Regressivism: Defunding Democracy through Class Warfare

For the past 30 years, the notion that a healthy democracy is based on the free exchange of ideas and that citizens should be able to freely organize to influence public policy has been under aggressive and institutionalized attack. When Republicans controlled the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and an increasing number of state governments, conservative activists seized the opportunity to undermine democracy by restricting who qualified for tax-exempt status (thereby undermining government and foundation funding sources for non-profits), public trust, and restricting the attention that civil disobedience protests received from the mainstream media.

The dominance of the Republican Party over this time period and an increasingly assertive conservative movement created a broad intolerance for dissenting voices and lack of access to public funding for liberal organizations. Funded by foundations and corporations, the conservative movement's objective was to silence its contemporary critics on the one hand and any future dissent on the other by defunding education and other "liberal" domains.

What started as a plan to 'defund the left' in the United States inspired conservatives around the world to adopt the same strategy. The consequences of this regressive Republican strategy in the United States was aptly articulated by Rick Kepler:

I am an American worker, and you are damn right I want the wealth to be shared and spread. I am talking about the wealth my hard work helped to create, but was taken from me by George Bush's base, the very rich, or as I know them, my corporate bosses. For the past eight years I have watched W.'s and McCain's (Country Club First) base grab the largest share of our country's wealth. Where did they take it from? They took it from my family's pocketbook, and my co-workers' families' pocketbooks. They stole the wealth that I was trying to build for me and my family when they stripped my pension plan from me and told me to invest in a 401k. Then they stole most of that 401k and other workers' 401k savings with this economic meltdown. This was a massive transfer of wealth from the workers' pockets into the already stuffed pockets of the rich. My retirement savings and my co-workers' savings all across America have been looted by the corporate bosses, who just got bailed out while we got left out. Again! [Rick Kepler, The American Worker, 21 November 2008]

Workers are finally "getting it." Most Americans, however, are still in the dark as the current majority Democratic Congress is not aggressively investigating the government abuses that the Left has catalogued on blogs for more than five years. More recently, citizens in Argentina and, currently, in Iceland has shown the world what an appropriate public response should be to put conservatism on the defensive. Yet, in the United States a New Era democratic president is attempting reconciliation rather than retribution or criminal enforcement of the US legal code. His actions could set back a global movement that in the end could result in more violent revolt against entrenched neo-con governments everywhere.

The inaction of Congress and the Obama administration may further exacerbate the capacity of citizens seeking a more expansive democracy to solve their problems and improve the quality of their lives. It's a strategy that empowers Republicans as revealed in the recent debates in the US Congress. To overcome this New Era politic the progressive movement in the United States must rise to the challenge and confront the Democrats in the streets. A dialogue will not occur until the American people engages its government at the seat of power. Many individuals are doing just this.

In a recent TruthOut perspective, 'Ending the Hidden Agenda Behind Tax Cuts,' Joe Brewer, has published an analytical framework that the public can use to better understand the regressive strategy that was used to inculcate Americans to act against their long-term interests by appealing to their immediate short-term self-interests. One of the key components of this strategy is tax cuts. Brewer writes: "It's time to tell the truth about tax cuts. This phrase dominates political discourse and is coughed out every time a conservative public figure opens his mouth. It is treated like the basis of sound reasoning, yet no one points out what should be obvious - that 'tax relief' and 'tax cuts' are just code words for destroying the capacity of government to serve the public."

So well we know. This is why an even larger stimulus plan will be necessary. The public sector that serves the needs of citizens is running on fumes as Republicans continue to stonewall in social spending in favor of...yawn...tax cuts. This class war is far from over and the stakes are very high for all Americans.

Other Resources

• SourceWatch
• Alternet
• TomDispatch
• TruthOut
• Baseline Scenario
• Bill Moyers Journal — The Economists
• ShovelWatch
• Economists View
• Institute for Policy Studies
• Real News
• GRITtv
• The Nation Magazine
  

The New Imperial Presidency?

What is it with this White House thing that drives men like Barack Obama to believe that the United States is the "greatest" country in the world. A truly great country would be building toward greatness in its future, not as its present. Saying it's so, don't make it so. Ultimately, it's not what you say, it's what you do. And, what the US government and its imperialist military industrial congressional complex is doing is bankrupting the Republic that laid the golden egg.

Make no mistake, with the damage done by Wall Street bankers, the US is limping along on one leg with one arm bound behind its back, made less visible by the charisma and the oratory of its new leader. As a citizen, I'm concerned because when the leader, inspirational as he may be, makes decisions that are antithetical to the laws of the country, such as intervening in the House of Representatives investigation into the Department of Justice malfeasance and its chief architect, Karl Rove, during the last administration, it is more than disturbing, it is outrageous, or in the president's own words, "shameful." It's the same old, same old oligarchy, the political elite taking care of its own.

Obama is no Lincoln and should not attempt to emulate Lincoln's presidency. What Obama should do is just be his own Alpha dog and stamp his own scent on the state of the union. It was Karl Marx who succinctly captured an attempt by a post partisan leader to resurrect the magic of his predecessor in the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

No one can doubt that Lincoln's administration was consumed by tragedy, despite his own brilliance. Whether the Obama administration will result in farce remains to be seen, but the current path he is taking does not bode well for the outcome. The US is in a very tenuous situation historically, and is sitting on the threshold of triumph or disaster. John Feffer writes in Foreign Policy in Focus:

"...the Pentagon is still maintaining the world's largest military force - but we have failed to defeat al-Qaeda, we are quagmired in Afghanistan, and all of our nuclear weapons have done little to prevent North Korea from entering the nuclear club. The global recession is hammering the U.S. economy, and we might finally see the end of the dollar's reign as global currency. With the bank bailout, the stimulus package, the bill for two wars plus the Pentagon's already gargantuan budget, the red ink is mounting. Debt has been the gravedigger of many an empire. I can hear the adding machine totting up the numbers. Or is that the sound of dirt hitting a coffin lid?" [A multipolar Moment]

This week President Obama is traveling to Canada on his first international visit to meet with the Canadian government whose people he hopes will endure more sacrifices to fight Bush's war. Once Obama takes on the Afghan war, however, he will own the previous seven years of a failed, if not illegal, war despite Congress authorizing appropriations to fight there. Crimes against humanity are never legal. In the process, the United States will do to the Middle East what it did to East Asia more than a generation ago in Vietnam, wreaking regional havoc environmentally, politically, and economically. Millions of innocent people will be displaced, maimed, or killed. The White House, US military, and the State Department will refer to this as "collateral damage." No one will be responsible for crimes against humanity. So, what has changed exactly?

How can this be avoided? Afghanistan is an adventure to which the rational world should respond with a resounding NO! WE CAN'T! There are rational ways to fight barbarity, like with a multilateral alliance of police agencies working in harmony with the Afghan and Pakistani governments. Of course, that is the problem. Imperialism demands unilateral operations. When your intentions are not good, sharing your agenda with the rest of the world would render pretty words empty. Where is all that diplomacy candidate-Obama shouted to the world? The Obama administration could have started its journey into the abyss by holding a peace conference in Sweden with all parties represented at the table, including the Taliban. Instead, more US troops and expensive boy toys are headed for the Mid-East battle grounds to fight against exactly who? Well, just about anybody who doesn't not look like us. Good luck with that.

Gore Vidal perniciously compared the so-called "war-on-terror" to a declaration of war against dandruff. Like dandruff, terrorists will come and terrorists will go, but if these last 50 years have taught us anything, it is that the US taxpayer will be called upon to keep a predatory military industrial congressional complex well greased. Remember Granada or Panama, those great third world powers to our south for whom we had to call out all the boy toys to show just how powerful the "great" nation can be when fighting for golf courses? Or, Somalia? Had to have a movie about that one to heal some sensitive Alpha dog wounds. Truly, the world cannot be impressed.

Ironically, as a chief Khmer Rouge torturer goes on trial for crimes against humanity this week 30 years after the "Killing Fields", a tragedy that led to the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians—Obama and his military high command are attempting to ramp up another failed policy. This tragedy and US military actions and policies in East Asia are directly linked by the undermining of civil authority in Cambodia. Can Pakistan become the next Cambodia? Afghanistan, the next Vietnam? The answers to both questions are YES, THEY CAN! But, don't expect the new administration to give in, it has something to prove: that an African American president can be as inane as a Caucasian one.

Wall Street Pirates v. Somali Pirates

"...talking about the benefits of free markets [is] like...promoting the benefits of rape." — Icelandic writer Haukar Mar Helgason

Quick question: Why are more than a dozen of the world's navies converging on Somalia to battle pirates there instead of sailing into New York to capture the Wall Street pirates? After all, CEOs captured over $20 billion in taxpayer money using tax loopholes, according to an Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) study. Surely the global economy would be made more secure by forcing former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, who doled out $4 billion in executive bonuses even as his company was collapsing, to walk the gangplank than by cracking down on the bands of privateers in the Horn of Africa. Read more here...

Executive Excess. The U.S. tax code is riddled with loopholes that allow top corporate and financial leaders to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Ordinary taxpayers wind up picking up the bill – to the tune of more than $20 billion per year. All five executive-friendly tax loopholes highlighted in the report are the targets of Congressional reforms. However, these efforts have stalled in the face of fierce opposition from corporate lobby groups. The report also finds that S&P 500 CEOs averaged $10.5 million in pay in 2007, 344 times the pay of typical American workers. Compensation levels for private investment fund managers soared even further. The top 50 hedge and private equity fund managers averaged $588 million each, more than 19,000 times as much as typical U.S. workers earned. Download the report here...

Stealing the Wealth of A Nation: When Adam Smith published his first edition of the Wealth of Nations, he could not envision people making money by just investing the capital of others as Wall Street pirates do today. He writes:

A capital may be employed in four different ways: either, first, in procuring the rude produce annually required for the use and consumption of the society; or, secondly, in manufacturing and preparing that rude produce for immediate use and consumption; or, thirdly, in transporting either the rude or manufactured produce from the places where they abound to those where they are wanted; or, lastly, in dividing particular portions of either into such small parcels as suit the occasional demands of those who want them. In the first way are employed the capitals of all those who undertake the improvement or cultivation of lands, mines, or fisheries; in the second, those of all master manufacturers; in the third, those of all wholesale merchants; and in the fourth, those of all retailers. It is difficult to conceive that a capital should be employed in any way which may not be classed under some one or other of those four. (Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edwin Cannan, ed. 1904. Book II, Chapter V — "Of the Different Employment of Capitals Library of Economics and Liberty.")

In fact, it's possible that Somali pirates would find some empathy from Smith. In Wealth of Nations, he defends smuggling as a legitimate activity in the face of "unnatural" legislation. Where he is unlikely to show empathy, however, is with the type of unethical piracy shown by CEO's of Wall Street financial institutions that appeared arrogantly before Congress yesterday. News reports have it that four of these CEO's received bonuses in excess of $120 million dollars. Where did this money come from? Was it really "created" by their labor? The answer to the second is absolutely not; it was stolen from the public trust.

Which is to say, the money came from institutional investors, organizations that pool large sums of money and invest those sums in companies. They include banks, insurance companies, retirement or pension funds, hedge funds and mutual funds. "Their role in the economy is to act as highly specialized investors on behalf of others. Furthermore, because institutional investors have the freedom to buy and sell shares, they can play a large part in which companies stay solvent, and which go under. Influencing the conduct of listed companies, and providing them with capital are all part of the job of investment management." (Wikipedia).

In brief, then, prior to the implosion of the US economy, income on Wall Street came from investment profits rather than the creation of new wealth. And the income that Wall Street was amassing was overwhelmingly in the form of paper profits that have now vanished as quickly as they appeared.

In other words, once the implosion began, those recent gross bonuses that Wall Street executives gave themselves came directly from the pension funds of working and retired Americans. These executives and the whole of Wall Street have had their own private run on the banks while the American people have been kept in the dark. It's one big ponzi scheme that the entire US Congress is an accomplice. In terms of guilt, the US Congress under Republican stewardship is no different from Bernie Madoff.

The only question remaining at this point is how much money remains in these pension funds. My guess is not much, which is why the public is not being told what has happened to their savings. Paulson and the Fed knew and the TARP funding has been used to hide the bad news. Now you see why the US government and the new administration is asking the Federal Reserve, the bank that is not a bank to print money. Can you say "revolt"? I hope so. Americans need to do what the Icelanders and Argentinians have done—drive these neoliberals to the prison cells they have earned. "All of them must go!"

The Media Begins Reading Progressive Blogs

Finally, the mainstream media is beginning to read the progressive blogs that for years have been telling truth to power: alternet.org, TruthOut.org, TomDispatch.com, and The NationNew York Times, entitled "Slumdogs Unite!" Rich identifies the neoliberal economists in the Obama administration that potentially can destroy public trust in his administration and undermine his economic recovery plan. He writes:

"There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe.

This includes Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary. Washington hands repeatedly observe how “lucky” Geithner was to be the first cabinet nominee with an I.R.S. problem, not the second, and therefore get confirmed by Congress while the getting was good. Whether or not this is “lucky” for him, it is hardly lucky for Obama. Geithner should have left ahead of Daschle.

Now more than ever, the president must inspire confidence and stave off panic. As Friday’s new unemployment figures showed, the economy kept plummeting while Congress postured. Though Obama is a genius at building public support, he is not Jesus and he can’t do it all alone. On Monday, it’s Geithner who will unveil the thorniest piece of the economic recovery plan to date — phase two of a bank rescue. The public face of this inevitably controversial package is now best known as the guy who escaped the tax reckoning that brought Daschle down."

Even before the president appointed these folks to his staff, liberal and progressive bloggers have shouted out loud and clear – NO! This week, it looks like President Obama is going to become more personally committed to a new direction. Let's hope so. The real work will begin when the income disparity between employers and employees is narrowed, so that the majority of American workers are spending discretionary income into the economy rather than credit card debt. More...

An Economic Bill of Rights

President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Excerpt from message to Congress on the State of the Union
11 January 1944

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;


• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;


• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;


• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;


• The right of every family to a decent home;


• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;


• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;


• The right to a good education.
  

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

Source: Rosenman, Samuel (ed.) The Public Papers & Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt , Vol XIII. (NY: Harper, 1950), pp. 40-4.

Capitalism and Consumption

“The worker leaves the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as soon as he no longer gets any use, or not the required use, out of him. But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labour-power, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class; and it is for him to find his man – i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class.”

– Karl Marx, “What are Wages? How are they Determined?"

In the context of Western intellection, there can be few fields of academic study as fictitious as that of American economic theory, as its practitioners largely have excommunicated their only credible intellectual critique from the marketplace of ideas — that critique derives from the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. To my knowledge, nowhere will their ideas be found in the U.S. secondary educational curriculum, a process accelerated after WWII with the "Red scare" and attack on "communists" championed by Joe McCarthy and other right-wing politicians in the 1950s. The McCarthy hearings were a media event, much like the hanging of skulls on posts alongside roadways in ancient times or lynchings in recent history; a real witch-hunt and vampire experience. Since this great propagandizing watershed in U.S. history, the public and the academic establishment largely was kowtowed and the political elite, acting for and on behalf of the military industrial complex, ramped up the fear levels of most Americans. Consequently, our educational system was designed to first and foremost graduate sheep, making the U.S. population one, if not the, most self-absorbed and misinformed on the planet.

The miracle is that this strategy did not fully succeed, though the self-absorption rate of xenophobia in the United States remains the highest of any place on the planet in the 21st century, with Germany and France attempting to catch up. In the U.S. one need only to monitor the machinations and negative commentary regarding the immigration issue today to understand some of what other Americans went through in the 50s whose only crime was that they valued ideas. Of course, school age children were taught that this WAS a war of ideas without being given an intellectual diet containing all the ideas. It was only when I entered college and took an economics class that I began to understand what the TV and propaganda farce was about. I compare the majority of Americans to the colony of ants in the really serious, must-see cartoon film that's not just for your kids: Antz.

General Mandible: [Z has broken through to the surface where Mandible and his soldiers wait for them to be drowned] Let go! Don't you understand? It's for the good of the colony!
Z: What are you saying? We are the colony!
[Mandible is about to strike Z when Cutter knocks him aside]
General Mandible: Cutter, what are you doing?
Colonel Cutter: Something I should have done a long time ago.
[extends his hand to the worker ants]
Colonel Cutter: *This* is for the good of the colony, General.
General Mandible: You useless, ungrateful maggot! *I* am the colony!

Sound familiar? Unfortunately, there were few Americans willing to come to the aid of those targeted as "Reds" in the 1950s. One of them, in his own indubitable way, however, was the late great Paul Robeson.

American economists like to say that economics is about scarce or limited resources, that not all human needs can be met, particularly yours and mine, and that the role of the economist is to determine the most efficient and equitable ways to distribute these resources. If this is the case, and the decisions are based on merit, why does that determination always insure that those who control the capital always get the lion’s share, and that labor is relegated to the garbage heap? Well, of course, that's the way the system is designed.

Some American economists even claim that their work is “science” based upon human behavior. Well, it is to some degree based upon human behavior, but that behavior has been carefully selected in favor of predators, rather than humanists or naturalists from which the works of Marx and Engels derive. For it is not “human behavior” writ large in world history who decides on the allocation of resources, scarce or not, but a mere few who have monolithic control of planetary resources and their derivatives by their control over capital and politics, but who, nonetheless, are able to mobilize other subordinated humans to work against their own self-interests either out of ignorance, powerlessness, or an innate scavenger nature.

Wealth consumes power or to paraphrase Marx's observation relative to history from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, “Economics does nothing, people do.” Economics does not decide who eats and who does not; humans make this decision. In short, all economic systems are first and foremost political, but of all economic systems that humans have devised capitalism is the most predatory, predicated on infinitely expanding market share, increasing both production and consumption on a planet where the only thing that is not finite is capitalist greed.

Frederick Douglass, the great 19th century American rhetorician and human rights leader, knew intimately the tyranny of consumption as a self-emancipated slave. He had these words to say about hierarchically-structured systems:

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they would oppress…. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get." [Douglass, 1845]

More than anything else, Capitalism is about who controls the “gross consumption” of resources – natural, human, manufactured, or spiritual. A few statistical bullets will suffice to support this observation:

1. It is estimated that "the richest 225 people in the world today control more wealth than the poorest 2.5 billion people. And that the three richest people in the world control more wealth than the poorest 48 nations. A.H. Bill, Facing the Future: People and the Planet. 1998.
   http://www.mindfully.org/Sustainability/Consumption-Industrialized-Commercialized.htm


2. The U.S. spent half a trillion dollars in 1998: 50% went toward the military budget; 6% was spent on education; health, the environment, and justice each received 5%, transportation less than 3%; economic development almost 2%; and agriculture and energy less than 1% each. A.H. Bill, Facing the Future: People and the Planet.


3. Americans constitute 5% of the world's population, but consume 24% of the world's energy. On average, one American consumes as much energy as 2 Japanese, 6 Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 307 Tanzanians, or 370 Ethiopians. P. Ehrlich, Population Bomb [PBS website– website now retired but book by same name should contain this information].


4. 250 million people have died of hunger-related causes in the past quarter-century — roughly 10 million each year.


5. 700 to 800 million people, perhaps even as many as a billion, don't get enough food to support normal daily activities.


6. 1.7 billion people lack access to clean drinking water and, by the year 2000, the number of urban dwellers without access to safe water and sanitation services is expected to grow by 80%.


7. One-third of the world's fish catch and more than one-third of the world's total grain output are fed to livestock.


8. 38 million people are poor in the United States; 19 million of these are working!

Afrothetic's First Law of Consumption: Humans are born from consumption, live by consumption and, at death, are by-products of consumption. Corollaries: “Dust to dust, ash to ashes.” "We are what we eat."