Neoliberalism has reigned supreme as an economic philosophy for nearly half a century. But neoliberal policies have wreaked havoc around the world, reversing most gains made under managed capitalism after the end of the Second World War. Neoliberalism works only for the rich and the huge corporations. But the failures of neoliberalism extend beyond economics. They spread into politics as the…
The US seems to have chosen the worst possible strategy, which is to do everything that’s in its power to maintain its dominant position in the world, even though that’s clearly an impossibility.
an animal (such as a horse) that is wild and unmanageable
Over the years much has been written about the chronic absence of accountability, oversight, transparency, rules, and regulations for charter schools. The record shows that these deunionized, deregulated, outsourced, oversold schools run by unelected private persons on the basis of “free market” ideology routinely operate with impunity. The failure rate of these segregated schools is staggering.
Many have wondered for decades why, in practice, charter schools do not uphold even weak rules and laws here and there. Why do they evade or superficially uphold many federal laws that are supposed to apply to them? Why are accountability and transparency so hard to come by in the crisis-prone charter school sector? After 31 years, how are charter school operators frequently able to dodge many basic standards and requirements of modern life, institutions, and organizations? How can charter schools be so anarchic and unmanageable decades after they first appeared?
Given this long-standing chaos, it is no surprise that charter schools, which barely make up seven percent of all schools in the country, are constantly mired in scandal, corruption, and fraud. Indeed, an arrest of a charter school employee is made nearly every week in the charter school sector. The news is regularly filled with sensational announcements of different crimes committed by charter school owners, operators, and employees.
Charter schools also regularly exclude different types of students and have fewer nurses than public schools. Many do not even require teachers to be certified or licensed to teach. In addition, teachers in public schools are generally paid more and tend to have better retirement plans than charter school teachers. Not surprisingly, the teacher turnover rate in charter schools is very high. So is the student and principal turnover rate. None of this helps continuity, stability, and collegiality.
On top of this, extensive information about widespread poor academic performance in cyber charter schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools is now available in many places. Poor academic performance is one of several reasons charter schools close every week, leaving many minority families feeling violated. Financial malfeasance and mismanagement are the two other most common reasons charter schools close regularly.
The main reason why charter schools are such anarchic and unmanageable schools is that they are set up under the law to be that way. The nation’s 7,500 charter schools are deregulated schools by design. They are purposely exempt from most public laws, rules, regulations, and standards upheld by public schools.
Charter schools are “free market” schools and do not operate like public schools. This is why they differ from public schools in legal, philosophical, and organizational ways. It is why, unlike public schools, charter schools treat parents and students as customers and consumers, not citizens and humans with definite rights. This “autonomy” and entire set-up are deliberate and intentional. This rules-free arrangement is not a fluke, some annoying oversight, or a silly mistake. This “autonomy” is the “independence” that these “innovative” schools run by unelected private persons need in order to “do as they please” under the banner of high ideals.
To be clear, the absence of meaningful supervision, regulation, and accountability is a built-in feature of charter schools, a salient feature of charter schools, not a bug or mishap. It is intrinsic to the charter school model and not the result of shaky thinking, poor implementation, or “unintentional outcomes.” Contrary to what charter school advocates like to claim, accountability and transparency are not at the core of charter schools. Clarity and conviction on this issue are critical.
Charter schools are not set up to be regulated, accountable, transparent, and stable in the sense of what people normally understand these terms to mean.
“Free market” accountability is not really accountability. Chaos, anarchy, and violence are the main features of the “free market.” The fact is that there can be no justice in a fend-for-yourself dog-eat-dog world. Survival-of-the-fittest is brutal and guarantees winners and losers. Equilibrium, stability, and security are rare in an economic set-up based on competition and profit maximization. Every day, we hear financial pundits use terms like “uncertainty,” “volatility,” and “instability” to correctly describe the “free market.” Conditions are so chaotic and anarchic in the “free market” that one of the most common refrains made by such pundits is, “well, of course, at the end of the day you can’t really predict what the markets will do; anything can happen.” This is true, but is it any way for modern humans to live today? Why should anyone live in a state of constant insecurity, instability, chaos, and anxiety centuries after the scientific and technical revolution made it possible to easily meet the needs of all several times over? This includes providing a free world-class public education under public control—free of narrow private interests—to everyone.
Trying to regulate or oversee something that is by design not really meant to have meaningful supervision and regulation would mean radically changing the laws and practices surrounding charter schools. It would mean doing the opposite of what we have today. It would entail making charter schools something they are not.
But can a charter school not be a charter school?
Can a charter school suddenly stop being privatized and become public like a public school? Can it become its opposite? Can it stop being a performance-based contract school? Can a charter school even be called a charter school if it acquires all the features of a public school? Can it become a state actor like a regular public school? Can it be governed by elected officials and have the power to levy taxes like public schools? Can charter schools be audited as normally, frequently, and effortlessly as public schools? Can charter schools allow teachers in their schools to be unionized even though about 90% are currently not unionized? Can charter schools stop treating teachers as “at-will” employees? Can a charter school become an entity that affirms the civil rights and other rights of students in practice? Can neoliberal governments eradicate the powerful private interests that own, operate, and promote charter schools? Can capital-centered governments end the commodification of education? Do the rich have any incentive to terminate unaccountable and unmanageable schools run by unelected private persons? Can the rich abandon the profit motive?
Charter schools differ profoundly from public schools by design, and these differences appear at many levels and in many forms.1 One of the original neoliberal justifications given for charter schools is that they could come into existence once public school districts, which have been around for more than 150 years, are deprived of what charter school advocate Ted Kolderie called their “exclusive franchise to own and operate public schools.” Once this historic pre-condition for privatization happened, Kolderie reasoned, a new and different “system” of schools—outsourced schools—owned and operated by unelected private persons and large corporations could come into being.
It is no accident that charter schools emerged firmly in the context of the neoliberal era that was launched at home and abroad in the late 1970s. Neoliberalism is at its core a major assault on the public interest and human rights. It further marginalizes the polity and ensures that the rich get richer even faster, thereby intensifying political and economic inequality.
The fact that the number of charter schools continues to steadily increase nationwide does not mean that there is any justification for their existence, it just means that neoliberals and their entourage are able to impose their narrow private will on the public will. It means that the public has not yet developed sufficient resistance to stop school privatization. Nonetheless, the justification for charter schools remains as weak today as it did when the charter school idea was first hatched by neoliberal forces more than 35 years ago. Charter schools did not originate with grass-roots forces, which is why they violate the public interest, undermine public education, and harm the economy and national interest.
Just as all the campaign finance reform laws in the world have not changed the corrupting influence of (massive amounts of) money in elections and just as inequality is guaranteed under capitalism, it is impossible for a charter school to not be a charter school. The rich are not going to eliminate arrangements that they have intentionally and methodically established for their benefit. They will always seek new sources of profit, and for the past 40 years the public sector has been a main target of major owners of capital.
It is wishful thinking to believe that a charter school can be something other than a charter school. Such an orientation blocks deeper thinking and deeper changes that are needed. The fact is that small or piecemeal changes to charter schools in different states have not slowed the expansion of charter schools and the myriad problems that accompany them. Problems continue to multiply in the charter school sector. The news is filled every day with reports of illegal and unethical activities in privately-operated charter schools. In this way, charter schools express the replacement of a government of laws with a government of police powers, which is a coercive non-democratic form of governance which rejects modern public standards, principles, laws, and rules. Police powers permeate U.S. political institutions and operate arbitrarily and with impunity.
As they have for the last 31 years, charter schools will continue to undermine public schools by siphoning billions of dollars a year from them. They will also continue to perform poorly, engage in outlaw activities, and close every week, leaving thousands of black and brown families feeling abandoned and angry. So much for a superior alternative to “dreadful” public schools—the same “dreadful” public schools that have been methodically set up to fail by neoliberals and privatizers for years. The general neoliberal playbook strategy here goes like this: starve public schools of funds year after year. Then impose tons of high-stakes standardized tests on them to “show” that they are “failing.” Then humiliate and degrade them repeatedly in order to generate antisocial public opinion against them. And finally, punish and privatize them, only to replace them with many failing charter schools that enrich a handful of people at the expense of low-income minority students.
What is needed today is a robust movement based on the principle that education is a right, not a commodity, not a business, not a consumer good, and not something that should be left to chance and the “free market” in a modern society. To treat parents and students as consumers and to make them fend-for-themselves in order to get a good education is inconsistent with modern demands, requirements, and possibilities.
If charter schools wish to exist, that is fine so long as they receive zero public funds, services, facilities, and resources because these belong legitimately and entirely to public schools. A school does not become public just because it is called public 50 times a day. Nor does it become public just because it receives public funds. Being public requires and means more. Private interests have no valid claim to public funds, services, facilities, and resources. The producers of wealth in society do not want their wealth handed over to non-public entities, especially unaccountable and lawless non-public entities plagued by corruption, fraud, and scandal. Public funds, services, facilities, and resources—and public authority—must remain in public hands at all times.
For extensive background facts and analysis about dozens of different aspects of the charter school sector, search for “Shawgi Tell” here.
Skidrow in Los Angeles, California (Photo: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The agenda was set with the Lewis Powell Memorandum in 1971. Written at the request of the United States Chamber of Commerce, probably the most influential structure of capitalist rule at the time, the concern for the Chamber was the need to find a more coherent counter-offensive to the attacks against the system over the previous years. At the center of the anti-system attacks during the 1960s was, of course, the Black Liberation Movement and the Anti-War movement.
Powell made the argument that the capitalist class had to recognize that their very survival was at stake and that meant capitalists had to understand that as a class their interests transcended their individual enterprises.
And while the tone of Powell’s memo was “professional” and lacked rhetorical excesses, the need for a more intentional and strategic class war was the call that leaped out from the Powell memo.
The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.
The policy implications were obvious. The U.S. ruling class concluded that it could no longer afford the “excesses” of the liberal welfare state and reform liberalism that as far as it was concerned had produced a failed war strategy, cultural decadence, rampant inflation, urban riots and demands for rights from groups representing every sector of U.S. society.
This was the beginning of the right-wing neoliberal turn. A societal-wide counterrevolutionary policy that also required a domestic counterinsurgency strategy that would have a military, but more importantly, an ideological/cultural component. Domestically the main target of the counterinsurgency would be the revolutionary nationalist and socialist forces of the Black liberation movement and “new communist” formations.
Internationally, the turn to neoliberalism translated into a brutal intensification of colonial/capitalist (imperialist) value extraction from nations in the global South buttressed by weak, corrupt, repressive neocolonial states politically and militarily propped-up by the U.S.
The neoliberal counterrevolution produced irreconcilable contradictions that we are living through today. The gap between rich and poor nations and between workers and capitalists had never been more pronounced and immiseration so cruel.
For the Black working class, the neoliberal turn was a catastrophe. The off-shoring of the U.S. industrial base with its relatively high paying jobs along with the reorganization of the economy to a service economy and the privatization wave that devastated social services and public employment where black workers were disproportionately located created structural precarity that only needed one incident to push tens of thousands into desperation. In the 2000s there were two. Hurricane Katrina and the economic collapse of 2008 that saw the greatest loss of Black wealth and income since the end of the reconstruction period between 1877 and 1896.
Compounding this devastation, the crimes against humanity represented by the 2020 covid pandemic in which literally tens of thousands of Black people, mainly poor, unnecessarily died because the state failed to protect their fundamental human rights to health and social security.
While Katrina exposed the fragility of Black life in the Gulf Coast, the economic crisis of 2008 just a few years later plugged millions of African workers into a desperate, depression era scramble for survival in conditions where Black labor was superfluous, and the very existence of Black life was seen as a social problem. The mass slaughter of the covid pandemic closed out the first two decades of a century that was supposed to exemplify “American” greatness with a demoralized and confused electorate turning to a washed-up hack politician named Joe Biden.
Midterm Elections: If Stopping Fascism is on the Ballot, what was it the Africans Experienced all These Years?
Neoliberalism was a rightist capitalist reform project. Today it informs the context for the midterms elections for African/Black workers. The objective material needs of Black workers and our desire for self-determination, independent development and peace were not on the ballot.
And while the duopoly represents the primary political contradiction obscuring the reality of the dictatorship of capital, the most aggressive neoliberal actors now operate in and through the democratic party. Consequently, the unspoken character of the competition between the two parties is that elections have now shaped up since 2016 as a contest between the far-right elements represented today by Trump forces and the neoliberal right represented by corporate democrats tied to finance capital and transnational corporations.
This is the undemocratic choice. The republicans represent the disaffected white nationalist petit-bourgeoisie settlers who think they are indigenous to this land. The ruling corporate capitalist elements of that party are for the most part nationalist oriented, dependent for their profits on the domestic economy. Some elements produce for the global markets, but they are in constant struggle with big capital as the capitalist economy “naturally” concentrates into its monopoly stage.
Democrats who historically had been associated with labor and the common man even during the period when it was the party of racist segregation under the apartheid system in the South, is today the party controlled by U.S. based monopoly capital. For workers, this form of bourgeois democracy has no space or structure representing the interests of workers, the poor and structurally oppressed. The working class and poor are slowly beginning to understand that.
That is why early evidence suggests that African/Black workers did not participate in numbers that were necessary for the democrats to have prevailed in some of those key races. The democrats have nothing to offer, no policies, no hope, and no vision.
Some of the cowardice phony “progressives” in that party suggest that the national democrats did not push an economic message even though it was clear that the economic crisis was their most pressing concern.
But what economic message? The democrats long ago abandoned their base and they continue to desperately find ways to dilute the influence of their most loyal base – African Americans – by seeking out that elusive white, primarily women, suburban vote.
What the midterms reaffirmed is that the class war that Powell advocated for in the 70s as a primary strategic objective of the ruling class continues and is intensifying, even as the ruling class is in crisis and cannot rule in the same way. This means that the people must disabuse themselves of all illusions and sentimental ideas around common national interests with this reckless and increasingly irrational bourgeoisie.
We cannot allow ourselves to fall prey to the slick propaganda that diverts attention away from the failures of the capitalist system. January 6th and Trump, evil Putin, the calculating Chinese, the exaggerated crime issue, and immigration issue, are all meant to divert us away from the fact that our lives are empty, that we have no time for friends and family, mindless soul crushing work characterizes our existence, if we have it, and the fear and anxiety that comes from a precarious existence saps our spirits and turns our confusion and anger inward.
Ideological clarity that stems from a liberated consciousness directs us to the conclusion that it is the system that is the enemy. Not our neighbor, or the undocumented gardener or food delivery person, not the peoples of Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba who just want to live in their own way and in peace.
The democrat party is a morally bankrupt shell, hollowed out by years of lies and corruption. Many do not want to accept the bitter reality that we (Africans and colonized peoples) must objectively acknowledge that nothing will substantially change by this election or any other bourgeois election. We can and must contest in those spaces but we are clear – as long as power is retained by the Pan European colonial/capitalist dictatorship Black people will continue to suffer and collective humanity will face an existential threat.
A group of Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is pressuring the Federal Reserve to explain why it’s continuing to raise interest rates at such a rapid pace when economists across the political spectrum say that rate hikes will only hurt the working class with little upside for the economy at large.
In a letter sent to Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Monday, 11 members of Congress lay out a wide swath of evidence from both Powell himself and from economists that American families will be in for “pain” in the coming months, as Powell has said, as the Fed plans to raise interest rates by 75 basis points, or 0.75 percent, for the third consecutive time this year.
The letter, signed by progressive lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Representatives Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), expresses “concern” about the Fed’s “alarming” plans and “disturbing warning” to American families about what to expect in coming months.
As the lawmakers point out, the Fed has predicted that as it continues raising rates through next year, unemployment will rise from its current rate of about 3.5 percent to 4.4 percent in 2023 and 2024. This means that about 2 million people will lose their jobs as economic growth slows and the labor market grows weaker, Powell has said.
Other experts’ estimates of the impact on the economy are more dire. Bank of America estimates that unemployment could jump as high as 5.6 percent, which could mean the loss of over 3 million jobs. Meanwhile, according to a survey released last month by The Wall Street Journal, economists predict that there is a 63 percent chance that the U.S. will enter a recession in the next 12 months, in large part due to the Fed’s relentless rate hikes.
Economists, who have been raising warnings about the damage that the rate hikes could cause for months, have been puzzled about Powell’s decisions, the letter points out. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has said that whether or not there will be a global recession comes down to “policy choices and political will,” economists are unclear on what the Fed’s goals are.
“The Fed clearly wants the labor market to weaken quite sharply. What’s not clear to us is why,” one economist wrote in a report earlier this year, as the letter writers pointed out. Economists have also questioned whether or not the rate hikes could have as much impact on inflation as they’re supposedly meant to have, saying that the impacts on the working class could outweigh any supposed benefits.
Memo to the Fed: Your rate hikes aren’t slowing inflation because inflation is coming from big corporations using the cover of inflation to increase their prices more than their costs.
Even the Fed itself admits that the rate hikes may have little impact on inflation, considering the vast amount of other factors at play, like corporate price gouging and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the letter reads. The lawmakers list a variety of times that Powell has admitted that the Fed’s power over commodity prices is limited.
“As one economist noted, the Fed can’t ‘click its heels three times, raise rates and have inflation drop. There’s a myriad of factors going on now, and it’s a mistake to think the Fed controls any more than a handful of those,’” the letter says. “Nevertheless, you continue to double down on your commitment to ‘act aggressively’ with interest rate hikes and ‘keep at it until it’s done,’ even if ‘[n]o one knows whether this process will lead to a recession or if so, how significant that recession would be.’”
“These statements reflect an apparent disregard for the livelihoods of millions of working Americans,” the lawmakers wrote, “and we are deeply concerned that your interest rate hikes risk slowing the economy to a crawl while failing to slow rising prices that continue to harm families.”
While progressives warn that the Fed’s rate hikes would be at best a band aid on the problem, they say that raising interest rates to suppress demand is a neoliberal policy that passes economic pain onto the consumer at any cost — even a recession. Progressive advocates say, instead, that providing relief to the public while targeting corporations who are using inflation to raise prices would be a good start.
President Joe Biden appears to agree that corporate price gouging is an important underlying cause for inflation, at least in part. On Monday, he warned oil and gas companies that, if they don’t take action to lower gas prices at the pump, they could face a corporate windfall tax that would capture excess profits. Indeed, the oil and gas industry — and corporations as a whole — have been enjoying huge profits as inflation has soared, while Americans are increasingly having to take out predatory loans for basic expenses.
Education and other public services and social programs have been under attack by major owners of capital and “free market” ideologues for several decades. To be sure, the privatization of all spheres and sectors continues at a brisk rate at home and abroad. Public-private “partnerships” and other pay-the-rich schemes carried out under the veneer of high ideals are multiplying rapidly and intensifying problems everywhere. Few countries are unaffected.
Charter schools and vouchers are the two main forms of privatization in the sphere of American education. Both have wreaked havoc on public education and the public interest for decades. Together they have lowered the level of culture and education, misled parents and the public, greatly enriched a handful of people along the way, and damaged the economy. These privatized education arrangements have not served the national interest in any way.
Extensive information and analysis of school privatization in its various forms can be found in many places, including at the Network for Public Education, Tultican, In The Public Interest, Common Dreams, and Truthout. Hundreds of scholarly peer-reviewed articles and books also expose many serious problems with school privatization.
The main theory behind the privatization and deregulation of public education is “free-market” theory, which maintains that treating education as a commodity, as a business, as an exchange phenomenon in a dog-eat-dog world where everyone fends-for-themselves, is the best of all worlds and the most effective, civilized, and fair way to save children, the economy, society, and the nation.
“Free-market” theory openly promotes a survival-of-the-fittest ethos for schools, families, and individuals, which ends up consolidating inequality and reinforcing a system of winners and losers. In practice, “school choice” leaves many children and families behind. In this connection, it is important to appreciate the segregationist origins of “school choice”.
Such a dog-eat-dog system is anachronistic and negates arrangements based on the affirmation of basic human rights that belong to all by virtue of being human. In the “free market” you may end up in a great school or you may not, which is often the case. It is on you alone to find a school that serves the needs of your children, and to do so in an environment that is increasingly complex and confusing. And “buyer beware” because when your school closes, often without warning, there is no way to secure redress. You have to live and die by the “free market.” Nothing is guaranteed.
Such upheavals and chaos are common in the crisis-prone charter school sector. They are a salient feature, not just a bug, of charter school arrangements. In some cases parents receive only a short cold email from charter school operators informing them that their charter school is closing abruptly—and at the worst possible time. It is an irresponsible approach to education in a modern society. And with no sense of irony, “free market” ideologues present such “churn” and disorder as a good and normal thing, as the way things are supposed to be.
Charter schools now have a 31-year record of failure, corruption, fraud, controversy, scandal, and closure. So do vouchers. Poor accountability and low transparency are hallmarks of the crisis-prone charter school sector. However, none of this has stopped charter school promoters from working tirelessly to oversell and prettify charter schools. Charter schools have become notorious for over-promising and under-delivering. Intense advertising and marketing are central to this business-centric drive. The nation’s 100,000 public schools, on the other hand, spend nothing on advertising and marketing because they are not businesses or promoters of consumerism, competition, and the “law of the jungle.” They do not view students and parents as customers shopping for a school. Education is not seen as a commodity or as something provided to society by private interests obsessed with maximizing profit as fast as possible.
“Free-market” theory does not recognize education as a modern human social responsibility. It does not view education as a collective responsibility in the 21st century. It does not consider education to be a basic human right that government must guarantee in practice. It does not accept that public schools in a society based on mass industrial production need to be universal, well-organized, world-class, fully-funded, integrated, locally-controlled by elected individuals accountable to the public, and available for free in every neighborhood.
Education in a complex society such as ours cannot be left to chance and a fend-for-yourself outlook. Such an orientation is at odds with contemporary conditions and requirements. The “law of the jungle” is not fit for human beings. For centuries, humans have needed and wanted a society fit for all, not a society for “the fittest.”
If private schools wish to exist—and thousands do in America—that is perfectly fine. They simply should not have access to any public funds, assets, facilities, services, or resources because these belong legitimately and wholly to the public alone and no one else. Only schools that are public in the proper sense of the word should receive public funds. Calling charter schools “public” 50 times a day does not automatically make charter schools public. Over the years courts in many jurisdictions have even ruled that charter schools are not public schools. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not state agencies. There is ultimately no justification for funneling public wealth to deregulated charter schools run by unelected private persons. The private sector has no valid or legitimate claim to public funds and resources produced by working people.
Public and private are antonyms and should not be mixed up. They are different categories with distinct characteristics. The public sphere and the private domain have different features and embrace different aims, roles, and agendas, which is why they cannot be reconciled. They are also governed by different laws. The rich and their representatives continually blur the critical distinction between these different realms for self-serving reasons. For example, if they can get away with calling privately-operated deregulated charter schools “public schools,” then they can lay false claim to public funds and resources, which is really nothing more than private parasitic expropriation of public property under the banner of high ideals. Such self-serving claims make the rich richer while wrecking public education and the public interest.
According to “free market” theory, anything other than “free-market” arrangements leads to “special interests,” “politics,” “inefficiency,” “economic distortions,” “government tyranny,” and more. Government is typically the bogeyman in “free market” theory. Government is automatically and permanently evil in “free market” theory, which is ironic because government today actively imposes the neoliberal outlook and agenda of the rich on everyone and everything, leading to greater inequalities and tragedies at all levels. Like the welfare state, the neoliberal state ensures that the rich keep getting much richer. This is all consistent with the theory of private property expounded by political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. They argued that government’s main role is to protect private property rights, which means, among other things, prioritizing individualism over the general interests of society. To be sure, states and governments intervene regularly in the “free market” to privilege big business. The rich seem to have no issues or concerns when government guarantees them even more benefits denied to others. The rich, in reality, do not like to live and die by the “free market.” They want the state and government to guarantee them profit at all times, regardless of how damaging this is to the natural and social environment.
Private property, it should be recalled, means that only one individual can use said property. All others are excluded from use of said property; the legal individual owner has the exclusive right to use it as he or she sees fit and no one else is allowed to benefit from this property. Private property is about exclusion.1
Further, any notion of consciously planning an economy to secure stability, sustainability, and growth for all is rashly rejected as irrational by “free market” ideologues. They maintain that it is absurd and impossible to plan for the needs of all humans in a deliberate and conscious way that ensures that all parts of the economy operate in a harmonious pro-social manner. “Things are too complex or too big to be controlled or planned” say “free market” ideologues. In this way, uncertainty, chaos, instability, individualism, consumerism, and a fend-for-yourself lifestyle are normalized.
According to “free market” ideologues, if everything were just left to the “free market” we would supposedly have the best of all worlds where “the best and brightest,” “the winners,” and “the most meritorious” would rise to the top, lead, and make everything better for everyone. Talent, ability, and initiative would be properly rewarded, according to “free market” theory. All the chips would land fairly and correctly in their proper place if everyone just played by the rules of “free market” theory. “Free market” ideologues claim that everything would be high quality if we just upheld “free market” ideas.
This ahistorical and apolitical approach ignores 50 things, including the unequal distribution and control of economic and political power in a class-divided society, that is, who is already-advantaged and who is already-disadvantaged. It ignores inherited wealth, unequal access to information, differing levels of literacy, uneven cultural capital, the exploitation of workers by owners of capital, and much more. The game, as they say, is already rigged, which is why “might makes right” and “winner takes all” prevail in the “free market.” After all, since “not everyone can be excellent” in the “free market,” then not everyone can be “a winner.” Only the “fittest survive” in this obsolete set-up. Many have to fail. Put differently, competition in the “free market” is already heavily pre-conditioned by economic and other considerations.
Mountain States Policy Center
The newest entity to enter the “free market education” foray is a “nonprofit” group called the Mountain States Policy Center. According to Idaho Ed News, the Mountain States Policy Center:
advertises itself as a nonpartisan research group. Its goal is to promote the free market, individual liberty and limited government in Washington, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.
We are also told that, “Education is one of the group’s top concerns.” Indeed, “school choice” is the group’s “top education priority,” which means more school privatization (e.g., charter schools and vouchers).
The group is led by committed long-standing “free market” ideologues and claims to be “above” politics and rhetoric, even though it is heavily involved in both. Chris Cargill is the co-founder, President, and CEO of Mountain States Policy Center. He “spent the last 13 years with the Washington Policy Center, a similar free-market think tank headquartered in Seattle.”
In an ideological sleight of hand, the Mountain States Policy Center explicitly equates the “free market’ with “the people.” This is a particularly dark form of disinformation because the “free market” and “the people” are not the same. They are different categories with different qualities. The “free market” is the way commodities are exchanged in a society based on individualism, commodity production, exchange relations, and private property. It is a set-up based on profit-maximization, not one based on meeting social needs. This is why there are six vacant homes for every homeless person in the U.S. The people, on the other hand, refers to the modern polity made up of citizens with equal rights and duties. There is no necessary or automatic connection between the “free market” and “the people.”
People have lived and worked in many periods that did not have a “free market.” Entrepreneurialism, for instance, did not exist in most economic formations; it is specific to capitalism and serves as a euphemism for “rugged individualism,” fend-for-yourself, and survival-of-the-fittest. Promoters of entrepreneurialism also try to equate it with “innovation.” It should also be noted that the concept of “the people” did not exist in periods prior to the rise of capitalism. Under slavery and feudalism many humans were not even part of “the people.”
The “free market,” it should be stressed, rests on instability, uncertainty, chaos, anarchy, competition, consumerism, possessive individualism, and private property. It fosters turmoil (“creative destruction”) and blocks the rise of a self-reliant, diverse, and balanced economy whose parts work together in harmony to meet the needs of all. Humans, however, do not need or want instability, uncertainty, and insecurity in the 21st century. People in a modern society based on mass industrial production need and want a society that ensures stability, peace, security, and prosperity for all on a planned, conscious, sustainable basis. Constantly lurching from one economic crisis to another is inhumane and avoidable.
The aim of conflating the “free market” with “the people” is designed to make it seem like the “free market” is somehow pro-social and human-centered when, in fact, it stresses possessive individualism and denies the existence of society and the social relationship between individuals. “Free market” theory does not see individuals as social beings but rather as self-interested, disconnected, isolated (“independent”) beings that just want to be left alone while they “make their way” in this dog-eat-dog world that perpetuates many inequalities and tragedies. The “free market” essentially ignores social responsibility and lionizes individualism and individual responsibility. It has no dialectical conception of the relationship between individuals and society.
The Mountain States Policy Center also creates a false dichotomy between government and “the people.” This is done in an attempt to de-link “the people” from the government, even though no civilized society can exist without government. Such disinformation is meant to foster the idea that government is not and cannot be an arrangement that actually represents and serves people. Indeed, government is seen as a big nuisance. “People” for “free market” ideologues really means capitalists, entrepreneurs, business people, stakeholders, and consumers. It does not mean humans and citizens with rights that belong to them by virtue of their being and which must be upheld by a modern government. “Free market” ideologues never distinguish between a human-centered government versus a capital-centered government. They do not recognize that a government that upholds a public authority worthy of the name differs from a government that puts the narrow interests of big business in first place all the time.
The neoliberal character of the Mountain States Policy Center comes out again in this statement: “We believe that parents should have the right to use the dollars that they put into the public school system to educate their children as best as they see fit.” This is one of many versions of the worn-out neoliberal disinformation to funnel public money into private hands. The statement combines “parents” and “choice” in a way that makes it seem like the Mountain States Policy Center is simply defending some sort of benign choice and rights, when they are really promoting consumerism, individualism, a fend-for-yourself mentality, and the commodification of education. It also ignores the fact that public school funds do not belong to parents or students, per se. Public school funds are not “portable” and free for any individual to use as they wish whenever and wherever they want. This is not the premise, purpose, and function of public school money in the U.S.
It is worth recalling that charter means contract, that contracts are part of private law, and that charter schools are contract schools. Contracts are the quintessential market category; they make markets ‘work’. Contracts are the expression of exchange relations in a society based on commodity production and the social division of labor and private property underlying such an economy. Individualism, competition, utilitarianism, and consumerism are the companion ideologies of such an outdated set-up. The link between private property and charter schools cannot be overlooked, especially because such a connection negates the oft-repeated irrational claim that charter schools are public schools. In practice, the concept and practice of charter schools forsakes public control and benefit. This is why charter schools are not, in fact, open to all students and do cherry-pick their students using many different methods.
Further, like private businesses, charter schools treat teachers as “at-will” employees, which means that they can be hired and fired at any time for any reason. In addition, many states allow charter school teachers to teach without a license or certificate. This is on top of the fact that charter school teachers, on average, are paid less, are less experienced, and work longer days and years than their public school counterparts.
Moreover, widespread fraud and corruption are perhaps the most striking features of cyber charter schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools. Not a day goes by where there is not some sort of scandal, crime, or controversy in the charter school sector. Arrests, indictments, and incarceration of charter school employees are commonplace.
Charter school owners and operators are also known for manipulating student waiting list numbers to create the illusion that most, or all, charter schools have long student waiting lists, which is supposed to “prove” and signal to the public that charter schools are popular and a superior alternative to the public schools that educate 90% of America’s youth. Apparently, parents and students are clamoring to escape “dreadful” public schools as fast as possible, just to get into a privately-operated, deregulated, segregated charter school governed by unelected private persons focused on the bottom line. In reality, countless charter schools manipulate their waiting lists and many cannot meet their own enrollment targets. This is besides the never-ending problem of high student (and teacher and principal) turnover rates in charter schools. Every week, many students are pushed out of charter schools in one way or another and dumped back into the “dreadful” public schools that accept all students at all times. But, as researcher Jeff Bryant notes, No Matter What the Charter School Movement Says, Parents Like Their Public Schools (October 5, 2022).
The list of problems plaguing the charter school sector, along with the damage that this sector is doing to education, society, the economy, and the national interest is lengthy, damning, and indicting.
Today, a robust and growing body of unassailable evidence documents many serious problems in the crisis-prone charter school sector. This has had the effect of steadily and methodically strengthening the ideological, theoretical, educational, and political battle against neoliberal educational ideas, policies, and arrangements.
After two generations of failure and scandal, privatizers and neoliberals continue to push aggressively for more school privatization in order to transfer as much public wealth away from the public and into the hands of narrow private interests seeking new sources of profit in an economy that is tapped out and steadily collapsing.
Working people, students, parents, educators, public education advocates, and others have an objective interest in ending privatization in all its forms and defending the public interest. Neoliberals, privatizers, and “free market” ideologues determined to further wreck public education, society, the economy, and the national interest under the banner of high ideals can and must be stopped.
Private property and personal property are not the same.
thank god for eels, marine science, the probing minds of people who want the world to be better
Yeah, I met this guy, Mork X Twain, at an auto parts shop. He was in his planetary orbit, and his home-van was disabled in Newport, at a Burger King parking lot. I told him I’d drive him to his van, try a jump and then from there, who knows? So, there you have it — a van he lives in, going from Newport to the Bay Area, and he said he’s 82, and estranged from his children but has contact with grandkids. The starter was kaput, so I took him to a starter-battery place, and they were reluctant to work on a vehicle that is also a home (their policy) but I talked them into it. Could have been $300, and the tow, that was $85 plus $6 a mile. He lives on Social Security. He wanted to pay me $20 for the help, but I declined.
Mork says he’s writing a collection of essays, tied to the next planetary synergy. China, Russia, Trump and other issues, and he wants a grand socialism, of sorts (he kept bringing up Michael Moore and his movie where he plants a flag in Finland and France cuz of their supposed social programs). He’s pretty smart, and who knows what that life was before 82, before he adopted Mork from Mork and Mindy, X from Malcolm X, and Twain, from Samuel Clemens. He has no phone, and he gave me a PO Box at a copy-postal center in Lincoln City.
I collect stories, and whew, I get embroiled in some interesting narratives of people who are traveling through the slipstream that is life. Mork is one of ten thousand!
I’m also thinking about my sister, Roberta, who hit the pavement near Kamloops, when she was 23, on her way on her new Harley to Tucson. Two other people were on their bikes, and some asshole fell asleep at the wheel, and crossed the line and ended Robbie’s life.
What could have been, and my mom and I went to Hyder, Alaska to be with her boyfriend and friends and spread her ashes in the ocean. I was 20 years old. My younger sister was 10. My old man was on his way to Saudi Arabia. US military.
I’m on this beach (below) a lot, following the tide charts, looking for agates, jasper and plenty of birds. Time to think, time to get caught up in my own slipstream, this aging out of this American Life, and, alas, thinking about just how damaged the world is around me, and then, de facto, how damaged I am now from absorbing plenty of wins and losses, ups and downs.
Then thinking of those eels. Amazing, really: “First direct evidence of adult European eels migrating to their breeding place in the Sargasso Sea,” (source, Scientists Track Eels to Their Ocean Breeding Grounds in World-First).
All the way to the Sargasso sea, these reverse anadromous fish ( which migrate from the sea up — Greek: ἀνά aná, “up” and δρόμος drómos, “course” — into fresh water to spawn, such as salmon, striped bass, and the sea lamprey), are actually, catadromous fish who migrate from fresh water down — Greek: κατά kata, “down” and δρόμος dromos, “course”) into the sea to spawn, such as eels.
The point of pointing out these incredible animals, eels, is to point to that human compassion and passion, where people study earth, the amazing life histories of the very animals we take for granted, and those we eat, too. And, I was a kid with my family in the Azores where European eels ended up on their way from UK, say, or Germany, to the Sargasso Sea to breed.
A sharp decline in European eel (Anguilla anguilla) numbers since the 1980s has only made the task all that much harder, and more urgent.
But don’t underestimate these enigmatic creatures. European eels migrate between 5,000 and 10,000 kilometers (3,100 to 6,210 miles) to spawn at sea, after which their larvae drift back towards land and the relative safety of rivers.
Using satellite tags, the researchers behind this latest discovery obtained tracking data from 21 female European eels as they navigated the last leg of their epic journey, southwest from the Azores, a volcanic archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, far west of Portugal.
Contrast these amazing biologists and such, with the Takers, and the absolute amount of trauma they — Homo Sapiens, Homo Consumopithecus, Homo Retailerectus — inflict on our own species. This war here, this famine there, this corporation poisoning this land there, these murderers and thieves doing what they can to be at the top of their manure piles here and there and everywhere.
It’s simple calculus, but Homo Anglo-Saxon-Bellum will do what it has to, with the puppet masters of folks like Nuland, Kagan, Blinken and Super Goy Zionists goading and propping up this actual subhuman, ZioLensky.
So it’s difficult to absorb the news of these neocons, these billionaires, these propagandists, these lockdown impresarios, these AI-VR-AR surveillance panopticons, and then take some respite in the woods or on a beach, but it is a must, to detoxify, like an spiritual elimination diet, finding which inflammatory ingredient in capitalism and Western culture culls joints or flurries brain fog. Imagine, this propaganda-violence, with that comic above in fake military drab, joking, and positing dirty bombs, and the Bucha lies, and bombing markets while helping with a Vogue Magazine layout.
The fog/miasma is great, in what is the 21st Century’s Sadistic, Broken, Chaotic, Propagandistic, Orwellian New Normal, ranging from SARS-CoV2 gain of function hell — that DARPA darling — to the lockdowns and forced vaccinations (sic), ghosting, confiscation of PayPal accounts and money, to stealing billions from Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and now, even, this nuclear saber rattling by the USA and the Dirty Bomb Boy ZioLensky, and the almost complete empty-headed bending over for their masters in Europe.
Here, that Neocon-Neoliberal cloning:
The latest edition of the aforementioned articles was recently released and titled “Renewing America’s Advantages: Interim National Security Strategic Guidance.” Perhaps, the president, who will sign it, is a devout Catholic because the document starts with a confession, which in Judeo-Christian tradition is a necessary step to obtain forgiveness: The U.S. will no longer resort to military coups when it wants to replace a regime in a foreign country.
Biden – or the authors Blinken, his Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is Robert Kagan’s wife, and Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense, also an Obama alumnus but not a neocon because she is a true conservative from the Henry Kissinger contingent – promises to chart a new route for the U.S. in international politics in the first three pages of the document. But the document then continues describing how the new U.S. administration will follow the beaten path devised by the Bush-Obama-Trump teams.
“I confessed all the sins committed before on behalf of my country, my Lord,” it reads, like a psalm, leaving the U.S. free to commit the same sins for future presidents to repent for. The Biden administration admits that previous administrations failed to use democracy to impact the policies of foreign countries they opposed, falling back on military coups and interventions, often soliciting them.
The U.S. is known for its controversial stance on Latin American coups and we, in Turkey, understand the Latin American people. Biden personally begged the White House not to issue a statement of support for the civilian government on the fateful night of July 15, 2016, hoping that “our boys could still prevail.”
Let bootlickers like CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and the New York Times’ David Brooks cheer the “changes the Biden team started implementing already” as we witness the administration attempt to implement the same military policy in the Middle East.
The document says that “we do not believe that military force is the answer to the region’s challenges,” but Biden’s National Security Coordinator for the Middle East, Bret McGurk, had already begun fortifying the military garrisons he was building in Syria until he was stopped by Trump.
No wonder the 7,000-word new national security bible features the term “diplomacy” 10 times but the tally for “military” is double!
This man, both, in foreground and then Biden Always Seeking the Background, are 21st Century monsters:
Here is one reaction from American Jewry: “We are proud of the fact that this slate of nominees includes multiple Jewish Americans and others whose family history represents the rich tapestry of American society,” the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) said in a statement. “Their understanding of our past will help build a stronger future.”
That response reflects pride that Jews have risen high in the government ranks, and that the new appointees’ understanding of Jewish values will infuse policy.
Contrast that with a tweet from Makor Rishon editor-in-chief Hagai Segal: “There is no need to attribute too much importance to the appointment of Jews in Biden’s administration. There are also a lot of Jews in J Street,” Segal wrote, in reference to the left-wing lobby that has played a leading role in legitimizing and mainstreaming harsh criticism of Israeli policies by both elected and nonelected US officials.(source)
Again, the fog of Western Civilization and the degrading lack of diplomacy and the hard liners in USA running the world aground, and the militaristic attitude, and the racism against Russia/Russians, all of this is important, for sure, and who knows what demographic percentages really mean, what diversity loading can achieve, and what we as thinkers and radicals can do with Anti-Russia people in our midst, the Anti-Chinese attitudes in this society, the amazing Anti-African American racism, and, well, Anti-Semitism, too, which is not even close to being smart about and against Israel’s apartheid state, and their Zionism gone amok. Below, overtly skewed, but then, we do not have open discussions amongst radicals and socialists on what the Biden Cabinet is and what it means to USA and the world.
Very interesting, the power of that occupied land to set the torches ablaze in the world, but these folk never get the mic:
In keeping with Israel’s policy of maintaining WMD ambiguity, Israel “has never made a public policy statement on biological weapons (BW)” and is reluctant to participate in regional and international fora on WMD disarmament. Preferring to address disarmament and arms control in a regional context, Israel has not signed the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Conventions (BTWC), and believes that progress in advancing the treaty’s goals in the region would require significantly improved political stability, discourse, and confidence building in the region. However, Israel has taken steps to strengthen its export control regulations on dual-use biotechnologies and is also examining ways to improve security at sensitive Israeli laboratories. In terms of BW research, development, and deployment, Israel maintains reticence and ambiguity about its activities and capabilities. However, Israeli defensive BW research regularly appears in open publications. The U.S. government offers conflicting assessments of Israel’s BW activities. Given the overall scarcity and ambiguity of official assessments and policy statements, reconstructions of Israel’s BW history, status, and capabilities can provide only partial and interpretive depictions.
Cohen focuses on a two-decade period from about 1950 until 1970, during which David Ben-Gurion’s vision of making Israel a nuclear-weapon state was realized. He weaves together the story of the formative years of Israel’s nuclear program, from the founding of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission in 1952, to the alliance with France that gave Israel the sophisticated technology it needed, to the failure of American intelligence to identify the Dimona Project for what it was, to the negotiations between President Nixon and Prime Minister Meir that led to the current policy of secrecy. Cohen also analyzes the complex reasons Israel concealed its nuclear program—from concerns over Arab reaction and the negative effect of the debate at home to consideration of America’s commitment to nonproliferation. Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Arms Control by Avner Cohen. Israel and the Bomb, exactly!
Again, priorities, and amazing how rotting we Homo Sapiens have become, from our decent tribal roots, our hunter and gatherer roots, to this, really, trillions for Blackrock, for Oil, for War, and so much time and lifetime lives expended on the Takers in the Complex — military-medical-pharma-mining-chemical-media-entertainment-legal-ag-prison-surveillance-finance-banking COMPLEX. Crazy days, man, at this point of drinking our own sewer water: “America’s western water crisis is so bad that Colorado is going to start drinking recycled sewage: Colorado’s water quality agency unanimously approved regulating direct potable reuse. It’s pending a final vote in November.” (source)
[Eric Seufert, owner and manager of 105 West Brewing Co., poses for a photo at his brewery room Tuesday, October 18, 2022, in Castle Rock, Colo. He brewed a test batch of beer in 2017 with water from recycled sewage. AP Photo/Brittany Peterson]
Oh, that incredible lightness of being. Ismael, the book, the ape (gorilla):
Why “Mother” Culture?
Culture is a mother everywhere and at every time, because culture is inherently a nurturer—the nurturer of human societies and lifestyles. Among Leaver peoples, Mother Culture explains and preserves a lifestyle that is healthy and self-sustaining. Among Taker peoples she explains and preserves a lifestyle that has proven to be unhealthy and self-destructive.
If culture is a mother among the Alawa of Australia and the Bushmen of Africa and the Kayapo of Brazil, then why wouldn’t she be a mother among the Takers? (To confirm the notion that “culture is a mother everywhere,” check foreign language dictionaries for the word CULTURE. In languages that recognize “masculine” and “feminine” nouns—French, Italian, Latin, and so on—the noun CULTURE is invariably feminine.) [source]
Working tribally, as a community, small scale, cooperative, that is, being LEAVERS, versus totalitarian everything, the TAKERS. Below, November 1998 Daniel Quinn and biologist Alan D. Thornhill met in dialogue with a small group in Houston, Texas, to forge a new tool designed to unseat the unexamined conventional wisdom that typically shapes all discourse on the subject of population. This program, Food Production and Population Growth, is that tool.
What is that end game. Pretending we have hope doesn’t work. Derrick Jensen a long time ago: End Game. If we do not go through a voluntary transformation, what do we do? Imagine all the minerals, metals, plastics, time and energy put into those weapons, and then the dead, the dying, the witnesses bearing the pain. Can civilization be sustainable?
This toxic culture, and trauma, and Gabor Mate does it well explaining how this Taker Culture takes us all down, in his books, and here on The Real News Network, Chris Hedges:
No matter where you stand on Donbass, on Ukraine, on the Nazis, on Minsk II, it’s the trauma trauma trauma that will continue with each generation, young and old and unborn. Deadly.
The linear political spectrum is bankrupt! How does it explain why socialist China is making alliances with capitalist Russia and even with fundamentalist Saudi Arabia? Why is it that so-called socialist Social Democrats support imperialist United States rather than socialist China? Why is it that right-wing fundamentalist states like India and Brazil are supporting Russia and socialist China instead of being rabid anti-communists? The linear political spectrum is not just simplistic. It serves the interests of neoliberals and New Deal liberals as we shall see.
All over the world, centrist parties are losing elections. People are either not voting at all or they are voting for fascists. In some countries, people are voting for Social Democrats. The traditional choices between liberals and conservatives do not speak to world problems today. Additionally, just as centrist parties are collapsing (as depicted in the image above) so is the linear political spectrum model that serves as its visual description. The purpose of this article is to show how the linear political spectrum model fails to conform to actual world politics as they are practiced today. We need a whole new spectrum model to do justice to the political and economic realities of today.
Linear Version of the Political Spectrum
In his textbook on Political Ideologies Andrew Heywood presents a linear perspective that looks like this:
There are many problems with this model. Let’s start with the more quantitative ones and then we will move to qualitative problems. Then I will provide lots of examples of how the linear political spectrum fails when applied to real-world politics of today. Lastly, I will show how this linear political spectrum really serves two points on the political spectrum: neoliberal libertarians and new deal liberals.
Quantitation problems
For one thing, to the left of communism should be anarchism. Anarchism has been a serious ideological movement for at least 200 years, beginning with William Godwin, and millions of people have fought and died for it. Secondly, within communism there should be delineated the different kinds of Leninism, including Trotskyism, Stalinism and Maoism. Third, it is unfathomable to have only one kind of liberalism on this spectrum. There is FDR liberalism but there is also centrist liberalism. But more importantly there is libertarianism that has no representation at all on the spectrum. Yet libertarianism has been predominant for over 40 years as an economic doctrine over most of the world. As we shall see later, it benefits libertarians to present themselves as more or less the same as New Deal liberals. Lastly, conservatism should also be divided into old paleoconservatives and new right-wing conservatives.
Qualitative problems
In contemporary Mordor politics, even this five-fold division of the spectrum is too much. The political spectrum consists of only liberals (Democratic Party) and the conservatives (Republican Party). Both socialism and communism is conveniently ignored even though thousands of people in Yankeedom claim to be socialists. The last time I checked, the Democratic Socialists of America had 90,000 people. Fascism was mostly ignored until the presence of Trump supporters brought fascism out of the closet of political scientists.
But are liberals (Democrats) and conservatives (Republicans) truly opposite from each other? Political sociologist William Domhoff says that in practice there are differences between the two when it comes to culture and politics (gun control) religion, race and gender politics.
But where the two parties are the same is far more significant. These similarities have at least to do with:
Support of capitalism as an economic system domestically;
Agreeing never to discuss socioeconomic class in the way sociologists would;
Unwillingness to engage third parties in political debate;
Support of imperialism around the world;
Support of the installation of right-wing dictators;
Support of Israel elites despite 50 years of Zionist fundamentalism; and,
Opposition against socialism around the world whether it be Leninism or social democracy.
Furthermore, are the differences between political tendencies just matters of quantitative gradation (as in the linear model) or are there qualitative leaps which are not represented? Under the linear political spectrum, the difference between Social Democrats and New Deal liberals is presented as being quantitative or even identical when it is not. For example, Bernie Sanders whose policies are clearly New Deal liberal, could get away with saying he was a social democrat. A real social democrat historically is Eugene Debs. Debs clearly talked about class warfare and abolishing capitalism. This is not something New Deal liberals, including Bernie Sanders, ever talk about.
The part of the political spectrum that is socialist is a qualitatively different form of economic system.There is a qualitative leap. Social Democrats, the different kinds of Leninists and anarchists are bitterly divided among themselves over the place of state, market relations and the role of workers. Yet they agree that basic resources, tools and means of harnessing energy should be collectively owned and that capitalism cannot be reformed. All socialists believe that whether in the short-run or the long run, workers are capable of running society without bureaucrats, or managers.
Once the separation is made between those advocating socialism and those hoping to preserve capitalism, a chasm exists that is not represented on the political linear political spectrum.
What this means is that:
There are far more commonalties between liberals and conservatives than there are between liberals and socialists because capitalism divides them; and,
There are far more commonalities between liberals and fascists than between liberals and socialists because both liberals and fascists support capitalism.
The Linear Political Spectrum is too Simple for Today’s Complex Politics
China forming alliances with non-socialist countries
These days there are some very complex political configurations that defy the linear political spectrum. For example, China, which claims to be socialist, is forming alliances with countries that are clearly not socialist such as Russia, and a theocracy such as Saudi Arabia. According to the linear political spectrum model, China should only form alliances with other socialist countries like Venezuela and North Korea.
Social Democrats (socialists) forming alliances with imperialists
Secondly, the supposedly left-wing German Social Democrats and Greens and the Swedish Social Democrats have not lined up with China. If the linear political spectrum was accurate, Social Democrats would support Communist countries because they were fellow socialists. Instead, these Social Democrats have aligned themselves with right-wing Democrats of imperialist Yankeedom.
Right-wing governments support a socialist country
Thirdly, the countries that have supported Russia, and indirectly China, (moving towards a multipolar world against the imperialists) have been right-wing rulers such as Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil and to a lesser extent, Viktor Orban in Hungary. The linear political spectrum would predict that right-wing states with fundamentalist fascists in power would be rabid anti-communists, but they are not – at least internationally. My claim is that the linear way of framing political life cannot do justice to the complexity of current political life
The Linear Political Spectrum Serves as an Ideological Tool to Support Two Points on the Spectrum – Either Neoliberals or New Deal liberals
The Recent elections in France
As many of you know, there was a recent election in France that was very close between Macron, Le Pen and the left wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Macron got 27% of the vote. Le Pen got 23% and the Mélenchon got about 21 ½%. The left-wing candidate failed by one point short of qualifying for the second round. So the French had to decide between the neoliberal Macron and the more conservative (or supposed fascist) Le Pen. Suddenly the neoliberal Macron discovers the linear political spectrum and presents himself, not as the center right candidate that he is, but closer to the Enlightenment values of New Deal liberalism. This is a prime minister who has presided over cuts to the French welfare system, tried to raise the retirement age and brutalized the Yellow Vests protesters for two years. Now he sings liberty, equality, fraternity. “Behold” this choir boy of Brussels, says “we have to watch out for the fascists.” It is true that Le Pen’s father was a fascist, but that doesn’t make her one. Is Le Pen’s stance against immigrants and refugees? Yes. But how does that compare with Macron in practice. Has he treated immigrants and refuges well? Hardly! Further, a comrade of mine who has lived in France for many years said that Le Pen’s program was considerably to the left of Macron. In addition, Le Pen was more likely to be pro-Russian. Sadly, the French people were tricked by Macron’s claim to define what fascism is and re-elected him. This is one case of letting a neoliberal define for socialists what a fascist is.
The Democratic Party defining what is and isn’t fascism
The Democratic Party has nothing to do with New Deal liberalism
In the 2016 election, the Democratic Party had a candidate who claimed to be a socialist. Every real socialist knew that Bernie Sanders was not a socialist and at best was a New Deal liberal. Since Lyndon Johnson the Democratic Party has slid from moderate left to center-right neoliberals. In 1985 Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council moved consciously away from anything like the FDR program (see Century of the Self Part IV by Adam Curtis) and that includes the eight years of Chicago boy, Baraka Obama. In 2016, the party gave a resounding “no” to New Deal liberal Bernie Sanders as they have done for 50 years. However, the public was 50 years behind the times. When most people voted for a Democrat, they thought they were getting a New Deal liberal. For sixteen years (Clinton and Obama) the party kept disappointing them. The Democratic Party has used the public’s out of date picture of the linear political spectrum to shove austerity programs down the throats of people in the name of liberalism. The public still does not know the difference between a New Deal liberal and a neoliberal, but it knows that the Democratic Party gives them nothing and I predict they will vote them out next month and in 2024.
Not such strange bedfellows: neoliberalism is right next to fascism on the political spectrum
Many people do not understand how fascism occurs. It’s as if suddenly a charismatic leader arises politically without rhyme or reason and this provokes a mass hysteria with people temporarily losing their minds and swooning over the dictator. The truth of the matter is that fascism is a product of a crisis of capitalism. There has been no fascism before the 20th century. Fascism began in the 1920s in response to a crisis in capitalism after World War I and throughout the twenties and into the 1930s. During such a crisis both liberal and conservative centrist parties lost credibility and withered, and the choices were either socialism or fascism. In fact, in the early thirties both the Democrats and Republicans wrote about how much they admired Hitler.
If the ruling party is a right-wing party, it is possible that a new deal liberal party might be a substitute for fascism, at least for a time. In Yankeedom, both Clinton and Obama provided nothing but wars and finance capital accumulation austerity for 16 years. Yet the public did not turn to fascism. But by 2016 the lower middle class and some working-class people had had enough and elected a fascist. Why? Because Trump promised to bring back American jobs and appealed to working class people who were pushed to the margins. Small businesses were even more difficult to start up and those that existed were struggling against the large corporations. Trump’s appeal was to economic issues. Meanwhile Democratic neoliberal Hillary Clinton haughtily called these lower middle class and working-class people “deplorables”. The party embraced identity politics and lost.
But fascism would not have won if the Democratic Party did not propose a New Deal liberal like Bernie Sanders. I’m convinced that had the Democratic Party gave Sanders their candidacy, he could have easily beaten Trump. What am I saying? The Democratic Party co-creates fascism by not running New Deal liberal candidates. My prediction is that with Uncle Mortimer as president almost two years in, by 2024 if Mordor is still standing, we will have a fascist president, whether it is Trump or someone else and the Democratic Party will be to blame. This is an example of a neoliberal party (Democrats) taking advantage of the public’s association of liberals with FDR to use that association to get themselves elected by carrying out a right wing-libertarian program.
Neoliberals support right-wing dictators and fascists internationally
Neoliberals in Mordor have supported right-wing dictators all over the world for 70 years. See William Blum’s book Killing Hope. In fact, the CIA is considered a liberal part of the Deep State. This doesn’t change whether Mordor’s regime is liberal or conservative. The most recent example is the Democratic administration’s support of Ukrainian fascists on and off for the past 70 years.
If the linear political spectrum were accurate neoliberalism would be right next to fascism on the political spectrum. So, I am saying that the linear political spectrum supports the ideology of Neoliberalism by:
Denying its existence in the political spectrum by not including it as a category;
Implementing right-wing neoliberal policies while pretending its legacy is New Deal liberalism.
Centrism is Bankrupt in Extreme Capitalist Crises
The linear political spectrum also makes it appear that the middle of the political spectrum is politically superior because it is not extremist. It is moderate, not hysterical like the fascism or communism. What this ignores is that when there are extreme economic, political or ecological conditions, the centrist political solutions don’t work. The center doesn’t hold, it caves in. In certain periods of history to be a moderate is unrealistic. Gradualist trial and error won’t cut the mustard because a storm is brewing. In the conditions of our time, extremes are the only answer because capitalism has brought us to this point and neither liberal nor conservative solutions have worked. The linear political spectrum arose during naïve political times when economics was thought to be separate from politics and political scientists papered over these extreme conditions which they couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. We need a new non-linear political spectrum which:
Is inclusive of many more political ideologies than the five at the front of this article;
Is economic as well as political;
Accounts for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
Decenters the spectrum so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable. This means that all political tendencies would have be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now, liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices.
Flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia, or between India (fundamentalist) and China. The spectrum should not be limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.
Much like individual change, societal developments happen gradually, often painfully; even when sudden shifts take place, seemingly ‘out of the blue’, they are the result of an accumulation of incremental steps – the last straw on the camel’s back as it were. Small developments may slip by unnoticed, major events scream out and demand our attention. Take man-made global warming – going on for 70 years or so, ignored for most of that time, until one July, when, in 40°C heat people collapse, crops are wiped out, water is rationed and drought blights the land.
Whilst it’s true that change is, paradoxically, constant, dramatic shifts, life-changing developments, by their very nature, occur only rarely, at key moments. Globally, we are living through such a time of major change; a transitional time akin to that step from one age group to another, adolescence into early adulthood, for example. A moment when everything is, potentially, set to shift and evolve, when old habits and ways of living, recognized as inadequate, either fall away naturally or are rejected.
Signs that we are living through such a time have been evident for a while – decades, longer probably, and have year on year become more and more widespread and diverse. The momentum for change, and with it resistance (which is intense) from those wedded to the status quo, appears to be reaching a point of crisis. Battle lines are exposed, delineating the choices before humanity, alternative values and modes of living that are becoming more defined, and more opposed all the time.
The political-economic arena has been the primary field of conflict and resistance, and also opportunity. This all-pervasive space encompasses most, if not all, areas of contemporary life, including education and health care, the environment, international relations, immigration, defense, etc; it shapes values and determines the direction of collective travel. Differing viewpoints have become increasingly polarized, opinions hardened. And, growing out of the vacuum created by government’s inability to meet the challenges of the time, and the uncertainty caused by clinging to systems and modes of living that are day by day being drained of life, extremism has exploded; populism, on the left and most fiercely, on the right of politics. Intolerance, prejudice and hate have accompanied this political polarization, dividing societies around the world.
Cynical politicians hungry for power have fueled and exploited these splits, inflamed divisions with the politics of tribal nationalism and intolerance. Truth has been perverted, facts questioned or disregarded; democracy, limited to begin with, has been undermined and autocratic leaders/demagogues have surfaced, or intensified their stifling grip on power.
When and how?
As points of crisis draw near in diverse, yet interconnected areas – climate/ecosystems, economic uncertainty and mass migration/displacement of persons, energy supplies and war, food security and global health threats, demands for solutions intensify.
Current socio-economic-political methodologies hold no answers, and are increasingly seen to be inadequate. Rooted in the Ideologies of Division Exploitation and Greed (Imperialism and Neo-liberalism), they are an integral part of the problem and cannot therefore respond adequately to the current challenges, which are immense. Creative solutions consistent with the emerging times are called for; compassionate alternatives rooted in social justice and freedom.
Systemic change in the economic sphere is desperately needed. Neo-Liberalism, which dominates the global economy, is a poisonous unjust ideology that relies on unlimited, irresponsible consumption and promotes greed, exploitation and inequality. Once change in this area takes place, and a more humane unifying and just model is introduced, then development in a range of other related areas becomes possible – health care and education, the eradication of food insecurity and large scale action on the environment.
It is values that need to change first though, and among many people they are changing; systems, policies and structures will naturally follow. Central to shifting values is the idea of unity, a recognition that humanity is one, varied, diverse but whole. This is not some incense-coated pseudo-religious fluff, but a fact (spelled out many times by visionary figures throughout the ages) in nature that is sensed by people everywhere; a fact that the existing socio-economic ideology, with its emphasis on competition and selfishness, actively works against.
Unity is a primary quality of the time, as is cooperation and tolerance. From these primary Principles of Goodness a series of positive consequences, or secondary colors flows: social and environmental responsibility, the eradication of prejudice; sharing as an economic social principle; social justice and equality, brotherhood — talked about for at least two thousand years, known in the heart but expressed fleetingly — and understanding of self and others. Unity shatters tribalism and strengthens collaboration; working together encourages relationship and erodes fear of ‘the other’, which in turn dissolves tensions and creates a space in which conflict is less likely. These are the values and ideals of the time, not radical, not new, perennial values that have been long buried and are now re-surfacing, influencing thinking in all areas of society. Coloring social and environmental initiatives, empowering popular action and driving change.
Momentum is building and, despite entrenched resistance from fearful forces determined to maintain control and ensure the perpetuation of systems and attitudes that breed division and suffering, the question is no longer will there be fundamental change and the inauguration of new modes of living, but when and how.
The ‘when’ is not a fixed moment in time but a dynamic flow expanding throughout the now; the ‘how’ is a creative explosion of collective action, examples of which are all around us, in every country of the world.
Wherever voices are raised in praise of social justice there is the how and the now; when people, young and old, stand together, despite the risks, demanding freedom from suppression, that is the how and the now; it’s individuals forming groups, acting in unison, crying out for substantive environmental action; it’s the rise of Trades Unions; it’s thousands of community initiatives, large and small, throughout the world; it’s Citizens Assemblies and the fall of demagogues – some, not all; it’s the growing influence of so-called Green Politics and demands for equality in all areas.
These are the signs of the times; diverse worldwide manifestations of ‘the how’, occurring within ‘the now’. Daily they multiply and strengthen, and the forces of resistance falter; they are the seeds of evolving socio-economic-political forms; they are the promise of things to come, the forerunners of The New time, which, no matter how the forces of resistance kick and scream, cannot, and will not, be held at bay.
The onslaught of five decades of relentless neoliberal reforms directed at public universities has aligned those institutions with the profiteering agendas of global capital while simultaneously shrinking dramatically the space for academics to fulfill their public roles as intellectuals. Paradoxically, as the global zeitgeist of neoliberal knowledge production has orchestrated the transformation of universities as propagandists for the free market, rife with entrepreneurship hubs and incubators for settler colonial/neo-capitalist experiments, the global right has organized systematic campaigns targeting academics engaged in public conversations on the raced, classed and gendered roots of neocolonial/capitalist knowledge.
The rise of the far right, mainstreamed through the hegemony of populist authoritarianisms globally, draws upon and in turn, unleashes, coordinated attacks on academics carrying out justice-based scholarship. Orchestrated digitally and mainstreamed through media platforms, these attacks are materialized through brick-and-mortar political-economic infrastructures that bring the disinformation/hate campaign to the university.
One tweet interrogating the hegemonic flows of colonial/capitalist power can turn you into the target of a digital disinformation campaign, as right-wing networks of anonymous internet users, funded by powerful political and economic groups, attack your life and livelihood. A white paper or policy brief in the public domain can turn your life upside down, making you the target of viral disinformation campaigns coordinated by far right hate groups, political parties and commercial funders overnight. You wake up to fake websites attacking you, digital attacks releasing your private information, and your mailbox full of threats of physical and sexual violence, including death threats. These digital infrastructures of disinformation and hate targeting academics are often run anonymously and are globally networked.
Within this climate of growing disinformation campaigns targeting academics, the power and control over the university held by risk managers and media professionals has turned public scholarship into the site of surveillance and management, replete with authoritarian techniques of control and erasure. Risk and reputation form the two key ingredients that fuel the corporate university, continually calibrating its managerial strategies while responding to the populist climate that is built on the premise of undermining knowledge.
An academic under attack from the far right can quickly find themselves alone, needing to respond to multiple requests for information from university technocrats, and struggling to just keep up with the disinformation. In many instances, the support from the university turns into facile prescriptions of self-help. In other instances, the university washes its hands of its duty to care for the academic under attack. In yet other instances, the university gives in to the demands of the far right, launching investigations, issuing disciplinary actions and even firing the academic being targeted.
How then can spaces for justice-based scholarship be secured, sustained and propagated across the neoliberal corporate university? How can universities be transformed into fulfilling their public roles as spaces for raising critical and inconvenient questions that interrogate power?
To articulate claims for justice and to raise questions that challenge the status quo, academics must turn within to find courage. However, this courage is rooted in the wider collective, necessitating that academics go public in securing support for justice-based public scholarship.
Friendships Beyond the Walls
Seeing academic work as collective work is at the heart of building and sustaining spaces for carrying out justice-based scholarship within the context of ongoing neoliberal transformations of university life. Building infrastructures of care that offer embodied support and nourishment as collective resources is vital to securing the lives and livelihoods of academics that become the targets of attacks by the far right. This infrastructure offers joy, kindness and security that are vital to offering comfort amid the targeted attacks by the various streams of the far right, nourishing us with strength and courage.
The enclosure of neoliberal universities by the individualizing logics of competition has disconnected academic life from public spaces of resistance. Corporate universities have increasingly become walled off, rife with ever-expanding building projects that separate them from the wider communities in which they are located. The managerial turn works precisely to detach the academic from the community.
To safeguard justice-based public scholarship therefore is to reject these enclosures, turning to friendships beyond the parochial confines of the university.
Solidarity emerges from the many friendships with activists who embody courage in their everyday practices of questioning structures, offering insights into strategies for sustenance, and offering guidance on ways to raise uncomfortable questions in spite of the threats mobilized by powerful forces. The everyday struggles of survival that activists negotiate offer immensely valuable pedagogies for survival within the toxic climates of corporate universities that have been re-organized to serve the power of the free market. Moreover, these activist networks come together amidst crises to plan strategies of resistance that challenge the campaigns mobilized by the far right, building frameworks for sustaining the strategies of resistance.
In my own public scholarship, I have drawn on friendships with activists in learning strategies of resistance and sustenance. From late-night conversations to strategic planning over weekends, infrastructures of activist organizing are vital in offering ongoing resources for challenging the forces that seek to silence us. When I have been targeted with a wide array of threats, including organized campaigns by powerful political and economic forces, my capacity to speak has been sustained by strategies of resisting repression such as petitions organized by academics and activist networks, letter writing campaigns, researching the attack strategies and writing about them in white papers and policy briefs, tracking the disinformation and reporting it, raising complaints about the harassing organizations and media, and engaging in media advocacy. When I have been targeted by disinformation campaigns, working alongside activists has been vital to building strategies for resistance, rendering these strategies public, sharing the strategies with academic and activist collectives, resisting the disinformation and hate on the platforms both individually and as collectives, and holding universities to account.
Community Struggles
Justice-based scholarship is sustained in the dignity, struggles and organizing of communities at the global margins.
That we must look beyond the university and into the generative capacities of community life in order to return our universities to our public roles is one of the most salient learnings for justice-based scholarship. Turning to the theories of decolonization — such as Kaupapa Māori theory, for instance — teaches us the power of theory emergent from within struggles and collective organizing. The rhythms of community life offer anchors for organizing knowledge, situated amid practices of occupying land, growing food and sharing resources. Justice emerges from the struggles of those who have been marginalized, laying claims to knowledge amid the violence of erasures.
Repression of voices at the margins is one of the most insidious strategies for sustaining and perpetuating inequalities. For those at the margins who have been systematically denied access to resources and erased from spaces of participation, turning to courage is an everyday act that challenges the silencing strategies catalyzed by those with economic and political power. Voicing out how the repression works and identifying the sources of the repression dismantles the silences that are circulated by colonial/capitalist power.
From Indigenous struggles against ongoing expansion of neoliberal extractivism, to feminist struggles among landless women farmers against the neoliberal attacks on food systems, to the various intersecting anti-racist struggles, to the struggles against exploitation among low-wage migrant workers, those who are speaking from the margins are manifesting enormous courage. It is this collective courage held in communities at the margins that forms the bedrock of justice-based scholarship. It works as a reminder that for structural transformations to take place, radical imaginations must be voiced.
Academics with the freedom, privilege and resources to raise these questions must intervene into the structures of power and control that constitute the corporate university. Critical interventions into the public sphere are fundamentally necessary when we place ourselves in academia as seeking to address social justice in our scholarship.
Struggles to Transform Our Universities
Most importantly, unless the neoliberal university is transformed, there is little hope for securing the spaces for carrying out justice-based scholarship.
Our everyday organizing therefore should turn to methods of collectivization that challenge the individualizing logic of the market-driven university.
The attack on academic freedom internally by professional-managerial technocrats who have no understanding of the academic mission of the university must be challenged and dismantled through collectivization.
The anti-intellectualism of shallow cost-effectiveness calculations must be thoroughly challenged. When technocrats seek to impose constraints on academic freedom and limit it, processes should be built for holding them to account, including measuring their performances on their understanding of (and advocacy for) academic freedom, and demanding their roles be circumscribed. Technocrats must be held accountable to elected academic bodies such as senates and academic boards, having to create annual academic freedom reports and be measured on the basis of these reports.
We should be asking questions that interrogate the staffing of managerial positions in areas such as risk management, audit, governance, media, reputation management and data management. We should interrogate the ways in which data are gathered and decisions are made. The power held by technocrats must be the site of our agitations within universities, with our unions organized to question technocracy in decision-making processes that directly impede academic freedom. In a neoliberal climate where senseless managerialism has shaped the broader approach to risk management in universities, sustaining justice-based scholarship calls for disrupting the power of technocracy through collectivization.
Academics doing justice-based scholarship should join unions in spaces where unions exist, and should organize to build unions in spaces where they don’t exist. Moreover, unions should be continually educated and engaged in the conversations on academic freedom.
Dismantling the technocracy that inundates the neoliberal university forms the basis of reorganizing university leadership in the affective registers of care. I have personally witnessed the ways in which the wider affective network of support offered by academic leaders at my university has sustained my public interventions. When academic leaders embody care, they create the infrastructures for raising claims to justice. This translates into steadfast assurances of support and sustenance even as the university negotiates threats that are directed at it because of the public scholarship of academics.
In sum, collectives and communities are the essential ingredients of scholarship seeking to make an impact on the unequal terrains of power and control that constitute injustices globally, nationally and locally. This recognition is vital in de-centering the individualized model of scholarship that prevails in the academe, and in turning toward the role of academia in working alongside struggles in seeking justice, working collectively and collaboratively to transform neocolonial neoliberal structures.
If we hope to build an America that works in the interests of the working class, then we must transcend the partisan culture war and come together around working class issues.
After 12 bleak years of various Conservative governments, led by inadequate Prime Ministers, the UK is on its knees. Democracy is under attack like never before; the disaster of Brexit, which has resulted in a catalogue of negatives including social polarization, isolationism and rabid tribalism.
Years of grinding austerity, underinvestment in public services, frozen wages and staggering levels of incompetence have culminated in the unmitigated mess we see before us: A country in terminal decline, poverty growing, inequality entrenched, and to cap it all The Wicked Witch of the raving Right, Liz Truss, has now been elected leader of the Conservatives, and, as they are in office, the new Prime Minister. A totally undemocratic electoral process, but hey, ‘that’s the way it’s always been’.
She was voted in, in a country of around 69 million people, by 81,326 (57.4% of the total gaggle) Conservative members. A tiny group, overwhelmingly old, posh, white, male, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, anti-environment – pro-fossil fuels, backward-looking nationalists. A crazy bunch operating within a dysfunctional system that, like much of the UK parliamentary structure and the primordial electoral model, desperately needs reforming.
The revolting campaign rhetoric spouted by Truss, was we hoped, just that, ranting rhetoric aimed solely at the conservative golf club nobs. Alas, in her first pronouncements as PM, surrounded by baying Tory sycophants, it was clear that Truss lives not in the real world at all, but in a crumbling castle for one, built on a foundation of Neo-Liberal doctrine, situated further to the right than any UK Prime-Minister in recent years.
Despite decades of disappointment, whenever a new PM/government takes office, naivety gives rise to a prickle of optimism: surely now things will improve, surely social justice will be prioritized, peace and environmental action imperatives. Well, PM Truss swiftly crushed any such childish hopes with her first speech in parliament and her wooden responses during Prime Minister’s Questions. Arrogance masquerading as certainty imbued every cruel statement of policy intent, and, as opposition parties shook their heads in disbelief, people around the country, millions of whom are struggling to pay rising energy bills and increased food prices, were again crushed.
Truss, her cabinet, and thanks to a purge of moderate voices undertaken by Boris Johnson to quieten dissent, most, if not all of the parliamentary party, is now firmly wedded to an extreme version of Neo-Liberalism and the failed doctrine of Trickle Down economics. After forty years of most boats being sunk by the rising tide, the Ideology of Injustice has been shown to deepen inequality, intensify poverty and further concentrate wealth in the pockets of The Already Wealthy.
In addition to economic plans designed to benefit corporations and, by her own admission, intensify inequality (‘I’m not interested in re-distribution’ she told the BBC), she plans to increase military spending, allow global energy companies to restart gas extraction in the North Sea, end the moratorium on fracking and abolish green levies, which are used to fund energy efficiency and renewable electricity. She despises labor rights and the Trades Union movement, peaceful public protest and immigrants, all of which she is threatening to criminalize or clutter with so much bureaucracy as to make such human rights unenforceable.
Her policies, dogmatism and the doctrine that underpin them are, in many ways, terrifying. And with the suspension of parliament and consequently, any form of scrutiny, resulting from the death of The Queen, there is a danger, or for her, an opportunity, that she attempts to introduce legislation under cover of national mourning. If Truss and her gang get their way, the limited form of democracy that exists in the UK will become a distant memory, rather as ethics and honesty in public office, compassion and honoring international commitments have in recent years.
Rising misery
The list of national crises that the Truss government inherits, most if not all of which she had a grubby hand in causing, is long, and growing. As is public anger. It is a list resulting from ideological obsession, gross incompetence and absenteeism.
The National Health Service (NHS) is in crisis – years of underfunding, lack of training and Brexit, which saw thousands of NHS workers from Europe leave the UK, have led to around 135,000 vacancies, including 40,000 nurses and over 8,000 doctors in England alone. The service has the longest waiting lists for routine treatments on record; if you dial 999 for an ambulance, it could be hours, or in extreme cases, days before it arrives. Social care is dysfunctional; there is a housing crisis, property prices are sky high, rents are unaffordable, tenancies offer no security, homelessness is increasing – according to Government figures, “between January to March 2022, 74,230 households were assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness,”up 5.4% in the same period in 2021, a further 38,000 were regarded as at “risk of homelessness”.
Inflation is at 10.1% and rising, recession predicted, poverty booming. Thousands of people/families (many of whom are in full-time employment) rely on food banks for basic supplies – over two million people visited a food bank last year, and this doesn’t include independent providers – local charities, churches etc. Ten years ago food banks barely existed in the UK, now there are estimated to be 2,572, and constitute a growth area.
The privatization of utility companies including water in 1989 under Thatcher, has led to energy and water companies making huge profits for shareholders (£72bn in dividends), but neglecting consumers and failing to invest. Since water was privatized no new reservoirs have been commissioned (in 33 years), and, The Guardianreports,“2.4bn liters [of water] a day on current estimates have been allowed to leak away.” Airports including Heathrow, have had to limit the number of flights due to lack of staff; the airport authorities and airlines use the ‘It’s not us, it’s Covid’ excuse, so loved by companies and government agencies who laid off too many employees during the pandemic and either haven’t re-hired enough, or employees refused to return unless wages and conditions improved.
The judiciary is in crisis, as is the prison system and the police, particularly in London; childcare and nursery education is shambolic, unaffordable for most, hard to find, limited places, particularly for those on average incomes; again due in part to lack of properly trained staff. It is, it seems, an endless list, shameful and intensely depressing, There may, however, be a glimmer of light within the storm; a positive effect of this cacophony of chaos is a growing movement of resistance to economic injustice, and Trades Union industrial action.
Enough is Enough
Wages for most people in the UK have been effectively frozen for years; and now, with rising inflation income is reducing in value, economic hardship intensifying, fury rising. Unions, which have been greatly weakened in the last thirty years through restrictive legislation, have rediscovered their courage and purpose, and in response to members’ demands have organised strikes in a number of areas. Most notably, railway and Transport for London workers have withdrawn their labor on a number of occasions in disputes over pay and conditions; refuse workers in Scotland have been on strike over pay; postal workers have also been striking; junior barristers are on indefinite strike over pay; workers at the UK’s largest container port, Felixstowe, recently withdrew their labour for eight days in another dispute about pay. Nurses and doctors working in the NHS are threatening industrial action, as are teachers.
The leader of the RMT union, Mick Lynch, who has emerged as a leading voice for the people, has suggested that, “unions are on the brink of calling for ‘synchronized’ strikes over widespread anger at how much soaring inflation is outpacing wages.” If such a positive step were taken, it would be a powerful act of resistance against years of exploitation and injustice, and may further empower working people, who for years have been silenced.
In parallel with the workers revolt is a social movement of defiance. Initially triggered by high energy bills, rising costs and low wages, the scope of disquiet is expanding to include outrage at huge profits for energy companies and other corporations, increasing payments to shareholders whilst the majority struggle to feed themselves and their families; i.e., it’s about social injustice, exploitation and greed. Two movements of resistance and change have emerged from the widespread disquiet – ‘Don’t Pay’, which aims to empower people to not pay increased energy bills, and ‘Enough is Enough’, which is a broader social movement founded by union leaders and MPs.
The appearance of these groups is deeply encouraging and could prove to be a pivotal moment. Many people, the majority perhaps, are worn down, ashamed of where the country finds itself, and have had enough. Enough of being ignored and manipulated; of being told to ‘tighten their belts’ and ‘carry on’, whilst corporations, public/private companies including energy firms, pay out huge dividends and government ministers, spineless, unprincipled puppets, who live in the silk-lined pockets of big business, including most notably the media barons, lie and lie and lie again.
In the face of increasing levels of social injustice, government duplicity and economic hardship, eventually the people must unite and revolt. If, after the endless pantomime of the Queen’s funeral, people do come together, refuse to pay rising energy costs; refuse to work, refuse to be exploited and marginalized; refuse to stand by while the natural world is vandalised; if the unions do take coordinated action, and many of us would support such a progressive act, there is a chance, slim, but real, that years of frustration and anger, can be turned into empowerment and hope.
Amazing, really, all the money, all the human lifetimes wasted on the Morty ZioLensky’s most corrupt regime, all the oligarchs making money there, and, of course, the endless gravy train for the most despicable of souls, those offensive murdering weapons manufacturers and the tens of thousands of other companies with big and little inside tracks to the culling and killing machine that is the USA.
Authorities have traced the cause of a sewage spill that closed RAT Beach in Torrance Wednesday to a residential street in the Palos Verdes Estates, health officials announced. (source)
Of course, it gets bigger, here in LaLa Land, where Morty ZioLensky rings the bell for the New York Criminal Stock Mafia Exchange. Much bigger, and alas, this is coming to a township or city near you. Forget about decades of environmental warriors talking about non-point pollution in our thousands of rivers and waterways.
About 17 million gallons of sewage were dumped into Santa Monica Bay following the failure at the Playa del Rey plant. The resulting odors were later blamed by residents who said they developed rashes, nausea, burning eyes and other symptoms in the aftermath.
The L.A. city attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment. (source)
Wonderful beachfront view (above) of the shit about to hit the fan. The hydrogen sulfide is just one issue from the fumes. Raw sewage is the thing of great potentials — heavy metals and SSRIs in the ecosystem, washed up viruses, e coli, and thousands of ever-expanding brain and flesh eating microbes.
Yet, the news is about Ukraine and EuroTrashLandia and the U$A and Klanada — how it is all Ukraine, cold winters, energy bills 8 times last year’s, food shortages, and, well, no more protests, or else. Full-fledged support of war, proxies, economic bombardment, and fake inflation. Here, Richard Wolff does the 101 Econ explanation of what inflation really is: the owners of the businesses and factories deciding it’s time to raise prices to, well, off-set the half-greed to proportionately throw down the full-throttle greed that is capitalism.
It’s only an hour long, and it is definitely basics of capitalism, and, yes, it is NOT the Putin Inflation . . . never was, never will be:
More cognitive dissonance in Chile, where they can’t pass an amazing constitution, but they can start squirting more untested crap into pregnant women, et al:
On Friday, Chile’s Ministry of Health (Minsal) announced that the country would start the vaccination of priority groups amid limitations of monkeypox vaccines in the international context.
RELATED: US: Concerns Are Mounting Due to Escalating Monkeypox Outbreak
Through his official Twitter account, Undersecretary for Public Health Cristóbal Cuadrado said, “We expect to begin the first stage of the inoculation process during October.”
The vaccine to be used for the immunization process in the country will be the Jynneos vaccine from the Bavarian Nordic laboratory. It was obtained through the Pan American Health Organization’s Revolving Fund.
The first stage will include those “close contacts of confirmed cases of monkeypox who are at risk of severe disease, i.e., immunosuppressed people, HIV patients, and pregnant women,” Cuadrado said. (source)
Here, not my favorite source, but two Chileans discussing it, the lost chance for this amazing constitution to get passed by the people:
Ariel Dorfman: This was an extraordinary Magna Carta, both because of its origins, in a popular protest, because it was drafted by people who looked like Chile itself, not sort of elite experts who behind closed walls were constantly deciding what others would be ruled by. And it was, as you mentioned, you know, incredibly ecological, the most advanced in the world. It extended democracy in participatory forms in all levels. It legalized — not only legalized abortion but — you know, when I read the constitution, and I’ve read it several times, the one that has just been rejected, what calls attention to myself is the extraordinary tenderness with which it’s been composed and written. It speaks about the glaciers. It speaks about the air. It speaks about the children, over and over again the children. It speaks about the caretakers at home. It speaks about the animals. It speaks about the dogs. It speaks about everything vulnerable that needs to be taken care of. And, of course, it includes there, for the first time, those who have been invisible and exspoliated constantly by the major powers in Chile: the Indigenous populations. It is also an extraordinarily feminist constitution. And I just could go on and on and on. It had 388 articles, perhaps too many.
Well, well, so the beat goes on, in the endless prattling of media, 24/7, beamed up directly into our brains. Here, another story, tied to my local view, at the OSU Hatfield Marine Sciences Center: “HMSC Science on Tap: Ocean Iron Fertilization: Knowns and unknowns.”
Several decades ago, oceanographers first recognized that the addition of iron to surface waters stimulates algal growth in over a third of the ocean. This realization sparked international efforts to understand the role that iron plays in regulating ocean ecosystems and global carbon cycling. How do feedbacks between climate, iron-rich dust deposition, and ocean productivity work? Can humans leverage iron fertilization to offset greenhouse gas emissions or boost fisheries? (source)
In the “old days,” well, there was a precautionary principle at the top of the agenda; there was a big skiepticism in the sciences and in anything around geo-engineering and climate and oceans. There were even activists against Genetically Engineered mosquitoes in the tens of millions being released into our ecosystems. There used to be folks concerned about nanoparticles in our foods, and there used to be concern about neurotoxins in pesticides and hormone distrupters in baby’s milk bottle.
David Emerson, a geomicrobiologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, told Mongabay in an email that when it comes to iron fertilization there are still “critical questions worthy of research,” such as whether alternative forms of iron would interact differently with phytoplankton and ocean currents. However, he also emphasized the “unknown cost” of ecosystem impacts from large-scale fertilization.
“We shouldn’t do it, unless there are concomitant major reductions in emissions,” he said. “We shouldn’t do it until we know significantly more about how effective it will be. We should only do it if the alternative is major ecosystem/human civilization collapse.” (source)
[Satellite image shows a phytoplankton bloom off Newfoundland, Canada, on September 19, 2019. The bloom occurred unusually late for the region, possibly because of higher temperatures and more sunlight than is typical for that time of year. Image courtesy of NASA.]
But there are still warriors going up against Monsanto, Bill Gates, the 10 controlling corporations of food systems, seeds and GMOs.
As effective action on the climate crisis could threaten corporate profits, Big Food and agribusiness conglomerates are counting on greenwashing to save them: the marketing strategy where they use misleading information to make it appear as if they and the products they sell are providing solutions to climate change. This confusing and unrealistic set of greenwashing tactics has even made its way inside international fora, especially at UN climate summits.
Building on the claims made by organisations and social movements around the world, GRAIN has prepared a short glossary to demystify these corporate proposals and expose them as false solutions. In a concise way, we aim to reveal who is behind these greenwashing concepts and why they actually deepen the climate crisis and social inequality.
This glossary focuses on corporations’ 10 favourite terms, ranging from “climate smart agriculture”, to “nature-based solutions” and “bioeconomy”. We have accompanied some of those concepts by infographics to help illustrate with irony the main problems generated by this corporate greenwashing. (source)
Here are the offending terms, the propaganda, the amazing work of millions of human lifetimes to lie, deceive, steal, and cobble the world.
Infinitesimal, grand, pervasive, from cradle to grave, the bombardment of propaganda and forced and concerted unlearning-unknowing (agnotology), each nanosecond, the world wide web and the dirty perversions of MSM and Holly-Dirt, and those millions and millions of Eichammans working for governments, the average kid or adult, well, he or she just isn’t getting the big or small of it. Logic and ethics are thrown out the window. Precautionary thinking, actions, commitments, well, those things are outside the common person’s way of going about his or her daily living.
Again, up is down, fat is thin, small is big, lies are truth, money is for nothing. Imagine, Switzerland, now a land of young women with masks and pro-pro war signs . . . That is the new propaganda frame — getting young people so messed up on their own roots, screwing with their own cultural DNA, their own history, that they would fall for this insanity:
Ahh, diplomacy is dead, and while Switzerland is a weapons producer, and a haven for criminal activity (hidden treasuries of dictators, drug kingpins, government leaders of the “free-for-all” world, for banks, for, well, you know what Switzerland is), here, the take on how to bring Switzerland back to the table as a neutral actor in maybe helping end the proxy war in Ukraine:
It is imperative that president Cassis take note and change his direction. Here is my prescription for Swiss change:
1. Abandon the NATO-leaning partisanship immediately.
2. Withdraw support of war inspired sanctions. Cassis has chosen to support the EU issued sanctions, but not those of Russia. Neutrality demands honoring the sanctions of neither side.
3. Recoil from any Swiss role that might involve facilitating the provision of weapons for use in the war.
4. Recognize that the ultimate decision makers in the conflict are Russia and the United States. It is readily apparent that NATO, the EU, and Ukraine are largely marching to the beat of an American drummer. Switzerland should seek to open negotiations with the principals, Russia and the United States, preferably hosted on Swiss territory.
5. Host the renegotiation of the basic precepts of the Minsk Accords, but this time with Russia and the United States as principals. That would mean achieving a cease fire and finding a mutually acceptable way of somehow incorporating the Donbass republics into Ukraine.
6. Work toward addressing Russia’s publically proclaimed security concerns vis-à-vis Ukraine, including the exclusion from Ukrainian leadership individuals who identify themselves, either by words or actions, with neo-Nazi ideology.
7. Seek agreement from Russia for the conduct of a Swiss-monitored referendum to affirm the current status of Crimea. (source)
And, then, the queen is dead (not really):
Anyone in the UK who imagined they lived in a representative democracy – one in which leaders are elected and accountable to the people – will be in for a rude awakening over the next days and weeks.
TV schedules have been swept aside. Presenters must wear black and talk in hushed tones. Front pages are uniformly somber. Britain’s media speak with a single, respectful voice about the Queen and her unimpeachable legacy.
Westminster, meanwhile, has been stripped of left and right. The Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties have set aside politics to grieve as one. Even the Scottish nationalists – supposedly trying to rid themselves of the yoke of centuries of English rule presided over by the monarch – appear to be in effusive mourning.
The world’s urgent problems – from the war in Europe to a looming climate catastrophe – are no longer of interest or relevance. They can wait till Britons emerge from a more pressing national trauma. (Jonathan Cook)
And alas, the Democratic Party is sooo different than the Republican Party (har-har). Imagine this, a hit squad list coming out of Brussels run by Ukraine (probably not Ukraine per se, more like CIA and Mossad and MI6, etal):
The co-founder of “Pink Floyd” is known for his support of imprisoned Wikileaks’ creator Julian Assange, and for his opposition to imperialism and war, as well as for his awesome music, loved by millions around the world.
Waters recently referred to Joe Biden as a “war criminal” on CNN, and said that Biden is “fueling the fire in Ukraine.”
“This war,” the musician stated, “is basically about the action and reaction of NATO pushing right up to the Russian border, which they promised they wouldn’t do when [Mikhail] Gorbachev negotiated the withdrawal of the USSR from the whole of Eastern Europe.”
Waters also said that Crimea belongs to Russia, because the majority of people living on the peninsula are Russian.
The rock star’s views have outraged the pro-NATO crowd and their Nazi friends, as well as the social justice warriors who froth at the mouth in support of whatever the mainstream media declares to be “the current thing.” Waters, who has always been something of a dissident and anti-war, the way all rock stars used to be when rock and roll was still real, is attacked mercilessly by the “woke” crowd, who are intolerant of all who are not in lockstep with their views. (source)
All is fine on the Western Front, and that shit has already hit the proverbial fan. ‘When the shit hits the fan’ alludes to the messy and hectic consequences brought about by a previously secret situation becoming public.
The true origins of the expression “shit hits the fan” are largely undetermined, though some sources suggest that Canada is to blame—it might have come from particularly picturesque Canadian military language of the early twentieth century. Another suggestion is that the idiom is descended from “an old joke”:
A man in a crowded bar needed to defecate but couldn’t find a bathroom, so he went upstairs and used a hole in the floor. Returning, he found everyone had gone except the bartender, who was cowering behind the bar. When the man asked what had happened, the bartender replied, “Where were you when the shit hit the fan?” (source)
Great piece by Eva Bartlet, on the hit list Ukraine supports, and who funds this Mafiosa thing?
“Western Media Continues to Ignore Ukraine’s Public ‘Kill List’ Aimed at Those Who Question the Kiev Regime”!
Bartlet: “Christelle Néant, a French war correspondent reporting from Donbass for the past six and a half years, mentioned to me before the panel began that some of the information on the site is not disclosed to the general public, and is password-locked.”
Néant, who said she’s been receiving death threats for years, spoke of how it impacts her:“Every time I use my car, I check underneath it for any unpleasant surprise,” referring to a potential car bomb. “
I don’t publish any photos with people I live with or love. I have to be vigilant at all times.”
“I’m not a terrorist, not a criminal, I’m just a correspondent. This list must be closed and all of those involved must be held accountable.”
And so it goes, as the people in Jackson, Mississippi still can’t drink the water. The optics here of this white governor, man, the reason for this environmental racism, just can’t be the only bitter taste in my “shit hit the fan” infused mouth:
Ahh, money in shitty water. Privatize, man. Every single time there is a disaster of the making of anti-government, anti-social safety net monsters, they come up with Privatize:
Jackson’s persistent water problems make daily life hard for residents and business owners alike. That includes boil water notices that can last weeks or more. Before the most recent failure, John Tierre, who owns Johnny T’s Bistro & Blues in downtown Jackson, said his business was already losing thousands of dollars due to spending weeks under a boil water notice.
“First, you’re gonna have to start a couple hours early. That’s already labor in itself, whatever you’re paying per hour,” he told the Mississippi Free Press in late August. “You gotta get in and start boiling water for everything that you’re gonna be using in service. Not only do we have to boil water just to wash dishes, for the bar, for glasses, but there’s the $200 or $300 a day in ice purchases, canned sodas, bottled water, things of that nature.”
State officials are discussing a number of possible solutions for a permanent fix, including privatising Jackson’s water system. “Privatisation is on the table,” Governor Reeves said earlier this week. The city’s Democratic mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, has also discussed hiring private contractors to operate and maintain the water system. (source)
Yeah, baby, billions more for Ukraine to run their corrupt system, from USA taxpayers.
Zelensky?
In a significant assault on worker rights in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky last week signed into law legislation that deprives around 73 percent of workers of their right to union protection and collective bargaining.
“For more than 15 months, the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine, in solidarity with other trade unions, with support of the international community, actively opposed promotion of the anti-labor draft law,” the Federation (FPU) said in a statement.
The Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) stated, “KVPU will not tolerate a blatant violation of the rights of workers, their constitutional guarantees and international norms and standards. We will continue the fight for workers’ rights.” (source)
There will be photo shoots, and there will be cannon fodder, and there will be blood, and there will be Zelensky rents to be paid:
That’s $51,000 a month Morty ZioLensky gets for this villa he owns in Italy:
Here we go, quoted just below, from the WSWS, world socialist web site, and these references already got me labeled a commie under a Bush or Trump, and alas, today? All Democrats hate social safety programs, err, nets, err, socialism programs. Commie, go home to Russia, China, Venzuela: (Source)
Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat notes that even under the existing labor code, the conditions of workers in Ukraine were atrocious.
“Before the Russian invasion, millions of Ukrainian workers migrated to EU countries (and not only), knowing well that even the poorest of them—Bulgaria and Romania—offered significantly better earnings to an average worker than their homeland.
“Low wages are virtually strangling our economy,” she continued. “In addition, some 20-30 percent of Ukrainian workers are employed ‘unofficially.’
“Even working in a state-owned enterprise, in a critical economy sector, does not guarantee a stable salary, allowing for a decent living.”
Miners, for example, faced delays in payment of wages. “The miners were regularly organizing spontaneous protest actions, including the most desperate move—an underground protest. Another huge underground protest action took place in 2020 in Kryvy Rih, the center of iron mining of transnational importance. A group of workers of KZRK, a formerly state-owned plant consisting of four iron mines and more associated factories, spent more than a month inside mines, demanding a pay rise.”
She cited an expert on labor law who warned that big companies may “artificially split into smaller 250-people entities so that maximum flexibility can be used even by the biggest and strongest employers.”
The fact that the war in Ukraine is being used to impose a brutal increase in exploitation on the already impoverished working class in the country is a further indication of the reactionary character of the conflict. Workers in Ukraine, as well as their brother workers in Russia and the NATO countries, have nothing to gain from this war, which contains the seeds of a world conflagration. Workers in all lands must unite in opposition to the war in Ukraine, which was instigated by US imperialism and its allies as part their drive for world hegemony. (source)
Selfies for Morty (ZioLensky): (source: “Ukraine Counterattacks!”)
Citizens in Chile are voting on whether to approve a truly world-leading constitution on 4 September. Ahead of the big day, people and communities around the world expressed their support for the principles it would enshrine.
As the New York Times highlighted, the result is a sweeping constitution that promises changes in multiple areas, such as universal health care, and rights to clean air, water, and much more. Its approval would mean Chile has “more rights enshrined in its constitution than any other nation” on Earth.
On Sunday the Chilean people can vote for a new constitution, replacing the old anti-democratic one written by the dictator Pinochet with a new one guaranteeing rights to health, housing, education, and a habitable planet. I am proud to support this effort.
Progressive International pointed out in mid-August that the Chile constitution has attracted the support of over 200 political and trade union leaders from around the world:
More recently, western media outlets have highlighted that polls suggest voters may reject the constitution amid widespread misinformation. The Guardian has reported on numerous bogus claims that have circulated about what the constitution will bring, such as the confiscation of private property. Outlets have also pointed to disquiet among industries like mining that benefit from the neoliberal status quo.
Nonetheless, significant support has been evident in Chile at rallies ahead of the vote:
There’s a huge feminist rally in Santiago today in favour of Chile’s proposed new constitution a week before the plebiscite. The constitution enshrines gender equality and the right to a life free from gender violence (@isidoradonosok) #Caupolicanazopic.twitter.com/lw6MUaONZ2
The draft Chile constitution significantly empowers indigenous communities, including in relation to sovereignty over their lands.
Chile is on the verge of making history for Indigenous Rights. If the new constitution passes, over 2 million Indigenous Chileans “would be able to govern their own territories.” A huge act of reparations paid. #Apruebo4deSeptiembre#AprobarEsHumanohttps://t.co/oEoSWiCpEC
On 3 September, 17 indigenous groups from Turtle Island – otherwise known as North America – backed the constitution. Jade Begay, climate justice director at the indigenous-led organisation NDN Collective, said:
Chile’s newly proposed constitution sets a precedent for the U.S. and other governments to not only recognize it is beyond time to update our draconian constitutions, but also that integrating Indigenous rights into our core laws will move us towards truly achieving equity and justice.
As an article in the Conversation also noted, the constitution offers “astoundingly progressive” reforms in relation to protections for the natural world. It contains no less than 50 provisions related to the environment, including granting nature constitutional rights. Ecuador granted such constitutional rights to nature in 2008. Its experience shows that they can safeguard precious ecosystems against extractive practices like mining. The University of Melbourne academics who wrote the Conversation article asserted that:
Chile has crafted one of the most progressive and environmentally conscious legal texts on the planet.
Unsurprisingly then, the new Chilean constitution has attracted attention and support among environment-focused groups:
We stand with the people of #Chile, as they head to the polls to vote whether or not to approve a visionary new constitution. The proposed constitution is one of the most progressive in the world, an achievement of decades of social movement organizing. #ChileVotaApruebopic.twitter.com/Ygu0GRKH2W
In short, a lot is at stake for Chileans in the referendum vote, not least for the country’s president Gabriel Boric. Moreover, the groundbreaking protections the constitution lays out for people, other animals, and the planet overall provides a stunning example to citizens around the world of what a just future for all could look like.
Chris Butters warns: “A specter is haunting America, the specter of middle-class leftists turning to the right.” Writing on the official website of the Communist Party USA, he attacks certain social media personalities for not being sufficiently fearful of the “Trumpist Republican power grab” and by implication for their failure to embrace the succor of the Democratic Party.
My intention is not to defend the people that Butters regards as “disembodied spirits” or to criticize the CPUSA. Rather, Butters is used to illustrate a broader phenomenon in the left-of-center blogosphere. Specifically, his narrow focus on the binary choice (“lesser evilism”) of Republican versus Democrat obscures the larger functioning of the two-party system beyond the merits of the individual parties.
Further, while I agree that a reactionary nationalist tendency with fascistic undertones is haunting not only the “land of the free” but is also threatening contemporary Brazil, some former Soviet republics, India, South Africa, and elsewhere, I differ on both the causes and potential remedies.
The failure of neoliberalism
Butters is scandalized that a “fringe” of the Bernie Sanders movement failed to vote for Biden; some even choosing Trump. While Bernie’s “Our Revolution” ended up herding the hopeful into the Democratic Party by giving that party a false patina of progressivism, the initial movement led by Sanders was broader than just liberal Democrats.
The Sanders movement reflected a mass disenchantment with the neoliberal model. Indeed, Trump’s parallel insurgency cynically seized on that same failure of neoliberalism to meet people’s basic needs via a dishonest faux-populist campaign that portrayed Trump as some kind of man of the people. That failure of neoliberalism partly explains why “make America great again” resonated with some 70 million US voters.
While the super-rich take recreational flights into outer space, neoliberalism – the contemporary form of capitalism – is not meeting working people’s needs. And the two parties of capital collude to shovel tax-payers’ dollars into endless foreign wars…enough, it should be noted, to alleviate hunger and homelessness at home.
Granted, the Trump phenomena is symptomatic of a mounting right-wing faux populism, but it wouldn’t be popular without the disease of a declining standard of living for the working class.
“The struggle against racism, sexism, and gender equality” is equated by Butters with “the broader fight for democracy.” Omitted in his article are class-based economic issues.
While flailing at the symptoms, the Democrats feed the disease. They enthusiastically join their supposed sworn enemies on the other side of the aisle engorging the military and security apparatus of the state with more funds than the White House even requests. In practice, both parties agree that anything like Medicare for All is to be deferred.
It is indicative that, despite Butters’ criticism of the “middle-class leftists,” only twice does the term “working class” appear in his article. That is as often as the litany of “multiculturalism, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism” is cited.
Although I believe that these cultural, identity, and life-style issues are important, they cannot be substituted for providing an adequate material basis for daily life for the working class.
The Democrats’ abandonment of the material interests of their traditional constituency makes them complicitous in the rise of a popular rightist blowback. Resentment by the dispossessed of the use of identify politics as a cover for the neoliberal agenda fuels – but in no way justifies – a white supremist, anti-immigrant, and sexist reaction, delivering them into the open arms of Trump.
With little else to offer, Trump is the Democrat’s greatest asset
WikiLeaks revealed that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC were leading promoters of the dark-horse Trump candidacy in the crowded 17-contender Republican 2016 presidential primary race. The Democrats got what they wished for…and more, as it turned out.
The Democrats no longer pretend to have a social welfare agenda. Forget about Joe Biden being the new incarnation of FDR. The former party of the New Deal and now of neoliberalism only offers its faithful the cold comfort that Trump is not their standard bearer.
After the debacle of January 6, 2021, the disgraced 45th president of the US retreated to a golf course in Florida. He was vilified by the preponderance of corporate media – itself overwhelmingly neoliberal and imperialist – and abandoned by major figures in his own party.
Rather than allowing Trump to fade into the shadows, the Democrats have continued to fan the flames of fear of fascism for their partisan advantage with their liberal constituency. By the same token, though, their publicity helps to mobilize the very right populism that they oppose.
Hence, over a year and a half since the original incident on 1/6/21, the House select investigative committee continued to keep the media spotlight on the former chief executive. And with a professional TV producer for the primetime extravaganza.
Defending “our democracy”
What has happened since that infamous day? The angry Republican mob took some selfies in the Capitol and went home. They never returned.
Meanwhile the Democrats had hundreds of the perpetrators pursued, causing some to be imprisoned. Under Democratic leadership, the US Army – not the civilian police – occupied the streets of the national capital. And new legislation was passed extending police powers to limit protests.
In the name of preserving “our democracy” and fighting fascism, measures that are in fact fascistic were enacted. What ensued under Democratic aegis is not what democracy looks like.
Butters, in another article, calls for a “mass anti-fascist front” against the Republican Party’s assault on voting rights in New York State. He fails to mention the Democrat’s own record of restricting voter choice through their initiative to greatly increase the votes needed for third parties to stay on the ballot in that state. The measure, in effect, denies ballot status to the Green Party.
The main danger
The Democrats’ championing of de-platforming dissenting voices from social media is for Butters counterposed by the cancel culture of the right. Butters argues that the “main danger” is “the increasingly fascistic power grab by Trump and the Republican Party” in contrast to what he characterizes as the concern with the “deep state.”
Butters dismisses the love affair of Democrats with the FBI and CIA. However, the “deep state” is the coercive apparatus of fascism.
With its uncomely embrace of foreign policy neo-conservatives (e.g., Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines), the Democrats have eclipsed the Republicans as the leading party of war. Now even accused war criminal Henry Kissinger stands to the left of the Democrats.
While 57 Republicans demurred, the Democrats – including the Squad – unanimously voted to appropriate tens of billions of dollars for the Ukraine War. Such hyper-aggressive nationalist partisans make untrustworthy bulwarks against fascism.
Prospects for fascism
A right populist insurgency could provide the shock troops for a future fascism. But it would be the ruling class or major elements of it that would opt to no longer maintain their class rule by liberal bourgeois democratic means.
If ruling elements imposed fascist rule, they would have to forego the convenient façade of legitimacy afforded by the current electoral regime, one where corporations are considered persons and buying politicians is an exercise of free speech. As long as popular discontent can be contained within the Republican-Democrat duopoly, the ruling powers are mollified to have fascistic measures already on the books, such as the Patriot and Espionage acts, used sparingly.
For now, then, the cabal of the two parties of capital is content with their theatre of bitter contention on cultural issues and fundamental collusion on matters of state. All the while, the system is lurching in an ever more authoritarian direction. Regardless of which party prevails electorally, the same class is in power.
On 9 July 2022, remarkable images floated across social media from Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. Thousands of people rushed into the presidential palace and chased out former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, forcing him to flee to Singapore. In early May, Gotabaya’s brother Mahinda, also a former president, resigned from his post as prime minister and fled with his family to the Trincomalee naval base. The public’s raw anger toward the Rajapaksa family could no longer be contained, and the tentacles of Rajapaksas, which had ensnared the state for years, were withdrawn.
Now, almost a month later, residual feelings from the protests remain but have not made any significant impact. Sri Lanka’s new caretaker, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, extended the state of emergency and ordered security forces to dismantle the Galle Face Green Park protest site (known as Gotagogama). Wickremesinghe’s ascension to the presidency reveals a great deal about both the weakness of the protest movement in this nation of 22 million people and the strength of the Sri Lankan ruling class. In parliament, Wickremesinghe’s United National Party has only one seat – his own – which he lost in 2020. Yet, he has been the prime minister of six governments on and off from 1993 to the present day, never completing a full term in office but successfully holding the reins on behalf of the ruling class nonetheless. This time around, Wickremesinghe came to power through the Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (Sri Lanka People’s Front), which used its 114 parliamentarians (in a 225-person parliament) to back his installation in the country’s highest office. In other words, while the Rajapaksa family has formally resigned, their power – on behalf of the country’s owners – is intact.
Sujeewa Kumari (Sri Lanka), Landscape, 2018.
The people who gathered at Galle Face Green Park and other areas in Sri Lanka rioted because the economic situation on the island had become intolerable. The situation was so bad that, in March 2022, the government had to cancel school examinations owing to the lack of paper. Prices surged, with rice, a major staple, skyrocketing from 80 Sri Lankan rupees (LKR) to 500 LKR, a result of production difficulties due to electricity, fuel, and fertiliser shortages. Most of the country (except the free trade zones) experienced blackouts for at least half of each day.
Since Sri Lanka won its independence from Britain in 1948, its ruling class has faced crisis upon crisis defined by economic reliance on agricultural exports, mainly of rubber, tea, and, to a lesser extent, garments. These crises – particularly in 1953 and 1971 – led to the fall of governments. In 1977, elites liberalised the economy by curtailing price controls and food subsidies and letting in foreign banks and foreign direct investment to operate largely without regulations. They set up the Greater Colombo Economic Commission in 1978 to effectively take over the economic management of the country outside of democratic control. A consequence of these neoliberal arrangements was ballooning national debt, which has oscillated but never entered safe territory. A low growth rate alongside a habit of issuing international sovereign bonds to repay old loans has undermined any possibility of economic stabilisation. In December 2020, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Sri Lanka’s long-term sovereign credit rating from B-/B to CCC+/C, the lowest grade prior to D or ‘in default’ status.
Sri Lanka’s ruling class has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to reduce its dependency on foreign buyers of its low-value products as well as the foreign lenders that subsidise its debt. In addition, over the past few decades – at least since the ugly 1983 Colombo riot – Sri Lanka’s elite class has expanded military expenditure, using these forces to enact a terrible slaughter of the Tamil minority. The country’s 2022 budget allocates a substantial 12.3% to the military. If you look at the number of military personnel relative to the population, Sri Lanka (1.46%) follows Israel, the world’s highest (2%), and there is one soldier for every six civilians in the island’s northern and eastern provinces, where a sizeable Tamil community resides. This kind of spending, an enormous drag on public expenditure and social life, enables the militarisation of Sri Lankan society.
Authors of the sizeable national debt are many, but the bulk of responsibility must surely lie with the ruling class and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since 1965, Sri Lanka has sought assistance from the IMF sixteen times. During the depth of the current crisis, in March 2022, the IMF’s executive board proposed that Sri Lanka raise the income tax, sell off public enterprises, and cut energy subsidies. Three months later, after the resulting economic convulsions had created a serious political crisis, the IMF staff visit to Colombo concluded with calls for more ‘reforms’, mainly along the same grain of privatisation. US Ambassador Julie Chang met with both President Wickremesinghe and Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena to assist with ‘negotiations with the IMF’. There was not even a whiff of concern for the state of emergency and political crackdown.
These meetings show the extent to which Sri Lanka has been dragged into the US-imposed hybrid war against China, whose investments have been exaggerated to shift the blame for the country’s debt crisis away from Sri Lanka’s leaders and the IMF. Official data indicates that only 10% of Sri Lanka’s external debt is owed to Chinese entities, whereas 47% is held by Western banks and investment companies such as BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Prudential (United States), as well as Ashmore Group and HSBC (Britain) and UBS (Switzerland). Despite this, the IMF and USAID, using similar language, continually insist that renegotiating Sri Lanka’s debt with China is key. However, malicious allegations that China is carrying out ‘debt trap diplomacy’ do not stand up to scrutiny, as shown by an investigation published in The Atlantic.
Wickremasinghe sits in the President’s House with a failing agenda. He is a fervent believer in Washington’s project, eager to sign a Status of Forces Agreement with the US to build a military, and was ready for Sri Lanka to join Washington’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) with a $480 million grant. However, one reason that Wickremasinghe’s party was wiped out in the last election was the electorate’s deep resistance to both policies. They are designed to draw Sri Lanka into an anti-China alliance which would dry up necessary Chinese investment. Many Sri Lankans understand that they should not be drawn into the escalating conflict between the US and China, just as the old – but raw – vicious ethnic wounds in their country must be healed.
Jagath Weerasinghe (Sri Lanka), Untitled I, 2016.
A decade ago, my friend Malathi De Alwis (1963–2021), a professor at the University of Colombo, collected poetry written by Sri Lankan women. While reading the collection, I was struck by the words of Seetha Ranjani in 1987. In memory of Malathi, and in joining Ranjani’s hopes, here is an excerpt of the poem ‘The Dream of Peace’:
Perhaps our fields ravaged by fire are still valuable
Perhaps our houses now in ruins can be rebuilt
As good as new or better
Perhaps peace too can be imported – as a package deal
But can anything erase the pain wrought by war?
Look amidst the ruins: brick by brick
Human hands toiled to build that home
Sift the rubble with your curious eyes
Our children’s future went up in flames there
Can one place a value on labour lost?
Can one breathe life into lives destroyed?
Can mangled limbs be rebuilt?
Can born and unborn children’s minds be reshaped?
We died –
and dying,
We were born again
We cried
and crying,
We learned to smile again
And now –
We no longer seek the company of friends
who weep when we do.
Instead, we seek a world
in which we may find laughter together.
Tens of thousands of workers, teachers, students, doctors, and members of social movements and Indigenous organisations have been mobilising across Panama since July 1, protesting the high cost of living and lack of support from President Laurentino Cortizo’s neoliberal government, reports People’s Dispatch.
On the eve of the Ukraine Recovery Conference, in Lugano, Switzerland, Ukrainian democratic socialist Vitaliy Dudin outlined an alternative vision for reconstruction to deregulation and liberalisation.
The specter haunting the United States consists not only of an impending fascism, but also of the inability of conscience, morality and justice to catch up with reality. The United States has increasingly come closer to tipping into the abyss of a new fascist politics. The latest indications of this include how the GOP is seeking to deputize vigilantes to prevent abortion seekers from even leaving their own states to seek abortions in other states, the ongoing evidence showing that Republicans are actively setting the stage to steal the 2024 election if they lose, new revelations about right-wing brainwashing in K-12 education, the enactment of voter suppression laws, the banning of books, the normalizing of “white replacement theory,”attacks on LGBTQ youth, and threats against librarians for refusing to remove censored books from their library shelves.
What is even more disturbing is the simultaneous crisis of political agency and historical consciousness, and the collapse of civic responsibility that have made it possible for the threat against democracy to reach such a perilous moment.
Politics in the U.S. is no longer grounded in a mutually informing regard for both its residents and the institutions that provide for their well-being, freedoms and a vast array of civic rights. With the collapse of conscience has come the breakdown of politics as the foundation for a democratic society.
As Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit have reported, democracy is losing ground around the world as more people betray a liking for authoritarian leaders. The most recent examples of this global trend can be found in the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S., Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Philippines and Narendra Modi in India, among others. According to Freedom House, in 2020, “nearly 75 percent of the world’s population lived in a place that saw a decline in rights and freedoms.” Moreover, the report found that the United States saw “an 11-point decline in freedom since 2020, making it one of the twenty-five countries to suffer the steepest drops over the 10-year period.”
The turn toward fascist politics in the United States has a long history rooted deeply in acts of genocide against Native Americans, the scourge of slavery, Jim Crow violence, the erasure of historical memory, and updated forms of systemic racism buttressed by a merging of white supremacy, the rise of the punishing state, staggering inequality, unchecked political corruption, and a pervasive culture of fear and insecurity. As history is blindsided by the Republican Party, an intentional erasure of political and social memory rule the U.S., unleashing a dreadful plague on civic life and proving that fascism lives in every culture, and that it only takes a spark to ignite it. The Republican Party elite now views historical memory as too threatening to invoke and learn from.
The GOP goal is to disable memory to incapacitate forms of critical agency and the connection between what we know and how we act. The far right’s attempt to erase history presents itself as a form of patriotism whose actual purpose is to control historical knowledge in order to normalize white supremacy and legitimate the poisonous furies of authoritarianism. History in this repressive instance can only serve the function of learned helplessness and manufactured ignorance. As historical consciousness is repressed and disappears, the institutions and conditions that give rise to critical forms of individual and collective agency wither, undoing the promise of language, dissent, politics and democracy itself. Consequently, politics becomes more ruthless and dangerous at a time when the forces of normalization and depoliticization work to unmoor political agency from any sense of social responsibility. Angela Davis rightly asserts that this attack on historical consciousness represents first and foremost represents an attack on education, an attack that must be taken seriously. She writes:
What we are witnessing are efforts on the part of the forces of white supremacy to regain a control which they more or less had in the past. So, I think that it is absolutely essential to engage in the kinds of efforts to prevent them from consolidating a victory in the realm of education. And, of course, those of us who are active in the abolitionist movement see education as central to the process of dismantling the prison, as central to the process of imagining new forms of safety and security that can supplant the violence of the police.
In an age of demagogues and aspiring autocrats, not only do democratic norms, values and institutions wither, but in their absence, the pathological language of nativism and unchecked lawlessness is reinforced through “vivid images of invasion and demographic warfare [that enhance] the allure of the rebranded fascism,” as Paul Gilroy has noted. While Trump has become a flashing signpost for white supremacy, he is only symptomatic of the party’s deep-seated racism. Indeed the racism that has driven the Republican Party has never been far beneath the surface. Recall, as Thom Hartmann observed, that “the #2 guy in the Republican House Caucus, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, [once stated] that he was ‘David Duke without the baggage,’ and … Reagan’s Education Secretary, Bill Bennett, [stated] that, ‘If it were your sole purpose to reduce crime, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.’” How else to explain the Republican Party’s “love of white supremacist militias and their embrace of both Nazi and Confederate iconography,” or their aggressive systemic policies of voter suppression, their racialized language of “law and order,” and their relentless attacks on transgender youth and their guardians? How else to explain Trump’s and his political allies either defense or dismissal of the violence that took place on January 6 against the U.S. Capitol?
Alarming echoes of the past have long been evident in a Republican Party that supports Trump’s description of undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border as “animals, “rapists” and “vermin.” They were silent (if not overtly supportive) when he disparaged Black athletes, claimed that all Haitians have AIDS, and repeatedly used the language of white nationalism and white supremacy as a badge of identity and as a tool to mobilize his supporters. It is worth remembering that in a different historical context, Adolf Hitler spoke of Jews, LGBTQ people and political opponents in the same terms. In both historical and contemporary cases, demagogues created a cultural politics and discourse that allowed people to think the unthinkable. In the current era of militarized hate, bigotry and white nationalism, the conditions that have produced fascism in the past are with us once again, proving, as Primo Levi noted, that, “Every age has its own fascism.” Again, Gilroy gets it right in stating that there is a need to understand “Fascism as a recurrent and infinitely translatable phenomenon.”
In the face of the Republican Party’s attack on electoral integrity, judicial independence, critical education and voter rights, coupled with its unabashed defense of corruption, white nationalism and support for oligarchs such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the U.S. has become more closely aligned with the nightmare of fascism. As language is stripped of any substantive meaning, and reason is undermined by conspiracy theories, falsehoods and misinformation produced by the right’s disimagination machine, the ideological and institutional guardrails designed to protect democracy begin to collapse. More specifically, the ideals and promises of a democracy are not simply being weakened by the GOP and their followers. Rather, the threat is far more serious because democracy itself is being replaced shamelessly with the hazardous plague of fascist politics. The rule of capital and economic sovereignty is now coupled with ruthless attacks on gender, sexuality, reproductive rights, and a re-energized umbrella of white supremacist ideology and white terrorist policies.The poisonous roots of racial capitalism and its egregious system of inequality can no longer be criticized simply for their casual nihilism, numbing lack of compassion or their detachment from the social contract. Instead, they have far exceeded these social disorders and tipped over into the ruthless abyss of fascist politics.
Fascism today once again wears boldly and shamelessly the trappings of white supremacy. As neoliberalism disconnects itself from any democratic values and resorts to blaming the victim, it easily bonds with the poison of white supremacy in order to divert attention from its own economic and political failures. Instead of appealing to a free-market utopia which has lost its legitimacy due to its ruthless policies of austerity, deregulation, destruction of the welfare state, galloping immiseration and scorn for any vestige of government responsibility, neoliberalism now joins hands with a fascist politics. In this discourse, it blames all social problems, including the absurd claim that white people are victims of racism, on people of color, anti-racist discourse, progressive social movements and almost any source capable of holding power accountable.
Central to neoliberal ideology is the normalizing tactic of claiming there is no alternative to gangster capitalism. This has proven to be a powerful pedagogical tool buttressed by the reduction of political problems to personal issues, which serve to infantilize people by offering them few opportunities to translate private issues into systemic consideration. While neoliberal ideology in the economic sphere has been weakened, this depoliticizing pedagogical tactic still carries enormous power in dismantling the capacities for self-reflection and forms of critical analysis crucial to a vibrant and engaged democratic polity. As Viktor Frankl argued in a different historical context, such reductionism is “the mask of nihilism.” Gilroy advances this argument and states that under such circumstances, democracy has reached a dangerous point. He writes:
As ailing capitalism emancipates itself from democratic regulation, ultra-nationalism, populism, xenophobia and varieties of neo-fascism have become more visible, more assertive and more corrosive of political culture. The widespread appeal of racialized group identity and racism, often conveyed obliquely with a knowing wink, has been instrumental in delivering us to a situation in which our conceptions of truth, law and government have been placed in jeopardy. In many places, pathological hunger for national rebirth and the restoration of an earlier political time, have combined with resentful, authoritarian and belligerent responses to alterity and the expectation of hospitality.
Such warnings by Paul Gilroy, Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Sarah Churchill, Robin D. G. Kelley, and others raise the crucial question: In what kind of society do Americans want to live?
In addition, there is the question of what kind of future we envision for upcoming generations, especially at a time when such questions are being either ignored or relegated to the dustbin of indifference by politicians, pundits and propaganda machines that harbor a contempt for democracy. As culture is weaponized, the horrors of the past are forgotten. Books that speak to struggles for freedom and address issues of social injustice are now banned by Republican legislatures in a variety of states.
As Robin D. G. Kelley has observed, the lesson here is that such practices have no interests in exposing children to historical narratives in which “courageous people risked their lives to ensure freedom for themselves and others.… The implication of this right-wing logic is that America is great, slavery was a good idea, and anti-racism sullied our noble tradition.”
Such policies are about more than suppressing dissent, critical thinking and academic freedom. The more radical aim here is to destroy the formative culture necessary to create modes of education, thought, dialogue, critique, values, and modes of agency necessary for individuals to fight civic ignorance and struggle collectively to deepen and expand a sustainable and radical democracy. Under such circumstances, the warning signs of fascism are overlooked, ignored and run the risk of being normalized.
In the current historical moment, ethical horizons are shrinking, and politics has taken on a deeply threatening stance. This is made clear by the growing popular support for Trump and his political allies who exhibit a contempt for both democracy and a sustainable future while embracing the most profoundly disturbing anti-democratic tendencies, particularly the mix of ultra-nationalism and white supremacy.
Crucial here is Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow violence” because it highlights theoretically those forms of power and violence “that occur gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed over time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” The slow violence of authoritarianism is evident in voter suppression laws, the subversion of election machinery, the embrace of white supremacist policies to define who counts as a citizen, and the use of Republican legislatures to purge critical thinking from public schools and undermine the courts. Trumpist calls to “restore greatness” are code for restoring the U.S. to a time when only white people had access to spaces of power, politics and citizenship.
Weaponized disposability and its language of unbridgeable identities is present in the misery that goes unmentioned as a result of the staggering inequality produced under neoliberal capitalism. Such violence, while destructive to democracy, is not of the eye-catching type that immediately grabs our attention because of its catastrophic visibility. As Nixon points out, such violence is rarely newsworthy regardless of how toxic it may be. Yet, it demands a rethinking of power and its workings as part of the hidden curriculum of violence, one that can only be made visible through a serious and concerted historical and relational understanding of politics and the forces that shape it. Slow violence is often one that is only visible in a totality of events, visible only through a politics that is comprehensive and functions to connect often divergent and isolated forms of oppression. For instance, the right-wing attack on schools that demand students not wear masks in the classroom, if viewed as an isolated event, misses the larger issue at stake in this form of attack which is the goal of privatizing (if not eliminating) public education.
The fast and catastrophic brutality of authoritarianism embraces violence as a legitimate tool of political power, opportunism, and a vehicle to squelch dissent and terrorize those labeled as “enemies” because they are either people of color or insufficiently loyal to Trumpism — or oppose the white Christian reactionary view of women, sexual orientation and religious extremism. Fast violence, in this instance, is not hidden; it is displayed by the Republican Party and the financial elite as both a threat to induce fear, and as a spectacle to mobilize public emotions. In this context, theater is more important than reason, the truth, justice and measured arguments. Violence and lies inform each other to shatter facts, evidence, democratic values and shared visions. As James Baldwin once observed in “A Talk to Teachers,” Americans “are menaced — intolerably menaced — by a lack of vision [and] where there is no vision the people perish.” This 21st century model of fascism legitimizes the ideological and political framework for a cowardly defense of an insurrection intended to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, and the vile claim that Joe Biden had not fairly won the presidency. This is a form of lethal violence that is both embraced as a strategy and denied and often covered over with lies in order to disavow its consequences, however deadly.
As the U.S. House Select Committee investigation of the January 6 attack on the Capitol clearly demonstrated, there is mounting evidence that the former president’s claim of a stolen election was the animating cause of the attempted coup, and that he and other high-ranking members of his party were criminally responsible for the murderous violence that took place. Moreover, they had plotted before the attack to engage in a larger coup aimed at both undermining the 2020 presidential election results and whatever was left of U.S. democracy. Trump and his political allies made a mockery of the law by trying to pressure the Justice Department, state officials, Vice President Mike Pence, election officials, and others into aiding his goal of reversing Biden’s election. Trump and his corrupt cohorts in the Republican Party did more than engage in seditions conspiracy — they normalized crime, corruption, state terrorism, fraud, lies and violence.
As Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows made clear during her deposition before the January 6 hearing, Trump both incited and encouraged the violence on January 6. She told the committee that, “Trump knew a mob of his supporters had armed itself with rifles, yet he asked for metal detectors to be removed.” She also recounted how his desire to lead them to the Capitol caused a physical altercation with the Secret Service. The security set up by the Secret Service was implemented to prevent Trump’s armed supporters from attending the rally space outside the Ellipse where he was scheduled to speak. As David Graham points out, drawing on Hutchinson’s testimony, “Trump didn’t care. ‘They’re not here to hurt me,’ he said. He demanded that the Secret Service ‘take the fucking mags away [referring to the magnetometers used to detect metal weapons],’ and added, ‘They can march to the Capitol after this is over.’”
Once again, Trump asserted the rhetoric of mass violence and revenge as a form of political opportunism, regardless of the lethal consequences. Unfortunately, Trump’s call for the public to arm themselves in order to overturn a stolen election was reinforced by the recent Supreme Court ruling on carrying guns in public. This is not to suggest that the Supreme Court legitimized the violent coup. Instead, it legitimated the conditions that both makes and encourages the conditions for mass violence by ruling that people can carry concealed weapons without applying for a proper permit or due cause.
Lest we forget, the January 6 insurrection, now revealed as an organized coup, resulted in the deaths of at least five people and injuries to 140 police officers, and more than 840 rioters have been charged thus far with a crime. Trump’s response to assault on the Capitol and the ensuing violence was to claim that the mob was engaging in a form of legitimate political discourse and that the attack “was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our country to Make America Great Again.” Peter Wehner rightly notes that such comments and actions suggest that Trump was not simply “a criminal president, but … a seditious madman.” Bennie Thompson, the House Select Committee chair, stated that Trump was a traitor to his country who “engaged in an attempted coup. A brazen attempt … to overthrow the government. Violence was no accident. It represented Trump’s last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”
Yet, in spite of the growing revelations about Trump’s penchant for corruption, sedition, lying, violence, willingness to overthrow democracy, and the almost irrefutable image of him as a would-be dictator willing to do anything to secure power, his “polling position with Americans overall is one of his best, and he remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination.” Incredulously, a recent NBC News poll found that “a majority of Americans (55%) now believe that Trump was either not or only partially responsible for the rioters who overtook the Capitol…. That’s up from 47% in January 2021.”
What appears lost from much of the coverage of January 6is that it cannot be solely attributed to Trump and Trumpism — his revised brand of fascism. The roots of such violence and the politics that inform it lie deep in U.S. history and its racist machinery of elimination and terminal exclusion. But the deep affinity for violence in the U.S. can also be found in a brutal neoliberal capitalist system that has produced massive inequality, misery, violence and suffering, while threatening the future for an entire generation of people. The roots of the current age of counterrevolution are also present in the falsification of history, degradation of language, the attack on the ethical imagination, a massive abuse of power, the emergence of massive disimagination machines, the cult of the strong leader, the rise of the spectacle, and the perpetuation of mass violence similar to what took place under fascist regimes in Italy and Germany in the 1930s.
History is once again unleashing its crueler lessons amid a climate of denial and counterattacks. Yet ignoring the lessons of history comes at great peril, since they provide a glimpse of not only the conditions that produce the terror and cruelty endemic to authoritarianism, but also serve as warning signs of what the end of morality, justice and humanity might look like. The warning signs of a fascist politics are crucial to recognize because they make visible common attributes of fascism such as ultranationalism, racial purity, the politics of disposability, nativism, the language of decline and resurrection, the appeal of the strong man, the contempt for the rule of law and dissent, the elevation of instinct over reason and an embrace of the friend/enemy distinction, among other attributes. The signpost of fascism and its threat to democracy become even more obvious when individuals surrender their agency, capacity for critique, morality and humanity for the plague of totalitarianism. Such dangers make it all the more necessary to understand the pedagogical forces at work that undermine political agency, reinforce lawlessness and pave the way for what Adorno once called the authoritarian personality. What is being promoted in the current counter-revolutionary moment is an attack on historical consciousness, memory and remembrance, which are elements of history that keep alive traditions that speak to human suffering, moral courage, and the struggle for democratic rights, public goods and social responsibilities.
If the current move toward fascism both in the United States and across the globe is to be resisted and overcome, it is crucial to develop a new language and understanding regarding how matters of agency, identity and consciousness are shaped in terms that are both repressive and emancipatory. This suggests that the struggle over agency cannot be separated from the struggle over consciousness, power, identity and politics, and that politics is defined as much by the educational force of culture as it is by traditional markers of society such as economics, laws, political institutions and the criminal legal system. The poison of bigotry, anger, hatred and racism is learned and cannot be removed from matters of culture, education, and the institutions that trade in shaping identities and consciousness.
As a long tradition of theoreticians and politicians ranging from Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams to Stuart Hall and Vaclav Havel have argued, culture is not a secondary but fundamental dimension of society and politics. Moreover, they have all stated in different terms that politics follows culture in that it is the pedagogical baseline for how subjectivities are formed and inhabited. Furthermore, a number of theorists such as Paulo Freire have rightly argued that matters of agency, subjectivity and culture should be a starting point for understanding both the politics that individuals inhabit and how the most repressive forms of authoritarianism become internalized and normalized. Havel was particularly prescient in recognizing that power in the 20th century has been transformed, especially in light of the merging of culture and modern technologies such as the internet and the social media. In light of this transformation, he stated that power was inseparable from culture and that it was:
grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth. [In addition, he states that] the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans [have reshaped] the horizons of our existence…. We must resist its complex and wholly alienating pressure, whether it takes the form of consumption, advertising, repression, technology, or cliché — all of which are the blood brothers of fanaticism and the wellspring of totalitarian thought depriv[ing] us — rulers as well as the ruled — of our conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual humanity.
The role of culture as an educational force raises important, if often ignored, questions about the relationship between culture and power, politics and agency. For instance, what ideological and structural mechanisms are at work in corrupting the public imagination, infantilizing a mass public, prioritizing fear over democratic values and transforming robust forms of political agency into an abyss of depoliticized followers? What forces created the conditions in which individuals are willing give up their ability, if not will, to discern lies from the truth, good from evil? How are such pathologies produced and nourished in the public spaces, cultural apparatuses and modes of education that shape meaning, identities, politics and society in the current historical moment? What role does a culturally produced civic illiteracy play as a depoliticizing force, and what are the institutions that produce it? What forms of slow violence create the conditions for the collapse of democratic norms?
Crucial to such questions is the need to recognize not only the endpoint of the collapse of democracy into a fascist state, but also what the tools of power are that make it possible. At the same time, important questions need to be raised regarding the need for developing a language capable of both understanding these underlying conditions in the service of authoritarianism, and how they are being sustained even more aggressively today in the service of a totalitarian state in the making. Language in the service of social change and justice must be reinvented and once again function in the service of critique and militant possibility. In part, this suggests the necessity for a language of informed resistance in which education becomes central to politics and furthers the efforts to create the conditions for new and more democratic forms of agency and collective struggle.
It is important to note that I am not suggesting that language is the only basis for power. On the contrary, language is defined through notions of literacy, civic culture, and shifting symbolic and material contexts. Power is more expansive than language and also present in the institutions, economic forms and material relations in which language is produced, legitimated, constrained and empowered. Matters of language and civic literacy cannot be either instrumentalized or stripped of the power of self-determination, critical agency or self-reflection. At its core and against the discourse of authoritarianism, cultural politics should be addressed from the point of view of emancipation — a discourse about education, power, agency and their relationship to democracy. Cultural politics should be acknowledged and defended as a pedagogical project that is part of a broader political offensive in the fight for a radical democracy and its sustaining institutions.
What we are witnessing in the United States is not merely a threat to democracy, but a modernized and dangerous expression of right-wing extremism that is a prelude to a full-blown version of fascist politics. One crucial starting point for mass resistance is articulated by Paul Morrow, who, referencing Hannah Arendt, argues that authoritarian societies do “everything possible to uncouple beliefs from action, conviction from action.”
Any struggle for resistance must create the pedagogical conditions that address the connection between agency and action. The great Frederick Douglass understood this when he stated that “knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” While it is generally accepted that power cannot be divorced from knowledge, it is often forgotten that this suggests that agency is a central political category and that atthe heart of authoritarianism is an uninformed and often isolated and depoliticized subject who has relinquished their agency to the cult of the strongman. Consequently, to resist authoritarianism means acknowledging the power of cultural politics to connect one’s ideas and beliefs to those vital human needs, desires and hopes that will persuade people to assert their voices and actions in the building of a new mass movement and a democratic socialist society.
The capitalist world economy is facing major challenges today: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused damage to most economies around the world, skyrocketing inflation is disproportionately affecting poor and working-class people, and even stagflation (a combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth) looms on the horizon. In addition, there is a global food crisis fueled by the war in Ukraine. The current food crisis has its roots in neoliberal policies in agriculture in developing countries, according to radical political economist Shouvik Chakraborty.
None of the current global economic problems can be solved without massive changes to the workings of the world economy to counter the harms caused by neoliberal capitalism over the last 40 years.
Is neoliberalism dying? And what are the alternatives? Is socialism a viable option for developing countries? Chakraborty addresses these questions in an exclusive interview for Truthout below. Chakraborty is research fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and author of scores of academic articles in macroeconomics and political economy.
C.J. Polychroniou: The world economy is projected to experience feeble growth and high inflation in 2022, and there are even concerns about stagflation. What are the major challenges facing the world economy in 2022?
Shouvik Chakraborty: The world economy entering a stagflation phase genuinely concerns the working class across the globe. However, given the income disparity among the advanced and low-income economies, the challenges faced by the workers under such a stagflationary scenario are different. The concerns in the former are more focused on the continuation of a particular lifestyle — whether they would be able to purchase a single-family home, afford a vacation or continue driving their private vehicles. At the same time, the fear in the lower-income countries is related more to the necessities of life — whether they would be able to put food on the table, a minimum supply of clean and safe water, and access to some minimum level of electricity and cooking fuel. Given the lack of income support such as food stamps, social security benefits and unemployment benefits, the marginalized sections in these low-income countries are acutely vulnerable to the coming economic crisis. The advent of neoliberal policies over the last four decades led to the retreat of the state from even the basic forms of welfare measures in these low-income countries like providing food through fair price shops, price-controlled health care through primary care facilities, supply of clean water, etc., which were once part of the dirigiste regime, and, thereby, exposing these vulnerable sections now to the vagaries of the market forces.
The pandemic made things worse for these poorer sections of society, especially the women who have been disproportionately impacted. During the pandemic, these marginalized sections have already faced an economic blow to their income and in sustaining their livelihood. With the unequal distribution of income globally and inequality within nations accentuating further during the pandemic, the more affluent sections globally were less affected by the recessionary conditions and could shield themselves. However, the marginalized sections, especially those in the low-income countries, were the worst impacted. Therefore, it is true that the fears of an economic recession combined with an inflationary situation concern the global economy. Still, their extent and nature differ based on the current levels of income and development of those economies. Additionally, for the developing countries, repaying their debts at higher interest rates in a reduced growth rate environment would pose additional macroeconomic challenges.
There is a global food crisis going on, and many accuse Russia of using food as a weapon of war. Yet, there are many governments around the world that are imposing food-export restrictions that not only drive food prices up but also squeeze food supplies. So, what is actually causing the global food crisis, how bad is it going to get, and what ways are there to solve the current food security crisis?
The global food crisis will be acute, and it will be most felt in the countries that are already food-insecure and suffering from hunger. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has already issued dire warnings. Although one can point to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, export restrictions, supply-chain issues and climate change-related disruptions accentuating the global food crisis, it is not the entire story. During the neoliberal era, one sector that mainly got ignored by the policy makers, especially in the developing world, is agriculture and its allied sectors. According to the OECD Agricultural Statistics, the total budgetary support to the agricultural sector as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the emerging economies declined from 1.25 percent to 0.81 percent over the last two decades.
As a consequence of negligence to this sector, the average annual growth rate of agriculture, forestry and fishing sector worldwide, according to the World Development Indicators, declined from 3.7 percent in the 1980s to 2.9 percent in the 2010s. It is starker in the case of the lower- and middle-income countries. Over this same period, while the overall growth rate of low- and middle-income countries increased from 3.6 percent to 4.7 percent, agriculture and its allied sectors’ growth declined from 3.9 percent to 3.4 percent. The point of citing these statistics is that much before the Russia-Ukraine war and pandemic, the agricultural sector was already suffering, and the food supply was impacted.
Historically, agricultural prices are volatile. With the underlying crisis of this sector and the recent events accentuating it, global food prices increased last year, and that trend continues. The two other factors contributing to the rising prices, as a direct fallout of the neoliberal policies, are the increased profiteering of the major multinational agribusinesses and the speculative activities on the futures commodity market. The increased speculative activity is recently confirmed by a critical study that tracked the movements of financial investors (investment funds in particular) in commodity markets. Both profiteering and speculation need to be immediately regulated.
The production of agricultural commodities is usually price-responsive (although with some lag), and it is possible that other agrarian economies (assuming the Russia-Ukraine war continues) would probably respond by increasing their production level and improving the supply chain. However, to do so, the governments in those economies need to support the sector by increasing public investments and total budgetary support. This would, however, be an anathema to any state adhering to neoliberal policies and its obsession with balanced budgets; hence, the political challenge should be to do away with the neoliberal order.
Neoliberalism has been a disaster for most countries in both the developed and the developing world. Is it the case though, that neoliberalism has lost its force? Is it in crisis?
Neoliberalism has weakened the working class globally — the race to the bottom in wages, de-unionization and privatization. In the advanced countries, the workers’ wages have got tethered to those in the lower-income countries and, therefore, the share of labor compensation in GDP has been declining for several advanced countries around the world. In the United States, this share declined by 5 percent between 1975 and 2017. The decline in other countries like Germany, Japan and France is even more significant, with the largest occurring in Canada, at almost 11 percent.
This has accentuated the inequality within countries, especially in these advanced economies, in terms of both income and wealth inequality. Since 1990, income inequality has increased in these developed countries. It also further accentuated the already existing wealth inequality globally — while the bottom half of the global population owned less than 1 percent of all wealth in 2018, the richest decile (top 10 percent) owned 85 percent of all wealth, and the top 1 percent alone held almost half of it. The pandemic has only worsened this inequality, with hundreds of millions of people forced to leave the workforce. This level of inequality creates a lot of precarity and vulnerability among the working class.
With the rise of nationalist slogans and racist mongering in the advanced countries, the right-wing forces blamed the poor workers in the emerging economies — Mexico, India, China and African nations — for the loss of employment faced by the workers in the advanced countries. Right-wing people falsely argue that the advanced economy workers have to suffer because some guy in Bangalore or Shanghai is taking away their job, and the workers in these emerging economies are prospering. It is true that inequality among per capita national incomes has declined in relative terms in recent decades. However, the average income levels in advanced economies are still very high. For example, the average income of people in the European Union is 11 times higher than that of people in sub-Saharan Africa; the income of people in North America is 16 times higher than that of sub-Saharan Africans.
Despite this reality, the right-wing forces continue the narrative and challenge the process of globalization, and encourage the rise of nationalism. In many advanced countries like the U.S., France, Germany, and others, this false narrative, along with other factors like immigration, led to the rise of authoritative, undemocratic regimes. These regimes bolstered the narratives of xenophobia and nationalism. In the U.S., for example, the Trump administration decided to escalate trade wars with China, moved out of the Paris Climate Accords, and turned their back on the European Union in the name of nationalism and protecting the national economy. This led many scholars, including some progressives, to write the epitaph of the neoliberal order.
It is true that the ideas associated with neoliberalism, especially that of the free market, are facing some challenges, especially after the pandemic during which a significant chunk of the population in the advanced countries benefited from the welfare measures of the state. However, I still doubt whether the free movement of capital and international trade, an integral part of the neoliberal regime, faces the same challenge. Capital, especially speculative finance capital, is still free to move across borders in search of speculative profits. And the U.S. dollar is still the top currency in the world and enjoys the global reserve currency status. Most of the central banks in the world have to adjust their interest rates in response to what the Federal Reserve does, sacrificing their independent monetary policy. This might even push their economies into recession because the central banks of those countries are scared of a capital flight. So, Main Street has substantially challenged Wall Street, but I still think the former has a long struggle ahead to make a permanent dent in the latter. Hence, it is true that neoliberalism is facing substantial challenges, but it might be too early to write the epitaph.
If the neoliberal agenda has indeed failed, what alternative paths of development are realistic for today’s world?
As mentioned earlier, although neoliberalism has not entirely lost all its steam, it has been challenged. The Green New Deal proposed and discussed in the Global North by various sections of the progressives presents a viable alternative to the neoliberal agenda. Any alternative progressive path of development in today’s world must keep the science of climate change at the center of policy making. The world is facing an existential crisis, and an alternative progressive development path must consider these policies’ environmental and ecological impacts. It should directly link to access to natural resources such as water, air and land.
However, from a developing country’s perspective in the Global South, the pursuit of the Green New Deal in the Global North should not become a cause of pain and exploitation for the workers, peasants, petty producers and miners in the former. Historically, the economic interactions of the advanced economies through the mechanisms of “free and fair” trade led to the exploitation of human and natural resources in the Global South. Hence, one should think about the Green New Deal as a Global Green New Deal, where the interest of the populace in the Global South is equally protected like that of the Global North, and the North partially bears the cost of this Green New Deal program in the South. Otherwise, what would happen, as history has shown us time and again, that the Global North will prosper at the expense of the Global South.
Is socialism a viable option for the Global South?
Socialism is, of course, a viable option for developing countries. With the recent win of the progressives in Peru, Chile and Colombia, it seems to become more feasible. But, the critical question is: Which model of socialism will these emerging countries follow? Will it be the Chinese model of socialism? In that case, I believe the progressives globally need to give it a pause and rethink whether they want to follow that trajectory. I say this because many leftists in the world, including my country, India, seem to unquestioningly follow the Chinese model of socialism without even genuinely understanding its repercussions in a democratic setup.
I believe democracy today needs to be an integral part of the socialist agenda, with the dignity of individuals upheld, where a top-down approach to planning with the state deciding it all needs to be questioned. Local participation, decentralized administration and democratic interaction should form the core of a new socialist agenda. A rights-based approach, where the right to life and the basic necessities for it — food, clean water and air, housing and clean energy are upheld, needs to be a central part of a socialist program, along with other rights like the right to health care, the right to education and employment. We need better protection of social and economic rights, which does mean a more significant role for the state. Protection of the workers’ rights, petty producers, small farmers and miners, whose interests have been sacrificed in this neoliberal era, must form the core of the new socialist agenda. A newly envisioned socialist order in the emerging economies of the Global South has to learn from the mistakes made by the earlier regimes by engaging in dialogues and attending to the needs of the local communities.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
An NPR/Ipsos poll released in January revealed that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.” What the poll does not disclose, of course, is the anomalous situation of the United States in comparison to other democracies. For starters, the U.S. is a very conservative and militaristic country, with a two-party system and a political culture that overwhelmingly favors powerful private interests over the common good. Indeed, in many respects, it operates more like a reactionary plutocracy than a democracy. For instance, the U.S. is the only wealthy country without a universal health care system. It spends more on health care than any other high-income country but has the lowest life expectancy. The U.S. is also a global outlier in terms of gun ownership, gun violence and public mass shootings. Income and wealth inequality is also higher in the U.S. than in almost any other industrialized country, and the U.S. also has the distinction of spending lesson children than almost any other wealthy country. Moreover, as evidenced by the recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court acts for the most part as an agent of reaction.
Indeed, the U.S. is a “highly unusual society, in many ways,” as Noam Chomsky states in the following interview about the economic and political organization of the U.S. polity and the shockingly reactionary rulings of the Supreme Court on guns and abortion.
Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics, a leading dissident and social critic, and one of the world’s most cited intellectuals. His work has influenced a variety of fields, including cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, computer science, mathematics, childhood education and anthropology. He has received numerous awards, including the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal and the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. He is the recipient of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from some of the world’s most prestigious universities, and is the author of more than 150 books.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, as gun massacres continue to plague U.S. society, the question that naturally pops into mind is this: Why is the U.S. government so uniquely bad among developed countries at tackling issues in general that affects people’s lives? Indeed, it is not just gun violence that makes the U.S. an outlier. It is also a big outlier when it comes to health, income inequality and the environment. In fact, the U.S in an outlier with regard to its overall mode of economic, political and social organization.
Those were not of course Justice Thomas’s words, speaking for the usual 6-3 majority of the reactionary Roberts Court, but they capture their import: In the United States, people may carry a concealed weapon for “self-defense,” with no further justification. In no functioning society have people been living in such terror of their fellow citizens that they need guns for self-defense if they’re taking a walk with their dogs or going to pick up their children at their (properly barricaded) nursery school.
A true sign of the famous American exceptionalism.
Even apart from the lunacy proclaimed from on high on that historic date, the United States is a highly unusual society, in many ways. The most important are the most general. In your words, “its overall mode of economic, political, and social organization.” That merits a few comments.
The basic nature of the modern state capitalist world, including every more or less developed society, was well enough described 250 years ago by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations and in the Madisonian framework of the Constitution of what was soon to become the most powerful state in world history.
In Smith’s words, the “masters of mankind” are those with economic power — in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England. They are the “principal architects” of government policy, which they shape to ensure that their own interests are “most peculiarly attended to,” however “grievous” the effects on others, including the people of England but more severely those subject to its “savage injustice” abroad. To the extent that they can, in every age they pursue their “vile maxim”: “All for ourselves, nothing for other people.”
In the Madisonian constitutional framework, power was to be in the hands of “the wealth of the nation,” men (women were property, not persons) who recognize the rights of property owners and the need to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The basic principle was captured succinctly by the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” His current successors understand that very well, to an unusual extent.
Madison’s doctrine differed from Smith’s description of the world in some important respects. In his book The Sacred Fire of Liberty, Madison scholar Lance Banning writes that Madison “was — to depths that we today are barely able to imagine — an eighteenth-century gentleman of honor.” He expected that those granted power would act as an “enlightened Statesman” and “benevolent philosopher,” “pure and noble,” “men of intelligence, patriotism, property and independent circumstances … whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”
His illusions were soon shattered.
In very recent years, the reigning doctrine in the courts has been a variety of “originalism” that would have judges view the world from the perspective of a group of wealthy white male slaveowners, who were indeed reasonably enlightened — by the standards of the 18th century.
A more rational version of “originalism” was ridiculed 70 years ago by Justice Robert Jackson: “Just what our forefathers did envision, or would have envisioned had they foreseen modern conditions, must be divined from materials almost as enigmatic as the dreams Joseph was called upon to interpret for Pharaoh.” That is a saner version than the Bork-Scalia-Alito et al. current version because of the highlighted phrase.
The contortions about “originalism” are of no slight interest. There’s no space to go into it here, but there are a few matters that deserve attention, just keeping to the most dedicated adherents to the doctrine — not the saner version ridiculed by Justice Jackson, but the very recent and now prevailing doctrine, which Jackson presumably would have regarded as too absurd even to discuss.
One issue has to do with the role of historical tradition. In Alito’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, he stresses the importance of relying on historical tradition in determining whether rights are implied in the Constitution (and Amendments). He points out, correctly, that the treatment of women historically gives little basis for according them rights.
In plain words, the history in law and practice is grotesque.
In his decision allowing people to carry concealed weapons to defend themselves in the hideous country he takes the U.S. to be, Thomas also referred to the importance of historical tradition, but he had little to say about it and the actual history undermines his allusions.
In the very important 2008 Heller decision, overturning a century of precedent and establishing his new version of the Second Amendment as Holy Writ, Justice Scalia explicitly ignored the entire historical tradition, including the reasons why the Framers called for a well-organized militia. The actual tradition, from the beginning, shows that the Second Amendment was largely an anachronism by the 20th century.
Even putting aside the problem of interpreting Pharoah’s dreams, the recently established originalist doctrine appears to be rather flexible, though there are some uniform features, as we have seen again in the past few days: The doctrine can be adapted to yield deeply reactionary outcomes that infringe radically on essential human rights.
Justice Thomas emphasized that consistent thread in his concurring opinion in Alito’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. He wrote that “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” These are the cases in which the court upheld the right to privacy in personal life, specifically the right to contraception, same-sex sexual relations and same-sex marriage. As Justice Kennedy put it in his majority opinion in Lawrence, what is at stake is the right of people “to engage in their [private] conduct without intervention of the government.”
Thomas agreed with Alito that his majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade did not in itself reach as far as Thomas’s projections, which have a good record of being later affirmed. We will soon see.
These issues are of great importance today, as the court is arrogating to itself extraordinary authority to determine how society must function, a form of judicial supremacy that not only has little constitutional basis but should not be tolerated in a democratic society.
The long-term McConnell strategy of packing the courts is casting its dark shadow over American society, not to speak of the prospects for survival.
Turning to the broader social context, one critical feature of the United States is the unusual power of the masters of mankind, by now multinational corporations and financial institutions. It is of great significance that the masters include the wide-ranging energy system: fossil fuel producers, banks and other financial institutions, and corporate law firms who devise legal strategies to ensure that the interests of their paymasters “are most peculiarly attended to.” Their interests are further safeguarded by NATO, the self-described “defensive alliance,” which, when not rampaging somewhere, must fulfill its general post-Cold War mission: “to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West,” and more generally to protect sea routes used by tankers and other “crucial infrastructure” of the energy system (NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, 2007).
There have been many changes in the past 250 years of course, but these basic principles hold steady. And with consequences of overwhelming importance, right now.
We need not review the evidence showing that we are at a unique moment in history. Decisions that must be made right now will determine the course of future history, if there is to be any. There is a narrow window in which we must implement the quite feasible measures to avert cataclysmic destruction of the environment. The masters of mankind in the world’s most powerful state have been hard at work to close that window, and to ensure that their exorbitant short-term profit and power will remain untouched as the world goes up in flames.
That may sound over-dramatic, too apocalyptic. Perhaps it does sound that way, but unfortunately it is true and not overstated. It is also no secret. We can gain some insight into the process in the lead story in TheNew York Times a few days ago. Energy and environment correspondent Coral Davenport reports the near consummation of the long-time campaign of the fossil fuel industry and its minions in Washington to prevent the government from instituting regulations that would impede its primary goal of profit (with ensuing cataclysm), relying on the Roberts Court to give its imprimatur.
We can dismiss the legalistic chicanery and the comical professions of high principle. The facts are plain and simple. The success of the project of destroying organized human life on earth in the near future is a testimony to the unusual power of the masters of mankind in the U.S.
The project is more ambitious than protection of the immediate interests of the energy system. The Supreme Court will soon deal with the case of West Virginia v. EPA, which has to do with “the federal government’s authority to reduce carbon dioxide from power plants — pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.” But that’s only a start, Davenport reports.
Other cases are wending their way through the courts, exploring various legal strategies to achieve the longer-term goal: to prevent the EPA and other regulatory agencies from enacting measures that are not explicitly legislated. That means just about all measures, since Congress cannot possibly reach decisions on the specific contingencies that arise, or even inquire into them. To do so requires the kind of intensive expert analysis by regulatory agencies and interaction with the public that the project of the masters seeks to ban. The project translates into carte blanche for private power to do as it wishes. In spirit, this is an extension of the reigning extremist version of originalism and has the same result of favoring the interests of the masters and consigning the rest to deserved oblivion.
It is worth looking into the sources of this unusual power of “those who own the country,” which manifests itself in many ways. One factor is that as Native people were subjected to genocide, the conquered territories were viewed as a kind of “blank slate,” with no existing framework of feudal structures. The feudal system, with all its horrors, did assign people some kind of place, however awful, with some rights.
Starting from fresh in a conquered country, individual settlers were on their own. They did have ways to benefit, many at least. The conquered country offered unparalleled advantages: rich resources, vast territory, incomparable security. And like other societies, the U.S. has been blessed with an intellectual class that is eager to extol its real or imagined virtues while suppressing inconvenient reality.
To be sure, for the truly totalitarian mind that is never enough, as we see in current GOP initiatives to suppress books and teaching that might be “divisive” or cause discomfort to (white) students — that is, all of history, everywhere.
The masters are highly organized and have many institutions devoted to their needs, apart from the state that they largely control: trade associations, chambers of commerce, the Business Roundtable, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), many others. When Thatcher and other neoliberal ideologues preach that there is no society, only individuals subject to the market, they understand well that the rich and privileged are exempt.
The efforts of the masters to atomize the rest are pursued with true passion. The traps of mass consumerism are one mode. Another is harsh suppression of labor organizing, the primary means of self-defense during the industrial era. In keeping with the unusually powerful role of the masters, the U.S. has an unusually violent labor history, adopting new modalities during the Reagan-Clinton imposition of the neoliberal programs that have torn society to shreds, not only in the U.S. The independent farmers of the genuine Populist movement of the late 19th century and their dream of a “cooperative commonwealth” met the same fate.
We should not, however, discount the successes. The 19th century struggles to create an independent labor movement based on the principle that “those who work in the mills should own them,” and to link it with the powerful Populist movement, were crushed, but not without a residue.
The struggles continued, with significant successes. Those years also saw the rise of mass education, a major contribution to democracy with the U.S. far in the lead — hence, not surprisingly, a target of the neoliberal assault on rights and democracy. The militant labor movement of the 1930s, rising from the ashes of Wilsonian suppression, led America to social democracy while Europe was succumbing to fascism — processes now being reversed under neoliberal assault. The popular movements of the 1960s forged the way to the establishment of freedom of speech as a substantial right, to an extent unparalleled elsewhere, along with civilizing the society over a broad range. The achievements have been targeted by the neoliberal reaction, but not destroyed.
The struggle never ends.
The U.S. is unusual in other ways. It is, of course, a settler-colonial society like all of the Anglosphere, the offshoots of Britain, which was the most democratic society of the day, and also most powerful and violent. These features carried over in complex ways to the daughter societies. Despite the efforts of the Framers to contain the threat of democracy, popular pressures expanded it, sufficiently so that the great statesmen of Europe, like Kissinger’s hero Metternich, were deeply concerned about “the pernicious doctrines of republicanism and popular self-rule” spread by “the apostles of sedition” in the liberated colonies, an early version of the “domino theory” that is a ubiquitous feature of imperial domination. King George III was also concerned that the American Revolution might lead to erosion of empire, as it did.
The U.S. has been by far the wealthiest and most powerful state of the Anglosphere, surpassing Britain itself, which was reduced to a “junior partner” of its former colony as the British Foreign Office lamented after World War II when the U.S. took the mantle of global hegemony, displacing Britain and virtually eliminating France. U.S. history reflects that power. It’s hard to find another society that has been almost continuously at war — almost always aggressive war — since its founding.
A major — arguably the major — reason for the revolution was to overturn the British Royal Proclamation of 1763 that prevented the colonists from attacking the Indigenous nations beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The colonists had other ideas in mind, including notorious land speculators like the founder of the country, George Washington, known to the Iroquois as “the town destroyer.”
The brutality of the conquests was hardly a secret. The first U.S. secretary of war, General Henry Knox, described what his countrymen were doing as “the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union” by means “more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.” It was soon to become far worse, though not without efforts to conceal it beginning with Jefferson’s infamous passage in the Declaration of Independence denouncing King George for unleashing “the merciless Indian savages” against the peaceful colonists, who wanted only their “utter extirpation.”
On the side, the U.S. picked up half of Mexico in what President/General U.S. Grant called one of the most “wicked wars” of aggression in history, greatly regretting his participation in the crime as a junior officer.
The task was viciously consummated by the end of the 19th century. By then the U.S. was turning to other exercises of violence and subversion too familiar to recount, to the present moment.
All of this has its impact on the prevailing culture. In the light of history, it becomes a little less shocking to see that even after the Uvalde massacre, almost half of Republican voters, mostly from rural traditional white Christian sectors, think that we must accept such horrors as the price of freedom.
The gun culture has other roots of course, some of which we have discussed. There is much more, some brought out in an incisive report by journalist and political analyst Chris Hedges, based partly on his own experience growing up in the rural America that has been crushed by neoliberal globalization, leaving guns as the last residue for men of some illusion of dignity and social role.
We should add that it is still possible to access Hedges’s outstanding work. Most of it was in regular programs on RT, which is now cancelled under the suffocating censorship designed to protect Americans from any awareness of what Russian leaders may be saying or thinking. Some fragments are permitted, those that can be twisted to show that Putin intends to conquer the world. Those versions receive triumphant exposure, but not, say, the regular negotiation offers, which, while not acceptable, might provide an opening for a diplomatic settlement of the kind that the U.S. government has been dedicated to undermine.
It’s been repeatedly said that the U.S. political system is broken and observers decry political polarization in today’s Congress. In what sense can we speak of a broken political system when the elites seem to have a strong grip on the policy agenda?
We can put the matter somewhat differently. A political system is broken insofar as the policy agenda is largely in the hands of some sector of power, typically “those who own the country” and therefore have the right to govern it to ensure that their own interests are properly attended to and that the minority of the opulent are well protected.
One effect of the neoliberal assault on the social order has been to amplify the grip of the masters over the political agenda, a natural consequence of the concentration of unaccountable economic power, which is, indeed, impressive. A rough measure is given by the Rand Corporation study that we have discussed earlier, which found that since Reagan opened to doors to highway robbery, almost $50 trillion have been “transferred” from the working and middle classes to the super-rich. That has proceeded alongside of the tendency towards monopolization that results from deregulation, spurred further by the highly protectionist measures of the “free trade agreements” of the Clinton years.
Harvard economists Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers attribute the sharp concentration of wealth in the past 40 years primarily to the assault on labor, initiated by Reagan (and Thatcher in the U.K.), carried forward in Clintonite neoliberal globalization. In their words, “Declining unionization, increasingly demanding and empowered shareholders, decreasing real minimum wages, reduced worker protections, and the increases in outsourcing domestically and abroad have disempowered workers with profound consequences for the labor market and the broader economy” — and as an immediate consequence, a stronger grip by the masters on the policy agenda.
The decline of functioning democracy is not limited to the U.S. The impact on the social order of 40 years of bitter class war — the operative meaning of “neoliberalism” — is starker in the U.S. because of the relative weakness of the social protections that are the norm elsewhere, even such elementary matters as maternal care, found everywhere apart from the U.S. and a few Pacific islands. The most dramatic of these social failures is the scandalous privatized health system, with almost twice the costs of comparable societies and some of the worst general outcomes. (The rich are spared.)
Specific illustrations are startling. One recent study found that the “fragmented and inefficient” U.S. health care system was responsible for 212,000 COVID deaths in 2020 alone, along with over $105 billion in extra medical expenses in addition to the nearly $440 billion of extra expenses in normal years, all avoidable with universal health care.
These deficiencies go back many years, despite the very substantial improvements of the New Deal policies that have been under neoliberal attack. The pandemic has brought to light starkly the lethal nature of the business model that has been imposed during these destructive years. The outcome is aptly described by political economist Thomas Ferguson:
the pandemic shined a terrible, unforgiving light on how fragile a globalized world really is. “Just in time” production, off-shoring, transnational supply chains, and the hollowing-out of firms as they degraded workers into external contractors with lower wages and fewer benefits produced fatally brittle social systems. As the pandemic spread and transnational supply chains broke down, the cumulative impact of more than a generation of steady government cuts in taxes, safety nets, education, and—above all—health care became overwhelming. Virtually every country became paralyzed for a while. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and many developing countries, I think we will eventually recognize that the pandemic actually broke their social systems. As pandemic relief fades from memory and the gruesome toll of delayed deaths, long Covid, substance abuse, and mental health problems climbs higher and higher, the true dimensions of the havoc the pandemic wrought, not least on the U.S. labor force, will stand out more clearly.
Ideologues whose arrogance far exceeds their understanding have played a very dangerous game with the international social order for the past 40 years, not for the first time in human history. Those who gave the orders — the masters of mankind — may exult about their short-term gains, but they too will rue the havoc they have wrought.
The polarization you mention is very real, but the term is somewhat misleading. The Republican Party has been going off the rails ever since Newt Gingrich took control of Congress in the Clinton years. A decade ago, political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute observed that the growing polarization is “asymmetric.” The Democrats have not shifted greatly, but “The Republican Party has become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
By then, Mitch McConnell, the real evil genius of the radical insurgency, had firm grasp of the reins. The course to destruction of democracy took a further leap forward under Trump and has since reached a quite astonishing level.
The Texas Republican Party, which is at or near the radical extreme of the GOP, has just called virtually for secession. Its June 2022 Convention determined that Biden “was not legitimately elected,” so Texas is free to ignore decisions of the federal government. Going further, the Texas Republican Party condemns homosexuality as an “abnormal lifestyle choice,” calls for schools to teach that life begins at birth, and roundly condemns any restriction on guns, arguing that those under 21 are “most likely to need to defend themselves” and may need to quickly buy guns “in emergencies such as riots,” while claiming that red flag laws violate the due process rights of people who haven’t been convicted of a crime.
Texas may be leading the radical insurgency, but not by much. Some 70 percent of Republicans hold that the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump is the legitimate president. Half of Republicans believe that “top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”
A large majority think that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with voters from poorer countries around the world,” and there are other fantasies that would be hard to believe in a normal country.
That’s the Republican voting base, after half a century of refinement of the Nixon “Southern strategy.” The leading idea is to divert attention of voters from GOP dedication to the reinforcement of the Vile Maxim to “cultural issues” that can be exploited to make political capital of the justified resentment and anger elicited by the policies being instituted, the class war of the neoliberal years.
Admiration of this achievement of the masters is somewhat tempered by the fact that the new GOP was pushing an open door. By the 1970s, the Democrats had pretty much abandoned concern for working people and the poor, openly becoming a party of affluent professionals and Wall Street: the Clintonite party managers and the kind of people who attended Obama’s lavish parties.
There is, then, polarization. The Republican leadership became a radical insurgency while across the aisle the leadership found their own more moderate ways to join the class war.
That’s the leadership. The public, as usual, has not been silent. On the Democratic side, there has been a revival of New Deal-style social democracy, sometimes beyond, invigorated by the impressive work of Bernie Sanders. On the Republican side it has, unfortunately, descended to a form of Trump worship, reminiscent to an extent of the Hitler worship of 90 years ago.
A new report from researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities shows that the U.S. has fallen behind on climate goals, thanks to four years of Trump in power. Yet, the Biden administration itself is falling quite short on the climate crisis. With that in mind, and given the nature of the U.S. political system, how do we move forward in the fight against global warming?
This is the most important issue of all, for reasons it should be unnecessary to review. To repeat, there are still opportunities to save us from our folly, but the window is not wide, and it is rapidly closing.
The Trump years were an utter catastrophe for the world. Furthermore, the GOP became a denialist party well before Trump, ever since the Koch energy conglomerate brought a quick end to its brief recognition of reality under McCain. The last Republican primary was in 2016, before the Republican Party was taken over by Trump. The candidates were the cream of the crop of the GOP. At the time they not only all opposed to Trump but were scandalized by him.
Uniformly, the candidates said that what is happening is not happening, with two exceptions. Jeb Bush said that maybe it is but it doesn’t matter. Ohio Gov. John Kasich was alone in saying that of course global warming is happening, and humans have a significant role. He was praised for that, but mistakenly, because of what he added. Yes, the climate is being destroyed, but we in Ohio will continue to produce and use coal freely and will not apologize for it.
That’s the GOP before Trump took it over. It’s the GOP that is likely to be running the most powerful state in history very soon.
Under activist pressure, Biden adopted a climate program that was inadequate given the severity of the crisis but was a long step beyond anything that had preceded, and if implemented, would have had some positive effects and granted some time to move beyond. McConnell obstructionism put an end to that, with the help of a few right-wing Democrats, primarily coal baron Joe Manchin, the leading congressional recipient of fossil fuel funding.
More generally, all of the positive Biden programs, mostly crafted by Sanders, met the same fate. Discussion of this tragedy for the country mostly focuses on the few Democrat collaborators, but the real story is GOP obstruction. Quite unfairly, Biden is criticized for the failure to implement his program. Yes, he could have done more, but the blame falls on the radical insurgency.
The political factions dedicated to destroying organized life on Earth — not an exaggeration — are only apparently “the principle architects of policy.” Behind them are the masters of mankind. The Koch conglomerate intervention was a vulgar illustration. The processes are more pervasive.
One major program is reaching a dread consummation, as discussed earlier. It received a shot in the arm from the increase in gasoline prices, the major contributor to inflation, accelerated by Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. The euphoria in the executive offices of the fossil fuel companies is matched only in the offices of weapons producers. They no longer have to face the annoyance of fending off environmental activists. They are now praised for pouring poisons into the atmosphere and urged to do more, accelerating the march to destruction.
In a sane world the reaction would be different. We would seize the opportunity to move more rapidly to sustainable energy to save coming generations from a miserable fate. The temporary problem of inflation is severe, and can be overcome for those suffering from it by fiscal measures, and beyond. Options reach as far as turning the fossil fuel producers into a public utility. Robert Pollin has shown that they could literally be purchased by the government for a fraction of the sums that the Treasury Department poured into compensating financial institutions for losses during the early stages of the pandemic.
That’s hardly unprecedented. Second World War measures came close to that in practice. That was of course total war, but today’s crisis is even more severe, far more so in fact.
There are recent precedents. In 2009, the U.S. auto industry was on the verge of collapse. The Obama administration virtually nationalized it, paid off its losses, and returned it to the former ownership (with some new faces) so that it could continue with what it had been doing before.
There was another possible choice, had there been popular backing: Turn the industry to a new task. Instead of creating traffic jams and poisoning the atmosphere, produce what the country needs — efficient mass public transportation based on renewable energy, a better life for all and for the future. And a different ownership was imaginable: perhaps the workforce and community, something resembling democracy. There are many options. We are not limited to those that cater to the existing energy system and the grim fate that it is designing for the human species, quite consciously, with meticulous planning.
An alliance of Indigenous organizations in Ecuador have held daily demonstrations after sharp increases in the costs for fuel and food.
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) began their general strike actions on June 13 after huge price hikes crippled the capacity of rural and urban communities to access transportation and food for their households.
In response to the demonstrations and an assortment of other forms of resistance, President Guillermo Lasso has declared a state of emergency in several provinces of the South American state. The order reads in part that: “To declare a state of exception due to serious internal commotion in the provinces of Azuay (south), Imbabura (north), Sucumbios (east) and Orellana (east).”
America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
— Hunter S. Thompson, “September,” Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, p. 413.
Imagine, just how programmed are we, and this is it for an excuse?
So, the electricity will be shaky here, there, and everywhere. The excuse is, of course, supply chain. Ports are cloggged. Container ship chaos. They will not admit to the real reason for economic and spiritual collapse: CAPITALISM and PRICE gouging. It’s Putin’s fault.
Mass shootings, Roe v. Wade down the drain, empty shelves at hardware and food stores. It’s all Putin’s fault, including the price thieving for these electrical transformers, right? The $6 a gallon for gas in USA and $10 a gallon in Denmark, Putin’s fault. Mindless media midgets, and here we are: Western culture trapped in their own lies, inside their own self-fulfilling nightmares. Or continuous requiems for our dreams!
The lies and the shallow inquiries and the lack of curiosity, right up there with everyone is a used car salesman.
Journalism has always been dead in the mainstream:
The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.
Which is more or less true. For the most part, they are dirty little animals with huge brains and no pulse.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s, November 6, 2003.
But back to other lies, and other lackeys lacking an inquiring mind. Local news from the local rag I publish my columns in, has stories about the local happenings. No pushback, just inverted triangle reporting. Referencing the local Public Utilities District here in Lincoln County:
Like utilities nationwide, Central Lincoln is being greatly challenged by supply chain delays, material shortages and massive cost increases for materials delivered. Demand for electrical supplies is robust, while transportation bottlenecks and raw material constraints are causing us significant concern over our ability to meet construction timelines. As we address these issues, Central Lincoln will strive to maintain supply levels to meet customer needs, while still maintaining emergency inventories.
We’ve all seen supply chain issues impact many aspects of life today. In some cases, lead times for Central Lincoln have increased six fold in the last two years when we’ve placed orders for materials. For example, new residential transformers typically took four months for delivery prior to the pandemic, and now they take between one year to 20 months to arrive. Costs for materials are also soaring — transformers that were $2,500 two years ago are now $15,000 each, and the cost is continuing to increase. This is not an exaggeration. (source)
Read that again: $2,500 for necessary transformers two years ago now SIX times more, at $15,000?
This is what defines USA, Biden, Trump, McConnell, Pelosi, Carson or Maddow, the entire shit show that is the American stupidity show. And how unprepared are we? This is the colonized mind, and this is the state of the American culture, as well as UK’s and Canada’s and EU’s. If all of this were true, and if we were guided (sic) by sane and humane folks, there’d be massive movements and masterful national plans to nationalize industries and rejigger the entire mess of capitalism for a world, a nation, that works for the people.
Now, shifting over to Scott Ritter, military lover, but still, smart. He’s not on mainstream TV, in mainstream news. Again, the plastic hair and the Botox lips and the grappling girdles on these airhead TV presenters match their plastic brains. Here (below), he talks about how stupid Americans are (about world issues), and that includes what Yanquis do not know or want to know about the Nazi Ukrainians and this special military operation that Russia FINALLY had to unleash on that disgusting Ukraine and that perverted Zelensky and his crew.
But before Scott’s interview, how about a little black robe insanity. Here we are now, with that un-Supreme Court, doing their shit show decision to get into the uterus of the female persuasion. Eichmanns, one and all.
Imagine that? Supreme (not) Court now determining the legality of obesity, the calories, the sorts of foods, the environmental effects on the male perusasion. Will the male be held criminally libel for what they ingest and what they do to their bodies, their sperm, the RNA?
Let’s be consistent here, perverts?
There is substantial evidence that paternal obesity is associated not only with an increased incidence of infertility, but also with an increased risk of metabolic disturbance in adult offspring. Apparently, several mechanisms may contribute to the sperm quality alterations associated with paternal obesity, such as physiological/hormonal alterations, oxidative stress, and epigenetic alterations. Along these lines, modifications of hormonal profiles namely reduced androgen levels and elevated estrogen levels, were found associated with lower sperm concentration and seminal volume. Additionally, oxidative stress in testis may induce an increase of the percentage of sperm with DNA fragmentation. The latter, relate to other peculiarities such as alteration of the embryonic development, increased risk of miscarriage, and development of chronic morbidity in the offspring, including childhood cancers. (source)
Preparing for American Roe v. Wade protests in DC. Imagine that, Plywood USA. DC Police Gauntlets. AmeriKKKa.
This all connects, really, these issues of local electrical power outages, and war. War against Russia, and, well, local costs soaring: War against the people. Supply chain excuses. Oh, where oh where are those Republican pukes and Democratic pukes serving us, the people? Electrical outages? Check that one failure of leadership for massive deaths and injuries in simple households?
Ritter talks about Nato using nuclear weapons, talks about the stupidity of Americans, and actors and the cultural cancelling.
Here you go, Gonzalo Lira: Israel Provokes Russia
Because I’ve lost access to all my accounts and channels to the SBU (Ukraine’s secret police), I don’t have any way to promote my content—so please be so kind as to share this video with anyone whom you think might learn something. GL
He talks about how Jews, not just Zionists and those in Occupied Palestine, seem to collectively hate Russians. It’s racism, of course, to hate an entire people: Russians? And, will this YouTube be taken down? For the opinion of Lira saying that Jews seem to hate Russians, or, for, another reason?
So, on the Scheer Post, we get all sorts of mixed bag aggregated articles on Russia and Ukraine. Many are like this: “China Will Decide the Outcome of Russia v. the West: Is Putin the Face of the Future or the Final Gasp of the Past?”
John Feffer wrote it, and he is bought and sold — co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is a fellow at the Open Society Foundation and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The original article came from Tom Dispatch. Feffer is self-described Jewish gay.
Look up George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. Look up DSA’s stance on pouring weapons and death into Ukraine. DSA is all for billions of weapons to Ukraine, and billions for ZioLensky to “operate” the Ukraine government, err, Mafia. This is how these pencil necks see their world:
In its attempt to swallow Ukraine whole, Russia has so far managed to bite off only the eastern Donbas region and a portion of its southern coast. The rest of the country remains independent, with its capital Kyiv intact.
No one knows how this meal will end. Ukraine is eager to force Russia to disgorge what it’s already devoured, while the still-peckish invader clearly has no interest in leaving the table.
Here some comments at Scheer Post, pushing back on this guy, and I won’t republish mine:
Robert Sinuhe:
This is what happens when you are seriously ignorant of facts. He seems to know what Mr. Putin is thinking which should prompt Mr. Putin to ask this fellow what he’s thinking. Complete nonsense!
Roger Hoffmann:
What a disappointing read from Scheerpost. As others have already noted the repeated falsehoods (Russiagate) and baseless claims (Russia wants to swallow Ukraine) and others, I won’t waste the time addressing them either.
I will only say that it is apparent that this writer, in stating a narrative that overlaps much with that of Washington and its mouthpieces, seems oblivious to (or else, dishonestly chooses to ignore) much of the actual history of this conflict- the context in which it emerged, the pleas and warnings not only by Russia but of many seasoned U.S. officers from military, Intel and Diplomatic corps alike, and that of Russia-expert western scholars; and the actions of the U.S. since 2014 at least.
My advice to the writer: please don’t write about things that you know so little about, especially if you want to persuade those who’ve taken the time to become informed.
Terrence Bennett:
Tom Dispatch is a now sadly Pro Nazi source for regressives.
I urge Robert Scheer to monitor and reject many former progressives who now appear on organs like the late great Tom Dispatch
So, taking it in the rear? The back alley abortions. The behind the box store automobile trunk deals for prescriptions and diapers. The people have a choice in what money goes here and there? No massive strike, rolling strikes, rebellion? Our lives are gutted more and more each day!
Rents? Is that on the Republicans’ and Democrats’ agenda?
Gerardo Vidal, who has lived in the same apartment in Queens, New York, with his family for 9 years, recently received a $900-a-month rent increase this year.
“It means having to uproot my entire family, given the fact we’re still having a difficult time earning money due to the pandemic and loss of jobs,” said Vidal. “It’s unfair that we are being basically forced out of places we lived in for nine years and that landlords can get away with this.” (source)
We’ll finish with Richard Wolff, on Capitalism and US Empire now that USA-Klanada-EU-UK are dumping their weapons on the world, and then a Brit who has been in Donbass reporting on the ground:
“The Economic, Political and Social Crisis of the United States.” One hour!
Here you go, the Nazi Zio-Zelensky using USA-French-German-Nato weapons to, well, bomb neighborhoods, bomb apartment blocks, bomb universities, bomb bomb bomb, and there are NO military targets in these volleys.
Graham Phillips: “20+ Minutes in Donetsk Under Shelling Just Now – Uncensored, Love Donbass, do what you can to help Donbass.”
Reality therapy. So, those transformers cost so much, uh? How many transformers in Donbass have been imploded by the USA-UK-France-Germany? Keep reading:
“National Security State Censoring of Anti-Imperialist Voices… the Latest Phase of its Long-Term Strategy to Divide and Control the Left” on Dissident Voice, by Stansfield Smith
In 1977 Carl Bernstein revealed CIA interconnections with the big business media. More than 400 journalists collaborated with the CIA, with the consent of their media bosses. Working in a propaganda alliance with the CIA included: CBS, ABC, NBC, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, United Press International, Miami Herald, Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald Tribune. The New York Times still sends stories to US government for pre-publication approval, while CNN and others now employ national security state figures as “analysts.”
Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat operate similarly, participating in covert British government funded disinformation programs to “weaken” Russia. This involves collaboration with the Counter Disinformation & Media Development section of the British Foreign Office.
The CIA pays journalists in Germany, France, Britain, Australia and New Zealand to plant fake news. Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the largest German newspapers, showed how the CIA controls German media in Presstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA. Ulfkotte said the CIA had him plant fake stories in his paper, such as Libyan President Gaddafi building poison gas factories in 2011.
The CIA was closely involved with the long defunct National Students Association and with the trade union leadership. The AFL-CIO’s American Institute of Free Labor Development, received funding from USAID, the State Department, and NED to undermine militant union movements overseas and help foment murderous coups, as against President Allende of Chile (1973) and Brazil (1964), as well as defended the rule of their masters at home. This continues with the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, which receives $30 million a year from NED.
The CIA created publishing houses, such as Praeger Press, and used other companies such as John Wiley Publishing Company, Scribner’s, Ballantine Books, and Putnam to publish its books. It set up several political and literary journals such as Partisan Review. This CIA publishing amounted to over one thousand books, mostly geared to a liberal-left audience, seeking to bolster a third camp left, and undermine solidarity with the once powerful world communist movement.
Ahh, those transformers:
No national movement to, well, nationalize the construction and deployment and installation of these valuable electrical units? Summer, heat, fridges, AC, fans, oxygen machines, well, you get how valuable electricity is and how dangerous disruption of it kill.
No Marshall Plan for that? For clinics in all neighborhoods? Social workers and counselors for millions of students? Aging in place adults, no help for them? All those with Complex PTSD?
Again, one little Oregon County, and, shit-show number 9,999,999, coming to a city-town-county-place near-by.
Footnote: So, I went to pick up some vital medications at the Walgreens in Newport. Lo and behold, that electrical outage a few days ago fried the Walgreens’ computer — here, in Newport, and then, in Lincoln City. So, there were people lined up, freaked out since some of their meds are, well, life saving. That’s it for America, and it will only get worse as I wait in a line of 20 at the small USPS office in Waldport, where signs say, “Don’t leave junk mail here since we do not have a janitor . . . We are short staffed so we have to cut Saturday pick up window services . . . Please be patient as we are understaffed.”
USPS, and Trump and Biden. Whew! Ben Franklin is turning in his grave. The light is out on his kite. Remember, USPS is a public service, and it is one foot in the grave:
What this report finds: The United States Postal Service is a beloved American institution that provides an essential public service to communities and good middle class jobs for workers. It is a model of efficiency and responsive to changing customer needs. But the conflicting demands made upon it by Congress and regulators put it in a precarious financial position even before the pandemic. Anti-government ideologues and special interests have long sought to privatize, shrink, or hobble the Postal Service. The Trump administration revived these efforts, spurred by the president’s opposition to mail voting and his animus toward Amazon, a major customer.
What needs to be done: The Biden administration and Congress must act to undo the damage and allow the Postal Service to adapt to meet unmet needs, including the revival of postal banking. (source)
Defying the state of emergency, enduring brutal police and military repression, hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians continue to remain on the streets against neoliberalism, reports Tanya Wadhwa.
People deserve a fair share of the wealth we build in this country, but right now, Americans’ paychecks are being squeezed while corporate CEOs make windfall profits. Any plan that seeks to address inflation, like President Joe Biden’s recently published piece in the Wall Street Journal, should acknowledge how corporations and the very rich are using our pain to push a false narrative about how we got here. Whenever they can, corporations blame workers who organize against unsafe, unfair workplaces, and voters who demand the public investments we need.
Let’s be clear about what’s really happening here: Prices are rising faster than wages, and the wages paid by corporations are not keeping up with rising productivity, nor is the federal government making the needed public investments to prevent serious economic hardship for the working class. While tens of millions of people were forced into poverty during the pandemic, billionaires got $1 trillion richer last year. And, as the recent report from People’s Action and Demos showed, corporations just spent millions of dollars to kill the Build Back Better agenda, which would have lowered costs for everyday people.
People do not have enough money because corporations and the very rich want it that way — and their propaganda blitz about inflation is designed to keep it that way. To truly understand their strategy, let’s take a step back.
When former President Ronald Reagan and the corporate forces behind him wanted to end the era of the New Deal, which dragged this country out of the Great Depression and lifted millions out of poverty, he leaned on fears about inflation. “Inflation,” he said, “is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man.”
But inflation is about rising costs and who bears them, and while he was activating people’s fear-based mentalities about it with violent imagery, he and his allies were destroying the public structures that kept costs down for everyday people and attacking the main institution — unions — that defended worker pay and working conditions.
He frequently misled audiences about the relationship between inflation, taxes, and budget deficits. The basic frame he brought to bear was one of discipline — or, austerity and authoritarianism. By terrifying people about inflation, enabling the deeper exploitation of workers, and scaring the public away from public investments, Reagan ushered in a toxic era of neoliberalism that led directly to the crises tearing our country apart today.
You can see this squeeze play operating in politics now, from the factory floor to the halls of Congress. When PepsiCo announced billions of dollars in payouts and stock buybacks in its second-quarter earnings call for 2021, the company also announced that it intended to increase “productivity” at its facilities — facilities at which workers had just gone on strike for being forced to work “suicide shifts,” or schedules with only eight hours off between shifts and 84-hour work weeks with no time off. One worker published a public letter days before the earnings call, in which she described one employee dropping dead at the plant in question only to have her supervisors move the body and slot someone else in to maintain that productivity.
Meatpacking corporations made similar moves, including Tyson Foods. Last January, Tyson had to agree to a $221 million price-fixing settlement, but in the following year, their net profit soared by 47 percent while they gave out $700 million to shareholders. A few months ago, Tyson’s CEO’s credited rising meat prices for doubling the company’s profit.
So, what was happening on the factory floor while Tyson was raking in these profits and jacking up food prices?
In 2020, Tyson’s legal department drafted an executive order for the Trump administration to “insulate meatpacking companies from oversight by state and local health departments and provide legal protection against lawsuits for worker illnesses and deaths,” according to a new report from the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis. According to the committee, the meatpacking giant made “baseless” claims of an imminent meat shortage to justify keeping workers in their facilities as the pandemic took off, putting consumers and workers at risk. The result? During the first year of the pandemic, Tyson saw roughly 30,000 employee infections and 151 employee deaths, the worst among major meatpackers.
The organization I work for, People’s Action, has been on the front lines of the battle to win the Build Back Better plan, before it was killed by a corporate Democrat. It has been a bruising fight between everyday people on the one hand and entrenched corporate power on the other. Our member organizations from West Virginia to Arizona and a bunch in between hosted direct actions exposing corporations for their behind-the-scenes puppeteering during the Build Back Better battle. We won some real victories, like cutting child poverty in half through the American Rescue Plan’s child tax credit and rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, but corporations are doing everything they can to stop this kind of legislation.
The same folks who will work a person until they collapse and die on the factory floor will certainly stop at nothing, including misleading us about the source of our pain, to keep profits sky-high. That’s exactly what they are doing when they spin rising prices at the grocery store and the gas pump as end-of-the-world economics. They want you to believe it’s your fault, not theirs, because you had the gall to elect leaders who would lower costs for you for once instead of the rich.
When corporations and their shareholders make record profits, when their CEOs bring home $21 million and some change every year, when their stock prices break records — when all of these things are true and they still raise prices and try to force their employees to deliver “higher productivity,” to work until they break — the problem is not that we demanded that our elected officials pass the reforms and investments that we need to survive. The problem is greed.
From the early hours of Monday, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) began a national strike against the government of Guillermo Lasso by blocking highways in provinces such as Pastaza, Napo, and Guayas.
CONAIE President Leonidas Iza said that the social mobilization, which will continue for an indefinite period of time, emerges as a result of the reluctance of the Lasso administration to continue the dialogue process, the last meeting of which took place on November 10, 2021.
Since then, Indigenous communities and farmers have been requested the reduction of fuel prices, the renegotiation of debts, the reduction of interest rates, fair prices for agricultural producers, job creation, and respect for labor rights.
Millions of Britons are suffering from stress-related mental disorders. The number of people with anxiety has been steadily rising for years. According to NHS statistics, more than six million people in the UK are taking antidepressants.
There is an acceptance that wide-scale mental distress is an unavoidable part of modern life. The general response to the crisis by government bodies and the media is to call for more treatment. While increased support is necessary, the focus on treatment hides the extent to which society is often responsible for personal distress.
The cause for much of this depression is social and political. Under neoliberal governance, workers have seen their wages stagnate and their working conditions and job security become more precarious. The individualising and privatising forces that underpin capitalism have led to the breakdown of communities and social bonds, leaving millions of people lonely.
Given the increased reasons for anxiety, it’s not surprising that a large proportion of the population diagnose themselves as chronically miserable. Converting that depression into a political anger is an urgent political project. This should be the job of the left, who are the natural critics of capitalism. I believe that we should develop a kind of ‘leftist psychotherapy’ in which mental distress is explained in relation to the power structures of society.
In this endeavour the work of British clinical psychologist David Smail (1938-2014) is instructive. His writings provide a searing critique of the psychology establishment, and a social constructivist model for how to better understand mental distress. I believe that building on his work could have a tremendous impact.
The Role of the Psychology Establishment
In his seminal text Power, Interest and Psychology, Smail explains how mainstream psychology reinforces the status quo. It does this by diverting us from connecting mental distress to the material circumstances that condition our lives. ‘The psychology establishment has nothing to say about how to apparatus of power and interest that so clearly operates at the level of society comes to be reflected in the subjectivity of individuals – or even whether it does’.
Psychology has become a technical profession, like chiropody or dietetics, which focuses on the pragmatics of relief rather than on any more abstract intellectual or scientific enterprise. The dominant forms of treatment in mental illness are drugs and therapy.
Antidepressants contain people’s depression rather than actually deal with the causes of depression. The focus on brain chemistry creates a horrible loop whereby massive multinational pharmaceutical companies sell people drugs in order to cure them from the stresses brought about by working in late capitalism. In this context, the message to patients is cruel; if you’re depressed because of overwork, that’s between you and your brain chemistry!
Smail was critical of therapy. He suspected that it is only effective to the extent that the therapist becomes a true friend to the client, involved in their world. The supposed process by which people are ‘cured’ of mental illness once they gain ‘insight’ into their problems is illusory, and therapists are to a large extent involved in wishful thinking.
He argued that therapeutic psychology gives patients a false understanding of reality. The focus on the individual turns ‘the relation of person to world inside out, such that the former becomes the creator of the latter. If the story you find yourself in causes you distress, tell yourself another one’.
Counsellors and therapists have a stake in maintaining an individualist and idealist account of emotional distress, for only such an account can legitimate the role of professional practitioner. ‘Psychology tries to be objective like a science – explanations of activities or interests undermines the ‘scientific’ rationale for our practice’.
This is not to say that drugs or therapy are harmful. Being able to talk to someone for an hour in therapy or having something which will take the edge of things via anti-depressants can make people feel better, but it doesn’t get to the sources of that sort of misery in the first place.
A Sociomaterialist Explanation of Mental Distress
Smail argued that feelings of well-being fundamentally arise from a public world. And in a society in which the concept of the public has been so viciously and systematically attacked – it’s no surprise, he argues, that distress has increased.
Interest and power are what determine events in our lives more than we are allowed to acknowledge. ‘The strength and integrity of the subject is determined not (as therapeutic psychology would have us believe) by efforts of individual will, but by the adequacy or otherwise of the environment (including, crucially, the public societal structures) in which it is located.’
It follows that where public structures are stable, supportive and nurturing, the individual may blossom and flourish; where they disintegrate the subject becomes demoralised and depressed.
To solve the mental health crisis we must ask broader ethical questions about how we treat each other. ‘We are bodies in a world: of course, in a physical world, but also a socially structured, material space-time in which what we do to each other has enormous importance’.
A Way Forward
To solve the mental health crisis it is necessary to critique the social conditions that we live in. Widespread mental illness is a hidden cost of neoliberal capitalism. Market forces have created heightened instability and alienation which has resulted in mass psychological distress.
The medical establishment reinforces the status quo by privatising stress. Those who struggle to meet the expectations of society are told that the problem is their family background or in the chemical make-up of their brain. There is a case to be made that anti-depressants and therapy are now the opiates of the masses.
As a collective, there is an urgent need for us to connect mental distress to systems of power and interest. If someone struggles to meet the cost of living, or to cope with the instability of working in the gig economy, it is vital that they understand that millions of other people are suffering for the same reasons. Those incapacitated by depression and anxiety often feel tremendous guilt and self-loathing. By connecting their illness to broader social forces, they may apportion less blame to themselves.
We need to challenge the idea that wide-scale mental distress is an unavoidable part of modern life. The kind of world we want is an ethical choice. We are not bound to accept that the ‘real world’ is one in which the ‘bottom line’ defines what is right and wrong. The ruthless world may be chosen, as it is by the current rulers of the globalised neo-liberal market. It can also be rejected.
The awareness that neoliberal governance is causing wide-scale mental distress can be a catalyst for social change. The left can drive this process by developing a ‘leftist psychotherapy’ that provides a theoretical framework for how the material conditions that we live in cause mental illness.
Violence is the oxygen of authoritarianism. It is the symbolic and visceral breeding ground of fear, ignorance, greed and cruelty. It flourishes in societies marked by despair, ignorance, lies, hate and cynicism.
Violence — and especially the killing of children such as the mass killing that occurred this week at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, leaving at least 19 students dead — can’t be understood in the immediacy of shock and despair, however deplorable and understandable. The ideological and structural conditions that nourish and legitimate it have to be revealed both in their connections to power and in the systemic unmasking of those who benefit from such death-dealing conditions.
Among Democrats, the general response to mass violence in the U.S. is to call for more gun regulations and criticize the NRA, gun lobbies and the weapons industry. This is understandable given that the arms industry floods the United States with all manner of lethal weapons, pays out millions to mostly Republican politicians, and in the case of the NRA has sponsored an amendment banning “any federal dollars from being used to research gun injuries or deaths in the US.”
We should indeed criticize the gun lobby and arms industry, but this critique does not go far enough. The tragic murders of the 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in rural Texas at the hands of a young man who resorted to a horrific act of violence — and the killing of Black shoppers in a Tops grocery store in Buffalo by a hate-filled racist and self-proclaimed fascist — represent the end points of a culture awash in guns and violence, a society that nourishes and rewards the gun industries, and values the accumulation of profits over human needs. All of the latter is amplified by a modern Republican Party that accelerates a gun culture, revels in violence as a form of political opportunism, strips young people of crucial social provisions, and enables a culture of lies that make it difficult to discern the truth from falsehoods, good from evil. New York Times columnist Charles Blow rightly claims that “The Republican Party has turned America into a killing field.”
In the current historical moment, the market-driven values of “freedom,” choice and rugged individualism have merged with the concentration of power in the hands of the super-rich and corporations, an unbridled individualism, and a culture of terror and fear. One consequence is that the corruption of politics as big money is used to pay off politicians while using a corporate-controlled media to flood the culture with the notion that individual liberty is synonymous with unfettered gun rights. How else to explain that “Gun rights groups set new records for lobbying in 2021, spending over $15 million, with GOP Sen. Ted Cruz the biggest recipient,” as Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote this week. It is not surprising that Cruz responded to the mass shooting in a Texas elementary school by declaring that one way to solve the problem of school violence was to arm teachers. It is worth noting that, according to Al Jazeera, “Sales of weapons and military services by the world’s 100 biggest arms companies reached a record $531bn in 2020.”
While the power of the NRA, arms dealers such as Lockheed Martin — the largest war industry in the world — and the military-industrial complex to shape politics and a permanent war economy is indisputable, this is only one register of a form of gangster capitalism that believes that market values, which privatize, commodify, and commercialize all social relations, are more important than addressing vital human needs, crucial social problems and the public good. This is a logic that suppresses human rights, views the struggle for social justice as a scourge, and cancels out the future for young people. William Greider in his book Who Will Tell the People, published in 1992, stated that if the U.S. lost its civic faith in the promise of democracy, it “has the potential to deteriorate into a rather brutish place, ruled by naked power and random social aggression.” Greider’s words were not only prescient, they capture the loss of vision and cult of authoritarianism at work in the United States.
Under neoliberalism, democratic life has no vision and no meaningful ideological civic anchors. Neoliberalism strips society of both its collective conscience and democratic communal relations. Violence proliferates in a society when justice is corrupted and power works to produce mass forms of historical and social amnesia largely aimed at degrading society’s critical and moral capacities.
There are more guns in circulation in the U.S. than people in a country of 325 million. The U.S. constitutes 5 percent of the world’s population and owns 25 percent of all guns on the globe. Judd Legum in Popular Information reports that in 2020, “39,695,315 guns were sold to civilians.” He notes further that this is an alarming figure given that “firearm ownership rates appear to be a statistically significant predictor of the distribution of public mass shooters worldwide.” Equally significant but not surprising is the fact that “More Americans have died from gunshots in the last 50 years than in all of the wars in American history,” according to NBC News. The Pew Research Center reported, “More Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2020 than in any other year on record.” What emerges from these figures and the relentless mass shootings in which young people have become an increasing target is the question of what kind of society has the United States become, and what are the broader economic, political and social forces that produce massive violence and its increasing collapse into authoritarianism?
As horrific as these figures are, the backdrop to the politics and plague of violence in the United States is rarely a subject of debate in the mainstream media. Even as specific policies are debated, what is ignored is a neoliberal economic system that feeds on self-interest, inequality, cruelty, punishment, precarity and loneliness. Neoliberal society fuels a criminogenic system that celebrates violence both as a source of pleasure and as an organizing principle of governance.
Neoliberal capitalism has given rise to a carceral state that criminalizes the behavior of young people, while filling the prisons with poor people of color, destroying their families and their futures. This is a system so cold-hearted that it refuses to renew the Child Tax Credit, pushing 3 million children below the poverty line.
The U.S. is the only country in the world where children as young as 13 are sentenced to prison without any chance of parole. Such policies are just one register of the slow and silent state violence waged against young people that works in tandem with the mass violence that is produced by a society in which injustice, poverty, fear and racial cleansing are central modes of governance. The irony here is that the current white supremacist Republican Party now claims it is the party dedicated to protecting children. This claim is ludicrous when tested against a party that bans books, models schools after prisons, demonizes transgender youth, assaults reproductive rights, and consistently puts policies in place that undermine efforts to lift children and their families above the poverty line.
Domestic terrorists now parade as politicians, and white supremacists dominate the Republican Party and revel in a civically depleted culture that has abandoned justice, ethics and hope for the corrupt currencies of wealth, power and self-aggrandizement. Increasingly young people are the targets of a form of gangster capitalism that has written them out of the script of democracy, placed them at the mercy of politicians who are self-proclaimed white Christian nationalists, and abandoned them through institutions that have broken from the social contract. Increasingly, they are stripped of their dignity, hopes, and in too many cases, their lives. This is the death machine of social abandonment and terminal exclusion that creates the conditions for blood to flow in the streets, schools, malls, supermarkets, churches, mosques and synagogues.
Young people are being killed in spaces that are supposed to protect them. In an age of fascist politics, mass violence has become normalized and is nourished by a culture of conspiracy theories, moral indifference, corrupt politicians, a social media that trades in hate, the normalization of mass shootings, and a grotesque public silence in the face of massive inequalities in wealth and power.
In such a context, it is not surprising that an increasing number of Republicans support violence as a tool for resolving political issues. It gets worse. The Washington Posthas reported that, “1 in 3 Americans say they believe violence against government can at times be justified.” Violence has become so widespread that it both neutralizes the public’s sense of moral outrage and shatters their bonds of solidarity. As society is increasingly militarized under neoliberalism, violence becomes the solution for everything. This is especially dangerous for those individuals who feel isolated and lonely in a society that atomizes everything. Some of these individuals turn to the internet and social media in search of community, often to be radicalized by white supremacist conspiracy theories, as was the case with the Buffalo shooter.
The culture of violence has intensified since the 1980s and has found a privileged place in the cult of authoritarianism in the United States. It is embraced, legitimated and endorsed by a Republican Party that uses gun violence and mass school shootings as part of a poisonous script designed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat argues to transform “public schools into death traps as part of a deliberate strategy to create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion conducive to survivalist mentalities and support for illiberal politics.”
Gun violence cannot be abstracted from a broader culture of violence and authoritarianism that calls for more gun ownership, more police and more national security. Moreover, both the gun industry and right-wing politicians who benefit from its profits are well aware fear and extremism sell more guns and generate lucrative markets for the merchants of death. The right-wing response to school shootings is as disingenuous as it is morally corrupt. In order to feed the coffers of the surveillance industry and other merchants of death, it calls for turning schools into armed camps, awash with high-tech security systems, more police, and more firearms for teachers while increasingly defining the purpose and meaning of schools through the language of a military culture. Such actions both cultivate a mass consciousness that worships violence even as it bemoans the terrible price it enacts on human life, especially when children become collateral damage in such a culture. The cult of violence in the U.S. is inseparable from cult of authoritarianism and the rise of neoliberal fascism.
In moments like these, we all must remember that justice is partly dependent upon the merging of civic courage, historical understanding, a critical education and robust mass action. There is a long history of resistance in the U.S. that is under siege and is being erased from schools, books and libraries by right-wing Republican politicians and their followers. This is not only an assault on historical consciousness; it’s also an assault on thinking itself, and the very ability to recognize injustice and the tools needed to oppose it. One consequence is that neoliberal authoritarianism now thrives in an ecosystem of historical amnesia and has become an accelerating agent of violence.
Authoritarianism as a death machine thrives by hiding in the language of common sense and the discourses of fear, terror and moral panic. As it becomes more widespread, it is normalized, becoming all the more destructive. Normalization is a form of mystification, and it can be seen in the way in which the larger forces behind mass shootings such as those at Tops supermarket and in the Texas school are often reduced to personal stories of individual grief and narratives limited to the assailants’ lives. As structural conditions are obscured, connecting the dots to a broader culture of violence becomes more difficult.
Hiding behind a rhetoric in which the political collapses into the personal and private troubles are removed from broader systemic considerations, power now functions in the service of a cabal of religious fundamentalists, charlatans of mass ignorance, the financial elite, and the corporate-controlled cultural apparatuses that trade in dishonesty, the spectacle of violence, and the demonization and dehumanization of anyone who is not a white Christian. Even worse, the modern Republican Party not only endorses calls for violence by members of its own party, including those made by Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others, but it has also become a party that openly views violence as a legitimate way to secure its desired political outcomes — to seize power and destroy democracy. Rather than being alarmed by violence, the Republican Party has created the conditions that suggest it wishes for even more. As Charles Blow observes, trading in fear and paranoia, the Republican Party terrorizes the public by claiming that “criminals are coming to menace you, immigrants are coming to menace you, a race war (or racial replacement) is coming to menace you and the government itself may one day come to menace you. The only defense you have against the menace is to be armed.” The only solution is to not only accept the American way of violence and death but to affirm it, be complicit with it, and in doing so legitimate it.
The killing of children turns this invisible scourge of power and its poisonous instruments on its head, if only for a moment, because of the shock of the unimaginable, gesturing at its roots the workings of current political and economic formations that function as a lethal force that turns everything into ashes. Such horrors cry out for connecting the endless threads of violence that mark the brutality waged against women, transgender youth, Black people, Indigenous people, undocumented immigrants, youth of color, disabled people, the environment, and all those considered disposable in this neo-fascist social order.
Against this authoritarian death machine, we all need to mobilize to turn despair into militant hope, critical analysis into action, and individual anger into collective struggles that refuse the seductions of gangster capitalism and its rebranded fascism.
On multiple fronts, youth are already at the forefront of this organizing. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, youth rose up against gun violence in unprecedented ways, creating the March for Our Lives and connecting the issue of school shootings with police violence, racial justice, and other urgent issues.
Youth are also speaking out and rising up in monumental ways regarding the climate crisis, racial justice, immigration justice, war, prisons, and more. Adults would do well to recognize, bolster and amplify these forms of youth activism to help them grow and gain momentum.
History is open, and the signposts of the current moment are waiting for a radical change in consciousness, institutions and action. How much more blood will flow in schools and other places where young people and adults live their lives before a sufficiently powerful mass movement arises to put an end to this capitalist architecture of ideological and institutional violence?
Resistance is the only option, and it has to be educational, structural, bold and disruptive — far removed from the weak call for a revitalized electoral politics or moderate gun reforms. Resistance has to breathe anger, outrage, and mediate a sense of moral righteousness through a mass movement for economic, environmental and social justice.
Frederick Douglass was right when he stated: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
How many more deaths can this country endure, how many more innocent children will be killed before a mass movement arises that can bring this brutal social order to an end?
Skidrow in Los Angeles, California (Photo: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) 
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