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.

US Political and Economic Elites Stealing the Wealth of a Nation

"John F. Kennedy famously said, 'Life is unfair,' and so it is. But it wouldn't feel as unfair if the shackles wound up instead on the well-heeled feet of Wall Street and Washington's elect. That's the change we need, the change we can really believe in." -- Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, 8 Feb 2009.

All day long, 24-hours a day, 365 days a year, the talking heads of cable television spew gibberish about almost every subject, quoting lies from the mouths of drones launched by the political and economic elites and who are represented primarily by the GOP. Little fact checking is attempted. Like a whirlpool, the talking heads interview one another. Only in public sector accidents or incidents, health and a few other areas do they interview subject matter experts. But, when it comes to politics, like Chris Matthews, they believe they are the experts! Given the technology available today, networks could easily check the facts almost in real time to determine the veracity of distorted, outright lies or propaganda-based statements, but do not do so, or at least do so recently only in so far as political campaigns are concerned. So, what the US public receives everyday from mainstream media is garbage and what they repeat is also garbage as in "garbage in, garbage out." Anyone who has a dependence upon the mainstream media is consumed by smoke and mirrors. It's all a mirage.

Consequently, when someone like Paul Krugman or David Harvey or Chalmers Johnson articulates a different vision, there is little deep discussion of their views. Oh, Krugman maintains access to the public through his columns in the New York Times, but few Americans read newspapers. When interviewed, his understanding of contemporary political economics is so far above the heads of the talking heads that they are unable, with few exceptions, to hold a reasonable conversation with the man. So, it's 3 minutes and done. Slam, bam, thank you Paul. Don't call us, we'll call you when we need you.

What's really scary to those of us on the Left is that Krugman might be considered a relative intellectual moderate, but at least he sees the trees in the dense forest of misinformation. David Harvey, who is a distinguished professor and teaches Marxism, among other things, at City University of New York, is persona non grata, but is far more insightful about the current economic crisis than Krugman. Nonetheless, we have yet to see him interviewed by any of the 24-hour cable news programs. Its management would rather replay the daily accident or insider interview ad nauseum than prospect for original ideas coming from the Left. Only YouTube saves Harvey, and us, from his views being obscure and relatively anonymous.

Chalmers Johnson, a distinguished social scientist and public intellectual, is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson on the Pentagon's potential economic death spiral, click here. He is a consistent critic of the encumbrance of the military budget on US society.

Marxism in the United States, of course, has been relegated (censored) to the landfill of ideas never to see the light of day by both the right and the center. It is only on the left that any real world discussions take place about the type of society that the United States should be or can be. On the right are predators, scavengers and vermin. In the center are the sheep. On the Left, of course, are the patriots and the humanists. Believe it! Do you think the right would have authored a Bill of Rights. They couldn't even read at the time the Constitution was enacted. For that, we are all blessed. Furthermore, Marx and Hegel were humanists—you know the folks who fight for human rights. Their writings expanded upon the ideas about capital Adam Smith introduced less their three generations before and like many intellectuals of their age were derived directly from the natural and physical worlds in which they lived, in the same way that Isaac Newton, and later Albert Einstein and Rudolf Steiner used the natural world to innovate their own ideas. The point here is that trying to understand capitalism and having no knowledge of Marxism is like astrophysicists not understanding Newton or Einstein. More importantly, as the world is coming to agree, trying to manage a rational economy based upon capitalism with a democratic intent and not understanding Marxism is impossible!

When Adam Smith published his treatise on the Wealth of Nations (1776), 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—unnatural, I assume to mean unwarranted and irrational, such as the prohibition legislation on alcohol in the first decades of last century, and the current legislation regarding marijuana in this generation. 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 recently. 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, in response to the first question, that the money came from average working Americans, past and present, through the machinations of institutional investors, organizations that pool large sums of money and invest those sums in companies. These 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 PRINCIPLE held in 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. The deregulation of capital markets has rendered the entire financial services industry one BIG Ponzi scheme in which the entire US Congress is an accomplice. In terms of relative guilt, the US Congress under Republican stewardship was no different from Bernie Madoff. Madoff may, however, become the proverbial straw that stirred a social revolution. He only absconded with $50 billion, some of which will be recovered. The Wall Street financial services community and their local partners have absconded with $100s of billions, NOT as investment profits, but as principle from their accounts, and the Obama administration is not showing that it cares.

In fact, what this administration appears to be doing is hiding the fact that our treasury is empty. So much for transparency. The administration's posture, as the editors of The Nation have noted with respect to the lack of rational discourse concerning the "Bailout," is deafening.

What are they hiding? If Geithner had spoken with any clarity, he would have revealed that his "new" plan is basically a continuation of the one that failed spectacularly in the closing months of the Bush administration: Washington intends to deliver vast additional sums of public money to the very largest banks while demanding little in return for the public interest. The Obama administration is adding new wrinkles to a doomed effort, attempting to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Since the old order led the country into this mess, enlarging its rescue package is certain to stoke further the ferocious public outrage. So Geithner cannot say plainly what he is up to. Neither he nor Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic adviser, can think his way out of the problem or propose a more aggressive approach, as both men are wedded to the old way of doing things.

Worst, apparently Obama's economic advisors are arrogant enough not to seek advisement from the Japanese about their economic crisis in the 1990's. Perhaps, the only question remaining at this point is how much real money actually remains in these pension funds or in social security, for that matter. Obviously, it's all virtual monopoly money, not real property. 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. The TARP funding is being used to hide the bad news. We now see why the past and current presidential administrations asked the Federal Reserve, the bank that is not a bank, to print more money. Can you say "revolt"? I hope so. Americans need to do with peaceful force of will what the Icelanders and Argentinians have been forced already to do—drive these neoliberals to the prison cells they have earned. "All of them must go!"

African Americans Experiencing an Economic Depression

Is it surprising, that some citizens are in a deeper economic crisis than others or that some sectors of the economy are in a deeper ditch than another? It shouldn't be. For the past 30 years, Republicans have attacked the Democrat voting bloc with impunity. At the vanguard of this attack are African Americans. Documenting this economic and political malaise is the "State of the Dream" report published by the Institute of Policy Studies, which found that people of color in the United States are experiencing a silent economic depression. "It's silent because it's going unnoticed, unacknowledged, and unaddressed — and yet the evidence is striking. While the general population has been in recession for one year, people of color have been in recession for five years. By definition, a long-term recession is a depression."

The report details "additional evidence that shows the current racial economic inequity, including poverty rates, wealth and assets and economic mobility. While racial barriers did not prevent an African American from becoming president, they continue to impede many people of color from achieving the same economic success as their white counterparts." Download the full report here...

Make speculators pay for the bailout

As Americans celebrated the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln on February 12, 2009, we need to be reminded that Lincoln's name is sometimes used in vain. One of these was Charles Keating. As head of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, California, Keating took advantage of loosened restrictions on banking investments, just as the current group of Wall Street bankers have done. Every 50 years in US history, the conservatives cook up schemes to rob the national treasury. Sometime this takes decades as legislation and policy are fixed. With the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1981, this last debacle began.

In between, conservatives rob the nation's Commons, without building anything. Always, they are bailed out by taxpayers. In 1989, Congress created the Resolution Trust Corp. to take over $125 billion in assets owned by 296 failed savings and loan associations. Over the next six years it added $394 billion in assets belonging to an additional 747 insolvent thrifts. The RTC’s main job was to sell those assets, mostly real estate, at the best price it could get.

In the end, the S&L cleanup cost American taxpayers an estimated $124 billion. The RTC ceased operation in 1996. Despite the price tag of the thrift bailout, many believe the RTC successfully averted even worse consequences and higher costs. Heading the RTC was Vice President George H.W. Bush despite the fact that his son, Neil, was one of the key perpetrators in robbing the S&L's. It's not coincidence that the majority of the perps were Republicans, only one of whom, Charles Humphrey Keating Jr., to my knowledge was convicted of any crime. And, once again, the US taxpayer is called upon to pay the bill, despite enormous wealth the CEO's have piled up during their tenure simply by moving pension fund wealth around that had already been made. From this wealth, they extracted gross bonuses that should have gone to the owners of this money, workers and retirees who should have gotten the majority of the interest on these funds, but were given only a pittance.

As a result of Wall Street's ponzi schemes, the Institute for Policy Studies has identified the staggering income inequality in the US population as the root of a deeply flawed political economy in a recent report entitled: Second Chance A Sensible Plan for Getting the Recovery Right. The authors -- Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chuck Collins, Dedrick Muhammad, and Sam Pizzigati have outlined a plan that begins with government rebuilding accountability and trust severly undermined by the Bush administration's lack of oversite with the Wall Street financial services industry. Briefly stated, the report warns that

"Congress assumes that the funding for the Wall Street bailout and stimulus investments will come from additional federal borrowing. But this rush to borrow merely shifts the recovery burden onto the backs of future taxpayers. Congress needs to change course — and develop a 'pay as we go' plan that makes Wall Street pay. The lion’s share of bailout funding should come from the high-finance gamblers and CEOs who have so profited from our casino economy."

The IPS report suggest several tax reforms that it believes could generate over $500 billion in revenue to pay for economic recovery. Program basics are:

• Fund a green stimulus for the real economy;
• Restructure mortgages for families put at risk by predatory lenders;
• Make Wall Street speculators pay for the bailout;
• Shut down the global casino: Assert real oversight of financial markets; and
  
• Limit CEO pay and prohibit profiteering from the bailout.

Download the complete report here...