Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Text of my comments at the OCCUPY THE COURTS rally JAN 20th
We are here today to OCCUPY THE COURTS.
We are here today to protest the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission case. Today is the two year anniversary of this infamous 5-to-4 ruling in the Citizens United case.
I strongly disagree with this ruling. Let me tell you why.
In my view, a corporation is NOT a person.
In my view, a corporation does NOT have First Amendment free speech rights
In my view, money is NOT the same thing as speech.
A corporation does NOT have A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to spend as much money as it wants, without any disclosure, to influence our elections.
Corporations should not be able to go into their treasuries and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a campaign in order to buy elections.
This infamous 5-to-4 Citizens United ruling has radically changed the nature of our democracy.
These activist judges, legislating from the bench, with no respect to precedent or strict interpretation of the Constitution, took it upon themselves to further tilt the balance of the political power in this country toward the rich and the powerful at a time when the balance is already shifted far too much in their favor. History will record that the Citizens United decision is one of the worst decisions in the history of our democracy.
At a time when corporations have more than $2 trillion in cash in their bank accounts and are making record-breaking profits, the American people should be concerned when the Supreme Court says that these corporations have a constitutionally-protected right to spend shareholders' money to dominate an election as if they were real, live persons. If we do not reverse this decision, there will be no end to the impact that corporate interests can have on our campaigns and our democracy.
---Does anybody really believe that that is what American democracy is supposed to be about?
How will this impact our representatives in Congress and the Senate?
When an issue comes up that impacts Wall Street, like breaking up huge banks,
what will senators and congressmen be thinking about when they decide how to vote? Every member of the Senate, every member of the House, in the back of their minds will be asking this: If I cast a vote this way, if I take on some big-money interest, am I going to be punished? Will a huge amount of money, funding negative attack ads be unleashed in my next election?
It's not just taking on Wall Street. It is any issue that effects corporate interests.
Maybe it's taking on the pharmaceuticals industry by trying to regulate new drugs.
Maybe it's taking on the private insurance companies by trying to reform health care system.
Maybe it's taking on the military-industrial complex by trying to end our overseas wars.
Maybe it's taking on the energy companies by trying to stop fracking or mountaintop removals
Whatever powerful and wealthy corporate interests Congress is prepared to take on -- on behalf of the interests of the middle class and working class families of this country -- they will know in the back of their minds that there may be a tidal wave of corporate money coming back at them. They're going to think twice about how to cast that vote.
When the Supreme Court says that for purposes of the First Amendment, corporations are people, that writing checks from the company's bank account is constitutionally-protected speech and that attempts by the federal government and states to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, when that occurs, then our democracy is in grave danger.
We are here today to OCCUPY THE COURTS and CALL FOR A MOVE TO AMEND that would reverse Citizens United and begin to get a handle on this problem.
Will this action today solve all the problems with our elections? No
Will a Constitutional amendment solve all our problems? No
Much more needs to be done.
But nothing can be done until we reverse this Citizens United ruling.
---
We have got to send a constitutional amendment to the states and the directly to the voters of all the states that says simply and straightforwardly and in no uncertain terms what everyone - except five members of the United States Supreme Court - already knows and understands:
Corporations are not people with equal constitutional rights.
Corporations are subject to regulation by the people.
Corporations may not make campaign contributions -- the law of the land for the last century.
And Congress and states have the power to regulate campaign finances.
ONLY then can we begin the process of getting all big money out of our elections.
This is going to be a hard fight, it will not be easy, but if you believe in democracy, if you believe in the rule of law, if you believe in free and fair elections, it is something we must do and we must do it together, starting now.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Text of Belden Fields teach in "The Myth of Corporate Personhood"
THE DISEMPOWERING FOG CREATED BY 14 IDEOLOGICAL MYTHS
Prepared for Occupy the Quad at the University of Illinois, Urbana 1/19/12
by Belden Fields
1. The myth that the corporation is a person with the rights of individuals.
This myth existed well before the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, but that decision put the icing on the cake.
In so ruling, the conservative majority violated two of its fundamental principles, that of judicial restraint (it did not have to approach that issue to resolve the case), and that of respecting the precedent decisions (stare decisis) by overturning two previous Supreme Court decisions. Moreover, conservatives have almost always denied group rights in favor of purely individual rights, (e.g., rights of minorities as a group). But when it comes to the interest of corporations in politics, it supports the fiction that the corporation is a person. While money has played a huge role in American politics in the past, (e.g., the Senate has long been the political club of millionaires, and families such as the Kennedys and the Rockefellers have had inordinate influence in American politics), the Superpacs that can now spend unlimited amounts for candidates have elevated the power of money to an unprecedented level.
2. The myth that Supreme Court represents a higher interpretation of law that transcends partisan politics.
As I learned in my constitutional law course in the late 1950s, judges always have had their own ideological bents that have influenced their decisions as they interpreted laws. But judges were not always predictable, e.g., why Republicans rail against former Republican governor Earl Warren who was appointed by President Eisenhower and turned out to be quite liberal. In our present climate, the two parties try very hard, and succeed, to make sure that the justices nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate have long ideological track records so that they will not turn out to be a surprise like Warren. The right-wing Federalist Society of lawyers has become a very potent pressure group in this regard, and its influence in law schools, particularly among law faculty in the Law and Economics (not by chance) field has grown significantly over the past decade. We now see more consistently than ever the 5 to 4 Republican/Democratic split in so many Supreme Court decisions. Indeed, Justice Clarence Thomas has broken precedent by speaking at Republican and right-wing political events while sitting on the court.
3. The myth that money is speech; therefore, money spent freely in elections is protected by the First Amendment right to speech.
Money is not speech. Money is a tangible scarce resource with an enormous power potential. Speech is not a scarce resource. Unless someone is afflicted by a physical malady that renders one mute, anyone can speak. The opportunities for speech in both oral and written form have been magnified by electronic technology.
As money is accorded greater freedom to play a powerful role, speech is being curtailed in the United States by restrictions, and sometimes outright prohibitions, on the right to demonstrate and protest, especially at meetings of the economic and political elite structures (e.g., meetings of the World Trade Organization, the Free Trade of the Americas, the G8, Davos, and the political party conventions).
But the power of money to speak is very well protected indeed.
4. The myth that the interests of large corporations is in the interest of workers because they create jobs and raise standards of living.
This is what Mitt Romney is arguing in defense of Bain Capital that has thrown so many workers out of their jobs. In fact, the large corporations are attempting to create an economy with the lowest possible wage and benefits for workers.
What has stood in their way more than anything, is the power of organized labor.
As the economic historian Gar Alperovitz has pointed out, after the Great Depression and the common sacrifices of the Second World War, a system emerged whereby a reasonably developed labor movement could check the most draconian instincts of corporations. There were social supports from the New Deal, and the Truman Administration was relatively supportive as well. The rate of unionization was about 35% of all workers.
Now the rate of total unionization is less than half that, 16 or 17%. In the private sector it is only between 6 and 7%. Corporate America, with the help of Republican national and state administrations, has been pushing an agenda of low wages and benefits, moving plants first from the unionized North to the South and then overseas, weakening the Labor Relations Board, firing union organizers, breaking strikes with replacement workers (since Reagan’s replacement of the air controllers), and Right to Work Laws such as that now being proposed in Indiana. At the same time, Republican governors in Wisconsin and Indiana have been attempting to break the unions in the public sector, the most highly unionized of any American sector. The Citizens United decision will be useful to those trying to elected more such anti-worker governors and legislators.
5. The myth that “right to work” laws really protect workers’ rights.
What so-called “right to work” laws really attempt to do is finish off what remains of the power of unions to contest the power of the corporation. To defend worker rights, unions need to have the economic means by which to represent workers’ interests vis-Ã -vis employers, the public, and political institutions. The intent of right to work laws is to deprive unions of that possibility by stipulating that no worker who benefits from union representation need pay dues into the union. This attempts to break the bonds of solidarity between workers and encourages “free-riding,” (i.e., enjoying a benefit for which one does not have to pay, thus increasing the burden on those who do pay.) It is the moral equivalent of telling someone in a community that he or she does not have to pay taxes to support the schools or fire department if they do not wish to, knowing full well that that will increase the tax burden on the rest.
6. The myth that government is the only source of bureaucracy that disempowers people.
It is true that bureaucratic governmental bodies at all levels can be rigid, intractable, and difficult to deal with. But the same is true of the private sector. Whether one deals with banks on foreclosure attempts, power companies on billing disputes, insurance companies on health-care claims, or any number of issues involving the consumer versus a large institution, people are often abused and disempowered. Disempowerment results form a combination of size of the enterprise, resources at the disposal of each interacting party, physical distance between them, and the medium and contact point of communication. That is true of both public institutions and private corporations. But it is in the interest of the corporate world to make people believe that only governments are bureaucratic because the corporations are trying to ward off government regulation that might favor the consumer, or that might prevent the corporations from degrading the environment.
7. The myth that economics is above moral concerns and the market will always, by definition, result in the greatest good for society.
This is a myth that was not even believed in by Adam Smith, the18th century Scottish philosopher and economist who is looked to by many as the premier historical capitalist thinker. It was given its greatest elaboration by the 20th century Austrian economist Frederick von Hayak, whose second volume of his three volume trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, is entitled The Myth of Social Justice. He and the rigorously individualistic novelist, Ayn Rand, have had perhaps the greatest influence on our contemporary free-market libertarian thinkers.
For Hayak, the only legitimate function of government, aside from the protection of a person from physical aggression, is to protect the free market rules and the enforcement of contracts. Aside from that, government should not be in the business of making determinations of what is or is not in the public interest.
Apart from the interests of the entrepreneurial group, there appears to be no such thing as a public interest in his thinking. Differential impacts to economic decisions and practices are of no public concern, unless they impose a negative impact on free economic activity. Solidarity, empathy, and material assistance to the needy should be purely a private matter handled at the level of family, church, fraternal organizations, or charities. They should be voluntary, purely at the discretion of the potential donor. The situation of the needy is a determination of the market, or the unwillingness of the needy to enter into market processes.
Except perhaps the physically impaired, the needy bear responsibility for their plight. The only hint he gives that there might be structural determinants of people’s plights, relationships of dominance and subordination that have significant moral implications, is a footnote admitting that it is disadvantageous to be born black in America. But even then, he might have agreed with his admirer, Ron Paul, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a bad thing because commercial property owners should be able to exclude people from their property on whatever criteria they choose. According to this conception, in the 1960s the southern lunch counter owners had every right to refuse service to blacks without governmental interference.
8. The myth that the United States is a democracy.
Actually, many on the right have argued that this is a myth, that the United States is not a democracy but something they call a “Republic.” Indeed, the founding fathers created barriers to democracy, such as property qualifications for voting, exclusion of women and Native and African Americans, indirect election of the Senate, and the Electoral College for the selection of the president. They were heavily influenced by the Roman Republic, which attempted to institutionalize balance between the senate of the wealthy and the assemblies of the more numerous poorer free citizenry (the plebes), as well as by John Locke’s absolutist adherence to property rights (so absolute that Locke cast one’s right to life as one’s right to the property in one’s body).
Whether the political order in either Rome or early United States actually offered a “balance” between classes or was more of a Republican justifying myth even then,
the fact is that today, after the industrial revolution, the growth of the modern powerhouse called the corporation, the globalization of that corporate economic power, and the extreme inequalities in income, accumulated wealth, and political accessibility, what we have is what Aristotle called an oligarchy, and which I prefer to call a plutocracy. Whichever term one uses, it means such a disproportion of economic and political resources that it can in no way be called a democracy or even any sort of balance of political influence between the classes.
During the Great Depression following the crash of 1929, everyone suffered. Wealthy people were jumping out of their office windows. As the economy recovered, thanks in part to the New Deal and in part to the economic boost of the Second World War, a significant middle class was created that served as a balancer between the very rich and the very poor. In our present situation, that middle class, which had a good bit of its wealth in its houses and relied upon a strong job market to keep those houses, is being devastated. The wealthy bankers and investors, far from jumping out of their windows, are walking out of their Wall Street office buildings and into expensive New York restaurants, having been bailed out by taxpayers who could ill afford it. There is thus no longer that balance which even conservatives had argued was essential for sustaining their favored form of government.
If our modern Federalists can no longer have the original property qualifications for voting, they have leveraged wealth more heavily in the electoral system through the contrivances of corporate personhood and money as free speech.
The threat they face is that, just as the property qualifications were abolished and the electoral system became more inclusive at certain points in history, democratic forms might now be created as their capitalist “republican” system falters.
9. The myth that the only legitimate human economic human right is the right to private property.
I have argued in my book Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium that the basis for human rights is the potential for development that all human beings possess just by virtue of being human. I further argued that those human potentialities are developed within a web of cultural, economic, and social relationships that are both facilitating and constraining such development. Human rights are about facilitating the development through processes of what I call “co-and self-determination.” I further argue that ignoring the material, or economic, basis of this development is arbitrary and that while the right to private property is one human right, there are other economic/material needs that must be met in order for people to fully participate in the opportunities for development.
So, I try to make a logically persuasive argument for human rights to such needs as adequate nutrition, health care, housing, etc.
Some people are, however, not persuaded by logical argumentation but rather by whether a conception has been able to develop a consensus, or at least a majority agreement, around it. As of 2011, one hundred and sixty countries had signed and ratified the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which affirms such economic human rights. The United States stands outside this agreement. President Jimmy Carter signed it in 1977, but the conservatives in the Senate refused to ratify it. Once Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1980, it was doomed. Neither Republican nor Democrats have raised this issue in the Senate since then. So the U.S. stands with a small minority of countries outside of the overwhelming agreement that economic rights extend well beyond the right to private property.
10. The collateral myth that that social security, health care benefits, and pensions are unearned and unaffordable “entitlements."
In fact, social security, health care benefits, and pension funds are not something just given to people by some exterior entity, but are the result of working people earning them through contributions from their wages, taxes, and wage concessions.
11. The myth that privatization is always more “efficient” than public goods and services.
We need only look at the US health insurance and delivery system: millions of people uninsured and high disease and infant and adult mortality rates among the poor, especially the minority poor. Yet the US spends more on health care than any other country, $2.6 trillion, or $8,402 per person. That is 17.9% of the entire economy. For all this spending, the US, with the highest GDP in the world, ranks 37th on the World Health Organization’s ranking of world health systems. This is below not only all Western European countries, but also Columbia, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominica, and Oman. How does one define “efficiency?”
My own favorite tale regarding privatization was when I reserved a place on the train from London to Manchester shortly after the very reliable British Rail was privatized. Branson’s Virgin company was awarded the London-Manchester route. After informing my Manchester friends that I would arrive at a certain time, I was stunned after waiting some time at the station to be informed that Virgin had cancelled that train because not enough people had purchased tickets. Whose “efficiency” was being catered to here? Surely not the public’s.
12. The myth that the “official” unemployment rate in the United States is accurate and comparable to the unemployment rates in other countries.
We do not count people who have never been able to find a job, who have been unemployed for a long time and no longer claim benefits, and who are in prison—thanks largely to the war on drugs, over 2 million of them—a higher % of the populations than in any other country. People who have been released after serving prison time for felony convictions find it very difficult to find jobs and they too hide the real unemployment picture in this country, especially of Blacks who already have such a high unemployment rate. If these factors are taken into account, the actual rate of unemployment of working-age people is probably at least double the “official” rate, which would now put it at least in the 17% to 18% range.
This does not take into account the increase in the working poor, many of whom can only find part-time jobs that usually do not offer benefits.
13. The myth that the U.S. offers the highest rates of upward mobility in the world.
It was once true that the U.S. offered very high rates of upward mobility to its white male population. That is no longer true. The New York Times (1/5/11, A1:12) reports that five recent studies indicate that the U.S. is now less mobile than Canada and Western European countries, with family background and education being the major determinants. One study found that 42% of American men in the bottom fifth remain there. Sixty-two percent of American men and women raised in the top fifth stay there. When I first did work on class stratification and income disparities in the 1970s, the U.S. class structure showed less disparity in both income and wealth, and higher rates of mobility, than in most Western European countries. That has been completely turned around. We are now one of the most economically unequal and least mobile countries in the industrialized world.
14. The myth that there is no alternative to the capitalist system that manifests the above characteristics and treats the worker as a commodity.
There are some short and longer-term measures that democratically-minded people can fight for to try to counteract the plutocracy. These include an amendment to reverse Citizens United; opposition to the massive privatization; restoration of union rights to organize, bargain, and strike without employer intimidation or use of replacement workers; minimum wage laws that truly reflect the actual cost of living; more investment in public services and infrastructure; publically financed jobs programs with strong training components; a single-payer healthcare insurance system; strong anti-trust laws; highly progressive taxes at both state and federal levels with a closing of loopholes used by the wealthy; capital gains taxed at the same rates as other income; restoration of anti-trust laws (no more enterprises that are “too big to fail”); increased regulation over finance and banking; the restoration of the separation between investment and commercial banks; the retention of home mortgages in local banks or credit unions; the closing of phony off-shore tax havens for tax avoidance; criminal, not just civil, prosecution of corporate law-breakers; a national “usury” limit on credit-card interest; public financing of elections; and some element of proportionality in the electoral system so that parties, such as a labor or ecological party, might arise on the national scene to offer more critical perspectives in the seats of political power.
But we should also be thinking about a more fundamental and democratizing change within the economic structures themselves. Here I would propose devoting serious effort to the expansion of public services in some areas (e.g., health, transportation, energy, water), but cooperative forms of ownership in most of the others.
I use the word “expansion” when referring to cooperative ownership because this is not merely an abstract idea. There are some very interesting examples of more democratic forms of economic organizations that remain largely unnoticed. An observation by the economic historian Gar Alperowitz would startle most Americans. This is that thirteen million workers in the United States are working in worker-owned enterprises. This number is greater than the number of private sector American workers who are unionized. There are workers in single-plants, such as in the plywood industry in the Northwest (see the work of Edward Green), and there are attempts to create broader networks of worker-owned cooperatives as in Cleveland (see community-wealth.org).
The most successful form of federated worker cooperatives of which I am aware is Mondragon in the Basque area of Spain. Founded in 1956 by a Basque priest influenced by both Catholic social thought and the Welsh socialist industrialist Robert Owen, it is the seventh largest corporation in Spain, and the largest machine tool operation. It employs almost 84,000 worker-owners. Aside from approximately 80 individual cooperative industrial enterprises, it has its own technical college, bank, R & D lab, social insurance and pension fund, and retail grocery outlets. I strongly encourage people to view the two videos on Mondragon on the web at community-wealth.org.
We might draw some inspiration from Mondragon. First, when enterprises attempt to close down their operations in order to chase lower wage rates or taxes elsewhere, workers could be given an option to purchase the plants. A national cooperative bank could assist such workers, or other people who simply want to start producer cooperatives. Existing credit unions or local banks devoted to community development, such as the already existing Union Partnership Bank (formerly Shore Bank) based in Chicago, could be brought into such a cooperative financing network. States could be encouraged create state-owned banks, such as that in North Dakota, which might be more inclined to extend credit to cooperative endeavors than commercial banks might be.
In sum, we should not succumb to the pessimism that there are no alternatives to the dominant forms that control over lives. Sometimes we just have to imagine alternatives before they exist, like Robert Owen and Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, the Basque priest he inspired to create Mondragon. But often there are concrete examples of possible alternatives that do get attention by the dominant commercial media and so remain outside our field of consciousness. To empower ourselves, we need to both think anew and search out the pockets of democratic counter-power that are hidden under the cover of the disempowering ideological fog.
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Aside from practical action, I would encourage people to read the books of Michael Albert and Gar Alperovitz and “Toward a Political Economy of Human Rights,” chapter 5 of my own, Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
From George Orwell's "1984"
NYT: "Wanted Worldly Philosophers"
By ROGER E. BACKHOUSE and BRADLEY W. BATEMAN
Published: November 5, 2011
IT’S become commonplace to criticize the “Occupy” movement for failing to offer an alternative vision. But the thousands of activists in the streets of New York and London aren’t the only ones lacking perspective: economists, to whom we might expect to turn for such vision, have long since given up thinking in terms of economic systems — and we are all the worse for it.
Alain Pilon
This wasn’t always the case. Course lists from economics departments used to be filled with offerings in “comparative economic systems,” contrasting capitalism and socialism or comparing the French, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon models of capitalism.
Such courses arose in the context of the cold war, when the battle with the Soviet Union was about showing that our system was better than theirs. But with the demise of the Soviet Union, that motivation disappeared. Globalization, so it is claimed, has created a single system of capitalism driven by international competition (ignoring the very real differences between, say, China and the United States). We now have an economics profession that hardly ever discusses its fundamental subject, “capitalism.”
Many economists say that what matters are questions like whether markets are competitive or monopolistic, or how monetary policy works. Using broad, ill-defined notions like capitalism invites ideological grandstanding and distracts from the hard technical problems.
There is a lot in that argument. Economists do much better when they tackle small, well-defined problems. As John Maynard Keynes put it, economists should become more like dentists: modest people who look at a small part of the body but remove a lot of pain.
However, there are also downsides to approaching economics as a dentist would: above all, the loss of any vision about what the economic system should look like. Even Keynes himself was driven by a powerful vision of capitalism. He believed it was the only system that could create prosperity, but it was also inherently unstable and so in need of constant reform. This vision caught the imagination of a generation that had experienced the Great Depression and World War II and helped drive policy for nearly half a century. He was, as the economist Robert Heilbroner claimed, a “worldly philosopher,” alongside such economic visionaries as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx.
In the 20th century, the main challenge to Keynes’s vision came from economists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who envisioned an ideal economy involving isolated individuals bargaining with one another in free markets. Government, they contended, usually messes things up. Overtaking a Keynesianism that many found inadequate to the task of tackling the stagflation of the 1970s, this vision fueled neoliberal and free-market conservative agendas of governments around the world.
THAT vision has in turn been undermined by the current crisis. It took extensive government action to prevent another Great Depression, while the enormous rewards received by bankers at the heart of the meltdown have led many to ask whether unfettered capitalism produced an equitable distribution of wealth. We clearly need a new, alternative vision of capitalism. But thanks to decades of academic training in the “dentistry” approach to economics, today’s Keynes or Friedman is nowhere to be found.
Another downside to the “dentistry” approach to economics is that important pieces of human experience can easily fall from sight. The government does not cut an abstract entity called “government spending” but numerous spending programs, from veterans’ benefits and homeland security to Medicare and Medicaid. To refuse to discuss ideas such as types of capitalism deprives us of language with which to think about these problems. It makes it easier to stop thinking about what the economic system is for and in whose interests it is working.
Perhaps the protesters occupying Wall Street are not so misguided after all. The questions they raise — how do we deal with the local costs of global downturns? Is it fair that those who suffer the most from such downturns have their safety net cut, while those who generate the volatility are bailed out by the government? — are the same ones that a big-picture economic vision should address. If economists want to help create a better world, they first have to ask, and try to answer, the hard questions that can shape a new vision of capitalism’s potential.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Gar Alperovitz -- "If You Don't Like Capitalism or State Socialism, What Do You Want?"
Gar Alperovitz -- Schumacher lectures
November 5th, 2011
New York, New Economics Institute
Transcript
Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, and the co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative. He is the author of "America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy."
AmericaBeyondCapitalism.com
GarAlperovitz.com
Theory and Practice in OCCUPY by Shamus Cooke
For a movement that started with one strategy and a couple of slogans, Occupy has preformed brilliantly. Having based itself on the examples of Egypt and Wisconsin, the Occupy Movement has raised the political consciousness of millions and created a large layer of new activists. But the uninterrupted string of successes of Egypt and Tunisia haven’t materialized for Occupy. We’re in a lull period. Next steps are being considered and some tactics are being re-thought.
This is where revolutionary theory comes into play: a set of ideas that help guide action. Sometimes theory is learned unconsciously, where it resembles a set of non-ideological “assumptions” about movement building and politics. Occupy’s theory began mostly with assumptions, many of them true.
One assumption was that previous political theories have failed — that past social movements contained deep ideological flaws. There is more than some truth in these conclusions, but other truths were thrown out as well.
The youth who built Occupy were born as the Berlin Wall was falling; “communism” had failed. Mass disillusion followed the loss of a socialist movement that had inspired dozens of revolutions in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe when half the globe declared itself for “socialism.” Many socialist-leaning countries inflicted heavy damage on capitalism while a few had crushed it outright.
The United States spent the 20th century fighting these movements: the Korean and Vietnam wars, the failed invasion of Cuba, the dirty wars in Central America, countless CIA coups in South America, Africa, Asia and elsewhere (the history of the CIA is a history of fighting “socialism” by any means necessary). A U.S. domestic war was waged by the FBI and police against socialists and other left activists during McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950s. Nuclear war against the USSR and China was a button push away during the Cuban Missile Crisis. All of this madness was in the name of fighting socialism and revolution.
The U.S. wars against these socialist movements was not irrational. A very real fear existed that capitalism was in danger — that corporations would instead be run in the public interest. In some countries capitalism was destroyed. But what replaced it seemed no better, and in some cases worse. Why? The popular (corporate) explanation is that any break from capitalism equals “authoritarianism.” Another popular argument is that without rich people running the economy it would cease to run; there is no alternative to capitalism, we were told.
This analysis is biased, shallow, and stupid. The truth makes far more sense anyway.
To this day no wealthy country has had a successful socialist revolution. Many have come close, especially several European countries before and after WWI and WWII. The 1968 general strike in France pinned capitalism to the floor, but its life was spared; corporations were allowed to continue to run social life, the super-rich remained so.
Real socialism cannot exist in a poor country. If Haiti implemented a “socialist” economy tomorrow it would still suffer under post-earthquake rubble, mass homelessness and life-sucking poverty. A “healthy democracy” cannot exist in these conditions. A socialist economy cannot transform mud into gold.
But capitalism took centuries to transform poor countries into rich ones, and even today a tiny minority of rich countries dominate a hundred plus poor capitalist nations. Poor capitalist countries — like their poor socialist counterparts — suffer from a chronic democracy deficit, forever destined to remain poor.
If Haiti were to leave capitalism, however, it would be allowed to escape the profit motive of development; items could be built with social need in mind, not simply profit. China and Russia were able to develop into powerful countries by escaping capitalism. Eventually, however, their undemocratic leaders decided to give capitalism a second chance; these leaders wanted to exchange their bureaucratic privileges —access to better food and nicer cars, etc. — for the billions of dollars that come with ownership rights (it’s no coincidence that China and Russia are #2 and #3 on the “nations with the most billionaires” list).
Occupy is right not to embrace the fake socialism of the past, undemocratic as it was. But past socialist experiments contained progressive elements that shouldn’t be forgotten.
For example, revolutionaries learned that they could not let a tiny group of super-rich shareholders own and run giant corporations that employed thousands of workers and made socially useful goods. Instead, these companies could be made into public utilities, run by the workers, engineers, and office staff that already do all the work for the benefit of society in general.
Revolutionaries also learned that organization and collective action was instrumental in overcoming the organized opposition of the rich. Capitalism can only be overthrown by a real revolution that draws into action the majority of working people, using the tactics of mass demonstrations, mass strikes, mass civil disobedience, and other mass actions that help to give shape, organization, and unity to working people. Once a powerful and united movement emerges, it must ultimately challenge the corporate elite nationally, which means wresting the levers of state power from their hands and using new organizational methods to make the post-revolutionary country more democratic.
How have these lessons been ignored by Occupy?
In reaction to the non-democratic USSR, Occupy eschews “centralization” in favor of “decentralization.” Instead of decentralization simply meaning “democracy,” in practice it often means “disorganization” and extreme individualism. Any powerful social movement must inevitably be organized; and although Occupy seems to realize this with its useful experiments in direct democracy, the movement as a whole remains incredibly disorganized and uncoordinated.
This is important insofar as disorganization prevents collective action. The Pre-Occupy Movement — what little there was — consisted of “issue-based activism,” i.e., different groups working disconnectedly towards various goals. Occupy has the power to change this, to create real power for working people. Initially, Occupy had united all the various left groups while bringing in new blood. But the old habits of issue-based, fragmented activism were hard to break.
Many Occupiers are content with “autonomous” actions, i.e., small groups acting independently of a larger body towards various ends. Small actions have their time and place, but a powerful movement is one that inspires. Working people are given hope when they sense that a movement is able to achieve victories for working people, i.e., when it is powerful. And working people are only truly powerful when they are united and acting collectively in massive numbers (the corporate elite uses divide and conquer tactics for a reason).
One reason that Occupy is fearful of centralization (organization) is because being organized inevitably creates leaders. And since much of Occupy is “anti-authoritarian” (again in response to the failed USSR), “leaders” are not welcome. But leaders exist within Occupy regardless of intentions; saying that Occupy is a “leaderless movement” does not make it so.
The inevitable leaders of Occupy are those who dedicate their time to the movement, organize events, are spokespeople, those who help set agendas for meetings or actions, those who set up and run web pages, etc. In reality there already exists a spectrum of leadership that is essential to keeping the movement functioning.
Occupy needs both leaders and organization while still operating entirely democratically. It already has leaders who refuse to accept the title as such, much like Noam Chomsky does, the famous anti-authoritarian and leader of the anarchist left, who thinks that by saying he is “not a leader,” he ceases to be one. In reality his massive authority continues to exist outside of his humble intentions.
Occupy seems, at times, so fearful of power or creating leaders that many Occupiers would focus on neutering the movement, so as to prevent Occupy from ever having real power, and therefore preventing the movement from ever making real change. The left has long suffered from the self-induced fear that, if we have actual power, we’ll become like our oppressors, since “absolute power corrupts absolutely” (a hangover from yet another shallow analysis of past socialist experiments).
In Occupy, this expresses itself by a fanatical fear of the movement being co-opted. Yes, Occupy should be wary of Democratic Party representatives in sheep’s clothing, but this fear has infected and has spread throughout Occupy and now includes internal finger pointing and accusations of “co-opting,” creating more unnecessary divisiveness.
It is a healthy impulse to strive towards greater democracy and away from charisma-based leadership, but any idea taken to its extreme can become nonsense. To denounce real organization and leadership “on principle” is to vastly oversimplify the real processes of movement building while erecting unnecessary barriers in Occupy’s path to real power. To self-mutilate a movement because of leader-paranoia is similar to euthanize a puppy because of its potentially dangerous sharp teeth. In fact, true leaders can only emerge in the context of real democracy; both need the other.
There is no blueprint for movement building, but general principles can be erected based on the revolutionary experiences of the past. The key strategies of Occupy should be based on those ideas that unify and promote collective action against the 1%.
Ultimately Occupy needs to organize for power; we need a greater power to displace the current power of the 1%. This doesn’t mean that we must adopt the same forms of power utilized by the state, but that new ones must be created, while using EVERY opportunity within the existing structure to organize, educate, and mobilize working people.
Luckily, an upcoming action has the potential to put the above ideas into action. The current struggle of the Longview, Washington ILWU Local 21 is a chance to see real power in action. The Longview Longshoremen have asked for Occupy’s support to create massive mobilizations against the union busting corporate-conglomerate EGT. Hopefully this action has the potential to unite Occupy in practice over a concrete struggle. If the action– or actions– are effective it will prove that Occupy needs to organize and mobilize in large numbers over issues that connect with working people — proving that theory is best learned in action.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
soon-to-be ex-Governor Walker's cronies are falling like dominoes
Wisconsin governor Walker's crony buddies are charged with embezzling public funds! This is the same governor Walker who was trying to tell Wisconsin teachers, firefighters, police, and other public sector union workers to tighten their belts...meanwhile, he's taking over public funds that were meant for wounded veterans and families of dead soldiers and handing those funds over to a front group created by his crony buddies. Those crony buddies then steal that money to take vacations to Hawaii and the Caribbean...so go the charges.
Walker is guilty of nothing yet, except surrounding himself with these people, and then possibly throwing them under the bus. One of the arrested people was an aide of Walker's for a decade. Another of Walker's former aides is facing similar charges for embezzling. This stems from an investigation into Walker's staffers from the time when he was Milwaukee County executive. He appointed these people to handle the funds that he stole away from a group of veterans, then he turned the prosecutors onto mishandling of funds by one of his aides after the investigation started...hmm.
In the end, somebody took more than sixty thousand dollars away from veterans and their families, and the accused are people with decade-long ties to the already unpopular governor...soon-to-be ex-governor.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/some-responsibility-some-credit-in-john-doe-cases-vo3m7f3-136856138.html
http://www.progressive.org/scott_walker_and_stench_of_scandal.html
Friday, January 6, 2012
We need a logo!
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Portmanteau Capitalism
In linguistics a portmanteau is a blend of two (or more) words (or morphemes) into one new word. A portmanteau typically combines both sounds and meanings, as in smog which is a blend of the words smoke and fog.
In the way that many people use the term 'capitalism' today, it may be such a portmanteau in an ideological sense, blending positive ideas -- thrift, industry, productivity, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit while subsuming or embedding negative ideas -- corruption, greed, fraud, competition, cheating, and cronyism in the same term.
When one hears "Capitalism is the best, most productive system in the world," one may respond with, "Yes, best for the top 1% of the richest countries in the world. Not so good for the non-moneyed billions at the bottom." Capitalism has demonstrated time after time that it cannot supply the poorest segments of the world with potable water, salt tablets, basic shelter, or adequate health or nutrition. But it is still somehow best?
When one hears the complaint that socialism is inefficient and will lead to stagnation and declining standards of living, one has to look around and wonder, “Isn’t that what we’re facing now, after 30 years of deregulation, globalization, and free-market capitalism?” While the richest 1% sees their quality of life skyrocket, again we are left with the images of deprivation, want, and suffering worldwide.
Some will argue that capitalism hasn't been tried in those places of deprivation and want, that they are the preserves of corrupt, self dealing governments that exploit their people for the sake of a crony class." Yet that is a perfect description of our own political-economy racket, in which business and government seamlessly blend and blur in the nether realm of lobbying firms, defense contractors, self regulating business, and captured government regulators. It is only the existing wealth accumulation that masks the effects of a Banana Republic style crony capitalism in the U.S. The U.S. distribution of relative wealth as measured by the GINI index is approximately the same as that of Brazil, and China.
In a recent article in Monthly Review," Richard Peet examines many of these contradictions and concludes that "earlier competitive “liberal capitalism,” opposed to intervention by the mercantilist state, was transformed at the turn of the century into monopolistic “finance capital” which was integrated into a “centralized and privilege-dispensing state.”
He notes the tendency of "corporations heavily involved in production — automobile or steel makers, for example — [to] become increasingly financial in orientation, diversifying into credit, insurance, real estate, etc." This propensity for capitalism to migrate toward financialization and away from productive enterprises was also noted by Marx. Peet regards this as "the financialization of everything — meaning control of all areas of the economy by finance. The tremendous economic power of the new entrepreneurial-financial class enables vast influence over the political process."
In Peet's view, capitalism is no longer concerned with Adam Smith’s moral virtues of industry, productivity, probity and thrift. Rather, capitalism has fallen prey to the Casino vices -- recklessness, shortsightedness, indulgence, wantonness, greed and fecklessness. "Financialization has involved increasingly exotic forms of financial instruments and the growth of a shadow-banking system, off the balance sheets of the banks. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 symbolized the almost complete deregulation of a financial sector that has become complex, opaque, and ungovernable."
Capitalism has morphed into 'finance capitalism' occluding and subsuming the very productive industries that created wealth, growth and prosperity in the first place. Finance capital now preys on productive corporations as items to be broken up, their assets liquidated, financialized, or hedged, i.e. bet against.
When you encounter bromides about 'capitalism' and its supposed efficacy, try to determine if the speaker is portmanteauing the old, romantic vision of capitalism, with all its supposed moral virtues and promise of prosperity for all, into the modern, predatory, and destructive finance capitalism.