Boris Johnson’s government is intent on delivering the National Health Service to global private health providers and private health insurance conglomerates — unless it is stopped, writes Bob Gill.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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In an upset reminiscent of the 2018 victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, socialist underdog India Walton has bested a powerful Democratic insider in the primary race for the mayor of Buffalo, New York. With the Democratic nomination secured, and in the absence of any Republican challenger, the path to the inauguration of a socialist mayor, a vanishingly rare event in major U.S. cities, seems clear.
Having defeated incumbent Byron Brown — Buffalo’s mayor since 2006, a close associate of Gov. Andrew Cuomo and, as a former state party chairman, a key player in the New York Democratic machine — Walton’s win is a testament to both the growing appeal of leftist policy and the extent of her opponents’ underestimation. (Brown, displaying the same kind of hubris that felled Rep. Joe Crowley, dismissed Walton as a threat, declined a debate and neglected to campaign against her until late in the race.)
But unlike Crowley, Brown has refused to concede defeat, instead launching a write-in campaign to reclaim his title — despite opposition from some elements of organized labor and the Erie County Democratic Party. In announcing his decision, Brown shared his thoughts on the differences between “socialism and democracy” and attacked Walton as an “unqualified, inexperienced radical socialist.” Although a write-in campaign is a long shot, Walton’s ascent is not yet a foregone conclusion. Brown will not lack for funding, with developers and other businesses alarmed at the prospect of a socialist wielding executive power.
Those private interests do have cause for concern. Identifying firmly with the left, Walton, a member of the Buffalo Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has promised to spend her mayoral tenure working to repair the conditions of severe inequality and racial injustice that mar the depopulated, deindustrialized city — in part by taxing business and the wealthy and ending remunerative tax breaks. Still, owing to decades of neoliberal policy, a gutted budget and opposition stemming from the intersecting interests of capital and labor, Walton will face towering barriers to the implementation of her ambitious plans.
Ambitious Designs
Walton’s far-ranging platform is aligned with longtime democratic socialist aims, including public banking, rent control measures, a tenant’s bill of rights, and increased taxes on upper brackets and corporations. Other leftist hallmarks include her support for municipal broadband, cannabis legalization and criminal record expungement. She also seeks to strengthen investment in public housing, infrastructure, cooperatives, women-owned businesses, businesses owned by people of color, green jobs, food access and the arts.
Several of Walton’s long-term proposals revolve around land use — a central question in a city that has undergone considerable population loss over the past 50 years. Her platform calls for half of all vacant city-owned properties to be set aside for public usage. Concurrently, the plan would expand community land trusts and allow democratic input on neighborhood planning, along with other means of bolstering local democracy.
But in her campaign, Walton first and foremost emphasized major policing reform: establishing an independent police oversight board and investigative task force, implicit bias training, more stringent disciplinary consequences for officers and public input into “police department functions and union contract negotiations.” She would also spearhead the replacement of police with city workers for traffic enforcement, domestic disturbances and mental health calls, the cessation of enforcement of low-level drug offenses, and, more broadly, a shift to restorative justice over punitive outcomes.
Buffalo police conduct has prompted numerous complaints of brutality and excessive force, to say nothing of regular “officer-involved” shootings. Two officers were spared any consequences for putting a 75-year-old man in the hospital with a violent shove to the ground during a racial justice protest last year. Compounding on momentum after George Floyd’s death, rounds of demonstrations and accountability campaigns aimed at the Buffalo department have followed, readying the public for a candidate promising major changes to policing. Yet any reform will not go uncontested by Buffalo’s police union, the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), which has already indicated that they will back a write-in campaign to restore Mayor Brown.
A History of Handouts
In recent years, Buffalo has undergone what proponents describe as a “revitalization” — increased construction and development, largely in downtown, waterfront, and other nightlife areas. However, such initiatives have done little more than burnish a thin patina of vitality, underwriting slick offices, condos, retail outlets, and other lifestyle businesses that are patronized largely by the white and wealthy. In their eagerness to spur growth and attract investment to the city, local and state elected officials have offered massive tax abatements to developers, amounting to flagrant giveaways to powerful interests. Luxury real estate enterprises are showered with lucrative tax breaks, while the losses are made up by slashing municipal budgets — meaning that the people of Buffalo are, in effect, subsidizing the profits of real estate corporations.
The “Buffalo Billion” investment plan epitomizes the disastrous neoliberal “revitalization.” A much-touted billion dollars was invested around the Buffalo area — chiefly, to lure developers, high-tech companies and the medical industry with grants and tax breaks. Their arrival was marketed as a replacement for once-plentiful manufacturing jobs. The deal, brokered by Governor Cuomo, has been badly tarnished by scandal, including egregious waste, dismal returns and bid-rigging to reward political cronies. Companies like Elon Musk’s Tesla were all too happy to take advantage of Cuomo’s largesse. (Even before the Billion, as far back as 2013, New York was dangling $750 million in front of the carmaker to entice it to Buffalo.)
Buffalo’s ostensible development has done little to improve dismal conditions for the populace — from environmental damage (the city’s industrial heritage has blemished it with several Superfund sites) to neglected infrastructure, including a pattern of frequent water main breaks. Poverty remains widespread, and what job creation has occurred has largely been limited to the low-wage, high-turnover service sector. Few of the stable, permanent jobs promised to the public by development apologists have materialized.
Neither has there been significant progress on ameliorating the serious issues of racial injustice in Buffalo, not least among them the city’s racially correlated income disparities and de facto segregation. On the latter, Buffalo is one of the worst cities in the nation; it’s also the only community in western New York where wealth inequality is higher than the national average.
As a result of profligate handouts to capital, the city’s tax base has been severely undermined. Many tax abatements, facilitated by Section 485 of the state tax code, were authorized by the municipal government under Brown and are effectively irreversible — though new applications can be denied. A possible alternate revenue mechanism exists in “Payment in Lieu of Tax” (PILOT) agreements, which permit sourcing funds even from untaxed entities such as nonprofits or the recipients of tax abatements. Still, Walton as mayor may struggle to secure funding within these constraints. She will have to hope for not only the continued backing of the all-Democrat Common Council, but also that allies are soon elected to the Erie County legislature.
Governor Cuomo is not inclined to look favorably upon the replacement of a top ally with an outspoken socialist, of course, and might leap at opportunities to stymie the new mayor. Relatedly, it wouldn’t be surprising if State Senators Chris Jacobs and Tim Kennedy (both closely aligned with real estate interests; Kennedy’s largest donor is the Real Estate Board) attempted to thwart Walton from Albany.
Walton is aware of these obstacles. In her victory speech, she spoke directly to the need to build infrastructure to elect political allies. The Common Council elections in 2023 will be a key initial test of any infrastructure assembled in the interim, and of whether she has a shot at governing with efficacy and retaining her mayoral seat. At the moment, none of these prospects are clear. Although Erie County Democratic officials have pledged their support, it’s unlikely to be full-throated, or to extend to assistance in building her political base.
What is evident is that fulfillment of Walton’s campaign promises will be dependent on her securement of funding — either by easing tax abatements to increase city budgets or by identifying other sources. Cuts to the police budget could provide a new revenue stream, though this will be stridently opposed by the Police Benevolent Association and the right.
Union Allies, Union Opponents
Further analysis of the terrain Mayor Walton will have to navigate during her term requires consideration of the complex union dynamics operative in Buffalo. The Police Benevolent Association isn’t the only combative union she may encounter, though it will certainly be one of the most vehement adversaries. Her proposals to intensify oversight and disciplining of officers and allow public input into police functions (and union contracts) seem guaranteed to infuriate the cops. The PBA exerted a heavy influence over Mayor Brown, whose police accountability measures minimized substantive changes. One PBA strategy might involve the weaponization of union privileges (as codified in New York’s Taylor Law) to file grievances or unfair labor practice charges against the incoming administration in an effort to stonewall any attempts at reform.
Walton does have some advantages. She was, in her past employment as a nurse, a representative in her union, 1199SEIU. Although 1199 did endorse Brown, it has pivoted from supporting establishment candidates before — for instance, backing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2020 reelection campaign. It’s plausible that Walton could win the support of Buffalo health care unions like 1199, the New York State Nurses Association and the Communications Workers of America, which represents a wide range of professional workers at Kaleida Health, the largest private sector employer in Erie County. As a result of the city’s successful campaign to court medical sector investments like the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, health workers have become a large and influential contingent. Securing the blessing of health care unions will be crucial. Walton is also currently employed as a Buffalo public school nurse and can probably expect the continued backing of the Buffalo Teachers Federation, which endorsed her in the primary.
Reining in developers is a crucial issue for public workforces that rely on property tax revenue; most have seen little benefit from the increase in development. Any future efforts by Walton to reduce tax abatements or negotiate payment in lieu of tax agreements will bolster public funding and will likely curry favor with public sector workers and unions like AFSCME — a major potential bloc of support. Seventy-four percent of public sector workers in the Buffalo metropolitan area belong to a labor union, comprising the majority of union members in the region.
Conversely, some unions, particularly in the building trades, have an interest in maintaining present development conditions, regardless of how such tax deals strengthen the bosses — even bosses like developer CEO and arch-reactionary Carl Paladino. Many developments have been accompanied by project labor agreements favorable to building trades unions. Their leaders have leveraged these prior bargains into additional union-friendly agreements on major projects, such as renovations to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
Building trades affiliates in Buffalo often have strong conservative streaks; controversy has cropped up around the hiring of undocumented workers, with unions turning to federal immigration authorities to crack down on worksites. Racist attitudes abound within the trades. This is the case in many local building trades councils in major cities, though it is particularly pronounced in Buffalo. Limited workforce diversity also means that it is largely white workers who have profited from the influx of capital. Local disparities in Buffalo are symptomatic of more pervasive problems — including corruption — in the building trades across New York State.
Walton’s fraught pathway to effective governance isn’t only complicated by the trades. Much of the area’s remaining heavy industry lies outside city limits, where major employers like GM Powertrain and Ford (represented by the United Auto Workers) still operate. Other legacy manufacturers include Allegheny Technologies Incorporated, where the workforce is represented by the Steelworkers. Courting the support of these manufacturing unions may prove difficult. They often face threats from management of offshoring or relocation to the largely non-union South: a management tactic to secure bargaining concessions. The election of a socialist mayor could supply a pretext for companies to claim concern over the business climate, especially if their facilities receive tax deals. Labor might be convinced to attribute unfavorable management proposals to politicians like Walton, rather than their bosses.
The necessity of courting labor is amplified by the absence of significant campaign architectures for left candidates and policy goals. Buffalo’s Democratic machine exerts tight control over local politics: The Erie County Democratic Party Chair Jeremy Zellner also serves as the Democratic commissioner on the Board of Elections, giving him the power to remove candidates from the ballot. The Working Families Party, which served as the primary engine of the Walton campaign, has historically been marginal in the area, and it’s far from certain that Buffalo’s DSA chapter will be able to singlehandedly organize the requisite support for the sweeping reforms laid out in her platform. Although activist organizations like PUSH Buffalo will be able to assist with some mobilization, without organized labor, a still-influential powerbroker in the region, the path forward for Walton looks even more treacherous.
Consequential Decisions
Still, helpful to Walton is that the local Democratic establishment has seen it fit to back the winning horse, declining to sanction Brown’s write-in campaign to restore his mayoralty. This is somewhat unusual, since the city, and Brown, were key allies and centers of power for Governor Cuomo and his firm grip on the reins of New York State. For the time being (in contrast to the case of Nevada, where Democratic Party staff quit en masse after the election of a DSA slate), the Democrats on Buffalo’s Common Council are tentatively respecting her win, as is the local party structure. Their immediate acquiescence is curious, and it remains to be seen how their relationship with their new mayor may grow more complicated.
The obstacles Walton will face are a microcosm of broader ideological and material conflicts that the burgeoning socialist movement will encounter as they seek to build majorities and win executive offices. To do so will require joining forces with unions and tailoring political priorities to meet the needs of potential allies in labor. This could be a significant challenge — some unions persist in identifying their interests with those of capital, imprinted with its logic of profit and growth and hewing to largely obsolete mid-century models of labor-management partnership.
That legacy runs deep. Well-paid union manufacturing jobs at employers like Lackawanna Steel were once the norm, and many Buffalonians believe that a similar bounty of opportunity could return. The recent investment in the region has given rise to hopes that the prosperity of postwar Buffalo could be reincarnated in the form of a high-tech manufacturing and medical sector. But initiatives like Tesla’s “Gigafactory 2” facility — originally the controversial “SolarCity” project that was bankrolled by the Buffalo Billion — have roundly failed to realize those visions.
The success of Walton’s mayoralty hinges on convincing union members and leaders that the path to true revitalization of Buffalo doesn’t run through public-private partnerships. Although she has ample evidence of neoliberal policy’s painful consequences, this will not be easy. Unions will have sharply differing appraisals of her candidacy, which could trigger internal division within Western New York labor, and perhaps labor statewide. For now, most have remained quiet, likely assessing the developing situation.
Their eventual decisions will be of significant import. With very few exceptions, the Buffalo mayoral race is the first chance in generations for socialists to wield executive power in a major U.S. city. Doing so in a place that bears the scars of deindustrialization and decades of slash-and-burn neoliberal austerity would be especially meaningful. The new mayor and her allies will need to overcome skepticism from organized labor and outmaneuver entrenched party machines simply to exercise the power to govern. If they succeed, India Walton’s tenure could make Buffalo, New York, a testbed for a radically different model of urban governance in the United States.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In this edition of The Daly Report, I explain why – in the midst of a global pandemic – the rich have never had it so good.
Whilst so many of us are struggling with this pandemic, I’m here to tell you that the rich have never had it so good.
With restrictions lifted, and the vaccine rolling out, there’s some light at the end of the tunnel. But what is the damage for ordinary working people?
According to the ONS, over 800,000 people have lost their jobs with no welfare state fit for purpose. Huge numbers of people have been pushed into debt and destitution.
Then there are, of course, people who are in work but still have lost hours and income.
Given all of this, the people at the top of society are still having a great time.
According to the Resolution Foundation, around a quarter of household wealth in this country belongs to the top 1%.
The study found that they had pocketed almost £800bn more wealth than suggested by official statistics. In reality, inequality is far worse than what we know at present.
Now we all know that gross inequality exists. We see it all around us, but it’s staggering when you look at the numbers.
The working class has been shafted for a long, long time. But the worrying thing is, it’s getting worse.
Despite inequality falling during the 20th century, thanks to improving living standards, people power movements,government interventions such as the NHS, the welfare state, and higher taxation.
The trend reversed from the late 70s to 80s.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the share of the wealth income going to the top 1% has tripled in the last 40 years.
With the rise of technology and more innovative ways of working, life should be getting easier, inequality should be disappearing, and everyone should be given equal opportunities.
But it’s not happening.
Let’s go back to the 70s. Margaret Thatcher wins a thumping majority in the 1983 general election. From then on, the UK embarked on a new political path, one of individualism, of extreme free market capitalism, and decimation of trade unions. This is known to many as ‘neoliberalism’.
The same happened in the US under president Ronald Reagan, and in a much more extreme way. Wages have almost completely flatlined whilst productivity has continued to rise. People are working harder for lower wages.
The idea was to allow the rich to get richer, remove regulations or ‘red tape’, cut taxes, stop collective bargaining, allowing businesses to ‘thrive’, because eventually the wealth will trickle down.
You can imagine what really happened.
If you tell a capitalist, a businessperson, or a CEO – whose job is to make their company spend as little as possible whilst trying to make it insanely profitable; that you can have so much wealth; so much money – you think they will give it away to their workers from the goodness of their hearts?
This is not to point the finger at any particular person, although there are more than a few bad bosses knocking around.
“Which bit are you not understanding… go away!”
It’s the system – a system error if you will.
When it comes to Covid-19 people have lost jobs, income; even their lives to this awful pandemic, it’s quite shocking that there are still people who have positively impacted from it.
Jeff Bezos’s net worth exploded by $75bn during 2020. His net worth was over $200bn by the time he stepped down as boss of Amazon.
Despite his massive increase in his riches, that money didn’t trickle down to his workers. Amazon employees are currently on £9.50 per hour.
To paint a picture, Amazon’s lowest paid would need to work 650,734 and a half years just to reach the amount of wealth Bezos accrued in one year during a global pandemic, and that doesn’t even cover unpaid lunch breaks.
Sure, whilst in today’s society there exists hierarchical structures and pay, Jeff Bezos does not work 5 billion times harder than his workers.
This is unhinged, inhumane, and you couldn’t make it up.
This is what we need to do, we need to have a new relationship with work. One of a truly balanced life, with proportionate pay and conditions. The minimum wage should be increased to at least £10, maybe £12 per hour. We need to revitalise our unions to fight back against these disgraceful levels of inequality.
We also need to tax the billionaire class, increase corporate taxation, but most importantly, get those taxes that are siphoned off in places such as the Cayman Islands, and make sure we close those loopholes.
The billionaire class cannot have it all, in fact, should they even exist?
It’s disgusting that so few have so much, that our economy, and our society, and our world is always geared towards those at the top.
A meritocracy suggests we are rewarded for what we contribute to society. These wealthy fat cats drain our resources, destroy the planet, and evade taxes to enrich themselves, whilst the many, us, we’re left to pick up the pieces.
We need to address inequality as a matter of emergency.
By Curtis Daly
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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The U.S. political system is broken, many mainstream pundits declare. Their claim rests on the idea that Republicans and Democrats are more divided than ever and seem to be driven by different conceptions not only of government, but of reality itself. However, the problem with the U.S. political system is more profound than the fact that Democrats and Republicans operate in parallel universes. The issue is that the U.S. appears to function like a democracy, but, essentially, it constitutes a plutocracy, with both parties primarily looking after the same economic interests.
In this interview, Noam Chomsky, an esteemed public intellectual and one of the world’s most cited scholars in modern history, discusses the current shape of the Democratic Party and the challenges facing the progressive left in a country governed by a plutocracy.
C.J. Polychroniou: In our last interview, you analyzed the political identity of today’s Republican Party and dissected its strategy for returning to power. Here, I am interested in your thoughts on the current shape of the Democratic Party and, more specifically, on whether it is in the midst of loosening its embrace of neoliberalism to such an extent that an ideological metamorphosis may in fact be underway?
Noam Chomsky: The short answer is: Maybe. There is much uncertainty.
With all of the major differences, the current situation is somewhat reminiscent of the early 1930s, which I’m old enough to remember, if hazily. We may recall Antonio Gramsci’s famous observation from Mussolini’s prison in 1930, applicable to the state of the world at the time, whatever exactly he may have had in mind: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Today, the foundations of the neoliberal doctrines that have had such a brutal effect on the population and the society are tottering, and might collapse. And there is no shortage of morbid symptoms.
In the years that followed Gramsci’s comment, two paths emerged to deal with the deep crisis of the 1930s: social democracy, pioneered by the New Deal in the U.S., and fascism. We have not reached that state, but symptoms of both paths are apparent, in no small measure on party lines.
To assess the current state of the political system, it is useful to go back a little. In the 1970s, the highly class-conscious business community sharply escalated its efforts to dismantle New Deal social democracy and the “regimented capitalism” that prevailed through the postwar period — the fastest growth period of American state capitalism, egalitarian, with financial institutions under control so there were none of the crises that punctuate the neoliberal years and no “bailout economy” of the kind that has prevailed through these years, as Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein very effectively review.
The business attack begins in the late 1930s with experiments in what later became a major industry of “scientific methods of strike-breaking.” It was on hold during the war and took off immediately afterwards, but it was relatively limited until the 1970s. The political parties pretty much followed suit; more accurately perhaps, the two factions of the business party that share government in the U.S. one-party state.
By the ‘70s, beginning with Nixon’s overtly racist “Southern strategy,” the Republicans began their journey off the political spectrum, culminating (so far) in the McConnell-Trump era of contempt for democracy as an impediment to holding uncontested power. Meanwhile, the Democrats abandoned the working class, handing working people over to their class enemy. The Democrats transitioned to a party of affluent professionals and Wall Street, becoming “cool” under Obama in a kind of replay of the infatuation of liberal intellectuals with the Camelot image contrived in the Kennedy years.
The last gasp of real Democratic concern for working people was the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins full employment act. President Carter, who seemed to have had little interest in workers’ rights and needs, didn’t veto the bill, but watered it down so that it had no teeth. In the same year, UAW president Doug Fraser withdrew from Carter’s Labor-Management committee, condemning business leaders — belatedly — for having “chosen to wage a one-sided class war … against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society.”
The one-sided class war took off in force under Ronald Reagan. Like his accomplice Margaret Thatcher in England, Reagan understood that the first step should be to eliminate the enemy’s means of defense by harsh attack on unions, opening the door for the corporate world to follow, with the Democrats largely indifferent or participating in their own ways — matters we’ve discussed before.
The tragi-comic effects are being played out in Washington right now. Biden attempted to pass badly needed support for working people who have suffered a terrible blow during the pandemic (while billionaires profited handsomely and the stock market boomed). He ran into a solid wall of implacable Republican opposition. A major issue was how to pay for it. Republicans indicated some willingness to agree to the relief efforts if the costs were borne by unemployed workers by reducing the pittance of compensation. But they imposed an unbreachable Red Line: not a penny from the very rich.
Nothing can touch Trump’s major legislative achievement, the 2017 tax scam that enriches the super-rich and corporate sector at the expense of everyone else — the bill that Joseph Stiglitz termed the U.S. Donor Relief Act of 2017, which “embodies all that is wrong with the Republican Party, and to some extent, the debased state of American democracy.”
Meanwhile, Republicans claim to be the party of the working class, thanks to their advocacy of lots of guns for everyone, Christian nationalism and white supremacy — our “traditional way of life.”
To Biden’s credit, he has made moves to reverse the abandonment of working people by his party, but in the “debased state” of what remains of American democracy, it’s a tough call.
The Democrats are meanwhile split between the management of the affluent professional/Wall Street-linked party, still holding most of the reins, and a large and energetic segment of the popular base that has been pressing for social democratic initiatives to deal with the ravages of the 40-year bipartisan neoliberal assault — and among some of the popular base, a lot more.
The internal conflict has been sharp for years, particularly as the highly successful Sanders campaign began to threaten absolute control by the Clinton-Obama party managers, who tried in every way to sabotage his candidacy. We see that playing out again right now in the intense efforts to block promising left candidates in Buffalo and the Cleveland area in northeast Ohio.
We should bear in mind the peculiarities of political discourse in the U.S. Elsewhere, “socialist” is about as controversial as “Democrat” is here, and policies described as “maybe good but too radical for Americans” are conventional. That’s true, for example, of the two main programs that Bernie Sanders championed: universal health care and free higher education. The economics columnist and associate editor of the London Financial Times, Rana Foroohar, hardly exaggerated when she wrote that while Sanders is considered the spokesperson of the radical left here, “in terms of his policies, he’s probably pretty close to your average German Christian Democrat,” the German conservative party in a generally conservative political system.
On issues, the split between the party managers and progressive sectors of the voting base is pretty much across the board. It is not limited to the relics of social welfare but to a range of other crucial matters, among them, the most important issue that has ever arisen in human history, along with nuclear weapons: the destruction of the environment that sustains life, proceeding apace.
We might tarry a moment to think about this. The most recent general assessment of where we stand comes from a leaked draft of the forthcoming IPCC study on the state of the environment. According to the report of the study, it “concludes that climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas — these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.… On current trends, we’re heading for three degrees Celsius at best.”
Thanks to activist efforts, notably of the Sunrise movement, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey have been able to introduce a congressional resolution on a Green New Deal that spells out quite carefully what can and must be done. Further popular pressures could move it towards proposed legislation. It is likely to meet an iron wall of resistance from the denialist party, which increasingly is dedicated to the principle enunciated in 1936 by Francisco Franco’s companion, the fascist general Millán Astray: “Abajo la inteligencia! Viva la muerte!”: “Down with intelligence! Viva death.”
As of now, the Democratic response would be mixed. The president refuses to support a Green New Deal, a prerequisite for decent survival. Many in Congress, too. That can change, and must. A lot will depend on the coming election.
While all of this is going on here, OPEC is meeting, and is riven by conflicts over how much to increase oil production, with the White House pressuring for increased production to lower prices and Saudi Arabia worrying that if prices rise it “would accelerate the shift toward renewable energy” — that is, toward saving human society from catastrophe, a triviality not mentioned in the news report, as usual.
Going back to the crisis of 90 years ago, as the neoliberal assault faces increasingly angry resistance, we see signs of something like the two paths taken then: a drift toward proto-fascism or creation of genuine social democracy. Each tendency can of course proceed further, reawakening Rosa Luxemburg’s warning “Socialism or Barbarism.”
It is useful to recall that the primary intellectual forces behind the neoliberal assault have a long history of support for fascism. Just a few years before the assault was launched, they had conducted an experiment in neoliberal socio-economic management under the aegis of the Pinochet dictatorship, which prepared the ground by destroying labor and dispatching critics to hideous torture chambers or instant death. Under near-perfect experimental conditions, they managed to crash the economy in a few years, but no matter. On to greater heights: imposing the doctrine on the world.
In earlier years, their guru, Ludwig von Mises, was overjoyed by the triumph of fascism, which he claimed had “saved European civilization,” exulting, “The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.” Mussolini’s “achievement” was much like Pinochet’s: destroying labor and independent thought so that “sound economics” could proceed unencumbered by sentimental concerns about human rights and justice.
In defense of von Mises, we may recall that he was far from alone in admiring Mussolini’s achievements, though few sank to his depths of adulation. In his case, on principled grounds. All worth recalling when we consider the possible responses to the neoliberal disaster.
How do we explain the rise of the progressive left in the Democratic Party?
It’s only necessary to review the effects of the 40-year neoliberal assault, as we have done elsewhere. It’s hardly surprising that the victims — the large majority of the population — are rebelling, sometimes in ominous ways, sometimes in ways that can forge a path to a much better future.
Democrats may need to expand their base in order to keep the House in 2022. How do they do that, especially with the presence of so many different wings within the party?
The best way is by designing and implementing policies that will help people and benefit the country. Biden’s programs so far move in that direction — not enough, but significantly. Such efforts would show that under decent leadership, impelled by popular pressure, reform can improve lives, alleviate distress, satisfy some human needs. That would expand the Democratic base, just as social-democratic New Deal-style measures have done in the past.
The Republican leadership understands that very well. That is why they will fight tooth and nail against any measures to improve life, with strict party discipline. We have been witnessing this for years. One of many illustrations is the dedication to block the very limited improvement of the scandalous U.S. health care system in the Affordable Care Act — “Obamacare.” Another is the sheer cruelty of Republican governors who refuse federal aid to provide desperate people even with meager Medicaid assistance.
That’s one way to expand the base, which could have large effects if it can break through Republican opposition and the reluctance of the more right-wing sectors of the Democratic Party (termed “moderate” in media discourse). It could bring back to the Democratic fold the working-class voters who left in disgust with Obama’s betrayals, and further back, with the Democrats’ abandonment of working people since the reshaping of the party from the ‘70s.
There are other opportunities. Working people and communities that depend on the fossil fuel economy can be reached by taking seriously their concerns and working with them to develop transitional programs that will provide them with better jobs and better lives with renewable energy. That’s no idle dream. Such initiatives have had substantial success in coal-mining and oil-producing states, thanks in considerable measure to Bob Pollin’s grassroots work.
There is no mystery about how to extend the base: pursue policies that serve peoples’ interests, not the preferences of the donor class.
I worry about reports about some immigrant neighborhoods showing increased enthusiasm for the ideals and values expressed by the Republican Party of Donald Trump. Do you have any insights?
The evidence that this is happening seems slim. There was a slight shift in the last election, but the results don’t seem to depart significantly from the historical norm. Latino communities varied. Where there had been serious Latino organizing, as in Arizona and Nevada, there was no drift to Trump. Where Mexican-American communities were ignored, as in South Texas, Trump broke records in Latino support. There seem to be several reasons. People resented being taken for granted by the Democratic Party (“You’re Latino, so you’re in our pocket”). There was no effort to provide the constructive alternative to the Republican claim that global warming is a liberal hoax and the Democrats want to take your jobs away. The communities are often attracted by the Republican pretense of “defending religion” from secular attack. It’s necessary to explore these matters with some care.
Many Democrats wish to eliminate the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — because with the wafer-thin majority that they hold it is impossible to pass into law landmark pieces of legislation. However, given today’s political climate, and with the possibility looming on the horizon that Trumpist Republicans will retake the House in 2022, aren’t there risks in abolishing the filibuster?
It’s a concern, and it would have some weight in a functioning democracy. But a long series of Republican attacks on the integrity of Congress, culminating in McConnell’s machinations, have seriously undermined the Senate’s claim to be part of a democratic polity. If Democrats were to resort to filibuster, McConnell, who is no fool, might well find ways to use illegal procedures to ram through acts that would establish more firmly the rule of the far right, whatever the population might prefer. We saw that illustrated recently in his shenanigans with the Garland-Gorsuch Supreme Court appointments, but it goes far back.
Political analyst Michael Tomasky argued recently, quite seriously, that the Senate should be abolished, converted to something like the British House of Lords, with a peripheral role in governance. There has always been an argument for that, and with the evisceration of remaining shreds of democracy under Republican leadership, it is an idea whose time may have come, at least as a goal for the future.
When all is said and done, the U.S. does not have a functional democratic system, and it is probably best defined as a plutocracy. With that in mind, what do you consider to be the issues of paramount importance that progressives, both activists and lawmakers, must work on in order to bring about meaningful reform that would improve average people’s lives, as well as enhance the prospects of a democratic future?
For good reason, the gold standard in scholarship on the Constitutional Convention, by Michael Klarman, is entitled “The Framer’s Coup” — meaning, the coup against democracy by a distinguished group of wealthy, white, (mostly) slave owners. There were a few dissidents — Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (who did not take part in the Convention). But the rest were pretty much in agreement that democracy was a threat that had to be avoided. The Constitution was carefully designed to undercut the threat.
The call for plutocracy was not concealed. Madison’s vision, largely enacted, was that the new government should “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Many devices were introduced to ensure this outcome. Primary power was placed in the (unelected) Senate, with long terms to insulate Senators from public pressure.
“The senate ought to come from and represent the wealth of the nation,” Madison held, backed by his colleagues. These are the “more capable set of men,” who sympathize with property owners and their rights. In simple words, “those who own the country ought to govern it,” as explained by John Jay, First Justice of the Supreme Court. In short, plutocracy.
In Madison’s defense, it should be recalled that his mentality was pre-capitalist. Scholarship recognizes that Madison “was — to depths that we today are barely able to imagine — an eighteenth century gentleman of honor,” in the words of Lance Banning. It is the “enlightened Statesman” and “benevolent philosopher” who were to exercise power. They would be “men of intelligence, patriotism, property and independent circumstances,” and “pure and noble” like the Romans of the imagination of the time; men “whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” They would thus “refine” and “enlarge” the “public views,” Banning continues, guarding the public interest against the “mischiefs” of democratic majorities.
The picture is richly confirmed in the fascinating debates of the Convention. It has ample resonance to the present, quite strikingly in the most respected liberal democratic theory.
Madison himself was soon disabused of these myths. In a 1791 letter to Jefferson, he deplored “the daring depravity of the times” as the “stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the government — at once its tools and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations.” Not a bad picture of America today. The contours have been sharpened by 40 years of bipartisan neoliberalism, now challenged by the progressive base that Democratic Party managers are working to subdue.
With all its anti-democratic features, by 18th-century standards, the American constitutional system was a significant step toward freedom and democracy, enough so as to seriously frighten European statesmen who perceived the potential domino effect of subversive republicanism. The world has changed. The plutocracy remains in place, a terrain of struggle.
Over time, popular struggles have expanded the realm of freedom, justice and democratic participation, not without regression. There are many barriers that remain to be demolished in the political system and the general social order: bought elections, the “bailout economy,” structural racism and other attacks on basic rights, suppression of labor.
It is all too easy to extend the list and to spell out more radical goals that should be guidelines for the future, all overshadowed by the imminent threats to survival.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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One view of change when it comes to charter schools is that charter schools are awful for various reasons, especially when it comes to funding arrangements, and that what is needed is better oversight, regulation, and accountability of privately-operated charter schools so that they stop “bilking the system” and stop harming public schools that educate the majority of students.More accountability and oversight are certainly better than no accountability and oversight, but the charter school sector has operated with neither for 30 years.
The key question is: do charter schools have any valid or legitimate claim to public funds, resources, and facilities in the first place? With or without oversight, should charter schools be receiving a single public penny at all? What right do charter schools have to public wealth produced by workers?
The only way to settle these questions is to deeply appreciate the critical difference between public and private and then ascertain whether charter schools are public schools or not. It is well-known, for example, that simply declaring something is public 50 times a day does not automatically and spontaneously make it public.
The public/private question has been answered by a long list of charter school investigators: charter schools are not public schools, they are not even run by elected individuals and cannot levy taxes like public schools. Charter schools differ from public schools in many critical ways and function like privatized, marketized, corporatized entities. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not political subdivisions of the state; many operate openly as for-profit schools and many more are “managed” by for-profit corporations. Charter schools and public schools differ on organizational, legal, philosophical, and operational grounds. They are simply not the same. Thus, for example, charter schools are heavily driven by “free market” ideology. Charter school promoters see education as a commodity, not a social responsibility, and they treat parents and students as consumers and shoppers, not humans and citizens with rights that must be guaranteed in practice by government. A fend-for-yourself ethos pervades the crisis-prone charter school sector. It is no surprise that more than 3,000 charter schools have closed in just three decades. Chaos, anarchy, instability, and corruption are rampant in the highly segregated charter school sector.
If deregulated charter schools wish to exist, they can exist, but they must not have access to any public funds, resources, and facilities that legitimately belong to public schools. They have no valid claim to public wealth. At no time should a private entity be able to seize public resources that belong to the public sector. Such a setup distorts the economy and undermines education. Accountability and oversight will not fix that.
The millionaires and billionaires behind charter schools are not interested in accountability, transparency, or oversight; they are determined to engage in more neoliberal restructuring of the state so as to maximize profit as fast as possible in the context of a continually failing economy. Charter schools are pay-the-rich schemes that have nothing to do with improving schools or achievement. They are promoted under the veneer of high ideals but cannot be prettified. Charter schools are a form of state-organized corruption to pay the rich. If the tens of billions of public dollars and public facilities seized annually from public schools by charter schools were returned to public schools then students, teachers, and society would be much better off.
The post Charter Schools: Oversight and Accountability Versus Validity and Legitimacy first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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In recent years, many centrist economists have claimed that canceling student debt is economically regressive in that it would disproportionately favor higher-income households. Yet, study after study has revealed that this is not the case. In particular, a new study by the Roosevelt Institute explains that the “regressive myth rests on a series of misleading methodological foundations,” demonstrating that, contrary to these regressive claims, student debt cancelation at each proposed level of cancelation — Biden’s $10,000 proposal, Warren and Schumer’s $50,000 proposal, or the Institute’s own proposal of $75,000 — would see those most economically marginalized benefiting the most.
The Roosevelt Institute study authors contend that previous assessments depend too heavily on annual household income, which does not fully account for a household’s overall assets. Instead, they incorporated student debt distribution data by race and household wealth, which is often ignored in studies that show cancelation to be regressive, to demonstrate that canceling student debt is fundamentally progressive while also taking into account the impact of student debt on the entire population, not just student debt borrowers. The authors note that this measure “more accurately depicts the size of the burden experienced by those in lower-income households, for whom each dollar of debt is actually a more substantial barrier to economic security, access to consumer credit, and increases in net worth.” Furthermore, the authors did not include private debt, since only federal student loans are eligible for cancelation under the present student debt cancelation proposals from Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer as well as the Biden administration, while valuing student debt by its costs toward borrowers, not lenders (Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, included private debt in his proposal).
By looking at the share of wealth, not just student debt in absolute numbers, it becomes clear that borrowers in the lower percentiles are much more burdened than their counterparts in the higher percentiles. In other words, student debt makes up a larger share of their annual household incomes or share of household wealth compared to higher percentile households which makes repayment difficult and almost impossible. This is precisely why the study finds that the greatest benefits of student debt cancelation accumulate to those in the bottom 40 percentile for all racial groups. Moreover, by examining the distribution of student debt by wealth and race instead of the standard income variable, cancelation provides ample evidence that the racial wealth gap would narrow in the process. The study’s authors note that Black borrowers would, in fact, benefit significantly more from student debt cancelation than their counterpart white borrowers at every point on the income and asset distribution continuum, reflecting the fact that Black borrowers must borrow more for expenses than white students of equivalent income levels due to the racial wealth gap in family resources. For instance, Black borrowers in the poorest 10 percent of household wealth would receive around $17,000, whereas white borrowers in the same percentile would receive approximately $12,000 under the Warren-Schumer plan. Meanwhile, the wealthiest households across all race groups would benefit from debt forgiveness by an average of $562.
It is critical to emphasise the significance of this study. It is another in a long series of studies that have provided evidence that student debt cancelation is progressive from an economic standpoint. A prominent scholar on the topic, Marshall Steinbaum of the University of Utah, showed that the Warren-Schumer plan would see the lowest earners who owe more than their annual income in student debt owe just one-fifth of their annual income. According to a Brandeis University analysis, 76 percent of student loan holders would have their debt canceled with Warren’s $50,000 proposal.
We have very good reason to believe that canceling student debt provides significant economic benefits that help stimulate the economy, too. Previous research showed that canceling all student debt creates over 1 million jobs per year while increasing GDP by up to $108 billion. Over 10 years, cancelation generates between $861 billion and $1,083 billion in real GDP in 2016 dollars. Freed from the heavy burden of debt, students would utilize the extra money for day-to-day living expenses and pay off other obligations.
As student debt remains in place, it is causing significant and unequal harm to marginalized borrowers, which can only be reduced and remedied by cancelation. For instance, as shown by a recent report from the Student Borrower Protection Center, students of color disproportionately struggle to pay their student debt at a higher rate than white students — creating a vicious cycle of economic inequality along racial lines. The authors note, “America’s student debt crisis is a civil rights crisis.” Additionally, on average, Black graduates owe $7,400 more than white graduates. Thirty-two percent of Black borrowers and 15 percent of Latinx borrowers are in “default” with their payments. In New York, the six communities with the greatest levels of student loan default are largely non-white and centred in the Bronx, even though they have relatively smaller average loan balances.
Moreover, the cost of cancelation is not a straightforward concept since the total amount of student debt owed by borrowers and the costs of cancelation are not the same thing. As Sparky Abraham argues, lending money is a gamble on the future. If a substantial number of borrowers struggle to pay off their debt or die in debt, forgiving all the debt would cost less than the total amount owed, $1.7 trillion. The only way the federal government loses revenue through cancelation is when all borrowers pay back their debt.
That is the direction we are now taking, which implies that the federal government is currently collecting payments and hence, inevitably losing money on a considerably smaller percentage than commonly assumed. The standard system — get the loan, pay it back in fixed amounts over time — only works for roughly a fourth of the loans. A whopping 75 percent of student debt is carried by those who are either not paying or are paying a fixed amount based on their annual income because they can’t afford their normal payments. This suggests that cancelation would cost substantially less than the total owed by borrowers since the federal government would end up losing revenue due to accruing interest and the inability to pay the total balance by student loan borrowers.
But, of course, the economic costs of cancelation should not even be the principal deciding factor. Even if student debt forgiveness is somehow shown to be economically “regressive,” it would be irrelevant. Forgiveness is an ethical matter, regardless of “cost.” The issue at hand is the harm caused to students and its moral implications. By forcing repayment on their student debt, society is dooming its next generation to miserable and suffering lives for essentially nothing other than to increase neoliberalism’s assault on the general population, as Noam Chomsky points out. Thus, student debt — and not its forgiveness — is the truly regressive policy and an unjust imposition.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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While democracy has always been limited and restricted in societies based on the “free market” and private ownership, one of the main things detested by the pro-privatization fanatics behind segregated charter schools operated by unelected individuals are the long-standing duly-elected school boards that govern America’s 100,000 public schools. Publicly-elected school boards are a huge thorn in the side of the millionaires and billionaires behind deregulated charter schools.
Currently, many public school boards in America can exercise a certain degree of power and authority when it comes to approving or terminating a charter school’s contract. Indeed, many public school boards are increasingly saying no to more charter school applications and renewals given the big problems plaguing the charter school sector and the harmful effects charter schools have on public schools, the economy, society, and the national interest. It is clear that 30 years after they appeared in America, many are not on board with privately-operated charter schools that siphon enormous sums of money from public schools and generate poor results at many levels.
In Texas, Iowa, and elsewhere charter school promoters are working tirelessly with neoliberal state officials and legislators to bypass the elected boards that run public schools in order to replace them with entities that are answerable only to them. These entities are designed to circumvent the public authority enshrined in public school boards and typically consist of appointed individuals not accountable to the public. They usually take the form of “commissions,” “control boards,” “emergency financial managers,” “outside monitors,” or some reconfiguration of an existing government agency that significantly changes who decides what. In practice, these new entities give charter school corporations and non-educators more authority than the public, which makes it much easier to impose more charter schools on everyone.
To be sure, these supra-public entities more directly represent capital-centered interests and exclude public authority. Their power is set up to supersede the power of any public official or entity. The rich do not want individuals accountable to the public blocking the creation of new charter schools. This neoliberal strategy is not new but there is an escalation in efforts by the rich to reconfigure state power so as to impose privatization faster and with fewer “democratic obstacles.” To be clear, these top-down heavy-handed neoliberal entities are favored by charter school promoters because they (1) override public opinion, elected bodies, and democratic deliberations, (2) further concentrate power in the hands of charter school promoters, and (3) impose antisocial decisions on the polity with impunity. Objectively, they are a form of tyranny.
Charter school promoters know that there is stiff non-stop opposition to privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools. For this reason, they see rule by decree carried out by executive bodies unaccountable to the public as a pragmatic neoliberal mechanism to override persistent democratic objections to dismantling public education and privatizing schools. Decades of disinformation from charter school promoters has not succeeded in eliminating human social consciousness. From coast to coast, the problems with charter schools are being exposed more rapidly and thoroughly. Major owners of capital know that they cannot impose their narrow private interests on the public without some sort of coercive mechanism to do so.
More privatization necessarily requires less democracy. This applies to every sector of society and all levels of government. Privatization is wreaking havoc at home and abroad. And the antisocial “Great Reset” agenda of the international financial oligarchy promises even more privatization worldwide. Capital-centered interests and human-centered interests are antagonistic and cannot be harmonized. No one should believe that working people and owners of capital have the same interests. Objectively, major owners of capital and the public have opposing interests that cannot be reconciled. This point cannot be overstated.
In this context, human-centered interests must figure out how to oppose and overcome these and other neoliberal assaults on the public interest and public power. It is not acceptable for a handful of historically superfluous millionaires and billionaires to eliminate public right and impose their narrow will on everyone. Who thinks this is a good idea in the 21st century? The public has no interest in funding pay-the-rich schemes like privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools. A modern nation based on mass industrial production needs a large, organized, universal, public, free, world-class, integrated, fully-funded school system that serves everyone and is free of all private influences. There is no legitimate reason for any private actor, organization, or entity to have any access to public funds, resources, programs, and facilities that rightly belong to the public. The distinction between public and private should never be blurred.
The post Neoliberal State Restructuring: Charter School Promoters Bypass Elected Governance and Impose Rule By Decree first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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There’s been a new public fracturing of the intellectual left, typified by an essay last week from Nathan J Robinson, editor of the small, independent, socialist magazine Current Affairs, accusing Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi of bolstering the right’s arguments. He is the more reasonable face of what seems to be a new industry arguing that Greenwald is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, setting the right’s agenda for it.
Under the title “How to end up serving the right”, Robinson claims that Greenwald and Taibbi, once his intellectual heroes, are – inadvertently or otherwise – shoring up the right’s positions and weakening the left. He accuses them of reckless indifference to the consequences of criticising a “liberal” establishment and making common cause with the right’s similar agenda. Both writers, argues Robinson, have ignored the fact that the right wields the greatest power in our societies.
This appears to be a continuation of a fight Robinson picked last year with Krystal Ball, the leftwing, former co-host of a popular online politics show called The Rising. Robinson attacked her for sharing her platform with the conservative pundit Saagar Enjeti. Ball and Enjeti have since struck out on their own, recently launching a show called Breaking Points.
Notably, Greenwald invited Robinson on to his own YouTube channel to discuss these criticisms of Ball when Robinson first made them. In my opinion, Robinson emerged from that exchange looking more than a little bruised.
As with his clash with Ball, there are problems with Robinson’s fuzzy political definitions.
Somewhat ludicrously in his earlier tussle, he lumped together Enjeti, a thoughtful right wing populist, with figures like Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, both of them narcissists and authoritarians (of varying degrees of competence) that have donned the garb of populism, as authoritarians tend to do.
Similarly, Robinson’s current disagreements with Greenwald and Taibbi stem in part from a vague formulation – one he seems partially to concede – of what constitutes the “left”. Greenwald has always struck me more as a progressive libertarian than a clearcut socialist like Robinson. Differences of political emphasis and priorities are inevitable. They are also healthy.
And much of Robinson’s essay is dedicated to cherrypicking a handful of tweets from Greenwald and Taibbi to make his case. Greenwald, in particular, is a prolific tweeter. And given the combative and polarising arena of Twitter, it would be quite astonishing had he not occasionally advanced his arguments without the nuance demanded by Robinson.
Overall, Robinson’s case against both Greenwald and Taibbi is far less persuasive than he appears to imagine.
Stifling coverage
But the reason I think it worth examining his essay is because it demonstrates a more fundamental split on what – for the sake of convenience – I shall treat as a broader intellectual left that includes Robinson, Greenwald and Taibbi.
Robinson tries to prop up his argument that Greenwald, in particular, is betraying the left and legitimising the right with an argument from authority, citing some of the left’s biggest icons.
Two, Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill, are former journalist colleagues of Greenwald’s at the Intercept, the billionaire-financed online news publication that he co-founded and eventually split from after it broke an editorial promise not to censor his articles.
Greenwald fell out with the editors in spectacularly public fashion late last year after they stifled his attempts to write about the way Silicon Valley and liberal corporate media outlets – not unlike the Intercept – were colluding to stifle negative coverage of Joe Biden in the run-up to the presidential election, in a desperate bid to ensure he beat Trump.
Greenwald’s public statements about his reasons for leaving the Intercept exposed what were effectively institutional failings there – and implicated those like Scahill and Klein who had actively or passively colluded in the editorial censorship of its co-founder. Klein and Scahill are hardly dispassionate commentators on Greenwald when they accuse him of “losing the plot” and “promoting smears”. They have skin in the game.
But Robinson may think his trump (sic) card is an even bigger left icon, Noam Chomsky, who is quoted saying of Greenwald: “He’s a friend, has done wonderful things, I don’t understand what is happening now… I hope it will pass.”
The problem with this way of presenting Greenwald is that the tables can be easily turned. Over the past few years, my feeds – and I am sure others’ – have been filled with followers asking versions of “What happened to Chomsky?” or “What happened to Amy Goodman and Democracy Now?”
The answer to these very reductive questions – what happened to Greenwald and what happened to Chomsky – is the same. Trump happened. And their different responses are illustrative of the way the left polarised during the Trump presidency and how it continues to divide in the post-Trump era.
Authoritarian thinking
Robinson treats the Trump factor – what we might term Post-Traumatic Trump Disorder – as though it is irrelevant to his analysis of Greenwald and Taibbi. And yet it lies at the heart of the current tensions on the left. In its simplest terms, the split boils down to the question of how dangerous Trump really was and is, and what that means for the left in terms of its political responses.
Unlike Robinson, I don’t think it is helpful to personalise this. Instead, we should try to understand what has happened to left politics more generally in the Trump and post-Trump era.
Parts of the left joined liberals in becoming fixated on Trump as a uniquely evil and dangerous presence in US politics. Robinson notes that Trump posed an especial and immediate threat to our species’ survival through his denial of climate change, and on these grounds alone every effort had to be made to remove him.
Others on the left recoil from this approach. They warn that, by fixating on Trump, elements of the left have drifted into worryingly authoritarian ways of thinking – sometimes openly, more often implicitly – as a bulwark against the return of Trump or anyone like him.
The apotheosis of such tendencies was the obsession, shared alike by liberals and some on the left, with Russiagate. This supposed scandal highlighted in stark fashion the extreme dangers of focusing on a single figure, in Trump, rather than addressing the wider, corrupt political structures that produced him.
It was not just the massive waste of time and energy that went into trying to prove the unprovable claims of Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin – resources that would have been far better invested in addressing Trump’s real crimes, which were being committed out in the open.
It was that the politically tribal Trump-Russia narrative engulfed and subverted a meaningful politics of resistance. It snared those like Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who had been trying to break open the black box of western politics. It fortified the US security services after they had been exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations as secretly and illegally conducting mass spying on the public’s communications. It breathed a dangerous credibility into the corrupt Democratic party machine after its embarrassment over engineering Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. And it revived the fortunes of an increasingly discredited liberal media that quickly won large ratings by promoting fabulists like Rachel Maddow.
Those on the left who tried to challenge Russiagate in order to focus on real political issues were stigmatised as Putin’s puppets, their arguments were labelled “fake news”, and they were gradually algorithmed into social media purdah.
Under the Russiagate banner, parts of the left were soon rallying, however reluctantly, behind corporate champions of the planet-destroying status quo.
But it was even worse than that. The fixation on the obviously hollow Russiagate narrative by the Democratic Party, the corporate media, Silicon Valley, and the US intelligence agencies served to prove to wide swaths of conservative America that Trump was right when he berated a “liberal” establishment for being invested only in its own self-preservation and not caring about ordinary Americans.
Russiagate did not just divide the left, it dramatically strengthened the right.
Free speech dangers
Robinson knows all this, at least intellectually, but perhaps because Trump looms so large in his thinking he does not weigh the significance in the same terms as Greenwald and Taibbi.
The problem with characterising Trump as a supremely evil figure is that all sorts of authoritarian political conclusions flow from that characterisation – precisely the political conclusions we have seen parts of the left adopting. Robinson may not expressly share these conclusions but, unlike Greenwald and Taibbi, he has largely ignored or downplayed the threat they present.
If Trump poses a unique danger to democracy, then to avoid any recurrence:
- We are obligated to rally uncritically, or at least very much less critically, behind whoever was selected to be his opponent. Following Trump’s defeat, we are dutybound to restrain our criticisms of the winner, Joe Biden, however poor his performance, in case it opens the door to Trump, or someone like Trump, standing for the presidency in four years’ time.
- We must curb free speech and limit the free-for-all of social media in case it contributed to the original surge of support for Trump, or created the more febrile political environment in which Trump flourished.
- We must eradicate all signs of populism, whether on the right or the left, because we cannot be sure that in a battle of populisms the left will defeat the right, or that left wing populism cannot be easily flipped into right wing populism.
- And most importantly, we must learn to distrust “the masses” – those who elected Trump – because they have demonstrated that they are too easily swayed by emotion, prejudice and charisma. Instead, we must think in more traditional liberal terms, of rule by technocrats and “experts” who can be trusted to run our societies largely in secret but provide a stability that should keep any Trumps out of power.
Greenwald and Taibbi have been focusing precisely on this kind of political fallout from the Trump presidency. And it looks suspiciously like this, as much as anything else, is what is antagonising Robinson and others.
Greenwald’s own experiences at the Intercept underline his concerns. It was not just that Greenwald was forced out over his efforts late last year to talk about the documents found on Hunter Biden’s laptop and the questions they raised about his father, the man who was about to become US president. It was that the Intercept stopped Greenwald from talking about how the entire liberal corporate media and all of Silicon Valley were actively conspiring to crush any attempt to talk about those documents and their significance – and not on the basis of whether they were genuine or not.
Greenwald walked away from what amounted to a very well-paid sinecure at the Intercept to highlight this all-out assault on democratic discourse and the election process – an assault whose purpose was not the search for truth but to prevent any danger of Trump being re-elected. By contrast, in a tweet thread that has not aged well, Robinson along with many others quibbled about the specifics of Greenwald’s case and whether it amounted to censorship, very much ignoring the wood for the trees.
Now that @ggreenwald's Biden article has been published, the relevant question for evaluating whether the Intercept was justified in refusing to publish it is: are its claims false/insufficiently supported? How did it fall short of publication standards? https://t.co/5CwJT72XpC
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) October 29, 2020
Greenwald and Taibbi talk so much about the role of the traditional media and Silicon Valley because they understand that the media’s professed liberalism – claims to be protecting the rights of women, ethnic minorities and the trans community – is a very effective way of prettifying corporate authoritarianism, an authoritarianism the left claims to be fighting but has readily endorsed once it has been given a liberal makeover.
It is not that the “liberal” establishment – the corporate media, Silicon Valley, the intelligence services – is actually liberal. It is that liberals have come increasingly to identify with that establishment as sharing their values.
For this reason, Robinson obscures the real nature of the divide on the left when he discusses the power of the Supreme Court. He criticises Greenwald and Taibbi for ignoring the fact that the right exercises absolute power through its packing of the court with rightwing judges. He accuses them of instead unfairly emphasising the power exercised by this “liberal” establishment.
But despite Robinson’s claims, the Supreme Court very obviously doesn’t wield “all the power”, even with its veto over legislation and actions of the administration. Because an even greater power is invested in those institutions that can control the public’s ability to access and interpret information; to find out what is being done in the shadows; and to make choices based on that information, including about who should represent them.
Information control and narrative management are the deepest forms of power because they shape our ability to think critically, to resist propaganda, to engage in dialogue and to forge alliances that might turn the tide against a profoundly corrupt establishment that includes both the Supreme Court and Silicon Valley. Robinson ignores this point in his essay, even though it is fundamental to assessing “What happened to Greenwald and Taibbi?”. A commitment to keeping channels of information open and ensuring dialogue continues, even in the post-Trump era, is what happened to them.
Hard drives smashed
The crux of Robinson’s argument is that Greenwald and Taibbi have made a pact with the devil, gradually chaining their more progressive credentials to a Trumpian rightwing populism to defeat the “liberal” establishment. That, Robinson suggests, will only strengthen and embolden the right, and ensure the return of a Trump.
The evidence Robinson and others adduce for Greenwald’s betrayal, in particular, are his now regular appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, where Greenwald and Carlson often find common ground against the authoritarian excesses of that same “liberal” establishment.
That should not surprise us. Carlson and the right have an interest in the break-up of Silicon Valley’s tech monopolies that favour a Democratic Party authoritarianism over their own Republican Party authoritarianism. Greenwald has an interest in the break-up of Silicon Valley’s tech monopolies too but for a very different reason: because he is against monopolies designed to keep the public propagandised and manipulated.
Opposing them both is an authoritarian “liberal” establishment – the Democratic Party, traditional corporate media, Silicon Valley, the intelligence services – that have every interest in perpetuating their control over the tech monopolies.
Robinson contrasts Greenwald’s behaviour to his own clean hands as the editor of the small socialist magazine, Current Affairs.
But we should note that Robinson has compromised himself far more than he cares to admit. For several years he used the liberal corporate outlet of the Guardian as a platform from which to present a watered-down version of his own socialist politics. To do so, he had to ignore the paper’s appalling record of warmongering abroad and of subverting socialists like Jeremy Corbyn at home.
Robinson finally came unstuck when a Guardian editor effectively fired him for writing a satirical tweet about the huge sums of aid given by the US to Israel each year to kill and maim Palestinians under occupation and destroy their infrastructure.
My latest: In sacking a columnist over a tweet criticising US military aid to Israel, the Guardian wasn't stopping 'antisemitism'. It was policing speech to stop the left drawing attention to the continuing colonial nature of western societies https://t.co/E2gORnn5x8
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 11, 2021
One can debate whether it is wise for the left to use essentially hostile corporate platforms – liberal or conservative – to advance its arguments. But that is not the debate Robinson is trying to provoke. And for obvious reasons: because in piggybacking on the Guardian, Robinson did what Greenwald has done in piggybacking on Tucker Carlson. Both have used the reach of a larger corporate outlet to build their audience and expand the number of people exposed to their more progressive ideas.
There is an apparent difference, though. In Robinson’s case, he has admitted with impressive frankness that he would have been willing to self-censor on Israel had he been told by the Guardian beforehand that speaking out was likely to cost him his job. That sets his own position apart from Greenwald, who decided to walk from the Intercept rather than allow his work to be censored.
Nonetheless, it is far from clear, as Robinson assumes, that liberal corporate outlets are a safer bet for the left to ally with than rightwing corporate outlets.
Greenwald, remember, was eased out of the “liberal” Guardian many years before Robinson’s sacking after he brought the paper the glory associated with the Snowden revelations while also incurring the intelligence services’ wrath. Those revelations exposed the dark underbelly of the US national security state under the “liberal” presidency of Barack Obama, not Trump. And years later, Greenwald was again pushed out, this time from the supposedly even more “liberal” Intercept as part of its efforts to protect Biden, Obama’s Democratic party successor.
Greenwald wasn’t dispatched from these publications for being too righ-twing. Tensions escalated at the Guardian over the security service backlash to Greenwald’s unwavering commitment to free speech and transparency – just as the Guardian earlier fell out with Assange faced with the security services’ retaliation for Wikileaks’ exposure of western war crimes.
The Guardian’s own commitment to transparency was surrendered with its agreement to carry out the UK security services’ demand that it smash hard drives packed with Snowden’s secrets. The destruction of those files may have been largely symbolic (there were copies in the possession of the New York Times) but the message it sent to the left and to the UK intelligence agencies was clear enough: from now on, the Guardian was resolutely going to be a team player.
What these experiences with the Guardian and the Intercept doubtless demonstrated to Greenwald was that his most fundamental political principles were essentially incompatible with those of the “liberal” media – and all the more so in the Trump era. The priority for liberal publications was not truth-telling or hosting all sides of the debate but frantically shoring up the authority of a “moderate” technocratic elite, one that would ensure a stable neoliberal environment in which it could continue its wealth extraction and accumulation.
Robinson implies that Greenwald has been embittered by these experiences, and is petulantly hitting back against the “liberal” establishment without regard to the consequences. But a fairer reading would be that Greenwald is fighting against kneejerk, authoritarian instincts wherever they are found in our societies – on the right, the centre and the left.
The irony is that he appears to be getting a better hearing on Tucker Carlson than he does at the Guardian or the Intercept. Contrary to Robinson’s claim, that says more about the Guardian and the so-called liberal media than it does about Greenwald.
Captured by wokeness
Robinson also misrepresents what Greenwald and Taibbi are trying to do when they appear on rightwing media.
First, he gives every impression of arguing that, by appearing on the Tucker Carlson show, Greenwald naively hopes to persuade Carlson to switch allegiance from a right wing to left wing populism. But Greenwald doesn’t go on the Tucker Carlson show to turn its host into a leftist. He appears on the show to reach and influence Carlson’s millions of viewers, who do not have the same investment in neoliberalism’s continuing success as the multi-millionaire Carlson does.
Is Greenwald’s calculation any more unreasonable than Robinson’s belief while writing for the Guardian that he might succeed in turning the Guardian’s liberal readers into socialists? Is Robinson right to assume that liberals are any less committed to their selfish political worldview than the right? Or that – when their side is losing – liberal readers of the Guardian are any less susceptible to authoritarianism than rightwing viewers of Fox News?
Robinson also wrongly accuses Greenwald and Taibbi of suggesting that the CIA and major corporations have, in Robinson’s words, “become captured by culturally left ‘woke’ ideology”. But neither writer appears to believe that Black Lives Matter or #MeToo is dictating policy to the establishment. The pair are arguing instead that the CIA and the corporations are exploiting and manipulating “woke” ideology to advance their own authoritarian agendas.
Their point is not that the establishment is liberal but rather that it can more credibly market itself as liberal or progressive when a Trump is in power or when it is feared that a Trump might return to power. And that perception weakens truly progressive politics. By donning the garb of liberalism, elites are able to twist the values and objectives of social movements in ways designed to damage them and foster greater social divisions.
A feminism that celebrates women taking all the top jobs at the big arms manufacturers – the corporations whose business is the murder of men, women and children – is not really feminism. It is a perversion of feminism. Similarly, establishment claims to “wokeness” provide cover as western elites internally divide their own societies and dominate or destroy foreign ones.
So inspiring pic.twitter.com/VPuIV71sH9
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 3, 2019
“Woke authoritarianism”, as Robinson mockingly terms it, is not an attribute of wokeness. It is a description of one specific incarnation of authoritarianism that is currently favoured by an establishment that, in the post-Trump era, has managed more successfully to cast itself as liberal.
Mask turn-off
The central issue here – the one Robinson raises but avoids discussing – is what political conditions are most likely to foster authoritarianism in the US and other western states, and what can be done to reverse those conditions.
For Robinson, the answer is reassuringly straightforward. Trump and his rightwing populism pose the biggest threat, and the Democratic party – however dismal its leaders – is the only available vehicle for countering that menace. Therefore, left journalists have a duty to steer clear of arguments or associations that might confer legitimacy on the right.
For Greenwald and Taibbi, the picture looks far more complicated, treacherous and potentially bleak.
Trump fundamentally divided the US. For a significant section of the public, he answered their deep-seated and intensifying disenchantment with a political system that appears to be rigged against their interests after its wholesale takeover by corporate elites decades ago. He offered hope, however false.
For others, Trump threatened to topple the liberal facade the corporate elites had erected to sanctify their rule. He dispensed with the liberal pieties that had so effectively served to conceal US imperialism abroad and to maintain the fiction of democracy at home. His election tore the mask off everything that was already deeply ugly about the US political system.
Did that glimpse into the abyss fuel the sense of urgency among liberals and parts of the left to be rid of Trump at all costs – and the current desperation to prevent him or someone like him from returning to the Oval Office, even if it means further trashing free speech and transparency?
In essence, the dilemma the left now faces is this:
To work with the Democrats, with liberals, who are desperate to put the mask back on the system, to shore up its deceptions, so that political stability can be restored – a stability that is waging war around the globe, that is escalating the threat of super-power tensions and nuclear annihilation, and that is destroying the planet.
Or to keep the mask off, and work with those elements of the populist left and right that share a commitment to free speech and transparency, in the hope that through open debate we can expose the current rule by an unaccountable, authoritarian technocratic class and its corporate patrons masquerading as “liberals”.
The truth is we may be caught between a rock and hard place. Even as the warning signs mount, liberals may stick with the comfort blanket of rule by self-professed experts to the bitter end, to the point of economic and ecological collapse. And conservatives may, at the end of the day, prove that their commitment to free speech and disdain for corporate elites is far weaker than their susceptibility to narcissist strongmen.
Robinson no more has a crystal ball to see the future than Greenwald. Both are making decisions in the dark. For that reason, Robinson and his allies on the left would be better advised to stop claiming they hold the moral high ground.
The post What happened to Glenn Greenwald? Trump happened and put the left’s priorities to the test first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The words “I can’t breathe” were not only uttered by Eric Garner and George Floyd as they were murdered by police. They were also uttered by over 70 others who died in law enforcement custody over the past decade after saying those same three words, according to the The New York Times.
Policing in the United States is a force of racist violence that is entangled at the core of the capitalist system. As Robin D.G. Kelley pointed out on Intercepted With Jeremy Scahill, capitalism and racism are not distinct from one another: “If you think of capitalism as racial capitalism, then the outcome is you cannot eliminate capitalism, overthrow it, without the complete destruction of white supremacy, of the racial regime under which it’s built.”
Police in the United States act with impunity in targeted neighborhoods, public schools, college campuses, hospitals, and almost every other public sphere. Not only do the police view protesters, Black and Indigenous people, and undocumented immigrants as antagonists to be controlled, they are also armed with military-grade weapons. This police militarization is a process that dates at least as far back as President Lyndon Johnson when he initiated the 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which supplied local police forces with weapons used in the Vietnam War. The public is now regarded as dangerous and suspect; moreover, as the police are given more military technologies and weapons of war, a culture of punishment, resentment and racism intensifies as Black people, in particular, are viewed as a threat to law and order. Unfortunately, employing militarized responses to routine police practices has become normalized. One consequence is that the federal government has continued to arm the police through the Defense Logistics Agency’s 1033 Program, which allows the Defense Department to transfer military equipment free of charge to local enforcement agencies.
The scope of the 1033 Program is alarming given that “Since its inception, more than 11,500 domestic law enforcement agencies have taken part in the 1033 Program, receiving more than $7.4 billion in military equipment,” according to CNBC. There is also the federally run 1122 Program which allows the police to purchase military equipment at the same discounted rate as the federal government. In addition, there is the Homeland Security Grant Program, which provides funds for local police departments to buy military-grade armaments and weapons. The military-grade weapons provided through these federal programs include armored vehicles, assault rifles, flashbang grenade launchers, bomb-detonating robots, and night vision items. Arming the police with more powerful weapons reinforced a culture that taught police officers to learn, think and act as soldiers engaged in a war. Moreover, as Ryan Welch and Jack Mewhirter write in The Washington Post, the more militarized and armed the police are, the greater the increase in civilian deaths. As they point out:
Even controlling for other possible factors in police violence (such as household income, overall and black population, violent-crime levels and drug use), more-militarized law enforcement agencies were associated with more civilians killed each year by police. When a county goes from receiving no military equipment to $2,539,767 worth (the largest figure that went to one agency in our data), more than twice as many civilians are likely to die in that county the following year.
This arming and militarizing of the police were intensified after the 9/11 attacks and privileged a police ethos defined by “the use of violent tactics and non-negotiable force over compromise, mediation, and peaceful conflict resolution.” Police brutality is endemic to American history. As Mariame Kaba argues,
There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against Black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.
Police brutality cannot be separated from the lethal nature of white supremacy, and in its recent incarnations became “the war on crime.” Under President Nixon and every American president after him, the war on crime continued to expand and intensify into a war on Black communities. The call for “law and order” repeatedly served as a smokescreen for racist and militarized police practices that equated Black behavior with criminality and authorized the use of force against them.
As the reach of the culture of punishment expanded, its targets included protesters, immigrants, and those individuals and groups marginalized by class, religion, ethnicity and color as the other — an enemy. This is the organizing principle of a war mentality adopted by the police throughout the United States in which the behavior of Black people and other marginalized communities is criminalized. It comes as no surprise that as one study reports, “Police kill, on average, 2.8 men per day…. Police homicide risk is higher than suggested by official data. Black and Latino men are at higher risk for death than are White men, and these disparities vary markedly across place.”
A militarized culture breeds violence. It wastes money on the security industries and policing, and drains money from the socially necessary programs that could actually prevent violence. Violence is both shocking and part of everyday life, especially for those who are poor, Black, Indigenous, trans, disabled and/or otherwise disenfranchised. In the last few decades, Francesca Mari writes, “the US has had the highest homicide rate of any high-income country, and according to preliminary data released in March by the FBI, it rose by 25 percent in 2020, when an estimated 20,000 people were murdered — more than fifty-six a day.”
Police brutality became code for a more violent expression of racism that emerged with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. This was especially obvious under the Trump administration as the racist adoption of both white supremacy and a wave of police brutality against Black people and undocumented immigrants was presented to the American public as a badge of honor and an act of civic pride.
As the power of the police expanded, along with their unions, social programs were defunded. These included job programs, food stamp programs, health centers, healthcare programs and early childhood education. In many states, more money was spent on prisons than on colleges and universities, as documented by Ruth Gilmore in her book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Targeted cities inhabited mostly by poor Black and brown people were now under siege as the war on poverty morphed into the war on crime. Instead of “fighting black youth poverty,” the new crop of white supremacist politicians fought what Elizabeth Hinton called “fighting black youth crime” in her book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.
As Jim Crow re-emerged in more punitive forms, immigration was criminalized, the war on youth of color intensified, and the culture of punishment began to shape a range of institutions. This was particularly evident as mass incarceration became a defining organizing institution of the narrow racially inspired policies of criminalization in the U.S. and, by default, the prison its most notorious welfare agency. The U.S. has been in the midst of an imprisonment binge since the1960s. As Angela Y. Davis writes in Abolition Democracy:
But even more important, imprisonment is the punitive solution to a whole range of social problems that are not being addressed by those social institutions that might help people lead better, more satisfying lives. This is the logic of what has been called the imprisonment binge: Instead of building housing, throw the homeless in prison. Instead of developing the educational system, throw the illiterate in prison. Throw people in prison who lose jobs as the result of de-industrialization, globalization of capital, and the dismantling of the welfare state. Get rid of all of them. Remove these dispensable populations from society. According to this logic the prison becomes a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent.
The numbers speak for themselves. Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad makes this clear in his new preface to The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. He writes:
By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision…. The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries.
Michelle Brown has argued persuasively in her book The Culture of Punishment that the rise of police violence, especially against people of color, indicates that increases in the scale of punishment cannot be abstracted from a parallel rise in both power and apparatuses of punishment — extending from the law enforcement, military services, private security forces, immigration detention centers, to intelligence networks and surveillance apparatuses.
Moreover, the culture of punishment increasingly defines both subjects and social problems through the registers of punishment, pain and violence. How else to explain the actions of the South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who in 2021 signed legislation giving people on death row the grotesque choice between a firing squad and electrocution. Frank Knaack, the executive director of South Carolina’s ACLU, stated that capital punishment and the new law “evolved from lynchings and racial terror, and it has failed to separate its modern capital punishment system from this racist history.”
Policing cannot be understood outside of the history of criminogenic culture and a racist punishing state marked by both staggering inequities in wealth, income and power, as well as a collective mindset in which those considered non-white are considered less than human, undeserving of human rights, and viewed as disposable. The journalist Robert C. Koehler rightly argues that underlying both the larger culture and the culture of policing is a deeply ingrained white supremacy marked by a system of growing inequalities in which economic rights do not match political and individual rights. Koehler writes:
it is racism that is the trigger that disproportionately escalates police encounters with people of color. However, even more sadly, it is systemic racism that normalizes it, or legitimates it, making it largely acceptable to white American eyes and consciences. For it is not only the police who have this problem, but our entire society.
As neoliberalism failed to deliver on its promises of upward social and economic mobility, it shifted attention for its broken social experiment to attacks on immigrants, Blacks, and other populations deemed unworthy, inferior and a threat to white people. In doing so, gangster capitalism has become armed, spiraling into a form of authoritarianism that has merged the savagery of market despotism with the rancid ideology of white supremacy. Cornel West is right in arguing that neoliberal capitalism with its emphasis on materialism, racism and cruelty “allows for endemic inequality and a culture of greed and consumerism that [has trampled] on the rights and dignity of poor people and minorities decade after decade.”
Sociologist Alex Vitale rightly insists that calls for change regarding policing should not be about producing “better” police through technocratic reforms such as the increased use of body cameras and bias training, but rather with a “larger structure of economic life in America.” In the age of neoliberal austerity, the defunding of the welfare state has given way to a range of social problems — extending from the criminalization of homeless people and the relentless erasure of human rights to the mass proliferation of surveillance and the placing of police in the schools — all of which have contributed to the expansion of police power as a way to control people removed from meaningful involvement in the broader global economy. Turning over every social problem for the police to fix is more than an impossible task; it is a failed, if not diversionary, political decision.
Police violence can be understood as a form of systemic terror instituted intentionally by different levels of government against populations at home in order to realize economic gains and achieve political benefits through practices that range from assassination, extortion, incarceration, violence, and intimidation or coercion of a civilian population. Some of the more notorious racist expressions of such terror include the assassination of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton by the Chicago Police Department on December 4, 1969; the MOVE bombing by the Philadelphia Police Department in 1985; the existence of COINTELPRO (an illegal counterintelligence program designed to harass anti-war and Black resistance fighters in the 60s and 70s); the use of extortion by the local police and courts practiced on the largely poor Black residents of Ferguson; and the more publicized killings of Ma’Khia Bryant, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by the police — to name just a few instances of acute state violence.
The American nightmare that has descended upon the United States points to a crisis of power, agency, community, education and hope. The effects of neoliberalism’s death-dealing-machinery are everywhere, and police abuse is only one thread of this criminogenic social formation.
Rather than fade into the past or disappear beneath the propaganda techniques of right- wing disimagination machines, widespread poverty, racially segregated schools, rampant homelessness, ecological destruction, large-scale rootlessness, fearmongering, social atomization, voter suppression, and the politics of disposability are alive and well. It is now unabashedly reproduced and defended by a Republican Party that has become the overt symbol of white supremacy, economic ruthlessness and manufactured ignorance.
Widespread corruption is now matched by a climate of fear and a willingness on the part of Trump’s political allies to inflict violence on undesirable members of the public along with anyone voicing criticism or dissent. The scaffold of resistance now faces a malignant fascist politics growing across the globe. Fascist politics, especially in the United States, has been on steroids, especially true both during Trump’s reign in office and after his defeat, with the rule of the Republican Party in Congress and among a majority of state legislatures. If the systemic violence and lawlessness that denies Black communities a claim to human rights, citizenship and dignity are to be challenged, it is crucial to understand how neoliberal fascism becomes a machinery of dread, tearing the social fabric, while cancelling the future. As a regime of ideology, neoliberal fascism wages a political and pedagogical war against the conditions that make thinking, agency, the search for truth and informed judgment possible.
The heart of American violence does not reside merely in the culture and practice of policing in the U.S., or for that matter, in its prison-industrial complex. Its center of gravity is more comprehensive and is part of a broader crisis that extends from the threat of nuclear war and ecological devastation to the rise of authoritarian states and the human suffering caused by the staggering concentrations of wealth in the hands of a global financial elite. The roots of these multilayered and intersecting crises lie elsewhere in a new political and social formation that constitutes a racialized criminal economy that has embraced greed, violence, disposability, denial and racial cleansing as governing principles of the entire social order. This is the rule of neoliberal fascism on steroids. It is also an extermination machine rooted in a vapid nihilism that fuels the celebration of materialism and social atomization with a belief in unshakable loyalty, purification through violence and a cult of heroism.
It is crucial to understand how the threads of racial violence in its broader historical context, comprehensive connections and multidimensional layers shape capitalism in its totality to produce what David Theo Goldberg calls a machinery of proliferating dread. It’s no wonder that the same activists who are working to defund the police are also part of a collective movement to bring an end to neoliberal capitalism. Mariame Kaba writes:
People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.
The challenge that Kaba and other abolitionists are posing does not advocate for liberal reforms. Their call is to advance a radical restructuring of society. Central to their call for social change is that such a task be understood as both political and educational. This necessitates the development of political and pedagogical struggles that take seriously the need to rethink the attack on the public imagination and attack on critical agency, identity and everyday life. Also at stake is the need to identify and reclaim those institutions, such as schools, that are necessary to produce and connect an educated public to the struggle for a substantive and radical democracy. The current crisis cannot be faced through limited calls for police reforms. It demands a more comprehensive view not only of oppression and the forces through which it is produced, legitimated and normalized, but also of political struggle itself.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Photo credit: BPM Media – Protest at G7 summit in Cornwall UKThe world has been treated to successive spectacles of national leaders gathering at a G7 Summit in Cornwall and a NATO Summit in Brussels.
The U.S. corporate media have portrayed these summits as chances for President Biden to rally the leaders of the world’s democratic nations in a coordinated response to the most serious problems facing the world, from the COVID pandemic, climate change and global inequality to ill-defined “threats to democracy” from Russia and China.
But there’s something seriously wrong with this picture. Democracy means “rule by the people.” While that can take different forms in different countries and cultures, there is a growing consensus in the United States that the exceptional power of wealthy Americans and corporations to influence election results and government policies has led to a de facto system of government that fails to reflect the will of the American people on many critical issues.
So when President Biden meets with the leaders of democratic countries, he represents a country that is, in many ways, an undemocratic outlier rather than a leader among democratic nations. This is evident in:
– the “legalized bribery” of 2020’s $14.4 billion federal election, compared with recent elections in Canada and the U.K. that cost less than 1% of that, under strict rules that ensure more democratic results;
– a defeated President proclaiming baseless accusations of fraud and inciting a mob to invade the U.S. Congress on January 6 2021;
– news media that have been commercialized, consolidated, gutted and dumbed down by their corporate owners, making Americans easy prey for misinformation by unscrupulous interest groups, and leaving the U.S. in 44th place on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index;
– the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with over two million people behind bars, and systemic police violence on a scale never seen in other wealthy nations;
– the injustice of extreme inequality, poverty and cradle-to-grave debt for millions in an otherwise wealthy nation;
– an exceptional lack of economic and social mobility compared to other wealthy countries that is the antithesis of the mythical “American Dream”;
– privatized, undemocratic and failing education and healthcare systems;
– a recent history of illegal invasions, massacres of civilians, torture, drone assassinations, extraordinary renditions and indefinite detention at Guantanamo—with no accountabllity;
– and, last but not least, a gargantuan war machine capable of destroying the world, in the hands of this dysfunctional political system.
Fortunately, though, Americans are not the only ones asking what is wrong with American democracy. The Alliance of Democracies Foundation (ADF), founded by former Danish Prime Minister and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, conducted a poll of 50,000 people in 53 countries between February and April 2021, and found that people around the world share our concerns about America’s dystopian political system and imperial outrages.
Probably the most startling result of the poll to Americans would be its finding that more people around the world (44%) see the United States as a threat to democracy in their countries than China (38%) or Russia (28%), which makes nonsense of U.S. efforts to justify its revived Cold War on Russia and China in the name of democracy.
In a larger poll of 124,000 people that ADF conducted in 2020, countries where large majorities saw the United States as a danger to democracy included China, but also Germany, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, France, Greece, Belgium, Sweden and Canada.
After tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle, Biden swooped into Brussels on Air Force One for a NATO summit to advance its new “Strategic Concept,” which is nothing more than a war plan for World War III against both Russia and China.
But we take solace from evidence that the people of Europe, whom the NATO war plan counts on as front-line troops and mass casualty victims, are not ready to follow President Biden to war. A January 2021 survey by the European Council on Foreign Affairs found that large majorities of Europeans want to remain neutral in any U.S. war on Russia or China. Only 22% would want their country to take the U.S. side in a war on China, and 23% in a war on Russia.
Few Americans realize that Biden already came close to war with Russia in March and April, when the United States and NATO supported a new Ukrainian offensive in its civil war against Russian-allied separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Russia moved tens of thousands of heavily-armed troops to its borders with Ukraine, to make it clear that it was ready to defend its Ukrainian allies and was quite capable of doing so. On April 13th, Biden blinked, turned round two U.S. destroyers that were steaming into the Black Sea and called Putin to request the summit that is now taking place.
The antipathy of ordinary people everywhere toward the U.S. determination to provoke military confrontation with Russia and China begs serious questions about the complicity of their leaders in these incredibly dangerous, possibly suicidal, U.S. policies. When ordinary people all over the world can see the dangers and pitfalls of following the United States as a model and a leader, why do their neoliberal leaders keep showing up to lend credibility to the posturing of U.S. leaders at summits like the G7 and NATO?
Maybe it is precisely because the United States has succeeded in what the corporate ruling classes of other nations also aspire to, namely, greater concentrations of wealth and power and less public interference in their “freedom” to accumulate and control them.
Maybe the leaders of other wealthy countries and military powers are genuinely awed by the dystopian American Dream as the example par excellence of how to sell inequality, injustice and war to the public in the name of freedom and democracy.
In that case, the fact that people in other wealthy countries are not so easily led to war or lured into political passivity and impotence would only increase the awe of their leaders for their American counterparts, who literally laugh all the way to the bank as they pay lip service to the sanctity of the American Dream and the American People.
Ordinary people in other countries are right to be wary of the Pied Piper of American “leadership,” but their rulers should be too. The fracturing and disintegration of American society should stand as a warning to neoliberal governments and ruling classes everywhere to be more careful what they wish for.
Instead of a world in which other countries emulate or fall victim to America’s failed experiment in extreme neoliberalism, the key to a peaceful, sustainable and prosperous future for all the world’s people, including Americans, lies in working together, learning from each other and adopting policies that serve the public good and improve the lives of all, especially those most in need. There’s a name for that. It’s called democracy.
The post Why Democracies in G7 and NATO Should Reject U.S. Leadership first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Massive debt levels are a feature of contemporary capitalism that cannot be eradicated without radical change, says political scientist Éric Toussaint.
“The indebtedness of the working classes is directly connected to the widening poverty gap and increasing inequality, and to the demolition of the welfare state that most governments have been working at since the 1980s,” says Toussaint in this exclusive interview for Truthout.
Toussaint — a historian and international spokesperson for the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM), and author of several books on debt, development and globalization — shares his thoughts on debt, inequality and contemporary socialist movements in the conversation that follows.
C.J. Polychroniou: Over the past few decades, inequality is rising in many countries around the world, both across the Global North and the Global South, creating what UN Chief António Guterres called in his foreword to the World Social Report 2020 “a deeply unequal global landscape.” Moreover, the top 1 percent of the population are the big winners in the globalized capitalist economy of the 21st century. Is inequality an inevitable development in the face of globalization, or the outcome of politics and policies at the level of individual countries?
Éric Toussaint: Rising inequality is not inevitable. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the explosion of inequality is consubstantial with the phase that the world capitalist system entered into in the 1970s. The evolution of inequality in the capitalist system is directly related to the balance of power between the fundamental social classes, between capital and labor. When I use the term “labor,” that means urban wage-earners as well as rural workers and small-scale farming producers.
The evolution of capitalism can be divided into broad periods according to the evolution of inequality and the social balance of power. Inequality increased between the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the 19th century and the policies implemented by the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States in the 1930s, and then decreased up to the early 1980s. In Europe, the turn towards lower inequality lagged 10 years behind the United States. It was not until the end of World War II and the final defeat of Nazism that inequality-reducing policies were put in place, whether in Western Europe or Moscow-led Eastern Europe. In the major economies of Latin America, there was a reduction in inequality from the 1930s to the 1970s, notably during the presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico and Juan D. Perón in Argentina. In the period from the 1930s to the 1970s, there were massive social struggles. In many capitalist countries, capital had to make concessions to labor in order to stabilize the system. In some cases, the radical nature of social struggles led to revolutions, as in China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959.
The return to policies that strongly aggravated inequality began in the 1970s in Latin America and part of Asia. From 1973 onward, the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (advised by the “Chicago Boys,” the Chilean economists who had studied laissez-faire economics at the University of Chicago with Milton Friedman), the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and the dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay are just a few examples of countries where neoliberal policies were first put into practice.
These neoliberal policies, which produced a sharp increase in inequality, became widespread from 1979 in Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher, from 1980 in the United States under the Reagan administration, from 1982 in Germany under the Kohl government, and in 1982-1983 in France after François Mitterrand’s turn to the right.
Inequality increased sharply with the capitalist restoration in the countries of the former Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe. In China from the second half of the 1980s onward, the policies dictated by Deng Xiaoping also led to a gradual restoration of capitalism and a rise in inequality.
It is also quite clear that for the ideologues of the capitalist system and for many international organizations, a rise in inequality is a necessary condition for economic growth.
It should be noted that the World Bank does not consider a rising level of inequality as negative. Indeed, it adopts the theory developed in the 1950s by the economist Simon Kuznets, according to which a country whose economy takes off and progresses must necessarily go through a phase of increasing inequality. According to this dogma, inequality will start to fall as soon as the country has reached a higher threshold of development. It is a version of pie in the sky used by the ruling classes to placate the oppressed on whom they impose a life of suffering.
The need for rising inequalities is well rooted into World Bank philosophy. Eugene Black, World Bank president in April 1961, said: “Income inequalities are the natural result of the economic growth which is the people’s escape route from an existence of poverty.” However, empirical studies by the World Bank in the 1970s at the time when Hollis Chenery was chief economist contradict the Kuznets theory.
In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty presents a very interesting analysis of the Kuznets curve. Piketty mentions that at first, Kuznets himself doubted the real interest of the curve. That did not stop him from developing an economic theory that keeps bouncing back and, like all economists who serve orthodoxy well, receiving the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1971). Since then, inequalities have reached levels never before seen in the history of humanity. This is the result of the dynamism of global capitalism and the support it receives from international institutions that are charged with “development” and governments that favor the interests of the 1 percent over those of the enormous mass of the population, as much in the developed countries as in the rest of the world.
In 2021, the World Bank reviewed the Arab Spring of 2011 by claiming, against all evidence, that the level of inequality was low in the entire Arab region, and this worried them greatly as it was symptomatic of faults in the region’s supposed economic success. As faithful followers of Kuznets’ theory, Vladimir Hlasny and Paolo Verme argue in a paper published by the World Bank that “low inequality is not an indicator of a healthy economy.”
Gilbert Achcar summarizes the position taken by Paolo Verme of the World Bank as follows: “in the view of the 2014 World Bank study, it is inequality aversion, not inequality per se, that should be deplored, since inequality must inevitably rise with development from a Kuznetsian perspective.”
Finally, the coronavirus pandemic has further increased the inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. Inequality in the face of disease and death has also increased dramatically.
Neoliberal policies have created massive debt levels for so-called emerging markets and developing countries, with debt threatening to create a global development emergency. What’s the most realistic solution to the debt crisis in developing countries?
The solution is obvious. Debt payments must be suspended without any penalty payments being paid for the delay. Beyond suspension of payment, each country must carry out debt audits with the active participation of citizens, in order to determine the illegitimate, odious, illegal and/or unsustainable parts, which must be canceled. After a crisis of the size of the present one, the slates must be wiped clean, as has happened many times before throughout human history. David Graeber reminded us of this in his important book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
From the point of view of the CADTM, a global network mainly active in the Global South but also in the North, the need to suspend payments and cancel debt does not only concern developing countries, whether they are emerging or not. It also concerns peripheral countries in the North like Greece and semi-colonies like Puerto Rico.
It is time to dare to speak out about canceling the abusive debts demanded of the working classes. Private banks and other private bodies have put great energy into developing policy of lending to ordinary people who turn to borrowing because their incomes are insufficient to pay for higher education or health care. In the U.S., student debt has reached over $1.7 trillion, with $165 billion worth of student loans in default, while a large part of mortgages are subjected to abusive conditions (as the subprime crisis clearly showed from 2007). The terms of certain consumer debts are also abusive, as are most debts linked to micro-credit in the South.
Indebtedness of the working classes is directly connected to the widening poverty gap and increasing inequality, and to the demolition of the welfare state that most governments have been working at since the 1980s. This is true all over the world: whether in Chile, Colombia, the Arabic-speaking region, Japan, Europe or the United States. As neoliberal policies dismantle their systems of protection, people are obliged, in turn, to incur debt as individuals to compensate for the fact that the states no longer fulfil the obligation incumbent upon them to protect, promote and enact human rights. Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser emphasized this in their book, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto.
What are the alternatives for a sustainable model of development?
As stated in the manifesto, “End the system of private patents!”:
The health crisis is far from being resolved. The capitalist system and neoliberal policies have been at the helm at all stages. At the root of this virus is the unbridled transformation of the relationship between the human species and nature. The ecological and health crises are intimately intertwined.
Governments and big capital will not be deterred from their offensive against the populations unless a vast and determined movement forces them to make concessions.
Among new attacks that must be resisted are the acceleration of automation/robotization of work; the generalization of working from home, where employees are isolated, have even less control of their time and must themselves assume many more of the costs related to their work tools than if they worked physically in their offices; a development of distance learning that deepens cultural and social inequality; the reinforcement of control over private life and over private data; the reinforcement of repression, etc.
The question of public debt remains a central element of social and political struggles. Public debt continues to explode in volume because governments are borrowing massively in order to avoid taxing the rich to pay for the measures taken to resist the COVID-19 pandemic, and it will not be long before they resume their austerity offensive. Illegitimate private debt will become an ever-greater daily burden for working people. Consequently, the struggle for the abolition of illegitimate debt must gain renewed vigor.
The struggles that [arose] on several continents during June 2020, notably massive anti-racist struggles around the Black Lives Matter movement, show that youth and the working classes do not accept the status quo. In 2021, huge popular mobilizations in Colombia and more recently in Brazil have provided new evidence of massive resistance among Latin American peoples.
We must contribute as much as possible to the rise of a new and powerful social and political movement capable of mustering the social struggles and elaborating a program that breaks away from capitalism and promotes anti-capitalist, anti-racist, ecological, feminist and socialist visions. It is fundamental to work toward a socialization of banks with expropriation of major shareholders; a moratorium of public debt repayment while an audit with citizens’ participation is carried out to repudiate its illegitimate part; the imposition of a high rate of taxation on the highest assets and incomes; the cancelation of unjust personal debts (student debt, abusive mortgage loans); the closure of stock markets, which are places of speculation; a radical reduction of working hours (without loss of pay) in order to create a large number of socially useful jobs; a radical increase in public expenditure, particularly in health care and education; the socialization of pharmaceutical companies and of the energy sector; the re-localization of as much manufacturing as possible and the development of short supply chains, as well as many other essential demands.
A few years ago, you argued that the socialist project has been betrayed and needs to be reinvented in the 21st century. What should socialism look like in today’s world, and how can it be achieved?
In the present day, the socialist project must be feminist, ecologist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, internationalist and self-governing. In 2021, we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune when people set up a form of democratic self-government. It was a combination of self-organization and forms of power delegation that could be questioned at any moment, since all mandates could be revoked at the behest of the people. It has to be clearly stated that the emancipation of the oppressed will be brought about by the oppressed themselves, or will not happen at all. Socialism will only be attained if the peoples of the world consciously set themselves the goal of constructing it, and if they give themselves the means to prevent authoritarian or dictatorial degradation and the bureaucratization of the new society.
What Rosa Luxemburg said in 1918 is as valid today as it was then: “without a free and untrammeled press, without the unlimited right of association and assemblage, the rule of the broad masses of the people is entirely unthinkable.”
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party — however numerous they may be — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of “justice” but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom” becomes a special privilege.”
Faced with the multidimensional crisis of capitalism hurtling towards the abyss due to the environmental crisis, modifying capitalism is no longer a proper option. It would merely be a lesser evil which would not bring the radical solutions that the situation requires.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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It is well-documented that charter schools intensify segregation on the basis of ability, language, race, and socioeconomic status. Charter school demographics frequently do not reflect the demographics of public schools in their communities. This is because privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools routinely engage in selective enrollment practices even though they are “schools of choice” ostensibly “open to all.” Families may “choose” a charter school but the charter school ultimately decides who is admitted, who stays, and who doesn’t. Public schools, on the other hand, accept all students at all times. They are also more accountable and transparent than privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools.
The latest report on federally-funded segregation in the charter school sector comes from the award-winning veteran educator Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education (NPE). Carol has produced several well-researched reports in the past couple of years on extensive fraud, waste, and abuse in the crisis-prone charter school sector. She has focused mainly on the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) which annually funnels hundreds of millions of public dollars to charter schools operated by unelected individuals. The program is authorized by the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Despite many attempts, the federal government has largely ignored multiple public demands to end this state-organized corruption to pay the rich. This is despite the fact that president Joe Biden promised to ban for-profit charter schools and support efforts to bring more accountability to charters. Instead, the Biden administration has stuck to spending $440 million on the Charter Schools Program this year, which is a default win for privately-operated charter schools. Since 1994 the federal government has funneled about $4 billion in public funds to these segregated contract schools through the Charter School Program. Through her previous work, Carol showed that millions of dollars were sent to many charter schools that either never opened or operated only for a few years and then closed, leaving many families high and dry.
In her latest investigation, Carol shows how public money from the federal Charter Schools Program is being used in North Carolina to strengthen segregation through the mechanism of charter schools. These are alternatively known as “white-flight academies.” Among other things, Carol notes that the justification for the use of many grant monies from the federal Charter Schools Program is often weak and makes no sense. Many disturbing details and cases can be found here. For example, 11 charter schools in North Carolina that received CSP funds “have significant overrepresentation of White students or a significant underrepresentation of Black students compared with the population of the public school district in which they are located.” So much for the worn-out assertion by charter school advocates that charter schools are about the civil rights of minority students.
Sadly, there is no shortage of such examples in many cities across the country. It is not easy to find charter schools that are diverse and integrated. In Rochester, New York, for example, the Genesee Community Charter School is not only known for being predominantly white and wealthy, but also for resisting any attempts to diversify and integrate. The New York State Board of Regents has repeatedly criticized the privately-operated charter school for maintaining a student body that is much wealthier and whiter than the Rochester City School District. The same can be said about the notorious Success Academies charter school chain in New York City. Many of these charter schools, it should also be noted, rely heavily on anachronistic Skinnerian behaviorist practices to enforce student obedience.
Another troubling twist in the evolution of privately-operated charter schools is the growing use by religious organizations, churches, Catholic schools, and private schools of the charter school mechanism to further segregate communities. This is another expression of the accelerated neoliberal restructuring of state arrangements by powerful private interests to seize public funds in the context of a continually failing economy. In the neoliberal period, public authority is increasingly being usurped to serve privileged private interests in the sphere of education. Private entities of various kinds are eager to fund their operations through the seizure of public funds that belong to the public sector. This parasitic appropriation of public funds by non-transparent and non-diverse private or religious entities usually goes hand in hand with offering fewer services and programs as well (e.g., transportation services and food programs). And more often than not, to make-up for “cost reductions,” parents are pressured or required to donate time and/or money to these private entities.
Privatized education arrangements are rarely about serving all students, let alone equally. More than anything else, such arrangements reflect and fortify the stratification found in society. They reinforce various inequalities. They do not reduce exclusion and segregation. They are the opposite of unitary public school systems that have emerged around the world to educate all students as part of a modern nation-building project.
Modern societies based on mass industrial production cannot survive without large, public, free, universal, school systems. Modern societies should not reduce a social necessity and public good like education to a commodity or treat parents and students as consumers who fend-for-themselves in an increasingly chaotic and anarchic education marketplace. A system of winners and losers ensures inequality and belongs in the past.
The post Public Money Used to Increase Segregated Charter Schools first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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With his wide-brimmed peasant hat and oversized teacher’s pencil held high, Peru’s Pedro Castillo has been traveling the country exhorting voters to get behind a call that has been particularly urgent during this devastating pandemic: “No más pobres en un país rico” – No more poor people in a rich country. In a cliffhanger of an election with a huge urban-rural and class divide, it appears that the rural teacher, farmer and union leader is about to make history by defeating–by less than one percent–powerful far-right candidate Keiko Fujimori, scion of the country’s political “Fujimori dynasty.”
Fujimori is challenging the election’s results, alleging widespread fraud. Her campaign has only presented evidence of isolated irregularities, and so far there is nothing to suggest a tainted vote.
The post Rural Teacher Pedro Castillo Poised To Write A New Chapter In Peru’s History appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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Photo credit: UNICEF Teachers and students were able to return to school in Lao Cai, Viet Nam, in May 2020A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that worries about the COVID pandemic in the United States are at their lowest level since it began. Only half of Americans are either “very worried” (15%) or “somewhat worried” (35%) about the virus, while the other half are “not very worried” (30%) or “not worried at all” (20%).
But the news from around the world makes it clear that this pandemic is far from over, and a story from Vietnam highlights the nature of the danger.
Vietnam is a COVID success story, with one of the lowest rates of infection and death in the world. Vietnam’s excellent community-based public health system prevented the virus from spreading beyond isolated cases and localized outbreaks, without a nationwide lockdown. With a population of 98 million people, Vietnam has had only 8,883 cases and 53 deaths.
However, more than half of Vietnam’s cases and deaths have come in the last two months, and three-quarters of the new cases have been infected with a new “hybrid” variant that combines the two mutations detected separately in the Alpha (U.K.) and Delta (India) variants.
Vietnam is a canary in the pandemic coal-mine. The way this new variant has spread so quickly in a country that has defeated every previous form of the virus suggests that this one is much more infectious.
This variant must surely also be spreading in other countries, where it will be harder to detect among thousands of daily cases, and will therefore be widespread by the time public health officials and governments respond to it. There may also be other highly infectious new variants spreading undetected among the millions of cases in Latin America and other parts of the world.
A new study in The Lancet medical journal has found that the Alpha (U.K.), Beta (South Africa) and Delta (India) variants are all more resistant to existing vaccines than the original COVID virus, and the Delta variant is still spreading in countries with aggressive vaccination programs, including the U.K.
The Delta variant accounts for a two-month high in new cases in the U.K. and a new wave of infections in Portugal, just as developed countries ease restrictions before the summer vacation season, almost certainly opening the door to the next wave. The U.K., which has a slightly higher vaccination rate than the United States, had planned a further relaxation of restrictions on June 21st, but that is now in question.
China, Vietnam, New Zealand and other countries defeated the pandemic in its early stages by prioritizing public health over business interests. The United States and Western Europe instead tried to strike a balance between public health and their neoliberal economic systems, breeding a monster that has now killed millions of people. The World Health Organization believes that six to eight million people have died, about twice as many as have been counted in official figures.
Now the WHO is recommending that wealthier countries who have good supplies of vaccines postpone vaccinating healthy young people, and instead prioritize sending vaccines to poorer countries where the virus is running wild.
President Biden has announced that the United States is releasing 25 million doses from its stockpiles, most of which will be distributed through the WHO’s Covax program, with another 55 million to follow by the end of June. But this is a tiny fraction of what is needed.
Biden has also agreed to waive patent rights on vaccines under the WTO’s TRIPS rules (the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), but that has so far been held up at the WTO by Canada and right-wing governments in the U.K., Germany, Brazil, Australia, Japan and Colombia. People have taken to the streets in many countries to insist that a WTO TRIPS Council meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 8-9, must agree to waive patent monopolies.
Since all the countries blocking the TRIPS waiver are U.S. allies, this will be a critical test of the Biden administration’s promised international leadership and diplomacy, which has so far taken a back seat to dangerous saber-rattling against China and Russia, foot-dragging on the JCPOA with Iran and war-crime-fueling weapons-peddling to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Ending international vaccine apartheid is not just a matter of altruism, or even justice. It is a question of whether we will end this pandemic before vaccine-resistant, super-spreading and deadlier variants fuel even more toxic new waves. The only way humanity can win this struggle is to act collectively in our common interest.
Public Citizen has researched what it would take to vaccinate the world, and concluded that it would cost only $25 billion – 3% of the annual U.S. budget for weapons and war – to set up manufacturing plants and distribution hubs across the world and vaccinate all of humanity within a year. Forty-two Progressives in Congress have signed a letter to President Biden to urge him to fund such a plan.
If the world can agree to make and distribute a People’s Vaccine, it could be the silver lining in this dark cloud, because this ability to act globally and collectively in the public interest is precisely what we need to solve so many of the most serious problems facing humanity.
For example, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) is warning that we are in the midst of a triple crisis of climate change, mass extinction and pollution. Our neoliberal political and economic system has not just failed to solve these problems. It actively works to undermine efforts to do so, granting people, corporations and countries who profit from destroying the natural world the freedom to do so without constraint.
That is the very meaning of laissez-faire, to let the wealthy and powerful do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us, or even for life on Earth. As the economist John Maynard Keynes reputedly said in the 1930s, “Laissez-faire capitalism is the absurd idea that the worst people, for the worst reasons, will do what is best for us all.”
Neoliberalism is the reimposition of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism, with all its injustices, inequality and oppression, on the people of the 21st century, prioritizing markets, profits and wealth over the common welfare of humanity and the natural world our lives depend on.
Berkeley and Princeton political theorist Sheldon Wolin called the U.S. political system, which facilitates this neoliberal economic order, “inverted totalitarianism.” Like classical totalitarianism, it concentrates ever more wealth and power in the hands of a small ruling class, but instead of abolishing parliaments, elections and the superficial trappings of representative government as classical totalitarianism did, it simply co-opts them as tools of plutocracy, which has proved to be a more marketable and sustainable strategy.
But now that neoliberalism has wreaked its chaos for a generation, popular movements are rising up across the world to demand systemic change and to build new systems of politics and economics that can actually solve the huge problems that neoliberalism has produced.
In response to the 2019 uprising in Chile, its rulers were forced to agree to an election for a constitutional assembly, to draft a constitution to replace the one written during the Pinochet dictatorship, one of the vanguards of neoliberalism. That election has now taken place, and the ruling party of President Pinera and other traditional parties won less than a third of the seats. So the constitution will instead be written by a super-majority of citizens committed to radical reform and social, economic and political justice.
In Iraq, which was also swept by a popular uprising in 2019, a new government seated in 2020 has launched an investigation to recover $150 billion in Iraqi oil revenues stolen and smuggled out of the country by the corrupt officials of previous governments.
U.S.-backed former exiles flew into Iraq on the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2003 “with empty pockets to fill,” as a Baghdad taxi driver told a Western reporter at the time. While U.S. forces and U.S.-trained Iraqi death squads destroyed their country, they hunkered down in the Green Zone in Baghdad and controlled and looted Iraq’s oil revenues for the next seventeen years. Now maybe Iraq can recover the stolen money its people so desperately need, and start using its oil wealth to rebuild that shattered country.
In Bolivia, also in 2019, a U.S.-backed coup overthrew its popular indigenous president, Evo Morales. But the people of Bolivia rose up in a general strike to demand a new election, Morales’ MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) Party was restored to power, and Luis Arce, Morales’ former Economy Minister, is now Bolivia’s President.
Around the world, we are witnessing what can happen when people rise up and act collectively for the common good. That is how we will solve the serious problems we face, from the COVID pandemic to the climate crisis to the terminal danger of nuclear war. Humanity’s survival into the twenty-second century and all our hopes for a bright future depend on building new political and economic systems that will simply and genuinely “do what is best for all of us.”
The post A People’s Vaccine Against a Mutating Virus and Neoliberal Rule first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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June 4, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the first charter school law in the United States. Privately-operated charter schools are now legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont have no laws enabling the creation of charter schools.
About 3.3 million youth are currently enrolled in roughly 7,400 charter schools across the country. By comparison, about 50 million students are enrolled in 100,000 public schools in the U.S. The U.S. public education system has been around for more than 150 years and educates 90% of the nation’s youth.
While charter schools, also known as contract schools, have grown rapidly over the last three decades, so have the endless serious problems associated with them, including the closure of more than 3,000 charter schools, usually for reasons such as financial malfeasance, mismanagement, or poor academic performance. Scandal, corruption, and controversy have been the main fellow-travelers of these segregated and outsourced schools operated by unelected individuals.
From the perspective of major owners of capital and their representatives, there is much to celebrate about the 30th anniversary of charter schools, namely the neoliberal restructuring of the state to undermine the American public education system in order to funnel tens of billions of public dollars from public schools into their private hands. Not surprisingly, the rise of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools has been a disaster for public schools, the public interest, society, the economy, and the national interest. The only thing “innovative” about charter schools is their ability to develop new forms of transferring public funds to narrow private interests under the banner of high ideals. Charter schools have always been pay-the-rich schemes that take socially-produced wealth out of the economy and leave the public worse off. As “private-public-partnerships” they represent another form of state-organized corruption to pay the rich. This has been the norm since 1991. Charter schools never started out as a humble, virtuous, organic, pro-social, benign, grass-roots “experiment.” Charter schools are a textbook example of neoliberal arrangements in the sphere of education. Their different forms, shapes, profiles, locations, and sizes do not change their neoliberal essence.
The public should not forget that charter schools are not public schools and that many, if not most, are not really “tuition-free” or “open to all kids.” It is well-known that charter schools choose parents and students, not the other way around. Charter schools routinely cherry-pick students and engage in discriminatory enrollment practices. It is also the case that many charter school authorizers are not really public in the proper sense of the word either. It is also worth noting that deregulated charter schools are created by private citizens.
Charter schools have not closed the “opportunity gap” or the “achievement gap.” Thousands have a poor academic track record. Their “autonomy” and “flexibility” to deliver “results” in the name of “accountability,” “choice,” and “competition” is another way of saying that they do not follow the same public standards that apply to public schools and that they operate with impunity. Coast to coast, the gap between charter school hype and charter school realities remains as wide today as it was 30 years ago. Charter schools are notorious for over-promising and under-delivering.
Charter schools are segregated, deunionized, unaccountable, non-transparent, deregulated schools that spend lots of money on advertising—just like a private business. They usually over-pay administrators, are run by unelected individuals, and cannot levy taxes. They hire more inexperienced and more uncertified teachers than public schools, generally pay teachers less than their public school counterparts, and also tend to have fewer nurses than public schools. Many charter school teachers are not even part of an employee retirement system.
Charter schools also tend to offer fewer full-fledged services and programs than public schools. Many do not provide transportation or proper food services and sports programs. On top of all this, hundreds of charter schools open and close every year, ensuring chaos, instability, and anarchy in the sphere of education, which is terrible for teaching, learning, and community.
Importantly, charter school promoters openly and publicly embrace “free market” ideology even though recurring economic crises have thoroughly discredited such an antisocial ideology. It is generally recognized that there is little that is “free” about the “free market” in a highly monopolized economy with a fine-tuned revolving door between government and rich individuals. With no sense of irony, charter school promoters casually talk about students and parents as consumers and shoppers instead of humans and citizens with basic rights that a modern government is duty-bound to guarantee in practice. Charter school promoters believe that a social Darwinist outlook based on winners and losers—competition—is wonderful for education. They think this is a good healthy thing. They endorse the idea and strategy that “edupreneurs” should use public dollars to run segregated schools governed by unelected individuals. They loathe the American public education system which has produced millions of educated individuals who have built the nation. They have no conception of education as a social responsibility and a human right that must be guaranteed. In the context of a modern socialized economy, charter schools increase social irresponsibility and anarchy in the sphere of education.
Charter school advocates are also averse to grasping the critical difference between public and private. They prefer to blur this distinction for private financial gain. Charter school advocates believe that if they assert 50 times a day that a charter school is a public school, then this will cause people to not recognize their privatized, marketized, corporatized character. They think that no one can see charter schools for the pay-the-rich schemes that they are.
There is nothing to celebrate about neoliberal education arrangements called charter schools. They have not solved any problems, just created more. Charter schools cannot be prettified no matter how hard their supporters and promoters try. They are terribly inequitable and do not meet the nation’s needs. Thirty years later all we have is even more controversy and scandal surrounding charter schools. Cyber charter schools and so-called “no-excuses” charter schools are especially scandalous. Is this what a successful “education experiment” looks like? What evidence is there that the next 30 years will be any better?
Charter schools have changed the American education landscape for the worse, which is why opposition to them is steadily-growing, not diminishing. This is bound to happen as the many problems with charter schools become more exposed and analyzed. The public gains nothing from funneling socially-produced wealth into the hands of narrow private interests concerned with cashing in on kids. Neoliberal arrangements in education are a big step backward, not something to rejoice.
One of the ironies in this entire saga is that one of the oldest charter schools in Minnesota, home to the first charter school law in the U.S., was recently shut down for the usual litany of serious problems affecting most charter schools. Many charter schools have a short shelf life. Hundreds close every year, leaving many minority families feeling angry and abandoned. Not surprisingly, charter school promoters rarely highlight, let alone openly and honestly discuss, the many grave problems plaguing the crisis-prone charter school sector. They prefer instead to present a Disney-esque portrait of charter schools, something akin to a fairy tale.
The next 30 years can be much better and much different. We can have a public school system free of the influence of privileged private interests. We can and must have a public school system controlled by a public authority worthy of the name.
Moving forward, it is critical for defenders of public education and the public interest to keep developing and strengthening the movement against privatization in general and school privatization in particular. This is an exciting time to keep galvanizing more people from all walks of life to keep public funds, resources, and facilities in public hands. History and justice are on our side.
Capital-centered interests will always oppose human-centered interests. Fortunately, there is a growing recognition that privatizers and neoliberals are historically superfluous and a big burden on society.
The post 30th Anniversary of Charter Schools: Three Decades of Neoliberal Wrecking first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Sold under the pretence of a quest for optimising well-being and ‘happiness’, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of peoples and the environment. What really matters is the strive to maintain viable profit margins. The prevailing economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption and needs a certain level of annual GDP growth for large firms to make sufficient profit.
But at some point, markets become saturated, demand rates fall and overproduction and overaccumulation of capital becomes a problem. In response, we have seen credit markets expand and personal debt increase to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages have been squeezed, financial and real estate speculation rise (new investment markets), stock buy backs and massive bail outs and subsidies (public money to maintain the viability of private capital) and an expansion of militarism (a major driving force for many sectors of the economy).
We have also witnessed systems of production abroad being displaced for global corporations to then capture and expand markets in foreign countries.
The old normal
Much of what is outlined above is inherent to capitalism. But the 1980s was a crucial period that helped set the framework for where we find ourselves today.
Remember when the cult of the individual was centre stage? It formed part of the Reagan-Thatcher rhetoric of the ‘new normal’ of 1980s neoliberalism.
In the UK, the running down of welfare provision was justified by government-media rhetoric about ‘individual responsibility’, reducing the role of the state and the need to ‘stand on your own two feet’. The selling off of public assets to profiteering corporations was sold to the masses on the basis of market efficiency and ‘freedom of choice’.
The state provision of welfare, education, health services and the role of the public sector was relentlessly undermined by neoliberal dogma and the creed that the market (global corporations) constituted the best method for supplying human needs.
Thatcher’s stated mission was to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit by rolling back the ‘nanny state’. She wasted little time in crushing the power of the trade unions and privatising key state assets.
Despite her rhetoric, she did not actually reduce the role of the state. She used its machinery differently, on behalf of business. Neither did she unleash the ‘spirit of entrepreneurialism’. Economic growth rates under her were similar as in the 1970s, but a concentration of ownership occurred and levels of inequality rocketed.
Margaret Thatcher was well trained in perception management, manipulating certain strands of latent populist sentiment and prejudice. Her free market, anti-big-government platitudes were passed off to a section of the public that was all too eager to embrace them as a proxy for remedying all that was wrong with Britain. For many, what were once regarded as the extreme social and economic policies of the right became entrenched as the common sense of the age.
Thatcher’s policies destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in just two years alone. The service sector, finance and banking were heralded as the new drivers of the economy, as much of Britain’s manufacturing sector was out-sourced to cheap labour economies.
Under Thatcher, employees’ share of national income was slashed from 65% to 53%. Long gone are many of the relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs that helped build and sustain the economy. In their place, the country has witnessed the imposition of a low taxation regime and low-paid and insecure ‘service sector’ jobs (no-contract work, macjobs, call centre jobs – many of which soon went abroad) as well as a real estate bubble, credit card debt and student debt, which helped to keep the economy afloat.
However, ultimately, what Thatcher did was – despite her rhetoric of helping small-scale businesses and wrapping herself in the national flag – facilitate the globalisation process by opening the British economy to international capital flows and allowing free rein for global finance and transnational corporations.
Referring to the beginning of this article, it is clear whose happiness and well-being counts most and whose does not matter at all as detailed by David Rothkopf in his 2008 book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. Members of the superclass belong to the megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world and come from the highest echelons of finance, industry, the military, government and other shadow elites. These are the people whose interests Margaret Thatcher was serving.
These people set the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, G-7, G-20, NATO, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
And let us not forget the various key think tanks and policy making arenas like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute and Chatham House as well as the World Economic Forum (WEF), where sections of the global elite forge policies and strategies and pass them to their political handmaidens.
Driven by the vision of its influential executive chairman Klaus Schwab, the WEF is a major driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, a tectonic shift that intends to change how we live, work and interact with each other.
The new normal
The great reset envisages a transformation of capitalism, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as livelihoods and entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceutical corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.
Under the cover of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, the great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which smaller enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs and roles will be carried out by AI-driven technology.
The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
At the same time new (‘green product’) markets are being created and, on the back of COVID, fresh opportunities for profit extraction are opening up abroad. For instance, World Bank Group President David Malpass has stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns that have been implemented in response to the Covid-19 crisis. This ‘help’ will be on condition that neoliberal reforms and the undermining of public services are implemented and become further embedded.
Just a month into the COVID crisis, the IMF and World Bank were already facing a deluge of aid requests from developing countries. Scores of countries were asking for bailouts and loans. Ideal cover for rebooting the global economy via a debt crisis and the subsequent privatisation of national assets and the further ‘structural adjustment’ of economies.
Many people waste no time in referring to this as some kind of ‘Marxist’ or ‘communist’ takeover of the planet because a tiny elite will be dictating policies. This has nothing to do with Marxism. An authoritarian capitalist elite – supported by their political technocrats – aims to secure even greater control of the global economy. It will no longer be a (loosely labelled) ‘capitalism’ based on ‘free’ markets and competition (not that those concepts ever really withstood proper scrutiny). Economies will be monopolised by global players, not least e-commerce platforms run by the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook and Google and their multi-billionaire owners.
Essential (for capitalism) new markets will also be created through the ‘financialisation’ and ownership of all aspects of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the fraudulent notion of protecting the environment.
The so-called ‘green economy’ will fit in with the notion of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’. A bunch of billionaires and their platforms will control every aspect of the value chain. Of course, they themselves will not reduce their own consumption or get rid of their personal jets, expensive vehicles, numerous exclusive homes or ditch their resource gobbling lifestyles. Reduced consumption is meant only for the masses.
They will not only control and own data about consumption but also control and own data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved. Independent enterprises will disappear or become incorporated into the platforms acting as subservient cogs. Elected representatives will be mere technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.
The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants and have cemented their dominance. Many small and medium-size independent enterprises have been pushed towards bankruptcy. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID19 government measures.
Politicians in countries throughout the world have been using the rhetoric of the WEF’s great reset, talking of the need to ‘build back better’ for the ‘new normal’. They are all on point. Hardly a coincidence. Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms given that, in the ‘green new normal’, unfettered consumption will no longer be an option for the bulk of the population.
It has long been the case that a significant part of the working class has been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – three decades ago, such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. They have had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services.
But what we are now seeing is the possibility of hundreds of millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. Forget about the benign sounding ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and its promised techno-utopia. What we are witnessing right now seems to be a major restructuring of capitalist economies.
With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision (3D printing/manufacturing, drone technology, driverless vehicles, lab grown food, farmerless farms, robotics, etc), a mass labour force – and therefore mass education, mass welfare, mass healthcare provision and entire systems that were in place to reproduce labour for capitalist economic activity – will no longer be required. As economic activity is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed.
In a reorganised system that no longer needs to sell the virtues of excessive individualism (consumerism), the levels of political and civil rights and freedoms we have been used to will not be tolerated.
Neoliberalism might have reached its logical conclusion (for now). Making trade unions toothless, beating down wages to create unimaginable levels of inequality and (via the dismantling of Bretton Woods) affording private capital so much freedom to secure profit and political clout under the guise of ‘globalisation’ would inevitably lead to one outcome.
A concentration of wealth, power, ownership and control at the top with large sections of the population on state-controlled universal basic income and everyone subjected to the discipline of an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.
Perception management is, of course, vital for pushing through all of this. Rhetoric about ‘liberty’ and ‘individual responsibility’ worked a treat in the 1980s to help bring about a massive heist of wealth. This time, it is a public health scare and ‘collective responsibility’ as part of a strategy to help move towards near-monopolistic control over economies by a handful of global players.
And the perception of freedom is also being managed. Once vaccinated many will begin to feel free. Freer than under lockdown. But not really free at all.
The post From 1980s Neoliberalism to the ‘New Normal’ first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Despite dumping on his former boss Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings has played his own role in the hollowing out Britain’s democracy, writes Simon Hannah.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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Currently, New York State limits the number of charter schools allowed in the state to 460. In 1998, when the state passed its charter school law, the numerical limit was 100. The law has been amended three times since 1998 to not only increase the number of charter schools allowed in the state but to also further lower the standards of accountability and transparency required of privately-operated charter schools.
Putting aside the issues of inflated charter school waiting lists, widespread corruption, discriminatory enrollment practices, high teacher turnover rates, and the fact that 50 charter schools have closed in New York State over the past 20 years, this dramatic neoliberal expansion in the number of charter schools allowed in the state has produced serious problems for public schools and charter schools themselves. The biggest problem has been charter schools depriving public schools of billions of dollars in public funds, resources, and facilities while delivering unimpressive results on several levels. It is also worth noting that with black and Hispanic students making up more than 90 percent of the students enrolled in New York City’s charter schools, these schools are some of the most segregated in the country. Such a setup not only undermines public education but also harms the economy, society, and the national interest.
While nearly 400 charter schools have been authorized to date, about 325 were open in 2020-2021. New York City alone is home to about 265 charter schools. The City reached its charter school limit in March 2019. About 92 open/unused charter school slots remain available outside New York City. There are other statistics pertaining to charter schools in New York State that account for why these numbers don’t always round up evenly (e.g., the number of “conversion” charter schools established in the state over the years), but these are reliable numbers to go by. The main issue is the statewide cap on charter schools and how this is currently affecting New York City in particular.
Not surprisingly, major owners of capital are once again deploying a pitch fork mentality to bully legislators, leaders, and state and city officials to override the public interest and increase the cap on charter schools allowed in New York City. For neoliberals and privatizers there are few pay-the-rich schemes more profitable than deregulated charter schools run by unelected individuals. Owning and operating more segregated charter schools is critical for owners of capital desperately trying to counteract the law of the falling rate of profit. The neoliberal restructuring of state laws is critical to maximizing profit as fast as possible, regardless of how damaging this is to the natural and social environment. Neoliberals and privatizers want laws changed in order to advance their narrow private interests at the expense of the common good—and all of this ruinous activity is carried out under the veneer of high ideals (e.g., “empowering parents” and offering “choices”).
While preventing a rise in the number of charter schools allowed in New York State is a good thing, it would be immensely better if no public funds, resources, and buildings found their way into the hands of charter school owners and operators. These public resources are produced by working people and belong to the public, not narrow private interests. Capitalist firms like Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) and Education Management Organizations (EMOs) should not have access to public funds and resources that belong to the public. Ending the flow of public funds, resources, and facilities to the private interests that operate non-profit and for-profit charter schools would greatly benefit public schools, society, the economy, and the national interest.
The public should remain vigilant about the non-stop effort by pro-privatization fanatics to push for an increase in the number of charter schools allowed in the state and city. No one should be fooled by their grandstanding and twisted logic. Now is the time to declare a moratorium on all new charter schools and to ensure that public funds, resources, and facilities remain in public hands only.
The post New York: Oppose Charter School Cap Increase first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Foreign policy analyst John Feffer is the author of The Pandemic Pivot: A Report from the Institute for Policy Studies, The Transnational Institute, and Focus on the Global South (Seven Stories Press, 2020). In this interview, Feffer provides a framework for how a unified pandemic response could repair and restore social movements and compacts in helping to reshape the national and global economy.
Daniel Falcone: Could you talk about The Pandemic Pivot and how the concept, format and structure developed for the book? Also, could you share your argument and what you contend in the book?
John Feffer: The project started in the spring, as the pandemic was developing and spreading. Around May we (at the Institute for Policy Studies) realized that this was a focal point in two respects. First, governments were responding to the pandemic in a systematic fashion, which revealed some important trends that had hitherto been either obscured or not remarked upon sufficiently — both on the positive side and on the negative side. Second, progressive activists were a little slow to respond to this phenomenon both in terms of the severity of it and its implications politically and economically. But also, we failed to take advantage of some of the opportunities that presented themselves in an otherwise very terrible period.
We wanted to get the reactions of activists and scholars and journalists from around the world. So, we approached approximately 80 folks to participate in a project. We divided up the topic of the pandemic into eight topic areas, and then invited experts on those topics of economic development, war and peace, migration and refugee questions, and so on. We didn’t necessarily have an argument, per se, going into it — more of a rough hypothesis that this was an important moment globally, that populist right-wing governments were taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis by consolidating their political power, and that the progressives should formulate some kind of response both to the pandemic itself but also to the right-wing activities around the pandemic.
We held those discussions over last summer. And then I prepared a transcript from those conversations. I checked them with all the participants to make sure that their quotes were correct and their insights were summarized correctly. And then I used that as the basis for each of the chapters of the report. It was my job to flesh out these arguments.
The argument coming out of this is that the pandemic brought into relief many of the existing inequities, whether political or social, aggravated those inequities and provided an opportunity for powerful actors of the world to increase their power. Those actors might be the leaders of countries or of institutions, like Amazon and Jeff Bezos, who were well positioned to take advantage economically of the breakdown of the global economy and the breakdown of traditional brick-and-mortar businesses in a quarantine situation.
At the same time, some transformational possibilities were also revealed. So, for instance, obviously, the climate crisis was very much in the foreground prior to the pandemic. But suddenly we had a very stark revelation of how a climate crisis can be addressed very quickly and very radically. We saw an unprecedented reduction in carbon emissions as a result of shutdowns of the economy. Animals returned to big cities and air pollution declined in cities because of the reduction in traffic.
Here’s another example: The major argument that was presented to climate activists prior to the pandemic was, “We acknowledge it’s a big problem, but where’s the money going to come from? Trillions of dollars are needed to deal with this climate crisis. Sorry, folks, but we’re already leveraged pretty heavily in many countries in the world.” And then, suddenly — surprise, during the pandemic the money is found to keep people employed, to deal with the consequences of the shutdown. We’ve been in financial crises or economic crises in the past but this was something really quite different qualitatively and quantitatively. The financial crisis in 2008- 2009 resulted ultimately in about a 0.1 percent reduction in global economic output. Last year, the global economy contracted by around 4.3 percent. That’s an extraordinary difference in scale between our current global economic crisis, which accompanied the pandemic, and the financial crisis.
So, obviously, there was a good rationale for governments to find money to deal with this unprecedented economic crisis.
The third argument is that the pandemic really revealed how interconnected these problems are and how interconnected a transformational response must be. It can’t be a return to the status quo ante, a return to “business as usual” as it existed prior to the pandemic. I think everybody has understood at an intuitive level that this was a transformational event and, therefore, required a transformational response. How transformational and in what direction that transformation goes, that’s obviously subject to discussion.
Falcone: We spoke previously, and you forecasted in a sense how “slowbalization” — the idea that globalization was slowing down — would impact and reach each social, economic and political system throughout the world. Has anything developed with a radical difference since we discussed the pandemic last year? Or even since you have come out with the book?
People are talking, obviously, about the global recovery. And many (and I would say most) industrialized countries have begun this economic recovery, complicated with certain kinds of speed bumps here and there. India was expecting to have a much faster economic rebound and then was hit by a much more severe wave of the pandemic. Taiwan thought it was completely free of infection and went slow in terms of its vaccination campaign only to be hit with its first significant wave of infections.
The situation is not so rosy for what are called emerging markets. Here we see the K-shaped recovery at a global scale. Of course, people talk about the K-shaped recovery at a national level here in the United States where you have a class of people that have done pretty well actually during the pandemic, who have saved money or who have become pandemic profiteers. And then there’s a much larger group of Americans who are seeing a major setback in terms of their economic fortunes: evicted from their properties, losing their jobs, dealing with a huge amount of debt, etcetera.
This K-shaped recovery is replicated at the global level. Some countries like China and the United States are emerging from this pandemic economically pretty strong. The EU is not doing as well but it’s not too bad off. But then, a number of countries have been driven to the brink of insolvency, including countries which hitherto had been doing reasonably well like Costa Rica, those that had not been in such great shape like Zambia, and countries somewhere in the middle like Brazil — all of them driven to the brink of insolvency because of this pandemic, because of the collapse of commodity markets and the collapse of the global system that allows countries to export and grow their economies. But also, they took on a lot of debt to deal with the pandemic and the economic crisis within their borders.
Slowbalization was a trend prior to the pandemic. It was largely a result of the declining rate of profits that were accruing to investments overseas, the vagaries of the labor market and the demands of workers overseas for higher wages in places like China. And now comes COVID-19, which starkly reveals the fragility of the labor market. Couple that with the rising costs of labor, and many global economic actors began to rethink the global supply change.
The pandemic has initiated a much longer conversation about the global economy and where it’s heading, above and beyond the day-to-day decisions made by individual corporations. There’s certainly not been any decision by any global authorities about what direction the global economy can move in at this point. But we’ll probably see two kinds of actions moving forward.
The first encourages some version of sustainability, which might include some form of greenwashing. If you look at, say, the extraction industry, which contributes quite a lot to global carbon emissions, not just in the burning of fossil fuels but the actual extraction of the resources from the ground, greening that process includes making the actual extraction process produce fewer carbon emissions. Is that good? Is that bad? If it continues to produce the same amount of fossil fuels in the end, probably not so good. But in any case, this is one type of trajectory for the global economy, an attempt to make it carbon-friendly.
The second involves the circulation of loans. With so many countries on the brink of insolvency, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, banks in general and creditors have to think about how to sustain the global economy. There have been some piecemeal reforms, like debt moratoria and increasing special drawing rights at the IMF. Debt forgiveness hasn’t really been on the table. But here, the trends could come together with debt-for-carbon swaps where countries reduce their carbon emissions to reduce their debt burdens.
We’ve also seen an acceleration of some trends that we saw before the pandemic hit, which are more technology-driven. The pandemic revealed the fragility of the labor force. The labor force tends to be the most expensive part of any factory process. If you get rid of those workers, you reduce costs and you protect yourself from labor shortages connected to future pandemics. So, automation is quickly going to accelerate it, and there are studies about how automation accelerates after economic crisis anyway. The International Labour Organization and World Bank produced detailed reports on how dramatic this automation might be, not just in places like the United States but also in China and Ethiopia. This is also going to raise the question of what all these redundant workers are going to do.
Another trend is reshoring, where transnational corporations make a decision that it doesn’t make sense any longer to have your manufacturing facilities so far from their consumer base. So, they’ll bring that manufacturing facility back home, closer to the consumer base. And that would accelerate the slowbalization process.
Falcone: The pandemic has created new norms. As disaster capitalism plays a role in intensifying inequality around the world, we also see new opportunities for resistance and advocacy. How has the pandemic reshaped the progressive left’s ability to harness energy and get resistance movements to focus on class disparity and class consciousness? Can recent events surrounding George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, Palestine and climate justice reduce addressing the pandemic pivot to class issues and struggles in a positive sense?
The starting point for this is really the rise of right-wing populism and the appeal of right-wing populism to what had traditionally been left-wing constituencies like the working class. We certainly saw that with Donald Trump. Obviously, there’s a race dimension here as well. It wasn’t the Black working class that Trump was appealing to, it was the white working class. But you saw this in Brazil as well. The pandemic — and this wasn’t necessarily clear from the beginning but has certainly become clear over time — removed the illusion that many of these right-wing populists fostered, that they in fact cared about these constituencies. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro engaged in a perverse version of the bolsa família, the livelihood supplement for working families that former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva introduced, by basically throwing money at people during the pandemic in an attempt to buy people’s support. Ultimately the failure of these leaders to have an effective response to the pandemic revealed to a lot of people, including working-class constituencies, that these leaders in fact didn’t care about their lives at all.
Trump most likely wouldn’t have lost the election if not for the obvious, palpable failures of his COVID response. I think we’ll see other political casualties from the camp of right-wing populists because of their COVID responses, like Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India. So, this is an opportunity for the left to say, “Okay, you know, you have been disillusioned by the right-wing populists’ response to COVID, now let’s build an authentic left populous economic program that acknowledges what has taken place during the COVID era and build a better version.”
So, I think we can see that the left has taken advantage and will take advantage of the new kind of economic possibilities within national boundaries. Transnational is another matter; I don’t think we’ve seen an effective transnational economic program. We’ve seen transnational movements on race questions, obviously Black Lives Matter, women’s issues like the #MeToo movement, on environment questions. The pandemic either didn’t sever those connections or actually created the conditions within which those transnational movements became stronger.
Going forward, we have some ideas about what the left can do, economically speaking. Here the climate movement has offered some thinking about the economy that is largely divorced from the original Marxist or producerist roots of left economics. The climate movement is saying, “Look, a producer bias has been the problem whether it’s on the left or the right. It has produced the same overconsumption and overproduction that has led to the environmental crisis.”
But in greening the global economy, we also have to think that this is our opportunity to close the gap between rich and poor folk. This is the opportunity for the Global North to subsidize the Global South’s leapfrog over dirty technologies. In the past, the New International Economic Order offered a program for reversing the North’s colonial extraction of the South’s resources, but it never got enough traction. Now, actually, there is a self-interest among the industrialized countries to engage in this type of transformational economics because we’re all in the same climate crisis and the industrialized countries cannot shield themselves from the economic and environmental consequences of global carbon emissions elsewhere in the world.
Busra Cicek: Yeah, I was going to ask something specific regarding what you partly covered but let’s try to mention or highlight more, if we missed anything talking about it. Nationalism articulates a lot of the renewed power that states have garnered through extraordinary measures, given the pandemic. But before the pandemic, there was already a rise of far right movements co-opting state structures. And as you know, history has shown a grim result from this combination, so, what I’m asking is, what does the immediate future look like? And will authoritarian statecraft remain in place after the pandemic?
I’ve talked a little bit about how the pandemic undermined some sources of legitimation, particularly for far right populists. These populists have basically three sources of power coming from their critique of existing authority. One is their critique of neoliberal globalization, and the fact that globalization is not benefiting everybody. They have said, “Look at how corporations and international financial institutions have profited from globalization but so many people in our country have not.” The pandemic has, in some sense, only emphasized that the global economy was not benefiting everybody.
The second source of legitimate issue was a critique of the political elites that aligned themselves with that globalization project. That was also a very strong argument. After all, it wasn’t just conservative or centrist parties that supported neoliberal globalization but also some left socialist parties and former communist parties in the former Soviet bloc that adopted these policies of privatization, reduction of government services and facilitation of foreign direct investment whether they liked it or not. The global economy was structured this way, and you either “got with the program” or went down the North Korean path.
The right-wing populists said, “Let’s drive all the bums out, you know? Left, right: they all collaborated with these globalists and we, the authentic populists, never collaborated with the neoliberals.” That’s a somewhat weaker argument now because governments reversed some key elements of neoliberalism to deal with the pandemic, such as engaging in large Keynesian stimulus packages that have benefited populations.
With the third issue, immigration, the right-wing populists made the false argument that, “We have to protect the authentic communities in our country.” This took the form of white nationalism in the United States with Trump or the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. But in India, Modi made the argument in terms of Hindu nationalism against Muslims while in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made the argument against the Kurdish minority.
During the pandemic, the immigration issue was largely off the table because countries shut down their borders. Right-wing arguments about the necessity to close borders became a reality in virtually every country. This took the immigration issue largely off the political agenda in elections — for instance, in the United States in 2020 or the Netherlands in 2021. But now that countries are opening their borders again, immigration will once again be on the political agenda.
All of which is to say, we have a mixed picture coming out of the pandemic for right-wing populists. They can make a stronger argument about the global economy, but a weaker argument about the national economy and what the centrist elite has done in response to the pandemic, at least from the vantage point of neoliberalism. But the real problem will be the return of anti-immigrant rhetoric.
The loss of Trump in November is huge in terms of the United States. Will it have an impact in terms of taking the wind out of the sails of right-wing organizing more generally? That’s hard to say. For the most part, right-wing populists organize their support within their own borders. So, the loss of Trump probably has not had that much impact. But I do think that there can be a kind of “We’re in this together” spirit generated by the response to the pandemic that can substitute for the populist attack on the global order, and this kind of international solidarity, coupled with Trump’s loss, can put the far right on their back foot.
Cicek: Where were we in 2020 concerning the progressive alternatives and in which direction are we now heading in 2021 regarding “working towards the international space” and “the rejection of both the neoliberal status quo and the far-right challenge [that] will require progressive alternatives not just nationally but globally?” In other words, can we still have hope?
Hope is unevenly distributed around the world. Now we have a vaccine available, but it’s not available to everybody. It’s available in surplus here in the United States where the government is begging people to get vaccinated and states are setting up lotteries that potentially give people a million dollars to get vaccinated. Whereas in other countries, including India, which is the largest actual producer of the vaccine, they’re still getting hit hard by the virus and vaccine distribution has been weak. So, here in this country, we are very hopeful, but folks in countries [that] are still waiting on the vaccine are not as hopeful.
Moreover, the uneven distribution of vaccines only makes the K-shaped recovery worse globally. In other words, countries that can’t vaccinate their populations quickly cannot open up their economies as rapidly. It’s like the tortoise and the hare. The hare can jump out of the gate very quickly because of vaccination whereas the tortoise is going to fall progressively farther behind as a result of this. Now, of course, as in Aesop’s fable, the hare might become complacent and lose the race. So, here in the United States, we have to guard against that kind of complacency and push back against the Republican arguments that we don’t need such a big infrastructure bill or the other follow-on bills that the Democrats are preparing.
Obviously, many people were very hopeful around Biden taking office. It was so bad for four years that just to return to what it was like four years ago is cause for celebration. It’s a pretty low bar, but still, all the executive orders Biden signed in his first couple days in office, which effectively reset the United States to the last days of the Obama administration, were a sign that the U.S. is emerging from four years of irrational leadership and has returned to some measure of internationalism.
But unfortunately, we either have the same problems that existed prior to the pandemic or they’ve gotten worse coming out of the pandemic. Carbon emissions, for instance, are rebounding back to new, higher levels globally. A number of countries are now on the verge of insolvency. U.S.-China relations took a step backwards as a result of the pandemic, and they weren’t exactly in great shape at the end of the Obama administration either. But any kind of major transformational change at the international level has to include U.S.-Chinese cooperation. That doesn’t mean that the United States has to applaud what China does in Hong Kong or Xinjiang. Nor does it mean that China has to applaud what the United States is doing in the Middle East. But it does require that there is a working relationship between the two countries, especially on environmental issues.
The same could be said about U.S.-Russian relations, which is experiencing something of a step backward in the transfer of power from Trump to Biden. A third issue, which is complicating international solidarity, is the issue of hedging. The United States is an unreliable superpower. It has proven this over and over again over the years, but it’s obvious now to everybody. It’s obvious not just because of four years of Donald Trump and his unpredictability, but over the longer period in the political transitions from Clinton to Bush, from Bush to Obama, from Obama to Trump, and now from Trump to Biden. How can anybody predict where the United States is going to be four years from now? Maybe it’s a second Biden administration, maybe Trump comes back, maybe it’s neither of them but we have someone even more toxic than Trump, someone more competent like Tom Cotton.
In any case, the United States has been see-sawing back and forth in its policies domestically, but more importantly, internationally in terms of how it engages the international community. Other countries are saying, “Thank you, we’re glad you’re back, we’re happy you’re back in the Paris agreement, World Health Organization, etcetera, etcetera. But honestly, we cannot trust you and, as a result, structurally we are going to change our policies to hedge our bets.” So, the EU has concluded a new economic deal with China. It’s going to continue to explore energy cooperation with Russia. It’s going to put more money into an EU military force independent of NATO.
This is in contrast with China. Countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America may not like the strings attached to Chinese investments but they know that China’s going to be pretty consistent, even consistent in a bad way. Predictability is very important when you’re making long-range plans. But the United States is very unpredictable.
It goes beyond the U.S. government. U.S. civil society is also unpredictable. Some organizations call for greater cooperation with China around environmental issues. Others are calling for more sanctions against China because of its human rights violations, actions in the South China Sea, etcetera.
Going forward, when it comes to progressive transformation at the global level, for instance on environmental issues, the real heavy lifting will increasingly be done by other countries because the United States simply can’t be counted on given the profound political divisions in this country.
Falcone: Are there any closing thoughts about the “pivot” or do you want to say something about the book in closing that you’d hope readers take away?
One thing which has been a challenge for the left — certainly here in the United States, but one could argue globally — is that we are doom and gloom. We’re always talking about the end of the world. It’s not like we’re wrong: the planet faces some serious existential crises. Part of this doom-and-gloom critique has to do also with the fact that in the United States, the left has been shut out of government. We have some people in Congress, but for the most part the left has not been in a governing situation. So, we are not forced by circumstance to put forward a positive program. And so, we end up focusing on critique and that critique tends to be, “The world is in a lousy situation, it’s getting worse and we’ve got to do something immediately.” That might be factually accurate, but I don’t think it’s a great electoral strategy.
I don’t think people elect doom-and-gloom candidates for the most part. They elect people who promise something glorious: Obama’s “hope and change” or Trump’s MAGA.
In The Pandemic Pivot, we talk about how the pandemic has aggravated a lot of bad situations. But ultimately, it’s a hopeful platform, a platform that says there’s an opportunity for transformation and we’re seeing signs of movement in that direction here, here and here. Under the rubric of a more hopeful future, the book ultimately wants to inspire both activists and the general reader with accurate descriptions and forward-looking prescriptions.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Huge billboards across Lima’s main avenues read like cheap Cold War propaganda: “Peru says no to communism”, “Socialism leads to communism”, and “Think about your children’s future”, are just three of the many panic-inducing slogans. Nobody knows who’s paying for the expensive advertisement and nobody cares, including the government agencies created to stop this kind of abuse.
The country’s oldest and leading newspaper, El Comercio –owner of another half a dozen smaller newspapers and a few television channels– is consciously throwing away the little credibility it has left in order to compel the masses to vote for their candidate: Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, who ruled Peru for 10 years (1990-2000) in one of the most corrupt governments in the country’s history, installing the long lasting neoliberal political-economic regime still in place.
Keiko Fujimori is also facing a potential 30 years sentence for her own corruption, mainly for receiving illegal campaign money from some of the most powerful local business tycoons, including top bankers. Winning the presidency would stall the criminal process against her for another five years. Along her political career, she’s been credibly connected to cocaine trafficking and corruption networks deep into different branches of the country’s government, among them the notorious “Cuellos Blancos” inside the Judiciary.
That’s the candidate being fiercely pushed by the elites throughout the traditional media landscape, as panic ensues among a citizenry subjected to a relentless propaganda blitz aimed to saw irrational fear toward anything that smells like leftwing politics. It doesn’t matter that neoliberalism lies on its deathbed and change is completely inevitable –as Chile constituent Assembly marches on and Colombia endures the riots and social upheaval that led to the former’s political shift in course–, the elites just won’t give up in their systematical and obtuse block of any meaningful change.
The result is a toxic wave of crude McCarthyism, extreme political polarization and hate among Peruvians. Meanwhile, Fujimori’s contender, the leftist Pedro Castillo –a modest and politically naive school teacher from the Andes–, isn’t proposing communism, but a political change in the guise of Evo Morales’ Bolivia.
But who cares about such a petty detail when you can seize on decades of anticommunism propaganda systematically imported from the most powerful country on Earth, and disseminated by the local media eco-chamber, in order to intimidate voters into abiding to the status quo.
And that’s hardly the lowest point of these elections.
A useful massacre
Peruvian military is deeply conservative thanks to its traditional subordination to the U.S. government in exchange of money, arms and technology, a sponsorship that includes both the army and the local police forces. They also train them and give them grants to study at notorious U.S. military academies like the School of the Americas, which changed its name –but not its spirit– back in 2001. But American patronage comes at a cost: they have to embrace anticommunism and the “national security state” doctrine; that means turning their attention away from defending the country from external threats to face the “domestic enemy”.
On May 23, as one of the last presidential debates was taking place in Lima, a massacre was being carried out in the VRAEM locality, deep inside the Peruvian liberated zones where cocaine production and trafficking thrives. Sixteen were killed with extreme cruelty, among them two little girls whose bodies were then burned beyond recognition.
The news about the massacre didn’t come from the media or even the police, but from a couple of Fujimori’s political aides and cabinet candidates, who posted pictures of the killing in social media. The message was clear from the very beginning: the culprit was Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the Maoist terrorist group responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Peruvians. Its leader, Abimael Guzman, was captured by the government of Keiko Fujimori’s father in 1992, virtually ending the bloodshed.
A few hours after the news arrived to Lima and the rest of the country, on May 24, high ranking members of the three branches of the military confirmed the message given by the fujimoristas: remnants from the Shining Path, now under a different name and wholly dedicated to cocaine trafficking, were responsible for the brutal murders. The only evidence: flyers left behind by the supposed killers as they fled the scene, a very well-known practice among terrorist groups. Among many other things, the flyers read:
“Those who vote for Keiko Fujimori are traitors…”
As many other authorities spoke out only to confirm the news, nobody addressed some of the serious inconsistencies. First of all, the few witnesses and most of the locals from Vizcatan del Ene, where the massacre took place, know the narco-terrorists and their methods very well, and are in complete disbelief regarding the official version. The latter haven’t engaged in politically motivated attacks for many years, and the victims were part of the labor force used in the coca fields they look after. Everyone living in the towns around the place of the atrocities are convinced that the culprits were outsiders.
The style of the brutal attack was also at odds with what the locals –and most experts– know about this long separated branch of the Shining Path, which took the name “Militarizado Partido Comunista del Peru” more than a decade ago, and don’t identify themselves as SP, who they despise as traitors for surrendering back in the nineties to engage in national politics.
The group of four to five killers approached their victims using motorcycles, which the narco-terrorists never use because they are impractical in the jungle terrain where they would’ve come from. They didn’t shout their usual harangues and they didn’t even talk to the victims to tell them what they did to deserve their horrible fate, which is something the narco-terrorists usually do.
One of the survivors said they were dressed like “normal people”, without any kind of clothing that would give out their identity as either terrorists, police officers or military personnel. Let’s be clear: the narco-terrorist who control the zone don’t usually hide their identities: they kill openly to give a message to everybody else, and they kill for business –police informants, suspicious outsiders and the armed forces who fight them at enormous risk– but not for politics. Finally, an electrical black out preceded the attack and, according to locals in Vizcatan del Ene, that usually happens before military raids.
Back in Lima, the massacre was swiftly seized by the Fujimori campaign and the conservative Armed Forces to revive the trauma of terrorism. A couple of days after the news shocked the country, the candidate preferred by the elites and the establishment started to climb up in the polls when all seemed already lost in favor of the leftist candidate.
Pedro Castillo, a syndicalist, is politically connected to members of MOVADEF, the political party created by sympathizers of the terrorists who were beaten and jailed back in the nineties, in order to enter the political arena and plead for amnesty. The tie that binds the leftist candidate and the mentioned party –a huge liability in Castillo’s campaign– lies in their common participation in the country’s biggest teachers syndicate, SUTEP.
Next Sunday June 6, Peruvians will go to the polls to choose between “the daughter of the dictator” and a leftist candidate that never dreamed to reach this far into the elections –and sadly, has proven not to be up to par– as extreme political polarization has bitterly divided the country between “patriots” and “communists”.
If we can talk about any kind of silver lining to this dark episode in the history of Peru, it would be that the El Comercio Group, the oligarchic newspaper and media empire, has completely lost the little credibility it had left, by showing itself as a mouthpiece for the Fujimori campaign and the most exaggerated and irrational Red Scare madness in decades. After whatever happens next June 6, nobody will ever believe in its alleged impartiality ever again.
Regarding what (really) happened in the cocaine infested jungle of Peru, and considering that the military establishment and the economic elite are fine with the evidence-free and politically convenient official version of the massacre, the possibility that the truth will ever be revealed seems remote.
The post All (MacCarthyite) hell breaks loose in Peru as the country prepares to choose new President first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The two dominant factions of our politics, conservatives and liberals, often wage wars of rhetoric and culture against one another but actually work together.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
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Up until recently I dismissed the hypothesis that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese lab as a crackpot conspiracy theory meant to increase anti- China sentiment in the US. Then two friends gave me very well researched articles making the case that the Lab Theory, as I will call it, was credible and should not be dismissed.
There is as yet no proof for either the Lab Theory hypothesis, or for the From Nature hypothesis. Still, the issue will rage in the mainstream media. If we don’t address it properly, we will look ignorant, and we will be dismissed.
Here are the key points to make in discussing it:
The post What Matters About The Origins Of The COVID-19 Virus appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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Tens of thousands of protesters have poured on to the streets of Brazil’s largest cities to demand the impeachment of President Jair Bolsonaro over his catastrophic response to a coronavirus pandemic that has claimed nearly half a million Brazilian lives.
The demonstrators turned out in more than 200 cities and towns for what is the biggest anti-Bolsonaro mobilisation since Brazil’s Covid outbreak began
“Today is a decisive milestone in the battle to defeat Bolsonaro’s genocidal administration,” said Silvia de Mendonça, 55, a civil rights activist from Brazil’s Unified Black Movement as she led a column of protesters through Rio’s dilapidated city centre.
Osvaldo Bazani da Silva, a 48-year-old hairdresser who lost his younger brother to Covid-19, said: “We can’t lose any more Brazilian lives. We need to hit the streets every single day until this government falls.”
The post Brazilians March To Demand Bolsonaro’s Impeachment appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
― W.E.B. DuBois
He died. In an assisted (sic) care (oxymoron) home (nope) facility/prison (yes). Homeless for a few years; he was a photographer; and his life went to shit in four years. He overspent on photo equipment, a studio, gave away shoots, and alas, he ended up living in his car, putting the entire inventory in an expensive storage unit, and then he tried surviving.
I met him when I was a social worker helping him as a short-term veteran (Army, 12 months, no combat) in a housing program, 24/7, where my job was to get him on his feet, get his VA benefits together, get him back on some financial track, and getting him inspired to live.
He was curious, could run in mixed company, and he was fragile. That is the way of families — estranged, bizarre old men (father) moving on with second and third wives, and just giving shit about offspring.
I worked for the Starvation Army, one bloody year, and you can read about that hell hole of a fake (maybe not) religious wacko institution (poverty pimps): Here, Here and Here, over at Dissident Voice.
The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.
…The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.
― Henry David Thoreau, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
He lost one leg to diabetes, and it was typical – small black dot on his foot, and then, living the rough life, cold weather chills in a vehicle, long walks in the cold when the car broke down. Bad diet, and stress.
They chopped it (the leg) off at the knee. He was having eye/vision issues. He was a smart guy, even did a trivia night for his fellow homeless vets and their families. His memory, though, was flagging. He never wanted to learn how to deal with a prosthetic leg. He was getting more and more confused, obsessed with CNBC-type shit, and anti-trump disease to the max.
He had to be reminded of everything, daily, and we worked on getting him housing vouchers, and, alas, he was finally getting Social Security, and then, the VA took care of some of his stuff.
He went to a couple of my fiction readings in Portland, and he was always there for my movie nights to watch some documentary that pushed to push against the military mindset, and he was there to listen to me rail and rail.
He found out his estranged father left some money to him when he died. It was a windfall, and my vet could not handle all the information and financial asides. It took two years to get that money, and he gave one leech a $10,000 loan for some scheme for a new dog food patent (right!), and alas, that leech never paid him back. The vet’s dead, and this deadbeat who pried money from him has no reason to pay back.
Before death, and after the Starvation Army, my vet got into an apartment (with my help), and they screwed him over. The one ground floor apartment with a large step and stoop, impossible for him to navigate his wheelchair, that wasn’t in the bargain. He already signed the lease and wanted out of the Starvation Army. He and I worked on getting the apartment to build a stone or cement pathway from the back slider, to the parking lot, so he could get his Uber or handicap buses trips.
It was another eye opener – largest (now #3) property management company in the USA for apartments, out of Texas, and not one of them responded to my emails or calls. Terrible, since that has never happened to me ever in my life. I have always gotten responses, even harsh ones back. From cops, senators, CEOs, IRS, more. These people are human leeches.
Pinnacle comes in at number three in the rankings for the largest property managers in the country, with 172,000 units under management. The company manages a diverse array of assets, including mixed-use properties, commercial properties, affordable developments, senior properties, and student housing. It also specializes in the turnaround of distressed assets and assisting in the management of HOAs and condo associations. Pinnacle is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and is currently headed by President and CEO Rick L. Graf.
So think about that. He had to pay for this walkway, and it was an improvement for that unit, to say the least, so why should he have to pay? He had volunteers with a construction company and from the Rotary Club, and that Pinnacle nixed it. They had to have their vetted company. We are talking about $500 for the job using volunteers and a bonded contractor, versus the $2500 through Pinnacle’s outfit.
That apartment life did not last long. He was having major choking issues, and cognitive ones. He wasn’t eating right. No phone calls taken, or texts.
We are talking about a man, 68, no family. He had no one but a friend he met at the Rotary Club and acquaintances. And me, his former social worker. Who happened to move on the Coast, so I was 3 hours from him one way, via car.
He had to leave the apartment, to a care center (sic). That apartment would not give him a break, since he had to break the lease because of medical reasons. No big deal he was a veteran.
These are parasites.
Then, he ends up in one of the larger senior living places, and that was a living hell for him as he slipped more and more, had no decent meals, and never had a case manager for months. Then, lockdown, March 2020.
Here it is, Wikipedia –
Brookdale Senior Living owns and operates over 700 senior living communities and retirement communities in the United States. Brookdale was established in 1978 and is based in Brentwood, Tennessee. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Fortress Investments became the majority owner of Brookdale, holding approximately 51% of its share. Currently, Glenview Capital Management (a hedge fund) holds the largest number of shares. Brookdale has approximately 70,000 staff members and 100,000 residents. As of 2018, it was the largest operator of senior housing in the United States. In 2021, a New York Times investigation revealed that Brookdale submitted wrong and manipulated data to the government, thus inflating ratings of the quality of care in Brookdale facilities. Shortly thereafter, the state of California filed a lawsuit against Brookdale, alleging that the company manipulated the federal government’s nursing-home ratings system.
He was paying out of his social security and this money he got from his father: $4100 a month plus another $2000 for “special services.” There were no “Special services.” This happens every minute in the USA. Imagine, a society with how many aging people? How many with chronic illness? Who the fuck has $6100 a month to pay for these scabies outfits?
Again, we can either prepare for the ultimate disaster that disaster capitalism gives us, or, put our heads back in that sand:
In 10 years, more than half of middle-income Americans age 75 or older will not be able to afford to pay for yearly assisted living rent or medical expenses, according to a study published Wednesday in Health Affairs.
The researchers used demographic and income data to project estimates of a portion of the senior population, those who will be 75 or older in 2029, with a focus on those in the middle-income range — currently $25,001 to $74,298 per year for those ages 75 to 84.
And it doesn’t look good for that group because of the rising costs of housing and health care. The researchers estimated that the number of middle-income elders in the U.S. will nearly double, growing from 7.9 million to 14.4 million by 2029. They will make up the biggest share of seniors, at 43%. — Source
This three paragraphs cited above are from a two-year-old article. You think the plandemic has assisted with this? Socialism is about planning for and building out facilities and holistic ways to help the aging, the poor, the sick. Capitalism is about planning for and setting out a million ways to fleece and fleece people. Maybe blood and plasma and bone marrow transplants are the only way to get through. Or, just donating body and soul to Big Pharma for their Mengele stuff. A 10 by 10 room, with a roommate, and mac’n’cheese six days a week, fasting on Thursdays.
This is how America runs, as a continuing criminal enterprise, an elaborate multi-layered system of bilking and outright theft, casino capitalism on steroids, and zero concern by the majority of the people with investments, banks (owners) and the elected officials to make safety nets. Who the hell can afford $6100 a month for a studio apartment? Crappy food? Surly workers (underpaid, over worked)? This is prison on a whole other level.
He had to go to the VA, via ambulance, and with taxis, a few times with this female friend.
She got him to get a will prepared, and to get some things in order, but he was failing, vacant, not there, and alas, he died August 2020 age 70, and that should never have happened. If I had a community, 100 acres, gardens, small (tiny) homes, pets, chickens, and community conversations, he would NOT have died. Life expectancy dropped because he ended up in an apartment, isolated, alone, scared, and with deeper cognitive issues. A supportive community getting him off his duff, getting him involved, would have saved him. Could save millions of Americans. Hundreds of millions of global citizens.
So who owns the land, the farms, the concepts of living and aging in place, intergenerational, cooperatives, decent air and water? Dog-eat-dog. And who thinks that a coronavirus lives and breathes in the summer? Oh, that flu season, now 365 days a year, some rain or shine.
You know, I didn’t get a chance to talk to this vet too much about his concerns around lockdown, the SARS-CoV2, and, well, like many things once a person ages, sometimes talking real stuff about real things is too much for a mind that is going south.
Not all pandemics are caused by the obvious suspects. Though the media have us whipped up into a frenzy over a select cast of superstar pathogens, the villain in the next global drama may be lurking in the unlikeliest of places; perhaps it hasn’t even been discovered yet.
“I think the chances that the next pandemic will be caused by a novel virus are quite good,” says Kevin Olival, a disease ecologist from the EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based organisation that studies the links between human and environmental health. “If you look at Sars, which was the first pandemic of the 21st Century, that was a previously unknown virus before it jumped into people and spread round the world. So there’s a precedent there – there are many, many viruses out there in the families that we’re concerned with.”
Out of millions of viruses on the planet, very few have ever caused a major outbreak
Olival is not alone. Earlier this year, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned that the next pandemic could be something we’ve never seen before. He suggested that we prepare for its emergence as we would for a war.Meanwhile, the WHO is so firmly convinced that they have updated their list of pathogens most likely to cause a massive, deadly outbreak to include “Disease X” – a mystery microorganism which hasn’t yet entered our radar. By Zaria Gorvett, 13th November 2018
The irony of ironies, I was talking about things like this way before that BBC (bad bad organization) put out these pabulum pieces as quoted about NOV. 2018, a year before the official Wuhan and Italian flu hit (sic).
The death of the vet, of course, create a nightmare for his friend, designated as the executor of his “estate.”
Comcast screwed the estate by keeping service going (charging $90 a month) even though he was dead. He had a storage unit that was charging $215 a month. That Brookdale ended up hitting the estate with more bills in the thousands. The apartment complex, Pinnacle, was looking for several thousand for fees and penalties. The bills came in, and the collection agencies rose to the occasion.
And this vet’s friend (sic) who had borrowed the money paid nothing back.
It is May, 2021, and those proceeds to his small estate have not yet been disbursed. Pandemic lockdown has hurt the process. Two of the beneficiaries are a free clinic that attended to this vet’s needs during his hours of need. And a food pantry out of a church who also helped him with food and electricity money.
He probably had $340,000 total, most of it in a Morgan Stanley account. Mind you, this is all from his dead old man, and the vet had not expected that. There are tax filing fees, moving expenses for his stuff to a furniture nonprofit, fees for the storage unit. Some prescription bills and other outstanding bills that should have just vanished. The creditors came out of the woodwork, and because I was not a family member, brother, say, of nephew, all those bills got paid. If I had been that family member, I would/could have wrangled many of the bills into either zeroed out bills, or some with a dime on the dollar. It takes letter writing, advocating, and pounding down these leeches.
As of May 18, 2021, the five beneficiaries – two nonprofits in need – have not seen a cent. Because the executor has had to do so much, and the fact the vet had no family, my vet’s estate is getting whittled down by that great American tick – middle men, fees, penalties, taxes, this and that amount extracted as part of the ugly middle and middle man/woman mentality of the USA.
Some people came up to the plate and did pro bono work, but because I was close to this whole thing, and talked with the executor a lot, I see how the total amount that could have been distributed five ways — $70,000 each – might now be even close to $60,000 each. What the beneficiaries don’t know won’t hurt them, right? All those leeches sucking the dead, well, they just don’t know it. It was money they were not expecting, so what’s the big deal.
That’s not the point. This is a minute-to-minute situation in USA. Millions of people and their families get screwed in the tens of billions each year by the ticks and leeches. I have had to deal with PayDay loan companies, repo men, collection agencies, courts, companies, telecoms and hospitals and others who have their hands out for more and more cuts of many of my clients who were making $730 a month in Social Security, and some way less. I contacted hospitals and businesses and others to get fees and bills reduced or zeroed out.
Young or old, many of the homeless people I worked with could NEVER work in a competitive work environment. Their health and minds are shot to shit. Much of that (PTSD and complex PTSD) was caused by the Armed Forces, and by the systems of punishment that hit these guys and gals after departing that shit hole.
Not everything in their lives is someone else’s fault and responsibility. They made bad choices. Booze and drugs, you betcha, took them down. Bad food, bad thinking smoking, and more, deteriorated them at a young age. Trying to pay rent, evictions, etc., all that adds up to the weathering.
Living in a truck or car or tent or in a garage, that also weathers these people. In the end, pre-Covid and now during it, these people are throwaways. The Stock Market is busting at the seams. Zoom school, and Zoom work for the middle class, the new normal abnormal. The rest of the workforce or citizen? Screwed blued and tattooed.
The irony is that my vet friend “made” more money in that investment account dead than when he was alive. And we know the great history of Morgan Stanley.
I’m writing this because I am delaying something bigger, and poetry, tied to the absolute hell hole that is American Zionism a la Israeli Zionism. War crimes that are ten thousand George Floyd’s “I Can’t Breathe” murder.
And I can’t wrap my head around this in a rural community. No marching here, no groups, and hell, in France and Germany and England, it is illegal to peacefully march for Palestine.
I’m thinking about Canada and USA, supporting murderous arms and murderous policies of that racist “country.” I am thinking about my vet’s account at Morgan Stanley:
The broker got him stocks in Walmart, Northrop Grumman, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Blackstone, BlackRock. This guy was a friend, and asked about investing, and I had a guy in mind, but my buddy went with a friend of the Rotary who said this broker with Morgan Stanley would take care of him. My buddy wanted social responsible investing, and that, alas, is yet another bullshit marketing tool of the masters of the casino capitalist Walled Street.
Northrop Grumman’s medium-caliber cannons boast unrivaled reliability and effectiveness. When paired with our exceptional training, services, certified accessories and warranties, the result is exceptional value and performance over the entire gun system lifecycle. The company has produced solid propulsion systems for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense interceptor, as well as for the Trident II D-5 and Minuteman III strategic missiles. Northrop Grumman has 100 percent propulsion success on strategic production motors. For nearly half a century, Northrop Grumman and its heritage companies have been designing and developing bomb fuses that have stayed on pace with the technological advancements of the time.
How many parts in a missile or Bushmaster automatic cannon? Parts equal jobs. Parts designed equal academic jobs. Think of all those people in all those companies, in factories and warehouses, and manufacturing plants, and marketing plants, paint plants, PR plants, all of them down to the web master and the photographer making money on dead Palestinian children. It comes down to that.
I have relatives whose kids (grown adults) are blonde beauties in the sense of USA beauty, and they are tall, and lean, and they are pulling down $120,000 a year as 28 year old’s, working for one of those California based military death companies.
Here, five — to include Raytheon, Northrup Lockheed Martin, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Flir Systems
More listed here —
Here are California Dreaming Death Machine (139) openings for just one hiring site —
In 2019, here are the top states, but remember, those figures are not the true amount of money made on death since so much more tied to offensive weapons and space should be factored in. Sort of the multiplier effect of all the businesses service and hard industries making bank because of those contractors and their employees and their subcontractors and their employees living and eating the California dream, or whichever state listed is the dream. Forget about the billions in Hollywood and their enormous entanglement of people making money off those Tom Clancy, et al crap movies. Death, death, death, even in the form of liberal actors spewing off on this or that thing, but in the end, they love the DoD.
- California: $66.2 billion
- Virginia: $60.3 billion
- Texas: $54.8 billion
- Florida: $29.8 billion
- Maryland: $26.1 billion
- Connecticut: $19.7 billion
- Pennsylvania: $18.1 billion
- Washington: $17.8 billion
- Alabama: $16.0 billion
- Massachusetts: $15.8 billion
So, I am having a difficult time focusing, with this Industrial Complex tied to killing Palestinians, and so many other people’s of the world, through the training, outfitting, arming, and educating of the despots of the world. This is a telling interview. Malak Mattar, Dan Cohen and Miko Peled join MintCast to discuss the ongoing Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip. See interview here.
I am still processing all of this, trying to listen to Zoom continuing education credited things like trauma and social service workers in a time of lockdown and Covid-19. Things like that, which are bullshit, really. Just amazing bullshit now on Zoom, most of it. But I am just cruising through these people who believe they are thinking and saying something new.
© 2021. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
BAR’s poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner is an accomplished performing artist. You can find much more of his work at https://www.youtube.com/user/zigilow
BAR’s poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner is an accomplished performing artist. You can find much more of his work at YouTube.
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The acrobats are back…(gimme a bleepin’ break!)
The acrobats are back—riding bareback and backwards on Donkeys! They’re back juggling hocus-pocus focus groups; Back, spinning Wall Street straw into fools’ gold for the war- mongering mouth of a punch drunk politician. Back hallucinating on FDR Fairytales. Back somersaulting over scarlet streets, strikes and factory seizures; back vaulting over violence/militant eviction resistance
The acrobats are back—Lilliputian left-Munchkin Marxists—juggling Classless analysis; doing back-flips erasing millions; Tumbling above herds of handcuffed communists, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists who waged pitched battles with Pinkerton-police-national guard-gun thugs. The acrobats are back turning cartwheels; Flipping history on its head— Landing squarely in the laps of generals and statesmen…
The acrobats are back—flipping LBJ minus 34 dead and smoke-filled skies over Watts/43 dead in Detroit/27 dead, 1400 arrests in Newark; LBJ minus millions marching NO to Jim Crow, war/women’s oppression; Minus martyrs—whose M’s include Mickey, Medgar, Malcolm, Martin… The acrobats are back, dancing in donkey dung down the Yellow Brick Road for the Emerald City Intersectional Empire—strangely resembling the Pentagon…
The acrobats are back—daredevils who dangled dangerously for 8 yrs. from the Drone Ranger’s dick. They’re back—Capitalist Hill cartwheels and flips—sticking stealth socialist landings as Comrade Schmo plays them like The Great Oz—ominously warning: “Pay no attention to Wall Street-War-Profiteer- Big Pharma/Fossil Fuel-Credit Card Companies behind my thin blue curtain of Promises!” Then he quietly pulls his pistol and mumbles, ”What’s in your wallet?”
The post Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing! first appeared on Dissident Voice.
And the reality is that Wall Street and those Mutual Funds and Exchange Tradeable Funds (ETF’s), all are tied to bombing, booze, tobacco, big pharma, the entire shooting match. Just can’t go to sleep at night, or can’t look myself in the mirror, when thinking about all that time and energy and research and writing, and educating, and the reality is we are what we are — war criminals. Or, read, “Try as You May to Deny, but Evil is in Our DNA“!
Israeli Forces spokesman Zilberman announced the start of the bombing of Gaza, specifying that “80 fighters are taking part in the operation, including the advanced F-35s” (The Times of Israel, May 11, 2021). It is officially the baptism of fire for the US Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation fighter, whose production Italy also participates in as a second-level partner.
Israel has already received twenty-seven F-35s from the US, and last February decided to buy no longer fifty F-35s but seventy-five. To this end the government has decreed a further allocation of 9 billion dollars: 7 were granted by a US to Israel free military “aid” of 28 billion, 2 were granted as a loan by the US Citibank.
While Israeli F-35 pilots were being trained by the U.S. Air Force in Arizona and Israel, the US Army Engineers built in Israel special hardened hangars for the F-35s, suitable for both fighters’ maximum protection on the ground, and their rapid take-off on attack. At the same time, the Israeli military industries (Israel Aerospace and Elbit Systems) in close coordination with Lockheed Martin enhance the fighter renamed “Adir” (Powerful): above all its ability to penetrate enemy defenses and its range of action which was nearly doubled.
These capabilities are certainly not necessary to attack Gaza. Why then are the most advanced fifth-generation fighters used against Palestinians? Because it serves to test F-35s fighters and their pilots in real war action using Gaza homes as targets on a firing range. It does not matter if in the target houses there are entire families.
The F-35s, added to the hundreds of fighter-bombers already supplied by the US to Israel. are designed for nuclear attack particularly with the new B61-12 bomb. The United States will shortly deploy these nuclear bombs in Italy and other European countries, and will also provide them to Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East with an arsenal estimated at 100-400 nuclear weapons. If Israel doubles the range of F-35 fighters and is about to receive eight Boeing Pegasus tankers from the US for refueling the F-35s in flight, it is because it is preparing to launch an attack, even nuclear, against Iran.
Wolff and I have corresponded.https://youtu.be/ynbgMKclWWcThe coronavirus pandemic, the deepening economic crash, dangerously divisive political responses, and exploding social tensions have thrown an already declining American capitalist system into a tailspin. The consequences of these mounting and intertwined crises will shape our future. In this unique collection of over 50 essays, “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself,” Richard D. Wolff argues clearly that “returning to normal” no longer responds adequately to the accumulated problems of US capitalism. What is necessary, instead, is transition toward a new economic system that works for all of us.“A blueprint for how we got here, and a plan for how we will rescue ourselves” – Chris Hedges“A magnificent source of hope and insight.” – Yanis Varoufakis“In this compelling set of essays, and with his signature clarity, intensity, accessibility and deference to historical and present perspective, Wolff has issued not just a stark warning, but concrete reasoning, as to why this time really should be different.” – Nomi Prins“One of the most powerful and incisive voices in America. As an economist he transcends that “dismal science”, he is a tribune of Main St, a voice of the people.” – George Galloway“Wolff clearly explains the ways that capitalism exacerbates unemployment, inequality, racism, and patriarchy; and threatens the health and safety of workers and communities – i.e., most of us.” – Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D.“If you care about deeper measures of social health as Americans suffer the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, you will find here a wealth of insight, statistics, and other ammunition that we all need in the fight for a more just society.” – Adam Hochschild“The current failed system has a noose around all of our necks. Richard Wolff offers an economic vision that gets our society off the gallows.” – Jimmy Dore
Source.Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world. — Henry Kissinger, interview with the Observer, 1983, on his book, Years of Upheaval
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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School privatizers and their political representatives are relentless in their efforts to restructure the state along neoliberal lines so as to restrict democracy and funnel more public funds into private hands. Privatization is a main mechanism for enriching major owners of capital, eliminating democratic arrangements, and degrading the public interest in the context of a continually failing economy. Privatization allows neoliberals to temporarily avert the law of the falling rate of profit under capitalism.
Recently, the Governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, signed a law that significantly increases the ability of major owners of capital to siphon public funds from public schools by creating more charter schools while also eliminating long-standing democratic arrangements, namely local school control over what happens in local school districts.
Under the new law, neoliberals seeking to privately appropriate public money can circumvent local public school boards and apply directly to the State Board of Education to start a charter school operated by unelected individuals.
The public has no say over this or what happens to the taxes they pay.
The new law no longer requires the approval of privately-operated charter schools by local school districts and sets the stage for even less accountability and transparency from charter school operators. The new law will further deprive Iowa’s public schools of much-needed funds produced by working people.
Through such top-down actions, the governor and other representatives of the rich refuse to take action to fully-fund and support Iowa’s public schools and have instead decided to make families and students fend-for-themselves when it comes to getting an education. This chaos and anarchy will be unleashed in the name of “choice” and “empowering parents.”
Currently, there are only two charter schools in Iowa. This number will increase rapidly now that the door has been opened to more effortlessly establishing neoliberal school arrangements. It is much easier for privatizers to get approval from one high-level state authority (e.g., the State Board of Education) than it is from trying to get approval from one of dozens or hundreds of local state authorities like public schools.
There are 100,000 public schools in the U.S. and they are governed by school boards comprised of publicly elected individuals. School boards are a main form of elected governance that neoliberals and privatizers are desperate to eliminate because “too much democracy” hinders privatization and the elimination of the public interest. Neoliberals and privatizers want the public to believe that the triumph of their capital-centered will over the public will is in the best interest of humanity.
Far from solving any problems though, privatization intensifies inequality, reduces efficiency, lessens transparency, increases corruption, raises costs, diminishes workers’ voices, lowers the quality of services, takes money out of the economy, and undermines the general interests of society. It is through these antisocial arrangements and methods that owners of capital are able to seize large sums of public wealth to temporarily counteract the law of the falling rate of profit under capitalism.
It won’t be long before the public begins to hear of the scandals, poor performance, segregation, arrests, fraud, and corruption that invariably accompany charter schools. Speaking up now and planning new forms of action with analysis to advance the public interest are critical. Privatizers and neoliberals are not invincible, they can be defeated. But even when they are defeated people must be vigilant to ensure that privatizers and neoliberals do not succeed in any future attempts to violate the public interest.
The post School Privatizers Restructure State of Iowa to Seize Public Funds first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Lula da Silva has confirmed that he wants to be a presidential candidate in Brazil’s 2022 election. This was expected. After being freed from a process of lawfare intended to curtail his political career, Lula has reemerged on the national scene with full force. The Datafolha Institute has published a poll according to which Lula would win the first electoral round with 41% of the votes and the second round with 55% of the ballots. On the other hand, if neo-fascist President Jair Bolsonaro seeks re-election, he would only obtain 32% of the votes in the second round.
Abysmal statistics about Bolsonaro fail to convey the depth of the crisis being faced by his regime. The ruling administration’s toxic mix of pandemic mismanagement and savage neoliberalism has generated cracks in Bolsonaro’s “bull, bullet and bible bloc” – a coalition based on connections with the agribusiness sector, military and police forces, and the evangelical religious Right. In addition to the internal fragmentation of the top-level governing caste, there has been a groundswell of grassroots resistance to the right-wing agenda of neoliberal fascism.
Callousness
In spite of the growing pressures, the ruling dispensation has remained steadfast in its commitment to callousness. The Bolsonaro-headed political class continues its anti-science virus denialism, now perceiving the pandemic not as a public health issue but as a biological or psychological weapon created by China to gain competitive advantages in the global market and expand communist domination. This view has resulted in a strategy of herd immunity, ensuring that the free-market economy would keep working without any hassles and the internal enemies linked to international communism would also be defeated.
By downplaying the disease’s severity, preventive measures have been interpreted as arbitrary authoritarian acts. The deaths among risk groups have been accepted as casualties of war that would have the corollary effect of natural selection in the population, thus reducing the social security deficit and streamlining the country’s economic mechanisms.
Bolsonarist doctors have backed the thesis that Covid-19 is a much less serious disease than the World Health Organization (WHO) is portraying in ostensible collusion with China. They have also defended a cheap and accessible medicine kit with no proven efficacy for the treatment of Covid-19 infection. According to them, this medicine kit has not been officially recommended against the disease because it would go against the interests of big pharmaceutical companies.
Rising Hysteria
With no arrows left in his quiver, Bolsonaro is increasingly resorting to hysteria to somehow consolidate his hegemony. On May 6, 2021, the state police entered the favela of Jacarezinho in Rio de Janeiro and opened fire, killing at least 25 people who appeared to surrender before the guns fired. A day later, Rupert Colville, Spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said:
This appears to have been the deadliest such operation in more than a decade in Rio de Janeiro, and furthers a long-standing trend of unnecessary and disproportionate use of force by police in Brazil’s poor, marginalized and predominantly Afro-Brazilian neighborhoods. We…urge a broad and inclusive discussion in Brazil about the current model of policing in favelas – which are trapped in a vicious cycle of lethal violence, with a dramatically adverse impact on their already struggling and marginalized populations.
Growing violence is a natural extension of the tendencies inherent in a specific component of Bolsonaro’s power alliance, namely, the bullet bloc. Firstly, a pro-armament stance performs a cultural function, attempting to symbolically suture the economic disempowerment suffered by Brazilian men under neoliberalism through a hyper-masculine code of violence. Secondly, members of the bullet coalition promote deregulation in terms of gun sales and fund Bolsonaro’s campaign with money coming from the arms industry.
Strengthening of the combative capacity of the police and the armed forces has proven to be lethal. State squadrons involved in the federal government’s ongoing operations against drug traffickers have become dangerously violent. Countless civilians, mostly those who are Black and poor, have been killed in such operations, including many children.
As Brazil’s human travail increases due to the criminal negligence of the ruling elite, Bolsonaro will go hammer and tong against in his efforts to shore up support through hysterical means. This will include a deepening of an obnoxious crusade against the rising left-wing camp and a possible increase in repression. However, the desire among the Brazilian masses for a better future can’t be defeated easily. It will keep increasing in tandem with worsening existential conditions.
The post Brazil’s Perfect Storm first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
We used to research the cup of coffee. School. Mostly community colleges, but at two universities — UT-El Paso and Gonzaga. A lot of evening classes I taught. Even on military compounds, and in prisons, and in the bowels of twin plants in Juarez.
In the old days, sleeves rolled up, adults and young people in classrooms, computers, paper and white boards at our ready, would get comfortable and uncomfortable. It was not an easy class, those Composition 101 and 102 mandatory (sometimes ONLY) writing classes for college students (I am so for mandatory 12 classes on writing, thinking, media, rhetoric, propaganda, etc.). Food and drinks, music during essay writing, and face to face consternation and confrontation. Cooperation.
That cup of coffee from the earliest look at where that bean came from originally intrigued the students. Who would have known (we talked about the Colombian exchange, the Doctrine of Discovery, food, animals, other things that came to the Imperialists). Think of the spice islands on steroids:
The original domesticated coffee plant is said to have been from Harar, and the native population is thought to be derived from Ethiopia with distinct nearby populations in Sudan and Kenya. Coffee was primarily consumed in the Islamic world where it originated and was directly related to religious practices.
Fun stuff, this sort of research and writing, and deep dive. We turned these assignments into poetry, poster illustrations, research papers on the diseases of coffee, on the power of coffee like so many thousands of other foods and products, crossing oceans. Many a product of empire and racism, and the coffee paper also turned into “Is There Slavery in Your Chocolate?” essays.
In recent years, a handful of organizations and journalists have exposed the widespread use of child labor, and in some cases slavery, on cocoa farms in Western Africa. Since then, the industry has become increasingly secretive, making it difficult for reporters to not only access farms where human rights violations still occur, but to then disseminate this information to the public. In 2004, the Ivorian First Lady’s entourage allegedly kidnapped and killed a journalist reporting on government corruption in its profitable cocoa industry. In 2010, Ivorian government authorities detained three newspaper journalists after they published an article exposing government corruption in the cocoa sector. The farms of Western Africa supply cocoa to international giants such as Hershey’s, Mars, and Nestlé—revealing the industry’s direct connection to the worst forms of child labor, human trafficking, and slavery. (Source)
So much has happened since I first hit the streets as a newspaper journalist in 1977, and so much has changed since I started teaching college classes in research writing and writing and journalism (1983). The “see, speak, hear no evil” paradigm is the destiny of capitalists. It is the way of who we are every waking nanosecond of our lives. Boycott Divest Sanction my ass. This is where I also pretzel myself into contradiction after contradiction. I should be on an island, or just on 20 acres I have near Mount Adams. Eating mushrooms and stitching moss and bark clothing.
Capitalism is the cancer, virus, prion, the tapeworm, the carrot and the stick. It is the blood sucker of all concepts. Slavery is Capitalism. We talked about this, in so many ways, not always me railing overtly with my anti-Capitalist thesis. I would bring to class small business owners, restaurant owners, ex-military, nonprofit directors, friends who were homeless, living in garages, artists, and dissidents of many kinds. Another thing that is DEAD in the water.
Now, you have to get people vetted and approved to come to a classroom. This is the sickness of our lefty culture. The rightwing has already played this card, too. “Why the hell are you bringing a person from Planned Parenthood to your class? Illegal. Stop. I’m calling the president.”
That coffee, now, looking at a cup, the ecological footprint, the energy used to get a cup of coffee to say, my Spokane students. Because Spokane loves its coffee. The amount of water used to grow a cup of coffee. We’d look at the coffee in Central America, or Colombia. Where that plant is grown. What was bulldozed to bring that plantation there. Who works the finca? Which indigenous group of non-Spanish speakers in Guatemala work these plantation, tends the bushes, picks and dries the cherries. Species lost, pesticides used. Water diverted. And, food crops denied.
Again, young and older adults, blown away in my classes, since I was teaching them to look deeper at any number of topics, and develop critical thinking and discourse skills, in whatever watered down version I’d get with many students who were coming to college ill-prepared to really write “essays.” Variations on a theme. Just the cup of liquid, first grown and processed in poor countries, takes about 38 gallons of water to grow.
We’d try and research more and more on the life-cycle of a ceramic cup or Starbucks thermos, and the life cycle and life span of a coffee maker. Embedded energy, waste, mining, slave warehouses, metals, all that fossil fuel to move those metals, cook them, mill them, ship them around the world. Sure, we could look at at sack of dried but not roasted coffee cherries coming from the Guatemala Highlands, and then where it gets shipped by boat, and then moved by truck, and then the actual cleaning and roasting of the coffee. Packaging, and then, that journey is crossing back and forth, over land, in the air, over seas.
The assignment blows many students’ minds, as it should. In the classroom, and I’d bring in a coffee person, with coffee and snacks, and she’d talk about farms in Mexico and Africa she’s visited. Talk about the flavor, the various types of coffees.
We’d look at Fair Trade, Beyond Fair Trade, Shade Grown and the like. Socially responsible coffee. I’d talk about how Vietnam — where I had gone and worked — was cutting more and more forests down to grow coffee. Coffee pests and diseases, and soil enhancements with fertilizers. The entire life cycle analysis of as many things we could extract from the coffee history and production, well, it blows students’ minds, and it only works in person. Don’t fool yourself with the fucking mouse, keyboard and Zoom camera/mic.
We need to talk about the environmental and human and ecological costs of plantation, mountain-razing coffee:
This pathetic Zoom and remote learning (sic) formula is the deadening of the brain. Recall, Americans already have three quarters of their brains (or more) colonized by lies, propaganda, hate, myth, plain stupidity, largely from terrible K12 (prison with smiling teachers) and all the marketing, and a government whose job is to fleece the masses for the company men, and fleecing includes culling thinking and deep analysis.
All this work, for coffee? Nope, because the students then do some of their own research on any manner of things. Cause and effect, solutions, pro-con, classification, expository, digital rhetoric, and deeper position papers. Research, and while we share sources and do all sorts of things at home, in groups, the big thing is getting the classroom energized, talking, arguing. Debate every minute. We even meet out of class in a, well, coffee shop, and coffee roaster.
Thinking about origins and perspectives. This is a full-time job as an instructor, in the class with all sorts of human beings there taking in and reacting to the work, the talks, the learning and the discourse. This Zoom shit is the death of humanity as I knew it. Radical Pedagogy, 2003 article!
Always with food, something in the class, mostly evening classes.
In 1960, the University of Missouri published a short “Guide for Television Teachers.” Across the country, over 100 different colleges offered nearly 500 televised courses to a half a million students. So professors needed pointers about the best way to teach in this burgeoning new medium.
“Relax,” the Missouri guide underlined. “Try to be yourself.” Male professors should wear “conservative” ties, the guide added, while women should avoid necklines or hemlines that might “cause discomfort or embarrassment” if they leaned over a counter or sat in a low chair. Once they were properly attired, they could loosen up and let their real character shine through. “Remember that the TV camera projects your natural personality best,” the guide urged, “and the more relaxed and natural that you are, the better you will reach your viewers.”
Who are these children forced to work the cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast?
Shit, those were the days. And here I am, suffering at age 64. I am feeling the burn, the beat-down burn, of more and more people around me stupid, mean, see-speak-hear not evil when it comes to this fucked up Empire, This War Machine. Those were the good old days? Is that my new mindset and refrain?
It is the contradiction to be an American totally — North American, Canadian or citizen of the USA. Every waking and sleeping minute we are covering the world in blood, exploitation, penury, death. Pain and misery is the way of the land. The hollow media, the celebrities in music and film, oh even more viral than the politicians. They are the elite, or the elite’s house boys or house girls.
“So what can we do but go with the flow? Just let it go. They have all the power, so just live your life as best you can. It’s not that bad. If we don’t bomb the world, steal the minerals, colonize space with weapons, then someone else will. What about China, Russia? I want a family, a job, and just a chance to live on weekends and kayak and smell the moose dung.”
I am down — really depressed — because of what that cup of coffee assignment represents: I am old. I am no good as a teacher because it is a digital and PC and cancel culture study body. I am down because most of the people I would have worked with years ago on political issues, as artists, well, they are either dead, or brains deadened by the struggle and the losing. I am depressed because that cup of coffee assignment is not lauded. The entire Western Civilization or Western Culture is in various forms of mental illness. That illness grouping includes a million wrong ways to medicate or mediate the illnesses of the minds.
I am not that, but I am alone, it seems. Now, the coffee, and where it comes from. Do I invest in Folgers Coffee (a division of J.M Smucker Company)? This is what’s depressing me now — my spouse and I are moving some money saved into some investments. Now I have to decide how to put some of it away, or as they say, to invest it. Because there are no interest rates, the average person can’t go to a state bank or any institution and put money into a municipal bond to do some good for society and make a few percentage points above zero. What’s wrong with 4 percent or 5 percent interest? That is the crime, zero or negative interest rates. Criminal. Imagine, there is not one thing on planet Earth, planet Wall Street, planet Retirement Fund which is not heavily tainted with DDDD: death, disease, destruction and destitution. We have been relooking at Socially Responsible Mutual Funds, or ESG’s, and the picture was never pretty:
Oh, you can say, “Broker, find me a fund that isn’t into war, weapons, mining, prisons, guns, germs, exploitation, banks, insurance companies.” It is virtually impossible. You might not want Walmart stock in the mutual fund, but then Amazon and Facebook and Kraft Foods might be in it. Microsoft, Boeing. Any amount of honor or commitment to NOT engaging in investing that gives money to the murderers, the exploiters, the ocean-soil-jungle-forest-wetland-river killers, it is all lost because they all are wrapped up into one big fat thievery corporation — BlackRock and Blackstone and the top 100 banks, hedge funds, and so many other “if-you-can-make-6-or-12-percent-on-yearly-return” investment products are so embedded in the master slavers in Fortune 1000 circles, and even within the 10,000 largest corporations.
[Modern-Day Robber Baron: The Sins of Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman]
The system is rigged for brokers to use brokerage houses, big ones, and those fees — buy, sell, trade, manage — more money and profits made for NOT producing one potato or bicycle. Yet, MBAs and the others in this crew believe that they don’t want their precious children to work the slave fields of Ivory Coast, or to be soccer ball stitchers, or to be at the wrong end of a toxic waste discharge hose. But invest in Hershey’s, or Nike, or Smithfield, well, out of sight, out of mind. Yep, they would not want their precious families bombed with the amazing number of components tied to an amazing number of businesses wrapped up in one missile. Screws, wires, capacitors, metal shrouding, telemetry, paint, seals, nuts and bolts, precision metal parts, tubes and coils and electronic guidance systems and batteries and, well, you get the picture. But goddamn, you can make bank on investing in defense (sic) companies because there is an endless demand by governments to have that shit in stock. We the taxpayer pay for those Hellfire’s:
Lockheed Martin, Boeing (previous second source), and Northrop Grumman (seeker only for AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire) Unit cost US$150,000 (FY 2021)!
It’s much more than just those three companies making bank for these missiles. There is an entire contingent (armies) of companies and service economies tied to this murder weapon:
Pretty simple looking murder weapon: those companies making tons of money, and the death makes more money for them, in resupplying.
In the past, I have studied mutual funds I have invested in, to squirrel away some savings, and the picture is pretty ugly. There are no SRI’s that are nothing more than just market washing. Socially Responsible Investing, NOT:
Top Holdings — Axis Bluechip
Company Sector P/E 3Y High 3Y Low % Assets 
Infosys Technology 29.50 10.06 1.48 9.36 
Bajaj Finance Financial 76.34 10.38 4.36 8.98 HDFC Bank Financial 24.82 10.94 6.06 8.97 Tata Consultancy Services Technology 34.90 9.05 2.30 7.32 Kotak Mahindra Bank Financial 33.90 9.46 4.74 7.12 ICICI Bank Financial 23.28 8.05 0.00 7.07 Avenue Supermarts Services 178.26 7.41 2.45 5.55 HDFC Financial 23.54 6.82 1.28 5.01 Reliance Industries Energy 27.33 8.33 0.89 4.30 Divi’s Laboratories Healthcare 57.37 3.15 0.00 3.15 Hindustan Unilever FMCG 68.89 5.27 1.49 2.58 Ultratech Cement Construction 34.72 2.36 0.00 2.24 Asian Paints Chemicals 85.41 4.24 1.32 2.17 Nestle India FMCG 77.15 4.59 0.00 2.14 Motherson Sumi Systems Automobile 147.57 2.08 0.00 2.08 
Maruti Suzuki India Automobile 46.37 5.83 0.00 1.89 Pidilite Industries Chemicals 86.93 2.55 0.60 1.82 Bharti Airtel Communication — 5.50 0.00 1.79 Cipla Healthcare 31.01 2.36 0.00 1.62 Wipro Technology 25.80 1.83 0.00 1.55 Shree Cement Construction 49.08 1.59 0.00 1.32 
Tata Steel Metals 17.76 1.21 0.00 1.21 Titan Company Cons Durable 139.72 3.45 0.78 0.98 Dr. Reddy’s Lab Healthcare 44.62 3.21 0.00 0.94 HDFC Life Insurance Financial 99.18 1.82 0.00 0.89 This is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Fund holdings, in general:
Top Warren Buffett Stocks By Size
Here are the top 10 Warren Buffett stocks by number of shares, as of March 31:
- Bank of America (BAC), 1.01 billion
- Apple (AAPL), 887.1 million
- Coca-Cola (KO), 400 million
- Kraft Heinz (KHC), 325.6 million
- Verizon (VZ), 158.8 million
- American Express (AXP), 151.6 million
- U.S. Bancorp (USB), 129.7 million
- Bank of New York Mellon (BK), 72.4 million
- General Motors (GM), 67 million
- Kroger (KR), 51.1 million
Look at what Warren Buffett owns as part of Berkshire Hathaway. Products — Diversified investments, property and casualty insurance, Utilities, Restaurants, Food processing, Aerospace, Media, Toys, Automotive, Sporting goods, Consumer products, Internet, Real estate, Railroad
So the average Joe and Jane, if they get a mutual fund or two for some long-term investment, this is the reality — you might be a social justice warrior, an anti-racist campaigner, an anti-war proponent, an environmentalist, community crusader, a socialist, an anti-capitalist, but if you stick your toe just a bit into the pond for minimal investments, just to protect a few thousand dollars here and there, this is what you get — money into the pockets of madmen: school to prison pipeline experts, war lords, surveillance capitalists, drug pushers, bad loan chieftains, medical fraudsters, real estate thugs, polluters, mountaintop removers, river toxifiers, land thieves, propaganda priests.
I am so serious about this now — where does the money go, and which company is being supported by stockholders shoveling money into their companies? Look at the union busters, at the price gougers, at the political lobbying arms, all these giant corporations and their networks of bunkos!
You can turn blue in the face decrying Monsanto (Bayer) for its pesticide poisons or Exxon for climate change propaganda or Sackler/Purdue Pharmacy for opioid addictions, but if you have a mutual fund, there is a chance that somehow those companies are entwined somewhere in the formula of a “strong mutual fund.”
The corporate giants are also demanding that Congress allow the repatriation of about $2.5 trillion stashed abroad without paying more than 5% tax. They say the money would be used to grow the economy and create jobs. Last time CEOs promised this result in 2004, Congress approved, and then was double-crossed. The companies spent the bulk on stock buybacks, their own pay raises and some dividend increases.
There are more shenanigans. With low interest rates that are deductible, companies actually borrow money to finance their stock buybacks. If the stock market tanks, these companies will have a self-created debt load to handle. A former Citigroup executive, Richard Parsons, has expressed worry about a “massively manipulated” stock market which “scares the crap” out of him.
Banks that pay you near zero interest on your savings announced on June 28, 2017 the biggest single buyback in history – a $92.8 billion extraction. Drug companies who say their sky-high drug prices are needed to fund R&D. But between 2006 and 2017, 18 drug company CEOs spent a combined staggering $516 billion on buybacks and dividends – more than their inflated claims of spending for R&D. — Ralph Nader
We all are sinners in capitalism — just paying our tax bill: death and destruction raining down on Palestinians, for example:
Seven deadly sins: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Science without humanity, Knowledge without character, Politics without principle, Commerce without morality, Worship without sacrifice.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Oh, we all think we have found the formula for living in this insane and murderous country. Oh, we have to put nose to the grindstone. Follow the leaders. Get the jab. Do as you are told. You home is not your castle. There are no 40 acres and a mule. No handouts. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Pinch your nose, cover your eyes, plug your ears, muffle your mouth!
So, you end up throwing in the towel — no purity test, no selective boycotting of this or that product or service. No true anti-Imperialist leaning, when tax filing time comes. Nothing free in this un-Democratic land of thieves, murderers and thugs. Almost every step you take in America is full of landmines, cow pies, toxic puddles and electrified fences. The horizon is one theater of the absurd after another. The amount of nonsense and self-congratulatory verbiage from all manner of people who think they are enlightened or vaunted or above the dirty, scab-sucking, ripoff fray of capitalism, well, that is the self-delusion, the big lie.
So, the role of k12, and of higher education? One of the key foundations for a society — good education, robust, and deep learning, deep thinking, and systems thinking growing. Under capitalism and consumerism and conformist ideology that is US of Amnesia, there are so many broken things about face to face education, and I have written tons on this. Taking it to Zoom, to televised classes, remote learning, well, all the bad gets funneled into this new normal-abnormal.
The post Try as You May to Deny, but Evil is in Our DNA first appeared on Dissident Voice.In addition to education, colleges and universities provide indoctrination in the values and shared beliefs that our society deems important. These commonly shared values and tenets must be instilled, importantly beginning in grade school and before (the Jesuit boast, variously stated, is “Give me the first seven years and you can have all the rest”), and continued and reinforced through high school and college.
It is at the university where young men and women of indoctrinated conviction are most typically apt and able to respond to what is going on in the world around them, perhaps even take to the streets. Indoctrination can be overt or subtle.
— George Heitmann
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Colombians have been on a national strike since April 28 with protests in 500 cities and blockades that have shut down the major highway. The protests were sparked by a proposed bill that would place the burden of financing the country’s debt on the people while cutting taxes for the wealthy, but economic conditions for most people have been in decline for a long time. The government has responded to the protests with violent repression by its militarized police that are funded and trained by the United States. Clearing the FOG speaks with Charo Mina-Rojas, a human rights defender in Colombia who was a leader in the 2016 peace agreement, about the protests, the conditions and the political environment in Colombia.
The post Repression Of National Protests In Colombia Is Backed By The United States appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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Ugliness defines the mood of state violence from Cali (Colombia) to Durban (South Africa), each context different and the depth of the violence particular to the location. Images of security forces cracking down on people trying to express their political rights have become commonplace. It is impossible to keep track of the events, which move swiftly from public manifestations to courtroom scenes, from the dissipation of tear gas to the invisible frustration of the prison cell. Yet, underlying these events and amidst the range of feelings that shape them lies a sense of refusal, the Great Refusal, the refusal to accept the terms dictated from those in power and the refusal to express this dissent in polite terms.
The post If I Fall In The Struggle, Take My Place appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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After decades of armed conflict and paramilitary violence, Colombia has seen protest movements return in strength over the past year and a half. The forceful demonstrations of the past week exceed even the high points of the nationwide uprising of November and December 2019. In response, the most heavily armed government in Latin America has carried out a brutal crackdown.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its social and economic consequences have hit Colombia hard. The country is reaching a breaking point as the ruling class attempts to squeeze the last drops of profit out of an already suffering populace kept in line via intense police violence. Although these conditions are especially extreme, they are not unique to Colombia—they resemble similar situations in Greece, Brazil, and elsewhere around the world.
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