The Mexican president continues to decry neoliberalism, but his government is failing to build an effective alternative to it.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
Adam Smith, Wealth of NationsIt’s not difficult these days to find symbolism for America’s culture built on violence and colonialism. Party to party, politician to politician, oligarch to oligarch, everything appears to be an illusion which harms the world the more we believe in it. It was just last January that Joe Biden illegally ordered a missile strike targeted towards Syrian soil. It was aimed at an Iranian-backed militia, and wound up killing at least 22 people, including Syrian citizens, and injuring several U.S. soldiers upon impact. Biden responded to this with mechanical indifference, along with, I assume, the tyrannical multinational corporations and military-partnered manufacturers who funded him. According to a statement made by Biden just hours after the bombing, which mirrors the militaristic dystopia of our time, it was meant to serve as a warning against Iran to “be careful” while U.S. bases have no scrupulous business in Syria or anywhere else.
This incident catalyzed a number of reactions.
Since this is America, the practice of doublethink sparked for yet another controversy. Defenders of the Duopoly—namely Democrats, in this case, even including some “progressives”—thoughtlessly rushed to Biden’s defense, abandoning all previous criticism of U.S. interventionism and the warmongering that took place during the Trump administration, resurrecting the Obama-era apathy towards human rights violations and corporate hegemony involving U.S. politics. They did this just as quickly as they switched to condone ICE concentration camps. Mainly, they used the tactics of downplaying the corruption and grisliness of the situation, acting like the Democratic Party doesn’t have any leverage, acting like a structure which gives a few individuals such devices are necessary, and using that pathetic “Trump would be worse” excuse. This time, they particularly ignored how Biden went out of his way and over the heads of others to do this.
Those who are less indoctrinated saw the bombing as either an expected or unexpected betrayal. They recognized that Biden was elected only because he was pushed on us and we were afraid; they saw in him nothing more than a corporate-sponsored murderer and demagogue who’d already abandoned his promises before ever trying to fight for them. Hopefully, it helped more than a few approached the realization that any job with that much power is undemocratic and unjustifiable on a default level, because there is no democracy in electing corporate-friendly politicians to dictate our lives, especially when we can have open participation and direct vote from the bottom. Among his lifelong history of corruption and warmongering, it was just additional evidence that he’s in the pockets of oligarchs. Since his inauguration, he has (among other scandals) signed 31 new drilling contracts against his vow to crack down on Big Oil, gaslit the country over the amount we were to receive with our stimulus, turned his back on student loan amnesty, perpetuated the ICE internment camps at an even higher capacity, and now this: illegally bombing a foreign country which we’ve been robbing and disrupting for no sensible reason for almost a hundred years.
American’s have a bad habit of only looking at the world from their own position, through viewpoints spun by propagandists, rarely considering the victims affected most by our corporatocratic state and its monopoly of power. People suddenly take sides in conflicts they know nothing about, fueled by the loyalty of their political “sports team” combined with misdirected discontent. We shouldn’t let ourselves have opinions forced onto us by corporate media. This is why I wanted to seek out people who’ve experienced among the worst of our country’s politics, someone who doesn’t need to be told what to think on the matter because it affects them every day. I was able to reach out to a 21-year-old Syrian artist who is attending university in Aleppo, Syria—a city which has endured tremendous destruction since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. I was asked not to use her real name, out of concern for her safety, so for the purpose of this article I will apply the alias “Elmira.” Before we begin, I want to say that it was made very clear to me after our interview that the citizens of Syria and other parts of the world are but bystanders, forced to watch their families murdered, their homes destroyed, and their resources robbed by hegemonic and neofascist powers such as Turkey, Russia, the United States, and others. It’s our duty to help them where we are, by pushing back against our governments making life worse for all of us.
The Syrian conflict began with the Arab Spring movement: a series of pro-democratic protests that (in Syria) quickly escalated into armed conflict, especially after an incident where 15 school children were arrested and tortured for graffiti-ing sentiments associated with Arab Spring. Civil war ensued, and quickly several world powers intervened to exploit the situation to their advantage. From the North, rebel groups, U.S.- and Saudi-backed Turkish forces attempt to seize territory and resources from Syria and Kurdistan (Rojava), although Kurdish and Western militaries combined forces briefly, making for an incredibly uneasy relationship between the bourgeois nation-states and minarcho-socialists; from the West, various nationalist and religious extremist groups such as ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) skirmish with Syrian allied and opposed militaries. Trade wars economically suffocate the citizens caught in the chaos.
Obviously, more than a decade of this would deeply affect any group of people. What began in idealism, opposition to the despotism and brutality under Assad and the neo-Ba’athist government, slowly transformed into broken down masses, a new generation which cares more about security than the quality of existence under that security, and an understandable pessimism towards the future. Besides the highly democratic and libertarian socialist aspirations of the Kurds in Rojava, who are more and more at risk, much of the population is now concerned foremost with survival and being left alone by foreign powers.
Elmira was eleven years old when the war began. Because of this she has less of a connection with the roots of the conflict and based on the impression I got from her she views Arab Spring as irrelevant to moving forward. However, despite her innocence in the matter, she still suffers the same result, along with the rest of the Syrian population. Her entire life, all she’s known is war, corruption, regimentation, territorial squabbles, and imperialism for which she and the Syrian population have paid dearly. I started by asking her about the Syrian conflict from her perspective.
Aleppo, Syria
Elmira: “The situation in Syria is not good. In terms of missiles and wars, we can say that it has ended somewhat, but Syria is now divided into many parts, and each part is controlled by a specific group. If you wanted to move in the city from one region to another, it would take a lot of time because of standing at the checkpoints and a lot of procedures, but now the situation is much more difficult due to the high prices of everything, especially food. There are families in Syria forced to give away their children to get rid of their expenses.“Whoever lives in any region must adapt to its people, but not many people could live here in Syria, and this is their right. During the war, Syria witnessed many cases of emigration and displacement. They preferred to live in a country other than theirs and endure the pain of exile in order to preserve their lives, and this is what it should be. As I previously told you, Syria is divided into many parts; the party controlled by the Free Army forces its people to be with the Free Army, and the party controlled by the Syrian Arab Army forces its people to be with the Syrian Arab Army, and so on . . . America supports the Free Army and thus the party that controls the Free Army will support America’s policy. I speak from my point of view.”
T.P.: “You told me in one of our previous conversations that the war has been hard on Aleppo. Can you say anything about that?”
Elmira: “Aleppo . . . We can say that it is the city that has suffered the most from war and destruction, so it had a greater fate than the demolition of homes, the displacement of families, and the killing of children and women . . . The effects of the war are still visible today . . . My country has suffered a lot and is still suffering. Parents work day and night, women and men just to keep their children alive, just to secure food for them. I am talking about families around me, in my area. I’m talking about the middle class and below. I hope that the future of Syria will improve, but it does not seem so. If the reconstruction took 10 years, it will not return to what it was. It will take a long time.
“No, there is no justice at all. Wasta [nepotism] and favoritism are spreading. For example, if I studied and graduated, I would not be employed in my field of study if I did not have an intermediary. At the same time, a person who does not have any degree can work in any job he wants only because he has wasta.”
I thought to myself how this sounded vaguely similar to the United States, though combined with more desperate internal and external factors.
T.P.: “What are your thoughts on Joe Biden, who recently bypassed Congress to bomb Syria?”
Elmira: “Joe Biden was at odds with the Iranians, and Syria is an arena for wrestling with the rest of the countries. Each country had a dispute with another that was attacking it, but in Syria, namely the Syrian people, they are the only ones to be hurt. For example, America and Russia are in constant conflict, and unfortunately, it is Syria that has endured all of this because of the wars against it.”
T.P.: “What do you think was the root cause of the Syrian Civil War? What are your thoughts on the factions that evolved from it.”
Elmira: “I really don’t know. I was young at the time. All I know is that there was a small armed group that was engaged in sabotage, and the media was helping to confuse the facts”
“The war began in 2011, and we can say that it is still continuing. Since then, many children have left school. Many Syrians have fled (moving within Syria) in search of a safe place. Many were killed and many emigrated abroad. In every Syrian family there are deceased and exiled. As for me and my family, we have been displaced five times. We were going out in the dark and running to escape from the shells and bullets. Now it is not so much a war of bullets, but it is a material war. Prices are very high and everyone suffers from poverty.”
“I lived in several areas, among them was controlled by the Free Army, including the Syrian Arab Army, but it was generally safer in the areas of the Syrian Arab Army.”
“The factions are all bad. We just want safety, and all of these factions do not provide us with sufficient safety. But I think the [Syrian Arab Army’s] platoon is the best. I lived in several areas, among them was one controlled by the Free Army, including the Syrian Arab Army, but there was more safety in the areas of the Syrian Arab Army.”
T.P.: “You said that you were forced to flee five times in your life. Would you mind sharing some of this experience in detail?”
Elmira: “No, I do not mind. This was in the year 2013, as the beating intensified a lot in places common in homes and public places. We were forced to flee looking for a way to live elsewhere in Syria. First, we went to live in a shared house for our relatives in an area without war. We were displaced again, but this time our relatives were with us. We lived with other family as well, and every time we repeated the same story, but to no avail. Life was almost impossible in all of Syria. About five years ago we settled in my current neighborhood in a brick house after our house was demolished.”
T.P.: “Is there anything you would like to say to Americans?”
Elmira: “American citizens are ultimately citizens like me, and they also have their problems like racism and so on. I just hope that there will be a voice or an advocacy by American citizens for humanity in my country and in the world in general.”
I was glad she made that point.
We should not allow ourselves and communities to permit the destruction of lives in the name of national and corporate greed. We had no right when the Truman administration and the CIA led a coup in Syria in 1949, when Obama led his bombing campaign which killed mainly Middle Eastern civilians, when Trump was bombing them during his turn, and while Biden is bombing them now. This isn’t a game, and even though we can’t prevent the actions of the tyrants making those decisions, we are still consenting to the structure which produces them. This is wholesale terrorism and theft we are contributing to one way or another.
But how can there be constructive advocacy if people in this country still have faith in the “essential decency” of bourgeois republicanism? When we are still caught up consenting to unjustifiable monopolies of authority in our so-called “democracy” with the delusion that any individual is going to come and save us, while defending “leaders” when they use that authority to rip us off and destroy the world, how could we ever successfully stop this trend? Even progressive Bernie Sanders voted for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, an exercise in unjustifiable violence and misuse of resources. There isn’t a single politician who isn’t either ineffective or hasn’t gone out of their way to contribute to corporate dominance and interventionism. If we were to both alleviate the chaos and encourage democracy in Syria (and elsewhere), it would require us to reject the antidemocratic and feudalistic principles where we are. By doing this, we’d in turn be rejecting neoliberalism, globalism, militarism, monopoly, nationalism, and pretty much everything else the United States, Joe Biden, and every other politician stands for. America is one of the most influential governments on the planet, which is not good on any level. The reason ultraviolence and corruption exist elsewhere is usually because we fail to stop it here. We bear this responsibility. At the very least, we need to take the time to stand up for what’s right.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
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A closer look at the Italian prime minister’s career reveals how the tangled history of post-Keynesian economic thought shaped his technocratic brand.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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After a full year of racist and repressive horror perpetrated by a de facto government resulting from a coup, the people of Bolivia went to the polls on October 18, 2020 and stunned their own country and the world by giving Evo Morales’ MAS-IPSP party candidate, Luis Arce, a landslide. The coup d’état that installed a racist regime led by Jeanine Añez, was engineered by OAS secretary General, Luis Almagro, carried out by fascists in November 2019, and of course, supported by the US.1
The specifics of the landslide reveal the size of the defeat of the de facto extreme right wing regime: the MAS-IPSP won the presidency with a 55% of the votes cast, against 28% of right-wing Carlos Mesa, and 14% of extreme right-wing Luis Camacho. This was a much improved performance compared to the election in November 2019 when their candidate, Evo Morales won with 48% against right wing Carlos Mesa’s 36%.
The post Bolivia: Right Wing Threatens The Recovery Of Democracy appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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Daniel Jadue is the mayor of Recoleta, a commune that is part of the expanding city of Santiago, Chile. His office is on the sixth floor of a municipal building in whose lower reaches one can find a pharmacy, an optical shop, and a bookstore run by the municipality that are dedicated to providing fairly priced goods. On the walls of his office are emblems of his commitment to the Palestinian people, including flags and an iconic cartoon of Handala created by Naji al-Ali, a Palestinian cartoonist who was assassinated in 1987. ‘I am Palestinian’, Jadue tells me with pride. ‘I was born on 28 June 1967, just days after the Israelis took Jerusalem’. The struggle of the Palestinians, which has haunted much of his political life, he says, is ‘not so different from the struggle of the Chilean people.
The post Neoliberalism Was Born In Chile; Neoliberalism Will Die In Chile appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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A cross-party group of MPs has said there’s “no clear evidence” the £22bn Test and Trace scheme contributed to lower coronavirus (Covid-19) infection levels.
“Staggering”
Meg Hillier, chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) behind a critical report, urged the government to justify the “staggering investment of taxpayers’ money”.
The MPs said ministers had justified the vast expenditure on preventing a second national lockdown. But they they questioned the programme’s effectiveness noting that England is currently living under its third lockdown.
They also urged the scheme, led by Tory peer Dido Harding, to “wean itself off” reliance on thousands of “expensive” consultants and temporary staff. Some of them have been paid £6,624 per day. The PAC said the programme does publish a significant amount of weekly data. Some of this shows that full compliance with the self-isolation rules relied upon by the scheme can be low.
But it criticised the data for failing to show the speed of the process from “cough to contact”. Therefore it did not allow the public to judge the “overall effectiveness of the programme”.
The MPs also criticised the scheme for struggling to consistently match supply and demand for the service. This resulted “in either sub-standard performance or surplus capacity”.
And they said it remained “overly reliant” on contractors and temporary staff after having to initially act quickly to scale up the service rapidly.
(PA Graphics) Waste
The report said the scheme admitted in February that it still employs around 2,500 consultants, at an estimated daily rate of around £1,100. The best paid consultancy staff are on a daily rate of £6,624. The report said:
It is concerning that the DHSC (Department of Health and Social Care) is still paying such amounts – which it considers to be ‘very competitive rates’ to so many consultants
England’s chief medical officer professor Chris Whitty has warned of another “surge” in the virus later in the year. So the PAC has called for ministers to set out how the scheme will “cost-effectively maintain a degree of readiness”.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Budget last week included an additional £15bn for Test and Trace. This takes the total bill to more than £37bn over two years.
“Incompetence”
Labour’s shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Rachel Reeves said the report shows the significantly outsourced system has “failed the British people and led our country into restrictive lockdown after lockdown”. She said:
It underlines the epic amounts of waste and incompetence, an overreliance on management consultants, taxpayers’ cash splashed on crony contracts, all while ministers insist our NHS heroes deserve nothing more than a clap and a pay cut
Trades Union Congress general secretary Frances O’Grady said the government’s refusal to increase statutory sick pay had “massively undermined Test and Trace”.
Royal College of Nursing general secretary Dame Donna Kinnair said nurses “will be furious to hear of the millions of pounds being spent on private sector consultants”.
The government said a further 231 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus as of 9 March. Meanwhile, there were a further 5,766 lab-confirmed cases in the UK.
Test and Trace systems have been deployed to high rates of success in countries other than the UK.
By The Canary
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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Since day one, advocates of privately-operated charter schools have tried to convince everyone that segregated charter schools “empower parents” and that parents are not only “stakeholders” but the most important “stakeholders” in education. Everything in education is supposedly all about parents first and foremost. Parents are the end-all and be-all. Education apparently serves no one else or 10 other broad functions. Education exists mainly to serve parents. Everyone and everything else is secondary at best. Oddly enough, while the “parent empowerment” theme is central to charter school disinformation it is actually charter schools that choose parents and students, not the other way around.
Such a narrow notion of parents-first-last-and-always deliberately degrades and debases the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic role, significance, and importance of public education in a modern society based on mass industrial production. The days of petty production, small estates, small farms, and feudal manors are long gone. Humans today are born to a complex modern society in which all production is highly technical, scientific, advanced, large-scale, and cooperative. Everything is interdependent and impossible without millions of skilled working people. The problem is that this modern mass production system is based on outdated relations of production, that is, it is owned and controlled by competing private owners of capital whose only aim is to maximize profit as fast as possible no matter the damage to the natural and social environment. Such a set-up reinforces old ideas such as consumerism, individualism, competition, and a fend-for-yourself culture. It renders education a commodity and parents become consumers who individually shop for schools the way they shop for a car. If things work out, that’s great, but if they don’t work out, then you are screwed. “Buyer Beware” is the only defense you have against getting ambushed in a “survival-of-the-fittest” society. In such a society, government abdicates its responsibility to people and nothing is guaranteed. Privileges, competition, and opportunities replace rights. Education is never upheld as a right that must be provided a guarantee by government, it is simply a commodity and an opportunity.
Neoliberal “Stakeholder”
The core idea behind the neoliberal notion of a “stakeholder” is that there are no social classes. We supposedly live in a “no-class” society. In this way, the 50 problems that exist in class-divided societies magically disappear. All that exists is isolated, abstract, allegedly equal self-interested calculating consumers with an “equal stake” in capitalism. We are to casually ignore massive and constantly-growing inequality and the fact that only the top 1% have a stake in capitalism and that the majority of humanity urgently needs an alternative to this crisis-prone economic system that leaves millions behind every year. The neoliberal idea of a “stakeholder” is a way to apologize for capitalism and to block any thinking that considers a modern alternative to this obsolete system.
Parents are not stakeholders. Nor are students, teachers, and principals. Women, workers, and senior citizens are not “stakeholders” either. They are human beings and citizens with basic human rights, not consumers, shoppers, or “market citizens” who fend-for-themselves in a chaotic and insecure “dog-eat-dog” world. Parents are members of the polity, just like everyone else, and they necessarily share the same objective interests as students, teachers, principals, and others. Education serves parents, as well as students, teachers, principals, society, the economy, and people who are not parents. The value of education is not based on parenthood. A modern society based on mass industrial production would not be possible without a modern mass public education system that is world-class, fully-funded, and locally-controlled.
The role of education is to pass on the accumulated knowledge of humanity to the next generation so that society can progress. Everyone has a “stake” in education. The same can be said about healthcare, transportation, postal services, food production, municipal services, and more. Everyone needs these services—parents and non-parents. Education must serve everyone in a modern society, not this or that “stakeholder” or “special interest.”
Government must take up its social responsibility to provide the rights of individuals and collectives with a guarantee in practice, not leave everyone to fend for themselves in a society that perpetuates insecurity, poverty, debt, unemployment, and inequality. Everyone should reject all attempts by narrow private interests to impose neoliberal ideas and arrangements on people, institutions, public enterprises, and different spheres of life. Defend the right to an education that serves all individuals, collectives, and society.
The post Charter School Disinformation About Families Being the Most Important “Stakeholders” first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Since day one, advocates of privately-operated charter schools have tried to convince everyone that segregated charter schools “empower parents” and that parents are not only “stakeholders” but the most important “stakeholders” in education. Everything in education is supposedly all about parents first and foremost. Parents are the end-all and be-all. Education apparently serves no one else or 10 other broad functions. Education exists mainly to serve parents. Everyone and everything else is secondary at best. Oddly enough, while the “parent empowerment” theme is central to charter school disinformation it is actually charter schools that choose parents and students, not the other way around.
Such a narrow notion of parents-first-last-and-always deliberately degrades and debases the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic role, significance, and importance of public education in a modern society based on mass industrial production. The days of petty production, small estates, small farms, and feudal manors are long gone. Humans today are born to a complex modern society in which all production is highly technical, scientific, advanced, large-scale, and cooperative. Everything is interdependent and impossible without millions of skilled working people. The problem is that this modern mass production system is based on outdated relations of production, that is, it is owned and controlled by competing private owners of capital whose only aim is to maximize profit as fast as possible no matter the damage to the natural and social environment. Such a set-up reinforces old ideas such as consumerism, individualism, competition, and a fend-for-yourself culture. It renders education a commodity and parents become consumers who individually shop for schools the way they shop for a car. If things work out, that’s great, but if they don’t work out, then you are screwed. “Buyer Beware” is the only defense you have against getting ambushed in a “survival-of-the-fittest” society. In such a society, government abdicates its responsibility to people and nothing is guaranteed. Privileges, competition, and opportunities replace rights. Education is never upheld as a right that must be provided a guarantee by government, it is simply a commodity and an opportunity.
Neoliberal “Stakeholder”
The core idea behind the neoliberal notion of a “stakeholder” is that there are no social classes. We supposedly live in a “no-class” society. In this way, the 50 problems that exist in class-divided societies magically disappear. All that exists is isolated, abstract, allegedly equal self-interested calculating consumers with an “equal stake” in capitalism. We are to casually ignore massive and constantly-growing inequality and the fact that only the top 1% have a stake in capitalism and that the majority of humanity urgently needs an alternative to this crisis-prone economic system that leaves millions behind every year. The neoliberal idea of a “stakeholder” is a way to apologize for capitalism and to block any thinking that considers a modern alternative to this obsolete system.
Parents are not stakeholders. Nor are students, teachers, and principals. Women, workers, and senior citizens are not “stakeholders” either. They are human beings and citizens with basic human rights, not consumers, shoppers, or “market citizens” who fend-for-themselves in a chaotic and insecure “dog-eat-dog” world. Parents are members of the polity, just like everyone else, and they necessarily share the same objective interests as students, teachers, principals, and others. Education serves parents, as well as students, teachers, principals, society, the economy, and people who are not parents. The value of education is not based on parenthood. A modern society based on mass industrial production would not be possible without a modern mass public education system that is world-class, fully-funded, and locally-controlled.
The role of education is to pass on the accumulated knowledge of humanity to the next generation so that society can progress. Everyone has a “stake” in education. The same can be said about healthcare, transportation, postal services, food production, municipal services, and more. Everyone needs these services—parents and non-parents. Education must serve everyone in a modern society, not this or that “stakeholder” or “special interest.”
Government must take up its social responsibility to provide the rights of individuals and collectives with a guarantee in practice, not leave everyone to fend for themselves in a society that perpetuates insecurity, poverty, debt, unemployment, and inequality. Everyone should reject all attempts by narrow private interests to impose neoliberal ideas and arrangements on people, institutions, public enterprises, and different spheres of life. Defend the right to an education that serves all individuals, collectives, and society.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Public K-12 schooling has long been intertwined with economic concerns in the United States, and the dysfunction of this relationship has never been clearer than in the educational fallout from the COVID-19 crisis. The complex relationship between federal, state and local control over schools — coupled with over two decades of neoliberal, corporate-driven education policies — has left the majority of schools and families in a complete tailspin in the wake of an unprecedented public health crisis. Communities are being fractured as people argue over the safety of opening schools. Local school board members are making potentially life-and-death decisions based on newly acquired knowledge of everything from HVAC metrics, to architectural blueprints, to public health codes. Misinformed tropes about powerful teachers’ unions and self-interested teachers are popping up in mainstream media, and seeping onto social media platforms and public comment forums. Parents pushed to the brink by full-time parenting and at-home work are breaking down in front of hundreds of community members on late-night Zoom meetings.
While recent polls have shown that much of the divide over whether to reopen schools during the pandemic largely falls along political lines, there are no easy answers on either side. The problems unearthed by attempting to reopen schools and by keeping schools remote are equally profound. Recent data confirms what school employees and students have known for decades — that school buildings in over half of U.S. districts are in grave disrepair, needing major updates in everything from roofing, to lighting, to, most critically, HVAC systems. Also common knowledge to most school employees is a shortage of staff, a problem that has been handled over decades by overcrowding classrooms, cutting programming and stretching available workers as far as possible. With the added need for regular quarantining due to COVID exposure, as well as requirements for in-person distancing, this shortage is now stymying in-person schooling in many places. Remote schooling too, has had its share of problems, ranging from lack of reliable technology, issues with attendance and a huge learning-curve for many teachers. Even more serious has been the psychological, physical and emotional toll on students during remote schooling.
Beyond all of the issues arising with both in-person and remote schooling, an underlying debate ensues about the actual safety of sending students and adults into school buildings during the pandemic. As new research and reporting emerge nearly daily on the topic, it is fair to say that both the short-term and long-term safety of school reopening is still unknown; it is an experiment at best, one that some families and school employees have chosen to or been forced to engage in, and others have not.
But one thing is clear: that many debates about school reopening fail to account for a larger political, economic and historical context of public education in the United States. Ironically, to now continue functioning, the economy is reliant on schools, yet it is this same economy that has, over decades, driven public schools to the brink of collapse.
For at least 30 years, the approach to education in the United States — and in other advanced nations — has been fully subsumed under a logic of free-market capitalism. Reaching back to the notorious “A Nation at Risk” report in the 1980s, our education system has been attacked for failing to provide a skilled, educated workforce, and for putting the United States at peril of losing its superpower status. Business leaders, national and international economic organizations, and politicians of both major parties have framed the most important goals of education as individual and national economic gain. In most public and policy rhetoric, the notion of school for workforce preparation and economic growth — with students and teachers as a form of “human capital” — is a paradigm that is not even questioned anymore.
This ideology is part and parcel of the neoliberal policies that have dominated society since the 1980s, which have materialized in the privatization of public assets and services, the deregulation of the market, and severe cuts to spending on the public sector and social welfare. Institutions such as public health, public education and other social services have faced untenable budget cuts and have been left to the whims of the market. In at least 22 states, school districts reported budgets in 2017 lower than they had had prior to the 2008 recession, and most are likely facing even more perilous cuts post-pandemic.
Deprived of adequate public funding, every facet of the education system has become increasingly privatized. An ethos of individual school, teacher and student responsibility has replaced support for public schools and the common public good. Everything from the proliferation of charter schools and voucher programs, to the multibillion-dollar high-stakes testing and textbook industries, to contracts for school technology have become highly sought sources of profit. The value of the U.S. K-12 education market alone in 2018 was estimated to be close to $1.5 billion, and has recently been projected to grow by over 30 percent in the next five years.
The privatization of education is deeply intertwined with and implicated by arguments about the economic goals of education, and about social and economic inequalities. Republican and Democratic administrations alike have unrolled decades of punitive, corporate-driven policies and reforms in the name of rectifying the persistent educational “achievement gap” between whites and non-whites. Rather than seeing discrepancies in educational achievement as the result of both a biased system of measurement, and generations of discrimination and oppression — what educator Gloria Ladson-Billings rightly calls the “education debt” — policy-makers have responded with large-scale, private-sector reforms to the education system.
These reforms have largely focused on “accountability” in the form of high-stakes testing, and “choice” in the form of charter schools and vouchers. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and the Every Student Succeeds Act all encompass the same misguided premises: educational inequality exists because schools, students and teachers aren’t being held accountable. Under this flawed ideology, rather than more funding, what is needed is corporate-style management and data-driven efficiency; and if allowed, families as consumers will make choices in their individual best interests in a marketplace of schools successful at producing workforce-ready students. The explosion of charter schools over the last several decades, particularly prevalent in communities of color, has been shown to actually worsen segregation and to hurt the traditional public schools that educate the majority of students. High-stakes testing has been shown to disproportionately disadvantage low-income students and students of color, and to have actually widened social and economic inequalities.
Individual schools, students and teachers who have failed to meet the standards of the enormously profitable and high-stakes testing that has come to measure success have been increasingly subject to outside-contracted, private services for remediation and support — itself a multibillion-dollar industry and growing, and highly racialized.
The effect of these reforms on the ability of schools and districts to function as healthy communities and vibrant educational ecosystems has been well documented over the past three decades. A robust resistance movement — in the form of activist teachers’ unions, parent and community groups, and a growing chorus of progressive educators — has persisted, as have on-the-ground practices rooted in a more holistic vision of education. The human lives and communities that make up public schools have not, ultimately, been successfully replaced by corporate-driven policies and data points, but the toll has been profound. Administrators and teachers have been forced to spend more time administering poorly designed tests and parsing data than exploring ideas and building healthy communities. Support staff and programming have been underfunded at the same time that the problems students come to school with have become more and more dire. Educators have reported feeling less able to reach their students in meaningful ways, and over time, the material and social conditions in all but the most affluent public districts have continued to deteriorate.
School employees on the ground have for years been sounding alarms about overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated buildings, a deficit of supplies and insufficient support services. Instead of addressing these glaring problems, research shows that money has been poured into surveillance, security and data collection — also a hallmark of neoliberal governance and a trend that has ballooned with the rise in mass school shootings. As has become particularly clear in schools serving Black, Brown and low-income students, money that goes to policing cannot go toward support services, and schools that exist in a culture of surveillance and discipline cannot function as healthy communities.
Despite resistance, education policy has continued to be viewed largely through the same distorted economic lens for decades. Concerns for children’s well-being have been couched in business-laden terms and practices: teachers are evaluated by “value-added measures,” students become “college and career ready,” school leaders are being trained to be “CEOs,” schools are managed as stock-market style “portfolio districts,” and above all, “data” rules.
In the wake of the pandemic, the panic over education loss has been similarly framed in terms of the economy, and arguments that focus on racial disparities. The loudest arguments for school reopening are often framed in terms of race, class and purported social justice. Black, Brown and low-income students are being the most hurt by the lack of in-person schooling, the argument goes, falling ever further behind in their education — and by extension, their life trajectory. Coupled with inequities in quality of health care and access to support resources, these students are being exponentially hurt by school closures and by the pandemic. Racial disparities have been used as a rallying cry to reopen schools before the pandemic is under control, and have bolstered arguments for more data-gathering to closely track academic losses. Yet, as scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes in a recent New Yorker article, “no one needs to invent a new metric to discover that, during the worst crisis in modern American history, students might be falling behind. It stands to reason that those students who were already the victims of the maldistribution of wealth and resources that mars the entire enterprise of public education in the United States would fall behind even more.”
Some studies have gone as far as to project lifetime losses in earning between whites and non-whites as a result of remote learning. Also noting greater losses for non-white children, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development issued a report in September 2020 arguing that COVID-19 school closures could cause nations “1.5% lower GDP throughout the remainder of the century” and that these “losses will be permanent unless the schools return to better performance levels than those in 2019.”
While in fact Black, Latinx and low-income children are undoubtedly bearing greater costs during the pandemic than their white and affluent counterparts, the push for a return to in-person schooling at the height of a pandemic fails to account for the underlying causes of racial and economic inequities in U.S. society, and in education in particular. It has also been documented that some students of color are actually benefiting from remote schooling, given a chance to learn with fewer pressures from a system that was not designed to serve them. An understanding of the larger context of educational inequities, and of the myriad ways the inequalities translate on-the-ground in actual schools and classrooms should be crucial to any decisions we make during and after the pandemic. It is also essential that we not see school closures as the cause of these inequities. The economy we’ve built and the systems we’ve shaped in its image have all but ensured these conditions in the face of a public health crisis. The push to reopen schools before we really know if it is safe to do so is 100 percent about saving that very economy, and getting us all back as quickly as possible to a system that actually wrought many of our social problems to begin with. The panicked rhetoric about children “falling behind” is about a desire to maintain the broken, inequitable status quo, not a desire for true social and economic equity.
Perhaps this is why a much higher number of Black families — who are more likely to have experienced the ravages of corporate education reform — are opting for remote schooling until school buildings are proven safe. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor also points out the push for school reopening in the name of equity “rings hollow,” and that it actually perpetuates white educational privilege: “Pushing for schools to re-open even as the majority of Black and Latinx parents opt for remote learning will only undermine remote instruction, all while catering to the disproportionate number of white students who show up in person.” The pushback from teacher and school-employee unions also reflects a crucial level of lived experience, in that people working on-the-ground in schools understand in very real ways the many reasons that school reopening protocols are likely to go wrong.
It has been clear from the beginning that the best way to stop the spread of the virus is for workers and families to stay home, yet U.S. politicians and business leaders have been unwilling to come close to the kinds of support that many other nations have provided to enable this to happen. The pandemic has laid bare our absolute subservience to an economy that has been designed to work against the majority of us.
There is an even greater risk, post-pandemic, of private interests capitalizing on a beleaguered school system, a phenomenon writer Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism,” which we can already see happening as tech companies and online schools swoop in to profit from the mess of public schooling gone remote. It is more essential than ever that we now bolster our public sector, and dismantle the corporate education reforms that have brought such damage to our public schools. When it comes to debates about school reopening, we should take our lead from the professionals who work in education day in and day out with children, not from business people or politicians who are beholden to them.
Even more, we should use this as an opportunity to grow social reconstructionist, critical and democratic aims of education. Public schools are “essential” places — despite the beating they continue to take — in that they are one of only a few places in U.S. society that have the potential to provide a forum for an open exchange of ideas between people of different backgrounds, and a forum for collectively exploring and countering the most pressing problems of our times. It is hard to imagine a time riper than now for the kind of emancipatory vision of education championed by Paulo Freire and other critical educators: an education that could truly liberate all of us from entrenched inequalities and suffering. In the past year alone that schools have been disrupted, students have witnessed: an unchecked pandemic kill over 500,000 people in the United States; the worst fire season in U.S. history ravage the West; the greatest call for racial justice since the civil rights movement; an attempted political coup and overthrow of the U.S. Congress; and an incapacitation of the power grid in Texas after a climate-change induced snowstorm. What could be a more powerful gift to give to our nation’s children than an education to help them understand these issues, and the tools to make a better world?
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The federal minimum wage hasn’t increased in over a decade. After a brief but failed attempt by the Biden administration to raise it to $15 an hour, it will most likely remain at the current $7.25 for an indefinite time to come. This is a shame, for the economic benefits of wage hikes are beyond dispute, as many studies have shown, including those authored by Robert Pollin, distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Pollin is co-author of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (1998) and A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (2008) and has worked with many U.S. non-governmental organizations on creating living wage statutes at both the statewide and municipal levels. In this interview, Pollin discusses why, even though we must continue to push for a $15 minimum wage, we must also consider what a true living wage looks like.
C.J. Polychroniou: The general argument against raising the minimum wage is that it is bad for small business and the economy in general. Is there any truth in this claim?
Robert Pollin: Going through a bit of background will be helpful here. The federal minimum wage was last increased in July 2009, from $6.55 an hour to $7.25. So, no increase in 12 years. But actually, the situation is far worse than even what this suggests. That is because, at the very least, we have to factor in the effects of inflation on people’s ability to buy the things they need to live. Inflation means that the prices of food, housing, transportation, clothing and other necessities have been rising. So the minimum wage today would need to be $8.77 in order to buy what $7.25 could buy in 2009.
But there is still much more to the story once we take account of inflation. That is, after we factor in inflation, the U.S. minimum wage actually peaked in 1968, 52 years ago. In today’s dollars, after factoring in inflation, the federal minimum wage in 1968 was $11.90, 64 percent higher than today’s $7.25 figure. Further still, average labor productivity — i.e., the amount of goods or services an average worker can produce over the course of a day in the U.S. — has risen at an average rate of 1.9 percent per year since 1968. What if, starting in 1968, the federal minimum wage had risen every year in step with the 1.9 percent average increase in productivity as well as inflation? That would mean that minimum wage workers would get raises when they are producing more every day, but their raise would only equal exactly their 1.9 percent improvement in productivity but not a penny more. In that case, the federal minimum wage today would be $31.67 an hour — over four times higher than the actual federal minimum wage today.
Now if we go back to 1968, when the federal minimum wage was approximately $11.90 in today’s dollars, in fact the U.S. economy was booming. The official unemployment rate was 3.6 percent, i.e., less than half of the average 8.1 percent unemployment rate over 2020. So it is obvious that the U.S. economy can function just fine at a much higher federal minimum wage rate than the $7.25 rate that prevails today.
We also get basically the same result by looking at the experiences in recent years with minimum wage laws in U.S. states and living wage statues in some municipalities that are higher than the federal minimum wage. Right now, 29 states along with the District of Columbia operate with minimum wage rates higher than the federal minimum. The citywide minimum in Washington, D.C., is already at $15.00, and the State of Washington is next highest at $13.69. The evidence on the experiences in these states and cities is that businesses function at least as well if not better than those states that still operate at the federal $7.25 minimum. The employment opportunities in these states and cities are also at least as good if not better.
It is fair to ask: If businesses are mandated to pay higher wages than they would choose to pay otherwise, then why is it that we don’t see these businesses lay off employees or close up operations after they are forced to give raises? The answer is that the overwhelming majority of businesses don’t want to be forced to raise wages for their employees, but they learn to adjust. They might raise their prices modestly to cover their increased payroll. The businesses’ level of productivity is also likely to improve. This is because their workers become more committed to their jobs when they are paid at minimally decent levels. These productivity increases will not be enough to compensate for the businesses’ increased payroll, but they will help to partially cover some of their higher costs.
Finally, some businesses may just end up accepting modestly lower profits, even if reluctantly. To the extent this occurs, raising the minimum wage will end up advancing a more equal distribution of income between businesses and workers. This is after 40 years under neoliberalism in which inequality has risen relentlessly. The decline in the value of the minimum wage, after adjusting for inflation, has been a significant factor contributing to the overall rise in inequality under neoliberalism.
Millions of Americans earn wages at or below the federal minimum. Are there estimates of the consequences of a wage hike to $15 an hour on the lives of the working poor?
According to a range of research compiled by the Economic Policy Institute, increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 would deliver pay increases for nearly 32 million workers, 21 percent of the entire U.S. workforce. Nearly 60 percent of workers whose families are currently living below the official poverty line would see their pay go up. The average affected worker with a year-round full-time job would earn an extra $3,300 per year. This would have a major impact on the lives of these workers and their families. It would mean, for example, they would be able to take care of an elderly relative rather than work a second job to cover rent. It would mean they could get their car repaired when that becomes necessary without having to cut back on buying food. It could even mean that they could take a modest vacation.
It is also important to note that the minimum wage increase to $15 an hour would disproportionately benefit Black and Latino workers — with 31 percent of Black people and 26 percent of Latinos getting raises through the minimum wage increase. Finally, we have to dispel the idea that a minimum wage increase largely benefits teenagers with after-school part-time jobs. Only 10 percent of the workers who would benefit from the $15 minimum wage are teenagers. But it is also the case that teenagers deserve to be paid decently. A large share of them are making significant contributions to their families’ overall income level.
Is a $15 minimum wage itself really enough for a worker to live on decently?
We should be clear that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour takes us only a small way towards establishing decent wage standards in the U.S. A critical question to ask here is: What would constitute a living wage standard in the U.S.? There have been various efforts at addressing this question. One of the most comprehensive efforts has been by a team of researchers at MIT, led by Professor Amy Glasmeier, who produce what they call a “Living Wage Calculator.” The MIT researchers describe their living wage standard as follows: “It is a market-based approach that draws upon geographically specific expenditure data related to a family’s likely minimum food, childcare, health insurance, housing, transportation and other basic necessities (e.g. clothing, personal care items, etc.) costs.”
The MIT researchers also make clear what their living wage standard is capable of purchasing in all the various regions of the U.S. They write:
The living wage model does not allow for what many consider the basic necessities enjoyed by many Americans. It does not budget funds for pre-prepared meals or those eaten in restaurants. It does not include money for entertainment, nor does it allocate leisure time for unpaid vacations or holidays. Lastly, it does not provide a financial means for planning for the future through savings and investment or for the purchase of capital assets. The living wage is the minimum income standard that, if met, draws a very fine line between the financial independence of the working poor and the need to seek out public assistance or suffer consistent and severe housing and food insecurity. In light of this fact, the living wage is perhaps better defined as a minimum subsistence wage for persons living in the United States.
Given this description of how the MIT researchers define a “living wage” standard, their results as to what constitutes a living wage in various regions of the U.S. are striking. For example, considering a family with a single parent and one child, the MIT Calculator finds that as a statewide average, the living wage would range from a low in Mississippi of $26.74 to a high in Massachusetts of $36.88. Wisconsin is in the middle of the state living wage average, at $30.17.
In short, the fight for a $15 federal minimum wage needs to be won. But it should also be recognized as being an important but still small step toward reversing the impact of 40 years of neoliberal economic policies on the lives of working people in the United States.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Neoliberalism, at its heart, is class war waged from above under the guise of rational, technocratic management of an economy that must — as neoliberals claim —be shielded from the corrosive influence of democratic politics.
— Chris Maisano, “Liberalism, Austerity, and the Global Crisis of Legitimacy,” The Activist, 7/19/2011.[W]hat’s becoming increasingly clear to many scholars and intellectuals is that there is a new morphology of fascism that is taking place in the United States, one that is integrated into, and supportive of, the political logic of neoliberalism.
— Eric J. Wiener, “Neo-Fascism, Or The Political Logic of Neoliberalism” 3 Quarks Daily, November 9, 2020.The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. To sustain itself, neoliberalism starts looking for some other ideological prop and finds fascism.
— Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, “Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End,” Monthly Review, July 1, 2019.In a recent, exceedingly instructive piece entitled,”This Crisis Has Exposed the Absurdities of Neoliberalism. That Doesn’t Mean It’ll Destroy It,” Greek political economist Costas Lapavitsus asserts that state intervention in response to the COVID-19 public health crisis was both breathtaking in its magnitude and also in revealing the glaring hypocrisy of neoliberal ideology of “The market rules,” as previously scorned Keynesian policies were temporarily rushed into service.
Some of these measures included massive liquidity injections, lowering interest rates to zero, credit and loan guarantees, Federal Reserve purchase of government bonds and as pitifully small and delayed one-time direct payment to most Americans. The fiscal stimulus packages already enacted are a quarter larger than those put in place during the Great Recession of 2008 and Biden recently proposed an additional $1.9 trillion coronavirus package in new federal spending.This episodic intervention in a crisis can be seen as another selective intervention by the state to ensure class rule. But the larger context includes the countless, irrefutable examples of the state’s welcome intervention to redistribute wealth upward and in prescribing critical market state functions in terms of policing, incarceration, surveillance, militarization and a host of other supportive services. U.S. interventions around the globe in support of the empire are so transparently obvious as to not warrant further elaboration. Lapavitsus speculates on whether this massive state intervention in the economy could result “…in a more authoritarian form of controlled capitalism in which the interests of the corporate and the financial elite would remain paramount.” Unless there’s a mass mobilization from below there is no evidence suggesting that whatever is done will address the needs of working people. Although Lapavitsus never explicitly suggests that neoliberalism will be transfigured into fascism, it’s not implausible to draw that conclusion.
Neoliberalism (“neo” is a Greek prefix for new) is the ideology of modern capitalism that was resurrected from the original laissez-faire liberalism that had been thoroughly discredited by the Great Depression and a spurred mass movement intent on abolishing capitalism. Neoliberalism has now held sway for over four decades and is the state religion in the United States, the common sense belief that this is simply the only way to organize society.
Neoliberalism was a repudiation of Keynesian economics under which the government intervenes to stabilize the economy, a theory that had a fundamental influence on the New Deal. It’s sometimes forgotten that both Keynesianism and neoliberalism are ideologies, flexible adjustments that capitalists made when a structural and political crisis undermined “enough” profitability. If Keynesian policy was an attempt to put a human face on capitalism on behalf of class survival, neoliberalism is, as economist Sam Gindlin has noted “capitalism with no face at all.”
The celebrated social theorist and geographer David Harvey explains that neoliberal ideology serves the following principle:
There shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective:
Those possessed of money shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion, not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative capacities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable.
Neoliberalism was incubated in the thinking of neoliberal intellectuals like Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman. They, along with 35 other individuals, formed the Mont Pelerin Society at a gathering in Switzerland in 1947 and began the slow process of gaining public acceptance of their ideas. Fulsomely funded by wealthy individuals and corporations, neoliberalism was first imposed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1975-1990) and by Ronald Reagan (1981-1989). Untold numbers of opportunistic politicians, academics, celebrities, journalists, public intellectuals and even artists, served as enthusiastic midwives.
The disastrous economic effects of 40 years of neoliberalism on American workers have been repeatedly catalogued and are irrefutable. Perhaps less well known, is that neoliberalism has largely succeeded in destroying working class values like solidarity and collective aspirations and replaced them with dog-eat-dog rugged individualism. A deliberate goal of neoliberalism is to eradicate the notion from people’s heads that collective action can improve their lives. One astute critic identifies the resulting pathological culture as the political economy of narcissism where a perverse “rational calculus of self-interest,” where everything is commodified, including morals. Empathic motives come to be seen as irrational, self-defeating, and existing beyond neutral, immutable market logic. Predictably, there has been a measurable diminution of empathy in U.S. society.
Whither Fascism?
Neoliberalism periodically creates its own crises, contradictions and tension-producing conditions. We know that the devastating effect of the pandemic further exacerbated already extreme social and economic inequality. Between 1975 and 2018, $47 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1%. In addition, neoliberalism faced a host of seemingly insoluble problems of its own self-serving creation, including: more low-wage workers falling behind, deindustrialization, endless wars, no single-payer health insurance, increased off-shoring, the “gig” economy, a militarized police state, massive underemployment, global overproduction, under-used capacity, a falling rate of profit, the looming threat of ecocide, a refugee crisis, glaring racial disparities across the board and the debilitating drain of 800+ military bases in 70 countries.
Neoliberalism became ascendant in the 1980s and gained strength under Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As their policies began to produce stress and public dissatisfaction, Trump’s campaign promised voters that his “America First” project would respond to their grievances. Abetted by race-baiting, xenophobia and religious chauvinism, he prevailed over the traditional neoliberal, Hillary Clinton.
Whether Trump, a symbol of neoliberalism’s disease and not its cause, possessed any convictions behind his promises or, more likely, was simply hoodwinking the voters with his right-wing populist pandering is immaterial because he could never have succeeded in solving the system’s deep structural problems. After his narrow defeat in the electoral college in 2020, when he still garnered 74 million votes, the other party in the capitalist duopoly assumed control but it also has nothing to offer. Part of the reason is that state intervention under neoliberalism has built-in limitations relating to legitimacy issues that portend potential danger for the ruling class. That is, if the state is directly involved, for instance, in creating employment, it prompts the question, “If the state can do the job here and on other pressing matters, why do we need capitalism at all?”
Ironically, one unexpected consequences of neoliberalism was the January 6, at times, cartoonish spectacle of a few hundred of Trump’s clueless, costumed and cult-like followers invading the “citadel of democracy” for a few hours, smashing stuff, taking selfies with cops and grabbing mementos. Whatever their motives, and surely they were mixed, if any of these intruders believed they were overthrowing the U.S. government, they were delusional. When the event fell risibly short of their hyperbolic Doomsday predictions, establishment narrators doubled down on them in the apparent belief that the public will believe anything if they hear it enough times. In retrospect, the riot proved to be a serendipitous gift to the establishment who then set about 24/7 scaremongering about an “insurrection” and “attempted coup.”
While pontificating about the security threat posed by “white supremacist, violent extremists,” the Kabuki theater of seemingly endless official investigations and serious prosecutions (a few which are warranted) proceeds apace. They are meant to scapegoat Trump, deflect blame from failed Democratic policies and soften up a frighted public for accepting necessary, “fighting fascism” national security measures. Stepping up censorship is one of the first.
What follows won’t be Trump’s mendacious, crude and jingoistic neofascist rhetoric and tactics but a sophisticated, insidious, below the radar and hence infinitely more dangerous variant of fascism, a “reset” promulgated from the top down by the Bidenadmin/nationalsecuritystate/MSM and their enablers. Although fascism follows when neoliberalism reaches a terminal point, this will be a hybrid, less apparent and hence more “acceptable,” crafted for American sensibilities.
It will appeal to those who still believe that voting matters and who retain reverence for the country’s governing institutions. In other words, procedural democracy minus substance. Further, as Eric Weiner’s adroitly explains, “North American fascism requires a degree of individual freedoms and rights in combination with the the perception that these rights and freedoms are inalienable by the state.” This variant can even co-exist with a modicum of dissent, provided that it remains ineffectual. Robert Urie labels this version, “fascism with better manners.” Given their track record of controlling the unfolding narrative, one hesitates to underestimate the state’s ability to shepherd this fascist hybrid into existence. Whether the marginalized left makes use of the remaining but vanishing interstices of limited freedom to resist this outcome remains an open question.
Where neoliberalism becomes potentially vulnerable and open to scrutiny is when it becomes trapped in its own inevitable contradictions and linked to unvarnished political and economic realities, when its fraudulence as the means to attaining the vaunted American Dream becomes more apparent and the gross inequities of the system reveal themselves in ever starker terms. When this happened in the 1930s, some of capitalism’s most ingenious defenders found the means to stave off fundamental structural change by making the sufficient temporary adjustments to save the capitalist system. But, as noted earlier, after these stopgap measures neutered organized resistance, neoliberals proceeded to methodically undo them. The absence of resistance from below, makes this all the easier.
The question is whether, if the second iteration of liberalism also becomes a discredited doctrinaire ideology and as many critics contend, has indeed reached a dead end, what’s next? The answer is uncertain and depends on several variables: whether the public concludes that society’s problems are intractable, permanent features of the capitalist economy; on the political savvy of elites and their two corporate parties; on the willingness of the ruling class to employ the state’s punishment function and finally, whether the new iteration can be sold to people already irreparably harmed by neoliberal policies.
When seen from this perspective, it’s a mistake — one that even some on the left are making — to view Biden’s election with a sigh of relief, a welcome breathing space. Rather, the U.S state is using the so-called insurrection at the Capitol to distract the public while proceeding to further consolidate big capital and the state on behalf of the neoliberal project. In the aftermath of January 6, far-right groups are rapidly splintering, many adherents are leaving the movement and far-right disorganization prevails. In short, this threat pales in significance when compared to the neoliberal fascists already in power. For now, Biden, the oligarch’s tool, is the front man, behind which the ruling class will decide how to proceed.
We know the inexorable, capitalist imperative of exploitation and accumulation will continue and both parties are committed to maintaining and expanding U.S. global hegemony. Further, while neoliberalism in the United States and fascism are not yet identical, the former now has sufficient affinities with the latter to assert that an “immoral” equivalency exists and the distinction becomes an academic one.
Ultimately, the answer doesn’t lie in voting or trying to pressure the Democratic Party but in new forms of collective agency from below, a movement prepared to engage in sustained, nonviolent, massive civil disobedience. Given the foregoing analysis, one might be resigned to restating Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will and heart. However, upon further consideration, knowing that the ruling class is unwilling to solve our problems tends to leaven the pessimism and lend cautious support to optimism.
Not surprisingly, Macfarquhar concludes that this makes them “even more dangerous” and without evidence, claims that Russia is assisting them.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Neoliberalism, at its heart, is class war waged from above under the guise of rational, technocratic management of an economy that must — as neoliberals claim —be shielded from the corrosive influence of democratic politics.
— Chris Maisano, “Liberalism, Austerity, and the Global Crisis of Legitimacy,” The Activist, 7/19/2011.[W]hat’s becoming increasingly clear to many scholars and intellectuals is that there is a new morphology of fascism that is taking place in the United States, one that is integrated into, and supportive of, the political logic of neoliberalism.
— Eric J. Wiener, “Neo-Fascism, Or The Political Logic of Neoliberalism” 3 Quarks Daily, November 9, 2020.The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. To sustain itself, neoliberalism starts looking for some other ideological prop and finds fascism.
— Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, “Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End,” Monthly Review, July 1, 2019.In a recent, exceedingly instructive piece entitled,”This Crisis Has Exposed the Absurdities of Neoliberalism. That Doesn’t Mean It’ll Destroy It,” Greek political economist Costas Lapavitsus asserts that state intervention in response to the COVID-19 public health crisis was both breathtaking in its magnitude and also in revealing the glaring hypocrisy of neoliberal ideology of “The market rules,” as previously scorned Keynesian policies were temporarily rushed into service.1
Some of these measures included massive liquidity injections, lowering interest rates to zero, credit and loan guarantees, Federal Reserve purchase of government bonds and as pitifully small and delayed one-time direct payment to most Americans. The fiscal stimulus packages already enacted are a quarter larger than those put in place during the Great Recession of 2008 and Biden recently proposed an additional $1.9 trillion coronavirus package in new federal spending.This episodic intervention in a crisis can be seen as another selective intervention by the state to ensure class rule. But the larger context includes the countless, irrefutable examples of the state’s welcome intervention to redistribute wealth upward and in prescribing critical market state functions in terms of policing, incarceration, surveillance, militarization and a host of other supportive services. U.S. interventions around the globe in support of the empire are so transparently obvious as to not warrant further elaboration. Lapavitsus speculates on whether this massive state intervention in the economy could result “…in a more authoritarian form of controlled capitalism in which the interests of the corporate and the financial elite would remain paramount.” Unless there’s a mass mobilization from below there is no evidence suggesting that whatever is done will address the needs of working people. Although Lapavitsus never explicitly suggests that neoliberalism will be transfigured into fascism, it’s not implausible to draw that conclusion.
Neoliberalism (“neo” is a Greek prefix for new) is the ideology of modern capitalism that was resurrected from the original laissez-faire liberalism that had been thoroughly discredited by the Great Depression and a spurred mass movement intent on abolishing capitalism. Neoliberalism has now held sway for over four decades and is the state religion in the United States, the common sense belief that this is simply the only way to organize society.
Neoliberalism was a repudiation of Keynesian economics under which the government intervenes to stabilize the economy, a theory that had a fundamental influence on the New Deal. It’s sometimes forgotten that both Keynesianism and neoliberalism are ideologies, flexible adjustments that capitalists made when a structural and political crisis undermined “enough” profitability. If Keynesian policy was an attempt to put a human face on capitalism on behalf of class survival, neoliberalism is, as economist Sam Gindlin has noted “capitalism with no face at all.”
The celebrated social theorist and geographer David Harvey explains that neoliberal ideology serves the following principle:
There shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective:
Those possessed of money shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion, not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative capacities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable.2
Neoliberalism was incubated in the thinking of neoliberal intellectuals like Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman. They, along with 35 other individuals, formed the Mont Pelerin Society at a gathering in Switzerland in 1947 and began the slow process of gaining public acceptance of their ideas. Fulsomely funded by wealthy individuals and corporations, neoliberalism was first imposed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1975-1990) and by Ronald Reagan (1981-1989). Untold numbers of opportunistic politicians, academics, celebrities, journalists, public intellectuals and even artists, served as enthusiastic midwives.
The disastrous economic effects of 40 years of neoliberalism on American workers have been repeatedly catalogued and are irrefutable. Perhaps less well known, is that neoliberalism has largely succeeded in destroying working class values like solidarity and collective aspirations and replaced them with dog-eat-dog rugged individualism. A deliberate goal of neoliberalism is to eradicate the notion from people’s heads that collective action can improve their lives. One astute critic identifies the resulting pathological culture as the political economy of narcissism where a perverse “rational calculus of self-interest,” where everything is commodified, including morals.3 Empathic motives come to be seen as irrational, self-defeating, and existing beyond neutral, immutable market logic. Predictably, there has been a measurable diminution of empathy in U.S. society.4
Whither Fascism?
Neoliberalism periodically creates its own crises, contradictions and tension-producing conditions. We know that the devastating effect of the pandemic further exacerbated already extreme social and economic inequality. Between 1975 and 2018, $47 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1%.5 In addition, neoliberalism faced a host of seemingly insoluble problems of its own self-serving creation, including: more low-wage workers falling behind, deindustrialization, endless wars, no single-payer health insurance, increased off-shoring, the “gig” economy, a militarized police state, massive underemployment, global overproduction, under-used capacity, a falling rate of profit, the looming threat of ecocide, a refugee crisis, glaring racial disparities across the board and the debilitating drain of 800+ military bases in 70 countries.
Neoliberalism became ascendant in the 1980s and gained strength under Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As their policies began to produce stress and public dissatisfaction, Trump’s campaign promised voters that his “America First” project would respond to their grievances. Abetted by race-baiting, xenophobia and religious chauvinism, he prevailed over the traditional neoliberal, Hillary Clinton.
Whether Trump, a symbol of neoliberalism’s disease and not its cause, possessed any convictions behind his promises or, more likely, was simply hoodwinking the voters with his right-wing populist pandering is immaterial because he could never have succeeded in solving the system’s deep structural problems. After his narrow defeat in the electoral college in 2020, when he still garnered 74 million votes, the other party in the capitalist duopoly assumed control but it also has nothing to offer. Part of the reason is that state intervention under neoliberalism has built-in limitations relating to legitimacy issues that portend potential danger for the ruling class. That is, if the state is directly involved, for instance, in creating employment, it prompts the question, “If the state can do the job here and on other pressing matters, why do we need capitalism at all?”6
Ironically, one unexpected consequences of neoliberalism was the January 6, at times, cartoonish spectacle of a few hundred of Trump’s clueless, costumed and cult-like followers invading the “citadel of democracy” for a few hours, smashing stuff, taking selfies with cops and grabbing mementos. Whatever their motives, and surely they were mixed, if any of these intruders believed they were overthrowing the U.S. government, they were delusional. When the event fell risibly short of their hyperbolic Doomsday predictions, establishment narrators doubled down on them in the apparent belief that the public will believe anything if they hear it enough times. In retrospect, the riot proved to be a serendipitous gift to the establishment who then set about 24/7 scaremongering about an “insurrection” and “attempted coup.”
While pontificating about the security threat posed by “white supremacist, violent extremists,” the Kabuki theater of seemingly endless official investigations and serious prosecutions (a few which are warranted) proceeds apace. They are meant to scapegoat Trump, deflect blame from failed Democratic policies and soften up a frighted public for accepting necessary, “fighting fascism” national security measures. Stepping up censorship is one of the first.
What follows won’t be Trump’s mendacious, crude and jingoistic neofascist rhetoric and tactics but a sophisticated, insidious, below the radar and hence infinitely more dangerous variant of fascism, a “reset” promulgated from the top down by the Bidenadmin/nationalsecuritysta
te/MSM and their enablers. Although fascism follows when neoliberalism reaches a terminal point, this will be a hybrid, less apparent and hence more “acceptable,” crafted for American sensibilities. It will appeal to those who still believe that voting matters and who retain reverence for the country’s governing institutions. In other words, procedural democracy minus substance. Further, as Eric Weiner’s adroitly explains, “North American fascism requires a degree of individual freedoms and rights in combination with the the perception that these rights and freedoms are inalienable by the state.”7 This variant can even co-exist with a modicum of dissent, provided that it remains ineffectual. Robert Urie labels this version, “fascism with better manners.” Given their track record of controlling the unfolding narrative, one hesitates to underestimate the state’s ability to shepherd this fascist hybrid into existence. Whether the marginalized left makes use of the remaining but vanishing interstices of limited freedom to resist this outcome remains an open question.
Where neoliberalism becomes potentially vulnerable and open to scrutiny is when it becomes trapped in its own inevitable contradictions and linked to unvarnished political and economic realities, when its fraudulence as the means to attaining the vaunted American Dream becomes more apparent and the gross inequities of the system reveal themselves in ever starker terms. When this happened in the 1930s, some of capitalism’s most ingenious defenders found the means to stave off fundamental structural change by making the sufficient temporary adjustments to save the capitalist system.8 But, as noted earlier, after these stopgap measures neutered organized resistance, neoliberals proceeded to methodically undo them. The absence of resistance from below, makes this all the easier.
The question is whether, if the second iteration of liberalism also becomes a discredited doctrinaire ideology and as many critics contend, has indeed reached a dead end, what’s next? The answer is uncertain and depends on several variables: whether the public concludes that society’s problems are intractable, permanent features of the capitalist economy; on the political savvy of elites and their two corporate parties; on the willingness of the ruling class to employ the state’s punishment function and finally, whether the new iteration can be sold to people already irreparably harmed by neoliberal policies.
When seen from this perspective, it’s a mistake — one that even some on the left are making — to view Biden’s election with a sigh of relief, a welcome breathing space. Rather, the U.S state is using the so-called insurrection at the Capitol to distract the public while proceeding to further consolidate big capital and the state on behalf of the neoliberal project.9 In the aftermath of January 6, far-right groups are rapidly splintering, many adherents are leaving the movement and far-right disorganization prevails.10 In short, this threat pales in significance when compared to the neoliberal fascists already in power. For now, Biden, the oligarch’s tool, is the front man, behind which the ruling class will decide how to proceed.
We know the inexorable, capitalist imperative of exploitation and accumulation will continue and both parties are committed to maintaining and expanding U.S. global hegemony. Further, while neoliberalism in the United States and fascism are not yet identical, the former now has sufficient affinities with the latter to assert that an “immoral” equivalency exists and the distinction becomes an academic one.
Ultimately, the answer doesn’t lie in voting or trying to pressure the Democratic Party but in new forms of collective agency from below, a movement prepared to engage in sustained, nonviolent, massive civil disobedience. Given the foregoing analysis, one might be resigned to restating Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will and heart. However, upon further consideration, knowing that the ruling class is unwilling to solve our problems tends to leaven the pessimism and lend cautious support to optimism.
Not surprisingly, Macfarquhar concludes that this makes them “even more dangerous” and without evidence, claims that Russia is assisting them.
- Costas Lapavitsus, “This Crisis Has Exposed the Absurdities of Neoliberalism. That Doesn’t Mean It’ll Destroy It, Jacobin, March 27, 2020.
- David Harvey, “The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis.” Also, by David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005.).
- Scott Preston, “Age of Delusion: Reflections on Narcissism and Self-Destruction, IV, The Crysalis, February a4, 2012.
- Konstantinos Tsoukalas, “The Deregulation of Morals: The Ultimate Phase of Globalization,” Situations, Vol. IV, No. 2 (Spring, 2012), pp. 6-36. For a book length treatment, see, Gary Olson, Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture and the Brain (NY: Springer Publishing, 2013).
- Faramarz Farbod, “Late Capitalism and Its Runaway Inequality Problem,” Dissident Voice, January 1, 2020.
- Patnaik and Patnaik, op.cit.
- Eric Weiner, Neo-Fascism, Or The Political Logic of Neoliberalism, “ 3 Quarks Daily, November 9, 2020.
- Gary Olson, “Was it only ‘fear itself?”: FDR and Today,” Common Dreams, June 18, 2020.
- Further elucidation on this point, see, Ajamu Baraka, “Neoliberals Seek to Establish Their Own Brand of Fascism,” Black Agenda Radio, February 15, 2021.
- Neil Macfarquhar, “Far-Right Groups Are Splintering in the Wake of the Capitol Riot,” The New York Times, March 1, 2021.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The problem of democratic representation has always turned on the question of the ‘have-nots’ — that is, not only those without wealth and property, but also those marginalised on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, origin, religion, and education. Even in a world of fully-fledged democratic rights, the democratic game tends to break in favour of the ‘haves’. They enjoy an easy affinity with political elites who are not so different from them, and they experience democratic politics as a hospitable and responsive place. When in doubt, they can back-channel, mobilise proxies and networks, and exchange cultural influence and economic power for political voice, cloaked in the comfort that what’s in their interest is in everyone’s interest. None of this means the powerful always get their way. But it means they operate on the assumption that their way is likely to prevail.
The post How The Third Way Turned Its Back On Democracy appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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To promote democratic and egalitarian ideals today, we need to break with the anxieties that drove U.S. politics during the Cold War.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Following the idea of the Big Other defense falling apart when a truth is seen to be publicly accepted, what would be another similar public acceptance of failure for capitalism? Especially now, I think the US healthcare industry is a great place to look. The more timely issue is one of ‘who gets coverage at all?’ Barack Obama is the first mainstream, high-profile politician to say the words ‘single payer,’ descriptors that don’t describe the Republican-influenced Obamacare that came to pass.
Bernie Sanders again was a part of the elevation of this idea in the mainstream. As I suggested before, he’s not an ideal agent for influencing the Big Other because he’s easily written off as a radical, and the Big Other is no radical. Nevertheless, Medicare for All became his signature issue, and over the years polling has found it has become one of the most popular political ideas in American politics.
Then, in 2020, COVID stressed the limitations of Obamacare to their breaking point. Of its many problems, the Act tied a lot of healthcare to employment, and with COVID bringing record unemployment, this left many without healthcare in a crippling pandemic. Being out of work in a pandemic left them unable to pay laughable COBRA rates to keep their previous and often basically unusable insurance, and that was the closest thing to a band-aid the system had in store. Despite Bernie Sanders gallantly keeping the issue in the mainstream, we found ourselves unable to pass a bill because of the unilateral power of people like Mitch McConnell.
But now, with the aforementioned Georgia victories giving Kamala Harris the tie breaker vote in the Senate and the Democrats a majority, we should be able to at least get emergency Medicare for All right? Well, for now it looks like no. The previous fight for even a single $1400 direct payment seems to be hard enough for them, and the closest thing we have to a solution is a COBRA subsidy, which is as much a solution as it is the Biden administration propping up the health insurance industry with government money.…and Driving US Crazy
We can do so much better, and thankfully, maybe we will soon. Fisher has his own issue with how capitalism interacts with our healthcare system, and that’s how we treat and even think about mental illness. As the health industry is increasingly discovering, mental health may be more the fault of the capitalist mode of production than we’re led to believe.
“The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.
Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”
This all lines up with a recent shift in thinking, mainly related to addiction.While the idea of a genetic basis for addiction still persists, recent evidence suggests the cause driving us to addictive behaviors is dissatisfaction with our lives and often our very material conditions. Is it any shock that the most economically depressed generations growing up in depression after recession and graduating into a weak job market with little opportunity to meaningfully advance or even maintain a single job as a career, a generation where the side hustle isn’t just a trend but the only way to tread water… is it any shock that these generations lead the world in rates of clinical depression?
Doesn’t this lend a lot of weight to the idea that the lack of serotonin isn’t the cause of depression, but simply an organic reaction to our environment?Capitalism is Destroying the World
I shouldn’t have to convince you that climate change is profit driven. I also shouldn’t have to convince you that energy sector lobbying, second only to war and health insurance, is a major corrupting influence in our governments. So, it’s easy to see how the principle of ‘profit makes right’ fails our common resources, the environment itself. Maybe it’s just especially easy for me to understand.
Where I live, the water is contaminated by Gen-X, a potentially dangerous chemical Chemours has been pumping into the inland watershed for decades now despite having no idea of what it might be doing to us. I go out each week and buy about eight gallons of water to drink and cook with because I know not to trust my own tap. But at least my water isn’t full of lead nor does it burst into flames.
At least I can still shower in it. This isn’t so for a shocking portion of America.
Experts say we’ve long passed the point of no return on climate change. The question is no longer if, but when and how bad? This is perhaps the most existential of capitalism’s failures because it threatens nearly all life on earth, including us humans. But as long as fossil fuel is cheaper than clean alternatives, that’s what the market, in all its infinite wisdom, will choose to power our cities. That decision is killing us, even now.
The good news is that alternative energy is starting to match the price points of fossil fuels, and companies are beginning to add in environmental damage as an external cost, either willingly or through regulations like carbon taxes. This encourages them to do better by us, but it’s simply too little too late.
Imagine a socialist America of the 1950s. Instead of a Cold War over Capitalism in which we stacked up nuclear weapons enough to end the world many times over, we could have built out nuclear power plants. Nuclear power has a similar price point over, 40 years of operation when compared to energy sources like coal, and it’s been viable for decades. Other than public opinion, the main reason we didn’t start greening the energy grid in the 1950s is capitalism.
While they do well in the long term, nuclear plants require enormous upfront costs more easily absorbed by the US government than private companies that didn’t have so much money they could invest into a project that could take decades to build and break even. We missed that opportunity, but considering what we know about MMT (Modern Monetary Theory), the opportunity is still present, and better late than never. Modern nuclear is much safer, more efficient, less expensive, especially modular concepts, and can recycle their own waste into fuel. The problem is that they’re almost all just concepts. Few companies can afford to experiment with these concepts and even less are willing.
If we wait for the free market to embrace nuclear as an abundant and clean energy source ideal for supporting the intermittency of modern renewables, we may well wait until the end of the world to make any significant progress.
There’s a little more good news about our impact on the climate, though. This seems to be the one issue the Biden administration is interested in doing something about. President Biden has signed numerous climate change related executive orders in just his first week as president. While this is a step in the right direction, many of the efforts are being made to restore the pre-Trump status quo established by the Obama-Biden administration. Alone those actions were insufficient then, and much like the need for direct payments, the longer we put them off the more urgent action is needed.
There are some new actions by the administration that are encouraging though, like the federal government’s commitment to a completely electric fleet of vehicles.
The effects of this go far beyond just the sale of cars though because this will require a large amount of electric charging infrastructure to be built nationwide, making electric cars more viable for consumers in many new markets, likely leading the public to increasingly be able to follow suit and begin abandoning their internal combustion engines.
This also provides a massive cash injection to the electric vehicle market and all of its submarkets, like the battery market. Not only will this investment create better electric cars and infrastructure over the next decade, but it will also likely lead to advances in battery technology and grid storage options, which will be a necessity to be able to rapidly green the grid without a strong nuclear backbone to stabilize intermittency.Suddenly, Anything is Possible Again
I think the most important takeaway here is to dream big and outside of the bounds of what the Big Other is aware of, because with exposure and legitimacy even impossible ideas can become possible with time. I think the other is urgency; these are life and death problems, both immediate and existential, and we may well die waiting for someone to step up and give voice to them, or for capitalism to find a way to solve the problem while still making a return for investors.
If you feel conflicted right now, ask yourself; is this the end of history? Is capitalism your Final Fantasy?This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
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MMT’s account of the origin of money is a useful corrective to the stories told by orthodox economists. But a deeper history of the social construction of money opens up more radical possibilities for rethinking the monetary order.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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A December 2017 statement from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights notes that, while the US manages to spend “more [money] on national defence than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined”, US infant mortality rates were, as of 2013, “the highest in the developed world”.
The Special Rapporteur provides a barrage of other details from his own visit to the US, during which he was able to observe the country’s “bid to become the most unequal society in the world” – with some 40 million people living in poverty – as well as assess “soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction”.
Capitalism, it seems, is a deadly business indeed.
![A demonstrator from the Occupy Wall Street campaign seen with a dollar taped over his mouth as he stands near the financial district of New York September 30, 2011 [File: Lucas Jackson/Reuters]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2b5cde192e7f444da69355329cfe6a5a_18.jpeg?resize=770%2C513)
A demonstrator from the Occupy Wall Street campaign seen with a dollar taped over his mouth as he stands near the financial district of New York September 30, 2011. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
How the Cookie Crumbles
She’s 80, comes from Ayr, Scotland, lives in a sea town along the Oregon Coast. She is caretaker for her 55-year-old nephew. Her heart-failed husband, liver shot through, dialysis weekly, is another of her charges.
Imagine, she and her family ran a small chain of shops — clocks, another locksmith, another fish and chips. That was in Bonnie Scotland.
Her sister married a bloke in the US Air Force, and she shipped out with him. Pregnant. Child Drew, early on, in Tucson at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, he was diagnosed with Downs Syndrome. Life for her changed, and then her sister promised if anything happened to this sister, Aunt Regina would take care of Drew. That was a long long time ago.
Regina’s sister and her sister’s husband immolated in a crash coming back from El Paso. Boy Drew left with a younger sister — the boy age 20, sis 16.
For 35 years, our Regina and her Bob raised the boy. Drew is now 55, and part of my job is to support him in his job at a grocery store. He’s been there more than 15 years, and he makes $12.01 an hour.
Forget that economic injustice for a moment. Listen to how the crumbling cookie goes in predatory capitalism — Regina has not been back to the old country in 20 years. She has two knees that are shot. She needs two replacements, but she is the caretaker for the chronically-sick husband. Drew lives with them, getting his two-times a week work at the grocery store as a bagger.
He’s got the infectious personality, and he also has some “issues” glomming onto female staff. Regina was not told that adults with Downs Syndrome many times have lost the synoptic connections tied to urgency for urination and defecation.
Sweet drinks he gulps down, like a lost man in the Sahara. He scarfs down or wolfs down his food.
Like anyone, Drew wants to be in a relationship, married, on some piece of property with a horse, dogs and big garden. He works eight hours a week, and receives under $800 in social security payments.
The state pays Aunt Regina for his care. Her biggest worry is Drew losing his job because of the bathroom accidents or the sexual harassment.
Regina is kind but firm, and her bedside manner isn’t from the latest holistic and enlightened training around people who live with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
“I tell Drew, that if he messes up one more time, the grocery store will fire him. The job is more than pocket change for him. He gets out, has responsibilities, is growing some from the integrated employment, and, mind you this is a big AND, I get him out of the house for a few hours a week so I can gain some sense of sanity. I don’t know if he has to be put into a state institution.”
Luck of the draw, luck of the gene expression, luck of the accidental car mortalities, luck luck luck.
That’s the way the cookie crumbles, and in capitalism, we are not judged by how we treat our aged, infirm, vulnerable, youth, sick, disabled, poor. The worse we treat “them,” the more “they” have to struggle, the more daily fear “they” have of failing, faltering, flipping out mentally, the more successful those Capitalists and those Investors and those Finance Wizards and those Upper Economic Class are!
Redistribution of wealth for “them” is taking every last penny from “them,” us. Working people at $12.01 an hour after 15 years in a national/international chain.
A mentality that posits that “they” meant to do that, defecate in their pants, or, oh, “they” know better, and, oh, “they” are gaming the system and pulling the wool over your bleeding heart social services worker heads.
Heartless in a Time of Plague
Our Scottish Regina is worried about what will happen to Drew once she kicks the bucket, or when she is no longer physically capable of carrying on and running a household with a very demanding Drew and a very failing Bob, her 86-year-old husband.
We talk about the old country’s National Health Service. We talk about the failures of a society that has been ripped open time and time again by the purulent investors — another word for making money anyway they can.
Gutting medical care, gutting entitlement programs, gutting progressive taxation, gutting the measures for health and safety for and by the public. Where oh where will Drew go once his aunt and uncle pass on?
Think of every dollar and penny pinched, and then think of how much we the taxpayer shell out for every nanosecond of the crimes of corporations eating at the belly of communities, and every penny taken in light speed for everything run by the imposters, the misanthropes.
Every million$ here, every billion$ there. Grifters and grabbers. How much did the first Billionaire’s “impeachment” cost us? How much does an Alex Jones or Tom Brady or Michelle Obama get paid for their insipid bolstering of their self-referential mythology? Each speech? Each rot gut book penned?
Every rivet sunk into a Hellfire missile, every pound of fuel used in US Military Terrorism Toys, every nanosecond million made through illegal and unethical investing through algorithm?
That Moon shot by India, or that Mars rover by Japan, or Israel gunning for more surveillance. How much is every human lifetime worth, if we are lumped together in that big pile of “other” and “non-human”?
That heartless cookie crumbling capitalism is rotten to the core. The joke is, though, by the filthy rich, the Art of War Friedman’s and Bezos and all the Google middling’s and upper crust, that if all the billions were taken from the filthy rich, and dumped into the majority on planet earth — the poor, the uneducated, the misbegotten, the terminal, the dysfunctional, the Jerry Springer protagonists and antagonists, in five years all that and more would be back in the hands of the Star Chamber 1,000 or 2,000 Multi-Billionaires.
“We’d just get it all back, because the masses are inherently stupid, know nothing about the value of a dollar, would buy all the junk and shit and whoring dreams we create to sell. We’d have all that so-called ‘redistributed’ wealth back in our hands.”
That myth is coupled with another one, where the rich and the rest of us, having collectively, as much as the 1,000 or millionth richest? Christian Parenti lays it out simply and clearly here:
The 85 richest in the world probably include the four members of the Walton family (owners of Wal-Mart, among the top ten superrich in the USA) who together are worth over $100 billion. Rich families like the DuPonts have controlling interests in giant corporations like General Motors, Coca-Cola, and United Brands. They own about forty manorial estates and private museums in Delaware alone and have set up 31 tax-exempt foundations. The superrich in America and in many other countries find ways, legal and illegal, to shelter much of their wealth in secret accounts. We don’t really know how very rich the very rich really are.
Regarding the poorest portion of the world population—whom I would call the valiant, struggling “better half”—what mass configuration of wealth could we possibly be talking about? The aggregate wealth possessed by the 85 super-richest individuals, and the aggregate wealth owned by the world’s 3.5 billion poorest, are of different dimensions and different natures. Can we really compare private jets, mansions, landed estates, super luxury vacation retreats, luxury apartments, luxury condos, and luxury cars, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars in equities, bonds, commercial properties, art works, antiques, etc.—can we really compare all that enormous wealth against some millions of used cars, used furniture, and used television sets, many of which are ready to break down? Of what resale value if any, are such minor durable-use commodities? especially in communities of high unemployment, dismal health and housing conditions, no running water, no decent sanitation facilities, etc. We don’t really know how poor the very poor really are.
Image by Judite B
The books and discourse and deep discussions and analyses have already been posited and published, and yet, we are in 2021, and the school system, the media system, the propaganda machines of government-military-resource extraction-big ag/med/pharma/AI/finance continue to cobble truth, censor the reality of the penury system that is consumer-corporate-criminal-corrupt Capitalism.
Here, a hodgepodge of readings ramifying the thesis in this essay of mine —
Chris Hedges and Richard Wolff: Capitalism Does Not Work for the Majority of the People
Make No Mistake: The Rule Of The Rich Has Been A Deadly Epoch For Humanity
Michael Parenti: Does Capitalism Work? (2002)
The 1% Pathology and the Myth of Capitalism
Capitalism: The Systematic Poverty and Exploitation of Human Beings by Finian Cunningham
Michael Parenti: These Countries Are Not Underdeveloped, They Are Overexploited (1986)
Luxury Eco-Communism: A Wonderful World is Possible
The Growing Disparity In Living Conditions and Its Consequences by Rainer Shea
Covid-19 and the Health Crisis in Latin America by Yanis Iqbal
The Start Of The Great Meltdown For Industrial Civilization by Rainer Shea
MFTN: Poverty Will Kill More Of Us Than Terrorism
The Rich Are Only Rich If We Let Them Be by Dariel Garner
Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World by Michael Parenti
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger + How Economic Inequality Harms Societies
Wealth Belongs To All Of Us – Not Just To The Rich by Dariel Garner
We Are So Poor Because They Are So Rich by Dariel Garner
Here are the source links — X and Y
Railroaded into this Mess
It all comes back to the rackets — war, banking, big ag, law, prisons, military, computing, finance, insuring, retail, lending, investing, for-profit medicine, education, utilities.
The rackets of putting garnishments on all of our wages. The punishment rackets of fines, foreclosures, levies, taxes, fees, surcharges, add-ons, user fees, disposal fees, tolls, late fees, interest fees, penalties, wage attachments, wage theft, any-government-revenue/policing/judicial entity having the legal right to crack into any savings or checking or real estate holding they want to….And steal!
Imagine that freedom, uh? My Drew or my Don, they work for pittances, and they have their measly wages garnished if they make too much above the allowable social security benefit level. Imagine all of the flimflam, all those middle and peripheral and shadowy and underhanded people and agencies each taking a gram of flesh until that human life has been pecked away.
Stuck in a closet somewhere. Huddled around a TV, surrounded by the deadly products of a food industry responsible for billions dead. Food (sic) more deadly than cancer sticks, AKA cigarettes.
Think hard how those children-who-come-to-me-as-adults as their social services manager, wanting me to help them find jobs in a dog-eat-dog culture, where the cookie isn’t just crumbling, but rather smashed into smithereens by the capitalists. All those poisons in food, all the polluting, toxin-laced, dam-building, river-tainting, air-staining processes that bring us better living with plastics-fastfood-shelf lives of a decade. Better living through chemistry, pharmaceutics, chronic illness, disease management, pain regulating.
Then, we cannot discuss the possibilities of a society with more and more allergies, more and more chronic illnesses, more and more learning disabilities, more and more developmental disabilities, more and more intellectual disabilities, more and more trauma and PTSD and generalized anxiety and physiological premature weathering.
And poverty does more than just kills. Poverty eats at the soul, drives people to unsafe harbors like consumerism, disposability, obsessions, addictions, inattentiveness, collective Stockholm Syndrome, perversions, empty calories-entertainment-thinking.
There are numbers just for one aspect of our consumer-retail-exploitative societies competing in a trans-national gallery of dirty capitalism — 4.2 million premature deaths annually? Five million? More? Exposure to air pollution caused over 7.0 million deaths and 103.1 million disability-adjusted life years lost in one year.
Attributed to dirty (polluted) air. Not dirty water. Not dirty food. Not dirty drugs. Not smoking. Not boozing. Not war.
The study uses existing data from IHME on global burden of diseases (Mortality and Disability Adjusted Life Years) related to air pollution such as Trachea, Bronchus and Lung cancer, COPD, Ischemic heart disease and Stroke. This study shows that air pollution is one of the major environmental risk factors for the global burden of disease in 1990-2015 and has remained relatively stable for the past 25 years. By region, the largest burden of disease related to air pollution is found in Western Pacific and South-East Asia, reflecting the heavy industry and air pollution hotspots within the developing nations of these regions. Moreover, the rates of Disability Adjusted Life Years increased because of increase in pollution, especially in South-East Asia region, African region, and Eastern Mediterranean region where populations are both growing and ageing.
— Source —
I’ve written about this for years — how there is so much disconnect in Criminal Capitalism, where the marketing ploys and psychological tricks force babies and then toddlers and then kindergarteners and then grade schoolers and then more and more millions of growing minds to adapt to counterintuitive thinking, to accept death, slow or otherwise, as part of the social contract. Dog-eat-dog, predation, big fish/small pond, and the roots of America after decimating Turtle Island, one smoke and mirror show after another snake oil sales pitch.
Which sane or humane person would accept a PayDay loan scam? Which humane person would accept forced arbitration clauses? Which caring human would not endorse clean, well-run, full coverage public transportation? Which caring mother would not demand prenatal care, and medicine and clinics on demand? Where is the logic of old men and old women (look at the senate, the congress, the administration) running the lives of the unborn, newborn and youth into the ground.
Even the thirty-somethings in Brooks Brothers suits look, sound, smell, and espouse OLD. I don’t mean old and wise, or elder thinkers, or experienced and well traveled. I mean old in decayed.
If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with old minds and new programs. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but a new program.
The Takers accumulate knowledge about what works well for things. The Leavers accumulate knowledge about what works well for people.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
These flimflam artists, these liars and cheaters and pontificators and media monsters, they are antithetical to a good governance, good society, good people.
They not only do not know the stories of Drew and his Aunt Regina and Uncle Bob, but they have no forward-thinking solutions to the aging old foster parents and the still healthy middle-aged Drew. With all his beauty. With all his kindness. With all his adept knowledge of how to get on, get along, get his day going. Drew, born in the cookie crumbles crap shoot. Regina, who was on her way back to the UK, Scotland, when she answered the call to take care of Drew and his sister.
This story is repeated a million times a month, worldwide. The penalty for living, for being human, for being not one of them (rich, powerful, greed-wielding) and for stopping their lives to do the right thing.
You wake up one day and believe you have a worthy life. You wake up and take account of what good you have done. You wake up and look in the mirror and wonder what it is you actually dreamt, thought, spoke, cared for, read, built, protected, grew, sheltered, did, held sacred, envisioned, husbanded, parented, fostered, ate, drank, created.
Did any of that living have purpose, or some connection to the humanity that is the real culture of Homo Sapiens, mother culture?
Daily, I have a million intersections with culture and cultures — Big D for deaf or small d for disabled? Brain-injured at birth, or hit by a truck at age 11. Traumatic Brain Injury from an early childhood beating, or massive psychological trauma from a rape at age 20. Born with any number of diagnosed maladies, or any expression of “being born on the autism spectrum.” Fragile X or fetal alcohol affective disorder. Or Downs Syndrome.
The luck of the draw is one enormous field of chance, and the outcomes are not just tied to the abilities — emotional, spiritual, economic, personal — of those you call family, but how the society at large and each community gauge the value of life, the value placed on those whose luck of the draw came up short in some areas.
But the world is fragile, and those on some neuro typical scale and those atypically neuro, can we build our culture together, and heal and protect and shelter and engender and facilitate and teach and learn from?
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
The post American Exceptionalism: Private Wealth and Public Squalor first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.
The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign. They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.
The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”
The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.
Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”
Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented, by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.
While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”
The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”
The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.
Who were the Trump voters
Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020. A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.
In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket. In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.
The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.
The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party
Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.
Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:
Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.
Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy. No such problem here.
This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.
While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.
A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers
The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.
Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.
Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.
Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.
The post The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.
The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign. They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.
The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”
The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.
Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”
Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented, by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.
While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”
The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”
The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.
Who were the Trump voters
Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020. A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.
In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket. In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.
The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.
The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party
Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.
Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:
Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.
Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy. No such problem here.
This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.
While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.
A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers
The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.
Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.
Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.
Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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In order to make sense of the natural and human-induced disaster that has struck Texas, the nation will first need an accurate picture of who lives here. Yes, Texas has its oil barons, fossil-fuel lobbyists, and opportunistic political “leaders” who have extracted wealth from the state at the expense of the environment and human needs. But the real figure that should stand out is 17 million people.
That’s roughly the Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Asian population of Texas, which comprises nearly 60 percent of the state. Only 3 states and 69 countries have a larger total population. Denmark, Finland, and Norway combined do not total 17 million residents. Of the 13 cities in the U.S. with populations above 900,000 today, five are in Texas (Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and Fort Worth) and only 25 to 48 percent “non-Hispanic whites.” Thus, any story of Texans freezing, dying or hospitalized from carbon monoxide poisoning, losing power for vital medical equipment, or suffering without water or pipes bursting is more than likely occurring among the states BIPOC majority.
Outrage has erupted in Texas and throughout the nation, perhaps building on the momentum of the 2020 uprisings against white supremacy and police-perpetrated violence. Coming on the heels of the Trump-fueled mob attack on the Capitol and GOP refusal to hold the former president accountable, the catastrophe in Texas may be similar to the many “100-year” or “500-year” events that have now become commonplace. Floods, wildfires, freezes and heatwaves wreak havoc today but provide a preview of much worse effects to come from the compounded effects of industrial pollution and capitalist consumption.
As a result, three long overshadowed problems are now being widely discussed.
First, after the popular revolts of the 1960s, global powers responded with neoliberal restructuring designed to heighten the free reign of capital while weakening the collective power of workers and unions. This is what the Zapatistas called the Empire of Money, and it’s the mentality behind the deregulation and privatization of energy markets and utilities that leaves people literally in the cold when rapidly changing realities overwhelm systems designed to cut corners for immediate profiteering.
Second, Gov. Greg Abbott’s spurious scapegoating of renewable energy for the power outages—a perfect exposition of what Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism”—has escalated demands for a Green New Deal. More broadly, it has exposed the need for an immediate and transformative response to the climate crisis rooted in principles of climate justice that empower and uplift peoples in the global South and the most oppressed sectors of the global North bearing the brunt of the crisis.
Third, Ted Cruz’s “let them eat cake” vacation to Cancun was a visible reminder of the cruelty of our political system — a system that rewards politicians propped up by corporate money, right-wing lies, and racist ideologies for blaming others and evading responsibility. The elites most responsible for the disastrous effects of climate change, racism, ableism, and poverty would have us believe that it is always others who must suffer instead of their own families.
The policies that have caused death and suffering have not “failed”; they have worked exactly as intended. The exponential growth of the billionaire class has been a direct product of five decades of neoliberalism, but the gains for the working and middle classes have been deliberately illusory. Yet, there can be no innocent return to the era of liberalism and the New Deal. We need to appreciate from history how the problems illuminated now in Texas are interconnected with the decline of the white majority and the liberal order.
Herrenvolk Democracy and the New Deal Order
Prior to the policy reforms of the first half of the 20th century, there was little assumption that the government had a responsibility to intervene to redress even the most grotesque economic injustices, such as exploitation of child labor, starvation wages, deadly working conditions, or food contamination. FDR’s New Deal galvanized a new and unprecedented coalition in support of social and economic reform, creating both employment and relief programs in response to the Great Depression and safety net measures like Social Security and Unemployment Insurance that have continued to the present.
The age of FDR represented a dramatic shift from the laissez-faire Hoover administration and a form of dominance that has been largely unparalleled in U.S. politics since. At its core, however, the New Deal coalition embodied the central contradiction in American democracy. Going back to at least Jefferson and Jackson, the push to expand the franchise and economic opportunity was tied to white supremacy. Thus, in the words of the late sociologist Pierre van den Berghe, it promoted herrenvolk (master race) democracy, or the concept that only the dominant group was entitled to such rights and capable of using them responsibly. White small farmers, settlers and workers routinely internalized a belief that they earned their freedom and citizenship rights as Americans through wars of genocide, campaigns of dispossession and reactionary social movements to uphold white supremacy.
The New Deal, though never coming close to achieving full equality, provided a new opening for labor unionization, civil rights, and Native sovereignty, thereby raising the prospects for multiracial democracy. Yet, the New Deal also continued to reinforce the contradictory unity of democracy and white supremacy. For example, it established public housing on a limited and racially segregated basis. However, the greater and longer-term impact of federal intervention was to subsidize white homeowners to buy homes with government-backed mortgages in neighborhoods restricted to whites by racist developers, realtors, and covenants.
Particularly in the South, FDR and national party leaders embraced white supremacist Democrats who prevented most African Americans and Mexican Americans from voting. So long as Black and Brown voters were shut out of the system, whites could perceive their votes as being for liberal economic policies like infrastructure development that served their self-interest, rather than simply voting against what they feared.
In Texas — part of the “Solid South” backing the Democrats almost exclusively for over 100 years — FDR won his first three elections with over 80 percent of the vote. Even when prominent conservative and white supremacist Democrats defected in 1944, he prevailed with 71 percent. During this time, the population of Texas was on average 70 percent or greater “non-Hispanic whites.”
The End of Liberal Hegemony
The Civil Rights Movement was born of a refusal to allow the white supremacist rule of herrenvolk democracy to continue. The right-wing currents that emerged in response were thus distinctly grounded in white supremacy. Though the new right was led by the corporate class — eventually finding a firm home in the GOP of Nixon and Reagan — it came to power with the fracture of the liberal order by winning middle and working-class whites away from the Democrats. This was a national phenomenon not limited to a “southern” strategy. In my 2017 book The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, I argue that Detroit, once the model of progress for capitalists and socialists, alike, became a model for the new right strategy of Black disenfranchisement and neoliberal dispossession.
During Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy engineered through a state takeover, the autocratic “emergency manager” worked with moneyed interests to take away or gut union jobs, homes, water, pensions, and health care benefits in order to impose austerity on the people and pave the way for billionaire developers and investors. This was an extreme form of a national trend to dismantle social programs and impose a Social Darwinist neglect of human needs by writing oppressed communities out of the social contract. The racist, classist and ableist response to COVID-19 has made this all too tragically clear.
As in Detroit, right-wing revanchism and race-baiting generally arose wherever demographic growth heralded a nonwhite majority. California was a pioneer of the dog-whistle racism that Republicans used to win over suburban whites from the 1960s to 1990s until the new majority came of age. Texas, whose once-commanding “non-Hispanic white” demographic majority disappeared between 1970 and 2010, has perfected much of the voter suppression, gerrymandering, and racist/heteropatriarchal scapegoating at the heart of the neo-Confederate playbook for minority rule by the current GOP.
The wealthy, privileged whites served by the Texas’s dominant political class are a small minority of the population. That’s the ongoing legacy of conquest, colonialism and proletarianization. Seen in this light, the unnecessary human suffering and death during the current catastrophe — whose full effects may not be known for some time — connect Texas to New Orleans and Flint, where short-term economic and political expediency have combined with racist, classist and ableist dehumanization to render mass populations disposable before, during, and after natural and human-induced disasters.
Contesting Minority Rule
This is how the bifurcation of herrenvolk democracy is now playing out: We are simultaneously moving toward a new social order that fulfills real democracy and a worse system driven by “master race” ideology. In Texas, where new and sustainable infrastructure is desperately needed, the New Deal has been supplanted by conspiracy theories and political Ponzi schemes. Like deregulated energy rates, these schemes promise cost savings at the expense of long-term stability and security, ultimately drowning households and local governments in debt while the Dow reaches record highs.
What is conceivable with the empowerment of a new majority in Texas and everywhere? We need structural change in politics to sweep away the politicians controlled by big money and dependent on lies, climate denial and scapegoating to remain in power. We all saw what Trump was able to get away with, and his legacy continues through the likes of Cruz and Abbott. But we also know that these crises are not limited to red states, and that Democratic policies have generally been inadequate, even as bolder and more promising proposals and leaders linked to activist movements have begun to arise and challenge the party’s establishment.
As Grace Lee Boggs recognized the growing illegitimacy of dominant institutions, she taught us that “the only way to survive is by taking care of one another.” That does not mean we should let those in power off the hook. What it implies is that we must do more than protest. We must to look to grassroots organizers, Indigenous peoples, and women of color feminists for models of solidarity in this transitional era of systemic collapse. In recent years, movements at Standing Rock and Mauna Kea have responded to colonial desecration by projecting a future centered on Earth, water and life.
During this catastrophe, Mutual Aid Houston has reported an “overwhelming wave of support” to provide food, blankets and money to people in need. The self-described BIPOC abolitionist collective formed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and police brutality. It demonstrates scholar-activist Dean Spade’s point that mutual aid is not charity: “It’s a form of coming together to meet survival needs in a political context.” These local acts are putting into practice the values and concepts of community-based care that can establish relations for a more humane social order.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The impeachment circus has mercifully come to an end. The public have endured rank hypocrisy and a cynical show meant to give both parties cover for their wrong doing. The Republicans defended Donald Trump on the charge of inciting an insurrection because that’s what their people want them to do. Their rank-and-file members are Trump defenders, and senators took a risk if they voted to convict the man who garnered more than 74 million votes in his losing effort.
As usual the Democrats want to look like an opposition party without really opposing anything. They made media stars of their impeachment managers, who talked a lot about the need to punish Trump for the January 6 Capitol riot and the threat to democracy if that didn’t happen.
The post Impeachment Theater appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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The social and economic destruction engulfing the U.S. and dozens of other countries remains out of everyone’s control and more chaos, instability, and insecurity now mark the global landscape.
The ruling elite have repeatedly shown their inability to tackle any serious problems effectively. They are at a loss for how to deal with current problems and refuse to consider any alternative to their obsolete economic system. The best they can do is recycle old ideas to maintain their class power and privilege. Their efforts to block the New focus mainly on promoting disinformation about “new and better forms of capitalism,” including oxymorons like “inclusive capitalism,” “responsible capitalism,” and “ethical capitalism.”
Since the outbreak of the “COVID Pandemic” in March 2020 every week has been a roller coaster for humanity. The economy and society keep lurching from one crisis to another while incoherence and stress keep amplifying. It is said that 1 in 6 Americans went into therapy for the first time in 2020.
Unemployment, under-employment, inequality, mental depression, anxiety, suicide, environmental decay, inflation, debt, health care costs, education, and poverty are worsening everywhere. Thousands of businesses that have been around for years keep disappearing left and right.
Top-down actions in response to the “COVID Pandemic” have made so many things worse for so many people. Many are wondering which is worse: the covid-19 virus or the top-down response to the pandemic. Governments everywhere have steadfastly refused to mobilize the people to solve the many problems that are worsening. The moral climate is low and more people are worried about the future.
An atmosphere has been created whereby people are supposed to feel like the exhausting “COVID Pandemic” will last forever and we can all forget about getting back to any normal healthy non-digital relations, activities, and interactions. No society in history has worn face masks for an entire year. We are told over and over again that there is no returning to anything called “normal.” Moving everything online and repeatedly asserting that this is great, “cool,” and wonderful is proving to be unsatisfactory and unfulfilling. People want and need real, direct, non-digital connections and interactions with other human beings. Life behind a screen is not life.
Even with all the restrictions and shutdowns the virus, according to the mainstream media, continues to wreak havoc at home and abroad. It is almost like none of the severe restrictions on people’s freedoms made any difference. People have had to endure this humiliation while also not being permitted any role in deciding the aim, operation, and direction of the economy or any of the affairs of society; they are left out of the equation every step of the way and not even asked for superficial “input” that always goes unheeded anyway. Existing governance arrangements are simply not working to empower people or affirm their rights. The people’s interests and will are blocked at every turn by an outdated political setup that advances only the narrow interests of the rich.
Despite intense pressure to blindly rely on the rich and their political representatives to “figure things out,” this is not working. Nor does it help that the mainstream media approaches multiple crises and issues with endless double-talk, disconnected facts, catchy sound-bites, dramatic exaggerations, angry voices, political axe-grinding, and lots of confusion. Coherence and a human-centered outlook are avoided at all costs. People are constantly left disoriented. Jumping arbitrarily and rapidly from one thing to another in the most unconscious way is presented as useful analysis and information. This is why sorting out basic information has become a full-time job for everyone. People are understandably worn-out and overwhelmed. Disinformation overload degrades mental, emotional, and physical health.
The world has become an uglier and gloomier place—all in the name of “improving health.” It is no surprise that a recent Gallup Poll shows that the majority of Americans are extremely dissatisfied with government, the economy, the culture, and the moral climate.
In this hazardous unstable context, there are two ever-present key pieces of disinformation operating side by side. Both are designed to deprive working people of any say, initiative, outlook, or power.
First there is the “once everyone is vaccinated things will be much better” disinformation. This ignores the fact that capitalist crises have endogenous causes not exogenous causes and that the economic crisis started well before the “COVID Pandemic.” More than 150 years of recessions, depressions, booms, busts, instability, chaos, and anarchy have not been caused by external phenomena like bacteria, germs, and viruses but by the internal logic and operation of capital itself. A so-called “free market” economy by its very nature and logic ensures “winners” and “losers,” “booms” and “busts.” It is called a “dog-eat-dog” fend-for-yourself competitive world for a reason. The modern idea that humans are born to society and have rights by virtue of their being is alien to “free market” ideology.
Despite the fact that millions have been vaccinated at home and abroad, poverty, inequality, unemployment, debt, and other problems continue to worsen. Businesses continue to suffer and disappear. Hospitality, leisure, recreation, and other sectors have been decimated in many countries. Air travel is dramatically lower. So are car sales. It is not enough to say, “Yes, the next few months will be rough and lousy economically speaking but we will get there with more vaccinations. Just be patient, it will all eventually work out.” This is not what is actually unfolding. The all-sided crisis we find ourselves in started before the “COVID Pandemic” and continues unabated. Such a view also makes a mockery of economic science and the people’s desire to decide the affairs of society and establish much better arrangements that exclude narrow private interests and do not rely on police powers.
In the coming months millions more will be vaccinated but economic decline and decay will continue. Both the rate and amount of profit have been falling for years. And owners of capital are not going to invest in anything when there is no profit to be had and when it is easier instead to balloon fictitious capital and pretend everything is a stock market video game. The lack of vaccinations did not cause the economic collapse the word is currently suffering through, nor will more vaccinations reverse economic decline and decay. The “COVID Pandemic” has largely made some people vastly richer and millions more much poorer. The “COVID Pandemic” has significantly increased inequality. Unfortunately, the so-called “Great Reset” agenda of the World Economic Forum and Pope Francis’s recent call for a “Copernican Revolution” in the economy will make things worse for millions more because they will perpetuate the existing moribund economic system. Such agendas are designed to fool the gullible, block working class consciousness and action, and keep the initiative in the hands of the global oligarchy.
The same applies to so-called “stimulus packages.” Various versions of these top-down monetary and fiscal programs have been launched in different countries, and while they have assuaged some problems for people, they have not been adequate or fixed any underlying problems. They have not prevented poverty or mass unemployment. Economies remain mired in crisis. In most cases “stimulus packages” have made things worse by increasing the amount of debt that many generations will have to repay. This is in addition to the many other forms of debt Americans suffer from and rent payments that will one day have to be paid.
Many are also wondering why trillions of dollars can be printed and instantly turned over to the banks and corporations with no discussion but the same cannot be done for social programs, public enterprises, and the people. Why, for example, can all not get free healthcare or have taxes eliminated? Why can’t various forms of personal debt be wiped out instantly? If the government can print money for “them” why can’t they print money for “us”? Who is government supposed to serve? Billionaires?
Nether the CARES Act of 2020 nor the stimulus package passed in December 2020 nor the one President Biden is pushing for in March 2021 will be adequate or solve any major problems. Many felt that the $600 stimulus checks that went out in December 2020 were pathetic and insulting.
The problem lies with a socialized productive economy run by everyone but owned and controlled by a tiny handful of competing private interests determined to maximize profit as fast as possible regardless of the damage to the social and natural environment. There is no way for the economy to benefit all individuals and serve the general interests of society so long as it is dominated by a handful of billionaires. The social wealth produced by workers cannot benefit workers and the society if workers themselves do not control the wealth they produce and have first claim to.
The outlook, agenda, and reference points of the rich must be rejected and replaced by a human-centered aim, agenda, direction, and outlook. The current trajectory is untenable and unsustainable. The situation is dangerous in many ways, but perhaps one good thing to come out of the accelerated pace of chaos, anarchy, and instability are the contradictions that are presenting new opportunities for action with analysis that favors working people.
The post Vaccinations and Stimulus Packages Won’t Mend the Economy first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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On 12 February, 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a resolution in which it criticized the removal of Myanmar’s democratically elected government by the military, locally known as Tatmadaw. The Council also called urgently for the immediate and unconditional release of all persons arbitrarily detained, including State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint and others, and the lifting of the state of emergency.As the international community condemns the coup and shows support for Suu Kyi, it is important not to whitewash the latter as a savior of the Myanma masses. Neither is she a doyen of democracy nor a courageous anti-military leader; she is the face of an alternative ruling class project which aims to incorporate the Tatmadaw into a new geo-economic architecture. The coup is the culmination of that intra-elite power struggle.
Intra-elite Power Struggle
The military regime that came to power in 1988 under Saw Maung looked to capitalism to provide a solution to the crisis that had led to social upheaval, and thus set in motion a process that aimed at breaking down the old state-owned economy and moving towards greater marketization. Their plan was not to sell off to private capitalists, but to transform themselves into the owners of the means of production. They proceeded to privatize a section of the economy, while holding on to key sectors via their control of the state sector.
Eventually, the military’s plan gave rise to a clique of generals who control, through straw men, Myanmar’s biggest corporations, as well as the lucrative trade in jade and other precious stones, narcotics and timber. Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) tried to re-configure this model of military-dominated capitalism by implementing an aggressively pro-market reform agenda that included mobilizing Western and East Asian investment into regular channels. Her “Myanmar Sustainable Economic Development Plan” allowed foreign capitalists to invest up to 35% in local companies, as well as holding stakes of up to 35% in Myanmar companies traded on the Yangon Stock Exchange.
Defensive Posture
The tussle between the NLD and the military reflected itself in different domains. However, the former always maintained a defensive posture – in the hope that by doing the junta a favour, it would hopefully grant them the minimal democratic reforms it wants. On the one hand, Suu Kyi took over some of the military’s positions — for instance, in the peace process. She also seemed to have taken over the military’s version of establishing a centralized state under the domination of the Bamar-Buddhist majority.
On the other hand, Suu Kyi feared the actions of the military. She avoided convening the National Defense and Security Council (NDSC), the institution responsible for discussing security matters. The 11-member body comprising the highest legislative, executive and military players has the right to take over power during a state of emergency.
Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing repeatedly demanded that Suu Kyi convene the NSCD, while she appointed her own security advisers. The NLD feared being forced to call a state of emergency (e.g. over Rakhine state), which could allow the Commander-in-Chief to take over power and dissolve parliament. Both the NLD and the military unsuccessfully attempted to increase their power in the NDSC by bringing in constitutional amendments that would have altered the organ’s composition in their favour.
Neoliberalism with Ethno-racial Characteristics
Insofar that Suu Kyi wanted to establish the complete hegemony of free market on the soil of Myanmar by striking compromises with the military, she generated a politico-economic framework that had excluded the common people. Positioned between the Tatmadaw and multinational companies, she became impervious to the concrete demands of millions of Burmese.
The majority of Myanmar’s population has not been able to see the prosperity that Suu Kyi promised. One in four remained poor in 2017, according to the World Bank. Nearly half of those polled by the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) in 2019 were worried about losing their livelihood, more than twice as many as in 2015. Some 54% said they were unable to access basic services, such as water, public transport and health care, up from 48% five years ago.
Suu Kyi’s government repressed a surge of labor organizing over the past five years. In particular, garment workers waged a massive organizing drive that was repressed by both the bosses and the government. In May 2020, six labor leaders were arrested for leading a strike that violated COVID-19 regulations in a factory in Yangon’s Dagon Seikkan Township.
The NLD administration also remained quiet over the Tatmadaw’s continued atrocities against the working class. In jade mining sites such as Hpakan, young children are sent to gather jade while facing brutal conditions, including mudslides. An estimated 1.13 million five to seventeen year olds are trapped in child labor in Myanmar. This means one in every 11 children is deprived of their childhood, health, and education.
Failing on the economic front, Suu Kyi used inhumane ethno-racial tactics to divert citizens’ attention from relevant issues. Silent support for increasing mobilization of ultranationalist Buddhist groups contributed to the outbreak of extremist attacks and anti-Muslim sentiments. Hate speech increased, particularly via new social media communities. Sectarian violence and military clearance operations drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh.
Governmental collaborationism with the Tatmadaw ensured that the Rohingya were left with no avenues for justice. One example of this is that the seven soldiers who were convicted and jailed for the death of 10 Rohingya men and boys during the 2017 military operations were released less than a year into their 10-year prison sentences. But the two journalists who reported the killing spent more than 16 months behind bars on charges of obtaining state secrets.
In the absence of the rule of law, the international community called for an independent investigation resulting in accusations of crimes against humanity. In December 2019, Suu Kyi had to defend her country from accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Domestically, both the government and the military used the increasing international criticism to rally their supporters behind them and to forge a unity, which is otherwise lacking in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious country.
On Suu Kyi’s watch, the country has seen a regression in press freedom, expanded usage of anti-defamation laws and a general crackdown on speech. In 2020, independent news organizations such as Karen News, and Rakhine-based Development Media Group and Narinjara News, were banned from local telecommunication operator’s networks by the government for allegedly disseminating “fake news”.
Yangon-based Khit Thit Media, Mandalay-based Voice of Myanmar, and Sittwe-based Narinjara News faced anti-terrorism charges for publishing interviews with the outlawed Arakan Army, which has been fighting for autonomy in the Rakhine and Chin states of western Myanmar. Reporters Without Borders ranked Myanmar 139 out of 180 in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index, while Freedom House categorized Myanmar as “Not Free”.
Defeating the Military
The protest movement that has broken out since the coup took place is the biggest since 1988. But the NLD will not take this movement to its final conclusion; it will stop half-way and maintain its strategy of cooperation with the Tatmadaw. Despite popular demands to amend the existing constitution, which gives too much power to the military leaders, the NLD had largely remained silent on that issue. Even with a majority in parliament and with full authority to make legislation, the NLD continued with its non-confrontational approach.
The NLD leaders instead focused on bringing in foreign investment in an attempt to develop a stable capitalist economy, while letting the military enjoy effective government control. NLD had no confidence that its mass support could overcome the military. The party feared that if they mobilised mass support it could get “out of control” and threaten their pro-capitalist project. Now, the working people of Myanmar are going to pay the price of this failure.
During the 8-8-88 uprising (8 August 1988), Suu Kyi demobilized the militant workers’ and student movements to turn them into a base for her electoral ambitions. At that time, the pro-democracy movement hesitated in ousting the junta once and for all. Now, students and workers must build a mass movement that does not repeat this mistake.
The post Why Suu Kyi is Incapable of Defeating the Military first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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On 12 February, 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a resolution in which it criticized the removal of Myanmar’s democratically elected government by the military, locally known as Tatmadaw. The Council also called urgently for the immediate and unconditional release of all persons arbitrarily detained, including State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint and others, and the lifting of the state of emergency.
As the international community condemns the coup and shows support for Suu Kyi, it is important not to whitewash the latter as a savior of the Myanma masses. Neither is she a doyen of democracy nor a courageous anti-military leader; she is the face of an alternative ruling class project which aims to incorporate the Tatmadaw into a new geo-economic architecture. The coup is the culmination of that intra-elite power struggle.
Intra-elite Power Struggle
The military regime that came to power in 1988 under Saw Maung looked to capitalism to provide a solution to the crisis that had led to social upheaval, and thus set in motion a process that aimed at breaking down the old state-owned economy and moving towards greater marketization. Their plan was not to sell off to private capitalists, but to transform themselves into the owners of the means of production. They proceeded to privatize a section of the economy, while holding on to key sectors via their control of the state sector.
Eventually, the military’s plan gave rise to a clique of generals who control, through straw men, Myanmar’s biggest corporations, as well as the lucrative trade in jade and other precious stones, narcotics and timber. Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) tried to re-configure this model of military-dominated capitalism by implementing an aggressively pro-market reform agenda that included mobilizing Western and East Asian investment into regular channels. Her “Myanmar Sustainable Economic Development Plan” allowed foreign capitalists to invest up to 35% in local companies, as well as holding stakes of up to 35% in Myanmar companies traded on the Yangon Stock Exchange.
Defensive Posture
The tussle between the NLD and the military reflected itself in different domains. However, the former always maintained a defensive posture – in the hope that by doing the junta a favour, it would hopefully grant them the minimal democratic reforms it wants. On the one hand, Suu Kyi took over some of the military’s positions — for instance, in the peace process. She also seemed to have taken over the military’s version of establishing a centralized state under the domination of the Bamar-Buddhist majority.
On the other hand, Suu Kyi feared the actions of the military. She avoided convening the National Defense and Security Council (NDSC), the institution responsible for discussing security matters. The 11-member body comprising the highest legislative, executive and military players has the right to take over power during a state of emergency.
Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing repeatedly demanded that Suu Kyi convene the NSCD, while she appointed her own security advisers. The NLD feared being forced to call a state of emergency (e.g. over Rakhine state), which could allow the Commander-in-Chief to take over power and dissolve parliament. Both the NLD and the military unsuccessfully attempted to increase their power in the NDSC by bringing in constitutional amendments that would have altered the organ’s composition in their favour.
Neoliberalism with Ethno-racial Characteristics
Insofar that Suu Kyi wanted to establish the complete hegemony of free market on the soil of Myanmar by striking compromises with the military, she generated a politico-economic framework that had excluded the common people. Positioned between the Tatmadaw and multinational companies, she became impervious to the concrete demands of millions of Burmese.
The majority of Myanmar’s population has not been able to see the prosperity that Suu Kyi promised. One in four remained poor in 2017, according to the World Bank. Nearly half of those polled by the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) in 2019 were worried about losing their livelihood, more than twice as many as in 2015. Some 54% said they were unable to access basic services, such as water, public transport and health care, up from 48% five years ago.
Suu Kyi’s government repressed a surge of labor organizing over the past five years. In particular, garment workers waged a massive organizing drive that was repressed by both the bosses and the government. In May 2020, six labor leaders were arrested for leading a strike that violated COVID-19 regulations in a factory in Yangon’s Dagon Seikkan Township.
The NLD administration also remained quiet over the Tatmadaw’s continued atrocities against the working class. In jade mining sites such as Hpakan, young children are sent to gather jade while facing brutal conditions, including mudslides. An estimated 1.13 million five to seventeen year olds are trapped in child labor in Myanmar. This means one in every 11 children is deprived of their childhood, health, and education.
Failing on the economic front, Suu Kyi used inhumane ethno-racial tactics to divert citizens’ attention from relevant issues. Silent support for increasing mobilization of ultranationalist Buddhist groups contributed to the outbreak of extremist attacks and anti-Muslim sentiments. Hate speech increased, particularly via new social media communities. Sectarian violence and military clearance operations drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh.
Governmental collaborationism with the Tatmadaw ensured that the Rohingya were left with no avenues for justice. One example of this is that the seven soldiers who were convicted and jailed for the death of 10 Rohingya men and boys during the 2017 military operations were released less than a year into their 10-year prison sentences. But the two journalists who reported the killing spent more than 16 months behind bars on charges of obtaining state secrets.
In the absence of the rule of law, the international community called for an independent investigation resulting in accusations of crimes against humanity. In December 2019, Suu Kyi had to defend her country from accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Domestically, both the government and the military used the increasing international criticism to rally their supporters behind them and to forge a unity, which is otherwise lacking in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious country.
On Suu Kyi’s watch, the country has seen a regression in press freedom, expanded usage of anti-defamation laws and a general crackdown on speech. In 2020, independent news organizations such as Karen News, and Rakhine-based Development Media Group and Narinjara News, were banned from local telecommunication operator’s networks by the government for allegedly disseminating “fake news”.
Yangon-based Khit Thit Media, Mandalay-based Voice of Myanmar, and Sittwe-based Narinjara News faced anti-terrorism charges for publishing interviews with the outlawed Arakan Army, which has been fighting for autonomy in the Rakhine and Chin states of western Myanmar. Reporters Without Borders ranked Myanmar 139 out of 180 in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index, while Freedom House categorized Myanmar as “Not Free”.
Defeating the Military
The protest movement that has broken out since the coup took place is the biggest since 1988. But the NLD will not take this movement to its final conclusion; it will stop half-way and maintain its strategy of cooperation with the Tatmadaw. Despite popular demands to amend the existing constitution, which gives too much power to the military leaders, the NLD had largely remained silent on that issue. Even with a majority in parliament and with full authority to make legislation, the NLD continued with its non-confrontational approach.
The NLD leaders instead focused on bringing in foreign investment in an attempt to develop a stable capitalist economy, while letting the military enjoy effective government control. NLD had no confidence that its mass support could overcome the military. The party feared that if they mobilised mass support it could get “out of control” and threaten their pro-capitalist project. Now, the working people of Myanmar are going to pay the price of this failure.
During the 8-8-88 uprising (8 August 1988), Suu Kyi demobilized the militant workers’ and student movements to turn them into a base for her electoral ambitions. At that time, the pro-democracy movement hesitated in ousting the junta once and for all. Now, students and workers must build a mass movement that does not repeat this mistake.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
