear the rumbling ob de chariots! I see de flashin ob de guns! White folks blood is a runnin on the ground like a ribber, an de deads heaped up dat high! Oh Lor! Hasten de day when de blows, a de bruises, and de aches and de pains, shall come to de white folks, an de buzzards shall eat dem as dey’s dead in the streets. Oh Lor! roll on de chariots, an gib the black people rest and peace. Oh Lor! Gib me de pleasure ob livin’ till dat day, when I shall see white folks shot down like de wolves when dey come hungry out o’de woods. (5)

There are 4 characteristics of hidden transcript which merit clarification:

1. The hidden transcript is specific to a given social site and to a particular set of actors. It happens among a restricted public. A slave speaking with a white shopkeeper during the day is not the same way he would speak in encountering whites on horseback at night.
2. The frontier between the public and the hidden is a zone of constant struggle. For example in medieval Europe if a woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would spit beetle juice over her dress.
3. Dominant groups also have hidden transcripts, but this is not the subject of Scott’s work.
4. The hidden transcripts of dominant and subordinate are never in direct contact with each other except in rebellious situations, as we shall see.

Scott develops an interesting spectrum of the range of possible reactions that slaves might express. It seems reasonable that this could also apply to serfs and untouchables. I’ve reorganized Scott’s spectrum so that it conforms with the traditional political spectrum. At the most extreme, right wing of the spectrum of subordination are the performances for a harsh overseer. This requires the most work. The responses to a more liberal lord or overseer is next on the spectrum and last and least demanding of public transcripts are the performances of whites who have no direct authority over slaves, but who still have privileges. The last four parts of the spectrum are the hidden transcripts, moving from sympathetic to the most trusted.

Confiding in other slaves and free blacks in general is certainly more direct than with any whites. More intimate still are the conversations had between slaves of the same master. Next is trustworthiness of one’s closest slave friends. Lastly are those with whom one can be most confidential – the immediate family of slaves.

Spectrum of Hidden and Public Transcript

Hidden Transcript                            Public transcript
dominant

For members of the same subordinate group

Hidden transcript will be least inhibited when two conditions are fulfilled:

• When it is voiced in a sequestered social site where control, surveillance and repression are the least able to reach. This is where they can talk freely.
• When this milieu is composed entirely of close confidants who share with each other similar experiences of domination (in-common subordination).

The first condition is to have a place to discuss, fantasize, plot and scheme and the second is to have something to talk about.

Need for social spaces for the hidden transcript

Slaves made use of secluded woods, clearing gullies, thickets and ravines to meet and talk in safety. In quarters at night, slaves hung up quilts and rags to muffle the sound. They gathered in circles on their knees and whispered with a guard to watch for the authorities. English historian Christopher Hill points out that the heretical movement, the Lollards, was most rife in pastoral forest, moorland and fen areas where social control of the church did not effectively penetrate. Familists, Ranters and Levellers thrived best in those areas where surveillance was least – the pastoral, moorland and forest areas with few squires or clergy. In European culture, the alehouse, tavern, inn and cabaret were seen by secular authorities and by the church as places of subversion. But what do you do if no site is available? Resistance is rawer when showing itself in linguistic codes, dialects, gestures.

Social spaces are not empty, neutral areas where subordinate groups simply slip into. Social spaces are an achievement of resistance – won and defended in the teeth of domination. Scott emphasizes the importance of having someone to share your perspective with in order to keep resistance alive. He refers to the social psychological Asch experiment. People are very likely to doubt their individually formulated perceptions of a line if enough people volunteer different perceptions. However, with even a minority of support for the individual’s perception, they are likely to stick with their original perception.

Are there subordinate groups that are more likely to stick together than others? Scott argues that among working class men some types of work are more likely to produce solidarity than others. These exist when a social group lacks mobility outside of their trade; there are high levels of cooperation necessary to do a job; there is high level of physical danger involved In the work; and workers are geographically isolated from other workers. That group is the most likely to be militant. What kind of workers are these? They are miners, merchant seamen, lumberjacks and longshoremen.

Conversely, in subordinate positions where there is likely to be an upward mobility built into the job: when the work involves contact with many other workers doing other jobs; the work does not require a great deal of cooperation and the occupation is not dangerous.  Those subordinate groups are not likely to build social solidarity.

Furthermore, the lower classes have horizontal mechanisms for controlling defection. These are not pretty and include slander, character assassination, gossip, rumor, public gestures of contempt, shunning, curses, backbiting, and out-casting. Anger will be disciplined by the shared experiences and power relations within that small group, ranging from raw anger to cooked indignation. Sentiments that are idiosyncratic, unrepresentative of the group’s feelings have weak resonance and are likely to be selected against or censored. 

Striving to atomize individuals – the dominant at work

The best social institutions at isolating individuals are what have been called by Erving Goffman “total institutions.” Examples are Jesuits, monastic orders, political sects, and court bureaucracies which enact techniques to try to prevent the development of subordinate loyalties. Preventive atomization of caste, slaves and feudal societies includes the following:

1. The introduction of eunuchs into an organization to undermine the possibility of competing family loyalties.
2. Bringing together a labor force with the greatest linguistic and ethnic diversity.
3. Requiring that the subordinates all speak the language of the authorities.
4. Planting informers to create distrust among the subordinate groups.
5. Recruiting administrative staff from marginal, despised groups.
6. People who were isolated from the populace and entirely dependent on the rulers for status.

As these techniques are usually only partly successful, heavy-handed strategies follow like:

1. Severing autonomous circuits of folk discourse such as seizing broadsheets and printing presses.
2. Detaining singers and itinerant workers who might be passing on information.
3. Arresting and questioning anyone caught discussing the subversive topics in markets and inns.

In short, a form of domination creates certain possibilities for the production of a hidden transcript. Whether these possibilities are realized or not depends on the composition of the workers as well as on the constant agency of subordinates in seizing, defending and enlarging a spatial power field and resisting the techniques of atomization by the authorities.

Methodological problems with the hidden transcript

The problem with detecting the hidden transcript is not merely that the standard record is one of the records of elite activities and the ways that reflect their class and status rather than the lower classes. An even more important difficulty is that subordinate groups have an interest in concealing their activities and statements which might expose them. For example, we know little about the rate at which slaves in the US pilfered their masters’ livestock, grain and larder. If the slaves were successful, the master would know as little about this as possible. The goal of slaves is to escape detection.

Resistance through Disguise

Steeling for guerilla warfare

The upper classes sense the lower classes’ resistance which the dominant group interprets as cunning and deceptive. Both classes train themselves in maintaining their cool in the face of insults. Aristocrats are trained in self-restraints in the face of insults by competing aristocrats. Among blacks, “the Dozens” serves as a mechanism for teaching and sharpening the ability of oppressed groups to control anger by deliberately taunting each other with the most personal, family-related and interpersonal insults without blowing up. This is training for dealing with the insensitivity and obliviousness of white racism.

Elementary forms of disguise

Elementary forms of disguise can be divided into types. In one, the message is clear but the messenger is ambiguous. In spirit possession, gossip, witchcraft, rumor, letters and mass defiance, the message is hostility to the authorities but no one can locate the messenger.

In the second type, the messenger is clear but it is their message that is ambiguous. Euphemisms and grumbling and words with double meaning allow the lower classes to communicate dissatisfaction without taking full responsibility for it. If they get “called” on their message, they retreat to the public transcript meaning of what is literally being said.

Disguising the messenger

One form of elementary disguised resistance is possession states. Unlike vision quests which are actively engaged in by egalitarian hunting and gathering societies, possession states are altered states which are more of a reaction. As I.M. Lewis writes, possession states are a covert form of social protest for women and for marginal oppressed groups where they can openly make grievances known. They can curse the authorities and make demands they would never dare to make under non-altered states. The incidence of actual afflictions laid at door of these spirits tends to coincide with episodes of tension and unjust treatment in relations between master and servant.

Two other forms of anonymity are rumor and gossip. Gossip is a way in which the lower classes may comment on the everyday affairs of a lord, slave master or brahman for the purpose of ruining their reputation. Witchcraft is a step beyond gossip. It turns spiteful words about another into secret aggression acts of magic against the authorities. Sorcery is a classic resort by vulnerable subordinate groups who have little or no safe open opportunity to challenge a form of domination that angers them.

Unlike gossip, rumor is a reaction, not to everyday events but to events that are vitally important and about which only partial information is available. Rumors elaborate, distort and exaggerate the information which is given in which oppressed groups can interpret their hopes for the situation they are in.

On the other hand, mass defiance requires effective coordination. These are informal networks of the community that join members of subordinate groups through kinship, labor exchanges, neighborhood and ritual practices. After the State socialist declaration of martial law in Poland in 1983 against the formation of the Solidarity trade union:

Supporters of the union in the city of Lodz developed a unique form of cautious protest. They decided that in order to demonstrate their disdain for the lies propagated by the official government television news, they would all take a daily promenade timed to coincide exactly with the broadcast, wearing their hats backwards. Soon, much of the town joined them.

There was a sequel to this episode when the authorities shifted the hours of the Lodz ghetto curfew so that a promenade at that hour became illegal. In response, for some time many Lodz residents took their televisions to the window at precisely the time the government newscast began and beamed them out at full volume into empty courtyards and streets. A passerby who, in this case would have had to have been an officer of the “security forces”, was greeted by the eerie sight of working-class housing flats with a television at nearly every window blaring the government’s message at him. (140)

Even in prisons without the relative freedom of neighborhood connections, kinship, labor exchanges or the opportunity for collective rituals, prisoners demonstrate mass defiance when they rhythmically beat meal tins or rap on the bars of their cells. Scott describes a more elaborate form of mass defiance that prisoners used against guards in reaction to an up-and-coming race between the two:

The prisoners, knowing that they were expected to lose, spoiled the performance by purposely losing while acting an elaborate pantomime of excess effort. By exaggerating their compliance to the point of mockery, they openly showed their contempt for the proceedings while making it difficult for the guards to take action against them. (139)

Disguising the message

It is easy to think that if anonymity is not possible, complete deference is the only option. But, as Scott says, if anonymity encourages unvarnished messages, the veiling of the message represents the application of varnish. At its best, euphemisms are code phrases to protect the frank description of things that are too personal to speak about in public. However, as we saw, euphemisms are used by the upper classes to mask what they are really up to. The lower classes can also exploit the use of euphemisms. The oppressed can disguise a message just enough to skirt retaliation. However, euphemisms are not just phases that can have double or triple meaning. They can take place when people do not change the words at all but say them in the wrong place at the wrong time. Scott retells a more in-your-face use of this.

Slaves in Georgetown, South Carolina apparently crossed that linguistic boundary when they were arrested for singing the following hymn at the beginning of the civil war:

we’ll soon be free (repeated three times)
When the Lord will call us home
My bruddeer, how long (repeated three times)
Fore we done suffering here?
It won’t be long (repeated three times)
For the Lord call us home
We’ll soon be free (repeated three times)
When Jesus sets me free
We’ll fight for liberty (repeated three times)
When the Lord will call us home.

In another time and place, the same song could be interpreted by slave masters as the slaves pining for an ideal afterlife, rather than justice in this one. Grumblings are a groan, a sigh, a moan, chuckle, a well-timed silence, or a wink. Like euphemisms, grumbling must walk the line between being too cryptic, when the antagonist fails to get the point, but not so blatant that the bearers risk open retaliation.

Elaborate forms of disguise: collective representations of culture

Elaborate forms of disguise tend to be more “built-in” to a subculture and less spontaneous.  These include dance, dress, drama, folktales, religious beliefs and symbols which reverse the cultural domination of the elites. In oral countercultures, what is communicated is less precise than when communicated in writing. However, communication through face-to-face, whether voice, gestures, clothes, or dance, the communicator retains control over the manner of its dissemination. Anonymity is retained because each enactment is unique to time, place and audience. With writing, once a text is out of the author’s hands control over its use and dissemination is lost.

Myths

In sacred ceremonies managed by elites, slaves were expected to control their gestures, facial expressions and voices. Dancing, shouting, clapping and participation countered the elites’ attempts to make a coronation out of a religious ceremony. Just as the lower classes were expected to be passive in public secular activities, they were also expected to sit still and keep their mouths shut in sacred contexts. But in their own clandestine services, slaves did the opposite.

This form of disguise also played itself out in the choice of which myths to emphasize. African slaves chose deliverance and redemption themes: Moses in the Promised Land, along with the Egyptian captivity and emancipation. The Land of Canaan was taken to mean the Northern United States and freedom. Conservative preachers emphasized the New Testament with meekness, turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile. Needless to say they were unpopular with slaves. On some occasions, slaves walked out of these services.

In the cultural conflicts that preceded the German Peasants’ War on the eve of the Reformation, there was a struggle over a pilgrimage site associated with the “Drummer of Niklashausen”. This tradition held that Christ’s sacrifice had redeemed all of humankind, including serfs. Access to salvation was democratically distributed. For a while, this church became a social magnet for pilgrimages and subversive discourse.

Folktales

In folktales, the trickster is a main player in folk resistance. Just as the lower classes can rarely stand toe-to-toe with the dominators, so the trickster, Brer Rabbit, makes his way through a treacherous environment of enemies by using wit and cunning. He knows the habits of his enemies and deceives them. North American slaves:

By identifying with Brer Rabbit, the slave child learned…that safety and success depended on curbing one’s anger and channeling it into forms of deception and cunning. (164)

Inverted imagery

There is a pan-European tradition of world-turned-up-side-down drawings and prints in which the hare snared the hunter, the cart pulled the horse, fishermen are pulled from the water by fish, a wife beats her husband, an ox slaughters the butcher, a goose puts the cook into the pot, and a king on foot is led by a peasant on horseback. Needless to say, this did not go over well with the authorities. In 1842 czarist officials seized all known copies of a large print depicting the ox slaughtering the butcher.

Rituals of Reversal, Carnival 

Much of the writing on carnival emphasizes the spirit of physical abandon – dancing, gluttony, open sexuality – as a reaction to Lent, which will follow carnival on the Catholic calendar. Michael Bakhtin argues that Carnival focused on functions we share with lower mammals, that is, the level at which we are all alike. But cutting the upper classes down to animals was only part of Carnival. Bakhtin also treats Carnival as the ritual location of uninhibited speech – the only place where undominated discourse prevailed – no servility, false pretenses, obsequiousness or etiquettes of submissiveness. It was a place where laughter with and at the upper classes was possible. For Bakhtin, laughter was revolutionary. Only equals may laugh together. Traditionally, the lower classes may not laugh in the presence of the upper classes. While the serf, slave and untouchable may have difficulty imagining other systems than serfdom, slavery and the caste system, they will have no trouble imagining a total reversal of an existing organization where they are on top, and the elites are on the bottom. This was also part of Carnival. These reversals can be found in nearly every major cultural tradition: Carnival in Catholic countries, Feast of Krishna in India, Saturnalia in ancient Rome, and the Water Festival in Buddhist Southeast Asia, to name a few.

Scott imagines carnival as a kind of people’s informal courtroom: the young can scold the old, women can ridicule men:

Any local notable who had incurred popular wrath, such as merciless usurers, soldiers who were abusive, corrupt local officials, priests who were abusive or lascivious – might find themselves a target… They might be burned in effigy.  (174)

In Andalusia in Spain, initially both classes participated in Carnival, but as agrarian conditions worsened, the landowners withdrew and watched Carnival from the balcony. They understood the reversals as getting uncomfortably close to the real thing.

Cultural reversals: hydraulic co-optations or rehearsal for revolution?

Fundamentalist Marxist theorists imagine that carnival is the invention of the elites. They also imagine that the effect of participating in these cultural traditions is to drain off energy that would be better utilized for making a revolution. Scott objects to both this claim and its analysis. If the first notion were true, elites would encourage Carnival. The opposite is more the case. Carnival was seen by the Church and state as a potential site for disorder and it required surveillance. In fact, the Church tried to replace Carnival with mystery plays. The proposal that elites create these rituals as hydraulic drainers confuses the intentions of elites with the limited results they are able to achieve. Rather, the existence and evolving form of Carnival is the outcome of social conflict, not the stage-managed concoction of elites.  Bread and circuses are political concessions won by subordinate classes. Carnival was the only time of the year the lower classes were permitted to assemble in unprecedented numbers behind masks and make threatening gestures. It was dangerous indeed!

Now to the issue of whether these cultural acts drain energy away from political action. Scott agrees with the hydraulic theory that systematic subordination elicits a reaction and this reaction involves a desire to strike or speak back. But the hydraulic theory supposes that the desire to strike back can be substantially satisfied in any of the cultural forms mentioned – myths, folktales, reversal imagery and rituals. For theories of hydraulic human interaction, the safe expression of aggression in joint fantasy yields as much or nearly as much satisfaction as direct aggression against the object of frustration. Scott argues against this.

Social psychological experimental studies of aggression today show that aggressive play and fantasy increase rather than decrease the likelihood of actual aggression. Additionally, many revolts by slaves, peasants and serfs occurred during seasonal rituals. The discourse of the hidden transcript is not a substitute for action. It merely sheds light on revolutionary action but it doesn’t explain it. Cultures of resistance help build the collective action itself.  The hidden transcript is a necessary but not sufficient condition for practical resistance. In response to Boudreau’s claim that conditioning from childhood socializes the lower classes to miss revolutionary opportunities, Scott argues it is equally important to be explained how working classes have imagined a sense of historical possibility which was not objectively justified, as the Lollards and Diggers of the English revolution found out.

From Resistance to Insubordination and Rebellion: When the hidden transcript goes public

How is it possible that so many people immediately understood what to do and that none of them needed any advice or instruction?

Apathy on the job

It is easy to overlook how much the indifference, lack of creativity on the job and low productivity levels can accumulate, not just in individual acts of frustration, but also in collective frustration that becomes a setting in which status infrapolitics builds up:

The aggregation of thousands upon thousands of petty acts of resistance has dramatic economic and political effects. Production, whether on the factory floor or on the plantation, can result in performances that are not bad enough to provoke punishment but not good enough to allow the enterprise to succeed. Petty acts can, like snowflakes on the steep mountainside, set off an avalanche. (192)

From this dissatisfaction on the job, the hidden transcript grows especially when for military, economic or political reasons, the elites have lost ground. As we saw in the argument against the hydraulic theory of inverted rituals, the rehearsal theory of Scott claims that aggression that is inhibited and may be displaced on other objects is rarely a substitute for direct confrontation with the frustrating agent. Repeated public humiliations can be fully reciprocated only with public revenge.

Defiance in public

In reaction to political, economic and religious downturns, the lower classes begin to become defiant in public. They begin wearing clothing not designated for their status such as turbans and shoes. They refuse to bow or give appropriate salutation.  A defiant posture can open acts of desacralization and disrespect. These are often the first sign of actual rebellion.

During the Spanish revolution of 1936 the revolutionary exhumations and desecration of sacred remains from Spanish cathedrals accomplished three purposes according to Scott:

• It partly satisfied the anticlerical population that had not earlier dared to defy the Church;
• It conveyed that the crowds were not afraid of spiritual or temporal power of the Church; and,
• It suggested to a large audience that anything is possible

As an historian of the English Civil War, Christopher Hill argues:

Each facet of the popular revolution unleashed and then crushed by Cromwell had its counterpart in low-profile popular culture long predating its public manifestation. Thus, the Diggers and the Levelers staked an open claim to a fundamentally different version of property rights. Their popularity and the force of their moral claim derived from an offstage popular culture that had never accepted the enclosures as just and found expression in the practices of poaching and tearing down fences.

Differentiating resistance from insubordination

There is a difference between accidental or disguised resistance and open insubordination or aggression. For example: the practical failure to comply is different from the declared public refusal to comply; bumping up against someone is different from openly pushing that person; pilfering resources is not the same as open seizure of goods; standing up and then failing to sing the national anthem is different from publicly sitting while others stand. In the forms of resistance, every act is separate. Insubordination calls into question many subordinate acts which, up until now, were taken for granted.

The last chapter of Scott’s book addresses two points about what happens when the hidden transcript becomes public, First, what is it like emotionally for the lower classes when hidden transcripts become public? He addresses how the first acts of defiance are mixed with fear on one hand and elation on the other. He also addresses how the presence of the hidden transcript explains the apparent gap between the docility of the lower classes during normal times and their rebellious collective acts which appear to come out of nowhere. How do the apparent isolated charismatic acts of individuals gain their social force by virtue of their roots in the hidden transcript of a subordinate group?

Emotional experience of going public with the hidden transcript

At the end of the American Civil War there was the open defiance of slaves. There were instances of insolence, vituperation and attacks by slaves on masters. For example, weakening of a damn wall permitting more of the hidden transcript to leak through, increasing the probabilities of a complete rupture.

Frederick Douglass reported an account of a physical fight with his master. Running the risk of death, Douglass not only spoke back to his master, but would not allow himself to be beaten. Out of pride and anger, Douglass fought off his master while not going so far as to beat him in turn.

He reports:

“I was nothing before; I was a man now…After resisting him I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection. I had reached the point where I was not afraid to die”

Douglass and others write of slaves who have somehow survived physical confrontations and have convinced their masters that they may be shot but cannot be whipped. The master is then confronted with an all-or-nothing choice.” (208)

In the Polish uprising against the Soviet government in 1980, the popular enthusiasm in the context of three decades of public silence was overwhelming:

To appreciate the quality of this “revolution of the soul” one must know that for 30 years, most Poles had lived a double life. They grew up with two codes of behavior, two languages – the pubic and the private – two histories – the official and the unofficial. From their school days they learned, not only to conceal in public their private opinions, but also to parrot another set of opinions prescribed by the ruling ideology. The end of this double life was a profound psychological gain for countless individuals…and now they discovered for certain that almost everyone around them actually felt the same way about the system as they did…The poet Stanisław Barańczak compared it to coming up for air after living for years under water. (212)

“For the first time in our lives we had taken a stand against the state. Before it was a taboo. I didn’t feel I was protesting just the price rise, although that’s what sparked it. It had to do with overthrowing at least in part everything we hated.”

There are historical circumstances that suddenly lower the danger of speaking out enough so that the previously timid are encouraged. The glasnost campaign of Gorbachev unleashed an unprecedented flurry of public declaration in the USSR. After the fall of the Soviet Union, state socialist heads in Eastern Europe squirmed, but the jig was up.

Millions of Romanians witnessed just such an epoch-making event during the televised rallies staged by President Nicolae Ceausescu on December 21, 1989, in Bucharest to demonstrate that he was still in command.

The young people started to boo. They jeered as the president, who still appeared unaware that trouble was mounting, rattled along denouncing anti-communist force. The booing grew louder and was briefly heard by the television audience, before technicians took over and voiced-over a sound track of canned applause. (204)

Raw vs cooked publicized hidden transcripts

There is a direct connection between the coherence of an open rebellion and the extent to which the hidden transcript has been “cooked”. The more the development of a hidden transcript has been suppressed by authoritarian regimes who have successfully atomized individuals through surveillance; the deliberately placing of people with geographical and linguistic differences in work groups, the more explosive and less coherent the uprising of public rebellion will be. Conversely, the more the hidden transcript has had a chance to be elaborated through repeated gatherings at subversive social sites, the more coherent and constructive the rebellion will be. Scott compares the degree to which hidden transcripts are shared to the electronic resistances on a single power grid:

We can metaphorically think of those with comparable hidden transcripts in a society as forming part of a single power grid. Small differences in hidden transcript within the grid might be considered analogous to electrical resistance causing losses of current. Many real interests are not sufficiently cohesive or widespread to create a latent power grid on which charismatic mobilization depends. (224)

Charisma as a social fire that transforms the hidden transcript into public transcript

When rebellions break out, one of the first things the authorities do is find out who “the leaders” are. Since it is hard for the authorities to imagine that most people are disgusted by their reign, they suppose that a charismatic leader had duped the well-intentioned or gullible masses down the road to damnation. If the first act of defiance succeeds and is spontaneously imitated by large numbers of others, an observer might well conclude that a herd of cattle with no individual wills or values has stampeded inadvertently. But charisma as a personal quality or aura of an individual that touches a secret power that makes others surrender their will and follow is comparatively rare and marginal. It ignores the reciprocity that must take place between leaders and followers for charisma to work. An individual has charisma only to the extent that others confer it upon them.

The hidden transcript is the socially produced rehearsal that has been scripted offstage by all members of the subordinate group over weeks, months and perhaps years. This hidden discourse created, cultivated and ripened in the nooks and crannies of the social order where subordinate groups can speak more freely. It is only when this hidden transcript is openly declared that subordinates can fully recognize the full extent to which their claims, dreams, and anger are shared by other subordinates with whom they have not been in direct touch. If there seems to be an instantaneous mutually and commonness of purpose, they are surely derived from the hidden transcript.

When some member of the lower castes, classes or religious groups has the nerve to voice what everyone else feels, of course,that individual becomes beloved and unforgettable. However, it is because that person has truly articulated something that was long overdue, an act or speech that truly swelled from the ground up that they are treated specially and followed. In other words, it was the time, place and circumstance that made their deed important, more than their individual qualities. Acts of daring might have been improvised on the public stage, but they had been long and amply prepared in the hidden transcript of folk culture and practice. Those who sing the catalyst’s praises are far from simple objects of manipulation. They quite genuinely recognized themselves in their speech or act. They invoked what Rousseau called the general will.

Scott closes his work majestically:

The first public declaration of the hidden transcript has a prehistory that explains its capacity to produce political breakthroughs. The courage of those who fail is likely to be noted, admired and even mythologized in stories of bravery, social banditry and noble sacrifice. They become themselves part of the hidden transcript.

It shouts what has historically had to be whispered, controlled, choked back, stifled and suppressed. If the results seem like moments of madness, if the politics they engender is tumultuous, frenetic, delirious and occasionally violent, that is perhaps because the powerless are so rarely on the public stage and have so much to say and do when they finally arrive. (227)

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

As a communist, I have deep understanding of the hate toward communists throughout history, and why countries in Africa and elsewhere are, were, and will lean toward socialism: kicking out the prostitutes, pimps and purveyors of chaos and terror. Bankers and Bombs. Viruses and Lockdowns. Neoliberal or Neocon. The purveyors of pain are at the top.

And, well, in the middle. So, I quit a job November 3 when my supervisor hung up on me. I was stationed 80 miles from where she was headquartered, where the HR was headquartered and where the Executive Director was headquartered.

This woman was a complete disaster as a human and professional (sic). She had already had issues with the fellow I replaced, who stormed out, quit. Her forked tongue and broken personality, well, she was the nonprofit’s two year wonder, her son worked for the nonprofit, and she had control of the small satellite office in my county.

My job was to take over case management for adults with developmental disabilities. That system is county run, with state DHS funding. It is a broken system, understaffed, and staffed with broken humans. So, one month on this job I was subjected to this supervisor’s personal life, her homophobia even though her Air Force son was marrying a man. She called herself a beaner, as she has some Latina in her bloodline. She asked me if I drove like an old man. On and on, and so, when I heard her voice, heard her warn me she was hanging up on me, and the fact that she would not listen to my concerns about a client who complained about shorted checks for a janitorial job we were not managing for him, I knew it was time to go.

Oregon’s judges:

So, this is my thinking — it was a just cause quit, to use the parlance of the dirty Unemployment Insurance/Employment Department lingo.

A job at $20 an hour, benefits like health insurance and PTO, and, I was expecting to be there for two years, three? But, for my physical health and mental health, bye-bye toxic and unprofessional people and organization. I was thinking this would be a legit quit making me eligible for some pittance of unemployment, as in $180 a week. Covid benefits had ended last November. Quitting or termination from a job after only one month looks bad to the future employers. Age 65, now, and alas, living in a rural county, and here we are, I am dead in the water as a worker, a man, a contributor to “society.”

Then, the application for Unemployment Insurance. Hoops to jump through (easy), and then applying for jobs as part of the deal. Then, the hell of Idiots Rule, the Bureaucrats. The adjudicator was unprofessional, taking my statements in his home (Zoom Doom), I heard him drawing on cig after cig, and he had to tell me he was gay, a real liberal (he thought I was a liberal — fucking comedy hour: Read, Communist!). Real bizarre. Real Portland Bizarro

The bastards got my story, and this dude had to get my statements over a span of three phone calls. He went off topic beyond stupidity, but he found against me: not eligible for UI, unemployment insurance. Then, I had to file an appeal.

That was more hell, and three hours with a judge (sic) and the HR director came on the line. Five days later, the judge, again, found against me.

Then, an appeal of the appeal through the Employment Appeals Board. That entailed sending in any additional information, to both the Board and the former employer.

Forty days later, again, two out of three judges (the 3rd one was not present to hear my appeal) found against me. They predicate that I had opportunities to deal with the issues I was dealing with through, yep, the HR, which was, again, part of the clique. The Executive Director was already on his way out, heading for another nonprofit ED position in the same place, Coos Bay.

Now, there is an appeal of the appeal through the state Appellate Court, but that entails a $391 filing fee. Yep, money to keep these blue state bureaucrats paid.

Irony after irony is that I have been employed to help homeless or developmental disabled to navigate systems of rents, medical needs, employment, and getting through the paperwork hell. I have helped some with their unemployment claims, and to get the Veterans Administration to find they have service – connected disabilities so they might get a few hundred bucks a month from Uncle Sam.

These are the systems of oppression and penury. This is the system that will never be discussed with gusto in mainstream and left-stream media. This is the system of holding people down and keeping worthless humans in jobs that are the opposite of humane and human.

Now now, this is not a spilled milk screed, hyperbolic and completely insignificant just because the world is falling apart, Ukrainians are being blowing apart by ZioLensky, and wildfires are rampant, toxicity out the roof, housing homicidal, billionaires drunk on power. This is foundational, readers of DV. Yep, amazing writers here talking about Boris Johnson, lots about Roe v Wade, lots on “the global economies” and tons on Ukraine and the EU and UK and global “situations.” Climate change, climate fatigue, climate chaos in a climate of fear and Stockholm Syndrome.

It starts locally, at the city and county level, at the state level. We (citizens) are here for a broken system of planned dysfunction, planned obsolescence, planned homicide to sputter ahead, to keep the bad people in jobs and the rest of us at their whim(s).

Oregon’s lovely housing opportunities:

Oregon’s growing business opportunities:

Here, one is title by yours truly: “One Degree of Separation: There Will be Parasitic Capitalism’s Blood“

But specifically here is one about this shit-hole nonprofit and my right to quit and the rationale for it: “Quitting is a Mental Health Decision”

So, more shouts into the wilderness, flailing against the windmills of the Byzantine world of state policies, and rationalizations spewed toward the middle managers, the professional office class, the cogs in the systems of pain and begging and absurdity.

Oregon’s seasonal recreation and employment — smoke jumpers:

My letter to the two hearing board people: Nothing fancy, nothing a lawyer would write. But life sucks, no, when you don’t have the shekels to pay for criminal lawyers?

Oregon:

To an uncaring two-person appeals board – Hettle and Steger-Bentz:

I wholeheartedly see this decision as both incompetence and lack of empathy. Citing that I as the employee had recourse to not quit a highly toxic work environment shows the lack of creed you have. You are not in the know about non-profits, about the developmental disabilities case management realm. You have no idea how toxic those small nonprofits can get. The new case manager, as I was, had no connection to the actual main office and all of those inner workings of their clique. I had no recourse to thrive or do well at this job after I was hung up on by the supervisor. I had already for a month dealt with her unprofessional commentary and her racist remarks. That was the culture there, and citing some sort of recourse I might have had with the HR head is inane.

This is not a state or county agency with a more developed culture of workplace stability and professionalism.

You have no street creed or ground truthing when it comes to workplace cultures.

This outfit, Bay Area Enterprises, is shoddy, highly unprofessional, and alas, the rationale given in your wrong-headed decision is faulty: I did not have just cause to quit. Absurd. I needed to get out of a toxic and uncompromising situation. You are fools to think there was another option. You are overpaid State bureaucrats with little sense of the real workplaces workers in Oregon have to submit to. Do you realize that this small company, new to me, is all about insider cliques? That my immediate supervisor and the HR head work in the same office, 80 miles from where I was assigned? That the executive director left the company a week after my complaints, so he was already on the outs. That the executive director and the immediate supervisor I was worked in the same office and were in constant discussion back and forth about employee x and employee y? That there are prejudicial allegiances made under those circumstances?

I was hung up on by my supervisor. She was in the office where the HR director and the ED work. My immediate motion for self-preservation was to resign. Indeed, your bureaucratic mentality is what I teach my students in colleges (and some in K12 as a substitute) to not only watch out for, but to rail against, and challenge. In this case, I went through the Oregon state hoops designed to assist companies to get out of paying some of the unemployment insurance. The system is rigged in favor of the employer.

You are at fault for this decision, for not taking into account a deeper sense of the workplace, that workplace I was in. In no away was I going to put myself through mental and emotional hell by putting up with the situation I have already laid out. You can sit back and lord over workers, making the same tired decision that occurred first by the Unemployment adjudicator, then by the appeals hearing judge. Here we are, now, a faceless board of three with one absent making the same wrong decision.

Now, for me to take this to the next level of appeal would require more state rip-off fees — $391 to file. This is why the average person has no faith in the State of Oregon’s so-called agencies for the people. You are dead wrong in denying me unemployment,  and your titles, whatever they might be in this sense, are not worth the paper I am printing this letter on.

Shame on you, and, well, this is another teachable and journalistic moment for me but it doesn’t compensate for the time and effort I put in filing unemployment weekly, and looking for work in this  county where I live. I will rail against this system, your decision and the process that was so protracted. You will not feel shame because I suspect you are wired to not have empathy when it comes to these cases that indeed are just cause for quitting. Nuance is not something you three probably have as human characteristics.

And so I have to pay for that lack of humanity.

Disrespectfully, Paul Haeder

 

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

“As far as I’m concerned, those people don’t exist.”

— Arizona Republican Governor Jack Williams, telling farm workers they’d be arrested if they were to strike and boycott during harvest seasons (May 1972).

May Day harkens back to celebrations of spring, a renewal and fertility. In Rome, I witnessed one such event: the festival of Floralia, where people wear colorful clothes and were pelted with beans and flowers (fertility symbols).

I was in Edinburgh and celebrated their May Day around a bonfire: The Celts welcomed spring during Beltane by lighting bonfires or the ‘fire of Belt.’ My partner and I even danced around a Maypole and watched the crowning of a May Queen.

However, my most meaningful celebrations for May Day tie into my family’s union roots. This day is about workers’ rights, which should be embedded in everyone’s blood in this country, post-COVID and with the growing gap between those who have and those who do not.

I’ve worked with Portland warehouse workers as their case manager, and many of them I met were either in mini-vans or broken down RVs. These are workers toiling 10 or 12-hour shifts. Some had two jobs just to make ends meet, sleeping in vehicles.

Going back 170 years, the eight-hour work day movement fanned across the world, aiming to reduce the working day from 10 to eight hours. In 1886, the first congress of the American Federation of Labor called for a general strike on May 1 to demand an eight-hour day, which culminated in what is known today as the Haymarket Riot.

On May 3, 1886, one person was killed and several others injured as police intervened to protect strikebreakers and intimidate strikers during a union action at the Chicago McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. It was part of a national campaign to secure an eight-hour workday. Then, a day later, anarchist labor leaders called a mass meeting in Haymarket Square to protest police brutality.

It was a peaceful gathering, even by Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison’s observation. But after Harrison and most of the demonstrators departed, a large group of police arrived and demanded that the crowd disperse. A bomb was thrown by an individual — never positively identified — and police responded with random gunfire. Seven police officers were killed and 60 others wounded before the violence ended; civilian casualties have been estimated at four to eight dead and 30 to 40 injured.

Employers regained control of workers, and 10 or more hour workdays became the norm again.

My May Day March participation includes Tucson, El Paso, Mexico City, Spokane, Seattle, Portland. I’ve marched with day laborers in Oregon demanding higher hourly pay, and I’ve marched with nuns, priests and other clergy in El Paso demanding worker rights for immigrant farm workers.

May Day for me is about that American sacred right to protest, right to free speech, and the right to gather and call out the powerful, the elite, the bosses.

Of course, I was always aware of heavy police presence, always aware of the negative mainstream media coverage.

Today, as Starbucks and Amazon workers are voting for unionization, many Americans are oblivious to the degradation of the workplace and the lack of real opportunities for young people to find gainful, sustainable and worthy employment.

Young and old — many with college degrees, and many with huge student loan debts — are finding a collective voice in setting up unions in order to demand fair wages, safe work environments and an end to the boss lording over their lives.

When I was an organizer for the Service Employees International Union, Local 925-Seattle, my work was around adjunct faculty. I had been a freeway flyer. I worked in Washington, Texas and Oregon as a part-time faculty. Low wages, countless hours of unpaid work (I was an English faculty so essays and tons of other writing assignments I took home for weekend reading/commenting/grading blitzes), no benefits and no guarantee of work semester to semester resonated with me.

I always saw myself as a worker, not as some professor or multiple college degreed highfalutin elite. Part of my work was with students of migrant farm worker parents, as well as organizing service workers — CNAs and others laboring as caregivers.

Many of my union brothers and sisters were from Somalia, Eritrea and Mexico. Working for pay on 24-hour shifts, these amazing immigrants were both first and last line of defense for aging and dying-in-place clients.

I talked to one terminal white woman, Gloria, who was in a foster care facility at the tune of $4,600 a month. She told me that her main caregiver, Mehret from Eritrea, not only bathed, fed and took her to doctor’s appointments, but Mehret celebrated Gloria’s birthday with her own Eritrean family, and even had Gloria come to her extended family’s gatherings.

“I will die with Mehret by my side. My own children haven’t seen me in a year. They pay for this care, but have no interest in an old cranky dying mother. Mehret is my only friend, my only family.”

Mehret got $12 an hour, and she had to pass dozens of classes to keep up her credentials. Many of Mehret’s family members were harassed by Seattle police and other law enforcement agencies for “driving while black.”

We need more labor history, more media coverage of workers, and more Americans pushing for the 8-8-8 day: eight hours of work, eight hours with family/community, eight hours of sleep.

If you haven’t already read the book, then check out Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.

It’s all about how Americans are working themselves to death. Literally. Unions can stop that. Happy May 1!

++Note: Appeared first in Newport News Times, April 29, 2022!++

And a side note — try and catch Johnny Depp (yes, that fool) in the movie, Minimata, about Chisso factory and the mercury poisoning of Japanese, young and old and fetuses.

At the end of the flick, you get a short run down of the industrial “accidents” that killed thousand immediately and then many others through time.

Fifty years after American photographer W. Eugene Smith first arrived in the Japanese port town of Minamata, the fight for recognition and compensation still continues, for scores of people poisoned by mercury dumped into the bay by a local factory.

Aileen Mioko Smith, Eugene’s Japanese-American wife and collaborator, hopes that the September screening of the film Minamata will once again shine a light on the case, which was one of the worst industrial pollution disasters in Japanese history.

Nearly half a century later, victims of the mercury poisoning are still trying to obtain full restitution from the national government, although 2,265 people, 1,784 of whom died, have been formally recognized as victims of the disease. In 2004, Chisso also paid compensation totalling $86 million (€70.7 million).

“There are 10 ongoing lawsuits against the prefectural government in Kumamoto and the national government,” said Smith. “These are people who were toddlers 50 years ago when they were exposed to this pollution. They have gone through the lower courts and some of these cases are now before the Supreme Court, but I do not think we will have a final decision before the end of this year.”

“The government has always refused to carry out a full epidemiological study of the impact of the poisoning, and that can only be because they do not want to know,” Smith added. “So these are people who have lived with this their whole lives, and they are still fighting.” (Source)

Here we go, more disasters of capitalism. Who pays the price? Workers, and those living around or near those facilities, or sometimes, those living and working thousands of miles away:

Bhopal

Chernobyl

BP Oil Spill, Gulf of Mexico

1952 London Great Fog

Dust Bowl 1920s-’30s, USA

For more on the “films” depicting corporate wrong-doing, go to the book, Corporate Wrongdoing on Film: The ‘Public Be Damned’ by Kenneth Dowler, Daniel Antonowicz

Fukushima, anyone?

And the workers helping release those millions of gallons of radioactive water? How will they be treated? Consequences? And us, the global citizen? Did we vote on this?

In April, the Japanese government announced its formal decision that the treated water stored at the Fukushima Daiichi site will be discharged into the sea. Japan intends to start releasing the treated water around the Spring of 2023, and the entire operation could last for decades.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Dear Barbara,

I hope that my email finds you and Bruce in good health and doing fine.

I will try to answer your interesting questions, please note that my answers are from my personal point of view, it is built on daily observations, readings, talking to different people, and even watching tv now and then, with no pretenses whatsoever.

How would you characterize the class structure in Russia in terms of upper class, upper-middle class, middle class, and working class?

The super-rich and oligarchs: This thin social layer is an entity by itself, it owns assets and shares in the big companies, banks and financial institutions. There is an uneasy peace between them and the government that regularly gathers them and “politely” reminds them of their social responsibilities and where their riches came from. They are at the present untouchable due to the fact that some of them are on boards of companies belonging to the state or near persons holding high positions in the government. That is when the political situation becomes corruptible.

The upper-middle class include the upper echelons of the government bureaucracy, the top management of companies, banks and financial institutions and people holding valuable assets (immovable and moveable). There is very little upward movement, the danger of moving downwards exists.

The middle class: mostly concentrated in the cities, professionals, engineers, teachers, doctors, small lawyers, office workers, shop owners, and small businessmen.  This is a relatively new class for Russia. Dynamic with porous boundaries, the danger of slipping to its lower level is higher than making a leap into its higher level or to the upper-middle class.

The working class is the most interesting and complex class. The classic working class person is in the military industrial complex, metallurgy, auto industry, oil and gas, power generation, and all types of transportation.  The upper classes make a point of a pretense of treating them well which includes salaries, perks and bonuses. Construction is a big part of the economy. Skilled workers are mainly Russians or citizens of the Russian Federation. There is a big part of the low skill jobs that are done by migrants from republics of what once was the Soviet Union. Their numbers are significant, including, janitors and, delivery workers.  They mostly do not integrate and hold on to their religion (mostly Muslim). Some of them are involved in misdemeanors and crimes, which are blown up and generalized to a whole nation or region. This is a sharp weapon in the hands of the authorities, pitting the migrants against locals. There is much more to be said but I will leave it for other occasions.

How do the different classes feel about “The Oligarchs” (billionaires in Russia) – do they think they deserve what they have?

I am afraid that my reply to this question is going to be a short one because there are no ambiguities or subtleties. Once again in my opinion it is not just a matter of class but a nearly unanimous negative attitude, especially from the working and middle classes and even from some of the upper classes. The Communists and left are just itching to nationalize some industries or at least have a better tax law. Fortunately, the majority of the people see the oligarchs as acquiring their fortunes like in Gustave Myers book History of Great American Fortunes as not having earned it.

What’s the range of differences in how the Russian people see the American people?

The range is narrow, and it does not depend on class.  Rather, it depends on age and the change in subtle things like music, art, and clothing.  I think that the average Russian attitude is negative, this is especially true for people older than 25 years. It is also a reaction to the US and western policies in demonizing and humiliating the Russian people. A western person a priori thinks that he is superior, and this not only on official state levels but in the mentality of the ordinary person. It is ubiquitous in art, literature, and Hollywood. From Harry Truman to Joe Biden nothing much has changed.

The Russian reaction was predictable, I am now mentioning daily stuff – not high politics or economics. It all started by making fun of the Americans and their ignorance about the history and geography of Russia, as well as their traditions and literature. Allow me to tell you one of the more famous stories of a well-known comedian (Mikhail Zadornov) who passed away not so long ago.

A Russian is traveling to the US to visit his friend, at the customs when they open his suitcase, they find a bunch of small branches (around 50 cm) tied together. The inspectors immediately are very suspicious. The Russian tries to explain that these branches are for the Sauna where they dip them in water and lightly hit each other (this is the Russian way and Sauna for some is like a religion, they can talk endlessly about which trees should be chosen for the best smell). The inspector’s eyes become like saucers. “This guy is not only a narcotic maniac, he is also sadomasochistic.”

I am not being flippant. I just want to show that ignorance and prejudice from nuclear policy to sauna lead us to making stupid decisions.

At the present the majority of the Russians, as a reaction to all the Russophobia, sanctions against any kind of activity, from industry and science to art and sport have really stiffened their stance against Americans. There is a set of people, belonging to the TV, cinema as well as some economists, and sports celebrities who are pro-western, which is not exactly pro American.  Anyway, many of them have left Russia after the beginning of the conflict with Ukraine. I should point out that in a real capitalistic society, a filmmaker or a painter is on his own in making his life. In Russia the majority receive help from the government on a regular basis. It is especially galling to the Russian taxpayer, who thinks his money is being wasted on someone who curses his country.

The Russians reacted coolly to the departure of US brands of fast food and clothes. This left many Americans wondering. Russia is not what it was in the 1990s. This is a different time. Russians now bring up their children not to eat fast food and drink soda pop (not always successfully), just like any sane parent in the US would do.

How do the different classes in Russia feel about China?

I do not think it is just a matter of classes. Defining how the Russians feel about China should be according to a number of factors that would include class. At the present there are two more or less evident trends. The first trend is supported by the state, the left, Communists and some of the nationalists who support strong ties with China on many levels. The Russians want to be sure that the Chinese have their backs through the Chinese Silk Road project and the Russian oil and gas supply to China. The liberals and pro-westerners try to find fault in any Chinese initiative.

However, all that being said, there is the human, psychological factor that broadly affects a significant number of Russians. There are cases when it is definitive and that is race. Many Russians, as most Europeans, cannot easily rid themselves of their racism that appeared after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They see themselves as superior and have been taken in by the western propaganda. The ignorance and prejudice regarding Russia about China is colossal in dimension.  Culture and humanitarian sciences are Eurocentric. The Yellow Peril of the early 20th century is alive and well. Anti-Chinese propagandists love to bring up the border conflict that took place in 1969 between the Soviet Union and China.

The Russian Far East regions have a special relationship with China. There are some that welcome trade and financial possibilities while others are afraid that they would swamp their region and take it over. The Chinese buy unprocessed Russian timber from Siberia, and some of the local producers are eager to do this because they get paid in US dollars. The government frowns upon this, and a lot of commotion is raised. Despite their racism, the upper-class businessman is still eager to do business with China. The average man is wary and cautious. It is only the incomprehensible, myopic, bone-headed American foreign policy that is driving Russians to overcome their racism and have more sympathy for the Chinese.

How do the different classes feel about the European continent around the natural gas issue?

Soviet gas reached Germany in 1973 and each side signed a contract for 20 years, after lengthy negotiations. The German side noted that in spite of the different ideologies, all the procedures were very business-like. Since then, the Soviet, and afterwards the Russian supply of gas continued more or less smoothly to Germany and most European countries as well. Countries that have natural resources to sell as a policy diversify their routes of outlet. Just by taking a look at any modern map of gas or pipelines of nearly every producing country one can notice that. Therefore, Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines were logical and legitimate, especially if your pipeline passes through territory that is unstable.

The prevailing opinion about Europeans and gas supply has been formed by the fact that Europe has blocked Russian assets that are counted in hundreds of billion dollars, besides stopping the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The Russians took a step from their side, dividing the countries that they were supplying with gas into “friendly” and “unfriendly”. The friendly would continue to pay in US dollars or euros while the unfriendly that had blocked Russian assets would pay in Russian rubles. Although the contracts were in US dollars, Russia decided that blocking their assets was a force majeure clause, and they therefore took this step to defend their interests. It is not so much a class issue as it is an issue that affects nearly the whole nation. The majority of the Russians are fed up with Europe, with the gas issue and all the holier-than-thou attitude of nations filled up to their elbows in the blood of the people of the Third World as well.

With affection and respect

HCE

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by HCE.

The Great Upheaval grew out of their intuitive sense that they needed each other, had the support of each other, and together were powerful. This sense of unity was not embodied in any centralized plan or leadership, but in the feelings and action of each participant.

— Jeremy Brecher, Strike! 1972

Although Critical Race Theory is now at the forefront of political debate, American history has often been about forgetting the events of its valiant labor past.

Following the crash of 1873, by July 1877 America was still deep in the depression. The previous year the total revenues of America’s railroads fell by $5.8 million. But they still raised profits to $186 million and managed to present shareholders with 10% dividends.

As Philip S. Foner noted in The Great Labor Uprising Of 1877, the railroads reduced workers’ pay by an average of 21%-37%. The Baltimore & Ohio reduced its staff’s pay by 50%.

Working people had to strike to provide for their families. They could no longer endure the misery. The Great Railroad Strike began on July 13 at  Martinsburg, West Virginia and the strike quickly spread across many parts of the United States, at times taking on the appearance of an insurrection. There were widespread attacks on rail company property. In St Louis workers’ committees and general assemblies began running things and gender and color differences were put aside. The strikes went beyond the grievances held by the railroad workers and grew into a campaign for the Eight-Hour-Day. 1877 was also the year that the army was withdrawn from the ex-Confederate states, leaving the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize the former slaves and impose the Jim Crow regime. Instead, the military was sent to put down the workers’ strikes.

East St Louis General Strike

Largely organized by the Knights of Labor and the Workingmen’s Party, in East St Louis on July 22, train workers held meetings calling for pay rises but they adopted a series of radical resolutions:

Whereas, The United States government has allied itself on the side of capital and against labor; therefore,

Resolved, That we, the workingmen’s party of the United States, heartily sympathize with the employees of all the railroads in the country who are attempting to secure just and equitable reward for their labor.

Resolved, That we will stand by them in this most righteous struggle of labor against robbery and oppression, through good and evil report, to the end of the struggle.

When the strike began, within hours strikers had taken control of the city.

One speaker declared:

All you have to do, gentlemen, for you have the numbers, is to unite on one idea – that workingmen shall rule the country. What man makes, belongs to him, and the workingmen made this country.

At one rally a black man asked, “Will you stand to us regardless of color?” and the audience responded resolutely, “We will”.

24th of July then saw 350 federal troops arrive, reinforced by a further 450 soldiers on the 25th and more were to come. The city’s 360 strong police force was augmented by a “Citizens” vigilante organization of at least 1,500 armed men and they too were to grow in strength. The strike ended when troops and deputized special police killed at least eighteen people in skirmishes around the city.

On July 28, 1877, they seized the strikers’ operations center, and arrested seventy strikers. With their leadership imprisoned, the strike movement lost momentum and the wage cuts were enforced, with many hundreds of strikers dismissed from their jobs.

David Burbank, in his January 1, 1966 book, Reign of the Rabble: the St. Louis General Strike, 1877 (also called The St. Louis Commune), wrote:

Only around St. Louis did the original strike on the railroads expand into such a systematically organized and complete shut-down of all industry that the term general strike is fully justified. And only there did the socialists assume undisputed leadership…no American city has come so close to being ruled by a workers’ soviet, as we would now call it, as St. Louis, Missouri, in the year 1877. [his emphasis]

The aftermath of July produced the Veiled Prophet Organization, a racist secret society, complete with KKK-style regalia, that comprised of St. Louis elite as an expression of the fear felt by the solidarity between white and black workers.

Pittsburgh

On Thursday, July 19, railroad workers brought train traffic to a halt. Iron and steel workers, miners, and many others, joined the industrial action. The National Guard was mobilised but the authorities recognized that they could not be relied upon.

“Situation in Pittsburgh is becoming dangerous. Troops are in sympathy, in some instances, with the strikers. Can you rely on yours?” said a request by the local commander to higher command.

Many of the Pittsburgh town police and its local militia had sided with the strikers and were refusing to take action against them. Reinforcements were rushed in from Philadelphia and they were far less friendly towards the strikers. In an attempt to disperse a crowd, someone was bayoneted. Protesters retaliated with stones and shot pistols at the troops who returned fire and bayonet charged. When the fighting ceased, an estimated 20 men, women and children had been killed.

The news of the shooting spread. A gun manufacturer was looted and rifles and small-arms were taken by the strikers while gun-stores were broken into for more weapons.

The Philadelphian units found themselves overwhelmed and they retreated but, in due course, fresh detachments from Philadelphia arrived, in addition to federal troops, and they managed to regain control. The exchanges had resulted in 53 strikers killed and eight soldiers.

Scranton

Whereas, we, the employees of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Company, believe that we are not getting a just remuneration for our labor or a sufficient supply for ourselves and families of the common necessaries of life, therefore Resolved, That we demand twenty-five per cent advance on the present rate of wages; also it is further Resolved, That with a refusal of these demands all work will be abandoned from date, as we have willingly submitted to the reduction and without murmur or resistance and finding that it now fails us to live as becomes citizens of a civilized Nation we take these steps in order to supply ourselves and little ones with the necessaries of life.¹

The strike began on July 23 when railroad workers walked off the job in protest of recent wage cuts. Railway workers were joined in the strike by coal miners, iron mill workers, and within three days it grew to include thousands of workers from a variety of industries. The employers and city officials responded with the creation of a vigilante force called “Scranton Citizen Corps.”

Violence erupted on August 1 after strikers attacked the town’s mayor, and then clashed with local militia, leaving four dead and many more wounded whereupon State and federal troops were called in to impose martial law.

Reading

There’s an army of strikers,
Determined you’ll see,
Who will fight corporations
Till the Country is free.

The chant of the crowd.

Another of the battlegrounds was in Reading, Pennsylvania, where the boss of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and Coal and Iron Company, Franklin Gowen, had already proved himself to be anti-worker and anti-union.

Reading Railroad was the biggest mine company in the Anthracite region. When it lowered mining wages to 54% of their 1869 level, miners began the “Long Strike” of 1875, lasting 170 days,  but the company had stockpiled enough coal to outlast the strike and crushed the miners’ union.

It also accused leaders of being part of the “Molly Maguires” allegedly assassinating company officials. Beginning in June 1877, 20 “Molly Maguires” were executed — often despite strong evidence of innocence and Catholics and Irish excluded from juries. The Reading Railroad later twice lowered miners’ wages by 10-15% between 1876 and 1877.

As for the railroad workers, the company demanded they desert the union and join the company’s insurance plan which they would lose if they stopped working. In defiance, the trainmen went on strike in April 1877. They were replaced with inexperienced scabs who caused many accidents. Nevertheless, it finished the Brotherhood of Railroad Engineers with most of its members dismissed and blacklisted by the company.

As a precaution on July 23, the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Police, the railroad’s private police force, arrived in Reading, along with the 4th Pennsylvania Volunteer Militia which was asked by the railroad to release a train being blocked by protesters. As the 4th marched along the tracks in the dark they were stoned by a crowd. The soldiers opened fire and left between 10 and 16 dead, and between 37 and 50 injured.

16th Regiment Mutiny

Several companies of the 16th militia regiment from Conshohocken, arrived; however, many supported the strikers.

General Reeder, commander of the 4th, telegraphed to his superior explaining his predicament:

My situation is not improved by the arrival of the Sixteenth regiment, which is very disaffected. The Fourth is becoming anxious, and is also very much exhausted. Should have reliable troops, without delay…The Sixteenth regiment is furnishing the strikers with ammunition and openly declare their intention to join the rioters in case of trouble. If troops do not reach us by dark, I cannot vouch for the safety of the city, or my power to hold the depot. Stir heaven and earth to forward reliable and fresh troops.

16th soldiers began deserting and fraternalizing with the strikers, sharing in the animosity towards the 4th over the killings of the previous night.

In the words of one member of the militia:

We may be militiamen, but we are workmen first.

There was a real and growing risk of an open fight between the 16th and the 4th  and as a precaution before leaving for Reading himself, General Bolton telegraphed the State Adjutant General, “Have United States troops sent to Reading at once. Portion of the Sixteenth regiment are about revolting and joining the strikers”.

Angry crowds had again gathered, and they again threw stones at the 4th; however, when some in the 4th aimed their rifles, the 16th shouted to them not to shoot while some handed over their arms and ammunition to the crowd. The 16th also warned that if the 4th fired on the crowd, the 16th would fire on them.

On the 24th of July, all militia troops were withdrawn, replaced by three hundred regular soldiers to ensure the Coal and Iron Police had control of the town.

The Battle of the Viaduct

In Chicago, on the 26th of July at the Halstead Viaduct, strikers and protesters refused to disperse and street fights began with the police who were reinforced by militia and regular troops. At least, thirty workers died, many being mere boys, and up to two hundred were wounded.

There were many other minor engagements with the employers such as Shamokin. On July 25, a day after the miners at the Shamokin’s Big Mountain Colliery demanded “Food or Work” and protested a 10 percent pay cut, the urban revolt arrived when the town’s Reading Railroad’s depot was sacked and looted. A citizens militia ordered the crowd to disperse. The crowd refused and was fired upon with many being wounded

Conclusion

Was it an insurrection? Could it be called a labor revolution, a civil war between labor and capital? Or merely the work of a mob of rioters?

In Chicago, workers marched through the streets to shouts of “Bread or Blood,” a slogan from the recent Paris Commune, and it instilled fear into the business community.

Writing to Engels on the 25th July 1877, Marx described it as the “first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War ” and predicted that although it would be suppressed, it “could very well be the starting point for the establishment of a serious labour party in the United States.”

Many thought as Marx that 1877 had acted like a catalyst.

The Workingmen’s Party of the United States the following year reformed itself as the Socialist[ic] Labor Party

Two-thirds of America’s seventy-five thousand miles of railroad track had been affected by the strikes. Millions of dollars worth of railroad property had been burned down, blown up or torn apart. And, for the first time in U.S. history, federal troops had been deployed in force to crush strikers.

In the aftermath, National Guard units proliferated. In many states and cities, armories, thick-walled citadels, were constructed in case anything like 1877 happened again. What was “poor men in uniform, fighting poor men in overalls” the local capitalists restructured the National Guard so they were now chosen from the well-to-do to ensure their class loyalty.

The July uprisings had shown the workers their strength and in the future, they would learn how to use it. It was a period in history, albeit short-lived and with varying degrees of success, when working people held power in their hands.

In 1877, the same year blacks learned they did not have enough strength to make real the promise of equality in the Civil War, working people learned they were not united enough, not powerful enough, to defeat the combination of private capital and government power.

— Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1980

Further online reading²

1. Scranton general strike – Wikiquote
2. The great railroad strike, 1877 – Howard Zinn (libcom.org); and The great upheaval of 1877 – Jeremy Brecher (libcom.org).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Alan Johnstone.

It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.

The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq was whitewashed. That is why the images now being brought to the public by the corporate media are so shocking. It has been more than two generations since the U.S. public was exposed to the horrific images of war.

In the 1960s the rulers inadvertently allowed themselves to be undermined by the new television technology that brought the awful reality of imperialist war into the homes of the public. Now, the ruling class operating through its corporate media propaganda arms has been effectively using Ukraine war propaganda, not to increase Anti-war sentiment but to stimulate support for more war!

Incredibly also, the propagandists are pushing a line that essentially says that in the name of “freedom” and supporting Ukraine, the U.S. public should shoulder the sacrifice of higher fuel and food prices. This is on top of the inflation that workers and consumers were already being subjected to coming out of the capitalist covid scandal that devastated millions of workers and the lower stratums of the petit bourgeoisie.

But the war, and now the unfair shouldering of all of the costs of the capitalist crisis of 2008 – 2009, and the impact of covid by the working classes in the U.S., amounts to a capitalist tax. It is levied by the oligarchy on workers to subsidize the defense of the interests of big capital and the conditions that have produced obscene profits, even in the midst of the covid crisis and now, the Ukraine war.

These policies are criminal. While the U.S. continues to pretend that it champions human rights around the world, the failure of the state to protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens and residents in the U.S. is obvious to all, but spoken about by the few, except the Chinese government.

For those who might think that the Chinese criticism of the U.S. is only being driven by politics, and it might be,  just a cursory, objective examination of the U.S. state policies over just the last few years reveals a shocking record of systematic human rights abuses that promise to become even more acute as a consequence of the manufactured U.S./NATO war in Ukraine.

The Ongoing Human Rights Crisis

The U.S. working class, and Black working class in particular, never recovered from the economic crisis of 2008 before it was once again ravaged in 2020 with the global capitalist crisis exacerbated by covid. On the heels of those two shocks, today millions of workers are experiencing a permanent state of precarity with evictions, the continued loss of medical coverage, unaffordable housing and food costs, and a capitalist-initiated inflation. The rulers are operating under the belief that with the daily bombardment of war images, U.S. workers and the poor will embrace rising costs of gas and even more increases in the cost of food.

Doesn’t the state have any responsibility to ensure that the economic human rights of the people are fulfilled? No, because liberal human rights practice separates fundamental human rights – such as the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and life-long social security – from democratic discourse on what constitutes the human rights responsibility of the state and the interests it must uphold in order to be legitimate.

The non-recognition of the indivisibility of human rights that values economic human rights to an equal level as civil and political rights, exposed the moral and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment, and unnecessary deaths among the population in the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., were never condemned as violations of human rights.

War and Economic Deprivation the Systemic Contradictions of the Western colonial/capitalist Project

The war being waged against global humanity by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is a hybrid war that utilizes all the tools it has at its disposal – sanctions, mass incarceration, coups, drugs, disinformation, culture, subversion, murder, and direct military engagement to further white power. The Eurocentrism and “White Lives Matters More Movement” represented by the coverage of the war in Ukraine stripped away any pretense to the supposed liberal commitment to global humanity. The white-washing of the danger of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and state and the white ethno-nationalism that the conflict generated across the Western world demonstrated, once again, how “racialism” and the commitment to the fiction of white supremacy continues to trump class and class struggle and the ability to build a multi-national, class based anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist opposition in the North.

It is primarily workers from Russia, the Donbas and Ukraine who are dying. But as in the run-up to the first imperialist war in Europe, known as World War One, workers with the encouragement of their national bourgeoisie, are lining up behind their rulers to support the capitalist redivision taking place, a redivision that can only be completed by war as long as capitalism and capitalist competition continues. Yet, instead of “progressives and radicals” joining forces to resist the mobilization to war, they are finding creative ways to align themselves with the interests of their ruling classes in support of the colonial/capitalist project.

In the meantime, the people of Afghanistan are starving, with thousands of babies now dying of malnutrition because the U.S. stole their nation’s assets. Estimates suggest that unless reversed, more people there will die from U.S./EU imposed sanctions than died during the twenty year long war. And the impact of the war in Ukraine with the loss of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia resulting not only in rising food prices globally but in some places like East Africa, resulting in death from famine.

In the U.S. where we witness the most abysmal record of covid failure on the planet, the virus will continue to ravage the population, with a disproportionate number who get sick and die being the poorest and those furthest from whiteness.

The lackeys of capital playing the role of democratic representatives claim that there is no money to bring a modicum of relief to workers represented in the mildly reformist package known as Build Back Better. Yet, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that the wars waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with another $8 trillion that will be spent over the next ten years on the military budget if costs remain constant from the $778 billion just allocated.

No rational human being desires war and conflict. The horrors of war that the public are finally being exposed to because it was brought to Europe again, the most violent continent on the planet, should call into question all of the brutal and unjustified wars that the U.S. and its flunky allies waged throughout the global South over the last seventy years. Unfortunately, because of the hierarchy of the value of human beings, the images of war in Ukraine are not translating into a rejection of war, but instead a rejection of war in Europe and on white Europeans.

This means that the wars will continue and we must fight, often alone, because as Bob Marley said in his song “War”:

Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned
Everywhere is war
Me say war

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ajamu Baraka.

Never in my imagination, just five years ago even, would I have figured I’d be here, that is, stuck in the USA, blessed to be in a relationship (it’s good, but again, people in my life do need me somewhat sane to handle varying degrees of their own trauma), and pigeon-holed as a malcontent who is also unemployable.

The fact that people in the fields I venture into are less than middling, and the fact that lives hang in the balance tied to vax mandates, and forced boosters, and proof of mRNA life (I hear people, through the fog of the propaganda madmen, that mRNA a la Pfizer and Moderna, is better than the J & J, Janssen, which is not the same vax, but is now being discontinued. Imagine, J & J was a single dose experimental jab, but the Mengele actors in the CDC and Big Pharma move the goal posts daily so J & J single dose, has to be seconded to be a full-vax record —  after a five month lapse between the two. However, the J & J is cancelled, no more manufacturing, so anyone trying to stay away from mRNA now, after their one shot of J & J has to submit to a completely different platform for this SARS-CoV2 mass experimentation game).

These are experimental. The blasphemy is, a, forced vaccinations on everyone, no discussion about the alternatives, or the safety; then, forcing these on youth, age six months; then, the lack of choice of all the vaxxes around the world, including China’s and Cuba’s; then, complete liability for death and injury for the big Pharma thugs; then, of course, we, the taxpayer foot the bill for R & D, for the salaries of these thieves, and then we buy the vials, and when they are contaminated, or when they expire, we end up watching 30 million doses down the drain, and then we, the taxpayer, foot the bill for the replacements. Money and more money, that is the planne pandemic.

Pre-Planned Demic — forced vaccinations for college students, and then, how many for kids going to kindergarten, K12, have to be vaxxxed? Then, the HPV, and I have written about that here —

“My Fate as a Social Worker Sealed by a Vaccine named Gardasil”

“Death by a Thousand Cuts: When the Cures of Big Pharma are Worse than the Diseases”

I got screwed, blued and tatooed by the powers that be. Big Pharma, Planned Parenthood and the nonprofit industrial complex. Try that out for size!

So, what is in the discontinued Johnson & Johnson (J&J)/Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine?

Ingredients:

The J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine contains a piece of a modified virus that is not the virus that causes COVID-19. This modified virus is called the vector virus. The vector virus cannot reproduce itself, so it cannot cause COVID-19. This vector virus gives instructions to cells in the body to create an immune response. This response helps protect you from getting sick with COVID-19 in the future. After the body produces an immune response, it gets rid of all of the vaccine ingredients just as it would discard any information that cells no longer need. This process is a part of normal body functioning.

Full list of ingredients: The J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine contains the following ingredients:

A harmless version of a virus unrelated to the COVID-19 virus: Recombinant, replication-incompetent Ad26 vector, encoding a stabilized variant of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike (S) protein. Provides instructions the body uses to build a harmless piece of a protein from the virus that causes COVID-19. This protein causes an immune response that helps protect the body from getting sick with COVID-19 in the future.

Sugars, salts, acid, and acid stabilizer:

• Polysorbate-80
• 2-hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin
• Trisodium citrate dihydrate
• Sodium chloride (basic table salt)
• Citric acid monohydrate (closely related to lemon juice)
• Ethanol (a type of alcohol)

These work together to help keep the vaccine molecules stable while the vaccine is manufactured, shipped, and stored until it is ready to be given to a vaccine recipient.

Alas, I teach a class at the community college here, OCCC. One student asked first day of class who was vaccinated and boosted. I massaged that into, “Well, we have to wear masks, per college requirements, but there is not vax mandate. Best we not ask people personal questions about their health issues and decisions.”

My marching orders were that if I asked once and then twice for a student to mask, and if they refused, the course would be cancelled.

That is the absurdity of this entire dress rehersal for bigger and more systematic totalitarian methods of control. The mob, the bandwagon, the transfer of Fauci’s credentials to infer credibility. Pissing matches now on which vax and booster you get.

I do not know if many DV readers get the totality of this Western Mentality for Ordering People Around at work, school, in public, everywhere. Again, pre-SARS-CoV2, and conccurently — people I have gotten jobs for are working 14 hour shifts, in sub-freezing warehouses, moving frozen goods/foods along frozen floors with forklifts sliding all over the place. Imagine, coming home and still five hours after the shift frozen fingers and core temperature still not normal. Forced drug screening, forced background checks, forced credit checks, checks on prior evictions, driving record checks, physicals, all medications listed, reference checks, in-case-of-emergency references, and more, including being paid every two weeks, on a fucking Visa card.

Toil, weathering, mean as cuss bosses and supervisors, repetitive deadening work. No talking on the job. Keep those headphones and ear buds off. I’ve challenged the honchos driving up in Mercedes and Teslas how the hell do they look at themselves in the mirror at night or in the morning without seeing a monster of exploitation. Big jacked up $60,000 pickups while my clients have to take rotten and rotting public buses, many lines of which stop a mile or two away from the facility.

Work, baby, the great resignation, sure. But, here we are now — who owns us? How do we put that roof over our heads and that john in the corner and kitchen next to the bed?

“America’s Largest Landlord Just Got Bigger: Blackstone Buys 17,000 Houses For $6 Billion” by Tyler Durden

Wall Street won’t rest until it become the biggest – and perhaps only – landlord in the US.

At least that’s the impression one gets by observing the behavior of the two Wall Street “black” giants, Blackrock and Blackstone. As a reminder, the WSJ sparked widespread outrage recently when it exposed what most industry insiders had known for a long time, namely that Blackrock (and other institutional investors) have been ravenously gobbling up US real estate. Now it’s Blackstone’s turn.

On Tuesday, the WSJ reported that Blackstone – which already is not only America’s largest landlord but also the world’s largest real estate company with a $325 billion portfolio – has agreed to buy single-family rental company Home Partners of America for $6 billion, betting the demand for suburban housing will stay hot even as the pandemic eases. Home Partners owns more than 17,000 houses in the United States; the company buys, rents out and eventually offers its tenants a chance to buy them. Now all those functions will be done by the largest US private equity firm.

And so, I, like millions, are at the whim of the followers, the sheeple, for sure, and we play their game, and STILL, we can’t be in their sandboxes. All those state and city and county and even nonprofit jobs tied to state, city, county contracts (grants) I apply for caveat the application in big bold notations — Upon hire, the candidate must submit proof of full Covid-19 vaccination. That means, of course, those agencies have the power to go straight to CDC/STATE records of the shot sheet. Not a paper copy of the CDC shot record, but the proof has had to be recorded into the data field; i.e. computer.

I was going to cross that bridge if and when I got any sense of being offered a job, but, alas, there are not job offers for schmucks like me. That is, of course, the lamentation here. But as always, I attempt to make my little Paul’s World tie into a larger frame, some universal set of lessons.

• age
• gender
• politics
• over-educated
• too many different jobs over time
• moving too many times
• too confident
• too willing to discussion many aspects of the job in the Q & A
• too much on the internet, easily searchable vis Google
• blacklisted through checking off, “no, it is not okay to contact previous employer”
• more

There are so many reasons why “they” don’t hire folks like “me.” Strike up the ageism and sexism band, for sure. I am 65, a male, and the jobs I am attempting to get are in the social services/education/editing/writing arena.

Educational navigator, state and county jobs, even city jobs. The writing is on the wall, in a rural county, and, when I do get interviews, it’s four to six women on Zoom. I’ve had 12 people in a room for one job interview I actually drove 40 miles to attend in person. I was asked to apply by the ED. Very good back and forth, and they liked me, thought I was smart, a fit, but not a perfect fit. The rejection letter from the Executive Director was all complimentary. But, again, here I am, on the job market. Many times an interview is couched with “we are a tight-knit family, a very close team so how do you think you’d be part of that?”

I’ve had to ask several time, at the end of interviews when they ask me if I have questions, what ways do the people on the team work with people like me, an obvious outsider, to be part of a team that they call family? Really, what makes it easy for a male with education to fit into a tight knit team, which from the outside seems like a clique?

I am a great interview, and I am able to put on many faces,  in addition to bringing up interesting connections to my long work experience and my education to each respective job I’ve applied for.

And, that small-knit female group is not wanting to have an outsider, someone who doesn’t look like them. These people, to be blunt, are seated inside a nanny mentality, and drawn into paperwork world while following procedures to the letter. They are not giving and creative souls, not in any real sense. Also, they seem to be pretty one-dimensional. I get through the screening, then the interview, then the email a week or weeks later, which is a form letter, that states in mealy mouthed terms, I was rejected:

PAUL — Thank you for interviewing for the position of Permanency Workers (Social Services Specialist 1) Newport . Although you have not been selected for the position, we enjoyed learning about your background and experience in greater detail.

Again, thank you for your time and interest. We encourage you to apply for other opportunities in the future.

Thank you.”

Yep, my mother told me I should have continued at the U of Arizona and got the medical degree. Even a law degree. That was way back when, at 19 years of age and having the gift of gab, the gift of testing to a high level, above 89 or 90. Gifts . . . now, at 65, feeling, well, embarassed that, a, I have to look for work with no retirement, in this shit hole country, and in any shit hole state (you name it). Democratic or Republican governor, the scum rises to the top. With so much scum below them. And, b, I am pissed off and in this predictament. And, c, that I even feel this way — useless, a throw-away, disposable, nothing (I don’t feel these for many minutes in a day, but still, feeling this shit is like hot lead down one’s gullet).

One of the questions from the above committee of three was around “Many people perceive the CPS (child protective services) has having a lot of power. Rightly or wrongly, how would you deal with this perception?”

Well, of course, I know a few things or two about CPS and foster care and removing children from families. And, I thought I could give the CPS a bit of perspective, AND, while the gender police want to top load professions that are traditionally not full of women with women, you would think those female-filled social services centers would want a few wise males in their ranks.

That’s just hopeful thinking. Well, here, from an old article, Atlantic, from a CPS worker:

It seems there is always some sort of story in the media regarding one form of child abuse or neglect or another. Recently, I came across two such stories, one about a working mother who allowed her 9-year-old daughter to play unsupervised at a playground near her work and was subsequently arrested and her daughter put into foster care; and another, actually, about the mass shut-off of water services in an underprivileged Detroit neighborhood which brought up the fact that many don’t complain about the issue due to fears of having their children immediately removed from their homes as lack of water service is, allegedly, grounds for this in the city. These stories always hit home for me. Besides being a parent, I previously worked for Children’s Protective Services in Ohio.

Opinions usually fell into one of two predictable camps: as a CPS worker you were either accused of doing too little to protect the children involved, or of being too invasive, at best another mindless bureaucrat and at worst a power-happy sadist that got off on telling others how to raise their kids. In truth, both are often correct. I’ve seen them personally. And it’s a problem. Most workers, however, fall somewhere along the wide spectrum in between, and where they fall will be influenced more by their local inter-and-intra-agency culture than any statute.

Thinking of the mother of the 9-year-old, I realize I am not privy to the details of the case. I understand there is a lot I don’t know. Things like, does this mom have a history of abusing or neglecting this child or other children? Did the child have any special needs that made her especially vulnerable to being unsupervised? Did the child have any other signs of abuse like severe bruising or physical injuries, or of neglect such as obvious malnutrition or chronic head lice, or any other incalculable number of things? These would no doubt make a huge impact on my opinion of the situation, but as it stands what I read is this: a 9-year-old girl was left with a cellular phone at a playground near her mother’s workplace with adequate shade and access to water. Upon learning that her mother was not present, an adult called the police. So far, I vilify neither the caller for calling nor the police for responding. It is what happens next that I strongly question.

Apparently, the best answer to this case was to remove the child from her mother’s custody, put her in foster care, and arrest the mother. I’ll be blunt: this is insane.

Well, of course, I handled ALL the questions well, but then, the rejection. All those rejections. All those terrible people lifted through the prostitution called politics of bureaucracies. There are so many mean, dog-eat-dog, I-got-mine-too-bad-you-don’t-got-yours fucking Americanos. Yankee or Stars and Bars, most are cut from the same shit-hole Mayflower cloth. There are some mean folks I have met in Child Protective Services. In Portland, in Seattle, in Spokane, in El Paso!

This is the shape of things to come, for many of us, who are self-avowed radicals, willing to say and write and publish things that are definitely outside the bold lines of the center fold of American meanness. American group think. American belonging in the bandwagon. Infantalized. Disneyfied. Now, get stuck in a rural arena, with few opportunities, and this is the weekly routine —

• change up the resume
• write a new cover letter
• do an on-line application
• sometimes complete these timed tests, many of which are psycho personality tests — sick stuff
• attest at the end of the application, before hitting submit, that all stuff is truthful, and that they, the prospective employer, has the right to go back into all manner of work and legal and living history

And it is almost impossible during this process, and while consuming corporate, commercial, un-News news, to not get jaded, cynical, pissed off and, well, dejected. Since all the stories are about the beautiful people, the celebrities, all the crap around thespian stars and sports stars. All the felonies committed by politicians, corporate heads, even those in positions of state-county-city government.

There are so many undeserving folk in positions of big and minimal power. Yep, we know that. And to hear any manner of these people who get quoted or get the limelight for me is to hear monsters who have zero idea how the 80 percent live.

Nepotism, favoritism, cancelling, xenophobia, bandwagoning, credentialism, and other -isms rule the day. Then, to see folks circling their wagons interviewing me only because they may be checking off something on their diversity list — “get a white old male in the mix to look like we are diversity mavens” — to have at least three people in the pool. I have had my application stopped because not enought applicants hit the pool. Imagine that.

Then, there’s this blasphemy — more and more staffing firms, the bane of humanity, controlling the hiring process. That culprit, Indeed, has gotten into staffing. LinkedIn? All of them, rotten to the core, and many jobs are now conduited through those chosen people’s job screening-prepping-hiring headhunter systems that are all relying upon algorithms and Salesforce techniques:

Contracting is Worker Exploitation — (source). I have written about this in the past. Broken records abound:

Staffing agencies perpetuate this ugly cycle because they make a hefty profit exploiting contractors. Staffing agency recruiters will lie about the length of the contract and specific requirements, they’ll alter resumes without your knowledge, and make little to no effort to find another assignment once a contract ends. Some of these staffing agencies are so unprofessional, they’ve sent me emails meant for other people they’re trying to recruit. Staffing agencies are the worst. They don’t disclose how much they charge a company for a contractor’s services to maximize their profits. For example, for one of my recent contracting gigs, the company paid the staffing agency $60 an hour. I received $40 an hour while the staffing agency received $20 an hour for every hour of my work. The staffing agency received $800 a week for doing practically nothing, while I did all the work. These are the risks of contracting work, but it doesn’t make it right or ethical.

+–+

“This Is One of the Most Important Legal Battles for Labor in Decades” (In These Times)

Over the last few decades, a growing number of American workers have effectively lost many of their labor rights because of the way their bosses structure the employment relationship. These workers are contractors who are hired by one company but work for another: the Hyatt Hotel housekeepers who actually work for Hospitality Staffing Solutions, the Microsoft tech workers who actually work for a temp agency called Lionbridge Technologies, and the Amazon warehouse workers who actually work for Integrity Staffing Solutions. These workers often perform the same work at the same place as other workers, frequently on a permanent basis.

But because their employers have entered into complicated contracts with each other, these workers have been unable to exercise their labor rights. If the workers can only bargain with the staffing company and not the lead company where they actually work, they are negotiating with the party that often has no power to change the terms of their employment. For that reason, workers have fought for a more inclusive definition under the National Labor Relations Act of what constitutes an employer — and when two employers are joint employers.

Here, in my neck of the woods, the Lincoln County School District, again, sell outs at the top, and the bizarre superintendent and her VPs and thug principals in league with her meglamania, the District gives shit about workers:

Educational Staffing Solutions (New Jersey, Tennessee) is a staffing firm specializing in placing highly qualified staff in daily, long-term, and permanent K-12 school district positions, including paraprofessionals, substitute teachers, and other support staff. The company innovates education staffing to provide dynamic solutions to schools and professional opportunities to passionate educators. ESS provides its employees with the ability to work for schools across the country and competitive training, flexible work schedules, and professional development. The company’s partner schools receive personalized solutions, hands-on management, technology, and program reporting and analytics. ESS was founded in 2000, and its headquarter is located in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, United States. The firm’s expert professionals serve more than 3 million students with a pool of 60,000 substitute and permanent employees throughout the United States. ESS provides healthcare benefits and other perks to its employees.

So these schools, public schools, have sold out their food services to profiteers (Sodexo, et al), given up cleaning to the janitorial profiteers (Sodexo; Bon Apetite), contracted out the buses (Student First, et al), and their hiring of staff, teachers, administrators, too, sold out to the profit gougers. Staffing firms and those all-American welfare cheats who look, sound, smell like, well, good people. This is what the average person has to confront.

A national labor phenomenon known as “The Great Resignation,” or “The Big Quit,” began to take hold in January 2021 and has since grown. Millions of workers in the United States have turned the turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic into opportunities to rethink their professions and reframe their lives.

The trend is especially pronounced in the accommodation and food services sector, which experienced more than 5 percent worker attrition each month from June to October of last year.

Online, people flooded a Reddit forum called “r/antiwork” for commiseration and solidarity; by year’s end, the page had reached 1.5 million members. In the streets, thousands of unionized workers in manufacturing, health care, and higher education went on strike last fall for fair pay and protections. (source)

So, with two master’s degrees, and three dozen years teaching, and some of that including substituting K12 in Washington and Texas, I have to face jobs where $14.89 an hour, no benefits, on-call, at will, are the options. But add to this paltry pay: a substitute teacher needs to pay a fee to get a substitute certification, which is $350 in Oregon. I even had to take a civics test, here in Oregon, a test that was so fucking easy that, well, another fee to pay in order to get a shitty $14.89 an hour.

Here, some of my work with students, K12:

“Professor Pablo and Fourth Grade Enlightenment in Lincoln City“

And, then, being banned from teaching, another story, here at DV —

“Take Down this Blog, or Else!” — No job interview, no job offer, targeting by city, county, state honchos, watched by the pigs, shadowed by all the sub humans

You will not hear VP Harris or Jill Biden talking about this blasphemy, or Henry Giroux or Chris Hedges writing about this stuff. Believe you me, this is below them, to be blunt. I am part of a legion of older folk caught in several levels or circles of THEIR hell: the arbitrators, the people in high and mid office, making some of the worst decisions ever. We are at the whim of lock-step fearful folk. We are at the beck and call of the most uncreative people on earth. I have seen the antithesis of education, of journalism, of social work, of college teaching in my many decades of wandering the planet as a writer who should have gone the route of med school or law.

I’m sixty-five and really part of the growing throw-away contingency of millions in this Western Culture who are just the flesh and blood (and data mines) in a pipeline for more rich and super rich and almost rich people to take their pound of flesh — fees, penalties, late charges, triple taxation, tickets, surcharges, foreclosures, evictions, repossessions, code infractions, add-ons.

Oh, cry for me, United Snakes of America. Evictions, uh? They — the landlords, the BlackRocks, the BlackStones, the Banks and the Insurance and the Real Estate monsters, they are the Stinkin’ Badges!

I’ve written about this before, so again, broken DVD/record:

Never forget who we are:

In 2019, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren blasted Blackstone for “shamelessly” profiting from the U.S. foreclosure crisis, arguing that Wall Street’s investment in single-family homes was a “huge loss for America’s renters.” (source)

Never mind, though, old Elizabeth states she is through and through a capitalist. Haha, rhetoric, yakking, and not a fucking thing is done. Huge loss for America’s renters? This is life and death, again, these people at the top are clueless, intentionally, or just because they do not know what it is to be us.

But then, forgetting is in the water:

And, you can’t get Whoopied when you got no millions:

Unemployment, on the dole, on the fiddle, under the table, riff-raff, deplorable, welfare king, trash, undesirable, vermin, dreg of society, scum, outcast — terms thrown at me and my people. Hell, just look at the Chosen People’s movie channels — all those narratives, those Hulu and Netflix and Amazon series and movie crap,  how they depict (they never really depict real struggle) us commoners, those of us who still have a few good years left to be “contributors,” but for many reasons, will never get the third, fourth, tenth chance. Watch closely how they depict the working class. Take notes. We are dregs, man. Broken, mean, thieves, fornicators, dumb, and deplorables.

Remote Area Medical? Shit, we are an underperforming country, intentional, vis-a-vis the corporate whores, the lot of them:

Scale this shit up. Dental clinics, care homes, medical clinics. Free, of course. Reroute that Biden-Trump-Bush-Obama-Clinton war money to what we need: Stan Brock, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom:

A debate over healthcare has been raging nationwide, but what’s been lost in the discussion are the American citizens who live day after day, year after year without solutions for their most basic needs. Remote Area Medical documents the annual three-day “pop-up” medical clinic organized by the non-profit Remote Area Medical (RAM) in Bristol, Tennessee’s NASCAR speedway. Instead of a film about policy, Remote Area Medical is a film about people, about a proud Appalachian community banding together to try and provide some relief for friends and neighbors who are simply out of options.

Fucking amazing Stan Brock — they don’t make people like him anymore!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Predictably, the OECD claimed that “a swifter roll-out of COVID vaccines” will improve the economy even though this has not stopped social and economic decline so far, and even though President Joe Biden, South African leaders, Governor Kathy Hochul of New York, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, and many others around the world, even Anthony Fauci have stressed that the Omicron variant generally causes mostly mild symptoms and does not warrant hysteria and panic. The OECD’s “the-vaccine-will-solve-all-economic-problems” narrative is evident in many news items and publications on its website.

The ruling elite and their media have been dogmatically insisting for 20 consecutive months that elusive economic recovery depends largely on giving everyone multiple vaccination shots with or without their consent—something that makes Big Pharma extremely happy.

But so far neither billions of vaccination shots nor top-down lockdowns have stopped the deepening economic and social crisis confronting the majority of humanity. Lockdowns have devastated the livelihoods of millions and increased poverty, debt, unemployment, inequality, misery, and depression worldwide. Millions of businesses have permanently disappeared in less than 20 months. How is this an effective response to a health crisis? Will more debt, poverty, inequality, unemployment, and insecurity improve people’s health and well-being? Do security and good health come from constant instability, fear, and uncertainty? Can an economy controlled and dominated by the top 0.1% even meet the needs of the people? Not surprisingly, a key feature of the “COVID Pandemic” has been even greater concentration of socially-produced wealth in fewer private hands, bringing inequality worldwide to even more barbaric levels. Currently, “the poorest half of the planet’s population owns about 2% of its riches”. In addition, high levels of inflation are spreading globally, thereby decreasing people’s purchasing power even further. Whatever wage or salary gains many people may be getting are being rapidly eaten up by rising inflation.

Nearly two years after the “COVID Pandemic” started economies around the world are plagued by many serious intractable economic problems. It has been a huge struggle for the rich and their political and media representatives to anchor themselves in any legitimacy, and given the chaotic, anarchic, and violent way everything is being approached by the rich and their entourage, more tragedies are in store.

The necessity for an economy, society, and institutions controlled by the people themselves has never been sharper and more urgent. The rich and their cheerleaders cannot offer a way forward. They are historically exhausted, unfit to rule, and determined to preserve obsolete arrangements that keep everyone marginalized and disempowered. They reject social responsibility and block any striving of the people for a better world. The all-sided crisis plaguing people everywhere can only be solved by people relying on themselves instead of the rich and their representatives.

1. Imperialist organizations like the OECD regularly over-project economic growth and thus they routinely revise their projections downwards several times a year, causing many to lose faith in their ability to accurately cognize economic realities and conditions.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

At the same time, with no sense of irony and with no fidelity to science, news headlines from around the world continue to scream that the economy in many countries and regions is doing great and that more economic recovery and growth depend almost entirely, if not entirely, on vaccinating everyone (multiple times). In other words, once everyone is vaccinated, we will see really good economic times, everything will be amazing, and we won’t have too much to worry about. Extremely irrational and irresponsible statements and claims of all kinds continue to be made in the most dogmatic and frenzied way by the mainstream press at home and abroad in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the deep economic crisis continually unfolding nationally and internationally. Dozens of countries are experiencing profound economic problems.

While billions of vaccination shots have already been administered worldwide, and millions more are administered every day (with and without people’s consent), humanity continues to confront many major intractable economic problems caused by the internal dynamics of an outdated economic system.

A snapshot:

1. More rapid and intense inflation everywhere
2. Major supply chain disruptions and distortions everywhere
3. Shortages of many products
4. “Shortages” of workers in many sectors worldwide
5. Shortened and inconsistent hours of operation at thousands of businesses
6. Falling value of the U.S. dollar and other fiat currencies
7. Growing stagflation
8. Millions of businesses permanently disappeared
9. More income and wealth inequality
10. High dismal levels of unemployment, under-employment, and worker burnout
11. Growing health insurance costs
12. Unending fear, anxiety, and hysteria around endless covid strains
13. More scattered panic buying
14. The stock market climbing while the real economy declines (highly inflated asset valuations in the stock market)
15. Spectacular economic failures like Lehman Brothers (in the U.S. 13 years ago) and Evergrande (in China in 2021)
16. All kinds of debt increasing at all levels
17. Central banks around the world printing trillions in fiat currencies non-stop and still lots of bad economic news
18. And a whole host of other harsh economic realities often invisible to the eye and rarely reported on that tell a much more tragic story of an economy that cannot provide for the needs of the people

The list goes on and on. More nauseating data appears every day. Economic hardship, which takes on many tangible and intangible forms, is wreaking havoc on the majority at home and abroad. There is no real and substantive economic improvement. It is hard to see a bright, stable, prosperous, peaceful future for millions under such conditions, which is why many, if not most, people do not have a good feeling about what lies ahead and have little faith in the rich, their politicians, and “representative democracy.” It is no surprise that President Joe Biden’s approval rating is low and keeps falling.

What will the rich and their political and media representatives say and do when most people are vaccinated, everyone else has natural immunity, and the economy is still failing? What will the rich do when economic failure cannot be blamed on bacteria or viruses? To be sure, the legitimacy crisis will further deepen and outmoded liberal institutions of governance will become even more obsolete and more incapable of sorting out today’s serious problems. “Representative democracy” will become more discredited and more illusions about the “social contract” will be shattered. In this context, talk of “New Deals” for this and “New Deals” for that won’t solve anything in a meaningful way either because these “New Deals” are nothing more than an expansion of state-organized corruption to pay the rich, mainly through “public-private-partnerships.” This is already being spun in a way that will fool the gullible. Many are actively ignoring how such high-sounding “reforms” are actually pay-the-rich schemes that increase inequality and exacerbate a whole host of other problems.

It is not in the interest of the rich to see different covid strains and scares disappear because these strains and scares provide a convenient cover and scapegoat for economic problems rooted in the profound contradictions of an outmoded economic system over-ripe for a new direction, aim, and control. It is easier to claim that the economy is intractably lousy because of covid and covid-related restrictions than to admit that the economy is continually failing due to the intrinsic built-in nature, operation, and logic of capital itself.

There is no way forward while economic and political power remain dominated by the rich. The only way out of the economic crisis is by vesting power in workers, the people who actually produce the wealth that society depends on. The rich and their outmoded system are a drag on everyone and are not needed in any way; they are a major obstacle to the progress of society; they add no value to anything and are unable and unwilling to lead the society out of its deepening all-sided crisis.

There is an alternative to current obsolete arrangements and only the people themselves, armed with a new independent outlook, politics, and thinking can usher it in. Economic problems, health problems, and 50 other lingering problems are not going to be solved so long as the polity remains marginalized and disempowered by the rich and their capital-centered arrangements and institutions. New and fresh thinking and consciousness are needed at this time. A new and more powerful human-centered outlook is needed to guide humanity forward.

Human consciousness and resiliency are being severely tested at this time, and the results have been harsh and tragic in many ways for so many. We are experiencing a major test of the ability of the human species to bring into being what is missing, that is, to overcome the neoliberal destruction of time, space, and the fabric of society so as to unleash the power of human productive forces to usher in a much more advanced society where time-space relations accelerate in favor of the entire polity. There is an alternative to the anachronistic status quo.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

Like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and many other capital-centered ideologues and “leaders,” Biden keeps disinforming the polity with the worn-out dogma that economic recovery is largely dependent on getting everyone vaccinated. We are to believe that the broad and stubborn economic failure confronting everyone today is largely caused by the virus and that once the virus is “under control” through vaccines rush-produced by for-profit companies with a long record of malpractice, the economy will soar and flourish. A variety of mainstream news sources have been desperately reinforcing this disinformation for more than a year; they have no interest in economic science.

However, despite an enormous number of vaccinations issued worldwide, despite a large portion of humanity “taking the jab” already, the economy keeps declining and decaying; many serious economic distortions, problems, and uncertainties persist. Inflation, debt, inequality, homelessness, poverty, under-employment, and environmental destruction, for example, appear to be growing. More than one million people per month are still filing unemployment claims in the U.S. alone and job “creation” numbers are superficial and unimpressive. In addition, the U.S. labor force participation rate remains historically low and the number of long-term unemployed remains high. On top of all this, millions of employed workers are living pay-check to pay-check, which means that even full-time employment is no guarantee of security and prosperity. Various surveys also show that large majorities are not hopeful about the future and health of the economy.

It is no surprise that euphoric economic growth forecasts made just weeks or months ago by “leaders” and “experts” are already being revised downward—in some cases significantly. The ruling elite is always embracing magical thinking; they are not on good terms with reality.

It is also being said that large numbers of people will end up leaving their jobs—voluntarily or by being fired—rather than compromise their right to conscience and get vaccinated. This could mean even fewer workers taking available jobs and even more retailers, businesses, and services operating in dysfunctional, disruptive, and unreliable ways without employees. Thus, for example, many nurses, teachers, police officers, and other workers are choosing the right to conscience and unemployment over mandated vaccination. Thousands of businesses are already struggling to fill low-paying positions in the context of constantly-rising inflation and an uncertain future. The American Hospital Association said that Biden’s vaccination plan “may result in exacerbating the severe work force shortage problems that currently exist”. Not surprisingly, some organizations have already started to oppose Biden’s vaccination plan.

The economic depression confronting humanity at home and abroad will not be overcome by leaving major owners of capital in power while workers, the people who actually produce the wealth that society depends on, remain marginalized and disempowered. Economic collapse will not be reversed by funneling more socially-produced wealth to different monopolies and oligopolies, while leaving everyone else with less. Fostering policies, agendas, and arrangements that make the rich even richer is a recipe for deeper problems, not a promising path forward. To date, billions of vaccination shots at home and abroad have not stopped or slowed a range of serious economic problems.

Since the start of the never-ending “COVID Pandemic” more wealth has become concentrated in even fewer hands and more people have experienced more psychological, social, and economic problems. Inequality has soared over the past 18 months.

The current economic crisis started long before 2020 and is rooted in the same contradictions that produced big economic problems before 2020. Even if there were no covid virus mutations, the economy would still be declining because economic upheavals are endemic to the capitalist economic system. Depressions and recessions are not caused by external factors. To claim that the economic system is generally sound but runs into problems now and then because of exogenous forces is nothing more than a way to apologize for the outmoded economic system.

Without major changes, without vesting power in workers themselves, economic crises will keep recurring and deepening. The rich and their representatives have shown time and again that they are unable and unwilling to solve economic and health crises, let alone in a human-centered way.

1. In December 2020 Biden publicly stated that the federal government should not or could not mandate vaccinations.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

When sex offenders can move more freely around New York City than someone who has chosen natural immunity, it’s time to get some things off my chest. And who better to talk with than the person I trust the most? To follow… is a self-interview.

*****

Mickey Z.: How’s it going with the mandate?

Mickey Z.: Coercion is not consent, my friend. And if my hometown is so concerned about our collective health, why don’t they mandate a safe, affordable home for everyone? How about meaningful jobs that pay a living wage? Mandate less crime and more libraries. 

MZ: I get the idea.

MZ: If they wanna control what goes into our bodies, why not insist that organic produce be made available at affordable prices and be consumed every single day?

MZ: I see what you mean.

MZ: Mandate that all lawns be turned into organic vegetable gardens. Did you know that lawn is the single most irrigated crop in God’s Country? 

MZ: You’ve made your point. 

MZ: Mandate people not commenting on social media until they’ve done some fuckin’ research. The next person who repeats the “ivermectin is horse dewormer” nonsense trope is the one who needs to be isolated from society.

MZ: Wait… you’re not gonna defend ivermectin, are you?

MZ: I’m not defending anything except adding facts to the conversation. Equine ivermectin — as the name implies — is made for horses. The FDA approved another kind of ivermectin for humans. It’s meant to treat infections in the body that are caused by certain parasites and was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. 

MZ: What has that got to do with COVID-19?

MZ: You might wanna pose that question to the National Institutes for Health (NIH). They endorsed several studies showing ivermectin can be effective for treating Covid. For example, the American Journal of Therapeutics published a study that found: “Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of #ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”

If you’re interested in more reality, click here and here and here. Read those links closely and then congratulate yourself for knowing more about ivermectin than any corporate media outlet or reporter — from Fox to CNN.

MZ: If ivermectin works, why is it being badmouthed by the mainstream?

MZ: Possibly because, according to the FDA, the only way the Covid “vaccines” could qualify for emergency use authorization is if “certain statutory criteria have been met.” For example: “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.” If doctors prescribe ivermectin, the jabs aren’t needed and thus don’t rake in billions for Big Pharma (and set the stage for endless boosters). Follow the money.

MZ: Is this why you’re calling this the“Covid Twilight Zone”?

MZ: It’s one of many reasons. The biggest might be the charade of PCR tests.

MZ: Please elaborate.

MZ: The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test works by converting the virus’s RNA into DNA (coronaviruses don’t have DNA). The PCR process makes millions of copies of the manufactured DNA by running it through “cycles” in a process called amplification. The more cycles run, the more the DNA can be copied. If no copies can be made, theoretically, no virus is present. The test provides a yes-no answer rather than any indication of how much virus was found, how old the virus is, or whether or not the virus is even capable of infectivity. 

The test is so flawed that in Tanzania, it returned positive results for a goat and a piece of fruit! 

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

It’s time for progressive activists to step up. The working class needs you.

On May Day – International Workers Day – we have launched a new union: UTU for Workers Union. Our mission is to build a working class, grassroots, campaigning movement to stop exploitation and end workplace abuse in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

The international trade union movement is in a fight for relevancy to the majority of the working class. Decades of relentless attacks on the workers’ movement have been devastating.

• READ MORE: May Day protesters demand workers’ rights amid pandemic
• France: Scuffles and arrests in Paris as thousands mark May Day

In New Zealand, out of more than 1.5 million private sector workers, less than one in fourteen (7 pecent) are members of a union. If we exclude the large private companies, unionisation in the private sector is effectively non-existent.

More than half of the workers employed in the private sector do not even have the option to join a trade union nor be covered by a collective agreement.

Despite the good work the present unions do for their own members, the rest of the working class has lost ground in terms of income and protections.

Non-unionised workers have no power to improve their position. They are at the mercy of their boss.

As a result, when workers in non-unionised workplaces have an employment dispute, they must seek support from an expensive lawyer, lay advocates, or a friend. Most exploited private sector workers receive no access to justice. Unscrupulous bosses know this.

The increase in vulnerable migrants and widespread casualisation, along with the growth of labour hire companies and dependent sole contractors, has seen the number of precariat workers in New Zealand explode.

This has led to a culture of fear and isolation. As a result, workers’ power, incomes, job security and self-confidence have declined.

The situation is similar in most Western countries, and if we don’t shake it up, the international union movement in the private sector will descend into irrelevancy.

It is unacceptable that we morph into a network of staff associations for relatively better-off workers. That would be a betrayal of our history and all the working-class fighters who came before us.

A new activist movement
The old ways no longer work for the overwhelming number of private sector workers. The only question any serious worker rights activist must consider, is not if we protect and organise all workers, but only: how?

It is clear we need new forms of organisation.

I have been part of the One Union project group for the last three years. We have been actively trialing various models in our attempt to find a sustainable and effective way to meet the new challenge.

We believe we now have the solution. Today we announce the formation of the UTU for Workers Union.

The mission of UTU for Workers Union
Our purpose is to build a mass movement to stop exploitation – migrant and non-migrant – and end unchecked workplace abuse that non-unionised workers routinely suffer.

The use of UTU is deliberate. We summarise it in Māori terms – justice. When a victim is exploited or abused, their mana has been diminished and it must be restored. That is UTU.

As the first step, we have to actually help individual workers with their immediate problem. For the last year we have been providing representation to any worker from non-unionised workplaces who needs help.

The jungle of predator employment advocates and lawyers scamming vulnerable workers is sickening. They get screwed by the boss, and then again by their advocates, some of whom do sweetheart deals with bosses.

The advocate gets their fee, but the worker is forced to accept a few crumbs. Simply outrageous.

The good news is that when we have backed up our representation with a direct campaign, through picketing or media exposure, the exploitative boss has realised the power of the worker feeling they have got justice.

More careful in future
The boss knows to be more careful in the future. We have had some success in having bosses agree to ongoing compliance monitoring.

We have found that workers want to join a union. In almost all occasions, there is no union. If there is, they don’t use their resources to help non-members.

That might make sense if you look at unions as business units, but completely wrong if you see them as a justice movement for workers. There are only two categories of workers – those in unions, and those we must get into unions.

Up until now we have not asked workers to join us. From today we will accept workers as members and supporters.

Our membership is open to everyone, whether they are employees, or dependent contractors. We will help any worker who is in distress.

What must unite us is not what work we do, or who our boss is. Instead, we have to join together as a working class.

The old and true clarion call, “an injury to one, is an injury to all”, is as relevant today as it ever was. All unionists must fight for justice for all workers.

If any applicant is from a unionised site or sector covered by another union, then of course they must join that union. It must be noted that we are solely focused on the vast majority of non-unionised private sector workers who are exploited and abused in the non-unionised world.

By having an inclusive and broad strategy, we believe many workers and allies will step up to build a powerful workers movement dedicated to stopping exploitation and workplace abuse.

How do we rebuild working class confidence?
We can do this in three phases.

Help victims first
If we claim to be pro-worker, we have to earn the right. Our first priority is to resolve individual workers’ immediate problems. This is the most important thing to anyone. Support any victim, and they become a union ally – and in time, an activist.

We currently force exploiters to pay thousands of dollars of unpaid wages and backpay legal underpayments. We have prevented unfair sackings, stopped harassment and bullying, and won compensation and fair outcomes for hundreds of workers.

In the last year alone, we have won hundreds of thousands of dollars for victims. This is only the tip of the iceberg. We need more people to help. Until they do, exploitation will continue.

Our case work is now carried out by the One Union Trust, which operates in partnership with the union. The trust has a dedicated legal team of three lawyers led by a former senior trade union official.

Confront criminal bosses directly
We have a dedicated UTU Squad. We hold UTU Vigils for Justice actions directly outside the businesses and homes of exploiters and abusers. Every community needs a local UTU Squad.

We name criminal bosses and expose injustices on our union website, utu.org.nz, and our Facebook page, @UTUForWorkersUnion.

We host a weekly radio programme on 104.6 Planet FM, Wednesdays at 12.40pm. We tell the truth about these exploiters and abusers.

We organise online Action Station petitions to mobilise support for victims, and let communities know about their local exploiters.

Build solidarity
After a boss has been found to breach minimum employment standards, we monitor compliance and enforce legal minimum codes. Thousands of workers in small workplaces don’t get their minimum entitlements. We can fix that through constant vigilance.

We also monitor visa compliance. 350,000 workers are reliant on a boss for their visas.
Workers will feel safer by regular check ins. Over time, we will patiently build a more collective confidence in their workplace.

Migrant exploitation
The most exploited and abused group of workers are migrant workers on temporary visas. Any project to eliminate worker exploitation in New Zealand must include campaigns that focus on migrant workers. We are judged as unionists on our commitment to the most vulnerable members of the working class.

The Migrant Workers Association partners with us and leads this work. The One Union Trust provides practical case representation for victims. MWA and UTU spearheads campaigns that rally the community against specific cases of injustice. Their fight is our fight.

A call to action
Progressive activists have to step up now. We need action. Go to this page for 8 practical steps you can do right now.

Matthew “Matt” McCarten is a New Zealand political organiser and trade unionist, of Ngāpuhi descent. He has been involved with several leftist or centre-left political parties, most prominently as the leader of the Alliance.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

It’s time for progressive activists to step up. The working class needs you.

On May Day – International Workers Day – we have launched a new union: UTU for Workers Union. Our mission is to build a working class, grassroots, campaigning movement to stop exploitation and end workplace abuse in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

The international trade union movement is in a fight for relevancy to the majority of the working class. Decades of relentless attacks on the workers’ movement have been devastating.

• READ MORE: May Day protesters demand workers’ rights amid pandemic
• France: Scuffles and arrests in Paris as thousands mark May Day

In New Zealand, out of more than 1.5 million private sector workers, less than one in fourteen (7 pecent) are members of a union. If we exclude the large private companies, unionisation in the private sector is effectively non-existent.

More than half of the workers employed in the private sector do not even have the option to join a trade union nor be covered by a collective agreement.

Despite the good work the present unions do for their own members, the rest of the working class has lost ground in terms of income and protections.

Non-unionised workers have no power to improve their position. They are at the mercy of their boss.

As a result, when workers in non-unionised workplaces have an employment dispute, they must seek support from an expensive lawyer, lay advocates, or a friend. Most exploited private sector workers receive no access to justice. Unscrupulous bosses know this.

The increase in vulnerable migrants and widespread casualisation, along with the growth of labour hire companies and dependent sole contractors, has seen the number of precariat workers in New Zealand explode.

This has led to a culture of fear and isolation. As a result, workers’ power, incomes, job security and self-confidence have declined.

The situation is similar in most Western countries, and if we don’t shake it up, the international union movement in the private sector will descend into irrelevancy.

It is unacceptable that we morph into a network of staff associations for relatively better-off workers. That would be a betrayal of our history and all the working-class fighters who came before us.

A new activist movement
The old ways no longer work for the overwhelming number of private sector workers. The only question any serious worker rights activist must consider, is not if we protect and organise all workers, but only: how?

It is clear we need new forms of organisation.

I have been part of the One Union project group for the last three years. We have been actively trialing various models in our attempt to find a sustainable and effective way to meet the new challenge.

We believe we now have the solution. Today we announce the formation of the UTU for Workers Union.

The mission of UTU for Workers Union
Our purpose is to build a mass movement to stop exploitation – migrant and non-migrant – and end unchecked workplace abuse that non-unionised workers routinely suffer.

The use of UTU is deliberate. We summarise it in Māori terms – justice. When a victim is exploited or abused, their mana has been diminished and it must be restored. That is UTU.

As the first step, we have to actually help individual workers with their immediate problem. For the last year we have been providing representation to any worker from non-unionised workplaces who needs help.

The jungle of predator employment advocates and lawyers scamming vulnerable workers is sickening. They get screwed by the boss, and then again by their advocates, some of whom do sweetheart deals with bosses.

The advocate gets their fee, but the worker is forced to accept a few crumbs. Simply outrageous.

The good news is that when we have backed up our representation with a direct campaign, through picketing or media exposure, the exploitative boss has realised the power of the worker feeling they have got justice.

More careful in future
The boss knows to be more careful in the future. We have had some success in having bosses agree to ongoing compliance monitoring.

We have found that workers want to join a union. In almost all occasions, there is no union. If there is, they don’t use their resources to help non-members.

That might make sense if you look at unions as business units, but completely wrong if you see them as a justice movement for workers. There are only two categories of workers – those in unions, and those we must get into unions.

Up until now we have not asked workers to join us. From today we will accept workers as members and supporters.

Our membership is open to everyone, whether they are employees, or dependent contractors. We will help any worker who is in distress.

What must unite us is not what work we do, or who our boss is. Instead, we have to join together as a working class.

The old and true clarion call, “an injury to one, is an injury to all”, is as relevant today as it ever was. All unionists must fight for justice for all workers.

If any applicant is from a unionised site or sector covered by another union, then of course they must join that union. It must be noted that we are solely focused on the vast majority of non-unionised private sector workers who are exploited and abused in the non-unionised world.

By having an inclusive and broad strategy, we believe many workers and allies will step up to build a powerful workers movement dedicated to stopping exploitation and workplace abuse.

How do we rebuild working class confidence?
We can do this in three phases.

Help victims first
If we claim to be pro-worker, we have to earn the right. Our first priority is to resolve individual workers’ immediate problems. This is the most important thing to anyone. Support any victim, and they become a union ally – and in time, an activist.

We currently force exploiters to pay thousands of dollars of unpaid wages and backpay legal underpayments. We have prevented unfair sackings, stopped harassment and bullying, and won compensation and fair outcomes for hundreds of workers.

In the last year alone, we have won hundreds of thousands of dollars for victims. This is only the tip of the iceberg. We need more people to help. Until they do, exploitation will continue.

Our case work is now carried out by the One Union Trust, which operates in partnership with the union. The trust has a dedicated legal team of three lawyers led by a former senior trade union official.

Confront criminal bosses directly
We have a dedicated UTU Squad. We hold UTU Vigils for Justice actions directly outside the businesses and homes of exploiters and abusers. Every community needs a local UTU Squad.

We name criminal bosses and expose injustices on our union website, utu.org.nz, and our Facebook page, @UTUForWorkersUnion.

We host a weekly radio programme on 104.6 Planet FM, Wednesdays at 12.40pm. We tell the truth about these exploiters and abusers.

We organise online Action Station petitions to mobilise support for victims, and let communities know about their local exploiters.

Build solidarity
After a boss has been found to breach minimum employment standards, we monitor compliance and enforce legal minimum codes. Thousands of workers in small workplaces don’t get their minimum entitlements. We can fix that through constant vigilance.

We also monitor visa compliance. 350,000 workers are reliant on a boss for their visas.
Workers will feel safer by regular check ins. Over time, we will patiently build a more collective confidence in their workplace.

Migrant exploitation
The most exploited and abused group of workers are migrant workers on temporary visas. Any project to eliminate worker exploitation in New Zealand must include campaigns that focus on migrant workers. We are judged as unionists on our commitment to the most vulnerable members of the working class.

The Migrant Workers Association partners with us and leads this work. The One Union Trust provides practical case representation for victims. MWA and UTU spearheads campaigns that rally the community against specific cases of injustice. Their fight is our fight.

A call to action
Progressive activists have to step up now. We need action. Go to this page for 8 practical steps you can do right now.

Matthew “Matt” McCarten is a New Zealand political organiser and trade unionist, of Ngāpuhi descent. He has been involved with several leftist or centre-left political parties, most prominently as the leader of the Alliance.

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Many of you in the middle class are opposed to socialism. You still think there is some chance for you under capitalism and you fear that the socialists will take what little you have and divide it among the shiftless and thriftless. You need not have the slightest fear. The socialist has no use for your small capital; it would do (them) not the least good. (They are) after the earth, the trusts, and the machinery of production. Besides, soon you will have nothing to divide. When the big capitalists get through with you, you will be ready for us. You may not be ready yet, but you are ripening very rapidly. When you have been stripped of what you have, when you have become proletarians, when you have become expropriated, you will be ready to join us in expropriating the expropriators.

— Speech by Eugene Debs over 100 years ago in Chicago about the middle-class fear of socialism

Orientation

Almost five years ago I wrote an article in Counterpunch: “Lost at Sea: Left Liberals Have No Party.” In that article I challenged the blithe interchangeability of the words “liberal” and “democrat”. I tracked eight historical changes of liberalism from left-liberal, to centrist-liberal to right-center liberals (neoliberals). I also argued that the words liberal and democracy are used interchangeably by liberals, even though it wasn’t until the 20th century that liberals were clearly for democracy (translated as universal suffrage for white males).

The problem with my article as I see it today is that I lumped upper middle-class left liberals with middle-class liberals. Two years later I wrote another article called “The Greater of Two Evils: Why the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party for 85% of the U.S. Population.” In that article, I outlined how, since the 2008 crash, the social classes whose wealth grew were the ruling class, the upper-class and the upper-middle-class, constituting about 15% of all social classes. Everyone else was doing worse, including the middle-class.

In my first article I slurred the differences between the upper-middle-class and the middle-class, advocating for both classes to get out of the Democratic Party. I have since come to see (as I will get into later) that the upper-middle-class has done very well under the umbrella of the Democrats and it is not in their material interests to leave. This is no longer true of the middle-class. Historically, the material interests of the middle-class and the upper-middle-class has more in common with each other than the working-class. In other words, the difference between news anchors, lawyers, senior managers on the one hand and high school teachers, librarians and supervisors on the other hand are more differences of degree than kind. After all, they all did mental work, as opposed to the physical work of the working-class. However, in the last 50 years middle-class life has gotten far worse than the life of the upper middle-class. It has gotten bad enough to be able to say it is closer to the working-class. Whether they realize it or not, for middle-class left liberals, the Democratic Party has left the building 40 years ago.

My claim in this article is that:

1. Middle-class FDR liberals need to leave the democrats and be part of building a new party
2. Middle-class left liberals need to form alliances with the working-class and the poor, not the upper middle-class
3. The new party should advocate for socialism

What follows is why this should be so.

Difference Between FDR Liberals and Neoliberals

Left liberal values

Left liberals are broadly for the following. They are pro-science as well as for investing in scientific research and development as well as investing in infrastructure. They are for the separation of church and state as well as for the use of reason in problem-solving, such as raising children through what is called “authoritative parenting”. They support the matriarchal state: universal health care, unemployment, pensions, food stamps and a minimum wage automatically raised to keep up with inflation. They expect the state to intervene in the economy to soften the hard edges of capitalism, following a Keynesian economic policy. They are committed to gradual change and a lessening of race and gender stratification. Left liberals support an expansion of unions. This left liberalism has been present in the United States for roughly 40 years, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s.  Since then, Democratic Party has slid further and further right to the point that their platform today is a center-right neoliberal party which embodies none of these values. The problem is the collective denial left liberals have in ignoring this fact.

Right-wing neoliberal values

Neoliberals are directly opposed to the matriarchal state. They support the economic policies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Von Hayek with minimum state involvement in the economy.  Neoliberals have withdrawn funding from long-term science programs. They have presided over the rise of New Age thinking initiated by Marilyn Ferguson’s book The Aquarian Conspiracy. Neoliberals have become extreme relativists championing the rise of identity politics which began in the early 1970s. Neoliberals have lost hope and have failed to bring the principles of the Enlightenment forward. They have abandoned investment in profits made on manufacturing and instead make their profits on the defense industry, arming the entire world. Under their rein most of the remaining profit is invested in finance capital.

Neoliberals have presided over the destruction of unions over last fifty years.  They have stood by and watched the full-time, well paid secure working-class jobs disappear.  Work hours under neoliberalism have gone from 40 hours per week to at least 50 hours per week for those lucky enough to be employed full-time. In general, the standard of living has declined in the US so that the next generation can expect to make less than their parents. It’s no accident that credit cards became available to the working-class in the early 1970s, so workers didn’t have to directly face the fact that their standard of living had declined. The civil rights movement spoke to what minorities had in common with organized labor, which was low-cost housing and fair wages. Today we have individualist identity politics where being recognized for your identity along with using politically correct language is all that is asked for. In the 1960s, community college was free. In the last 50 years the cost of college education is so high that student debt appears to be debt for life.

Neoliberals have supported the explosion of the prison-industrial complex which has expanded many times over since the 60s despite the rate of crime going down. The police departments have been equipped with military weapons that make the equipment of police prior to the 1970s pale in comparison. They have presided over the growth of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies which now have control over our physical and mental health. The official diagnostic manual was 50 pages in 1950. Today the same manual is well over 1000 pages. Today upper-middle-class parents are no longer authoritative but instead are practicing a form of “permissive parenting”, which easily results in spoiled, narcissistic children, with helicopter parents fretting endlessly over their little darling’s self-esteem. Please see Table A for a comparison.

Differences Between Middle Class and Upper Middle Class

Not everyone is middle-class

In the United States, most people think of themselves as middle-class. Last time I checked 80% of the working-class mistakenly thought they were middle-class. Why? Because in Yankeedom, it’s an embarrassment to be working-class. So too, upper-middle-class people, nervous about being seen as well-to-do, play down their wealth. Nevertheless, there are real parameters around what it means to be middle-class, as I’ll get to. But first the social class composition.

Social class composition

Based on the work of William Domhoff, in his books Who Rules America and The Powers That Be, the ruling-class and the upper-class together compose about 5% of the population. They live off stocks and bonds and don’t have to work. Their investments are principally in oil, mining, the military and banking. They have been characterized as “old money” and are mostly Republicans.

The upper-middle-class is about 10% of the population. They make most of their money off scientific innovations like computers, internet and electronics. They are called “new money” and are mostly Democrats. Upper-middle-class people are also doctors, lawyers, architects, senior managers, scientists and engineers, as well as media professionals such as news commentators, magazine and newspaper editors, college administrators and religious authorities.

The middle-class consists of about 25% of the population. Occupational examples include high school and grammar school teachers, registered nurses, librarians, corporate middle managers, self-employed artisans and tiny little mom-and-pop operations. The middle-class is at the bottom rung of the Democratic Party not well-represented at all.

The working-class is about 40% of the population and consists of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers. The skilled working-class include carpenters, welders and electricians, wait-staff and store clerks who are likely to vote Democrat. Their interests are not represented by the Democratic Party either. The semi-skilled are bus drivers or train operators and along with unskilled are less likely to vote. The last 10% consist of what Marx called the “lumpenproletariat” who live by their wits as prostitutes, hustlers, gamblers or those on welfare. These folks are not likely to vote either.

Income is not the most important determinant of social class: the nine dimensions of social class

When most Yankees try to understand social class, the first thing they think of is how much income a person has. But this is only one of the nine dimensions of social class, and not the most important one. Most of these dimensions are covered in the work of Marxist Erik Olin Wright as well as some of the followers of Max Weber. The first dimension of social class is technical, and this consists of three parts: a) the proportion of mental and physical work the job requires; b) the amount of independence or interdependence the kind of work involves; and c) the proportion of the work that is mechanical rote work versus creativity. So typically, a good upper-middle-class job will involve mental work, be independent from others and involve creativity. At the other end of the spectrum is unskilled working-class labor which predominantly involves physical labor and working with other people, while the work itself is repetitive. Other social classes have various combinations in between.

The second dimension of social class is political and economic authority relations. This consists of two sub-categories. The first is the degree of power the person has over resources, tools, goods and services. A capitalist has control over all these things. Workers usually have control over none of them, except that skilled workers might own their own tools. The second sub-category has to do with the proportion of order-giving and order-taking involved. The owner of a company gives orders and takes no orders. His workers take orders and don’t give orders. Middle-class people in corporations may give orders to workers but must take orders from senior management. This category is simply – who gets to boss around who and under what conditions.

The third dimension of social class is mobility. How easy is it to move up or down the class hierarchy both within one’s lifetime or across generations? The fourth dimension of social class is resources. Most people think of resources in terms of income. But wealth also includes assets such as inheritance, real estate, stocks, bonds and property. Sometimes upper-class people may work only part time, but it would be deceptive to make sense of their class position by some part-time job when they have an inheritance.

The fifth dimension of social class is education. This consists of the number of years of school completed as well as the quality of the school attended. The sixth dimension of social class is status. This is the degree of prestige in which one’s occupation is held by others. One reason why income is unstable as an indicator of social class is that some workers can make a good deal of money, such as unionized garbage collectors, but have low status. Conversely, an adjunct college instructor can have high status among the Yankee population but make significantly less money than a garbage collector.

The seventh dimension of social class is lifestyle and consumption patterns. This has four sub-categories. The first is health – birth and death rates. As many of you know, working-class people die on average seven years younger than people in the middle and upper-middle-classes. The second sub-category is how people dress, their speech patterns, body mannerisms and manners. The third sub-category is their recreational habits – whether they ski, play baseball or go bowling. The last sub-category is their religious beliefs. Religions are class divided. In the case of the protestants, there are the Unitarians, Episcopalians and Presbyterians near the top and Baptists and fundamentalists at the bottom.

The eighth dimensions of social class is the degree of awareness people have of their social class. Generally, the upper class and the ruling class are extremely class conscious and are very fussy about who is allowed into their circles. The upper-middle-class and the middle-class tend to be less class conscious. In countries other than the United States, the working-class is very class conscious. But here in Yankeedom, workers see themselves as “temporarily indisposed millionaires”. The last social dimension of class is the ability to take collective action. Capitalists at the end of World War II and soon thereafter organized a big campaign to win back the allegiance of workers. The ruling class has exclusive clubs in which they organize class strategy. The World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg group are examples. At the other end of the spectrum, when workers join unions or strike, they are showing class consciousness. No social class fits neatly into each dimension. There are what Wright calls “contradictory class locations” where a person is caught between two classes either between generations or within their lifetime.

Why does class count?

Why have I gone over the dimensions of social class in such detail? One reason is to show that upper middle-class people and middle-class people are not interchangeable. They vary in the technical division of labor, authority relations, class mobility, resources, education, status, lifestyle, degree of class consciousness and their willingness to take collective action. They also differ in their attitudes towards the meaning of work, as well as in their attitudes towards time and eating habits. If we want to suggest that the middle-class should break its alliance with the upper middle-class and get out of the Democratic Party, we have to expand and deepen their differences as I am starting to demonstrate.

Summary: two reasons why middle-class left liberal should get out the Democratic Party

Summarizing, the first thing we needed to do is to establish that the Democratic Party is a center-right neoliberal party which has next to nothing to do with being left-liberal. This is reason A to get out of the Democratic Party. The second reason is that the Democratic Party serves the interests of the upper-middle-class not the middle-class. The most obvious indicator of why the middle-class should no longer align themselves with the upper-middle-class is to understand what has happened since the crash of 2008. Both Thomas Piketty and Richard Wolff argue that the “economic recovery” was very class specific. The rulers, the upper class and the upper middle-class have done considerably better in that “recovery”. All other social classes, including the middle-class, have done worse. The middle-class, economically and in other dimensions, is far closer to the working-class than it has ever been. Reason B to get out of the Democratic Party.

But can these two classes really get along? There is a built-in tension and discomfort about doing mental work and physical work; there are differences in the degree of status in the two classes’ occupations.  If we want to move middle-class people and working-class people closer together, we have to understand their commonalities and where the tension points are in their differences.

Similarities and Differences Between Middle Class and Working Class People

Similarities

The biggest similarity between the two classes is a decline in the standard of living. This includes income, work stability, increase in hours worked and lack of benefits. Another commonality is sports. Working-class people and middle-class people can unite around being fans of baseball, football and basketball professional teams. In terms of music, rock or country rock might bring these two classes together. Another commonality is that both classes have what sociologists have defined as achieved status. Unlike the upper classes, they usually do not come into life with an inheritance. Lastly, both classes see hard work as a virtue.

Differences

One of the major differences between these two classes is that middle-class people make their living primarily by doing mental and/or supervisory work. Working-class people make their living primarily with their hands and their bodies. A second major obstacle to overcome is that middle-class jobs usually have higher status. The third difference is that middle-class people often give orders to working-class people, but the reverse is not the case. This can lead to jealousy and resentment among working-class people. Middle-class people are very individualistic and not likely to organize as a class. There is likely to be tension between the classes when the working-class agitates to start a union or take strike action. There are also differences between the classes around the meaning of work. For working-class people, the meaning of work is less important than the money and material benefits. Some middle-class people might trade off a higher paying job for work that seems socially redeeming to them.

In terms of resources middle-class people today are likely to own their own home and have stocks and bonds. Working-class people’s assets are usually a car and possibly a home. Mostly they do not own stocks. Whatever savings account they have, that is it. There are also differences in their health conditions. Working-class people are likely to have eating, drinking and smoking problems and middle-class people are healthier. Working-class people are more likely to go to gambling casinos and play the lottery. Middle-class people see that as a waste of time and money.

Another tension point is education. Usually, middle-class people will have a bachelor’s or master’s degree, while working-class people will have no degree or an associate degree at best. Middle-class people will dress, speak and have manners that will be different from the working-class, and this will produce class tensions. Middle-class and working-class people will attend different religious denominations. Working-class religious services invite submission, confessions of being a sinner as well as altered states of consciousness like speaking in tongues, singing and dancing in the church aisles. In middle-class religions, there is less pressure to make you feel like you are a sinner. At the same time, sermons are designed to appeal to what is reasonable rather than to force you to have a revelatory experience which alters one’s state of consciousness.

Middle Class People Meet Socialists

Surely you are kidding

Let’s suppose middle-class left liberals have enough doubts about the Democratic Party because they are no longer New Deal liberals, and they’re starting to see that the party no longer looks out for middle-class interests. Let’s assume that economic, political and ecological disasters will continue to plague capitalism, and somehow a third party – a mass party – has emerged founded on socialism and is getting up a head of steam. This party has some working-class support as well as some union support. What would it take for middle-class left liberals to join?

Fears Middle-class Liberals Have About Socialists

Dictatorship and one-party rule

In its propaganda war with socialism, capitalists inevitably point out some of what it perceives to be the dictatorial tendencies of communism – in Russia, China and Cuba – as the archetypal example of socialism. What it does not do is study the conditions under which one-party rule occurred and what the authorities were up against. I am not going to get into pros and cons of this here because this kind of socialism – whether Stalinist or Maoist – is only one type of socialism. There are six types of socialism. Starting from the right and moving leftward there are social democrats and then three kinds of Leninists – Maoists, Stalinists and Trotskyists. Continuing leftward, there are left communists or council communists and the anarchists. In my efforts to convince middle-class liberals of the feasibility of socialism I will address as much as I can what most or all of these types are in agreement on. For now, let’s just say that dictatorial rule is not a foundational principle of socialism, even for the Stalinist and Maoist parties that have been called dictatorial by capitalists.

Furthermore, I think it is ludicrous for members of the Democratic Party to complain about the one-party rule of socialists when in Yankeedom there are only two parties. The Democratic Party is hardly democratic when it only serves the interests of the about 10% of the population (Republicans serve the ruling and upper classes) and leaves over 85% with no representation at all. The party I call the “Republicrats”, representing 15% of the population, is one party, the party of capital.

Confusion of personal property with social property

We socialists have a running joke on our Facebook posts, mostly in reaction to over-the-top conservatives who think we want to abolish personal property. We say “yes indeed, we are coming for your tooth brush.” That perceived threat is accompanied by imagining that socialists are all having group sex. But seriously, when we socialists say we want to abolish private property we only mean social property. We want to abolish capitalist control over water, food, energy systems, tools, all the necessities that people need to live. We don’t believe resources that everyone needs in order to live should be privately owned. On the other hand, personal property will remain with the individual as it would under capitalism.

Discouragement of innovation

Capitalism has a very shallow and narrow understanding of human nature. Capitalists imagine that people are lazy at heart and unless the carrot is held in front of people – the prospect of being a millionaire – they will do nothing. Further, they look at the types of “leisure” activities a working-class person enjoys after another 50-hour work week and take those as representing what human nature is really like. For example, on Friday night the worker wants to play cards. On Saturday he watches a ball game and have a few beers and on Sunday he sleeps in. For the capitalist this is lazy. What the capitalist thinks is that if workers did not have to work, then playing cards, watching football, drinking, getting laid and sleeping is all he would ever do. What the capitalist doesn’t understand is that the entire weekend is not leisure at all. Its recovery from the week and preparation for the new week.

Under conditions of socialist work, alienation would be minor – and I am being conservative here. The natural collective creativity on the job will arise. People will work less, perhaps 30 hours a week at first. Because workers will control the workplaces as well as decide what to produce, how to produce it, how much they should work and how they will be compensated, work will be a joy, not a curse as under capitalism. There will be plenty of room for innovation, in fact, much more than under capitalism where most workers are imprisoned in wage labor and told not to be curious and not have their own ideas about how things should be run.

All this collective creativity gives the lie to the ridiculous capitalist notion that people want socialism because they want “free stuff” with no contribution. All socialist plans have a budget and decisions have to be made about what and how the budget will be spent. No one will “get out of working”. What the capitalist cannot imagine is that under socialism people will want to work. The idea of not working would be painful – not liberating.

Equality of poverty

In its heyday, between the 1930s and the 1970s, the Swedish Social Democratic Labor Party was a socialist society which produced great material wealth. The socialist countries that have been showcased by capitalists as poor – the Soviet Union, China and Cuba – were only poor during certain times of their existence. What capitalists fail to inform us of is that before the socialist revolutions, as Michael Parenti points out, those countries were even more poor. What material wealth does exist in capitalist societies has taken hundreds of years to build up. In China today, absolute poverty was eradicated within 40 years.

There will be far more innovation than existed under capitalism because under socialism the workplaces will be controlled by the workers and workers’ activities will be guided by an overall plan. To cite one instance, before Yugoslavia was destroyed by capitalists, Yugoslavian productivity under worker self-management was higher than in any capitalist country. The same was true during the Spanish Revolution under worker self-management in both industry and in agriculture.

People are naturally greedy

Cross-cultural research on happiness has found that there is a direct correlation between money and happiness when people move from poverty to a middle-class life. However, the movement from middle-class to upper-middle-class and beyond is no longer correlated to happiness. In other words, people who are upper class or upper-middle-class are not any more likely to be happy than are middle-class people. This gives the lie to the capitalist notion that people are greedy and that everyone secretly wants to be a millionaire. What is more likely is that people want to be middle-class. They want basics in material security. After that they want other things; creativity on the job, to be able to contribute to society and to be recognized for their work, to mention only a few things.

Socialists will want to abolish religion

I admit that the state socialist attempt to decree the abolition of religion was a big mistake. I also think that doing so was contrary to the principles of materialism Marxists aspire to. While I stand firm in the ontological belief that there are no gods or god, at the same time I understand the degree to which people wish to hold on to religion as an expression of their alienation of social life. As generations pass and prosperous ways of life become normalized, I predict three things will happen. First, more people will become atheists. Secondly, those who continue to believe in religion will notice that the nature of the gods, or god, will change. The gods or god will blend more with the nature we know because social life will be more likely to begin to resemble heaven on earth. Third, the fundamentalist religions that plague many working-class people will disappear because the working-class will no longer consider themselves sinners or need fire and brimstone to make things right.   

Commonalities Between Middle-Class Left Liberals and Socialists

Need for a mass party

We socialists think you’ll agree with us that we badly need a mass party that can speak to the needs of the 25% of us who are middle-class and the 40% percent of us who are working-class. This party will develop a program and a step-by-step plan for implementation of the plan over the next 5, 10 and 15 years. It will be a dues-paying party and we will implement methods for getting input into what the plan will be. The issues will be prioritized, and everyone will have a say in carrying out the plan. Once the plan is set, people will be able to sign up for tasks they agree to carry out over the course of weeks and months. In addition to a thirty-hour work week, approximately five hours per week will be devoted to this “political” work.

Massive support for Unions

We socialists know that you left liberals have supported unions from the 1930s to the early 1970s. However, we also know that it was under liberal presidents that the best organizers of unions, the communists and the socialists, were drummed out of unions in the 1950s. This limited the vision of unions as they turned into “business unions”. We also think you should be very upset with the neoliberals in the Democratic Party who have not supported unions for the last 50 years, causing union representation in Yankeedom to be now less than 10%. We hold neoliberals directly responsible for the fact that wages, working conditions and job security are pretty much last in the industrial capitalist societies. The vision of unions needs to be built back up to the ways of the Industrial Workers of the World who saw unions as workshops for how to run a society, not merely a way to sustain and improve everyday working conditions.

Society can be engineered

Like you, we socialists agree with the great project of the Enlightenment that a better society can be engineered by its members. Unlike conservatives, we do not accept that social organizations should be ruled by kings, aristocrats, priests or any traditional authorities. Neither do we think society is some kind of reform school in preparation for the next life. We also don’t think society is best governed by the automatic preservation of traditional institutions that have been here the longest. Like you, we agree in the notion of progress.

The value of science and technology in producing a society of abundance

Like you we are very disappointed and angry that capitalists have chosen to invest their profits in warfare and in finance capital rather than in scientific research that could make our lives better. We also think you should blame the neoliberals for allowing this to happen over the course of the last 50 years. As socialists we have always felt that the scientific method is the best way to know things and that science is a crucial ingredient in Marx’s call to “develop the productive forces”. For us, the creation of socialism was never any kind of sacrifice or doing with less. Nor are we unrealistic about human nature. We fully understand that the foundation of socialism has to be the production of more than enough wealth to go around. With abundance in place, there is no motivation for stealing or wanting what others have.

The value of the state overview

We socialists are in complete agreement with the value you hold about the importance of the functions of the matriarchically state. We also think it is important that the matriarchal state take over the realm of overall planning. This does not mean that all social production and distribution is centrally planned with no feedback from the local and regional levels. We see the relationship between the three in a dialectical manner. The local and regional levels feed up to the state level what products and services are needed. The state incorporates our feedback but then makes adjustments based on the fact that at the local and regional level we cannot see the whole. Once the state produces an over-all plan, that is then fed down to the local and regional levels. It will no doubt take a number of times for there to be a smooth “cybernetic” rhythm established.

Micro-level – the value of cooperative learning and authoritative parenting

We socialists are well aware that you middle-class left liberals have always supported public schools. Some of the more visionary of you might have had the money to send your children to a Montessori school. Some of you might have heard the name Lev Vygotsky and associated him with cooperative learning, which is used in Montessori education. What you probably were never told was that Vygotsky was a communist and he and his followers, Alexander Luria and Aleksei N Leontiev, founded a whole school of psychology, the “socio-historical school of psychology”. They developed a theory of cooperative learning that has been applied not only in school settings but in the design of social intelligence tests, the development of theories of cognitive development and in working with the deaf. Vygotsky’s work could be massively applied to the fields of social psychology, and possibly to therapy, as one group in New York City is currently doing.

Lastly, we admire the way that many of you have raised your children using authoritative child-rearing methods. You have avoided both extremes in child rearing. On the one hand are the authoritarian methods of conservative child rearing which raises children who are repressed, frightened and lack curiosity. On the other hand, it is the permissive parenting of upper-middle-class neoliberal parents that has turned out a generation of narcissistic, entitled, ungrateful brats who are the product of neoliberal schooling where the focus was on raising self-esteem in every school program. We think the authoritative (as opposed to authoritarian) method with its flexible structure, welcoming of dialogue, appeal to reason, rather than emotion is the best way to raise children. We are on the same page with you.

Deeper Differences between Middle-Class Left Liberals and Socialists

Commitment to an antiwar international policy

We socialists have always been against wars because we know they are usually turf wars between capitalists about resources and that it is the workers and the poor people who do the fighting, not the capitalists. As far as wars go, we know that your class has supported the Cold War and the war in Vietnam. Beyond the 1970s you seem to have treated these wars with less enthusiasm except for perhaps, the war on Iraq. As it stands now, the capitalists in Yankeedom not only make a fortune in military warfare to “protect our borders” but they also arm the entire world. If counties decided to end their wars the capitalists here would be destitute. These wars need to end, not just because of the senseless deaths at home and abroad, but for pragmatic reasons. All this money could go into the trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructural work that is left undone. Suppose the military was employed on these infrastructural projects. Suppose the military was employed to build low-cost housing in every city. Living in a society of abundance requires the reinvestment in the military from wars abroad to infrastructure and natural disaster relief at home.

Anti-imperialist international policy

We socialists are also against imperialist wars where capitalists invade other countries to steal their political or economic resources, land and labor to make a profit. This can be most blatantly seen in Africa. Yankeedom also continues its imperialist ventures in Latin America, regularly attempting to overthrow governments there. Why? For the simple reason that freely elected governments (socialist or not) may have the nerve to set their own economic policy, which might not necessarily be friendly to transnational corporations.

Yankee capitalists want to rule the world and they don’t want any competition.

China, Russia and Iran refuse to tow the line and have formed an alliance. The Chinese represent the best hope of the world now. Why are they such a threat to the United States? Because they are making a profit through building infrastructures, not just in China but in other parts of the world. China, Russia and Iran have also withdrawn from the US dollar as a use of international currency, which costs the western banks in significant loss of profits. Yankee capitalists are slitting their own throats, and ours as well, by acting like big-shot imperialists fifty years after their time has passed and their own territory is falling apart. As middle-class people we think you can see that nothing good can come from this and we need to rebuild our own society.

Dismantling the Deep State

Unfortunately, most middle-class people don’t know any more about the FBI and the CIA and what these organizations do to promote themselves, including what is on television and in movies. The FBI has upended or ruined the lives of socialists for decades. Their role in undermining the New Left has been documented in David Cunningham’s book There’s Something Happening Here. The CIA is in a class by itself, the world’s most powerful terrorist organization. I will limit myself to three books: The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford; The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stoner Saunders and The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot. Funding for these organization should be ended, and the sooner the better.

 Class Dismissed, Where Left Liberals Missed the Boat

For socialists of any stripe, social class has been the foundation for understanding capitalism. The capitalist class makes its profits by exploiting the working-class. As Marx points out, workers produce all the wealth, but they are given only about 40% in the form of wages (the first four hours of their labor) which allows them to support themselves. But the worker works another 6 hours. Who gets the value from that? The employer. The employer uses the rest of the surplus value produced by the worker to pay the middle-class managers, pay landlords for the use of plant and set aside funds to pay the state in taxes. They claim the remainder of the surplus as profit.  Middle-class people have stood structurally between the working-class and the capitalists, giving orders to workers, taking orders from capitalists. There are other social classes as I’ve discussed earlier but the major dynamic is between the capitalist and the worker.

Middle-class people, like most other classes, do not talk about this because class is about political and economic power between groups. It is uncomfortable and middle-class people among others have been afraid to discuss this. Why? Because they feel guilty, that maybe it is their fault they have a better life? Maybe they owe the workers something? Middle-class people need to get over this, because the fact is, you are sliding south, in the same direction as the working-class. In fact, you now have more in common with working-class people than upper middle-class people.

Race relations: Social Movements vs Individualist Identity Politics

Strange as it may seem, middle-class people have been more comfortable talking about race than class. After all, many middle-class people prided themselves as left liberals by supporting the civil rights movement. This was a social movement in which racial minorities joined together to fix objective conditions such as higher pay, better housing, legal rights. I suspect most of you did not know that Martin Luther King, a paradigm of middle-class respectability, was a socialist.

However, since the mid 1970s, but especially from the 1990s on, race relations have turned from a social movement into something different. Identity politics is a psychological spin-off from the civil rights movement with a very different agenda. In the hands of upper middle-class, neoliberals of all colors, including lawyers and university professors, identity politics has been used to win political seats in the Democratic Party. They do this by focusing on the rights of individuals to recognition, the right to be called a certain pronoun and rights to declare being offended by this or that innuendo. Identity politics has crippled the ability of working-class and middle-class people to form alliances by dragging meetings through competitive battles as to who is more offended than whom. When an organization as corrupt as the ruling class Democratic Party starts babbling about “white privilege” it’s time to get off that sinking ship. The mess that race relations are today is made worse by the upper middle-class neoliberals seizing on identity politics. Here is yet another reason to dump the Democratic Party and any alliance with the upper middle-class. A terrific short book that lays out the limitations of identity politics is Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider.

Democracy is economic and participatory more than political representation

Middle-class left liberals in the 20th century have thought of democracy as synonymous with voting. Democracy was having the right to vote for one of the two major parties. For socialists this is a sham. Both parties are ruling class parties and workers have nothing to say about what candidates are running and what they will do after the election. For us, democracy is economic. We think it is ridiculous to imagine we live in a democracy when we go to work to be bossed around from beginning to the end of the day by the employer. For us, democracy begins and ends in the workplace. Workers should have a say in what is produced, how it is produced, where it is distributed, how long we work and how we are compensated. In addition, within socialism democracy is also present by its involvement in city planning. This includes participatory planning councils at the local level, participating in setting agendas and deciding how city revenue should be spent. Under socialism, political parties will still have their place, but they will operate under direct democracy, not representational democracy.

The future of capitalism

All socialists are against capitalism except for some right-wing social democrats who believe in a mixed economy. For us, capitalism is a system plagued by crises and inherently unstable. Various Marxist crisis theorists have developed theories about how and why capitalism will end. Even non-Marxist political economists have theories about how it will end. Please see my article “Name Me One Capitalist Country That Works: A Thirty Year Reckoning” for more sources. Where I think we can agree is that capitalist profits should not be made on wars, or on fictitious capital. It is the neoliberals, not you, who have made profits on fictitious capital and wars over the past 50 years. Rather, capitalist profits should be made on the production of goods and services. We still think that eventually capitalism will fail even if it only produces goods and services, but we can’t convince you of that until we are further down the road.

What is the place of competitive markets? Some of you might feel that having markets is a better mechanism for quickly finding out what people need and how those goods and services have been delivered. As Michael Parenti writes in Black Shirts and Reds, the central planning mechanisms in the USSR were no bargain. At the same time, we know that during the Spanish Revolution, the workers and peasants self-organized in industry and on farms for 3 years, covering millions of people and had better production records than the Spanish government had before the revolution. So, our choices are more than choosing between the state and the market. In the new society perhaps there might be a minor place for markets instead of state planning or worker planning, but the markets should never be among the major players. We can do better than markets.

• Published first in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This article was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2021 at 2:22pm and is filed under Capitalism, Communism/Marxism/Maoism, Deep State, Democracy, Democrats, Disinformation, Economic Inequality, Elections, Employment, Exploitation, Identity Politics, Infrastructure, Karl Marx, Labor, Labor Theory of Value, Neoliberalism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Socialism, The “Left”, Unions, United States, Wage, Working Class.

You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car manages the braking system; ‘machine-learning’ algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity.

While the field isn’t something I plan to pursue (I’m too much of a wannabe Luddite for that to happen), it was fascinating to learn more about what programming actually is; its language; how the work combines engineering and art, logic and puzzle-solving, passion and patience. I also learned more about the people that do the work; how they think and why; the heady impact of being able to literally change the world overnight, particularly when an app or program generates millions of global users. Of special interest was the history, beginning with the first coders: “Brilliant and pioneering women, who, despite crafting some of the earliest personal computers and programming language, were later written out of history.”

Coders affirmed two things for me. One is that in the struggle for social justice and human liberation, coders are a decisive force for success—arguably the decisive force, particularly in any pursuit of a People’s Internet, or at the very least a People’s Media. Indeed, the digital battlefield is paramount.

My second affirmation was being reminded, yet again, about the power of the working class. The Internet, embedded in the lives of billions around the globe, is routinely compared to a cloud, a place without place, without distance. But that’s an illusion. All it takes is for service to go down for us to realize that someone has to fix it, be it a broken fiber optic cable, a damaged router, or a down electrical line.

When we rely on the Internet, we rely on workers, from mainframe engineers to computer programmers to office workers to maintenance personnel. In his 2012 book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Wired correspondent Andrew Blum describes how the Internet is “as fixed in real physical places any railroad or telephone ever was. It fills enormous buildings, converges in some places and avoids others, and it flows through tubes underground, up in the air and over the oceans all over the world. You can map it, can smell it, and you can even visit it.”

There is a human, geographic side to the worldwide web, intricate and utterly interdependent on the other: Those who keep the power going and the work stations clean; the workers who mine and extract the silicon, the silver, copper, mercury, aluminum, tin, lead, and all the rare earth elements; the vast and global workforce that assembles the computers, smart phones and tablets. Then there are those who do the shipping and delivery, who dispose the toxic and radioactive electronic waste.

I think of tech’s working class whenever I feel I’m too becoming user-centric, and forgetting about the human beings whose labor makes it all run, with the awesome power to make it not run as well.

This article was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2021 at 10:06am and is filed under Opinion, Technology, Working Class.

The ruling elite have repeatedly shown their inability to tackle any serious problems effectively. They are at a loss for how to deal with current problems and refuse to consider any alternative to their obsolete economic system. The best they can do is recycle old ideas to maintain their class power and privilege. Their efforts to block the New focus mainly on promoting disinformation about “new and better forms of capitalism,” including oxymorons like “inclusive capitalism,” “responsible capitalism,” and “ethical capitalism.”

Since the outbreak of the “COVID Pandemic” in March 2020 every week has been a roller coaster for humanity. The economy and society keep lurching from one crisis to another while incoherence and stress keep amplifying. It is said that 1 in 6 Americans went into therapy for the first time in 2020.

Unemployment, under-employment, inequality, mental depression, anxiety, suicide, environmental decay, inflation, debt, health care costs, education, and poverty are worsening everywhere. Thousands of businesses that have been around for years keep disappearing left and right.

Top-down actions in response to the “COVID Pandemic” have made so many things worse for so many people. Many are wondering which is worse: the covid-19 virus or the top-down response to the pandemic. Governments everywhere have steadfastly refused to mobilize the people to solve the many problems that are worsening. The moral climate is low and more people are worried about the future.

An atmosphere has been created whereby people are supposed to feel like the exhausting “COVID Pandemic” will last forever and we can all forget about getting back to any normal healthy non-digital relations, activities, and interactions. No society in history has worn face masks for an entire year. We are told over and over again that there is no returning to anything called “normal.” Moving everything online and repeatedly asserting that this is great, “cool,” and wonderful is proving to be unsatisfactory and unfulfilling. People want and need real, direct, non-digital connections and interactions with other human beings. Life behind a screen is not life.

Even with all the restrictions and shutdowns the virus, according to the mainstream media, continues to wreak havoc at home and abroad. It is almost like none of the severe restrictions on people’s freedoms made any difference. People have had to endure this humiliation while also not being permitted any role in deciding the aim, operation, and direction of the economy or any of the affairs of society; they are left out of the equation every step of the way and not even asked for superficial “input” that always goes unheeded anyway. Existing governance arrangements are simply not working to empower people or affirm their rights. The people’s interests and will are blocked at every turn by an outdated political setup that advances only the narrow interests of the rich.

Despite intense pressure to blindly rely on the rich and their political representatives to “figure things out,” this is not working. Nor does it help that the mainstream media approaches multiple crises and issues with endless double-talk, disconnected facts, catchy sound-bites, dramatic exaggerations, angry voices, political axe-grinding, and lots of confusion. Coherence and a human-centered outlook are avoided at all costs. People are constantly left disoriented. Jumping arbitrarily and rapidly from one thing to another in the most unconscious way is presented as useful analysis and information. This is why sorting out basic information has become a full-time job for everyone. People are understandably worn-out and overwhelmed. Disinformation overload degrades mental, emotional, and physical health.

The world has become an uglier and gloomier place—all in the name of “improving health.” It is no surprise that a recent Gallup Poll shows that the majority of Americans are extremely dissatisfied with government, the economy, the culture, and the moral climate.

In this hazardous unstable context, there are two ever-present key pieces of disinformation operating side by side. Both are designed to deprive working people of any say, initiative, outlook, or power.

First there is the “once everyone is vaccinated things will be much better” disinformation. This ignores the fact that capitalist crises have endogenous causes not exogenous causes and that the economic crisis started well before the “COVID Pandemic.” More than 150 years of recessions, depressions, booms, busts, instability, chaos, and anarchy have not been caused by external phenomena like bacteria, germs, and viruses but by the internal logic and operation of capital itself. A so-called “free market” economy by its very nature and logic ensures “winners” and “losers,” “booms” and “busts.” It is called a “dog-eat-dog” fend-for-yourself competitive world for a reason. The modern idea that humans are born to society and have rights by virtue of their being is alien to “free market” ideology.

Despite the fact that millions have been vaccinated at home and abroad, poverty, inequality, unemployment, debt, and other problems continue to worsen. Businesses continue to suffer and disappear. Hospitality, leisure, recreation, and other sectors have been decimated in many countries. Air travel is dramatically lower. So are car sales. It is not enough to say, “Yes, the next few months will be rough and lousy economically speaking but we will get there with more vaccinations. Just be patient, it will all eventually work out.” This is not what is actually unfolding. The all-sided crisis we find ourselves in started before the “COVID Pandemic” and continues unabated. Such a view also makes a mockery of economic science and the people’s desire to decide the affairs of society and establish much better arrangements that exclude narrow private interests and do not rely on police powers.

In the coming months millions more will be vaccinated but economic decline and decay will continue. Both the rate and amount of profit have been falling for years. And owners of capital are not going to invest in anything when there is no profit to be had and when it is easier instead to balloon fictitious capital and pretend everything is a stock market video game. The lack of vaccinations did not cause the economic collapse the word is currently suffering through, nor will more vaccinations reverse economic decline and decay. The “COVID Pandemic” has largely made some people vastly richer and millions more much poorer. The “COVID Pandemic” has significantly increased inequality. Unfortunately, the so-called “Great Reset” agenda of the World Economic Forum and Pope Francis’s recent call for a “Copernican Revolution” in the economy will make things worse for millions more because they will perpetuate the existing moribund economic system. Such agendas are designed to fool the gullible, block working class consciousness and action, and keep the initiative in the hands of the global oligarchy.

The same applies to so-called “stimulus packages.” Various versions of these top-down monetary and fiscal programs have been launched in different countries, and while they have assuaged some problems for people, they have not been adequate or fixed any underlying problems. They have not prevented poverty or mass unemployment. Economies remain mired in crisis. In most cases “stimulus packages” have made things worse by increasing the amount of debt that many generations will have to repay. This is in addition to the many other forms of debt Americans suffer from and rent payments that will one day have to be paid.

Many are also wondering why trillions of dollars can be printed and instantly turned over to the banks and corporations with no discussion but the same cannot be done for social programs, public enterprises, and the people. Why, for example, can all not get free healthcare or have taxes eliminated? Why can’t various forms of personal debt be wiped out instantly? If the government can print money for “them” why can’t they print money for “us”? Who is government supposed to serve? Billionaires?

Nether the CARES Act of 2020 nor the stimulus package passed in December 2020 nor the one President Biden is pushing for in March 2021 will be adequate or solve any major problems. Many felt that the $600 stimulus checks that went out in December 2020 were pathetic and insulting.

The problem lies with a socialized productive economy run by everyone but owned and controlled by a tiny handful of competing private interests determined to maximize profit as fast as possible regardless of the damage to the social and natural environment. There is no way for the economy to benefit all individuals and serve the general interests of society so long as it is dominated by a handful of billionaires. The social wealth produced by workers cannot benefit workers and the society if workers themselves do not control the wealth they produce and have first claim to.

The outlook, agenda, and reference points of the rich must be rejected and replaced by a human-centered aim, agenda, direction, and outlook. The current trajectory is untenable and unsustainable. The situation is dangerous in many ways, but perhaps one good thing to come out of the accelerated pace of chaos, anarchy, and instability are the contradictions that are presenting new opportunities for action with analysis that favors working people.

This article was posted on Sunday, February 14th, 2021 at 8:28pm and is filed under Capitalism, COVID-19, Debt, Economic Inequality, Economy/Economics, Environment, Evictions, Fearmongering, Federal Reserve, Free Market, Health/Medical, Masks, Media, Mental Health, Neoliberalism, Pandemics, Propaganda, Rent/rent strikes, Ruling Elite, Surveillance, Unemployment, Vaccines, Working Class, World Economic Forum (WEF), World Health Organization (WHO).

Joe Biden’s Economic Dream Team

Such disinformation is evident in a January 6, 2021, BBC News article titled: “Joe Biden: The team he hopes can fix the US economy.”

How exactly will the rich and their political representatives fix their obsolete economic system? Why wasn’t the broken economy fixed long ago? Why are inequality, poverty, unemployment, under-employment, debt, the labor force participation rate, environmental decay, and other major social problems steadily worsening regardless of which party of the rich is in power? Will there even be a useful analysis of what is actually unfolding and what is needed to serve the general interests of society?

Will Biden’s “team of Ivy League trained economists and lawyers, well-versed in the ways of Washington,” as the BBC News article describes them, bring about prosperity and security for all? Is it possible that such a “team” is exactly what is not needed?

Working people want to know why previous fiscal and monetary policies have not fixed the economy so far? Why does the economy keep lurching from crisis to crisis? Why are stability and security so elusive? Why do so many people have a nagging bad feeling in their stomach about what lies ahead? If previous economic stimulus strategies did not work and failed to avert economic collapse, why will the one currently being proposed by Biden work?

It is known that Biden’s “team of Ivy League trained economists and lawyers, well-versed in the ways of Washington” has experience bailing out large for-profit corporations and serving in one of the two parties of the rich in the past, but how does that help the average American who is confronted with growing inequality, joblessness, endless bills, inadequate healthcare, inflation, debt, anxiety, uncertainty, and insecurity?

The U.S. economy is not failing because someone never assembled a “team of Ivy League trained economists and lawyers, well-versed in the ways of Washington.” A “team of Ivy League trained economists and lawyers, well-versed in the ways of Washington” is actually part of the problem because it should be working people who decide the affairs of the economy, not someone else. Production and distribution of social wealth cannot take place without workers. Shouldn’t workers decide the aim, operation, and direction of the economy? Why are they not even in the picture? As the only source of value, why are workers dismissed so casually?

The BBC News headline, “Joe Biden: The team he hopes can fix the US economy,” is meant to keep working people marginalized, humiliated, and deprived of any say over the economy. It is designed to perpetuate the illusion that only the rich and their political representatives can figure things out and should be trusted to do so. The opinions and views of workers are to have no meaningful space or role in directing the economy or the affairs of society.

Unfortunately, Biden and his economic team will do nothing to address the basic contradictions inherent to an outdated crisis-prone economic system. No one believes that a massive surge of amazing jobs that provide people with a dignified existence and security is right around the corner. No one believes that workers in different sectors will suddenly have a real say in how things are run in their sector. And no one believes that the stock market is not going to crash again soon.

Jerome Powell Intensifies Disinformation

“There’s nothing more important to the economy now than people getting vaccinated,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday, January 27, 2021.

This is part of the stubborn “the vaccine will reverse economic problems because the virus, not something else, caused the economic collapse” disinformation being relentlessly promoted by the rich and their representatives. Many media outlets are tirelessly promoting the illusion that vaccinating everyone is key to restoring economic well-being. In other words, capitalist economic collapse is not caused by the internal logic and operation of capitalism but by “external” forces like germs or natural disasters. There is apparently nothing inherently wrong with the outmoded economic system itself and no serious analysis is needed: “We just have to get through this pandemic via mass vaccinations and then all will be well again. Just hang in there.” This makes a mockery of economic science.

With or without a vaccine the unplanned chaotic obsolete U.S. economy will continue failing and leave tens of millions behind. About a million new first time unemployment claims have been filed in each of the last 46 consecutive weeks. This is historically unprecedented and unheard of. Staggering by any measure. Even mainstream news sources like Reuters can’t ignore damning and indicting economic data and statistics.

The brutal “business cycle” that plagues all capitalist economies is not caused by bacteria, viruses, or germs. Most, if not all, slumps, busts, recessions, and depressions in the past have had nothing to do with bacteria, viruses, or germs. Pandemics, natural disasters, and other phenomena can affect economic conditions but they are not the underlying reason for endless “boom and bust” cycles that regularly wreak havoc on millions.

So far, big “stimulus packages,” infinite money printing, more pay-the-rich schemes, and endless other distortions of the economy have not solved any problems or given rise to a path that people can call stable, reliable, and sustainable.

Many countries have actually been describing their economic “recoveries” as “jobless recoveries” for decades. Others have used the phrase “another lost decade” to describe the economic mayhem caused by an economic system that cannot provide for the needs of the people. Where is stability, security, and prosperity for all? Why is the financial oligarchy so inept at solving basic problems in the 21st century?

The only solution to the constantly worsening economic crisis is to vest sovereignty in the people through democratic renewal so that they can be the actual decision-makers. Only when decisions are made by the people themselves can their interests and rights be upheld. Keeping people disempowered does not solve any problems. Talking about inclusion while constantly excluding people will ensure that things keep going from bad to worse.

In practice, the existing authority is committed only to making the rich richer. This is why constantly relying on and begging and pressuring the rich and their politicians to do the most basic simple things has not reversed growing inequality, joblessness, hunger, poverty, debt, anxiety, and insecurity. Such begging and pressuring only puts working people, the producers of all social wealth, in a humiliating impotent position. It causes lots of burnout and disillusionment as well. Sadly many will keep begging politicians without ever cognizing that the results of their begging are very poor or nonexistent. They never seem to realize that there are far better ways to advance the public interest than endlessly begging unaccountable politicians. They have yet to realize that existing governance arrangements no longer work, which is why problems keep worsening.

There is an urgent need for an entirely new outlook, direction, politics, and agenda in society, one that stems from working people and serves the general interests of a society free of the destructive influence of narrow private interests and their political representatives. The ideas, views, politics, outlook, and agenda of the rich are anachronistic and retrogressive. They have made things worse for the people and society. No one should believe for one second that the rich and their political and media representatives have the best interest of the people at heart. The power, necessity, and hope for opening the path of progress to society lies only with working people.

This article was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2021 at 8:38pm and is filed under Capitalism, Economy/Economics, Joe Biden, Ruling Elite, Vaccines, Working Class.

Inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga; paulatimque discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et balinea et convivorum elegantiam. Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset.

(They adopted our dressing fashion, and begun wearing the togas; little by little they were drawn to touches such as colonnades, baths, and elegant talks. Because they didn’t know better, they called it ‘civilization,’ when it was part of their slavery.)

— Tacitus, Agricola

Introduction

The general problem of culture today is its ability to facilitate and support negative aspects of society through encouraging escapism, diversion and ignorance regarding many important issues of contemporary life, such as economic crises, repressive legislation, poverty, and climate chaos. Or worse still, the use of culture to promote elite views of society regarding power and money, as well as imperialist agendas through negative depictions of a targeted ethnic group or country.

In this, some would call a neo-feudalist age, we see echoes of an earlier feudalism with its abuse of power and wealth that the philosophers of the Enlightenment tried to deal with and rectify. The Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.

It was led by philosophers such as Cesare Beccaria, Denis Diderot, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire. Their concerns about injustice, intolerance and autocracy led to the introduction of democratic values and institutions, and the creation of modern, liberal democracies.

A painting of the 1840 Anti-Slavery Conference. The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840, by Benjamin Robert Haydon (died 1846), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1880 by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Oil on canvas, 1841. 117 in. x 151 in. (2972 mm x 3836 mm). This monumental painting records the 1840 convention of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society which was established to promote worldwide abolition.

However, a new movement in the arts and literature arose in the late 18th century, Romanticism, which emphasized inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual. Romanticism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, aristocratic society and politics, and the scientific rationalization of nature. Romanticism became the basis of many subsequent cultural movements whose common feature has been anti-science and individualism.

The Romanticist influence can be seen in ‘mainstream’ mass culture and high culture in terms of its emphasis on formal experimentation or emotions over sociopolitical content. Romanticist reaction stressed “sensibility” or feeling, and tended towards looking inwards. It was a movement whose ideas have come to dominate much of culture today.

Weighing scales, planets, and fractals

Romanticism is portrayed as having left and right aspects. If we picture a weighing scale with opposing ideas, for example,  we can have the radical opposition to fascism (Romanticist Expressionism) on one side and the radical right of National Socialism on the other side. However, what if this weighing scale was on one side of an even bigger scale? On the other side of that bigger scale would be Enlightenment ideas.

Little weighing scale on one side of an even bigger scale

We rarely get to see the Enlightenment side of the larger scales. We live in a society where we are generally presented with the small scales two sides to everything (the bi-party system, good Nazis [only following orders] v the bad Nazis [gave the orders], this ‘good’ person v that ‘bad’ person, good cop v bad cop) but the reality is that they are usually different sides of the same coin. Similarly, on the smaller scale, the left and right aspects of Romanticist ideas are also two sides of the same coin, because what they both have in common is their rejection of science and reason.

Yet, on the big scales, the Enlightenment side we find progressive politics, the left opposition who were the first to be put into the concentration camps in the 1930s, the community workers, writers, and activists who work diligently today for change in the background are all squeezed out of the large, dominant media-controlled picture.

The problem with this skewed picture is that understanding what is going on becomes as difficult to ascertain as the movements of the planets were to the ancients. Seeming to go in all sorts of strange directions, the ancient Greeks called the planets ‘planeta’ or ‘wanderers’. The movements of the planets were perplexing in a geocentric (earth-centered) universe. It was only with the application of modern science, putting the sun at the center of a solar system, that the odd movements of the planets suddenly fell into place and made sense. We have the same experience of ‘revelation’ or understanding when science is applied to many different difficult problems in various aspects of history, philosophy and society itself.

‘Planets appear to go in one direction, take a looping turn, and then go in the opposite direction. This appears because of the differences of our orbits around the Sun. The Earth gets in an inside or outside track as we pass them causing a planet to look as if it had backed up and changed direction. They wander around the sky.’

The word ‘science’ comes from the Latin word ‘scientia‘ meaning ‘knowledge’ and is a systematic exploration that allows us to develop knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.  The development of science has allowed us to determine what is truth and what is falsehood. Truth is defined as the property of being in accord with fact or reality and the application of science allows us to verify truth in a provable way.

In this sense truth is like a fractal. Fractals are geometrical shapes that have a certain definite appearance. When we magnify a fractal we see the same shape again. No matter how much we magnify the shape, the same geometrical patterns appear infinitely. Truth is similar to a fractal in that whether the truth of something is held by one person, a group of people, a community or a nation its essence remains the same on a micro or macro level.

‘Fractals appear the same at different levels, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. Fractals exhibit similar patterns at increasingly small scales called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry.’

The heliocentric view of the universe remains true even if only one person believes or many believe, even in the face of powerful forces. For example, Galileo’s championing of heliocentrism led him to be investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, where he was found guilty of heresy and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The truth eventually came out and Galileo was pardoned by the Roman Catholic church (359 years later).

Contradictions and falsehoods

It has often been said that the truth will set you free. We live in a society of contradictions and falsehoods where lies, cheating and deception contradict reality. However, many refuse to see the truths of modern society, while others are actively involved in creating the deceptions that maintain the status quo. We know that people are ‘unfree’ and we accept many different levels of this condition: captivity,  imprisonment, suppression, dependency, restrictions, enslavement, oppression.

We may even see this condition as applying to others and not to ourselves. But if we examine closely and truthfully our own position in the societal hierarchy we may recognize our own powerlessness: the contradiction between our view of ourselves and the reality of our situation. Although we vote and we recognize the social contract by rendering taxes to the state, the fact is that very little of substance changes and generally things seem to get worse.

As I have written elsewhere, the fact is that we are triply exploited: we are taxed on wages, alienated from wealth created (profits), and we pay interest on the money borrowed from the wealthy to pay for the capital and current expenditure needed for the maintenance of society and fill in the gap created by the wealthy in the first place.

How is this system of exploitation maintained? Aside from the obvious threat of imprisonment for nonpayment of taxes, and the existence of police and army to enforce the laws of the state: the most influential, and sometimes most subtle tool, is through culture.

The culture of slavery

Culture has a long history of use and abuse, from the bread and circuses of Roman times to the social media of today.

In modern society mass culture helps to maintain this system of exploitation and keeps people in general from questioning their position in the societal hierarchy. The middle classes are lulled into thinking they are free because of better wages making for an easier life, while the working class work ever harder to achieve the benefits of the middle class: higher education, higher status, higher wages. (It has been suggested that the middle class are essentially ‘working class people with huge debts’; e.g., large mortgages.)

However, in general, people work in a globalized system of exploitation in states that support and maintain it thus making wage slaves of the 99 percent.

Slaves in chains during the period of Roman rule at Smyrna (present-day İzmir), 200 CE.

The traditional definition of slavery is ‘someone forbidden to quit their service for another person and is treated like property.’ Modern slavery takes on different forms such as human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labour:

Experts have calculated that roughly 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries; today, an estimated 40.3 million people – more than three times the figure during the transatlantic slave trade – are living in some form of modern slavery, according to the latest figures published by the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation. Women and girls comprise 71% of all modern slavery victims. Children make up 25% and account for 10 million of all the slaves worldwide.

While this may apply to the most extreme cases in modern society, the majority of workers have no control over the wealth they produce:

One of the defining features of the employment relationship in all capitalist countries is that the worker’s will is, by law, “subordinate” to the employers. The employer has the right, within broad bounds, to define the nature of the task, who performs it, and how. This shows up in all kinds of surveillance, control, and submission — also known as maximizing productivity and extracting profit.

The investors and the shareholders benefit the most, while the employees receive wages of varying levels according to the demand for their particular skill-set.

We are encouraged to accept this way of life and there are plenty of different state methods to make sure that we do. However, culture is an important tool of soft power, in particular, mass culture.

The role of mass culture is absolutely essential for the creation, maintenance, and perpetuation of a broad acceptance of the ever-changing forms of technological ‘progress’ and geopolitical shifts in modern capitalist societies, particularly as the global financial crisis (corporate and national debt) deepens.

Culture on three levels

To do this, modern mass culture operates on three different levels. The first level is creating acceptance through diversion and escapism and turning people into passive consumers. Secondly, through the overt representation of elite ideology. Thirdly, and more controversially, through covert manipulation of mass culture to benefit the agenda of elites.

In the first case, consumption becomes inseparable from the ideas of enjoyment and fun. Earlier twentieth century theorists of the Frankfurt School saw consumers as essentially passive but later theoreticians such as Baudrillard saw consumption as an unconscious social conditioning, consuming culture to achieve social mobility by showing awareness of the latest trends in mass culture.

Secondly, overt representation of elite ideology is evident in mass culture that glorifies the upper classes and promotes racism and militarist imperialism. In particular, mass culture depicting historical and contemporary events can be portrayed from an elite perspective.

Thirdly, conscious manipulation of the masses using psychological means, and more controversially, predictive programming. In the 1930s Edward Bernays was a pioneer in the public relations industry using psychology and other social sciences to design public persuasion campaigns. Bernays wrote:

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.

‘For Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry creates false needs to keep us purchasing products we do not actually need by manipulating our psychological impulses and desires.’

Another form of mass manipulation is the concept of predictive programming. Predictive Programming is the theory “that the government or other higher-ups are using fictional movies or books as a mass mind control tool to make the population more accepting of planned future events.”  It is by its nature hard to prove yet the many extraordinary coincidences between events depicted in mass culture and later actual events is, at the very least, disconcerting. For example, the film The Manchurian Candidate depicting the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy, was released in 1962, a year before the assassination of J F Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, an emotionally disturbed ‘communist sympathizer’ who declared his innocence and believed he was being used as a ‘patsy’.

Thus, these three levels allow elites to control how the past, the present, and the future is depicted in mass culture, according to national and geopolitical agendas.

Cultural producers

In their defense, the role of cultural producers has never been easy, and the more money or support that is needed for a cultural project, the harder it is to maintain an independent position.

While with modern production methods and technology it is easier to produce books, films and music independently of the major producers and distributors, in the past elite pressure, censorship, and imprisonment were common.

Pushkin, for example, in his Ode to Liberty, exclaimed with indignation:

Unhappy nation! Everywhere
Men suffer under whips and chains,
And over all injustice reigns,
And haughty peers abuse their power
And sombre prejudice prevails.

However, later during the time of Nicholas I, he changed and ‘adopted the theory of art for art’s sake’:

According to the touching and very widespread legend, in 1826 Nicholas I graciously “forgave” Pushkin the political “errors of his youth,” and even became his magnanimous patron. But this is far from the truth. Nicholas and his right-hand man in affairs of this kind, Chief of Police Benkendorf, “forgave” Pushkin nothing, and their “patronage” took the form of a long series of intolerable humiliations. Benkendorf reported to Nicholas in 1827: “After his interview with me, Pushkin spoke enthusiastically of Your Majesty in the English Club, and compelled his fellow diners to drink Your Majesty’s health. He is a regular ne’er-do-well, but if we succeed in directing his pen and his tongue, it will be a good thing.” The last words in this quotation reveal the secret of the “patronage” accorded to Pushkin. They wanted to make him a minstrel of the existing order of things. Nicholas I and Benkendorf had made it their aim to direct Pushkin’s unruly muse into the channels of official morality.

Pushkin’s contemporaries, the French Romanticists, were also, with few exceptions, ardent believers in art for art’s sake, the idea of the absolute autonomy of art with no other purpose than itself.

In the twentieth century, Ars Gratia Artis (Latin: Art for Art’s Sake) would become the motto for the American media company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to designate art that is independent of political and social pressures.

Of course, while some believe that art should not be politicized, others think that if art was not a social endeavor, then it would be used as a commercial item only available to the rich; e.g., a profitable escapist product while simultaneously maintaining and promoting a conservative mindset.

‘During the Cold War period, films were an important factor in the persuasion of the masses. They would be used in various ways, to present the ideal image of their country and to distinguish a national enemy, to name a few.’

However, any thoughts of art as a progressive tool were soon quashed by the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) in the USA, a body which was set up in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and any organizations with left wing sympathies.

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Not long after, a theoretical analysis of consumerist mass culture was published in a book by Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) in 1947 entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment in which they coined the term the Culture Industry. For Adorno and Horkheimer “the mass-media entertainment industry and commercialized popular culture, which they saw as primarily concerned with producing not only symbolic goods but also needs and consumers, serving the ideological function of diversion, and thus depoliticizing the working class.”

They believed that the production of culture had become like a “a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.— that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.”

Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood 1937-38 oil on canvas; 56×84 in. (142.2×213.4 cm)

More significantly, Adorno and Horkheimer also believed that the scientific thinking the Enlightenment philosophers had developed “led to the development of technologically sophisticated but oppressive and inhumane modes of governance.”

Adorno and Horkheimer believed that because the rationalization of society had ultimately led to Fascism, science and rationalism provided little optimism for future progress and human freedom.

However, this view of the history of science and its relationship with human emancipation is, according to Jeffrey Herf in ‘”Dialectic of Enlightenment” Reconsidered’, one that ignores many progressive movements and changes brought about by Enlightenment ideas, and that Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of modern society and politics simply reduced modernity to technology, science, and bureaucracy. Herf outlines many of the events, institutions, laws, rights, treatments and other human benefits that Adorno and Horkheimer (and others) had ignored:

In Weber’s sociology, Heidegger’s philosophical ruminations, or Dialectic of Enlightenment, the panoply of ideas and events associated with the 1688 revolution in Britain, the moderate wing of the French Revolution, and the ideas and institutions that emerged from the American Revolution, and then from the victory of the North in the American Civil War, are simply absent. As a result of this paucity of historical specificity, Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of modernity during World War II was a very German caricature that did not include ideas about the extension of citizenship, British antislavery, American abolitionism, feminism in Europe and the United States, and the rule of law. Theirs was modernity without liberal democratic ideas and institutions, the rule of law, and the freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press, and of religion or unbelief. […] Dialectic of Enlightenment presented modern science as primarily an exercise in the domination of nature and of human beings. Theirs was a view of the history of the scientific revolution that left out Galileo’s challenge to religious authoritarianism and Francis Bacon’s liberating restatement of the role of evidence in resolving contentious issues. From reading Horkheimer and Adorno — as well as Heidegger and Baumann — one would conclude that modern science was first and foremost a source of control, and would have no idea of how modern medicine, unthinkable without the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, had come into existence.

Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer’s view leaves us with an almost Nietzschian nihilism, that knowledge is impossible, and life is meaningless because to try and improve society will fail and ultimately only increase oppression. Without action, Nietzsche predicted a society of ‘the last man’, the “apathetic person or society who loses the ability to dream, to strive, and who become unwilling to take risks” and slave morality characterized by pessimism and cynicism. A society which has not only lost its ‘will to power’ but also its will to revolt.

The culture of resistance

Throughout history, oppression has been met with resistance in many forms such as uprisings, rebellions, and insurrections.

‘Richard II meeting with the rebels of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

(The Peasants’ Revolt, also named Wat Tyler’s Rebellion or the Great Rising, was a major uprising across large parts of England in 1381. The revolt had various causes, including the socio-economic and political tensions generated by the Black Death pandemic in the 1340s, the high taxes resulting from the conflict with France during the Hundred Years’ War, and instability within the local leadership of London.’)

The resistance often starts with strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience, leading to mass movements of people who ultimately reject the old system of governance and change it for a new system which can be anti-colonial, anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist. The rise of resistance seems to generally develop in three stages, each affecting culture in very different ways. These different stages could be called criticism, substitution and implementation.

Irish Citizen Army group outside Liberty Hall. Group are lined up outside ITGWU HQ under a banner proclaiming “We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland!”. Photo taken in early years of WWI.

Resistance often begins as criticism of the policies or nature of government, or the state. This can be aesthetic or intellectual resistance appearing, for example, in various art forms. Critiques can be of an ideological nature, or simply to highlight social problems and issues. Resistance can take the form of criticism of officially sanctioned culture through demonstrations and boycotting.

It may also take a violent form, for example, the blowing up of colonial statues in Ireland (see my comprehensive list of statues blown up in my blog post here). The blowing up of Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin in 1966 was celebrated subsequently in two different ballads which became immensely popular, an aesthetic critique arising out of a violent ‘critique’.

On a formal level resistance can also be ‘form-poor’ as struggle without help from educated or trained professionals is left to amateurs.

Substitution

Gradually, a new ideology, a different reading of history, a new set of artists and writers produce culture which eventually substitutes the old culture with a new culture as the movement gathers momentum.

The less costly forms like art, music, ballads, books etc. can become very popular and important elements of the resistance itself. The more expensive cultural forms are difficult to produce in the new culture; e.g., cinema, theatre, opera, TV etc., (unless, of course, if the format is changed like in community theatre substituting for state theatre).  Digital equipment can be vastly cheaper to use for the making of movies for mass viewing assuming that the outlet for presentation, the internet, is not closed off through censorship.

Implementation

The final stage is implementation, whereby popular resistance takes control of the state and is able to implement progressive culture as state policy. This is particularly important for the most costly art forms which also gain access to state finance and auditoriums. It allows movies, for example, to cover ignored themes such as histories of resistance, or to show past events from more radical perspectives than the previous elite mindset and agendas.

These different levels of cultural change: criticism, substitution, and implementation can be a long process or all come together in a short span of time.

The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789, during the French Revolution.

I have tried to show in my previous examination of ten different art-forms (see: art, music, theatre, opera, literature, poetry, cinema, architecture, TV, and dance articles) that since the Age of Enlightenment there has been a strong vein of radical ideas relating to social progress. Over the centuries radical culture has looked at the plight of the oppressed using different forms such as naturalism, realism, social realism, and working class socialist realism.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that advancements in science, technology, economic development and social organization would have universal application globally. They also believed in the idea that empirical knowledge should be the basis of society and that with these ideas political and societal change would strengthen civilization itself. While social progressivism, as a political philosophy, is reformist in nature, it also has the potential to snowball into more radical action through discussion around questions as to who runs the state and ownership of the means of production.

The form and content of the culture of resistance has many aspects. Some emphasize change on the community level, developing the skills, community spirit, and artistic sensibilities of the community members whether they be producers, creators or observers. An important element of this strategy for social change is encouraging critical thinking through participation in active dialogue. General themes for discussion have been, for example, gender equality, human rights, the environment and democracy.

The Bash Bush Band musical protesters at Bush’s 2nd inauguration, Washington DC.

Others have taken a more radical approach of examining human conflict and its sources. They look at human conflict from a social perspective and see society in terms of conflicting economic classes. By portraying economic classes in conflict they hope to evolve or expand a working class consciousness or at least an understanding of, and empathy with, oppressed groups. Radical artists, writers, composers etc are encouraged to take a scientific approach and work against superstitions and blind practices. As radical cultural producers they try to present the truth and inspire wide-ranging social and political activism.

Future of culture?

Modern resistance, often in digital form on the internet today, is now subject to a creeping censorship as big tech tries to slow down the efficacy of the internet at making widely available different perspectives on many different issues. At the same time, big tech tries to portray technological progress as social progress, and is at the forefront of liberal campaigns for individual rights at the expense of mass movements for collective or group rights. Such group rights allow for organizations to speak for, and negotiate on behalf of, trade unions, trade associations, specific ethnic groups, political parties, and nation-states.

However, internet censorship and the gradually increasing power of the state (through police, courts, and prisons) using current and new legislation will be able to continue unabated, that is, unless the slave culture that facilitates it is shaken off and a new culture of resistance is born.

This article was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2021 at 10:22am and is filed under Censorship, Civil Unrest, Culture, Ecological Socialism, Enlightenment, Exploitation, Feudalism, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Marginalism, Media, Propaganda, Resistance, Romanticism, Slavery, Working Class.

The economic depression that is unfolding was a long time in the making and was accelerated and intensified by the “COVID Pandemic” but not the direct result of it. A severe economic collapse was going to take place with or without a virus. If anything, the virus provided convenient cover for what was inevitable.

It is well-known that the unplanned chaotic capitalist economic system habitually goes through violent upheavals, leaving millions perpetually insecure, poor, unemployed, and stressed. This is not news to anyone. Equally disturbing, we are routinely told that the so-called “business cycle” is inevitable and normal—just a “natural” part of life, as if the economy is beyond human comprehension and conscious control. There is supposedly no alternative to the “invisible hand” of the so-called “free market” regularly wreaking havoc on us. We are all to feel helpless against “forces larger than us.” We are to believe that there is no economic science that can ensure stability and prosperity for all. The “law of the jungle” is allegedly the best humanity can muster and no alternative to this inhuman system is to be considered.

Long after vaccines have come and gone the economy will continue to deteriorate because the economy is in the hands of competing owners of capital who treat the socialized economy as theirs to plunder for private gain, no matter the damage to the social and natural environment. The tendency for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer was going on for decades before the “COVID Pandemic” and will continue so long as those who actually produce the wealth in society remain disempowered and marginalized, alienated from and unable to deploy the very wealth they produce for the benefit of society.

Economic crises, recessions, and depressions—including wars—are usually how the obsolete capitalist economic system temporarily “resets” itself before crashing again. During periods of over-production and under-consumption, labor and production are destroyed until a “new zero” can be established. “De-leveraging” has to take place, sometimes for years, before capitalism can establish a temporary “new equilibrium” again. Carnage is unavoidable in this historically-exhausted economic system that privileges a tiny ruling elite. The problem is that each crisis, recession, and depression sets the stage for a deeper crisis, recession, and depression the next time. Just look at the number of long-term unemployed, inequality, the labor force participation rate, the number of homeless, the “gig economy,” and debt at all levels. All keep steadily worsening, leaving many anxious about the future. In June 2020 the Congressional Budget Office went so far as to say it would take ten years to return to pre-pandemic economic conditions, which were not that great to begin with. Recall as well that after the 2008 economic collapse most countries ran on gas fumes for years, there was no real and meaningful “comeback” for most countries. International imperialist organizations like the IMF and World Bank continually revised not-so-rosy growth predictions downward. The economy has been stagnant and lackluster for a long time and this is not about to suddenly change in the final and highest stage of capitalism. Without organized working class resistance, more parasitism and decay is in store for the economy. The rich and their representatives have no solutions.

The economy will not serve people and the general interests of society until there is a change in the aim, direction, and control of the economy. It does not matter what “plan” is put forward by establishment politicians or “leaders.” So long as maximizing profits as fast as possible for a tiny ruling elite and depriving workers of any say in anything remains the norm, problems will keep going from bad to worse. Things will not magically improve on their own or when left in the hands of a few billionaires. There is no scenario in which the economy serves people and society while the actual producers of wealth remain sidelined and removed from the levers of power. Lofty words, phrases, and promises from politicians and “leaders” are designed to dupe the gullible and prevent people from engaging in action with analysis that favors them. The rich and their representatives do not want people to break free from capital-centered thinking and think and act independently. All thinking and action is to take place from a capital-centered reference point.

The main thing the “COVID Pandemic” revealed very sharply is that the richest and most powerful countries are not set-up to serve the basic needs of the people. In these and other countries where the neoliberal antisocial offensive has been wreaking havoc for decades, the “COVID Pandemic” left millions sick, dead, unemployed, depressed, dehumanized, and poor while the rich got much richer. Does this make sense to anyone? Would this happen if sovereignty was vested in the people and they decided the affairs of society? “Representative democracy” is increasingly revealing itself to be defunct, corrupted, and ineffective. There is no mechanism for people to effectively direct affairs in their own vision and interests. Existing institutions block people from affirming their rights. The so-called “social contract” underpinning economic and political arrangements for decades in the U.S. died long ago, and “leaders” and politicians have left everyone rudderless and disillusioned.

A main task confronting working people is how to open the path of progress to society under very difficult conditions. Already it can be seen from a variety of events and actions that unfolded in 2020 and early 2021 that people from all walks of life are in motion on several fronts. People are striving to affirm their rights and are gradually developing better actions and better analyses. Many are fed up with an outmoded system that keeps making life more difficult for them. This sentiment can be seen and felt worldwide. One can sense a change in the energy of the world’s people and a more robust pro-social thrust and desire among people. It is critical to nurture this drive so that it is not continually sabotaged by the anticonsciousness and disinformation of the rich and their political and media representatives. The current heroic struggles of farmers in India is a good example of workers defending their rights in the context of defending the rights of all.

Health crises, economic crises, and social crises cannot be resolved so long as society and the economy are dominated by a handful of billionaires. Only when defunct liberal governance arrangements are rejected and social consciousness and the human factor are unleashed can problems be solved effectively by the people themselves who already know what is needed to move society forward.

1. It is even said that covid-19 vaccines will not prevent virus transmission and everyone still has to wear masks and socially distance. And many continue to experience a range of side effects from covid-19 vaccines.

The post Vaccine Will Not Reverse Economic Problems first appeared on Dissident Voice.

Have you ever found yourself surrounded by masked rioters being chased by flag-waving patriots and thought, I’ve seen this movie before?

I woke up this morning dreaming that I was speaking at one of your rallies.  I thought then, well, if I probably won’t be getting an invitation to speak at one of them, what would I say if I were to be asked to share some words?

Contrary to popular opinion in kindergarten, words are far more powerful than either sticks or stones, and I think this is something that most of us actually already know.  Words can be used to divide and rule entire societies, it seems.  We can have some people on some TV networks saying some sets of words, with other people on other networks using different vocabulary, and a different perspective, to talk about the same issues, and pretty soon we can achieve an endless series of tragic physical results from such words.

So I especially like to avoid alarm-bell words that require lots of defining if you’re going to use them successfully, or else no one really knows what they mean.  If I do use such a word, I’ll tend to define it clearly first, unless I’m writing for a very particular audience.  I’m mostly talking about “ism” words such as as socialism, anarchism, communism, capitalism, fascism, nationalism, supremacism, racism, anti-racism, sexism, progressivism, conservatism, liberalism, elitism.

Other words are important, or at least to some people they can be, so I’d want to first say that I’m so sorry Aaron Danielson was killed.  Without getting into the details and not having been present, many of us were expecting something like this to happen.  Whether the next person killed at a protest was going to be shot or run over was unknown, but that someone else would be killed was just a matter of time.

Many people, of course, avoided downtown that day, knowing there would be lots of armed people with different opinions all in the same place at the same time, shouting at each other and worse.  Other people, perhaps people with stronger political convictions than most, can’t stay home.  Such as many of the folks who I hope might be hearing these words right now.

There are a lot of people, from a wide variety of political orientations, who would think it pointless for me to even attempt to communicate with you.  They think the divide is too great.  They’re expecting all the predictions of civil war to come true.  They think folks like you and I live in our insulated little echo chambers, in different worlds, and we couldn’t even communicate with each other if we tried.  And then, going to protests, as you and I have done so often, any of us can bear out the fact that there is a whole lot more bear mace being sprayed in different directions than anything resembling communication going on.  Looking at my YouTube channel, the comment section on certain songs largely consists of people exchanging death threats with each other.

But I think the folks who think we’re hopelessly polarized and have no grounds for communication are completely wrong.  I think we live in the same world, and we face the same sorts of problems, and could benefit from the same sorts of solutions, too, and I think many of you already agree with this notion.  That’s what I would really want to focus on, if I were speaking at one of your rallies.

I think about so many of the rallies when I’ve seen you guys around, and I don’t want to judge too much by appearances, but to me you look mostly like members of the working class.  Some of you might be rich, I don’t know, but I’d be willing to bet that at least 99% of you aren’t.  Many of you are military veterans, which is also true of no small number of those among the ranks of the groups you oppose.

Being members of the working class living in the Portland area, as so many of you are, and as I and most of my friends are, I’ll bet there are a whole lot of things we have in common.

I’ll bet half of us live in the same sorts of two-story, wooden, grey, Class C apartment complexes that you can see lining most of the major roads in most of the neighborhoods of both Portland and across the river in Vancouver.  I’ll bet many of us have the same landlord, in the form of an investment group, such as Prime or Randall.  I’ll bet our apartment complexes are managed by the same stingy management company, such as CTL.  And I’ll bet your rent also doubled over the past ten years, and this development has caused you great consternation, made you angry, made you want to find solutions.

Oh, and did you happen to notice that during the time your rent doubled, Obama was in the White House?  Hard not to notice coincidences like that.

And while your rent was doubling during the Obama years, maybe you, like me, were having kids, making a family, hoping to move into a bigger place, maybe to buy a house, only to see any such hopes dashed by the reality that the cost of buying a house or renting a bigger apartment was out of the question, if you didn’t have a six-figure income.

And during that decade, who was running the city you lived in, where the rents and the taxes kept going up and up, while your income did not?  Democrats.  I noticed that, too.

When you look around your neighborhood at all the construction sites here in the booming Pacific Northwest, and you see the workers, and when things break at your apartment complex and you see who comes to do repairs, and who maintains the grounds, did you notice that most of the people doing most of the work are immigrants?  I noticed that, too.

And who are the people always advocating for the rights of immigrants, and for taking in more immigrants and refugees, while the cost of living keeps going up and jobs are as scarce as they are?  Democrats, once again, as I know you have observed.

Have you ever wondered, if we had a lot less immigration in this country, what that might do to wages in the construction industry?  They’d go up, right?  That’s obvious, isn’t it?  Same for other industries, too, right?

A lot of people look at all of this, they put two and two together, and they conclude that the policies of the Democratic Party are not very conducive to our survival.  If they want to do things like welcome lots of immigration, export jobs with free trade deals, and govern cities in such a way that the rent doubles every ten years, maybe it’s very reasonable to conclude that the Democratic Party isn’t representing the interests of the general population.  Did you reach that conclusion at some point along the line?

And then someone comes along who wants to deal with this mess, to do something on behalf of most people, drain the swamp, build the wall, stop the flood of immigrants taking so many of the jobs, end the endless wars and stop policing the world, get out of free trade deals, put up tariffs, and try to make moves to reverse the trend of everything going in the wrong direction all the time, and for supporting his evidently reasonable policies, you are called every bad name in the book.

But then, as you have been giving your support to this president, you may have also been noticing that many of the policies he’s been talking about are opposed not only by the Democrats, but, at least until very recently, by most of the Republican leadership as well.  You may also have begun to notice that the man doesn’t necessarily support the things he says he supports, and he hasn’t drained the swamp at all.  Am I right?  Or did I just lose you there?  I’m just guessing there are a lot of you who realize, on some level, along the line, that Trump is mostly just saying the things he thinks you want to hear, and then governing on behalf of big business, like very rich politicians have done in DC for a very long time.

Being a history buff, if I were speaking at one of your rallies I’d want to try to talk about what I see as some pretty clear historical parallels between now and a century ago.  Trump seems new and unconventional in many ways, but this kind of societal divide between large groups of economically struggling Americans on different sides of issues like immigration goes way back.

Exactly one hundred years ago here in the Pacific Northwest and around the United States, as well as across Canada, conflict raged in the streets.  Veterans of the First World War made up the ranks of many of the people involved on all sides of it.  The cities were full of returning soldiers, many of whom were sick with the Spanish Flu.  Disease was rampant, there was insufficient housing, and not enough jobs, either.  At the same time, a massive influx of immigrants from war-torn Europe was coming, along with the returning soldiers from the war.

It was a situation designed for conflict, and conflict there was.  On one side were people who viewed themselves as patriots, who wanted to control the dramatic impact that widespread immigration was having on the job and housing markets, and in society generally.  On the other side was a labor union led largely by immigrants, who said everyone — the working class throughout the world, regardless of nation, race, gender or other such factors — should be organized into One Big Union.

This movement saw the First World War and immigration from Europe that was going on at the time as just two more ways the ruling class was trying to divide the working class, and have us fighting each other, whether on different sides of trenches in European wars, or in competition over low-paying jobs here in the US, in order to make sure those jobs keep on paying badly, and the owners make more profits.  Instead of opposing immigration, they organized immigrants along with everyone else.  They had learned that they had to make a choice between supporting their nation, in the sense of supporting the imperial goals of their governing elite, or supporting their class, and they chose the latter.

Today, there is no massive, ecumenical movement of the working class for us all to join.  No such alternative like that currently exists.  When it did exist, laws were passed, called the Alien and Sedition Acts, and a national police force was formed — called the FBI — in order to destroy the movement.  Union halls across the country were burned to the ground, and union organizers of all races were lynched under bridges here in the Pacific Northwest.

But the kind of vision that formed this movement that was so targeted by the authorities back then has in the past been so powerful that it has brought down governments, it has forced the world’s biggest corporations to make massive concessions, it has reshaped entire societies for the better.  It has also brought down upon it such terrible repression, it has been so targeted by the authorities and so alternately vilified and silenced by history, that even the very concept that the movement ever existed seems like a utopian fantasy, not like a practical reality that has shaped the world as we know it, perhaps more than any other force besides gravity.

I may be a geek, but if I had the chance to speak at one of your rallies, I’d want to talk about patterns.  There is a pattern happening here, and these consistencies between Portland in 1920 and Portland in 2020 are not accidental.  The dynamics of the conflicts in this society now are created by the same sorts of people who were creating them back then.  In many cases, their direct descendants.  These things tend to run in the family, as does inherited wealth.

Why does the political elite enact policies intended to create these conflicts, and why do they then make moves to exacerbate them?  In the back of our minds, I think we all know the answer.  If I were speaking at one of your rallies, and I asked this question, would anybody shout, “divide and conquer,” or am I being overly optimistic?  Because it seems to me that as long as those who, for example, support increasing immigration and those who support decreasing immigration can be in conflict with each other over the scraps dropped from the table of the ruling class, the ruling elite wins.

The ruling class logic is so simple and effective on us, it’s hard to even see it’s there.  Most Mexicans accept such low wages because they’re either undocumented and living in the shadows of the law, or they’re competing with people who are in that situation.  And, as you know too well from personal experience, in all likelihood, the rest of us are competing with them, too.  And unless we take the concept of exclusion to its logical conclusion and we really think laws and walls are going to keep out the hundreds of millions of people just on the other side of the southern border who also need to feed their children, or unless we believe genocide is the actual solution here, then all the people living in this country are going to have to have the opportunity to work, and if they’re going to work, they’re going to have to be paid, and if they’re going to be paid, then whatever they’re paid is what you’re going to get paid, too.  So if you want to be paid well, and to live in an affordable place, you have to stand up for everyone else’s rights to a living wage and decent housing.  That’s what these conflicts in other societies have taught us.  The ruling elite here learned those lessons from history, too, which is why they divide and rule the way they do.

I’m a musician, by profession, and before the pandemic I used to tour a lot.  Ireland is one of the places where I have the most fans.  There are reasons for this, both political and cultural, but I’ll save that discussion for another time.  Point is, I have a fairly deep familiarity with some other countries where I have spent a lot of my time over the decades, working.  In a part of Ireland called Northern Ireland, which is more a political term than a geographical one, the population is fairly evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants.  The Catholics there have long lived as second-class citizens, and what has come to be known as the Troubles, which resulted in thousands of people being killed in Northern Ireland from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, was largely about Catholics having equality with Protestants.

So, you can see if you look at it that there is this, even now, a simmering conflict going on between two groups of people in this very conflicted part of the world that we call Northern Ireland.  If you’re part of the society, you will likely have developed ideas about the folks who live on the other side of the wall — those Protestants only care about other Protestants, or those Catholics are criminally inclined, etc. — and you likely will have developed a sort of bipolar, Catholic/Protestant view of the world, as a sort of default, whether you feel passionately about it or not.

But if you back up and look at it from the outside — even if you just go work in England for a few years, like so many Irish do, from both sides of the sectarian divide — what you’ll see looking back at Northern Ireland are two groups of people we call Catholics and Protestants, one group of which is generally a little better-off than the other, but what you’ll notice most of all is that the majority of both Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are poor by European standards.  I heard one speaker at a union rally in Derry note that the Catholic community in Northern Ireland has the fifth worst quality of housing in Europe, while the Protestants have the sixth worst housing standards.

Back to the US.  Contrary to the rhetoric, our ruling elite consists of millionaire Democrats as well as millionaire Republicans.  The Congress consists almost entirely of millionaires, the Democrats being slightly richer than their Republican counterparts.  And history shows us in abundance that different elements of the two groups of millionaires are always vying, over the years, decades, and centuries, to convince us all that they represent us, or different elements of us, the people of this country.  What they’re doing in their efforts to appeal to different segments of society, in effect, is practicing divide and rule politics.  Who they’re trying to divide from whom doesn’t even vary that much over the years, though the dynamics evolve somewhat.

What I’d most want to get across, if I were ever to have access to your attention, is that the reason they need to divide us is because they can’t afford to have us be united.  And the reason they can’t afford to see us united is because they don’t rule on our behalf, they rule on behalf of the 1%.  Neither party represents us, the working class majority, of whatever color or gender.  And Trump doesn’t, either, no matter how much he may succeed in painting himself as an outsider or a rebel of some kind.

What the elite from both ruling parties want is division.  What they want is for us to shout at each other and shoot each other.  They will try in so many different ways to make that happen.  They — and their friends who run the major social media platforms, with their conflict algorithms, and their friends in the corporate media, whether CNN or Fox — will do their best to reduce the debate to some people calling others fascists who love racism, while others are called communists who hate freedom, or anarchists who love chaos and arson.

What they fear most, I would conclude, is a united working class.  Or, to put it another way, a working class that is aware of its own existence.  Or, to put it another way, class solidarity, and especially international class solidarity.  What they love most are pawns.

The United States has reached a severe crisis point and the next few months will determine how we address it. The COVID-19 pandemic is raging across the country and some areas are struggling to provide enough hospital beds and staff to care for people. The recession is deepening as unemployment benefits and the moratorium on evictions run out. Yet, members of Congress cannot even agree to pass a weak version of the CARES Act they passed last March when the situation was less serious.

This is our moment. This is the time to make demands that the government take action to address the people’s needs. Even the most ‘progressive’ members in Congress  have shown they are unwilling to do more than talk about the crisis. They refuse to use what little power they have to confront their leadership. It is up to us to bring the crisis to members of Congress and demand immediate action.

Twitter

The minor economic recovery that occurred over the summer when businesses started to open back up has faltered. The real number of unemployed people rose in November as hundreds of thousands of people stopped looking for work. On top of that, the crises have gone on for so long that businesses, especially restaurants, are scaling back or closing making the job losses permanent. In fact, 110,000 restaurants have gone out of business this year.

Bill Quigley provides some “tragic facts” about the crisis. Without Congressional action, 87 million workers will lose their sick leave, 30 million people will face eviction and 12 million people will lose their unemployment benefits by the end of the month. The student loan deferment is also set to expire.

Hunger and poverty are rising with 50 million people, including 1 in 4 children, lacking food security. The number of children who are homeless, 1.5 million, is at a record high. And fewer students are applying for college.

Unemployment, homelessness and hunger put people at risk of poor health and death from COVID-19 and other causes. It is all connected and there are obvious solutions to these crises. The problem is that Congress is refusing to act.

Sarah Lazare points out that Congress had no trouble approving a $740 billion budget for the Pentagon on December 2. She writes, “That we can find the mon­ey for war but not for coro­n­avirus relief expos­es the moral rot at the cen­ter of U.S. pol­i­tics, a rot that must be dug out and expunged if we are to get through this crisis.”

This week, Congress agreed to a one week extension of funding to keep the government open and to give them more time to agree to a COVID-19 relief package. The package currently being discussed is much smaller, just over $900 billion, than the $3.4 trillion HEROES Act passed by the House last May. It would give $300/week in unemployment benefits for 18 weeks and extend the two pandemic unemployment programs, one that targets gig and self-employed workers and the other that extends unemployment benefits. It would provide some funding to small businesses and local and state governments as well as funding for vaccines and health care. It will also extend the eviction moratorium and student loan deferment, give funds to schools and increase food stamps. It will not provide direct payments to people.

The sticking point seems to be that the Republicans are insisting on immunity for businesses from liability for workers being infected with COVID-19 on the job. There have been record numbers of complaints to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) this year by workers who are not being provided with adequate protection on the job. The Democrats are refusing to concede on this provision in the bill, which is far weaker than what is needed.

CNBC.

Project Syndicate reports that scholars who study wealth inequality and its impact on the overall economy are pretty clear about the problems and solutions. The wealthy, who have benefited greatly during the pandemic, hoard most of their money, keeping it out of circulation. The rest of the people spend any money they have out of necessity to cover basics like food and housing, but this doesn’t add up to much when the bottom 80% of people only hold 14% of the wealth.

The consensus is that the best way to stimulate the economy and reduce wealth inequality is to give more money to the bottom 80%. Project Syndicate cites policy recommendations from MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future that include taxing the rich, raising the minimum wage and strengthening collective bargaining, and providing government healthcare, free education and more extensive unemployment benefits.

These are similar to demands that many groups are making. This week, taxi drivers from New York to Maryland converged on Washington, DC to demand relief. They rallied at the Capitol and drove around downtown with signs on their cars. Health care workers continue to strike over long hours and lack of protection. Students at Columbia University, the most expensive school in the country, are preparing for a tuition strike to protest student debt. Teachers are also resisting school re-openings. Churches are raising funds to buy up and forgive medical debt.

One demand that is getting a lot of attention is National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA). The Congressional Budge Office came out with a report this week that found NIMA would save $650 billion a year in administrative costs. If it included long term care, it would still save $300 billion. There is a NIMA bill in the House that is pretty good, HR 1384, introduced by Pramila Jayapal.

Jimmy Dore is calling on so-called progressive Democrats who champion NIMA to demand a vote on HR 1384, which has 115 co-sponsors, by threatening not to support Pelosi for Speaker of the House if she refuses. The Democrats will have a slim majority in the House next year, so even if as few as 15 members had the courage to do this, they could force a vote. This would expose whether the Democrats who have run on NIMA and won really mean it. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is the largest caucus in the House. They have the power to stop legislation, but to date, they have refused to use that power.

If there were ever a time to demand NIMA, it is now. At least 14 million more people have lost their health insurance this year, bringing us to similar numbers of uninsured people as there were in 2009 when the health reform process took place. But, sadly, it doesn’t look good. Even the “Squad” in Congress is refusing to go against Pelosi.

People’s Dispatch.

This is why it is up to us to take action. We can’t count on Congress or a Biden-Harris White House to take action to meet our needs. In his most recent article, Chris Hedges calls out the liberal class that called itself “The Resistance” while Trump was in office. Where will that liberal class be in 2021 as the pandemic, recession and right wing violence escalate?

The liberals and those who are funded by Democratic Party-aligned groups will not demand what is needed unless there is a strong left that exposes them and holds them accountable. In fact, groups like the Poor People’s Campaign have already abandoned support for NIMA and are supporting the totally inadequate Biden-Harris healthcare proposal.

To win what we need, we must be clear about what we are demanding. The People’s Agenda is a good place to start. And we must take action in our communities to pressure lawmakers at every level, to withhold our support through strikes, boycotts and other actions, to build networks of mutual aid to sustain us through these crises and to create alternative institutions that are founded in equity and democratic participation. This is what revolution looks like.

Caitlin Johnstone wrote in “In an Insane World, Revolution Is the Moderate Position,” that our demands for putting people and the planet over profits and for respect for human rights are not radical, although the power structure will tell us they are. If we want to defeat the extreme right, we must create a country where all can prosper. It is economic insecurity and the power holder’s blaming certain sectors of society for it instead of taking responsibility that is fueling division and violence.

Johnstone concludes with these wise words:

To live a revolutionary life, you should insist on the normality and mundaneness of your own position. Sanity should not be special and unusual, and we should not participate in the delusion that it is. Let your life be an expression of the common sense ordinariness of revolution.

It is time to take revolution mainstream.

This article was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 at 11:04pm and is filed under Activism, COVID-19, Housing/Homelessness, Job Termination, Militarism, Minimum Wage, National improved Medicare for all (NIMA), Rent/rent strikes, Revolution, Student Loans, The Pentagon, US Congress, Weaponry, Working Class.

The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and Hungarians….Sometimes these brutes are referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the blue-collar types.’ But the bureaucratic, sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class. Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.

He wrote that on April 14, 1969. Yesterday. Little changes.

Transferred from NYC to the middle of the country half a century later, these people are referred to as Trump’s “deplorables.” They come in baskets, as Hillary Clinton said.  And even though they represent nearly half the voting public in the last two presidential elections – 70+ million Americans – their complaints are dismissed as the rantings of ignorant, conservative racists.

Name calling substitutes for understanding. This is not an accident.

Like Hamill, I am a NYC born and bred Irish-American – my working-class Bronx to Pete’s Brooklyn. We both attended the same Jesuit high school in different years. Unlike Hamill, known for his gritty street reporting, because I have been a college sociology professor, I could falsely be categorized as a northeastern liberal intellectual oozing with disdain for those who voted for Trump.  This is false, because, like Hamill, I see it as my intellectual duty to understand what motivates these voters, just as I do with those who voted for Biden.

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump, nor did I vote for Joseph Biden, or Hillary Clinton in 2016.  I am not one of those sociologists Hamill refers to; I use the term Working Class and am acutely aware of the social class nature of life in the U.S.A., where the economic system of neo-liberal capitalism is constructed to try to convince working Americans that the system cares for them, and if they grow disgusted with its lies and inequities and rage against the machine by voting for anyone who seems to be with them (even a super-rich reality TV real estate magnate named Trump who is not with them), they are dumb-ass bigots whose concerns should be brushed off.

The truth is that both the Trump voters and the Biden voters have been taken for a ride.  It is a game, a show, a movie, a spectacle.  It hasn’t changed much since 1969; the rich have gotten richer and the poor, working, and middle classes have gotten poorer and more desperate.  Those who have profited have embraced the fraud.

The Institute for Policy Studies has just released a new analysis showing that since the start of the Covid-19 “pandemic” in mid-March and the subsequent transfer upwards of $5 trillion to the wealthy and largest corporations through the Cares Act, approved 96-0 in the U.S. Senate, 650 U.S. billionaires have gained over a trillion dollars in eight months as the America people have suffered an economic catastrophe.  This shift upward of massive wealth under Trump is similar to Obama’s massive 2009 bailout of the banks on the backs of American workers. Both were justified through feats of legerdemain by both political parties, accomplices in the fleecing of regular people, many of whom continue to support the politicians that screw them while telling them they care.

If the Democrats and the Republicans are at war as is often claimed, it is only over who gets the larger part of the spoils. Trump and Biden work for the same bosses, those I call the Umbrella People (those who own and run the country through their intelligence/military/media operatives), who produce and direct the movie that keeps so many Americans on the edge of their seats in the hope that their chosen good guy wins in the end.

I am well aware that most people disagree with my analysis.  It does seem as if I am wrong and that because the Democrats and their accomplices have spent years attempting to oust Trump through Russia-gate, impeachment, etc. that what seems true is true and Trump is simply a crazy aberration who somehow slipped through the net of establishment control to rule for four years.  To those 146 + million people who voted for Biden and Trump this seems self-evident.  But if that is so, why, despite their superficial differences – and Obama’s, Hillary Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s for that matter – have the super-rich gotten richer and richer over the decades and the war on terror continued as the military budget has increased each year and the armament industries and the Wall Street crooks continued to rake in the money at the expense of everyone else?  These are a few facts that can’t be disputed. There are many more. So what’s changed under Trump?  We are talking about nuances, small changes.  A clown with a big mouth versus traditional, “dignified” con men.

If you were writing this script as part of long-term planning and average people were getting disgusted from decades of being screwed and were sick of politicians and their lying ways, wouldn’t you stop the reruns and create a new show?  Come on, this is Hollywood where creative showmen can dazzle our minds with plots so twisted that when you leave the theater you keep wondering what it was all about and arguing with your friends about the ending. So create a throwback film where the good guy versus the bad guy was seemingly very clear, and while the system ground on, people would be at each other’s throats over the obvious differences, even while they were fabricated.

Variety is necessary.  You wouldn’t want to repeat the film from 2008 when a well-spoken black man came into town out of nowhere to clean up the mess created by the poorly spoken white sheriff who loved war and then the black hero went on to wage war in seven countries while his fans sat contented in the audience loving the show and making believe they didn’t see what was happening on the screen even though their hero jailed whistle blowers and greatly expanded the surveillance state right in front of their eyes.

No, as the years passed, those two guys turned out to be buddies, and their wives hit it off, and a famous photograph appeared of the good guy’s wife hugging the bad guy, which was not a good thing for the script that has the Republicans warring against the Democrats.

A new story line was needed. How about an opéra bouffe, someone suggested, and the rest is history. Or pseudo-history. This is the real matrix. The most sophisticated mind control operation up to this point, with the coronavirus lockdown added to propel it to what the producers hope is a conclusion.

What more can I say?

Billy Joel said it:  “JFK blown away.”

The Towers pulverized. David Ray Griffin told us the truth repetitively.

Minds of this generation destroyed, as Allen Ginsberg said in Howl: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

It’s been many generations now.  There has been a form of social madness growing over the decades and it is everywhere now.  Look at people’s faces, if you can see them behind the masks; everywhere the strained and stressed looks, the scared rabbit eyes that you see on the wards of mental hospitals. The look that says: what the fuck has happened as they stare into a blank screen in a tumbling void, to paraphrase Don DeLillo from his new book Silence, where people speak gibberish once their digital world is mysteriously taken down and they wander in the dark.  We are in the dark now, even though the lights and screens are still shining for the time being.

Let those who think I am wrong about Trump and Biden being players in the same show, consider this. If Trump is truly the opponent of the Deep State, the Swamp, the corrupt establishment, he will pardon Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden who have been persecuted by these forces.  He has nothing left to lose as he exits stage right.

The journalist Julian Assange has done more than anyone to expose the sick underbelly of the gangster state, its intelligence and military secrets, its illegal and immoral killings. That is why he has been hounded and locked away for so long. It’s a bipartisan persecution of an innocent man whose only “crime” has been to tell the truth that is allegedly the essence of a democratic society.

Chelsey Manning has also suffered tremendously for exposing the savagery of U.S. military operations.

And Edward Snowden has been forced into Russian exile for telling us about the vast global surveillance systems run by the NSA and CIA to spy on the American people.

Three innocent truth-tellers at war with the Deep-State forces that Donald Trump says he opposes.

If he is what his supporters claim, he will pardon these courageous three.  It’s all in his power. A simple, clear message as he goes out the door. If by the smallest chance he does pardon them, I will be very happy and publicly apologize.  If he doesn’t, as I expect, please don’t say a word in his defense.  My ears will be stuffed with wax.  For he won’t, because, like Biden, he is controlled by the very forces that these truth-tellers have exposed.

But back to the working class “deplorables” that voted for Trump. They aren’t going anywhere.  Their grievances remain. For decades, under Democratic and Republican administrations, their lives have been hollowed out, their livelihoods taken as corporate thieves have ravaged their towns and cities by closing down the factories where they worked and sending them overseas for greater profits. Small farmers have been “liquidated” for agribusiness.

As always, the coastal urbanites have considered rural people stupid, uncouth, and clownish, as the words clown, boor, and villain have all originally meant farmer or countryman or lower-class peasant.  Such hidden etymological social class prejudices have a way of persisting over the years.

Towns and small businesses disappear, traditional values are ridiculed, drug addiction and suicide increase, the fabric of traditions crumble, etc.  This list is long.  The people who voted for Trump feel betrayed; feel like victims. Of course, as Pete Hamill wrote of the NYC white working class in 1969, there are racists among them, and with all racists, they have their reasons, but these reasons are poison and despicable. But overall, these Trump voters are, in Hamill’s words, “actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”  Any politician, he added, who leaves these people out of the political equation, does so at a very large risk.  That risk has been growing over the decades.

Yet desperate people do desperate things, and for many Americans these are desperate times.  Everywhere you look, there are long lines at food pantries and soup kitchens.  The unemployment numbers are staggering. Homelessness. Suicides.  Drug and alcohol addictions rising.  Clear signs of social disintegration.  This is true not just in the United States but is happening around the world as neo-liberal economic policies are exacerbated by the widespread lockdowns that has given rise to massive protests worldwide, protests that the corporate press has failed to publicize since doing so would give the lie to their promotions of the lockdowns.

In England, the Mirror newspaper just printed the legendary Australian journalist John Pilger’s article about his 1975 interviews with impoverished English families with this lead:

John Pilger interviewed Irene Brunsden in Hackney, east London about only being able to feed her two-year-old a plate of cornflakes in 1975. Now he sees nervous women queueing at foodbanks with their children as it’s revealed 600,000 more kids are in poverty now than in 2012.

Vast numbers of people are suffering.

Many Trump voters no doubt know that Trump was never going to save them. But he said the right things, and desperation and disgust will grasp onto the slightest will-o’-the-wisp when disbelief in the whole rotten system is widespread.

Let’s not bullshit: everyone knows the game is rigged.

Trump is a liar.

Biden is a liar.

Great Britain’s Boris Johnson is a liar.

Fill in the names of the political charlatans.

The system is built on lies to keep the illusions brightening the screen of the great picture show, what Neil Gabler has rightly called “life the movie.”

Biden voters no doubt desperately hope that we can go back to some semblance of “normal,” even while knowing this is a losing game. Many of them try hard to conceal their true feelings, that their hatred for Trump and their love of living in times when imperialism is concealed as democracy is what they want. They don’t want to know. Concealment of the atrocious underbelly of normal is their hope and desire, even while they too are being fleeced and secretly know that the “new normal” will be far from their restorative dreams.  There are exceptions, of course, true believers who think Biden will significantly change things, but I would say they are a very small minority.  Many Biden voters say they have voted for the “lesser of two evils,” an old, worn-out excuse that in a rigged system will perdure.

Little changes. The past lives on.

Next year’s Academy Awards will be interesting.  A wit I know suggested that perhaps Trump and Biden will be nominees for the Best Actor in a Leading Role and they will tie for the Oscar.  That will be the second time that has ever happened.  The first was in 1932 when Fredric March and Wallace Beery shared the award.  March starred in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Beery in the boxing film, The Champ.

Both winners will be announced as starring in the same film, confusing the audience until it’s named: The American Nightmare.  Then raucous cheering will erupt from the jaded audience.  Dr. Jekyll will embrace Mr. Hyde and the melded Champ will take a bow as he winks for the cameras.

The post The Past Lives On: The Elite Strategy To Divide and Conquer first appeared on Dissident Voice.

Why do political science and neoclassical economics go in one ear and out the other?

A human being who has a fully integrated social body understands that economics is about a social system of circulation of goods and services. In other words, provisioning for the population.  Politics is the collective process of evaluating and deciding a) where have we been (our past) and b) where are we going (the future). Politics is about steering.  With this framework, it would be inconceivable to steer or govern without referring to how well the economic system is working. How can you steer without an evaluation of how goods and services are circulating? So too, how can you monitor the economic provisioning process without checking on the decision-making process of the steering of our social direction? In fact, a person with an integrated social body only makes a distinction between economic and political processes for analytical purposes. It would be better to call the whole endeavor “political economy”.

However, if you received an undergraduate college degree you probably never had a class in political economy. What you probably had is at least one class in political science and another class in economics. If you are like most people, you found these classes either boring or incomprehensible. Why? The answer is because both fields are riddled with capitalist propaganda that has little basis in most people’s experience. Sure, there are some people who are convinced that political science and neoclassical economics make sense but which social class is this? Chances are it is members of the upper middle class for whom political and neoclassical economics make sense from their class position. But upper middle-class people are 10% of the Yankee population. Even if we take half of the 30% of the middle class, it is still only a quarter of the population. (I exclude the ruling class and the upper class for whom these courses are not relevant for different reasons).

For the rest of the middle class and lower classes, these courses are likely to produce apathy. There is a reason why Yankee masses hate politics and why they pay no attention to economics. For the elites who control political science and neoclassical economics fields, mass apathy is fine because they don’t want the lower classes asking political and economic questions. Mass apathy doesn’t mean they haven’t internalized the propaganda of political science and/or neoclassical economics. It just means some of these assumptions and images exist in the unconscious of people. For example, most people will say, if asked, “we live in a democracy”. So too they will say economically “there are no free lunches”, right out of neoclassical economics guru Milton Friedman’s playbook.

In the meantime, the social body has now slowly been taken over by two zombies: a political science zombie and a neoclassical economics zombie. This zombification process undergoes at least five processes:

1. Political science and economics are cut off from history, anthropology and sociology.
2. Political science and economics are separated from each other. In a political science class, if you ask an economic question about politics you will be told that is “not their department”. If you ask a political question in an economics class you will be told the same thing.
3. Political science and economics classes become reified because both disciplines are presented as changeless and not subject to scandals, false turns or ideological manipulation. Both fields appear as things, dogmas, idols. In the case of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, these documents have become dogma. George Washington or Thomas Jefferson have become idols that are uncriticizable.
4. Both fields focus on very small micro processes that are relatively inconsequential for the average person’s life. In both fields, this is done because smaller processes lend themselves more easily to scientific measurement. In addition, most neoclassical economics theories are presented in mathematical form which is intimidating for working class and even some middle-class people because they do not have formal training.
5. Scientific method is emphasized over the content in the field. Unless you have some reason for going into each field professionally, knowledge of how they do science is not really relevant. In the case of Trump, if you want to know how someone with no political experience or training could become the president of Yankeedom, you won’t find the answers in your political science or civics courses.

The result is that any zombified Yankee college graduate is filled with self-congratulatory political science propaganda about the nature of democracy as well as self-congratulatory neo-classical economics which is filled with economics propaganda about the wonders of capitalism.

For this article I will draw on the books Tragedy of Political Science by David Ricci and Disenchanted Realists by Raymond Seidelman and Edward Harpham. For the economics section, I’ve drawn on Introduction to Political Economy by Sackrey, Schneider and Knoedler as well as E. K. Hunt’s History of Economic Thought and Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.

FROM INTERDISCIPLINARY TO SPECIALIZATION OF POLITICS AND ECONOMICS

In the beginning of both the study of politics and the study of economics each was understood as being inseparable from history, philosophy, sociology and anthropology. So, in the case of politics, we could never understand a form of rule without understanding the economic property relations through which rulers, and ruled interacted. Nor could we make sense of the rise and fall of dynasties without understanding the social class composition of the society. Lastly, how could we know how the current ruler differs from rulers decades or even centuries ago without including history.

In the case of economics, the interdisciplinary field that preceded it was called political economy. In the work of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, no economic transactions could be understood without understanding the machinations of political rulers or how the newly formed industrial capitalist society differed from the agricultural, slave capitalism that preceded it. This way of looking at things began to change in the last three decades of the 19th century with the marginal utility theorists Menger, Marshall and Walras, who gradually isolated economics from these other fields. This isolation continued into the 20th century with the Austrian school economics in the work of Eugen Ritter Böhm-Bawerk, Von Mises and Von Hayek just before World War II.

In the United States during the depression the work of Keynes was carried on as a political economy point of view because Keynes was interested in macroeconomics and he insisted the state needed to intervene to keep capitalism from going off the rails. The work of neo-classical economists Samuelson and then Milton Friedman in the 1950s and 1960s emphasized the independence of the market from all political influences.

ZOMBIE NUMBER ONE: POLITICAL SCIENCE PROPAGANDA FOR DEMOCRACY

How the political ideology of liberal pluralism gets in the way of research into how democratic Yankeedom actually is

American political theory has always fancied itself a democratic politics well before the end of the 19th century. There was never a time when political theory considered that Yankee politics’ “democracy” was ever something to be proven. It was already always the case.  Political science was not a neutral approach to the study of politics. It dwelt in a national context of liberal democracy. This political ideology operates with the following postulates:

• presumption of human rationality – people are capable of thinking through their situation about what their own interest requires them to do;
• the separation of religious from secular institutions (separation of church and state);
• separation of political powers into legislative, executive and judicial fields;
• the presence of more than one political party to represent factions of citizens who must have their interests checked and balanced by the upper classes (electoral college);
• all that is most profound and enduring about politics was laid down by the Founding Fathers in their documents; and,
• liberal faith in science as the midwife of social progress and enlightenment.

The infrastructure of democracy – political parties, the electoral college, the constitution, the separation of powers – could not be challenged. This is crucial because it puts a damper on the study of power blocks and the behavior of elites. To the extent that it takes inequalities seriously, it farms them out to other social science disciplines such as sociology or political sociology.

What would happen if the results of actual political scientific research continually denied central tenets of democratic ideology that political scientists in the United States believe in?  Supposed research showed that American citizens do not behave much like democratic citizens? Suppose a political scientist has a hypothesis that democratic theory in practice is an illusion. Can you still practice political science if you believe democracy really doesn’t exist? Suppose a scientist insists on studying politics scientifically even though their inquiry cannot insure the health of a democratic society. Hypothetically you should be able to do this research.

What are the chances of a research grant for a hypothesis designed to show how anti-democratic American social institutions are? Of course, political scientists have done this research in these areas and received grants. But the research in political science would be easier if you proposed research that made people hopeful, comfortable or at least neutral, rather than disturbing them. As of around the year 2000 there were two political science textbooks which did not toe the line of what will later be called “political pluralism”. One was Michael Parenti’s Democracy for the Few, which is Marxist. The other is Irony of Democracy by Louis Schubert and Thomas Dye, which are from the Elitist school of political science.

But political scientists work in educational communities and are somewhat dependent on each other. They have political tendencies that are not based on political facts but on political ideologies that inform the facts whether they are conservative, liberal or Marxist. These ideologies inform whether the reception they receive from their work is cool, hostile or enthusiastic. For example, the topic of political disorder is not looked upon favorably by political scientists. It undermines their theories and cracks their time-honored assumptions. This kind of research is far from welcomed, as important a topic as it might be.

As a political scientist, do you try to use the research to change the institutions in a more democratic way or do you leave the institutions alone and rewrite democratic theory to fit the growing problems and weaknesses of its institutions? The field of political science in the United States did the latter. We will focus on how the ideology of democracy kept political scientists from critically analyzing their own institutions.

Generations of Political Science in Yankeedom

The first generation of politics in the US, from 1880-1900 grounded politics in morality and comparative history. The goal was to pass on qualitative, comparative, eternal wisdom through the ages that led to the development of character.  Teachers taught many subjects in the humanities. A single teacher would be responsible for teaching rhetoric, criticism, English composition, logic, grammar, moral philosophy, natural and political law and metaphysics. Teachers were not expected to “publish or perish”, as commercial publishers would not publish books on research because they were not profitable. Scholars in other disciplines, however, judged their work. A single organization, Allied Social Science Association (ASSA) housed History, Economics and Anthropology. Teachers were both products and co-producers of breadth-full learning.

Progressive era of muckraking: Charles Beard

The period of muckraking in the Progressive Era (1896 – 1916) was more down-to-earth and left-liberal compared to the previous generation. The desire was to expose the conditions and the workings of corporate capitalism with writers like Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens and Ida Turnbull.  Yet they were still interdisciplinary. For example, Charles Beard famously took the Constitution apart and identified the economic property relations that underlined it. Beard’s vision of a new society included the fusion of new state powers with a revived, educated, informed and activist public.

Positivism political science

But after World War I, interest in political muckraking and activism cooled. When the American Political Science Association (APSA) was set up as a field, its connection to research was separated from history, economics or sociology. As capitalists expanded their industry, companies merged into corporations.  They increasingly needed more highly trained managers to help in coordinating production, planning and supervising workers. Universities were chosen as the location to train the middle classes for work in these institutions. Some of these folks became political scientists.

Masses seem uninterested in substantive democracy

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, the field of politics was taken over by a positivist scientific orientation and was rechristened as “political science”. The emphasis on science meant using techniques of modern empirical research and descriptive studies. Guided by the perspective that the social sciences could be as rigorous as the natural sciences, modern political science was based not on the discovery of eternal truths, but on an ever-expanding body of quantitative research. Science was considered a university affair in which basic research was done, supposedly independent of how the research could be used.

What this new science found was that Americans did not seem to be acting very democratically at all. Many did not bother to vote and masses were susceptible to dictators. The research showed the average American does not conform to the modern liberalism of Dewey and Roosevelt. Merriam and Gosnell wrote about the non-voting public that 44% of non voters gave general indifference or inertia as reasons for not voting. Lasswell pointed out that the findings of personality show the individual is a poor judge of their own interest. In a world of irrational humans, Lasswell argued that a stable order must rely on a universal body of symbols and practices which sustain an elite. This stable order propagates itself by peaceful methods and wields a monopoly of coercion which is rarely necessary to apply, as Graham Wallas said in Human Nature in Politics.

But what if scientific investigations carefully carried out with the intent to improve society might instead contradict popular expectations and undermine faith in democracy? Were political scientists to inquire into the most efficient ways to overthrow America’s government and then publish the results? These are not the types of questions political scientists would be happy to entertain. The tragedy of political science is that in pursuing scientific facts while ignoring political values, those political values became unconscious as they crippled their ability to critically evaluate and challenge the social institutions that stood in the way of a substantive democracy.

Political science fails to explain dictatorships, communism or fascism

Liberal democracy had failed to take hold in Europe after World War I. Instead, in Mussolini’s control of Italy, dictatorships were established in Portugal, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Bulgaria. In 1931 the Japanese invaded Manchuria. In 1932 the Nazis were voted into power and in 1939 fascism triumphed in Spain – and then came World War II.

Political science provided little guidance for understanding the political processes that were shaping Germany (fascism) and Russia and China (state socialism). With regard to key questions of the day such as why fascism existed or how it was possible for peasants to overthrow governments, they provided no serious answer. Even more damning, they could not explain why the politics in their own country were becoming less democratic. The entire corpus of scientific knowledge seemed unable to provide a course for society to follow which would enlighten the population about the rudiments of democratic government. World War I, fascism, Stalinism and World War II signaled a loosening of forces that would make human progress chaotic at best, rather than automatic

In spite of all this, political science proceeded on its merry way as if nothing had happened. Old liberalism counted on the rationality of citizens and the responsiveness of government. Neither was found to be very true. These are not findings that political science wanted to hear because it strongly supported institutions and practices of liberalism. Probably the most famous political scientist of the 1920s and 1930s, Charles Merriam, still held out hope for the public. He promoted a civic education to improve the political life of the average person.

THIN DEMOCRACY

The reification of research methodology

The first thing political science did was to bury itself in research methodology and stop paying attention to voting patterns or even more seriously, the electoral process itself. It worked overtime to be accepted as a kindred spirit to the natural sciences. Its aim was to make its research methods as close to natural science as possible. This meant quantitative measurement and specialization of the field.

Liberal democracy is like scientific method

John Dewey saw science as organized intelligence. When humans work together at science, the methods they employ individually are reinforced by their interaction collectively as an ever-increasingly joint capacity. Dewey developed a system called instrumentalism to organize the findings of science. Dewey believed that discovering the truth was a dynamic process which was forever incomplete yet evolving. Likewise, Dewey thought democracy must be the scientific method applied to politics. He came to think that the method of political science as at least as important, if not more important, than criticizing and changing political institutions.

In 1945, Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies was published. For the next decade, this was the stance that informed many polemics of the Cold War. Like Dewey, Popper saw the application of the scientific method as the road to democracy.  He wanted to use the scientific method in his professional work so as to make modest proposals for reforming small parts of society one at a time – piecemeal social engineering as opposed to a “dangerous” utopian program for reframing all parts of society totally and simultaneously as in Marxism. Part of the process of distinguishing science from non-science is to make a distinction between what is true as the result of research, and what should be done with the research. The basic concepts and hypotheses of political science should contain no elaboration of political doctrine or what the state and society ought to be or do.

A product of this specialization was the loss of communication with the public. Political scientists talked to fewer and fewer people and those who listened heard more and more about less and less. Their research was guided by statistics, survey research, and later on formal modeling and game theory. These studies created jargon incomprehensible to the lay person. Instead political scientists became more concerned with how the work might interest their colleagues. As this happened political scientists lost touch with their colleagues in other disciplines and only discussed their findings with those already in their field. Associations which once housed many disciples differentiated into specialized bodies: Political science became more on the surface and lost its depth and breath. Only concrete scientific investigations could yield true knowledge and that knowledge was empirical, particular and experimentally verifiable.

Political scientists naively believed that by simply amassing more data, eventually a theoretical breakthrough would occur about how political systems changed. But while political scientists were slowly amassing reliable political knowledge about increasingly smaller political processes, in their insistence on separating fact from political commitment they left the barn door open by not providing political alternatives as a guide for social policy. Their political crisis came when Leninists and fascists did have political commitment while political science had nothing qualitatively to offer their own politicians.

Thin (Procedural) Democracy

Additionally, besides burying themselves in research method, their standards for what constituted democracy slipped badly. Instead of facing the lack of real substantive democracy in their own country they simply compared themselves favorably to “totalitarian societies” to make them seem relatively more democratic. The bad news for substantive democracy in the West was papered over by a comparison with the political life in “totalitarian” societies. As the evidence on individual and group irrationality mounted, many members of the discipline felt constrained to advocate an approach to politics designed to compensate for some of democracy’s shortcomings. This thin theory of democracy would praise existing liberal practices and institutions rather than criticize weak democratic processes such as voting and the electoral college. They needed to find new justifications for accepting the sometimes-disappointing outcome of democratic processes in the real world.

Rise of pluralism: political practice of interest groups as social science

If individuals are irrational, how did American democracy control its rulers? Empirical democratic theorists or pluralists examined the dynamics of group politics and the effect of organized interest groups on electoral competition. A plurality of groups competes with each other to constrain rulers and political parties to some extent. Pluralists claim, following Arendt, that unlike atomized individuals in totalitarian societies, in liberal democratic societies voluntary associations can and do exist for exerting pressure. William Kornhauser argued for the importance of maintaining pluralism, a bevy of competing power centers to guard against “mass society”.

Tinkering Instrumentalism as the invisible hand of politics

Why isn’t democracy the collective process by which we first establish our values, list our alternatives, prioritize the alternatives, weigh the potential consequences of each alternative and then act together to test what works? According to pluralists, this collective rational deduction process won’t work because humans cannot agree as to which values are to be pursued.

Dahl and Lindblom claim there is another way, which they call disjointed incrementalism. In Politics, Economics and Welfare, Dahl and Lindblom claim that democratic politics is incremental.  Here small policy steps are taken without reference to unattainable consensus or grand objectives. Since a great many political actors from voters to interest groups to parties to bureaucrats must be consulted before anything gets done, this process will be disjointed. Yet it is a series of policy adjustments and taking small steps via calculated risks where immediate additions to old policy will not at once achieve all goals but at the same time will not unduly invite unforeseen tumultuous consequences.

Political science and the end of ideology movement

The self-congratulatory nature of political pluralism reached new heights with the “end of ideology movement.” From the late 1940’s and well into the 1960’s many leading scholars in the US agreed that Western society had progressed beyond any need for an explicit liberal ideology because liberalism had already won. The fundamental decency and social efficiency of American policy had been conclusively proven between 1930-1950. Daniel Bell (End of Ideology), Seymour Lipset, (Political Man) and Edward Shils agreed that most political parties in the West paid only lip service to ideology anyway. Secondly, there were so few social issues left that only practical tinkering rather than ideological solutions was needed. Daniel Boorstin’s book The Genius of American Politics argued that American political institutions by-passed the need for ideology. Raymond Aron, in the Opium of the Intellectuals, called for the abolition of ideological fanaticism and the advent of skeptics who will doubt all models and utopias. They rejected ideological speculation because its propositions could not be confirmed or disconfirmed. To questions about their ideological use of “the end of ideologies” in the service of the Cold War they responded that the Cold War was largely a military affair. Anti-ideologists represented the dominant American mood after WWII.

Political science pluralism excludes the working class

Seymour Lipset writes about working class authoritarianism. He points out that studies show the poorest strata of Western society were most likely to support Communist parties. Lipset believes the lower-class people simply do not fit the requirements for good citizenship. They are insufficiently pragmatic, open-minded skeptical and tolerant. Therefore, there is a social utility in the relative weakness of the lower classes. Real world democracies operate on the basis of high participation by elites with their superior political knowledge.  Low participation by the masses might impair the political process with their undemocratic attitudes. Liberal political scientists had accepted apathy among citizens.

Rough road for political science in the 1960s

As most everyone knows, the 1960s were a time of explosion that neither Popper nor the pluralists predicted. As far back as the mid-1950s C. Wright Mills described a concentrated power elite which controlled society rather than the pluralist theories of a many-centered polity. The civil rights movement, the opposition to the Vietnam War, the rise of the New Left and the women’s movement all went unexplained by political science pluralism.  Whether they called for reform or revolution, the politics of the 1960s were far from pluralist instrumentalism. Murray Edelman, in his book Symbolic Use of Politics, says the job of democratic procedures is to provide the public with symbolic gratification. Elections are for expressing discontent, for articulating enthusiasm, for enjoying political involvement and legitimating the democratic regime by giving it the appearance of popular support. Herbert Marcuse attacked pluralism for creating a “one-dimensional man”. John Galbraith argued that capitalism was not creating real public goods such as roads and bridges but was creating or expanding on the fleeting fancies of consumer products introduced by advertising.

Students complained that the universities were machines in the service of churning out passive consumers or beholden to military contractors. Student activists wanted universities to be agents of change, not handmaidens to the status quo. What united all these strands was a vision of politics that was participatory, not consensual. Political sciences had been focusing on conventional political processes, not the quality of the institutions themselves. They dealt with congresses, political parties, but not the content of what these institutions were doing. Students wanted more policy studies – that is, what the government chooses to do or not do. There were too few, if any, quantitative research studies found on powerful bureaucracies like the Department of Justice, the Ford Foundation or Institute for Defense Analysis. Political philosopher Sheldon Wolin advocated a for a renaissance in the vocation of political theory – to read, analyze, appreciate, extend and build upon the great political philosophers of yesterday. He called for a development of “epic theory”. Political science was not neutral. No stance is a stance for the status quo.

ZOMBIE NUMBER TWO: NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS

From political economy to neoclassical economics

Just as political science got cut off from its relationship to history, sociology, anthropology and moral theory by end of World War I, so too economics theory also got cut off from history, politics, anthropology and moral theory beginning around 1870. What now passes for economics, which is known in the United States as neoclassical economics, didn’t exist until the mid-20th century. Throughout the 18th-19th century there was a tradition called “political economy” which included Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill among others. Political economics assumed that economics could not be separated from history, politics or anthropology. It was only in the last three decades of the 19th century with the work of Jevons, Walras and Marshall – with what was called “marginal utility theory” – that economics began to be treated as if it could be separated from these other fields. The Austrian school of von Böhm-Bawerk, Von Mises and Von Hayek continued this tradition which separated the economy from the rest of social life. In the United States Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman brought together neoclassical economics fields.

Polanyi’s Great Transformation

In his powerful book The Great Transformation, political economist Karl Polanyi argues that for most of human history there was no such thing as a separate realm called “the economy”. The economy was embedded in social relationships regarding the circulation of goods based on principles of “reciprocity” within families and kin groups. At the level of the state power of kings and aristocrats, these political relationships were regulated by what Polanyi called “redistribution”. What might be called an “economy” was limited to some trade relations between societies, not within them.

Polanyi argues that this began to change when capitalism brought into society the wheeling-and-dealing that was once limited to trade between societies. At the end of the 18th century when industrialization began to pulverize community relations based on generalized reciprocity and redistribution, the state became more centralized and reorganized society as market relations. There is no better account of this great transformation than to examine Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. While Adam Smith is considered the “father” of neoclassical economics, in most ways he represented a cross between political economy and neoclassical economics. In the first section below I will contrast him with those harder-line political economists like Marx. In the next section I will show how different he was from neoclassical economists.

Substantive vs formal rationality

If you ask most people what an economy is, they will tell you that it is a social process by which people work to produce goods and then the goods are circulated and consumed. But in the minds of neoclassical economists, the economy is not a society-wide social process involving the transformation of nature to meet human needs through a production and circulation process. For neoclassical economists, the economy is a micro exchange between self-interested, hedonistic individuals who compete with each other. Their decisions about what will be traded or bargained is based on short-term self-interest in which they weigh the pros and cons. Society is no more than the aggregate sum of these micro interactions.

Adam Smith vs radical political economists (Marx)

Turning to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the first thing worth noticing is the ahistorical manner in which the origins of capitalism are presented. Smith argues that individuals “trucked and bartered” all the way back to hunting and gathering societies. Ideologically it is important to establish that some form of capitalism has always existed. For Marx and the institutionalist political economy theory, capitalism has a more recent origin in the 15th and 16th centuries. No anthropologist who studied tribal societies would try to make Smith’s case.

Secondly, Smith claims that capitalism starts when frugal, hard-working, shrewd traders identify a need to invest capital in land. In the best of all possible worlds, the product sells and he makes a profit. This capitalist has to compete with other traders and the results of this competition are better products for everyone. Smith called this “the invisible hand” of the market. Marxists and post-Keynesians contest this. Marx argued that capitalism doesn’t begin with trading. It begins with what Marx called “the primitive accumulation of capital” when peasants are thrown off the land (enclosures) and their tools and animals are taken away from him. The capitalist uses the land for commercial farming growing coffee, sugar, cotton and tobacco through the labor of slaves. Meanwhile former peasants are driven to work in cities and eventually work in factories after capitalists have revolutionized industry in the 19th century.

Smith believes that the source of profit is in the circulation process. Capitalist make profits by winning the competition, buying land cheap and selling it dear. His ingenuity and risk-taking are rewarded. For Marx, the key to understanding the source of profit is not primarily circulation process, but the production process. Marx says that the exploitation by the capitalist of the laborer comes in the form of wages paid to the worker. Marx estimated that the wages of work covered the first four hours of labor. This was enough money to reproduce working-class life. The last 4-6 hours were surplus labor that was pocketed by the capitalist. So, the ultimate source of profit was the exploitation of labor power. Smith also has a labor theory of value, but it was not the most important factor.

Adam Smith was sensitive to the cost the specialization of labor might have on the body and mind of the worker in terms of alienation on the job. Despite that, he felt that the massive productivity of volume that would result was worth that cost. In Bertell Ollman’s great book Marx’s Theory of Alienation he points out that workers are alienated from a) the process of labor; b) the products of labor; c) other people on the job while laboring; d) the tools harnessed; e) alienation from himself. Marx’s hope was that once an abundance of goods was produced the worker should work less and have a diverse set of activities, as he said, fishing in the morning, cattle rearing in the afternoon, criticism in the evening.

Human nature for Smith is pretty bleak. He believed that human beings are pleasure-seeking, rational and competitive, but lazy. Most people would prefer to do nothing and it is only by the carrot and the stick of enterprising capitalists that makes workers productive. For Marx, people are naturally collectively creative and want to cooperate. People only appear lazy when they have been performing wage labor and they are tired and miserable. When people control their conditions of labor, they are more productive than under capitalist conditions. This has been shown in evidence of worker cooperatives and workers councils during revolutions.

For Adam Smith the fruits of competitive capitalism led to lower prices for consumers. Marx said this is not what actually happens. Competition between capitalists leads to a concentration of capital in a few corporations and the elimination of smaller capitalists. As Marxists Baran and Sweezy point out, corporate capitalists agree not to engage in cut-throat competition and the prices of commodities are pretty much the same. They compete through advertising, not through the prices themselves.  There are many more contrasts that could be made, but these are the most important. Let me turn now to the difference between Adam Smith and neo-classical economists like Milton Friedman. It is Milton Friedman‘s right-wing economics that is propagandized in college courses.

Adam Smith Vs Milton Friedman

Despite Smith’s departure from the more leftist political economists of Marx or Thorstein Veblen, compared to Milton Friedman, Adam Smith would have been considered a left liberal. In the first place, Adam Smith understood that the state was necessary for public works like roads, canals and harbors to provide education and defense. With rare exceptions, Milton Friedman wanted the state completely out of the market. His theory was “let the markets run everything”.

While Adam Smith was sensitive to the impact of the working conditions in factories, Milton Friedman might say that workers are free to find work elsewhere if the working conditions did not suit them. In terms of the source of profit, Adam Smith, like Marx, also included a labor theory of value. That means that the cost of a product depended at least partly on the labor time it takes to produce the product. To my knowledge, Milton Friedman ignored this.

How is wealth measured? Smith had an infrastructural answer to this. For him wealth is measured in a) the increased dexterity of every workman; b) the amount of time saved; and c) the inventions of machines that would shorten the workday for workers. Ultimately for Smith the increase in the standard of living of the poor should be the ultimate determination of social wealth. By today’s neoliberal and neoconservative light, Adam Smith would be to the left of Bernie Sanders! For Milton Friedman, he believed that maximizing the profits of capitalists would have a trickle-down effect on the poor.

Notice there is nothing in Adam Smith’s work about investment in the military or finance as sources of profit. For Adam Smith production of material, physical wealth was how profit was measured. For Milton Friedman, profit should be measured regardless of the field. This means that the profits made on a tractor and the profits made on a tank should all count as profit. This fails to make the distinction between tools which can produce food and tools which destroy land and people. So too, for Friedman, profits made on finance capital, investment in paper which produces no material wealth is the same as profits made on building roads, bridges or houses.

Adam Smith, like political economists such as Thorstein Veblen, included the creativity of farmers, artisan, scientists and engineers as creative sources for the economy. For Milton Friedman, the only fount of creative power was the ingenuity of the capitalist. Apparently, Friedman had little idea that the wealth capitalist possessed was not the result of personal ingenuity but most often from inheritance. Last time I checked about 2/3 of capitalist got their wealth from the inheritance they received.

Playing Hardball: the totalitarian nature of capitalist economics courses

In the fields of psychology, a student is presented with six different theoretical schools: psychoanalysis, behaviorism, humanistic psychology, physiological, evolutionary psychology and cognitive. In the fields of sociology, we might be presented with three founding schools – Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Second generation schools might be added: The Elitists (Mosca, Pareto, Michels), symbolic interactionists and rational choice theory. But in the field of economics, in Economics 101 classes, the student is presented with one school. That school would be the neoclassical economics of Samuelson and then later, Milton Freidman. No matter what the chapter heading, neoclassical economics has an interpretation and analysis.  Keynesian theory might be presented somewhat, but only in select chapters. Surprisingly only two schools are presented. Does this mean there are only two schools? Hardly.

In their book Introduction to Political Economy, Sackrey, Schneider and Knoedler identify a number of other schools. In addition to a full presentation of Keynes, also included are the works of John Kenneth Galbreath, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx, along with might be called the anarchist economics of worker cooperatives. There are other schools called post Keynesians like Steve Keen and Michael Hudson. These are all first-rate economics, why are they not included?

The reason is solely for propaganda purposes. Neoclassical economics theorists are cheerleaders for what I call market fundamentalism. Other schools vary in calling for more state intervention (Keynes, Galbraith) while some are critical of finance capitalism (Keens and Hudson). Others like Marxists and anarchists are critical of the entire capitalist system. The propagandistic nature of neoclassical economics can be more blatantly seen in the fact that there is not one Marxian economist in the United States that is the head of an economics department.

Conclusion

It has often been said by people living outside of Yankeedom that the Yankee masses are stupid people. We don’t know anything about the history of other societies or where they even are on the globe. As true as this may be, what is even more disturbing is that Yankee masses do not understand our own political economy. This article was designed to show how our social bodies have been snatched away and then inhabited by two zombified entities. A political science body which is designed to persuade us that we live in a democracy despite our own best judgment. The evidence political science offers us is self-congratulatory, contradictory, irrelevant, myopic, filled with deceptive comparisons and anti-communist.  The other body is a neo-classical economic entity which is also triumphant, mystifying, naïve, cynical, wooden, anti-social, shallow, obscurant and also anti-communist. Anyone in Yankeedom who manages to recover their social body must go through a process of de-zombification. What does this recovery look like? We must analyze the world through a political economy which is interdisciplinary, which is always undergoing quantitative and quantitative changes and through which we can collectively imagine and then build a new socialist world.

This article was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2020 at 12:26pm and is filed under Adam Smith, Capitalism, Capitalist totalitarianism, Economy/Economics, Education, Federal Reserve, Finance, Global Capitalism, Hypocrisy, IMF, Karl Marx, Labor, Labor Theory of Value, Language, Markets, Milton Friedman, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), Narrative, Neoliberalism, Political Science, Students, Transparency/Secrecy, United States, Universities, Wage, Wall Street, Working Class.

Each couch by the street has a story
I wonder what this one maybe
Did they leave their home and move into a car
Or find a sofa to sleep on at a friend’s house
Did they stay near, or go far away
Disappear without a trace […]
When they come to evict your neighbor, what will you do?

— “Each Couch by the Street” song by David Rovics

When I checked the Street Roots archives by putting in the search window, “David Rovics,” I got one hit:  a March 8, 2010 press release, “Peace groups, parents, children and folk musicians Steve Einhorn, Kate Powers, and David Rovics will all be at the rally outside Portland Public Schools headquarters.”

It was a protest against military influence in Portland’s K-12 Portland Public Schools. He was there singing to inspire parents opposing a $320,000 revenue contract for Starbase, a 25-hour educational program funded out of the Department of Defense recruitment budget.

Fast forward a decade: If you’ve been part of the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, you might have heard David Rovics perform social justice and protest songs outside Mayor Ted Wheeler’s condo or at Revolution Hall after the election.

The 53-year-old father of three (ages one, four and 14 years) has been working the protest concert circuit since 1993, helping lift spirits at WTO protests, environmental actions, antiwar events, and more.

Think of Rovics as an iteration of Joe Hill, a la Arlo Guthrie-Phil Ochs-Pete Seeger-Joan Baez. And Buffy Sainte-Marie, for sure!

Journalist Amy Goodman referred to Rovics as “the musical version of Democracy Now!” Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan called him “the peace poet and troubadour of our time.”

Accolades aside, we talked about the landscape before and now during (and post) Covid-19 being littered with dwindling hope for all artists. Many artists will not make it, study after study bear out.

“I definitely know folks who have either gotten on unemployment or gotten a job not related to their art, as a result of the pandemic.  Of course, I also know a lot of artists who had to throw in the towel long before the pandemic, as a result of Spotify, Amazon, etc., and theses corporations’ cannibalistic orientation towards the arts.”

He came to Portland from Berkley almost 14 years ago, and he too, like so many artists I have spoken with, experienced a Portland that was a Mecca for artists – thriving music, theater and graphic arts scenes that allowed creatives to live and provided venues at affordable rents in order for artists to show their stuff.

That nirvana didn’t last long – “Artists started clearing out of the city, with most of the Black population from the inner neighborhoods moving to the exurbs.” That wave started around 2007.

Rovics is acutely aware that most of the thriving artists who might weather economic tsunamis are white artists, but there are thousands upon thousands of BIPOC artists who continue working but do not have those “safety nets” underneath them.  The mainstream and commercial art scene will continue to be a white wave.

This gentrification is now coupled with lack of income(s), Rovics says, as artists who used to be able to show and sell their work (and bar-tend and wait tables), and in the case of musicians, perform and then peddle “merch” at venues, have zero options for in-person engagement.

Mounting debt, continuing eviction threats, and increasing vulnerability to disease and illness also are additional factors to the mental health stress of artists. David knows of artists who just have shut down, and can’t work. Others are manic, going through sleepless periods but producing a lot. For Rovics, he fits this latter category, but he admits he is not immune to GAD – general anxiety disorder. He told me he watches a lot more news feeds than he did before the pandemic, and doesn’t sleep through the night.

“The whole response of this country has been a disaster,” he points out. “Whole industries have collapsed. There have been anemic shreds of money, but it will not magically keep society as we know it going. What is it, the day after Christmas when unemployment benefits run out?”

We both agreed Charles Dickens, if alive, would be in a 24/7, 365 days a year flurry of creativity and commentary.

There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth! Poverty and oysters always seem to go together. To close the eyes, and give a seemly comfort to the apparel of the dead, is poverty’s holiest touch of nature.

— Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs Gone Haywire

It’s difficult to not keep circling back to the fact many people – artists included – are both depressed and inspired by the events that have unfolded since February. “I’ve talked to a lot of artists who tell me the isolation takes away that creative edge. I also know of people succumbing to more serious mental health issues. I have one friend in a psychotic episode who was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.”

Painting in a studio by yourself is one thing, but Rovics points out that because all venues for performing artists are shuttered, touring musicians are really having it hard. “They are addicted to performing, so this isolation has been devastating.”

The pandemic might be the last nail in the coffin for truly independent, thriving, outside-the-box artists. Rovics has studied the wave of predatory capitalists running Spotify and Amazon that has helped move the minuscule profits from artists to investors: millionaires and the billionaire owners like Jeff Bezos (Amazon).

The music industry has been trying to separate music from politics for years now, trying to get artists to believe that politically oriented music is not attractive for mainstream audiences so they produce work that is safe and preferably only between two people. But artists are part of society too, so they can’t expect to be above politics, he stated in a 2009 interview.

Spotify is another beast Rovics condemns.  According to Rolling Stone’s Tim Ingham, “In total, at the close of last year, SEC documents show that exactly 65 percent of Spotify was owned by just six parties: the firm’s co-founders, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon (30.6 percent of ordinary shares between them); Tencent Holdings Ltd. (9.1 percent); and a run of three asset-management specialists: Baillie Gifford (11.8 percent), Morgan Stanley (7.3 percent), and T. Rowe Price Associates (6.2 percent). These three investment powerhouses owned more than 25 percent of Spotify between them — a fact worth remembering next time there’s an argument about whose interests Spotify is acting in when it makes controversial moves (for example, Spotify’s ongoing legal appeal against a royalty pay rise for songwriters in the United States).”

The problems artists are facing are part of a many-headed Hydra Rovics calls “vulture capitalism.”

He also confronts this problem from renter’s and the affordable housing lenses. He naturally comes to the conclusion that Capitalism in this sense is fraught with parasites:

“The way forward is about solidarity, but achieving solidarity will require moving beyond the false consciousness that says it is okay to run a society like this,” he states. “That housing is a privilege, whose cost is to be determined by profit-minded individuals and corporations, protected by the state’s armed enforcers. We must collectively come to realize that housing is actually a right, that we must demand, as a society. And that a rent strike is an activity to engage in not only if you can’t afford to pay the rent, but if you believe that it is wrong to pay the rent, when so many others are unable to. That an injury to one is an injury to all. That the parasites in this society are not the unemployed, the homeless, the recipients of meager government aid programs, the housing insecure, the couch-surfers, the car-dwellers. The parasites are those who own multiple properties, and profit off of renting them to people who need housing. This is a parasitic activity, whether hiding behind the fig leaf called ‘mom and pop,’ or whether ‘mom and pop’ has successfully managed to turn their little operation into a bigger one.”

The people who control the rents for galleries, theaters and cinemas answer to the owners, the investment boards and many times to behemoth property management entities, he states.  And while artists’ careers will pile up by the wayside like those couches in Portland he wrote a song about, what is worse is that the “art” that is and will be coming out of the corporations controlling culture will be narrowed down and basically “crap.”

The reverberations of artists not making it go way beyond the axiom of “where you find one successful artist, you will find a thousand starving artists behind them.” The hoarders of capital are the dream hoarders, and these Titans of Predatory Capitalism are galvanizing a highly commercialized, denuded, lowest-common-denominator “arts.” Disneyfication, infantilization, consumerist, apolitical and anti-working-class pabulum might be another way to couch what is happening in the arts.

Rovics and I talk intensely about these series of preventable events in a Time of Covid.

No matter where the reader stands on this question of what is art, the fact of the matter is people need housing to not just survive and shield themselves from the elements, but to be dignified, spiritually available to the world and to be creative.

Rovics is part of Artists for Rent Control (ARC) and a more recent group, PEER – Portland Emergency Eviction Response (his creation). When I went to PEER’s website, I found a plethora of information, podcasts of mostly Rovic’s songs and ways to stave the flow of blood that both artists and non-artists living in Portland face with their housing.

PEER is definitely grassroots, sort of a network with no financial backing or lobbying clout. It has one clear strategy, and one tactic.

The goal is the abolition of forced eviction as an option for landlords and police forces. The implementation of the goal is to form a large and militant rapid response team that can respond quickly to attempted evictions as they are occurring, and at that point either stop them from happening, or move the tenant back in to the property after the police leave the scene,” Rovics states. “Specifically, or at least ideally, the process we’re talking about goes something like this: Tenants facing potential eviction because they’re pretty sure they’ll be unable to pay the back rent due when the eviction moratorium is over are faced with various decisions. They may have family they can move in with — a majority of young adults now live with their parents in the US, for the first time since the 1930’s. A tenant will often prefer to move into a vehicle or do any number of other things other than attempt to stay in their home after receiving an eviction notice. Forgive the harshness of this sentence, but these are not the tenants that are tactically of interest to PEER. We are looking to work with tenants who want to challenge their eviction notice by attempting to stay in their homes. We realize the stakes are high, and you do, too. People may decide to try to stay in their homes because they have no other options they want to consider, or because they want to challenge the whole system of forced eviction, or both.

Seeds of Creativity, Germination into Activism

Rovics grew up in New York with two musicians as parents. They also taught music, and they were progressive and anti-establishment. He started touring in the 1990s dialed into groups like Students for Environmental Action. He did a lot of college campuses concerts. He worked as an activist songwriter/performer in the anti-war and Occupy Wall Street movements. He was a long hair white guy with a guitar and anger.

“In places like Germany and Scandinavian countries, unionism has always been strong. I’ve performed in trade halls, union halls, theaters. Take a country like Denmark – the government supports the arts in a big way.” Even punk rock squat concerts were financed by governments and unions.

Before the pandemic, Rovics toured Europe two months in the Spring and two more in the Fall. He said he was paid well. “Students and activists would come in for free, drink cheap beer and my merchandise sales were significant.”

So, Spring would have Rovics crisscrossing nine countries, mostly in Scandinavia. Then in the Fall he would tour in Britain and Ireland. Each concert, each interaction created a bigger and broader group of adherents and fans. Getting people’s emails is like a gold mine, the musician tells me.

While the gigs attract a wide variety of people, he emphasizes it is mostly left-wing idealists and organizers unified in the  anti-war, anti-imperialism, global justice, environmental movements. Not all left-wingers fit the same mold, though, so socialists, anarchists, hippie environmentalists and even in Ireland Sein Fein members would populate the audiences in his concerts.

Even though Rovics — before he started his own family — lived out of a vehicle as he toured, and was homeless for two years in his youth, he knows he came into the world and into the arts with a boatload of white privilege and that his two musician parents and his life back east provided him with untold advantages.

“I play for people across the board, from wealthy to the homeless.” He has written and performed songs about homelessness.

When I asked him about artists forced onto the streets because of the pandemic, Rovics said he wasn’t aware of any in Portland who hit that far into rock bottom land. “I was just talking with a panel discussion of artists —  one in Detroit who got a job as a welder, another in New York who got on unemployment, another artist who has felt very inspired by the pandemic,  and one who has not done anything in months, because of the negative impact of the isolation she’s experiencing.”

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

— Victor Hugo

We talk much about activism welded to the arts – “Activists, many of whom are barely making a living or working two jobs just to make ends meet, are also stressed out for a variety of reasons, but they tend to be among the happier people in society because they are trying to do something. That is empowering. My line of work permits me to travel around the world regularly and I meet people like that all the time and they’re lovely.”

Not so ironically, the murder of a friend in 1993, was to him, a seminal moment in his life: a gang shooting that was intended for someone else. He was moved to action on a global justice plane. He composed a song about it in “Song for Eric”:

San Francisco at night
And the warm summer breeze
Walking back alleys
Just as free as you please
And I think of those poor boys
Who drove up to say
“Give us your money”
And then they blew you away
With one pull of a trigger
Your sweet life was through

Every time I see that street, I think of you

As a final (side note), I contacted David to help facilitate another piece for this column about two artists and two others associated with the arts concerning their thoughts on Art in a Time of Covid. What unfurled was a deep discussion with this inspiring man, active in Portland on many levels. While he is not “down so long everything looks up to him,” David and his family have been on a rent strike and are having issues making ends meet.

“As of November 21, just in case it’s of interest to your editor, my family’s situation is that we have been denied unemployment since last April, inexplicably, so other than the $1,200 per adult and $500 per kid we received from the feds early on, we have gotten no federal aid.”

They’ve also been denied food stamps because they make too much money, but they’ve been getting the supplementary food aid ($500 for a family of five) Oregon has added to the usual amount people get over recent months.

The reality is an anarchist like David Rovics is optimistic and less hopeful in the same breath He tells me social democratic countries are faring far better than capitalist countries like the USA. He believes system change is best taught through storytelling. “People get turned off if you tell them what should and should not be.” Being a troubadour allows him to relate to the individual struggles of our time, set forth universalities hardcore lectures on the ills of war, capitalism and climate change can’t facilitate, he believes.

This statement Rovics made in 2019 in response to the “concentration camps” set up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) highlights this dichotomy of hope and struggle:

“We all had that conversation when we were kids about how if we could go back in time and shoot Hitler, even though we’d be sacrificing our lives in the process, we’d do it, but we probably wouldn’t, and we don’t.  The overwhelming majority of humanity, quite sensibly, according to the historical record, don’t stick their necks out like that unless they think there’s at least some remote chance of coming out the other end with their heads intact, along with a victorious social movement and an end to the fascist dictator they’re trying to get rid of in the first place.  Social movements are based on optimism, and this isn’t an optimistic moment in America.  So, this is what it’s like.”

Check his music here, and these are David’s top picks of his current work: Say their Names; Anarchist Jurisdiction; Essentially Expendable; Each Couch by the Street; Wear a Mask. David Rovics music —

This article was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2020 at 8:33pm and is filed under Art, Arts and/or Entertainment, Capitalism, Civil Disobedience, Civil Unrest, Crowdfunding, Imperialism, Internationalism, Labor, Music, Politics, Portland Oregon, Resistance Art, Ruling Elite, Strikes, Working Class.

The COVID pandemic and economic collapse have highlighted the race and class inequalities in our society. With more than 35 million jobs lost, millions have lost their employer-connected health insurance in the middle of a pandemic. COVID-19 deaths are disproportionately afflicting working-class people, particularly Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people. The case for universal healthcare through a publicly-funded Medicare for All has never been stronger.

As income disappears, the rent — already too high — has become impossible for many to pay. The threat of eviction is with many of us every month. Even if eviction has been stopped by a temporary moratorium for some of us, we see our rent piling up each month so that we will be evicted anyway when the moratorium ends. We need a federal emergency housing relief program that helps people make their rent and mortgage payments during the emergency. To fix the fundamentals of the housing crisis requires a major investment in public housing, this time not just as segregated housing for the poor but as high-quality mixed-income developments that include middle-income workers and professionals.

Congress and the president are responding to the economic collapse so poorly that the nation is falling into a depression. A poll this week reported that 50% unemployed workers, 8.3 million people, were unable to cover their basic expenses in August.

Trump and Biden rely on private enterprise alone to pull us out of this economic hole. Their public economic recovery spending proposals feature corporate welfare grants, loans, and tax breaks that will supposedly trickle-down to working people as new jobs. But with working-class consumer demand depressed, it is too risky for corporations to make job-creating productive investments. Instead, they will again invest their stimulus money in stocks, bonds, and derivatives, just rearranging and further concentrating who owns the productive assets we have rather than creating new ones.

Our alternative is large-scale public investment in new public enterprises and services to benefit the working-class majority. Our ecosocialist Green New Deal will create 30 million jobs in manufacturing, construction, transportation, energy, and agriculture to rebuild our production systems for zero-to-negative carbon emissions and 100% clean energy by 2030. It provides for a Just Transition of up to five years wage and benefits maintenance for workers displaced by this economic transition, but few will need it for very long with all the new jobs that will be created.

We create 8 million more jobs with an Economic Bill of Rights to a living-wage job, a guaranteed income above poverty, affordable housing, universal health care, lifelong tuition-free public education, and a secure retirement for every senior by doubling Social Security benefits.

The two corporate parties, who represent their Wall Street and big business donors, continue to undermine the rights of workers and let employers get away with breaking labor, health, and safety laws. It is time to repeal repressive labor laws, starting with the Taft-Hartley law that restricts labor’s ability to organize, act in solidarity, and engage in political activity. We need to enact new laws that enable union organization, including card check union recognition and the repeal of anti-union “right-to-work” laws.

We call for a Workers Bill of Rights, including workers rights to unions, to living wages, to portable defined-benefit pensions, to information about chemicals used at work, to refuse unsafe work, and to participate in enterprise governance. In order to increase economic security and strengthen workers’ power, we must replace employment-at-will laws, which let employers discharge workers for any reason or no reason, with just cause termination laws, where workers can only be fired for nonperformance or economic reasons. We must extend constitutional rights into the workplace, including free speech, association, and assembly, and freedom from warrantless employer surveillance, search, and seizure.

Even before the pandemic health and economic crisis hit, three super-rich Americans owned more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population, who earn a poverty-level median income of $18,000 a year.

Now, mounting COVID-19 deaths, economic depression, accelerating economic inequality, and climate collapse are all reasons to restructure our economy into a socialist economic democracy where the working-class majority is empowered to protect its interests and receive the full value of its labor. The first step is the ecosocialist Green New Deal for economic recovery as well as climate recovery.

This article was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2020 at 5:00pm and is filed under Climate Change, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Environment, Evictions, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Global Warming, Green New Deal, Joe Biden, Medicare for All, Minimum Wage, Patient Rights, Rent/rent strikes, Unemployment, US Green Party, Vacation Pay, Workers’ Safety, Working Class.

During pre-pandemic years, the labor market was shifting, producing a rising percentage of workers concentrated in low-paying jobs.  A study released by the Brookings Institution in late 2019 reported that 44 percent of American workers (53 million people) earned low wages, with median annual pay of $17,950 per year.  Low-wage work was often precarious, with unpredictable schedules, reduced benefits, and unsteady employment.  Low-wage workers usually remained stuck in these jobs, and even workers in the middle class were “more likely to move down the occupation ladder than up.”  Unable to cover their living costs, substantial numbers of Americans worked at two or more jobs.

Overall, wages remained stagnant during the Trump era, with gains in take-home pay eaten up by inflation, leaving “real wages” for workers the same as 40 years before.  By contrast, the compensation received by their bosses rose dramatically, leading to an executive-to-worker pay ratio of 339 to 1.

Millions of American workers also suffered injury and even death on the job.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2018 alone private sector employers reported 2.8 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses.  Fatal work injuries numbered 5,280.

Moreover, despite legal restrictions on child labor, it remained remarkably widespread.  According to the U.S. Labor Department, in 2017 there were 2.5 million child workers in the United States.  Child labor was particularly common in agriculture, where it was perfectly legal for a 12-year old to work 50 to 60 hours a week in the fields, exposed to toxic pesticides and extreme heat.  When Human Rights Watch interviewed child tobacco workers in four Southern states in 2019, most reported symptoms consistent with acute nicotine poisoning, including nausea, vomiting, headaches, and dizziness.

American workers faced other kinds of mistreatment, as well.  Enormous numbers filed official complaints of gender, race, age, and religious discrimination.  In late 2017, a Pew Research poll of U.S. working women found that 42 percent said they faced gender discrimination on the job.  Another survey, conducted in 2018, reported that 38 percent of women and 13 percent of men claimed that they had experienced sexual harassment at work.  McDonald’s, one of the largest employers in the United States (with over 800,000 employees), became notorious for the sexual attacks experienced by its workers, who even staged a nationwide strike over the issue.

Perhaps most significant, American workers were largely stripped of a key protection against exploitation:  labor unions.  Thanks to union activism, union members are more likely than other workers to have good wages, employer-provided health insurance, paid vacations, sick leave, and pension plans.  And even workers without unions gain when union agitation leads to improved working conditions and pro-worker legislation.  But unscrupulous U.S. employers effectively used legal and illegal tactics—including harassing union organizing drives, firing union sympathizers, and waging vicious, anti-union campaigns—to deprive workers of union representation.  As a result, although nearly two-thirds of Americans approved of unions and roughly half of unorganized workers said they would join one if they could, union membership in the United States fell to an all-time low, with severe consequences for workers.

But how does the record of United States compare with that of other advanced industrial countries?

In 2016 (the last year for which comparative statistics are available), the death rate for U.S. workers on the job was considerably higher than the rate in comparable nations—more than twice as high as in Japan, three times higher than in Canada, and more than five times higher than in Sweden.  Moreover, in 2019, U.S. unemployment insurance benefits were considerably lower than in many advanced industrial societies.

Among the three dozen industrial nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States, in 2019, was exceeded only by Latvia in having the highest percentage of low-wage workers.  This is not entirely surprising, as the U.S. minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009, placing the United States behind Luxembourg ($13.78), Australia ($12.14), France ($11.66), New Zealand ($11.20), Germany ($10.87), Netherlands ($10.44), Belgium ($10.38), Britain ($10.34), Ireland ($9.62), Canada ($9.52), and Israel ($7.94).

Furthermore, American workers put in many more hours on the job than did their foreign counterparts.  At the beginning of 2020, full-time U.S. workers had a longer work week than full-time workers in 24 OECD nations.  In addition, the United States remained the only country with an advanced industrial economy that did not guarantee workers a paid vacation.  The European Union guaranteed workers at least 20 paid vacation days a year, with some countries mandating as many as 30.  Although the United States had no legally mandated paid holidays, most advanced industrial countries offered at least six per year.  As a result, close to one in four Americans had no paid vacation and no paid holidays, while the average American worker in the private sector received only 10 paid vacation days and six paid holidays—far less time free of employment responsibilities than in almost every other country with an advanced economy.  The United States also remained the only advanced industrial nation that failed to guarantee paid maternity leave to workers.

When it comes to unions, the story is much the same.  American unions represented a much smaller portion of the workforce than labor organizations in comparable societies.  In 2019, when union membership in the United States fell to 10.1 percent, it stood at 90.4 percent in Iceland, 66.1 percent in Sweden, 54.2 percent in Belgium, 34.3 percent in Italy, 25.9 percent in Canada, 24.2 percent in Ireland, and 23.2 percent in Britain.  Union membership in OECD nations averaged 16 percent.

Not surprisingly, in a 2020 report, the International Trade Union Confederation, representing 200 million workers in 163 countries, ranked the United States as the worst among the nations with the world’s leading economies for workers’ rights.

Against this backdrop, it’s hard to take seriously Trump’s claim that U.S. workers have thrived during his presidency.  Indeed, even before the disasters wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, American workers received a raw deal.

This article was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2020 at 2:08am and is filed under Donald Trump, Minimum Wage, Unemployment, Unions, Vacation Pay, Working Class.

Introduction

Why do we need to talk about Romanticism? What is Romanticism? And how does it affect us in the 21st century? The fact is that we are so immersed in Romanticism now that we cannot see the proverbial wood for the haunted-looking trees. Romanticism has so saturated our culture that we need to stand back and remind ourselves what it is, and examine how it has seeped into our thinking processes to the extent that we are not even aware of its presence anymore. Or why this is a problem. The Romanticist influence of intense emotion makes up a large part of modern culture, for example, in much pop music, cinema, TV and literature; e.g., genres such as Superheroes, Fantasy, Horror, Magical realism, Saga, Westerns. I will look at the origins of Romanticism, and its negative influence on culture and politics. I will show how Enlightenment ideas originally emerged in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Church and led to the formation of a working class ideology and culture of resistance.

Romanticism and the modern world

The whole exuberance, anarchy and violence of modern art … its unrestrained, unsparing exhibitionism, is derived from [Romanticism]. And this subjective, egocentric attitude has become so much a matter of course for us … that we find it impossible to reproduce even an abstract train of thought without talking about our own feelings.
— Arnold Hauser, (1892–1978), A Social History of Art, Vol. 3, p. 166

Romanticism arose out of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century as a reaction to what was perceived as a rationalisation of life to the point of being anti-nature. The Romantics were against the Industrial Revolution, universalism and empiricism, emphasising instead heroic individualists and artists, and the individual imagination as a critical authority rather than classical ideals.

The Enlightenment itself had developed from the earlier Renaissance with a renewed interest in the classical traditions and ideals of harmony, symmetry, and order based on reason and science. On a political level the Enlightenment promoted republicanism in opposition to monarchy which ultimately led to the French revolution.

The worried conservatives of the time reacted to the ideas of the Enlightenment and reason with a philosophy which was based on religious ideas and glorified the past (especially Medieval times and the ‘Golden Age’) — times when things were not so threatening to elites. This philosophy became known as Romanticism and emphasised medieval ideas and society over the new ideas of democracy, capitalism and science.

Romanticism originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1890. It was initially marked by innovations in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the subconscious, the mystical, and the supernatural. This period was followed by the development of cultural nationalism and a new attention to national origins, an interest in native folklore, folk ballads and poetry, folk dance and music, and even previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works.

The Romantic movement “emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature.” The importance of the medieval lay in the  pre-capitalist significance of its individual crafts and tradesmen, as well as its feudal peasants and serfs.

Thus Romanticism was a reaction to the birth of the modern world: urbanisation, secularisation, industrialisation, and consumerism. Romanticism emphasised intense emotion and feelings which over the centuries came to be seen as one of its most important characteristics, in opposition to ‘cold’, ‘unfeeling’ Enlightenment rationalism.

Origins of Enlightenment emotion

Whence this secret Chain between each Person and Mankind? How is my Interest connected with the most distant Parts of it?
— Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Treatise II: An Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, Sect. I.

However, this ‘cold’, ‘unfeeling’ scenario is actually very far from the truth. In fact, the Enlightenment, itself, had its origins in emotion. Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century tried to create a philosophy of feeling that would allow them to solve the problem of the injustice in the unfeeling world they saw all around them.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) believed that all human beings had a ‘natural affection’ or natural sociability which bound them together.  Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) wrote that “All Men have the same Affections and Senses”, while David Hume (1711–1776) believed that human beings extend their “imaginative identification with the feelings of others” when it is required. Similarly, Adam Smith (1723–1790), the writer of Wealth of Nations, believed in the power of the imagination to inform us and help us understand the suffering of others.

Portrait of Denis Diderot (1713-1784), by Louis-Michel van Loo, 1767

For the Enlightenment philosophers the relationship between feeling and reason was of absolute importance. To develop ideas that would progress society for the better, a sense of morality was essential. Denis Diderot (1713–1784) a prominent French philosopher of the Enlightenment in France, for example, had strong views on the importance of the passions. As Henry Martyn Lloyd writes:

Diderot did believe in the utility of reason in the pursuit of truth – but he had an acute enthusiasm for the passions, particularly when it came to morality and aesthetics. With many of the key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume, he believed that morality was grounded in sense-experience. Ethical judgment was closely aligned with, even indistinguishable from, aesthetic judgments, he claimed. We judge the beauty of a painting, a landscape or our lover’s face just as we judge the morality of a character in a novel, a play or our own lives – that is, we judge the good and the beautiful directly and without the need of reason. For Diderot, then, eliminating the passions could produce only an abomination. A person without the ability to be affected, either because of the absence of passions or the absence of senses, would be morally monstrous.

Moreover, to remove the passions from science would lead to inhuman approaches and methods that would divert and alienate science from its ultimate goal of serving humanity, as Lloyd writes:

That the Enlightenment celebrated sensibility and feeling didn’t entail a rejection of science, however. Quite the opposite: the most sensitive individual – the person with the greatest sensibility – was considered to be the most acute observer of nature. The archetypical example here was a doctor, attuned to the bodily rhythms of patients and their particular symptoms. Instead, it was the speculative system-builder who was the enemy of scientific progress – the Cartesian physician who saw the body as a mere machine, or those who learned medicine by reading Aristotle but not by observing the ill. So the philosophical suspicion of reason was not a rejection of rationality per se; it was only a rejection of reason in isolation from the senses, and alienated from the impassioned body.

Michael L. Frazer describes the importance of Enlightenment justice and sympathy in his book The Enlightenment of Sympathy. He writes:

Reflective sentimentalists recognize our commitment to justice as an outgrowth of our sympathy for others. After our sympathetic sentiments undergo reflective self-correction, the sympathy that emerges for all those who suffer injustice poses no insult to those for whom it is felt. We do not see their suffering as mere pain to be soothed away when and if we happen to share it. Instead under Hume’s account, we condemn injustice as a violation of rules that are vitally important to us all. And under Smith’s account, we condemn the sufferings of the victims of injustice as injustice because we sympathetically share the resentment that they feel toward their oppressors, endorsing such feelings as warranted and acknowledging those who feel them deserve better treatment.

Cooper, Hume and Smith were living in times, not only devoid of empathy, but also even of basic sympathy. Robert C. Solomon writes of society then in A Passion for Justice: “There have always been the very rich. And of course there have always been the very poor. But even as late as the civilized and sentimental eighteenth century, this disparity was not yet a cause for public embarrassment or a cry of injustice. […] Poverty was considered just one more “act of God,” impervious to any solution except mollification through individual charity and government poorhouses to keep the poor off the streets and away from crime.”

Enlightenment emotion eventually gave rise to social trends that emphasised humanism and the heightened value of human life. These trends had their complement in art, creating what became known as the ‘sentimental novel’. While today sentimentalism evokes maudlin self-pity, in the eighteenth century it was revolutionary as sentimental literature

focused on weaker members of society, such as orphans and condemned criminals, and allowed readers to identify and sympathize with them. This translated to growing sentimentalism within society, and led to social movements calling for change, such as the abolition of the death penalty and of slavery. Instead of the death penalty, popular sentiment called for the rehabilitation of criminals, rather than harsh punishment. Frederick Douglass himself was inspired to stand against his own bondage and slavery in general in his famous Narrative by the speech by the sentimentalist playwright Sheridan in The Columbian Orator detailing a fictional dialogue between a master and slave.

As Solomon notes: “What distinguishes us not just from animals but from machines are our passions, and foremost among them our passion for justice. Justice is, in a word, that set of passions, not mere theories, that bind us and make us part of the social world.”

The Man of Feeling  (Henry Mackenzie)

Writers such as the Scottish author Henry Mackenzie tried to highlight many things that he perceived were wrong during his time and showed how many of the wrongs were ultimately caused by the established pillars of society. In his book, The Man of Feeling, he has no qualms about showing how these pillars of society had, for example, abused an intelligent woman causing her to become a prostitute (p. 44/45.), destroyed a school because it blocked the landowner’s view (p. 72), and hired assassins to remove a man who had refused to hand over his wife (p. 91.), etc. Mackenzie shows again and again the injustices of British military and colonial policy, and who is responsible. As Marilyn Butler writes:

Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), is pointedly topical when it criticizes the consequences of a war policy – press-ganging, conscription, the military punishment of flogging, and inadequate pensions – and when, like the same author’s Julia de Roubigné (1777), it attacks the principle of colonialism. An interest in such causes was the logical outcome of art’s frequently reiterated dedication to humanity. It was a period when the cast of villains was drawn from the proud men representing authority, downwards from the House of Lords, the bench of bishops, judges, local magistrates, attorneys, to the stern father; when readers were invited to empathize with life’s victims.

It took a long time for the ideas of sentimentalism (emotions against injustice) to filter down to the Realism (using facts to depict ordinary everyday experiences) that Dickens used in the nineteenth century to finally evoke some kind of empathy for people impoverished by society. As Solomon notes: “It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that Dickens shook the conscience of his compatriots with his riveting descriptions of poverty and cruelty in contemporary London, […] that the problem of poverty and resistance to its solutions [e.g. poorhouses] has become the central question of justice.”

Buss, Robert William; Dickens’s Dream; Charles Dickens Museum, London;

European literary sentimentalism arose during the Enlightenment, and partly as a response to sentimentalism in philosophy. In England the period 1750–1798 became known as the Age of Sensibility as the sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility became popular.

Romanticist emotionalism: the opposite of Enlightenment sentimentalism

Classicism is health, romanticism is sickness.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)

However, sensibility in an Enlightenment sense was very different from the Romanticist understanding, as Butler notes:

It is, in fact, in a key respect almost the opposite of Romanticism. Sensibility, like its near-synonym sentiment, echoes eighteenth-century philosophy and psychology in focusing upon the mental process by which impressions are received by the senses. But the sentimental writer’s interest in how the mind works and in how people behave is very different from the Romantic writer’s inwardness.

She writes that ‘neither Neoclassical theory nor contemporary practice in various styles and genres put much emphasis on the individuality of the artist’ (p. 29). This is a far cry from the apolitical, inward-looking, self-centered Romantic artists who saw themselves outside of a society that they had little interest in participating in, let alone changing for the better. Butler again:

Romantic rebelliousness is more outrageous and total, the individual rejecting not just his own society but the very principle of living in society – which means that the Romantic and post Romantic often dismisses political activity of any kind, as external to the self, literal and commonplace. Since it is relatively uncommon for the eighteenth-century artist to complain directly on his own behalf, he seldom achieves such emotional force as his nineteenth-century successor. He is, on the other hand, much more inclined than the Romantic to express sympathy for certain, well-defined social groups. Humanitarian feeling for the real-life underdog is a strong vein from the 1760s to the 1790s, often echoing real-life campaigns for reform.

This movement over time towards the Romanticist inward-looking conception of emotion and feelings has had knock-on negative effects on society’s ability to defend itself from elite oppression (through cultural styles of self-absorption, escapism and diversion rather than exposure, criticism and resistance), and retarded ‘art’s frequently reiterated dedication to humanity’. Solomon describes this process:

What has come about in the past two centuries or so is the dramatic rise of what Robert Stone has called “affective individualism,” this new celebration of the passions and other feelings of the autonomous individual. Yet, ironically, it is an attitude that has become even further removed from our sense of justice during that same period of time. We seem to have more inner feelings and pay more attention to them, but we seem to have fewer feelings about others and the state of the world and pay less attention to them.

Thus while Enlightenment sentimentalism “depicted individuals as social beings whose sensibility was stimulated and defined by their interactions with others”, the Romantic movement that followed it “tended to privilege individual autonomy and subjectivity over sociability”.

Romanticism as a philosophical movement of the nineteenth century had a profound influence on culture which can still be seen right up to today. Its main characteristics are the emphasis on the personal, dramatic contrasts, emotional excess, a focus on the nocturnal, the ghostly and the frightful, spontaneity, and extreme subjectivism. Romanticism in culture implies a turning inward and encourages introspection. Romantic literature put more emphasis on themes of isolation, loneliness, tragic events and the power of nature. A heroic view of history and myth became the basis of much Romantic literature.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, painted by Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier

It was in Germany that Romanticism took shape as a political ideology. The German Romanticists felt threatened by the French Revolution and were forced to move from inward-looking ideas to formulate conservative political answers needed to oppose Enlightenment and republican ideals. According to Eugene N. Anderson:

In the succeeding years the danger became acutely political, and the German Romanticists were compelled to subordinate their preoccupation with the widening of art and the enrichment of individual experience to social and political ideas and actions, particularly as formulated in nationalism and conservatism. These three cultural ideals, Romanticism, nationalism and conservatism, shared qualities evoked by the common situation of crisis. […] The Germans had to maintain against rationalism and the French a culture which in its institutional structure was that of the ancien régime. German Romanticism accepted it, wished to reform it somewhat, idealized it, and defended the idealization as the supreme culture of the world. This was the German counter-revolution. […] They endowed their culture with universal validity and asserted that it enjoyed the devotion of nature and God, that if it were destroyed humanity would be vitally wounded.

The reactionary nature of German Romanticism was demonstrated in its hierarchical views of society, its chauvinist nationalism, and extreme conservatism which would have serious implications for future generations of the German populace. As Anderson writes:

The low estimate of rationalism and the exaltation of custom, tradition, and feeling, the conception of society as an alliance of the generations, the belief in the abiding character of ideas as contrasted with the ephemeral nature of concepts, these and many other romantic views bolstered up the existing culture. The concern with relations led the Romanticists to praise the hierarchical order of the Ständestaat and to regard everything and every-one as an intermediary. The acceptance of the fact of inequality harmonized with that of the ideals of service, duty, faithfulness, order, sacrifice – admirable traits for serf or subject or soldier.

Anderson also believes that the Romanticists remained swinging “between individual freedom and initiative and group compulsion and authority” and as such could not have brought in fundamental reforms, because: “By reverencing tradition, they preserved the power of the backward-looking royalty and aristocracy.”

Thus Romanticist self-centredness in philosophy translated into the most conservative forms for maintaining the status quo in politics. Individual freedoms were matched by authoritarianism for the masses. The individual was king all right, as long as you weren’t a ‘serf or subject or soldier’.

Beyond morality: Working Class perspectives on Reason and Sentiment

We have never intended to enlighten shoemakers and servants—this is up to apostles.
Voltaire (1694–1778)

Around the same time of the early period of Romanticism, Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) were born. They grew up in a very different Germany. Capitalism had become established and was creating an even more polarised society between extremely rich and extremely poor as factory owners pushed their workers to their physical limits. On his way to work at his father’s firm in Manchester, Engels called into the offices of a paper he wrote for in Cologne and met the editor, Marx, for the first time in 1842. They formed a friendship based on shared values and beliefs regarding the working class and socialist ideas. They saw a connection between the earlier Enlightenment ideas and socialism. For example, as Engels writes in Anti-Duhring:

in its theoretical form, modern socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the eighteenth century. Like every new theory, modern socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in economic facts.

However, once they had connected themselves to the Enlightenment they soon saw the limitations of both Enlightenment concepts of reason and sentiment. They realised that the new bourgeois rulers would be limited by their conceptions of property, justice, and equality, which basically meant they only applied universality to themselves and their own property. The new rulers were buoyed up by the victory of their ideological fight over the aristocracy but incapable of applying the same ideas to the masses who helped them to victory. Thus Marx and Engels viewed the struggle for reason as important but limited to the new ruling class’ world view, just like the aristocracy before them:

Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion was flung into the lumber room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on nature and the inalienable rights of man. We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realisation in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.

As for sentiment, they were well aware of the Realist critical nature of modern writers (the Realist movement rejected Romanticism) and indeed praised them (e.g. G. Sand, E. Sue, and Boz [Dickens]), but limited themselves to offering some advice. While recognising that progressive literature had a mainly middle class audience (and were happy enough with these authors just ‘shaking the optimism’ of their audience), they knew that this was not by any means a socialist literature and were

I think however that the purpose must become manifest from the situation and the action themselves without being expressly pointed out and that the author does not have to serve the reader on a platter — the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he describes. To this must be added that under our conditions novels are mostly addressed to readers from bourgeois circles, i.e., circles which are not directly ours. Thus the socialist problem novel in my opinion fully carries out its mission if by a faithful portrayal of the real conditions it dispels the dominant conventional illusions concerning them, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world, and inevitably instills doubt as to the eternal validity of that which exists, without itself offering a direct solution of the problem involved, even without at times ostensibly taking sides.

Sentimental literature focused on individual misfortune, and constant repetition of such themes certainly appeared to universalise such suffering, so that, as David Denby writes, “In this weeping mother, this suffering father, we are to read also the sufferings of humanity.” Thus, “individualism and universalism appear to be two sides of the same coin”. Sentimental literature gives the reader the ‘spectacle of misfortune’ and a representation of the reaction of a ‘sentient and sensible observer’ who tries to help with ‘alms, sympathy or indeed narrative intervention.’ Furthermore, the literature of sentiment “mirrors eighteenth-century theories of sympathy, in which a spontaneous reaction to the spectacle of suffering is gradually developed, by a process of generalisation and combination of ideas, into broader and more abstract notions of humanity, benevolence, justice.”

Workers in the fuse factory, Woolwich Arsenal late 1800s

This brings us then to the problem of interpretation, as Denby suggests: “should the sentimental portrayal of the poor and of action in their favour be read as an attempt to give a voice to the voiceless, to include the hitherto excluded? Or, alternatively, is the sentimentalisation of the poor to be interpreted, more cynically, as a discursive strategy through which the enlightened bourgeoisie states its commitment to values of humanity and justice, and thereby seeks to strengthen its claims to universal domination?”

While such ideas of giving a ‘voice to the voiceless’ was a far cry from monarchical times, and claims of commitment to humanity and justice were laudable, the concept of universality had a fundamental flaw: “The universal claims of the French Revolution are opposed to a [aristocratic] society based on distinctions of birth: it is in the name of humanity that the Revolution challenges the established order. But for Sartre this does not change the fact that the universal is a myth, an ideological construct, and an obfuscation, since it articulates a notion of man which eliminates social conflict and disguises the interests of a class behind a facade of universal reference.”

Striking teamsters battling police on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 1934

Thus for Marx and Engels defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, that is, a universal moral theory, could not be achieved while society is divided into classes:

We maintain […] that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed. That in this process there has on the whole been progress in morality, as in all other branches of human knowledge, no one will doubt. But we have not yet passed beyond class morality. A really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life.

Marx and Engels worked towards that morality through their activism with working class movements and culture. Their critical writing also formed an essential part of working class ideology and culture of resistance and has remained influential in resistance movements the world over.

The culture of resistance today still uses realism, documentary, and histories of oppression to show the harsh realities of globalisation. Like during the Enlightenment, empathy for those suffering injustice forms its foundation. And unlike Romanticism, reason and science are deemed to be important tools in its struggle for social emancipation and progress.

Conclusion: Enlightenment and Romanticism today

When we are asked now: are we now living into an enlightened age? Then the answer is: No, but in an age of Enlightenment.
— Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

There is no doubt that the influence of Romanticism has become ever stronger in twentieth and twenty-first century culture. Romanticist-influenced TV shows on Netflix are watched world wide. Love songs dominate the pop industry and superheroes are now the mainstay of cinema. Even Romanticist nationalism is making a comeback. Now and then calls for a new Enlightenment are heard, but like the original advocates of the Enlightenment, they are limited to the conservative world view of those making the call and whose view of the Enlightenment could be compared to a form of Third Way politics, that is, they avoid the issue of class conflict.

This article was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2020 at 7:27pm and is filed under Art, Enlightenment, Equal Rights, Europe, Human Rights, Literature, Philosophy, Romanticism, Society, Working Class.

Employer expectations are being tested with spread of the coronavirus, at least when it comes to being physically present at a workplace. In some industries, companies are encouraging their employees to heed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines: work from home, avoid large crowds, and see a doctor immediately if you’re sick.

But those recommendations are not an option for workers in the service industry and the gig economy, who can’t work from home, won’t get paid if they don’t work, and often don’t have adequate health insurance.

As The New York Times reported this weekend, “[this] disparity could make the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory illness known as Covid-19, harder to contain in the United States than in other rich countries that have universal benefits like health care and sick leave.”

Most retail and service workers unable to work from home because their jobs depend on person-to-person contact. For example, home health aides can’t care for homebound seniors, waiters can’t serve food and drivers for ride share companies can’t ferry passengers via laptop — nor can warehouse workers assembling packages with the hand sanitizers Americans can’t seem to stop ordering, causing a nationwide shortage. And unlike most white-collar office workers, they don’t have paid sick leave.

This cohort is most likely to be among the 27.5 million people in America without health insurance, according to 2018 data from the American Community Survey Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

Portia Green, a restaurant employee who spoke to the Times, doesn’t have paid sick leave or health insurance. If she doesn’t work, she doesn’t get paid, and that means losing at least $100 per day. If her child’s school closes, she can’t afford child care. The expectation in her industry is that sick workers will show up. “They’re going to push you to do it anyway,” she explained, adding, “You go to work, pop a vitamin C and if you can do it, you do it.”

Kris Garcia, an airport worker in Denver, told a similar story. “When you’re talking about paid leave and who should stay home, it’s the ones who need it most that don’t have access to it, the ones showing up at work sick touching your food, touching your bags, coming into everyday contact with your direct life,” he said. Garcia does get paid sick days after six months on the job, but he is out of luck if he needs to deal with health issues before then.

Infectious disease experts echo workers’ concerns. “Very quickly, it’s going to circulate a lot faster in the poorer communities than the wealthiest ones,” Dr. James Hadler, Connecticut’s former epidemiologist and now a consultant to the state, told the Times.

Only 10 states and 33 cities have passed some version of paid sick leave, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families, but they vary in amount and eligibility, which is a particular cause for concern as coronavirus cases mount.

“It’s very clear,” said Nicolas Ziebarth, associate professor of economics at Cornell University, who wrote multiple papers on the subject. “When people don’t have access to sick leave, they go to work sick and spread diseases.”

Read the full New York Times story here.

Every attempt at creating a socialist let alone communist society has incurred the bloody violent wrath of the capitalist world, beginning with the Paris Commune of the 19th century, extending to the Soviet Union and China in the twentieth, and continuing to the present when truly electoral democratic attempts at revolutionary transformation in places like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia are met with external warfare in the form of sanctions and foreign financing of internal opposition reducing populations having finally achieved balanced diets for the first time in their lives to not only scrounging for survival but living under threat of military invasion for doing so.

While this minority created imperial policy that views the world as subject renter and American wealth as royal owner will soon be replaced by real democracy if it doesn’t destroy everything in its process of failing, attempts at creating what is called a “sharing” economy are made by well meaning souls trying to take the merchant relationship away by replacing it with person to person deals, as in the ancient markets which offered humanity a place to bargain as equals. But making a deal with someone at a flea market or neighborhood swap doesn’t really amount to a social change, just as a private non-profit hardly transforms market forces. The non-profit results from massive tax write-offs for the rich making donations that insure their system remains strong, and the innocent personal bartering that takes place among well meaning people is no comparison to a truly collective worker owned democratically controlled enterprise. We might as well claim that McDonalds is “sharing” its burgers and fries with us, as Tesla is “sharing” its autos, General Dynamics “shares” its weapons, and documented pharma and undocumented dope dealers “share” their drugs. The market still rules and it remains under the ownership and control of minority wealth, with the number of dollars they command at a peak never before seen in the history of humanity. The Roman Empire’s wealth amounted to chump change compared to the trillions of dollars owned and controlled by a tiny handful of global, mostly American billionaires.

A philosopher teaching the social values of the capitalist market and calling them democratic is like a pimp teaching social values of the sex market and calling it love, or an economist doing a cost-benefit analysis of dating that skips the expense of dinner and a movie and gets right to the rape. Under the control of such market forces, unless you are the philosopher, the economist or the rapist, ultimately you get screwed. Unfortunately, it is most of the world that has been criminally abused, but rising populations of workers are demanding and taking action for radical change to transform reality before it transforms all of us into lonely souls screeching and tweeting “me-me” while all collapses around “us”.

A real sharing economy will be cooperative, not competitive, involving majority social behavior, not individually imposed anti-social-ism promoted as beneficial for all when it only rewards some at the expense of the many. And too much that passes for “progressive” politics is like the “progressive” tax system which takes far more from the vast majority while rewarding the ruling class of fantastic wealth all manner of deductions, write-offs and constitutionally sanctioned criminality that makes them richer and the rest poorer. That is regressive, not progressive, using words that have nothing to do with the actions, which speak much louder. We need radical economic changes like a 20-hour workweek at a $20 an hour minimum wage, free public transit, worker owned and controlled businesses, public banks, health care for all, and far more. At cries of “how can we afford that? made by the innocent and ignorant under the control of their slick manipulators, try this: Stop spending trillions on war and instead spend it on life. Duh? But, all those jobs will vanish. How will those workers survive? With better jobs that serve humanity – their “identity group” – the environment, and their personal and social lives. Double duh?

We can defend our nation, if such is needed, with a truly defense force that does not involve spending hundreds of billions to place our military in foreign locales. We can save lots of transportation dollars by staying the hell out of other people’s national, political and economic business unless trading with them on a fair, non-superior market forces arrangement but one that treats everyone as having the same rights of pursuit of life and liberty, but in reality instead of just rhetorically.

If we truly mean to aid foreign people in a time of need, we can do it the way Cuba does by sending doctors, nurses and medical equipment at a time of plague or disease, and not the way we’ve always done it by sending bombs, guns and bullets to help prevent looting. And to the really ignorant bordering on stupid charges that we can’t afford to offer our entire population health care under public control because taxes will have to increase: For the rich? Of course. But even if working people see a tax increase of $500, and a health care expense decrease of $1,000, unless their education has exclusively been at private schools, they can see that represents a savings of money, not a loss.

Attempts to transform economic reality have always been, at their core, to establish a class free society of truly equal citizens, with no survival aspect of life denied anyone because it is not affordable. The shame of people living in the street in a society that spends trillions on war and billions on pets should relieve us of any fear of a judgmental, righteous, vindictive Old Testament god. We’d have been wiped out by such a deity, with holocausts, earthquakes, tsunamis and worse until he-she-it was finally rid of us. But our problem is not a deity, nor even the corona virus, which may be a threat to some of us, but  the capitalist virus is a threat to all humanity.

The Sanders campaign is the American equivalent of the growing global demand that ends the hypocrisy of calling minority electoral rule of the rich by the name democracy and using media and political hired help to plant that idiotic notion more deeply into public consciousness.  It wont work anymore. Real democracy means choosing the greater good, not the lesser evil which is the usual choice for the minority that has voted in the past. Hopefully, a majority will show up at the polls and vote for humanity in the majority, contradicting the minority shapers of what passes for conscious reality and beginning the transformation of the nation, in accordance with what is going on all over the world, from a selfish, anti-social and anti-human environment, to one of mutual aid, social justice, peace, and for the first time in human history, rule of the majority. The beginning of that pro-social democracy is dependent on the end of anti-social capitalism.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2020 at 12:22pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/bernie-sanders/" rel="category tag">Bernie Sanders</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/capitalism/" rel="category tag">Capitalism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/co-operatives/" rel="category tag">Co-operatives</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/democrats/" rel="category tag">Democrats</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/economics/" rel="category tag">Economy/Economics</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/elitism/" rel="category tag">Elitism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/employmrent/" rel="category tag">Employment</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/environment/" rel="category tag">Environment</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/media/fake-news/" rel="category tag">Fake News</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/healthmedical/medicare-for-all/" rel="category tag">Medicare for All</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/militarism/" rel="category tag">Militarism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/minimum-wage/" rel="category tag">Minimum Wage</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/opinion/" rel="category tag">Opinion</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/language/propaganda/" rel="category tag">Propaganda</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/ruling-elite/" rel="category tag">Ruling Elite</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/unions/" rel="category tag">Unions</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/wage/" rel="category tag">Wage</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/militarism/weaponry/" rel="category tag">Weaponry</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/militarism/weaponry/weapons-sales/" rel="category tag">Weapons Sales</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/working-class-labor/" rel="category tag">Working Class</a>.


Campaigning for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump promised that, if he was elected, “American worker[s] will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them.”

Has he kept this promise?

When it comes to protecting workers’ health and safety, his administration has been a disaster.  Once in office, Trump packed the leadership of U.S. regulatory agencies with pro-corporate zealots, leading to predictable results.  They repealed an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rule requiring employers to keep accurate records of injuries, repealed a rule requiring that federal contractors follow safety and labor laws, and withdrew an OSHA policy allowing workers to participate in OSHA inspections.  In addition, as the AFL-CIO noted, the Trump administration targeted job safety rules for toxic chemicals, mine examinations, and child labor protections for destruction.  It also sharply reduced the number of OSHA inspectors.  As of 2019, only 875 were enforcing health and safety regulations nationwide―the lowest level in the agency’s half-century of operation.

Meanwhile, although Trump bragged in June 2019 that the wages of American workers “are rising at the fastest rate in many decades,” this claim is far from the truth.  In fact, wages rose faster only a few years before, under his predecessor.  Furthermore, an examination of what economists call “real wages”―wages offset by inflation―reveals that they have remained remarkably stagnant during the Trump era.  As the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics later reported, “real” average weekly earnings of American workers rose during 2019 by just one-tenth of 1 percent.

The wage stagnation of the Trump era is particularly hard on America’s vast number of low-paid workers.  According to a study by the Brookings Institution appearing in late 2019, 44 percent of U.S. workers (53 million Americans) were employed in low-wage jobs that paid median wages of $18,000 a year.  The writers of the report concluded that “nearly half of all workers earn wages that are not enough, on their own, to promote economic security.”  Moreover, as data gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates, the percentage of low-wage workers has grown dramatically.  Naturally, many of these workers have been forced, by economic necessity, to work two―and sometimes three―jobs to survive.

The Trump administration bears considerable responsibility for this impoverishment of American workers.  It has consistently opposed raising the starvation-level federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, set in 2009.  Indeed, Trump opposes establishing any federal wage minimum, and his GOP minions have blocked a minimum wage increase passed in 2019 by the Democratic-controlled House from being introduced in the Senate.  In addition, the Trump administration stymied a scheduled pay raise for federal workers and gutted Obama administration rules that made millions of Americans eligible to receive overtime pay for their overtime work.

Trump has also championed measures to deprive American workers of major healthcare and pension benefits that they have funded through their tax payments.  Although, during his 2015-16 campaign, Trump promised never to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, he has repeatedly sought to do so.   On February 8, 2020, he again insisted that his new federal budget “will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare.”  But, only two days later, Trump unveiled a budget that called for cutting Medicare by half a trillion dollars, Medicaid by $900 billion, and Social Security by $24 billion.

The Trump administration has also been waging an assault upon labor unions, which provide the major organizational muscle defending the rights of America’s workers.  Thanks to Trump’s anti-labor appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an agency established in the 1930s to guarantee fair treatment for workers and their unions, it has become ever more difficult for unions to operate.  The NLRB has issued rulings constraining how and where workers can organize and protest, gerrymandering bargaining units to the benefit of employers, permitting corporations to fire workers in retaliation for union activity, and narrowing the right to strike.  Given the NLRB’s pro-corporate bias, even existing labor organizations ― such as unions comprised of graduate student workers ― are now being threatened with loss of collective bargaining rights.

In recent decades, as an unrelenting corporate attack has crippled unions in the private sector, big business, the wealthy, and their right wing allies in public office have turned to destroying the lingering strength of public sector unions.  Working toward this goal, they have promoted “right-to-work” laws on the state and national level.  These laws, by eliminating the obligation of workers to pay for the union representation they receive, encourage the emergence of millions of “free riders” and, thereby, provide an effective way to undermine unions.  Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, House Republicans introduced the National Right to Work Act and, within days, the White House announced the new president’s support for “right-to-work” laws.

Although anti-union forces never managed to push the National Right to Work Act through Congress, they did secure an important victory.  After they brought the “right-to-work” case of Janus v. AFSCME before the Supreme Court, Trump’s Justice Department joined the case with an anti-union brief.  Then, thanks to Trump’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch, a right wing ideologue, to the Supreme Court, the court issued a 5-4 ruling, overturning precedent and declaring that workers could refuse to pay dues to public sector unions representing them.

In the aftermath of this decision, public sector unions worked vigorously ― and, in most cases, successfully ― to convince workers to pay dues voluntarily.  But their membership did decline.  Consequently, despite opinion polls showing that about half of America’s non-unionized workers want to join a union, the Janus decision and the other anti-labor measures of the Trump administration have combined to reduce union membership in the United States to a record low of 10.3 percent.

As a New York Times editorial concluded, Trump, as president, has sent “a clear message to American workers:  You’re on your own.”

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Tuesday, February 25th, 2020 at 12:45am and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/donald-trump/" rel="category tag">Donald Trump</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/economics/" rel="category tag">Economy/Economics</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/minimum-wage/" rel="category tag">Minimum Wage</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/unemployment/" rel="category tag">Unemployment</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/unions/" rel="category tag">Unions</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/wage/" rel="category tag">Wage</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/working-class-labor/" rel="category tag">Working Class</a>.


Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam

The tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to homelessness is what the average person sees on Newport’s streets – mostly men, some women, seeking a public or private building’s overhang to get out of the rain.
Many on the streets are disheveled, struggling with mental health issues and addiction. Others are not so easily identified as homeless people.

Creating a permanent warming shelter is one stop-gap measure the Newport (OR) Working Group on Homelessness has been grappling with for more than a year.

On Feb. 5, more than 20 people filled the cramped space in the Avery building (where DHS offices are co-located with other agencies) to move this group into achievable goals.

Outside the DHS office, fighting against the gale force rain, many of these house-less people were on the covered concrete pad that lead up to the offices housing SNAP and TANF DHS workers.

They were seeking a dry space and companionship.

I asked one fellow – he said he goes by Fred, age 47 — what he wants immediately as a homeless citizen.

“Look, I see families out there with kids in tents. That’s just not right. I am okay living in the woods, but even a dude like me wants something, some place, to get out or the rain and cold. Even some simple open carport like structure, man. Nothing fancy. They should be all over the place.”

We talked about portable toilets, even cold-water taps and sanitary soaps. “Look, with this virus over in China, coming here. . . you think the powers to be would think about sanitation. I guess the solution is to let us die off in the woods . . . or ship us off to come sort of camp.”

Paul looking for camps.

Running a Permanent Shelter Costs Money

Without financial support, and without volunteers, a shelter is a pipe dream. “We have to have financial support,” Jones stated.

Cynthia Jacobi, Newport City Council, told me at a PFLAG event at OCCC Feb. 8 she is hopeful that HB – 4001 will spur serious discourse on what to do about the homeless population in relationship to cities having the tools to allow for shelters. House Speaker Tina Kotek, D-Portland, has introduced a $120 million proposal to allow cities to more easily site homeless shelters. Kotek also wants a statewide emergency declaration on the homeless problem.

Jacobi too sees the need for immediate mitigation and a shelter for this emergency-sized problem here in Newport.

Pastor Ingalls on her blog tells her congregation a chilling fact most social services agencies in Lincoln County also shudder to contemplate – There’s a 17% homeless rate in our local schools. How a community frames the idea that nearly 1 out of every 5 students don’t have stable housing while the county is home to many second home residents will be important.

Several compelling stories about people who are homeless dying exposed to the elements were discussed at the meeting: According to Kamikawa, an 87-year-old Lincoln County resident was found dead in her car. She had been in an apartment living with her disabled son. Electrical wires were eaten through by rats. She had no electricity. She was evicted. She had a stroke while living in her car with her son.

Putting a face on and a story behind each homeless person might get the average person to think about how he or she can support a shelter and permanent housing solution as well as volunteering some hours each month to stem the tide of tragedies like this one.

Grilling Newport City Councilwoman

I decided to ask a Newport City Councilwoman some questions on homelessness and next steps.

Paul Haeder:  What role do you see citizens joining the Homeless Task Force?

Cynthia Jacobi: I’m the City Liaison to the Homeless Work Group/coalition.

PH:  What role do you see citizens joining the Homeless Task Force?

CJ: I see the role of citizens in the new homeless coalition work group (as yet without an official name or title) as coming forth with the best ideas tailored for our community. Social services, government entities, law-enforcement, interfaith community and concerned citizens can all have a Voice in shaping these policies.

PH:  Why are you involved?

CJ: I have always felt a strong sense of social justice.  I see Families with more than one parent working who still cannot afford safe and decent shelter. Sometimes the cost of an illness, a car repair, or other unexpected costs forces the choice between buying groceries or paying rent or utility bills. Children in unstable situations are especially vulnerable.

As a wealthy society, in good conscience we cannot say there is no room at the inn. We have the means to house all of our population.  With strong leadership and compassion, I know we can do this.

PH: Will the Task Force cover larger issues?

CJ: There are so many overlapping issues:

The new Oregon State House Bill 4001 which may be a game changer in zoning, and funding.

All coastal communities have been addressing the Short-Term Rentals impact on housing inventory for working folks.

It is a valid suggestion to have a study on the actual impact economically and socially of STRs. For example:   Does the room tax cover expenses of police and fire departments, wear on roads, etc.?  Who would finance this study?

The City of Newport has been instrumental in building Surfview, the 110-apartment complex for lower-income citizens. This will open by summer. This was accomplished with a complex partnership of public and private funds, and the leadership in local city and county government. Need to do more of this.

PH: What role do you see mental health services playing in this move to have both temporary homeless facilities (a night facility) and also a warming shelter?

CJ: My understanding is that the county mental health providers have formed out-reach teams Which will go directly to unsheltered people, assess their needs and provide services and contacts for assistance.

PH: Car camping at churches and non-profits and governmental parking areas WITH some sort of case management and oversight seems like a good first step in getting the housing insecure into a system of evaluation and moving ahead with housing options. Is this the biggest and easiest priority now?

CJ: I think the quickest way to make an impact is to allow safe, supervised car camping in Newport.  Newport Planning Commission is in the process of examining our ordinances to allow car camping in certain Defined areas.  Along with oversight, outreach teams, and case management, this is the easiest first step to create safe shelter areas. Women, children, and seniors living in their cars are especially vulnerable. At the very least, they need a safe place to stay at night. We can do this.

I heard anecdotally that much of the seasonal help lives in their cars and rents small storage lockers for belongings.

PH: Do you know anyone personally or within a family circle who have been or are housing insecure, or homeless?

CJ: Personally, I have a few family members who have experienced bad luck, poor choices, and mental illness causing them to live in unstable conditions.

My husband, Gary, and I have volunteered at the overnight shelter.  We have met people displaced from their previous long-term housing, people who can’t afford rent, people who are disabled.

A common problem is affordability when working folks have to pay the first month, the last month, a damage deposit and utility hook ups. Before any of this can happen, there is background check costing $50 per adult for each application, even to be placed on a waiting list. While realizing that landlords must be protected, this situation seems unfair. How many working families can afford $2500 and more up front?

PH: What role do businesses and the chambers have in helping get some sort of affordable housing for the very people who clean the fish, serve the food, chop the veggies, clean the hotels, etc.? Can we get a round-table together, a charrette, where we bring a large brain trust together to attack the housing insecurity and the street homeless issues as a multi-pronged problem to solve?

CJ: As far as the responsibilities of businesses and chambers of commerce: Some businesses have stepped up to help their workers.  In particular, one of the fish plants has purchased motels and converted them to longer-term living quarters.

In the last few years, Newport has lost three large economy motels: one deteriorated and was bulldozed, one burned, and the fish plant bought another one. (or two?). These motels were often used as emergency shelters with vouchers by government agencies.

– The availability of housing related to jobs is affected by public transport access.

– Walkability and bicycle access are also important.

Jacobi third from the right.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Friday, February 14th, 2020 at 9:32pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/cities/" rel="category tag">Cities</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/finance/debt-finance/" rel="category tag">Debt</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/prisons/debtors-prison/" rel="category tag">Debtor's Prison</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/discrimination/" rel="category tag">Discrimination</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/economics/economic-inequality/" rel="category tag">Economic Inequality</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/general/" rel="category tag">General</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/cities/gentrification-cities/" rel="category tag">Gentrification</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/housing/" rel="category tag">Housing/Homelessness</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/human-rights/" rel="category tag">Human Rights</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/healthmedical/mental-health/" rel="category tag">Mental Health</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/poverty/" rel="category tag">Poverty</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/prejudice/" rel="category tag">Prejudice</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/working-class-labor/" rel="category tag">Working Class</a>.


As he did in 2016, Bernie is offering something unique to the political landscape: a transformative vision for a more just and equitable country, and a renewal of American democracy.

His movement is built upon four central tenets:

1. The American political system is currently broken, unable to respond to the needs of the people and the planet.
2. There needs to be a political realignment along lines of economic self-interest, uniting the working class.
3. That realignment, combined with a powerful appeal to common-sense morality (anti-racist, anti-war, pro-environment, universal inclusion), will build a new progressive majority.
4. Even so, there must also be a revival of citizen participation in politics, lest the movement be crushed by big-money interests.

Sanders is correct on all four fronts. Until such a program is successfully implemented, America’s endemic social and political crises will continue unabated.

American politics are locked in a decades-long stalemate. The Republicans block any major Democratic initiative and vice versa. This arrangement invariably preserves the status quo, frustrating anybody who tries to change things democratically. Sanders’ political revolution, which unites working people across the racial divide, promises a release from this stasis, and there’s ample evidence that it will deliver the kind of electoral victory in the House and Senate required to do just that.

Before I turn to that evidence, however, let’s make clear what it would mean for American politics if Sanders were to triumph this November: We could begin to meaningfully deal with climate change, wealth inequality, the housing and health care crises, and perhaps wind down our forever wars in the Middle East; under a President Joe Biden, nothing will get done.

Despite this, establishment favorites like Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and form South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg maintain Sanders is a dreamer, his platform would never make it through Congress, and only their incrementalist goals have a chance of being realized. What goes unsaid is that the moderate agenda would do nothing to alter the basic realities of American life in which the rich get richer while working people continue their slide into debt peonage.

The moderate Democrats have an alibi: those evil Republicans won’t let them do more. This, of course, is total nonsense. It’s their wealthy donors who won’t let them do more. The Republicans wouldn’t let them do anything.

If, on the other hand, Sanders can alter the balance of American politics with a new majoritarian coalition, real, necessary change could happen.

As noted above, Sanders intends to achieve this by dramatically expanding the electorate — something he has already done by energizing young voters and deploying his legions of supporters to the kinds of communities politicians tend to overlook. Sanders has also proved more popular with the white working-class than Democratic candidates have in recent election cycles. His appeal to this bloc is the same as it is to people of color. The difference is that the former has overwhelmingly voted Republican in recent years. If Sanders could win over even a portion of these voters, he’d likely break our political stalemate.

One byproduct of a multi-racial working class coalition is that it would create the conditions to finally end the American political system’s de facto protection of white privilege, which the modern Republican Party has been able to preserve and perpetuate since it began targeting Dixiecrats as part of its racist Southern strategy.

This is the bedrock of Trump’s white nativist appeal, allowing him to gain the allegiance of many white voters without providing any improvement to their material conditions. Sanders can take a sledgehammer to that bond by meaningfully bettering the lives of all working people. This alone could shatter the GOP’s hold on power.

It’s a beautiful paradox that Sanders’ appeal among the white working class might break the deadlock that has kept America’s structural racism in place. A Sanders presidency would mean that anti-racists would control the federal government, which remains the most powerful instrument available to address this foundational crime of American society.

A lifetime of following American politics tells me that little if any progress can be made in this country without tackling the persistence of structural racism; as long as it goes unaddressed, it will continue to harm and pervert our collective sense of justice. The Sanders movement is committed to doing what’s necessary to overcome this scourge, going beyond the fatuous claims of equal opportunity promoted by the Democratic establishment. Sanders calls for direct investment in poor communities of color, universal voting rights and registration, criminal justice reform and a radical reduction in incarceration, all while seeking nothing less than the eradication of the racial wealth gap. It’s an agenda that aims to lift every family into the middle class. If you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a link to his platform. Suffice to say that if he were successful, it would truly be a new day in America.

Indeed, ending our political stalemate would usher in the kind of progressive change polls indicate Americans would welcome with open arms. These policies include a reduced Pentagon budget, sane gun laws, a humane immigration policy (with a direct route to citizenship), the expansion of Social Security and the erasure of student debt, guaranteed vacation time, a $60,000 minimum salary for teachers, equal pay for equal work, a federal jobs guarantee and Medicare for all. Perhaps most important, we could respond to the climate emergency on a scale scientists say is necessary.

Of course, no discussion of climate change is complete without mentioning the other plague on America’s political system—what I call the lobbying industrial complex. Every Democrat on Capitol Hill claims to respect climate science, but only the true progressives have been willing to buck the fossil fuel industry. Given their hostility to the Sanders agenda, it’s reasonable to assume that big-money donors and even bigger money lobbying would conspire against him. Perhaps you’re wondering: Would they succeed?

If he were a mere politician, the answer might be yes. But Sanders is also the lead organizer of a mass movement, the central aim of which is to mobilize Americans to take back their government from big-money interests, and one that is designed to prevail. If you think any House member is going to get away with voting against President Sanders’ climate policies, to choose one example, you’re simply not paying attention. Any such official would face pressure from his or her constituents far surpassing a handful of expensive suits. Indeed, he or she would be unlikely to survive a primary; call it democracy in action.

Finally, with the Iowa caucus less than a week away, it’s important we step back and recognize that the legions of Bernie backers are having the time of their lives. This is a magnetic movement, with loads of conscientious, intelligent people of all ages, from all backgrounds. It turns out that redeeming American society is a blast! And the fun is just beginning.

In America, the term “middle class” has long been used to describe the majority of wage and salary earners, from those receiving a median annual income of around $50,000 to those who earn three or four times that amount. Whether Democrat or Republican, politicians from across the political aisle claim to represent the middle class—that vast-yet-amorphous segment of the population where the managers and the managed all seem to fit together.

The term has always been somewhat problematic when it comes to politics. As Joan C. Williams observes in her 2017 book, “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,” a “central way we make class disappear is to describe virtually everyone as ‘middle class.’ ” The majority of Americans see themselves as middle class, including those in the top 10% earning several times the average income. According to Williams, a close friend of hers who “undoubtedly belonged to the top 1%” once referred to herself as middle class, a perspective that the author describes as “class cluelessness.”

This cluelessness was also evident in a New York Times article last summer titled “What Middle Class Families Want Politicians to Know,” which included interviews with a number of purportedly middle class families with household incomes of up to $400,000 (only one of the interviewees earned less than $100,000, with the average around $200,000).

The fact that people who earn a quarter-million dollars annually place themselves in the same category as those earning $70,000 tells us just how politically useless the term “middle class” has become in contemporary America. Even when we take into account geographic factors and fluctuations in the cost of living, there is little rational justification for categorizing a $60,000-a-year blue-collar worker with a lawyer or doctor earning in excess of $200,000.

Of course, some may argue that one’s class is based largely on her own experience and perspective, but this confuses psychological feelings with concrete social and economic realities. As C. Wright Mills pointed out in his classic study, “White Collar: The American Middle Classes,” just because people “are not ‘class conscious’ at all times and in all places does not mean ‘there are no classes’ or that ‘in America everybody is middle class.’ ” Although subjective feelings are no doubt important, to accept that everyone who identifies as middle class must be middle class is to disregard objective economic realities.

One’s class consciousness (or lack thereof) has important implications for one’s political attitudes, and in America class consciousness has always been somewhat lacking compared to other countries. The United States has never had a true aristocratic class or feudal property relations like those in Europe, and in the 19th century, the “middle class” essentially stood for small capitalists and propertied farmers. Between the mid-19th century and mid-20th century, the country was transformed, in Mills’ analysis, from a “nation of small capitalists into a nation of hired employees”—a trend that sociologists call “proletarianization.”

In the post-World War II era, thanks to the struggle of labor and the policies of the New Deal, which aimed to reduce inequality and mediate class tensions, many in the working class became comfortably middle class. In other words, the proletariat turned into a kind of “petty bourgeois,” adopting the same values and attitudes as their employers, while accepting the status quo after a few adjustments. Ironically, this ended up undercutting more radical labor movements while preserving the economic system, which eventually came back to bite working people and their children.

The new middle class flourished until the capitalist class decided to revolt against the legacy of the New Deal toward the end of the 20th century. In the contemporary era, many who would have been middle-class in the postwar years have effectively been proletarianized once again, and economic inequality has returned pre-Great Depression heights. Proletarianization, Mills explained, “refers to shifts of middle-class occupations toward wage-workers in terms of: income, property, skill, prestige or power, irrespective of whether or not the people involved are aware of these changes. Or, the meaning may be in terms of changes in consciousness, outlook, or organized activity.”

The proletarianization of the middle class over the past 50 years has had an enormously detrimental effect on communities across the country, but it has taken quite a while for many working people in America to recognize their new situation in terms of consciousness and outlook. The enduring popularity of the term “middle class” reflects this state of affairs.

In the Democratic primaries, only one candidate has deliberately chosen to use “working class” over “middle class.” Not surprisingly, that candidate is Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I am a candidate of the working class,” Sanders recently declared on Facebook. “I come from the working class. That is my background, that’s who I am. I fought for the working class as a mayor, a Congressman and a Senator. And that is the kind of president that I will be.” Sanders, whose campaign is 100% grassroots-funded, wrote in a column last week for the Des Moines Register, “… our campaign is focused on making sure the government stops representing billionaires and start representing us — the working class of this country.”

Though it may seem like a somewhat trivial distinction, when we look at the rest of the Democratic field, it’s clear that Sanders has indeed distinguished himself from the other top candidates. For example, Sanders’ opponent Joe Biden frequently speaks of the middle class but rarely the working class. “This country wasn’t built by Wall Street bankers and CEOs and hedge fund managers. It was built by the American middle class,” Biden declares on his campaign website, where he says that the middle class “isn’t a number,” but a “set of values.” (In a way this is correct, but not in the sense that Biden seems to think.)

On the more progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s website, where she lists her numerous plans, one searches in vain for any references to the working class, though there are plenty to the middle class.

How much this actually matters is, of course, debatable, but the term “working class” undoubtedly has far more implications and political significance than “middle class,” which, like many overused words in the political lexicon, has lost all meaning. By using “working class” instead, Sanders appears to be trying to increase class consciousness in America, where those in the ruling class have often demonstrated the highest level of class consciousness (never failing to use their abundant resources to protect and advance their own interests).

The more young and working-class people come to recognize their own situation and place in the 21st century American economy, the more they seem to embrace “socialist” policies that are rejected by “middle class” sensibilities.

In the Democratic primaries, only one candidate has made raising levels of class consciousness part of his campaign strategy, and in an election that could very well be determined by working-class voters, this may be the strategy to defeat Trump.

For a century the GOP has been bankrolled by big business and Wall Street. Trump wants to keep the money rolling in. His signature tax cut, two years old last Sunday, has helped U.S. corporations score record profits and the stock market reach all-time highs. To spur even more corporate generosity for the 2020 election, Trump is suggesting more giveaways. Chief of staff Mick Mulvaney recently told an assemblage of CEOs that Trump wants to “go beyond” his 2017 tax cut.

Trump also wants to expand his working-class base. In rallies and countless tweets he claims to be restoring the American working class by holding back immigration and trade. Incumbent Republicans and GOP candidates are mimicking Trump’s economic nationalism. As Trump consigliore Stephen Bannon boasted recently, “we’ve turned the Republican party into a working-class party.”

Keeping the GOP the Party of Big Money while making it over into the Party of the Working Class is a tricky maneuver, especially at a time when capital and labor are engaged in the most intense economic contest in more than a century because so much wealth and power are going to the top.

Armed with deductions and loopholes, America’s largest companies paid an average federal tax rate of only 11.3 percent on their profits last year, roughly half the official rate under the new tax law – the lowest effective corporate tax rate in more than eighty years.

Yet almost nothing has trickled down to ordinary workers. Corporations have used most of their tax savings to buy back their shares, giving the stock market a sugar high. The typical American household remains poorer today than it was before the financial crisis began in 2007.

Trump’s giant tax cut has also caused the federal budget deficit to balloon. Even as pretax corporate profits have reached record highs, corporate tax revenues have dropped about a third under projected levels. This requires more federal dollars for interest on the debt, leaving fewer for public services workers need.

The Trump administration has already announced a $4.5 billion cut in food stamp benefits that would affect an estimated 10,000 families, many at the lower end of the working class. The administration is also proposing to reduce Social Security disability benefits, a potential blow to hundreds of thousands of workers.

The tax cut has also shifted more of the total tax burden to workers. Payroll taxes made up 7.8 percent of national income last year while corporate taxes made up just 0.9 percent, the biggest gap in nearly two decades. All told, taxes on workers were 35 percent of federal tax revenue in 2018; taxes on corporations, only 9 percent.

Trump probably figures he can cover up this massive redistribution from the working class to the corporate elite by pushing the same economic nationalism, tinged with xenophobia and racism, he used in 2016. As Steve Bannon has noted, the formula seems to have worked for Britain’s Conservative Party.

But it will be difficult this time around because Trump’s economic nationalism has hurt American workers, particularly in states that were critical to Trump’s 2016 win.

Manufacturing has suffered as tariffs raised prices for imported parts and materials. Hiring has slowed sharply in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other states Trump won, and in states like Minnesota that he narrowly lost.

The trade wars have also harmed rural America, which also went for Trump, by reducing demand for American farm produce. Last year China bought around $8.6 billion of farm goods, down from $20 billion in 2016. (A new tentative trade deal calls for substantially more Chinese purchases.)

Meanwhile, health care costs continue to soar, college is even less affordable, and average life expectancy is dropping due to a rise in deaths from suicide and opioid drugs like fentanyl. Polls show most Americans remain dissatisfied with the country’s direction.

The consequences of Trump’s and the Republicans’ excessive corporate giveaways and their failure to improve the lives of ordinary working Americans are becoming clearer by the day.

The only tricks left to Trump and the Republicans are stoking social and racial resentments and claiming to be foes of the establishment. But bigotry alone won’t win elections, and the detritus of the tax cut makes it difficult for Trump and the GOP to portray themselves as anti-establishment.

This has created a giant political void, and an opportunity. Democrats have an historic chance to do what they should have done years ago: Create a multi-racial coalition of the working class, middle class, and poor, dedicated to reclaiming the economy for the vast majority and making democracy work for all.

“He restored credibility to the Federal Reserve at a time it had been greatly diminished,” wrote his biographer, William Silber. Volcker’s policies led to what was called “the New Keynesian revolution,” putting the Fed in charge of controlling the amount of money available to consumers and businesses by manipulating the federal funds rate (the interest rate at which banks borrow from each other). All this was because Volcker’s “shock therapy” of the early 1980s – raising the federal funds rate to an unheard of 20% – was credited with reversing the stagflation of the 1970s. But did it? Or was something else going on?

Less discussed was Volcker’s role at the behest of President Richard Nixon in taking the dollar off the gold standard, which he called “the single most important event of his career.” He evidently intended for another form of stable exchange system to replace the Bretton Woods system it destroyed, but that did not happen. Instead, freeing the dollar from gold unleashed an unaccountable central banking system that went wild printing money for the benefit of private Wall Street and London financial interests.

The power to create money can be a good and necessary tool in the hands of benevolent leaders working on behalf of the people and the economy. But like with the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Disney’s “Fantasia,” if it falls in the wrong hands, it can wreak havoc on the world. Unfortunately for Volcker’s legacy and the well-being of the rest of us, his signature policies led to the devastation of the American working class in the 1980s and ultimately set the stage for the 2008 global financial crisis.

The Official Story and Where It Breaks Down

According to a December 9 obituary in The Washington Post:

Mr. Volcker’s greatest historical mark was in eight years as Fed chairman. When he took the reins of the central bank, the nation was mired in a decade-long period of rapidly rising prices and weak economic growth. Mr. Volcker, overcoming the objections of many of his colleagues, raised interest rates to an unprecedented 20%, drastically reducing the supply of money and credit.

The Post acknowledges that the effect on the economy was devastating, triggering what was then the deepest economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s, driving thousands of businesses and farms to bankruptcy and propelling the unemployment rate past 10%:

Mr. Volcker was pilloried by industry, labor unions and lawmakers of all ideological stripes. He took the abuse, convinced that this shock therapy would finally break Americans’ expectations that prices would forever rise rapidly and that the result would be a stronger economy over the longer run.

On this he was right, contends the author:

Soon after Mr. Volcker took his foot off the brake of the U.S. economy in 1981, and the Fed began lowering interest rates, the nation began a quarter century of low inflation, steady growth, and rare and mild recessions. Economists attribute that period, one of the sunniest in economic history, at least in part to the newfound credibility as an inflation-fighter that Mr. Volcker earned for the Fed.

That is the conventional version, but the stagflation of the 1970s and its sharp reversal in the early 1980s appears more likely to have been due to a correspondingly sharp rise and fall in the price of oil. There is evidence this oil shortage was intentionally engineered for the purpose of restoring the global dominance of the U.S. dollar, which had dropped precipitously in international markets after it was taken off the gold standard in 1971.

The Other Side of the Story

How the inflation rate directly followed the price of oil was tracked by Benjamin Studebaker in a 2012 article titled “Stagflation: What Really Happened in the 70’s”:

We see that the problem begins in 1973 with the ’73-’75 recession – that’s when growth first dives. In October of 1973, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries declared an oil embargo upon the supporters of Israel – western nations. The ’73-’75 recession begins in November of 1973, immediately after. During normal recessions, inflation does not rise – it shrinks, as people spend less and prices fall. So why does inflation rise from ’73-’75? Because this recession is not a normal recession – it is sparked by an oil shortage. The price of oil more than doubles in the space of a mere few months from ’73-’74. Oil is involved in the manufacturing of plastics, in gasoline, in sneakers, it’s everywhere. When the price of oil goes up, the price of most things go up. The spike in the oil price is so large that it drives up the costs of consumer goods throughout the rest of the economy so fast that wages fail to keep up with it. As a result, you get both inflation and a recession at once.

… Terrified by the double-digit inflation rate in 1974, the Federal Reserve switches gears and jacks the interest rate up to near 14%. … The economy slips back into the throws of the recession for another year or so, and the unemployment rate takes off, rising to around 9% by 1975. …

Then, in 1979, the economy gets another oil price shock (this time caused by the Revolution in Iran in January of that year) in which the price of oil again more than doubles. The result is a fall in growth and inflation knocked all the way up into the teens. The Federal Reserve tries to fight the oil-driven inflation by raising interest rates high into the teens, peaking out at 20% in 1980.

… [B]y 1983, the unemployment rate has peaked at nearly 11%. To fight this, the Federal Reserve knocks the interest rate back below 10%, and meanwhile, alongside all of this, Ronald Reagan spends lots of money and expands the state in ’82/83. … Why does inflation not respond by returning? Because oil prices are falling throughout this period, and by 1985 have collapsed utterly.

The federal funds rate was just below 10% in 1975 at the height of the early stagflation crisis. How could the same rate that was responsible for inflation in the 1970s drop the consumer price index to acceptable levels after 1983? And if the federal funds rate has that much effect on inflation, why is the extremely low 1.55% rate today not causing hyperinflation? What Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is now fighting instead is deflation, a lack of consumer demand causing stagnant growth in the real, producing economy.

Thus it looks as if oil, not the federal funds rate, was the critical factor in the rise and fall of consumer prices in the 1970s and 1980s. “Stagflation” was just a predictable result of the shortage of this essential commodity at a time when the country was not energy-independent. The following chart from Business Insider Australia shows the historical correlations:

The Plot Thickens

But there’s more. The subplot is detailed by William Engdahl in The Gods of Money (2009). To counter the falling dollar after it was taken off the gold standard, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Nixon held a clandestine meeting in 1972 with the Shah of Iran. Then, in 1973, a group of powerful financiers and politicians met secretly in Sweden to discuss how the dollar might effectively be “backed” by oil. An arrangement was finalized in which the oil-producing countries of OPEC would sell their oil only in U.S. dollars, and the dollars would wind up in Wall Street and London banks, where they would fund the burgeoning U.S. debt.

For the OPEC countries, the quid pro quo was military protection, along with windfall profits from a dramatic boost in oil prices. In 1974, according to plan, an oil embargo caused the price of oil to quadruple, forcing countries without sufficient dollar reserves to borrow from Wall Street and London banks to buy the oil they needed. Increased costs then drove up prices worldwide.

The story is continued by Matthieu Auzanneau in Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History:

The panic caused by the Iranian Revolution raised a new tsunami of inflation that was violently unleashed on the world economy, whose consequences were even greater than what took place in 1973. Once again, the sharp, unexpected increase in the price of crude oil instantly affected transportation, construction, and agriculture – confirming oil’s ubiquity. … The time of draconian monetarist policies advocated by economist Milton Friedman, David Rockefeller’s protégé, had arrived. The Bank of England’s interest rate was around 16% in 1980. The impact on the economy was brutal. …

Appointed by President Carter in August 1979, Paul Volcker, the new chief of the Federal Reserve, administered the same shock treatment [drastically raising interest rates] to the American economy. Carter had initially offered the position to David Rockefeller; Chase Manhattan’s president politely declined the offer and “strongly” recommended that Carter appeal to Volcker (who had been a Chase vice president in the 1960s). To stop the spiral of inflation that endangered the profitability and stability of all banks, the Federal Reserve increased its benchmark rate to 20% in 1980 and 1981. The following year, 1982, the American economy experienced a 2% recession, much more severe than the recession of 1974.

In an article in American Opinion in 19179, Gary Allen, author of None Dare Call It Conspiracy: The Rockefeller Files (1971), observed that both Volcker and Henry Kissinger were David Rockefeller protégés. Volcker had worked for Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank and was a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1971, when he was Treasury undersecretary for monetary affairs, Volcker played an instrumental role in the top-secret Camp David meeting at which the president approved taking the dollar off the gold standard. Allen wrote that it was Volcker who “led the effort to demonetize gold in favor of bookkeeping entries as part of another international banking grab. His appointment now threatens an economic bust.”

Volcker’s Real Legacy

Allen went on:

How important is the post to which Paul Volcker has been appointed? The New York Times tells us: “As the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve System, which by law is independent of the Administration and Congress, has exclusive authority to control the amount of money available to consumers and businesses.” … This means that the Federal Reserve Board has life-and-death power over the economy.

And that is Paul Volcker’s true legacy. At a time when the Fed’s credibility was “greatly diminished,” he restored to it the life-and-death power over the economy that it continues to exercise today. His “shock therapy” of the early 1980s broke the backs of labor and the unions, bankrupted the savings and loans, and laid the groundwork for the “liberalization” of the banking laws that allowed securitization, derivatives, and the repo market to take center stage. As noted by Jeff Spross in The Week, Volcker’s chosen strategy essentially loaded all the pain onto the working class, an approach to monetary policy that has shaped Fed policy ever since.

In 2008-09, the Fed was an opaque accessory to the bank heist in which massive fraud was covered up and the banks were made whole despite their criminality. Taking the dollar off the gold standard allowed the Fed to engage in the “quantitative easing” that underwrote this heist. Bolstered by OPEC oil backing, uncoupling the dollar from gold also allowed it to maintain and expand its status as global reserve currency.

What was Volcker’s role in all this? He is described by those who knew him as a personable man who lived modestly and didn’t capitalize on his powerful position to accumulate personal wealth. He held a lifelong skepticism of financial elites and financial “innovation.” He proposed a key restriction on speculative activity by banks that would become known as the “Volcker Rule.” In the late 1960s, he opposed allowing global exchange rates to float freely, which he said would allow speculators to “pounce on a depreciating currency, pushing it even lower.” And he evidently regretted the calamity caused by his 1980s shock treatment, saying if he could do it over again, he would do it differently.

It could be said that Volcker was a good man, who spent his life trying to rectify that defining moment when he helped free the dollar from gold. Ultimately, eliminating the gold standard was a necessary step in allowing the money supply to expand to meet the needs of trade. The power to create money can be a useful tool in the right hands. It just needs to be recaptured and wielded in the public interest, following the lead of the American colonial governments that first demonstrated its very productive potential.

• This article was first posted on Truthdig.com.

            <div class="author">Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the <a href="https://publicbankinginstitute.org/">Public Banking Institute</a>, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling <a href="https://www.powells.com/book/web-of-debt-the-shocking-truth-about-our-money-system-how-we-can-break-free-9780983330851?partnerid=36683&amp;p_ti"><em>Web of Debt</em></a>. In <a href="https://www.powells.com/book/the-public-bank-solution-from-austerity-to-prosperity-9780983330868?partnerid=36683&amp;p_ti"><em>The Public Bank Solution</em></a>, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/author/ellenbrown/">Read other articles by Ellen</a>, or <a href="https://ellenbrown.com/">visit Ellen's website</a>.</div>

            <p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Saturday, December 14th, 2019 at 7:45am and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/economics/" rel="category tag">Economy/Economics</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/finance/federal-reserve/" rel="category tag">Federal Reserve</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/finance/" rel="category tag">Finance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/obituary/" rel="category tag">Obituary</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/unions/" rel="category tag">Unions</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/finance/wall-street/" rel="category tag">Wall Street</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/labor/working-class-labor/" rel="category tag">Working Class</a>.