Obama's first year

An edifying essay by David Michael Green on Obama's first year:

Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most inept
president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my
lifetime. Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so
rapidly, and what’s more in the context of so much national urgency and
crisis. It’s astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in
a single year.

It was hilarious, of course, when Michelle Bachmann invoked the Charge
of the Light Brigade at a rally against “Obama’s” (has he ever really owned it?)
health care “initiative” (isn’t that too strong a word to use?), quite oblivious
to the fact that the actual historical event was one of history’s greatest
debacles. Obama, on the other hand, seems to be actually reliving the
famous cock-up in the flesh. Except, of course, that he doesn’t really
“charge” at anything. He just talks about things, thinks about things a
real long time, defers to others on things, and waits around for things to maybe
happen.

There may have been presidents in the USA's chequered history who've been even more incompetent, mendacious, indecisive, and lacking in ideas and conviction -- Warren Harding, maybe? But like Green, I think Obama is the most pathetic and worthless little sh!t who ever got elected to the presidency. Of course, being a Marxist, one must be careful to see things systemically. A pathetic and scummy little sh!t like Obama is a simply a product of a corrupt and mendacious political system, itself a part of an extortionate and militaristic plutocracy. Christ, I could use a stiff whiskey right now.

Labor, Part II: Trumka

One of the few bright spots in the recent development of the labor movement is the election of Rich Trumka as president of the AFL-CIO. A quick view of the succession of AFL-CIO presidents, from Meany to Kirkland to Sweeney to Trumka, shows that the political views of each gets 'a bit' more leftish. This corresponds to the increasingly weak and desperate state of the labor movement - though of course lagging behind the real situation.

Trumka is a veteran of the ferocious Pittston strike in the 80s. He was president of the United Mine Workers and led the UMW into the Labor Party in the 90s. The UMW is a blue-collar union of workers actually making goods, not moving paper or providing labor services. The recent demonstrations in Chicago against the bankers convention there were the biggest mobilization labor has had in awhile - and it was highly visible. Trumka just today warned the Democrats that a bad health plan and a lack of financial regulation will lead workers to stay home in droves in 2010, as they did in 1994 under Clinton. He pointed out that workers at that time did not see a dimes worth of difference between the Party's practice, in spite of the Democrats happy labor sloganeering.

Trumka could help lead to a new attitude towards labor's electoral and strike practice. Watch Trumka.

Red Frog
1/11/10

When slowdowns

Mao Ma, Mao Ma, Mao Ma, Ma Mao, Get a Job

“Embedded With Organized Labor,” by Steve Early, 2009

This is the first book on labor reviewed on these pages. This is not an accident. Like a bad marriage or a war, looking back on a long string of defeats or miseries is not something anyone relishes. I spent the mid-70s to the early-90s mostly as a union ‘rank-and-filer’ in Chicago and Minneapolis, so this is not an abstract story for me. The labor movement has been beaten senseless. It has puked on its shirt before the whole nation time after time. Even the singing of innocuous songs like “Solidarity Forever” now grates. Because ‘solidarity’ is almost, actually, never. Labor clichés, like Marxist cliché’s or anarchist clichés, need to be banned for awhile. We need to go back to … facts. Ruthless facts.

Steve Early’s book is actually a book of book reviews, although the sections seem somewhat disjointed. He has read almost every recent book concerned with the labor movement. This volume is invaluable as a readers’ guide for labor activists and anyone else who understands that without labor, there will be very little change. It is appreciated that he only dwells briefly on the classics of American Labor history. Our infatuation with the 30s and the Knights Of Labor etc. blinds us to our own recent history and the present configuration of American and world capital. Early does not read as a zombie, but as someone who has definite ideas about what is needed for labor to come back from the dead. He has been there too.

Early’s reviews go from general, high-profile books down to academic volumes concerned with the twists and turns of Sweeny and the “Change to Win” coalition. Barbara Erenreich’s book “Nickel and Dimed’ comes in for review as one of the former. Early compares it to George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London," and Jack London’s “The Abyss” - quite high praise. Early reviews “Revolution in the Air” by Max Elbaum, (also reviewed in these pages, below) pointing out its bizarre Maoist infatuations, and reaffirms that Elbaum does not really cover Maoist labor activity. Early seems to be a class-conscious labor activist, not really wedded to any one Marxist strand, close to the CLR James view of the importance of actual working-class practice. (CLR James is reviewed below too.) He also seems to be a sympathizer of the International Socialists, based on their work in TDU and Labor Notes, but he is not dominated by any one ‘line.’

After a short section on historical labor literature, Early scans Linda Chavez’ anti-labor books, probably as his version of ‘fair and balanced.’ Chavez once worked for Albert Shanker and the AFT – a cold-war, uber-white-collar union leadership. In a way, the teachers’ unions replaced the AFL building trades as the unions of ‘privileged’ labor. Chavez is their bastard child. Her account follows the right-wing reign of Meany-Kirkland and its domination by staffers from Social Democrats USA. She spends much time showing her fondness for neo-conservatives, and red-baiting the Democratic Socialists of America around John Sweeney, a closet member. As a former ‘labor’ leader, she spends most of her time attacking even the idea of labor unions.(!)

As an antidote to cold-war ‘unionism,’ Early reviews “SingleJack Solidarity” and “Punching Out,” both books concentrating on a rank-and-file unionism, and attacking the ideas coming from, for instance, the leadership of UNITE-HERE, that bigger is better. The authors are former supporters of the Workers Party of CLR James. They criticize the idea of ‘social unionism’ represented by Reuther as not much different than ‘business unionism,’ because both of them were thoroughly top-down. Early also later reviews Staughton Lynds two books on modern rank-and-file activism, “The New Rank & File” and “Personal Histories of Working-Class Organizers,” including leftists who ‘colonized’ various work sites.

Believe it or not, someone has written a book on Tony Mazzochi, called “The Man Who Hated Work.” Mazzochi was legendary as the conflicted founder of the Labor Party; head of OCAW and friend of Karen Silkwood; fighter for OSHA and environmentalism; supporter of various social causes, who helped organize “US Labor Against the War” and started working-class book clubs. Early considers Mazzochi to be a unique individual in the American labor movement, combining an affinity for the left with an ability to remain connected to the rest of the labor movement.

Regarding black labor activism, Jacqueline Jones has written a descriptive book on the long history of discrimination and racism in the US labor movement, “American Labor.” “Black Freedom Fighters in Steel” covers the history of black workers influence in the steelworkers union, up to the Sadlowski campaign in the 1970s and the rust belt turn in the 80s. Another book, “Left Out’ details the influence of non-white workers in the labor movement, even quoting WEB Dubois, who points out that the CIO became a ‘major racially egalitarian force in American life.’ “Beyond the Fields” is a book covering the UFW campaigns from the 1960s to the present. It shows how the UFW, lead by Cesar Chavez, functioned as a social movement, not just a union, and owed much of its success to that. There is a chapter on the short-comings of Chavez, who towards the end got rid of any democratic life in ‘his’ union. A member of the “Change to Win” coalition, the UFW is now down to 6,000 members in 2007.

Early then takes up theoretical questions, reviewing “The Working-Class Majority” by economist Michael Zweig. Zweig directly attacks the idea that the ‘middle class’ is the majority in the United States, and that this phrase means the same thing as ‘working class.’ Zweig contends that this verbal ‘switch’ so beloved of politicians and bad journalists disappears the working class from existence - although, according to him, the working class is 62% of the labor force. The book “Striking Steel” also makes the same point, though in a more personal way, attacking the domination of the professional middle class in culture and politics, and pointing out that the exceptional period of the 50s was the high point of working-class life in the U.S. And, I might add, never to be repeated. Early also covers the ILA dock-workers campaign of the ‘Charleston 5’ in the book, “On the Global Waterfront.” The remnants of the Labor Party in South Carolina were deeply involved in this campaign.

In two sections, Early reviews a number of books, both laudatory and critical, on the Sweeney “New Voice” leadership of the AFL-CIO, and the politics behind the recent split of the “Change to Win” coalition, and their leader, technocrat Andy Stern. Both situations involved an influx of more middle-class, college-educated activists into staff positions. As someone who had zero faith that Sweeney would change anything vital, it is interesting to read about the small changes that did happen when Sweeney swept the cold warriors of the SDUSA out of Solidarity House. Early feels this event was largely based on the Ron Carey victory in the Teamsters Union election immediately prior to Sweeney’s election.

The hardest part to read is Early’s section on labor’s strike defeats. If the words “Phelps Dodge”, “P9”, “International Paper”, “AE Staley”, “Caterpillar”, “Bridgestone-Firestone,” “Decatur”, “Ray Rogers,” “Overnite”, “6.5 years”, “camos” and “Pittston” bring out a certain pain, then you know what I am talking about. The central book Early reviews is “Three Strikes” by Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin about the ‘war zone’ in central Illinois around Decatur in the early 90s. This section mentions our own home-town hero and labor academic, Peter Rachleff, and his book, “Hard-Pressed in the Heartland,” about the Hormel strike, a defeated strike Minnesota labor activists were intimately connected to. 2003 saw only 14 strikes in the US, involving 129,000 people.

Early has somewhat disjointed sections on books about labor and environmentalism, prospects for future labor activism, labor law reform (including Chicagoan Tom Geoghegan’s book, “Which Side are you On?”) and in-plant strategies, international unionism, workers organizing outside unions in workers centers, immigrant labor activism, and again revisits SEIU and Andy Stern, in very illuminating pages. The section on Stern is dense, and reveals what “Change to Win” is really about – technocratic changes, top-down unionism, mergers and cooperation schemes with various managements.

Early ends his book in a most obvious, yet odd way, describing working-class literacy and book efforts in unions and out. He details the efforts and non-efforts of various union activists and internationals to promote reading about labor. Tony Mazzochi started a book club as one of his first acts of labor involvement. To focus on such a basic reality like this makes reading Early’s compendium of reviews such a pleasure.

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 1/6/2010

Book Club at Mayday Books?

We've had requests for a book club at Mayday in the past, with intermittent success. Let me know by commenting if this idea appeals to you and what you might like to read and discuss with a group at Mayday?

The origins of the state

This notion of a "workers' state" continues to bother me (though my apprehensions may be misplaced). As I understand it, the state originated with Babylon, Sumeria, Lydia, and Assyria. The idea was to expropriate agricultural surplus from peasant communities and use it to feed standing armies, which could then be used to invade other peasant communities (a "virtuous circle" of military expansion). The expropriation was carried out (if memory serves) through the introduction of coinage -- i.e., a monetary economy -- which allowed for taxation and caused, inter alia, the instant impoverishment of the peasantry. Anyone in the neighborhood not organised along state lines quickly got invaded by these proto-states and incorporated into these structures. Thus, the state itself was born as a military entity, and organised to channel resources from peasants to armies, rulers, a priesthood, and an aristocracy. In passing, it goes without saying that the state has been in the hands of different oligarchies at different times -- military rulers (like Sargon, Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar in ancient times) or the modern capitalist bourgeoisie that we're lumbered with today. But regardless of the era and regardless of the nature of the ruling oligarchy, it has always served as an instrument of armed might, coercion and extortion. Whether it can ever be anything else -- such as a "workers' state" -- is what I'm wondering about.

Nice poster!

Ugly demonstrations

David Macaray echoing what I've been saying for awhile now:

And guess what happened when these people poured into the streets, stopped
traffic, shut down businesses, and mixed it up with the police? They found
that by making a goddamn bloody nuisance of themselves they got what they
wanted. Only by “embarrassing” themselves were they reckoned with.

Of course, those in authority will always tell you that ugly
demonstrations don’t work. They’ll tell you that demonstrations are, in
fact, counterproductive, that the only tactics that can be relied upon to get
the dirty job done are rational discourse and the free but orderly exchange of
ideas.

This is a myth. The authorities tell workers that because they
want to control them. They want workers to believe it because the bosses
have no fear of rational discourse, and no dread of the free exchange of
ideas. What they do fear are massive protests. What they do dread
are ugly demonstrations. Which is why they work.

I look forward to an implacable and militant working-class movement, which has been purged of all limousine liberals and champagne socialists, and which has been purged of all sissy "discourse" about Jameson and Althusser. I look forward, indeed, to a working class which slams an iron fist on the table and makes the ruling class dirty its pants. Unabashed class warfare, with class consciousness firmly instilled.

Default structure

As I understand it, the usual liberal and progressive point of view is that there are certain immoral and greedy individuals at the pinnacle of capitalist society and that if these people are done away with (or persuaded of the error of their ways), everything will be hunky-dory. This is a deeply unsatisfying explanation, particularly to anyone steeped in Marxist thought. That we have the specific structure that we endure on a daily basis should itself give us pause. I contend that it is the "default structure" of our times, given our technological modernity and the concomitant stage of history we are presently at.

This is not to say that we should not struggle. We should. But this notion of "default structure" does, however, suggest two important caveats. The first is that we need to have an alternative very clearly delineated. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We don't want the fiasco of Orwell's "Animal Farm." Or in other words, without a very clear and detailed idea of where we want to go, we will unknowingly replicate the "default structure." The second caveat -- closely related to the first -- is that this default structure exerts a magnetic pull; in scientific lingo, it's a point of "stable equilibrium," towards which any artificial system -- even if carefully designed -- will naturally gravitate.

This mix of finance capitalism, plutocracy, sham democracy, militarism, a global economic web controlled by a hegemon, growing disparities between rich and poor, both globally and in nation states, deteriorating biosphere -- this is our present structure. Whether revolutionary force can change this set-up at a fundamental level, and transform it root and branch, is an open philosophical question.

The House and Senate health care "reform" bills

Andy Coates -- in this interview with Ashley Smith at Socialist Worker -- succinctly explains what's in the health care reform proposals:

The crux of each bill is compulsory private health insurance. The
government will use its power to compel every individual to purchase private
health insurance, or enroll in Medicaid. The bills don't make private health
insurance affordable; they propose to subsidize private insurance premiums for
those who live on modest means.

For example, the House bill will subsidize the premiums of those whose
income is 400 percent of the federal poverty level and below. Taxpayers would
pay for this. But it would still mean that people who earn 200 percent to 400
percent of the federal poverty level would have to pay 8 to 12 percent of their
income for private insurance premiums, or pay a fine and stay
uninsured.

That would be the so-called "choice." For the uninsured, paying for
expensive insurance would amount to an enormous wage cut. And then they'll get
skimpy coverage, with high co-pays, high deductibles and all those other onerous
and unworkable measures that come with very expensive private insurance.

It serves no point for me to do a lengthy copy-and-paste so I recommend the interview be read in toto at the Socialist Worker site I've linked above. Just the picture of those three scumbags (at the SW website) -- Reid, Baucus, and Dodd -- should suffice to convince one that they're up to no good. Another giveaway is the 2000 pages of small print in the House proposal. This kind of voluminous paperwork is produced whenever the public is to get shafted. I suppose this is the reason we say, "The devil is in the details."

As I've made clear in previous posts, I don't think the usual "activism" -- standing with placards or calling one's representatives -- will serve any purpose. All it is does is provide camaraderie and a feeling one is doing "one's bit'" -- without achieving any tangible results whatsoever.

Another essay savaging liberals

An essay at commondreams:

Sometime early in Ronald Reagan's first term, I decided to forget
everything I'd always disliked about liberals. I took pains to subordinate what
put me off about them to the larger objective of unity against the rightwing
onslaught, I decided to overlook their capacity for high-minded fervor for the
emptiest and sappiest platitudes; their tendencies to make a fetish of procedure
over substance and to look for technical fixes to political problems; their
ability to screen out the mounting carnage in the cities they inhabit as they
seek pleasant venues for ingesting good coffee and scones; their propensity for
aestheticizing other people's oppression and calling that activism; their reflex
to wring their hands and look constipated in the face of conflict; and, most of
all, their spinelessness and undependability in crises.

... Beneath all this idiotic coyness lie liberals' long-standing aversion
to conflict and their refusal to face up to the class realities of American
politics. They avoid any linkage of inequality with corporations' use of public
policy to drive down living standards and enhance their plunder,

The tools being used by both sides in the "War on Terror" and the ideological implications

I found a thought-provoking article in Dawn:

The cavalcade of controversy that has followed recent revelations regarding
Blackwater/Xe are notable for the marked turn they represent in the nature of
warfare as defined by the age of terror. In essence, they represent the implicit
admission that liberal democracies, even those as strong as the United States,
are unable to fight transnational terror without giving up the very core
principles that define their ideological positions.

...

The new terms of the war on terror are thus being defined not by Obama or
Karzai or Zardari but Osama bin Laden and Erik Prince. In being the leaders of
the lawless frontiers where truth is ill defined and law merely an
inconvenience, they operate beyond accountability and are untouched by political
opinion. While one uses faith and the other money, the recipes of both are
simple: they employ and operate the tools at their disposal to maim kill and
destroy on a global scale. Together they have revealed the war on terror as a
conflict of evil vs evil where good is either invisible or altogether
absent.

Why is the ruling class the ruling class?

My memory grows feeble in my dotage but I seem to recall 19th century social theorists like Mosca and Michels contending that oligarchy was the natural state of affairs in human society. Why this inevitability? On the left we like to argue that it's because of the lack of scruple among the rulers. And this is doubtless a contributing factor. Though the lower orders hardly seem to be overburdened with scruple either. One explanation might be that the rulers are smarter. The plebs sordida are a stupid lot. Orwell's "Animal Farm" describes a post-revolutionary situation where the smart animals -- the pigs -- rapidly become the new governing elite. Most of the rest of the animals can't even remember the second letter of the alphabet. I've been musing about the (relative) smartness of the ruling class for some time. Yesterday evening I tried once again to initiate a political discussion -- which despite my efforts rapidly deteriorated into speculation about whether Tim Pawlenty would have Michele Bachmann as running mate should he run for president. Faced with this wall of obdurate stupidity -- which is utterly incapable of grasping the structural aspects of our situation -- I become despondent. Ah well, maybe we can teach them "Four legs good, two legs bad."

Liberals are useless

An excellent essay by Chris Hedges, with which I concur:

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to
challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class,
and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade
Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal
health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk
stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them.

The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although
it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the
will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

It's a point I've been making for some time: the problem with the USA is not the right, but the so-called "left." It has no balls, no real conviction. It's empty posturing and cheap moral outrage. It's standing with anti-war placards. It's voting for the "lesser of two evils." It's that fat buffoon Michael More and his admirers. You could shoot all the scumbag liberals -- with their hypocrisy, posturing, and impotent bleeding hearts -- and it would not make the USA any worse than what it is today (in fact, it might make it better as at least there would be more intellectual honesty).

Press conference after Obama's Escalation Speech

Local activists gathered at Mayday Books on Tuesday evening, December 1, to listen to and respond to President Obama's long-awaited speech about plans to escalate the war against Afghanistan. It was great to hear a variety of reasons and viewpoints explaining why this plan is bound to fail and do little for the lives of Afghans or people here at home. Some images of the event:

Who likes Short Shorts?

“The Handmaid’s Tale” about being “Born Under a Bad Sky” in “The Merry Month of May” while “On the Trail of the Assassins” (by Margaret Atwood (1985), James Jones (1970), Jeffrey St. Clair (2008) and Jim Garrison (1988).)

For those of you who can’t stand long book reviews, here are four short reviews:

“Handmaid’s Tale” by Margret Atwood – of course a Canadian – wrote this book about the aftermath of a violent fundamentalist Christian takeover of the United States. You are dumped into an unknown world of high-walled compounds, fear and segregation of groups. No one dances, no one plays, there is no joy allowed except in the worship of Almighty God. The ruling law is the fundamental oppression of women. It is told from the point of view of a Handmaid, a ‘breeder,’ Offred, a former modern woman now enslaved to bear sacred children. She is to be ritually impregnated by the Commander, who has a barren Wife, served by working-class Marthas, and guarded by violent Guardians. Children are the point of this society. And of course, there are still secret prostitutes, which the Commanders visit to get relief.

For every repressive society, there is an underground resistance, which Offred makes contact with, in her attempt to escape to Canada. Warning her of the fate awaiting those who defy the religious order, dead offenders are ritually hung for public viewing. Enjoy!

P.S. - The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopic book. Below, I did a review of “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, a post-apocalyptic book. This has now come out as a film with Viggo Mortenson. The film is not as good as the book, however repetitive that comment may seem, but it is still worth seeing at some point. The new film 2012, loosely based on a Mayan end-of-the-world prophecy, is also coming out soon. For a review of dystopic and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction, here is a long analysis by a professor on this very subject: Http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091102/deresiewicz.

"Born Under A Bad Sky," by Jeffrey St. Clair, rips the hood off of neo-liberal Democratic Party ‘environmentalism.’ The Republicans take their share of fire, of course, but the clear new information is about the coddling during the Clinton/Gore years of the worst anti-environmental corporate figures and companies, looking especially at the situation in the U.S. mountain West. St. Clair, an editor at Counter-Punch, uses these essays to focus on water theft, forest destruction, mining pollution, dam consequences, nuclear carelessness, oil drilling, air pollution levels in LA, mine safety, FBI treatment of environmental protesters, Cancer Alley along the Mississippi, the oppression of native and Latino rural populations and the destruction of endangered species.

St. Clair especially focuses on the ‘Big Green’ paper organizations complicity with all of this. Sainted figures like Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Bruce Babbitt, Dick Gephardt, Ralph Cavanaugh, John Kerry, Ken Lay, Mary Landreiu, Edward McGaffigan and sainted groups like the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Counsel, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation and the Environmental Defense Fund are all pinned for their attacks on the environment in the name of market solutions and corporate giveaways. This is another hard book to read.

“In the Merry Month Of May," by James Jones, is the story of the massive May-June 1968 worker-student rebellion in France, as told by the middle-aged, middle-class editor of a literary magazine. Jones, evidently, was trying to compete with “The Sun Also Rises” by Hemingway. If so, this is a truly poor second. The blasé editor doesn’t take the events seriously at first, then treats them like tourism, and eventually blots them out by his overwhelming focus on the sexuality of a young black woman from America. Jones trivializes everything that happens to focus on the romantic quadrangle of one family – wife, father and son – with this woman, who also happens to be anti-political.

Nevertheless, Jones WAS in Paris at that time, and his eye-witness descriptions of clashes between the flics and the students in the West Bank, and the activities of the students at the Sorbonne are its chief benefit. The involvement of the working class is marginal to what Jones witnesses. The book’s events are treated like a light-weight diversion, until, of course, he has to kill off a central character to give it some weight.

“On the Trail of the Assassins,” by Jim Garrison, is the story of the Kennedy assassination investigation undertaken by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. Garrison was the only one who treated the assassination like an actual criminal case, unlike the Dallas police or the FBI. Garrison was attacked for doing his duty by nearly every magazine and newspaper, the U.S. government, the CIA and every useless pundit in America. Which means he was on to something. Later this story was made into the film “JFK” by Oliver Stone. The books abounds with great facts about what a sorry white-wash the Warren Commission, the FBI and the later Congressional Inquiry made of the assassination. It is invaluable as a description of how the intelligence agencies work in the United States.

Garrison conclusively proves that Oswald did not even fire a shot at Kennedy, but was a prepared patsy; that Oswald did not shoot Officer Tippet; that people impersonated Oswald for quite a time before the assassination; that Oswald worked with CIA and FBI figures like David Ferrie and Clay Shaw as a fake ‘communist’ in New Orleans; the Ferrie and Shaw openly discussed killing Kennedy; that Jack Ruby delivered guns to the grassy knoll just before the assassination; that about 15-20 people were openly involved in the assassination as shooters, getaway drivers, diversions, fake Secret Service agents; that the Dallas police destroyed much valuable evidence, and that the whole force of the secret police and their political allies in the United States blocked a real investigation of the killing.

He concludes that this event had all the hallmarks of a military coup by the secret police, aiding the political class in support of a continued hardline, cold-war approach against the USSR, Cuba and for intervention in Vietnam - a line Kennedy was not following.

And I bought all but one of these books in the new and used sections of May Day Books
Red Frog, 12/1/2009

Senior Goldman Sachs people arming themselves

An article by Alice Schroeder at Bloomberg:

... The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have
loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a
populist uprising against the bank.

... Talk that Goldman bankers might
have armed themselves in self-defense would sound ludicrous, were it not so apt
a metaphor for the way that the most successful people on Wall Street have
become a target for public rage.

And the single most damning comment in the article:

The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money,
not from the free market, but from the lack of one.

It's becoming clear even to an indoctrinated and befuddled public that politicians are acting overtly for those at the financial pinnacle.

There's no question that the situation is becoming tense. As a recent New York Times article made clear, one in eight Americans are now on food stamps. Destitution is increasing. And the baboon elected to supreme office has turned out to be another shameless sell-out.

It's also clear (at least to me) that many self-proclaimed "people of the Left" will be caught off-balance by a spontaneous populist uprising. These people can argue about something obscure in Althusser or Lacan till dawn -- but wouldn't know how to change a light bulb. Sort of reminds me of the film "Life of Brian," where the People's Front of Judea gets to arguing with the Judean People's Front .... Anyway, not to quibble. Serves no purpose.

Yup!

WHERE WILL WE GET THE MONEY?

Except for military spending, that question is always asked.
Health care.... where will we get the money?
Education....how will we pay for it?
Roads, bridges, environmental clean-up....where will the money come from?
Well, fellow commodities, the money will come from where it always comes from: LABOR! Even in all-out war such as World War 2 there was enough labor for both guns and butter albeit some shortages in non military goods. Otherwise there is not only enough labor, there is an excess! The other part of the equation is materials. As yet, as of now, at this moment the planet has enough stuff to take care of now and to have enough for a few decades and maybe even a millennium or two, IF it is handled wisely. Here is where we get political: corporate capitalism is not able to handle it wisely. EXAMPLE: There are 3 million more people in the U.S. every year needing more goods and services. In spite of this ever-increasing demand we have economic CONTRACTIONS periodically. More people need more things yet the economy CONTRACTS. Go figure.
Tom R Dooley

Insightful essay at dissidentvoice on why the US system of governance makes single-payer health care well-nigh impossible. I thank my lucky stars I'm a European citizen. I just don't see what the benefits are these days of being an American citizen.

Sad but true

When you finally have time to read...

Yoga, Roy-Style

“Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers,” Essays by Arundhati Roy, 2009

India is a caldron of ethnic, religious and class hatreds, folks. Not the land of mellow ‘gurus,’ yoga, Gandhi, vegetarian food, beaches and quaintness, as it is marketed to the hipster elite. Or of bright, enthusiastic entrepreneurs and high-tech workers in Bangalore, marketed to, and also paid-for by corporate America.

Roy is the gorgeous pin-up woman of Indian activism, who wrote the novel “The God of Small Things,” which won the Booker prize in 1997. This, her latest book, details the slow descent of Indian political culture, of both the Congress and BJP parties, into an India dominated by Hindu nationalism and creeping fascism. Bollywood objected to “Slumdog Millionaire,’ which revealed India’s poverty-ridden cities. The Indian political elite ground their teeth when “The White Tiger,” about a servant who kills his master in Delhi, wound up on the best-seller charts. (And which also won the Booker prize.) The Congress and BJP hate Roy and various other writers like Vandana Shiva, who detail the legal, political, environmental and communal disasters that have occurred on their watches. They have both been threatened many times for speaking out and organizing.

India broke with a somewhat centralized economic model of development in 1991, which consisted of controlling the ‘commanding heights of the economy;’ then adopted neo-liberal market methods, at which point many things began to come apart. According to Roy, this period was preceded in 1989 by the BJP beginning a program of Hindu nationalism – Hindutva. This is a country, after all, that has as one of its major founding events the British ‘Partition’ of 1947. Partition resulted in hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims dying in communalist violence, and millions became homeless or moving, as the British ‘created’ Pakistan, Bangladesh and India out of the fabric of one multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.

The recent slaughter of Tamil’s in Sri Lanka by the Sinhalese government’s army in April and May 2009, mostly hidden from the world, has inspired the present Congress government to now declare war on the Maoist Naxalites in the east-central regions of India. I think hoping to duplicate that feat. The Naxalites, who got their name from a village in West Bengal named Naxalbari, are still waging a guerrilla war to defend the forests and land of the poor, bottom-caste people of those regions against corporations eager to control their land and the mineral and water wealth beneath it. This struggle has been almost invisible outside India. Congress hopes that drowning it in blood will be equally invisible.

Against this background, Roy's essays focus on the collapse of the police and legal system in the face of Hindu fundamentalism and Muslim terrorism - real and fabricated – something that accelerated greatly after 9/11. George Bush essentially gave the green light to anti-Muslim pogroms and politics in India, and the Hindu nationalist politicians eagerly took advantage of it. Essentially, Roy sees much evidence pointing to the Indian secret police carrying out many frame-ups and provocations. For her, the central events are:

• 1984 - Congress Party leads mobs in Delhi in slaughter of thousands of Sikh’s as revenge for the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
• 
  December 1992 – mobs of Hindu fundamentalists converged on the town of Ayodhya and demolished an old Muslim mosque. Plans to build a huge Hindu temple over that spot are underway.
• 
  1993 – a fundamentalist Hindu mob killed a 1,000 Muslims in Mumbai. In response, Muslim terrorists used bombs to kill 250 people in that same city.
• 
  1998 – Using this polarization, the BJP takes national power after starting with only two representatives in 1989. Roy sees this as linked to the anti-Islamism of the first Gulf war. The BJP then conducted nuclear tests within weeks of taking power, linking nuclear weapons to the pride of being ‘Hindu.’
• 
  January 1999 – Bajrang Dal, a Hindu militia, burns a Christian missionary and his two sons alive.
• 
  December 2001 – Attack on the Indian parliament resulted in 5 dead “Pakistani” terrorists, never identified, and the remaining ‘conspirators’ being judging innocent or being declared guilty in the face of much evidence that this was actually a police provocation by the “Special Cell.” Roy spends several chapters on this incident.
• 
  February 2002 – 58 Hindu pilgrims on an express train burned alive as they returned from Ayodhya. According to Roy, the BJP government in Gujarat, lead by Chief Minister Modi, responded with a carefully planned genocide; 2,000 Muslims were murdered, Muslim women gang-raped, and 150,000 Muslims driven from their homes and forced to live in the woods or on the outskirts of towns. Modi has now been re-elected 3 times, running against Congress party candidates that are mostly ex-BJP. He has never been prosecuted. Roy focuses especially on this event.
• 
  November 2002 – Undercover Delhi police kill alleged Muslim terrorists in Lashkar-e-Taiba. Witnesses say the victims were unarmed.
• 
  2002 - Draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act passed. The Indian Congress repealed it in 2004, then adopted a tougher law in December 2008, with almost no debate between parties.
• 
  December 2007 – Systematic attacks in three states against Christians lead to the burning of churches. Lower-caste Muslim Dalit and Adivasi are urged to attack Christians Dalits and Adivasi by the BJP. Thousands of Christians now live in refugee camps in the forests. Roy thinks this was actually an attack on the base of the Maoists.
• 
  November 2008 (or as the press calls it, 26/11) - The attack in Delhi by alleged Pakistani-backed Muslim terrorists, has been promoted to basically turn India into a police-state. Roy hints that it, too, might have been a police operation.
• 
  December 2008 – Hindu fundamentalists attack women in Bangalore and Mangalore for wearing jeans and western clothes, protected by the new BJP government.

Roy links the recent 2009 election – in which UPA/Congress triumphed with 10% of the vote – as showing the unity of both parties behind neo-liberal economic practice. Roy delineates how this economic philosophy is actually intimately linked to the pogromist BJP and the tolerant-of-pogroms Congress. For instance in Chattisgarh, the BJP government and the Congress-Party militia Salwah Judum work together in a war with the Maoists and the low-caste Adivasis population. 644 villages have been emptied. 50,000 people have been moved into Salway Judum camps. 300,000 hide in the forests. The newest Gandhi, Varun Gandhi, is a BJP campaigner who believes Muslims should be sterilized. He won overwhelmingly.

The Left Front in West Bengal took a hard right, according to Roy, and made deals to build a chemical complex, a plant for Tata motors, and a Jindal steel plant in the forests. This was opposed by the population, but the Left Front attempted to make this come true virtually at gun-point, using thugs in their own party militia. The population eventually defeated the Front over these plans. The Left Front, of course, was decimated in the 2009 elections for embracing neo-liberalism - the first time they had lost elections in 30 years. The ruling class press said it was because the Left Front was too antagonistic to neo-liberalism, not the reverse. Roy also analyzes the strengths of the multi-headed, very well-organized, reactionary-nationalist, pogromist BJP, which has mass educational, military, economic and social organizations all over the country.

Roy ends with a description of the endless and brutal occupation of Islamic Kashmir by the Indian army, supported by both Indian Parties, the intelligentsia, the bureaucracy and the media. The occupation has gone on for 20 years, leaving 70,000 dead, 1,000s tortured, many raped, fabricated elections, and an occupation army of half-a-million. Massive non-violent protests by the Kashmiri population in summer 2008 put a dent in this occupation, but it still sits at the center of every violent vortex in the area, and even Indian politics itself.

For those Americans who have only the haziest understanding of India, and think of it more in relation to the beaches in Goa, this book is a great introduction to the politicians, organizations and issues that are tearing India apart. Within the limitations of the essay style, Roy makes impassioned, yet factual, analyses of every contradiction she uncovers, in sibliant prose.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, 11/09/2009

Dennis Kucinich on why he voted against the healthcare "reform" bill

The arguments of Dennis Kucinich against the healthcare reform bill can be found here. I don't see in what manner the bill improves matters for ordinary Americans. Indeed, it arguably makes matters worse. Obama, Pelosi, and Baucus (among other Democrats) are the scum of the earth.

Postscript: This article by John Geyman is also eminently worth reading.

Time to Vote

Melt-down of the Minnesota Green Party?

Curiouser and curiouser. Two months or so ago, Cam Gordon, a Green, received the endorsement of the Minneapolis Democratic Party and Mayor RT Rybak – that mannequin guy that looks just like Tim Pawlenty. According to Mike Calvan, someone testifying under oath explained in a court suit brought about by Dave Bicking that Rybak and Gordon had made a deal. Gordon would oppose the Greens running anyone for mayor, and the Democrats would not run anyone against Gordon. It happened…especially the last part. Mr. Rogers now has a safe seat. Dave's suit was to stop Rybak from claiming Gordon's support, which he had not gotten written approval for at that time. Later, Gordon did endorse Rybak.

At any rate, this sad setup was preceded by the main Party in town, the Democrats, gerry-mandering the wards of Natalie Johnson Lee and Dean Zimmerman, in order to get them out of the city council. Evidently, the Democrats couldn’t make a deal with these two. Also evidently desperate for cash to pay for a lawsuit against this gerry-mandering, Dean Zimmerman accepted some in an entrapment sting organized by the Republican federal District Attorney. There was no quid pro quo, but this did not make a difference to the DA. Those with long memories can remember how the U.S. DA did somewhat the same thing to Eddy Felien, another progressive council person for the Farmer-Labor Association from an era long ago. And you might add several black council people that the powers-that-be evidently didn’t like, adding to a pattern against ANYONE who rocks the boat in this here ‘nice’ town. In effect, only if you are 'approved' can you get away with this kind of thing in Minneapolis. In sum, together the two – the Democrats and the Republicans – eliminated two Greens in the city council, by fair means but mostly foul.

Dean Zimmerman is back in town and out of jail. And Natalie Johnson Lee’s Uncle Tom replacement rules the roost in the forgotten part of town. But Natalie is still kicking, running again in the 5th Ward, though not as a Green it seems.

Now ‘Papa’ John Kolstad is running against RT for mayor, breaking a pact Gordon could not enforce. Remember Rybak, the pretty-boy, do-nothing former neighborhood activist, who claimed he was going to fight for ‘affordable housing?’ Right - he increased housing stock for poor people less than the former Republican mayor in St. Paul, which was hardly any. RT is running a non-campaign, dreaming about being the next handsome, young, white governor of Minnesota.

RT’s Minneapolis police evicted Rosemary Williams from her house a month of Fridays ago because of a Minneapolis trespassing charge… trespassing in her own house. Ah, yes, the bank owns it now. So the bankers’ cops - with RT not making a peep, or issuing instructions to allow her to live in her home - busted in, boarded up the house to the rafters with steel grills, and hired a private security guard to stand by the property, while arresting more than a dozen. And so, Rybak’s move for ‘affordable housing’ continues. Rosemary's house stands empty, joining thousands of others while the 'leaders' of Minneapolis fiddle.

However, in this virtual crapdown, Papa John is now running as an “Independent Civic Leader,” not a Green. He has secured the endorsement of the Minneapolis Republican Party, which has been seized by the followers of Texas Republican Ron Paul. The Independence Party has also endorsed Kolstad. Kolstad ran previously as the Attorney General candidate for the Greens. Al Flowers, who also has ties to the Greens, and is endorsed by Fareen Hakeem, is now running as a “Democratic Farmer-Labor” candidate. The Green Party is not running an official candidate for Mayor, much as RT wanted. The Greens are running Dave Bicking, Jeanine Estime and three others for city council, including Gordon.

Now read that back. Kolstad got an endorsement from Ron Paul’s libertarians, who are hated within the fundamentalist Republican Party, it was thought. However, Ron Paul has also recently endorsed Michelle Bachmann. So there is no Chinese Wall between the crazy fundie wing of the Republican Party and the libertarian one, contrary to certain illusions. I understand that Kolstad has good personal relations with the Paulites, and that on certain issues they agree. And I also understand the Paulites are upset about the Paul endorsement of Bachmann.

Certainly, if the Greens are endorsed by someone, it is different than if the Green's adopted their program, which they haven't. And in this run, Kolstad is not an official Green. In this instance, that certain piece of the program that they all seem to agree on is standing up for small businessmen – or as Kolstad put it on cable TV and at Merlin’s, ‘small businessmen are the life-blood of the community.” Wha?

OK, so now we come to the meat of the issue. Anyone hanging around the Greens can see that labor people are few and far between. And anyone hanging around also sees that they have had an over-representation of small businessmen among their candidates. Essentially the Marxist analysis of the Green Party is that it is a basically a progressive, petty-bourgeois opposition to big capital – in the Democratic and Republican forms. In a way, the Ron Paulites are also a petit-bourgeois opposition to big capital. And so we see the link. It is not that some of their criticisms are not accurate, or that we do not need small businessmen as allies - it is that they represent a class that is not, ultimately, able to fundamentally change our situation. No Marxist wants to point this out, but at this point, it is so obvious even the uninitiated can figure it out.

With the evaporation of the Labor Party in the U.S. because they would not run candidates, I supported Nader in 2000, and worked in a group called “Labor for Nader.” No wing of capital supported Nader at that time, and a critical vote for Nader was a useful tactic in 2000. He got millions of votes and showed up Gore in state after state. I voted for that ‘crazy black woman’ from Atlanta in 2008, Cynthia McKinney, who ran as a Green candidate. I have worked and donated money to David Bicking, running for the council in Ward 9 as a Green, who is one of the most principled persons in Minnesota politics today. I will be voting for a member of Socialist Action, Brent Perry, in my own Ward, Ward 12. He doesn’t have a chance in hell against another former neighborhood activist, the wretched Sandy Colvin Roy, who gave away public park land on Nicollet Island to the Catholic Church for ANOTHER stadium - among other acts. These people are truly stadium-crazy. Roy's claim to fame, from her candidate forum, was protesting outside the ROTC building in 1972. I was there too, but seem to have gotten a different message from that event.

At any rate, the national race in 2000 galvanized the local Greens into some kind of mass support in the City. Since then, no national race has helped the local Greens. And this is a real deficit. I know there is an argument between those Greens who just want to concentrate on local issues (and who refused to endorse a national candidate in 2008) and those who think the two are interrelated. The answer is now in. You need to burn the candle at both ends if you are a Green.

The Minneapolis City Council is the grave-yard of neighborhood activism.
So how can we absorb these changes? I think the Green Party in Minneapolis is fractionating, and has lost its ideological and organizational coherence. And just when IRV was to go into effect in the city, a situation they could have taken advantage of.

The real masters of our local Democratic Party council members are the real estate interests and giant corporations who run this town. This is a One-Party Town, presided over by an incestuous council cozy with the ruling financial interests, the stadiums, the real estate developers, the cops, and anyone with a dollar bill. They all vote alike. Once they get elected, it is 'hasta la vista.' These people are just tiny versions of the corporate Democrats on the national stage, and neo-liberalism in general. They are helping undermine the true health of the city by giving a free license to the police, condo overbuilding, corporate welfare like stadiums, wasting taxpayer money on ridiculous projects like the Lake Street makeover and the new downtown public library; trying to liquidate any independent groups like the Park and Library boards and other anti-democratic moves, and ignoring the foreclosure crisis and the jobs crisis. They also allowed the federal and various city police to run wild during the Republican Convention. The Greens made a valiant effort to change this. Hopefully their present candidates will do well. However, the present situation points to a need to go beyond Green politics. The fat is in the fire.

Red Frog
10/20/09.

Petition to Harry Reid:

When you read this I may be dead if I am one of the 93,000 who die each year from hospital infections or one of the 100,000 who die each year from wrongly administered drugs or one of the 43,000 who have no coverage. It's a disgrace in this rich country. Yesterday, Ralph Nader, Michael Moore, Cornell West and Jon Stewart all were disgusted at the lack of health care for so many. You and your esteemed colleagues and distinguished gentlemen should become human!