Only the previous year, the agency was given the go ahead through the NASA Authorisation Act to advance the cause of space commerce.  The Commercial Orbital Transportation Program (COTS) marked, in the words of Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of the Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office at NASA, ‘a significant NASA activity to implement the commercialisation portion of US space policy’.

One of those to first receive assistance from NASA was the US company SpaceX, an example of how the US hopes to catch up with Japan, Russia and Europe in being able to supply the ISS.  The situation became more acute once the shuttle program was retired in 2011.  Uncle Sam was falling behind.

SpaceX is owned by the modern, mercantile South African Elon Musk, PayPal’s co-founder, a billionaire who fancies himself as something of a modern Vasco da Gama, or, more likely, the brigand-like qualities of a Francis Drake.  The modern comparison has been to the fictional stinking rich character Iron Man, whom he is said to have inspired.  “We are really at the dawn of a new era of space exploration, one where there is a much bigger role for commercial space companies.”

That commerce is receiving funding from Washington in what are bound to be examples of space mercantilism.  SpaceX itself has a $1.6 billion contract, Orbital Sciences somewhere in the order of $1.9 billion.  As NASA administrator Charles Bolden explained, NASA’s interests are elsewhere – “exploring even deeper into our solar system, with missions to an asteroid and Mars on the horizon.”  The drudgery of transport was best left to the ‘private sector’.

Bolden’s own historical frame of reference is smaller.  “The Internet was created as a government endeavour but then the introduction of commercial companies really accelerated the growth of the Internet and made it accessible to the mainstream.”  He might well go back to the European courts of the fifteenth century, when aggressive colonial forces were unleased upon much of the world, courtesy of government trading companies.  An empire on earth can well move to one in space.  Indeed, Michael Milstein, writing for Popular Mechanics (October 1, 2009), did not shy away from the words “solar-system conquest”.

The Dragon space capsule, attached to the SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, is a versatile beast, able to carry both crew members (up to seven) and cargo.  And it will have few rivals.  The reality remains that space travel is a frightfully expensive business. The only individuals who tend to go into extra terrestrial orbit, leaving aside astronauts, are rather wealthy earth gazers with a fetish.  Till a formula is found to bring down costs and build cheaper equipment, space will, thankfully, be a less crowded place.  We might even claim it will be a less imperial place.  NASA is determined to change that.

1. If President Barack Obama is re-elected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.

2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like “a moderate Republican circa 1992″. Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected “creeping fascism.”

In today’s society — based on gross economic inequality facilitated by a two-party political system spanning center right to far right and where big money is the decisive factor in the electoral process — an ostensibly democratic election can hardly mitigate the worst of abuses afflicting working people and their families much less bring about substantial reform.

This dreary reality is offset by an important new development. For the first time over the last several presidential elections — when voters are usually cheering exclusively for their candidate — masses of people are protesting in the streets against inequality of income and opportunity, and the class war waged by the wealthy, as well as global warming, ending wars, dismantling NATO and the like. Some unions, too, are not simply backing Obama but protesting on their own against Wall Street’s depredations.

Thirty years of wage stagnation, the growing rich-poor chasm, evisceration of the so-called American Dream and the long, painful effects of the Great Recession are the objective conditions behind the developing political consciousness of many Americans. Like the Roman Catholic church after widespread evidence of priests molesting children, sacrosanct capitalism — the economic holy of holies — is finally attracting public criticism for its crimes and hypocrisy, not yet on a huge scale but growing.

The sudden entrance of Occupy Wall St. last September with an open critique of the substantial excesses of capitalism in American society, following the democratic Arab Spring and Wisconsin uprising, has energized much of the left and progressive forces. Nationwide May Day actions and the 15,000 who demonstrated against NATO in Chicago later in May, among other protests, including civil disobedience, are encouraging harbingers that many more people eventually will take their grievances to the streets and meeting halls, where all social progress begins. If this momentum manages to continue for the next few years it could become a broad and diverse national movement for social change — but it’s still a big “if.”

The political system seems no longer accountable to the public. Several matters of great importance to the American people do not even figure in this year’s election because both ruling parties basically agree  about them and there’s little to squabble about but details. The administration has taken the U.S. up to its elbows in the quagmire of war, so the conservatives cry, “up to the shoulders!” Here are some issues the voters won’t be able to influence at the ballot box:

• President Obama is presiding over U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, killing “terrorist suspects” in Somalia and wherever the CIA’s drones wander. May opinion polls show 66% of the American people want the expensive 10-year-old stalemated Afghan conflict to end, and 40% — many of whom want it terminated now — are strongly opposed. Only 27% support the war, 8% strongly. For all the chatter about nearing the end of the Afghan war at the NATO summit in Chicago May 20, Obama, days earlier, announced that he was prolonging the war a decade after his “final” pullout date at the end of 2014. An undetermined number of special forces combat troops, military trainers, and CIA paramilitaries will “defend” the corrupt Kabul government until 2024. American taxpayers will foot the bills — several billion a year. Progressive Democrats in Congress seek to restrain Washington’s penchant for wars, but they are consistently ignored and occasionally berated by the Obama Administration for their efforts.

• Most citizens want cuts in the war budget. But as they go to the polls, the American people will be lugging a military and national security behemoth on their recession-bent backs, costing about $1.2 trillion a year. Rumors of meaningful reductions are illusory. The Pentagon accounts for over half of this amount (about $642 billion for fiscal 2013); the rest goes to Homeland Security, 17 spy agencies, nuclear weapons, interest on past war debts, and so on.

• Global warming is here and getting worse while the White House is opening up new areas to drill for oil and supports massive development of shale-derived natural gas (which requires fracking), “clean” coal (though it does not yet exist), nuclear power, and dirty tar sands fuel. The Obama Administration’s support for alternative non-carbon development is a token tossed to the environmental movement. Meanwhile, the U.S. — which demands to be recognized as world leader — is using its leadership to undermine international progress in fighting climate change. Big business and Wall St., primarily concerned with expansion and greater profits, heartily approve. Like Rhett Butler, the conservatives, frankly, just don’t give a damn.

• Since he has borrowed populist phrases for the election, some of from Occupy, President Obama has finally at least mentioned poverty, inequality and low wages, but he has done nothing about this situation since taking office and will not put forward an anti-poverty program if reelected. The United States is the most economically unequal of the top 20 advanced, industrialized capitalist economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The U.S. also pays the lowest wages to its working class compared with OECD countries. Almost 25% of the American work force receives low wages (about $10 an hour down to minimum wage and below), usually without any benefits or health care. One in two Americans is low income or poor. The poor account for one in seven people. About 47 million Americans require food stamps to eat. Food stamps are the only “income” for six million of them. This has not come about by mistake; it’s the political system’s payoff to the ever-richer plutocracy and its minions.

• The Obama Administration has responded more resourcefully to the Great Recession than the conservative opposition, but it only goes a quarter or half  way in remedial action, which adds to the stagnation and prolongs the pain for the working class, lower middle class and a large sector of the middle class as well. When Obama delivers on the economy — whether in the stimulus, jobs, foreclosures, bank regulations, or infrastructure — it’s always partial and inadequate because the main concessions are made with the power structure up front before the inevitable compromises with the right wing. There’s a difference between talking like a fighter when trawling for votes, and avoiding confrontation as president. Krugman says “we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion.” This is a major reason why over 22 million Americas need but cannot secure full time work.

• President Obama has retained all former President Bush’s many erosions of civil liberties, particularly the onerous Patriot Act, and added many of his own, such as when he approved of indefinite detention for suspects, including American citizens. A unique coalition of liberals and conservatives in the House tried to pass legislation to reject indefinite detention May 18, but the effort was defeated. The U.S., under Obama, is becoming a full fledged surveillance state. Tom Engelhardt writes that “30,000 people [are] hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country.”

• Any listing of the important issues that are not part of the election campaign and over which the citizenry has no say must include a foreign/military/national security policy based on exercising world hegemony backed by military power. What’s the “pivot” to East Asia really all about, other than to weaken China in its own sphere of possible influence and cling to world domination? Why has the U.S. been taking steps to bring about regime change in Syria, other than to dominate yet another country and weaken Iran in the process? Why did Obama facilitate a violent civil war for regime change in Libya, other than to gain another oil-rich client state, but this time with an enormous aquifer under its sands which may become more precious than the oil as water supplies dwindle through North Africa? Why did the president get behind the coup in Honduras, other than to dispatch a potentially progressive regime friendly to Venezuela?

Further, why does Obama still maintain Cold War sanctions and a trade blockade against Cuba, other than to win Florida votes in November? Why is Washington supporting the vicious Sunni monarchy in Bahrain which routinely oppresses and attacks the Shi’ite majority seeking equality, other than satisfying the obnoxious rulers of Saudi Arabia? Why is Obama now fighting a war in Yemen, other than to keep the new president, who ran unopposed with strong U.S. support, in his pocket, and to bestow another favor upon the Saudi lords? Why is the administration seeking to strangle Iran, other than to prevent an Iran-Iraq alliance that might compromise U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf, through which 40% of the world’s oil must pass? And what is the real purpose of the Oval Office’s new “scramble for Africa,” other than establishing a military presence throughout the continent while elbowing China out of the way to grab natural resources, trade and markets.

President Obama blames all his failures in office on the conservatives and the recession, and most Democrats accept this explanation. Even progressive Democrats, well aware of Obama’s abundant shortcomings, will cut him slack for fear of the “greater evil.”

The corrosive impact of far right ideology in America must not be underestimated. But despite Don’t-tread-on-me Tea Party reactionaries and conservative obstruction in Congress, Democrats in the House and Senate remain responsible for many unmet objectives and a weak legislative record. Led by Obama, they would not fight for progressive goals and spent much of the time trying to fulfill the naïve presidential fantasy of “governing like Americans, not Republicans or Democrats.” Once the conservatives understood Obama would rather compromise than fight they attacked full force and virtually paralyzed the Democratic agenda.

The silence of some Democratic politicians toward the erosion of civil liberties, indifference to climate change and support for unnecessary wars — a silence many would have broken had a Republican been in the White House — should subject them to publicly wearing scarlet letters inscribed with a “C” (for craven) around their necks.

Despite the stagnant economy —  the main issue in the election according to 86% of potential voters — the Republican Party’s lurch to the far right and the bizarre legislative behavior of the Tea Party-influenced GOP House majority led by the ineffable Speaker John Boehner seem to have at least evened the election odds. Stranger things have happened in American politics, but it remains very doubtful that the critically important independent voters will swing toward fringe conservatism. This factor, in our view, gives Obama the edge.

In this connection the April 28 international edition of Britain’s conservative magazine, The Economist, wondered “What happens to a two-party political system when one party goes mad?” The article quotes the following from the new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a product of one author from the establishment Brookings Institute and the other from the conservative American Enterprise Institute: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Many right wing voters despise Romney, a shape-shifting opportunist whom they distrust, but they will stick with him because Republican leaders and funders insist he has the best chance to defeat the “big government socialist” whom many Tea Partiers scandalously allege conceals his “true” nationality and religion. Those funders, by the way, will see to it that — as opposed to 2008 — the Republicans will spend at least enough money to buy the election as the Democrats, so the race should be close.

Once a moderate Republican, Romney adopted far right positions on most issues to secure the nomination, calling for severe cutbacks in social programs for the poor, unemployed, foreclosed and similarly discarded, among a plethora of counterproductive social and economic nostrums satisfying to the Rush Limbaughs and Michele Bachmanns. Now he’s in a tight bind. It is absolutely necessary to gravitate partially toward the center, where the independent votes are, but he is under considerable restraint from his own unforgiving constituency.

Consistent with mendacious ultra-conservative propaganda, Romney attributes the economic crisis entirely to Obama’s presidency, without suggesting that the Great Recession emanated from the millionaire tax cuts, war spending and the huge deficits of his Republican predecessor (following years of Clinton Administration deregulations of banking and Wall St. that set the stage for what by now had become a “winner take all” economic system.)

Romney’s nonsensical economic speech in Iowa May 15 was an epic self-exposure. While promising to cut social spending, increase the war budget and not raise taxes, he declared:

President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero…. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.

Virtually every word was a lie, according to an analysis of the entire speech by the Associated Press the next day which pointed out that “the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.” AP didn’t mention Romney’s political characterization of Obama, but he’s hardly a liberal — as was clear during his first term, and his adhesion to “free enterprise” capitalism is indissoluble.

Romney has been sharply critical of Obama on two of the biggest issues of the campaign — health care and the Afghan war —  despite the fact that his own past positions on both matters were nearly identical to those of his rival. Obama’s health care plan is based on the program Romney implemented as governor of Massachusetts. And despite far more hawkish rhetoric to please the far right during the primaries, the Republican’s views on Afghanistan did not differ markedly from those of Obama. In recent weeks before and after the NATO summit, Romney has hardly spoken of the Afghan war, obviously recognizing that his primary views are anathema to the American people as a whole.

Obama and Romney have agreed on other issues. An article in Grist, April 24 by Lisa Hymas pointed out that  Obama’s “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program…. As governor, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: ‘Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,’ he said in 2002…. Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it.” It went into effect in June 2009. Romney also supported abortion rights, environmentalism and immigration as governor.

These “coincidences” are the outstanding ironies of the campaign so far. “Far right” Romney and “liberal populist” Obama have both resembled “moderate Republicans” when in power. Obama will revert to his center-right configuration if reelected, but if Romney ever gets to the White House his constituency will force him to largely govern as an ultra-conservative.

A principal Republican issue in the past several presidential elections has been that the Democrats were “weak on defense,” including in 2008 when Obama opposed the Iraq war, but the right wing has lowered the volume significantly because it can’t work this year.

The Democratic Party, of course, voted for, supported and funded the Afghan and Iraq wars, but Obama defeated pro-war Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination because his critique of the disastrous adventure in Iraq accorded with that of most Democratic primary voters — then turned around when elected and stole the Republican thunder by transforming into a war president. He governs foreign/military affairs as a hawk, juggling several bloody conflicts simultaneously, abjectly pandering to the armed forces and fostering the growth of militarism in American society. A year after the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, the Obama Administration has launched its own Imperialist Spring in the same region.

Many Democrats voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries because he was considered a “peace candidate” of sorts. A recent article by Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf compiled a brief partial account of Obama’s “peace” record:

• Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars. • He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security. • He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan. • He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. • He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad. • He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist. • He expanded drone attacks into Somalia. • He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia. • He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America. • He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn’t know their identities so long as they’re suspected of ties to terrorism. • He’s implied that he’d go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.”

No matter who wins in November nothing listed above will change, except perhaps for the worse. If Obama returns to the White House, it will be to the same mess the U.S. finds itself in today, along with the wars, inequality and hardship. Should Romney get in it will be a mess on steroids.

Progressive change certainly remains possible in America, although neither ruling party is equipped to bring it about. These parties were not prepared to end the Vietnam war either, or to get rid of Jim Crow, or to implement the eight-hour day, or to allow women the democratic right to vote. But the people organized radical mass movements to fight for these goals and won.

The informal people’s struggles of various organizations that began coalescing early last year, propelled several months later by Occupy’s left critique of inequality, Wall St. and the 1% ruling plutocracy, has the potential to become a mass movement. Many such potentials have come along and faded for various reasons, including some that were co-opted or lost their vision. But such broad and deep movements — as long as they are massive, activist, radical and well organized — also have significantly changed American history. It may be a long, arduous struggle, but that’s the light at the end of this dismal electoral tunnel.

This obviously has profound implications for media performance, as even the corporate media are sometimes willing to accept. Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson notes in the Financial Times: ‘Behind their journalistic missions, most news organisations have always been commercial operations that sell audiences to advertisers.’¹

Media corporations are also typically owned by wealthy individuals or giant conglomerates, and are legally obliged to subordinate human and environmental welfare to maximised revenues for shareholders.²

The consequences for democracy are normally ignored. But again, the truth sometimes pops up. After giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry in April 2012, the owner of the Independent, Evgeny Lebedev, tweeted: ‘Forgot to tell #Leveson that it’s unreasonable to expect individuals to spend £millions on newspapers and not have access to politicians.’

Even a Guardian report had to note: ‘It was a funny and refreshingly honest message after all the recent humbug and hypocrisy from media magnates about not wanting to influence the political class.’

A less refreshingly honest morsel was served up by Brian Leveson himself when he said: ‘The majority of journalism is people doing their job honourably with dedication, fearlessly and entirely in the public interest.’ (our emphasis)

Imagine if Leveson had noted that the majority of journalism is fearlessly doing its job ‘in the corporate interest’. It would have elicited mayhem among the politico-media classes.

Perhaps we’re being a tad unfair to Leveson, given that he appeared to let slip that he supports media activism. He said that internet-based scrutiny is ‘leading to greater accountability for journalists. People will study them, and I think there’s no reporter — no decent reporter — in the land who would not welcome this extra scrutiny.’

Or so one would like to think. Alas, it is not quite our experience over the last eleven years of being blanked, blocked, abused and dumped beyond the pale of media ‘respectability’; even by people who very much like what we’re doing but who would rather not be tarred with the same brush.

The Thumb-Sucking 5-10 Per Cent Rule

The Leveson inquiry has exposed the profound influence of corporate owners on media reporting. The Guardian’s Nick Davies, whose reporting of the Milly Dowler phone-hacking scandal has been justly praised, claimed in his book, Flat Earth News, that the cumulative effect of owners and advertising was no more than 5-10 per cent:

‘Journalists with whom I have discussed this [i.e. what Davies calls “the retreat from truth-telling journalism”] agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference.’³

As we have pointed out, these numbers are contradicted even by the fact that so many aspects of the modern newspaper have evolved in response to the demands of advertisers and corporate owners.

Jonathan Cook, a former Guardian journalist, has been keeping a beady eye on the Leveson inquiry evidence challenging Davies’ 5-10 per cent claim. For example, Harold Evans, a former Rupert Murdoch editor at the Sunday Times, described to Leveson how, in 1981, Murdoch rebuked him for reporting gloomy economic news and ‘not doing what he [Murdoch] wants, in political terms’. Evans says that Murdoch came to his home and the two ‘almost ended up in fisticuffs over a piece on the economy.’

Evans added:

Murdoch would also haul in senior staff for meetings to tell them to alter their coverage, including the editorial line of the leader columns and telling the foreign editor to “attack the Russians more”.

No wonder former Sun editor David Yelland described how editors ‘go on a journey where they end up agreeing with everything Murdoch says … “What would Rupert think about this?” is like a mantra inside your head’.

Cook also pointed out two articles ‘that as good as admit the obvious: that Murdoch decided what parties his papers would back in return, of course, for political support for his business interests.’

The first described how, in 2009, James Murdoch, deputy chief operating officer of News Corp, had told David Cameron, then Tory leader of the Opposition, that the Sun would switch its support in the upcoming general election from Labour to the Conservatives. This announcement was made shortly after Jeremy Hunt, then the Tory’s shadow culture secretary, had visited News Corp offices in the US.

A second article reported that Murdoch was ‘attracted by the idea’ of Scottish independence and thought that Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, was a ‘nice guy’. Murdoch ‘cleared the way’ for the Scottish edition of the Sun to endorse Salmond’s Scottish National Party at the Scottish elections in spring 2011, ‘just as [Salmond] was promising to lobby for News Corporation to take control of BSkyB.’ The SNP won a landslide victory in the Scottish parliamentary elections on May 5. Salmond admitted that he had been ‘happy’ to make a direct call to culture secretary Jeremy Hunt to support Murdoch’s controversial attempt to take complete control of the satellite broadcaster.

But this wasn’t just a one-off; it was — and remains — a crucial part of the political process. As Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin told Leveson, News International bosses ‘could be very demanding’. Referring to then Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, charged last week with conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice: ‘If you are on the same side as her, you have to see her every week. This was how it worked.’

Letwin added: ‘The realpolitik is that you have to get on with people who run newspapers. Labour did the same.’

Indeed, in 1995, opposition leader Tony Blair flew halfway round the world to curry favour with Rupert Murdoch at the luxury Hayman Island resort in Queensland, Australia. Addressing senior News Corporation executives, the Labour leader pledged an end to the ‘rigid economic planning and state controls’ of the ‘Old Left’ and declared that ‘the battle between market and public sector is over.’ Two years later, after 18 years of supporting the Tories, Murdoch used the Sun to officially endorse Blair and New Labour who then won a landslide victory at the 1997 general election. In 2011, Blair even became godfather to Murdoch’s youngest child.

And Murdoch isn’t alone in casting a shadow over the political process. Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that ‘he and other politicians became too close to too many newspaper proprietors and executives.’ So politicians have been bending to the will of media owners, and media owners have been influencing, and even directing, what their own editors and journalists do.

Jonathan Cook told us why he believes it’s important to document examples of senior journalists revealing the extent of proprietorial interference:

‘Davies’ book [‘Flat Earth News’] was so influential, especially with other journalists, because it propped up the lie journalists like to tell themselves and others that the problem of the “profession” is essentially a lack of funding and proper care from media owners. They prefer that assessment for two obvious reasons: first, journalists want more money invested in their papers because they hope it means promotions and wage rises; and second, it helps to avert their gaze from the reality that editorial independence is, and always was, a myth.⁴

Cook also told us:

It’s really about time Davies retracted that bit of nonsense from his book. The problem is that, were he to do so, he could no longer justify his argument that media failure is the result chiefly of economic pressures rather than structural flaws.⁵

A Private Conversation Between Elite Groups

Peter Oborne, chief political commentator at the Daily Telegraph, is no raving leftie. But as a political conservative, he had some astute observations to make to Leveson on the corrupt state of politics and media in this country.

Oborne said that when he arrived on the political reporting ‘scene’ he was ‘staggered’ by the closeness of politicians and journalists:

It was ceasing to be a conversation between activists and politicians but between the media and the politicians. The News International annual party at the Tory and Labour conference was an extraordinary power event to which people were excluded. Unfortunately I never got in, but you got the entire cabinet and all the influence brokers and the senior members of the media class, and it was a very important statement I felt about how Britain was being governed.

He continued:

And then you got the astonishing business of the senior News International people sitting just behind the Cabinet. They were the VIPs in the chamber, I believe really important media types were there as well, they were brought into the inner sanctum. I felt this was a perversion of our democracy, it was starting to become a private conversation between elite groups rather than a proper popular engagement.

He described the politico-journalism collusion as a ‘conspiracy against their [newspapers’] readers’. When challenged by Leveson to justify such a blunt assertion, Oborne responded:

That’s exactly what was going on. [...] In order to report during that time you had to get close to the people who ran new Labour, there were very few of them. [...] People who tried to report objectively and fairly were bullied and victimised and not given access to information. People who were part of the circle were favoured and of course there was a price for that. Very hard to be an independent observer, to keep your integrity in those circumstances.

Political reporting, he said, had become ‘private deals, private arrangements, between media and politicians.’ Collusion between politicians and the media helped to explain why the public was so ‘grievously misinformed’ about Iraq in the run-up to war. And we would add that it also helps explain why the public has been grievously misinformed about the post-invasion death toll in Iraq which likely exceeds one million, with four million refugees, in a country that has been utterly devastated.

1. ‘News industry can survive in the digital age,’ Financial Times, March 21, 2012.
2. See Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Constable, 2004.
3. Flat Earth News, Chattus & Windus, 2008, p. 22.
4. Email, April 26, 2012.
5. Email, April 25, 2012.

Many writers have exposed the role architecture plays in controlling public space. Mike Davis discusses how cities have installed public benches designed to discourage sleeping and fenced in public parks. Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has studied the nature of control implicit in Israel’s design of its cities, settlements and highways. Fictionally, China Mieville’s The City and the City is a riveting tale of a future place strikingly reminiscent of today’s occupied Palestine. Most recently, economist and critic David Harvey has contributed a refreshingly new look at the nature of the modern city and, more importantly, why they need to be wrested back from the neoliberal corporate megalith currently trying to buy the world.

Harvey, who has lived in Baltimore, Maryland for the past several decades, places the modern city’s economic role directly in the center of capital’s creation and consumption of surplus. He discusses the claim that cites are the product of the proletarianization of the rural peasantry, pointing to industrial revolutions of the past and the current movement of populations in nations such as China and India from the countryside to existing urban areas and new economic zones created by international capitalism. Furthermore, his text, titled Rebel Cities, provides a look at the growth of so-called shantytowns on the outskirts of some of the world’s largest population centers. These shantytowns are often the focus of raids by military and police forces intent on making it easier for bulldozers behind them to destroy the structures found there. In certain instances, however, the authorities have conceded to the citizens of these shantytowns and given them rights to their homes.

It is from these shantytowns that we can gain inspiration. The people who live in such areas are considered surplus in the world of monopoly capitalism. They have no rights as far as the stock exchanges and bourses of the world are concerned. Yet, because they refuse to accede to this characterization, they will struggle to maintain their shelter, their communities and their human dignity. Like their historical predecessors in the Paris Commune of 1871, this population is determined to make the city a popular and democratic human organism. They are joined by those around the world who in the past couple of years have occupied city squares and parks and demanded a reconceptualization of the city, more democratic control of the urban space, and a reconsideration of who constitutes the working class and, subsequently, who will make the anti-capitalist revolution.

Harvey insists that the only genuine anticapitalist struggle is one with the goal of destroying the existing class relationship. Such a struggle cannot be waged by separating workplace issues from those of the community. Pointing to the classic film The Salt Of the Earth as an example of how the latter scenario might occur, Harvey suggests that the union must view the world of working people as an organic whole. Utility access and costs are workplace issues; childcare and education are too. Affordable housing and food costs are more than secondary concerns. Their role as a means for the capitalist system to take back wages describes their existence as a means for that system to maintain its control on working people. Debt peonage, whether incurred via education and vehicle loans in the advanced capitalist world or incurred via a micro-loan program in the developing nations, is still debt peonage. The increasing cost of post-secondary education throughout the world and the mortgage crisis are both tools of the neoliberal regime to continue the upward motion of capital.

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city. History is combined with economics and a call for serious struggle. With the Paris Commune as his inspiration, David Harvey discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Occupy movement, the squatters’ movements and allied struggles. He presents their historical precedents and he warns against essentially conservative attempts to manipulate such movements into supporting the existing economic reality. He further opines that cooptation by parliamentary elements are proof of these movements success, not their failure. Fundamental to all of this is Harvey’s radical definition of the city as the wellspring of capitalist oppression and also the foundation of resistance to that oppression.

A world without workers is impossible. A world without capitalists is necessary.

– World Federation of Labor

The unemployment rate in the USA is down to just over 8%. This is evidence that we are in a recovery from a recession. But that rate is actually higher than it was when this particular recession began.

The patient’s temperature has gone up, a sure sign that the patient is getting better. Huh?

Living under the rules of a profit and loss religion in a market church controlled by private clergy, almost anything negative can be made to sound positive, especially to those who have not yet felt the full impact of a disintegrating political economy. But those who are experiencing its worst aspects find no relief in academic jargon about structural or cyclical problems, stagnation, supply/demand curves, unemployment blips and market equilibrium. None of this helps them find jobs or borrow enough money to pay their rent, mortgage, food bills, or education loans. As those people are not only in the USA but in the rest of the world, the global nature of the problem makes it more clear that a solution is far beyond a particular nation state and concerns all of humanity.

An old admonition to act local but think global has come to mean far more than was originally intended. Then it had almost nothing to do with economics but now, if we don’t think and act economically we may assure failure for the planet and all its inhabitants. That’s us, whatever market terminology may be used to hide that fact behind national, racial, religious or other divisive identity group labels that help keep power in minority hands. And that minority is doing better than ever, in the short run, amassing more power and money than any past godlike royalty in what were supposed to have been more primitive societies. How much has really changed since ancient times when peasants and slaves were ground underfoot so that royal families and their wealthy sponsors could live lives of luxury? Not much, in essence, though the material standard of living for workers became what was called middle class and assured far more material comfort than previous generations of common people enjoyed. That lasted until the present breakdown began decreasing the income of more people at a faster rate so that the wealth of less people could increase at a greater rate.

What kind of system is this? This kind:

If people are murdered in wars, that is good for the weapons business. If illness and disease run rampant that is good for the medical business. If natural disaster ravages communities and kills people, that is good for the construction industry and the burial business. Such are the realities of the cold blooded economics by which the people of the world have been organized for hundreds of years. A profit for one always means a loss for many. The idea of keeping people healthy, safe, secure and alive is reduced to the private force of doing so only if they are able to create profits for those selling health, safety, security and life itself to the highest bidder in the market. If we can’t afford to buy those things and charity does not exist for us, we can just drop dead.

Millions of us do, and not only in bloody wars which profit the war makers. Many of us starve for lack of food while others have to go on diets because they eat so much. Many of us sleep in doorways, on the street or under bridges, while dogs and cats have their own rooms in comfortable homes. None of this happens because of individuals who are thoughtless or cold hearted or murderous, although such do exist. But in a system which dictates that profit must be created in a market sale, the owner of a private firm that makes band aids can be the nicest person on earth but still only profit and prosper if lots of people are bleeding. The social concept of doing all that is possible to avoid bleeding would be terrible for his private business. That is the case for every single human endeavor in the capital dominated religious belief system of the market, an anti-human, anti-social core of political economics that is threatening the future of all people all over the world.

Criticism and rebellion to such injustice is the history of humanity but today it is growing far beyond the national minorities previously involved in such struggle. People organized to obey authority, work for others to survive, live in physical poverty or shop in moral poverty and vote for employees of wealthy rulers when allowed to and call it democracy, have remained unorganizable for the kind of change now necessary for the survival of humanity. But as the critical conditions grow worse, new methods of communication among the people are helping bring more rebellious response to this old order of great wealth for the few at cost of crippling poverty and debt for the many.

Under the threat of potential social collapse, environmental destruction and radical revolution, those who reap the greatest profits are exploiting, ravaging and murdering at insane rates in mindless desperation to maintain their power and wealth. That cannot continue and is no longer tolerable to billions of human beings nor the planet’s natural support system.

All over the world of capitalist anti-social democracy, the collapsing structure has brought about calls for austerity from the rulers and their paid minions in government. This means further losses absorbed by the majority so that even greater profits can accrue to ruling minorities. Establishment philosophers of mass culture operating through corporate media still have enormous impact as they explain why the present reality is all that exists and must be experienced without substantial question. But when increasingly painful economic conditions for more people combine with increasingly dangerous conditions for much of the natural environment, the complex of events called material reality take on a new meaning well understood by growing numbers who face that reality in all its harshness and are less influenced by misinformation, propaganda and economic fairy tales.

Thus, many world citizens, even while their governing powers continue representing capital, wars and injustice, are rejecting the ugly burdens forced on them by their rich overlords. Elections in some places are small indications of change but far more indicative than the voting process which is still under the control of capital, are the rising multitudes all over the world all aiming for the same goal: a new world based on democratic power exercised by people taking action as members of the one and only human race and not simply as parties, religions, sects, cults or other labeled divisions which serve to keep minorities in control of majority created wealth.

Those tiny minorities are the capitalists who somehow own the fantastic wealth produced by enormous majorities of previously divided people. The divisions still exist and the power still is in the hands of those minorities whose days may be numbered, but so are those of humanity as well if action is not taken to create the world of democratic equality which has been the stuff of wishes and dreams but must become reality. Or else.

Doomsayers and doubters are in abundance and are to be expected, even when they are not on the payroll of the ruling minority. It’s easy to look at the state of the world and surrender to present reality. But that is only possible for those not yet suffering the ever increasing misfortune of dependence on a political economics of profit for a few through loss, pain and misery for most. It is not just time for social change activists but for all citizens of the world’s 99% to heed the words quoted at the beginning. An end to the reign of minority capitalism is necessary to save the earth and all its people so that we can begin a human society offering hope for all and not just some.

I have and I can say that they’re typically rough workplaces.

At first glance, Amazon’s LV fulfillment center appears benign.

Primary red, yellow, green and blue splashes of color brighten the place, and motivational posters and friendly educational signs that feature cute characters provide guidance. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers populate the warehouse at once, diligently taking direction from hand-held scanners or computers, and the place is enormous so it doesn’t appear cramped. Seriously, the place could house a small city.

Physical strength is not a necessary qualification to perform any of their warehouse job functions, and management is ostensibly concerned with worker safety. Just about anyone could staff Amazon’s FC, especially since it only takes a couple of hours to train workers to perform any specific job function. It’s safe to say that anyone laboring in an Amazon FC has fallen into hard times, and many of my former coworkers’ resumes featured distinguished past titles, impressive demonstrations of manual skill and ability, and/or lofty educational attainment.

Many never thought they’d wind up in a warehouse and so, yes, this was all foreign for many. Other workers who staffed other warehouses in the past didn’t know what to make of the place because there is something different about Amazon, something alien.

“Chairman” Bezos once said that Amazon workers don’t need a union because we own the company. “Chairman” Bezos has zero tolerance for union activity and several Amazon unionization attempts were summarily squashed.

After two years on the job an Amazon FC associate is entitled to eight shares of stock. If Amazon is trading at, say, $250 a share, that’s $2,000. Ownership? $250 per share is a generous projection. Seasoned investors are baffled by AMZN’s current overvaluation because of its unhealthy 188:1 (fluctuates, yet always unhealthy) price to earnings ratio, and they’re waiting for the bubble to burst.

I imagined reaching the two-year mark, receiving my payout, and some smiling patriarch saying, “There’s some shopping money sweetheart, have fun.”

Forget about those riff-raff temps, they work for nothing more than an hourly wage, and Amazon relies heavily upon temp labor.

Amazon relies heavily upon labor—period. Yet, we were routinely led to believe that our existence was owed to them, that it was they who paid our bills. Oh yes, and Amazon provides its employees with health benefits, a rare and precious commodity these days. I accepted the best plan, $59 was deducted from my pay every month, and I couldn’t even afford to use my benefits. I visited an in-network clinic for a cold and lost an entire shift’s pay after I forked over the $30 copay and the seemingly arbitrary additional prescription costs.

After taxes and other deductions, $12.75 per hour doesn’t go far. Amazon’s FC associates EARN greater compensation than they currently take home. Problem is, corporate Amazon deliberately keeps its FCs in a constant state of flux and it is practically impossible for Amazon associates to organize from within.

Could a union deliver dignity and quality of life to Amazon’s FC associates? Employment with Amazon is so thoroughly all-consuming and work/life balance is an ideal that this workaholic corporation deems unimportant. Amazon demands unquestioning loyalty and sacrifice from its workers and everything is non-negotiable. Workers’ schedules can be changed with little or no notice to suit management’s needs. Single mothers struggled with this most. Badges are deactivated without notice and a worker could suddenly be out of a job. The only incentive workers are offered to exceed expectations is the diminished risk that they may be let go at any time.

We worked, 10, sometimes 11 hour shifts and received a thirty-minute break for lunch and two, fifteen-minute paid breaks. Managers enforced break times to the minute and we were chained to the floor until the minute break started and expected to be back on the floor the minute break ended. Factor in walking time and getting hung up at security and we were able to sit and eat maybe forty minutes total during a 10 1/2 or 11 1/2 hour span of time.

In training they suggested we eat oats, fruits and vegetables (No, you’re not horses the poster said, but oats are a great way….). Meat, bread, cheese and energy drinks provided sustenance; not my typical fare, but it went the distance and I could stuff it down quickly enough. If we returned from break a minute late, we were “stealing company time.”

Yes, we’re criminals, and Amazon owns time. At any time, an ISS “coach” or Amazon manager could accuse a picker of a “false pick short.” If a picker couldn’t find an item in a bin, reported it missing, and someone checked the bin afterward and found the item there, a write-up was issued.

One write-up and a temp can’t be hired by Amazon, despite stellar performance, and the accusation could not be verified or disputed. If management sees that an employee didn’t scan a product’s bar-code for more than a couple minutes or so, the worker was often called down, scolded for “time-off-task” (even if they were exceeding rate) and possibly written up.

Managers watch numbers on a computer screen like it’s a horse race and workers’ every move is tracked. We were often paranoid, and it is wise for anyone to never feel too secure in Amazon’s most neurotic workplace. This was all too reminiscent of the East German Stasi for my tastes.

Brrr!

I never spoke to family or friends while I worked there and, for all they knew, I could have run off and joined some cult. My sister phoned after a local news station reported that an Amazon employee set fire to a shelving unit while we were working. The building was evacuated and, if we wanted to keep our jobs, we were forced to stand in sub-freezing temperatures for more than two hours wearing only t-shirts and shorts.

My sister was concerned. “What kind of place are you working at?” she asked. “Don’t worry,” I answered. “Call you tomorrow, need sleep, I work another 11-hour shift tonight.”

Our managers told us that we were like Santa’s elves, delivering happiness to children and families. If that’s the case, Santa is a hard driver and his elves must sport super-immunity because I never thought them to be as sick and rundown as the crew staffing Amazon during peak season. I suffered a chronic, dry, hacking cough and my spirits were never so low.

The shoppers want lower prices. The shareholders want greater profitability. Amazon strives to be “the most customer-centric company in the universe” and we must forever give thanks to anyone with money!

Happy holidays.

As a follow-up, Paul Haeder asked Nichole Gracely a few additional questions since her fine essay precipitated a lot of leaping-off points and questions.

PKH: How long did you do this job?
What was the feeling when you were let go?
What do you think Amazon would even think about reading this account? Bezos reading it? Average college grad coming to Amazon reading it?
Do Americans think life is dog-eat-dog existence, since this Amazon model is replicated in so many work places, abroad, and here?

NG: I worked there August 2010-February 2011 and August 2011-February 2012. I was ISS my first run, wanted to get hired by Amazon and was let go after I accumulated too many demerit points for missing work during snowstorms. My contribution to the Morning Call story talks about how they dangled the possibility for FT employment with Amazon in our faces, false promises. I returned in August 2011 as an ISS temp and I, surprisingly, was included in a group of ISS temps who were hired directly by Amazon in October 2011, shortly after the Morning Call expose was published.

Both Peak seasons were different experiences although I am certain that Peak 2011 would have been the same nightmare I encountered Peak 2010 if they would have never been challenged by the bad publicity. Although, again, more FCs were built in the interim so that may be why conditions in our warehouse eased up a bit.

For the sake of simplicity, I talked about conditions, workplace abuses that are still happening today, basic workplace rights and quality of life issues that a union could address. 10-hour shifts are too long and that’s what we were working, their surveillance tactics were in place, time-off task, false pick shorts, etc. Amazon directly hired more people and while I was there the second time around they relied less upon temp labor (I think they may have been scolded by their friends in govt. after the story ran) though nobody ever really felt secure there. In his message to me, Morning Call‘s Soper’s other informant who is still there said they were bringing in more temps. The turnover rate is insane, and Soper could never get concrete employment figures from management. We talked about it and I know he tried. Amazon tried to keep me there this last time around because I’m incredibly productive and I trained people well as an “ambassador” (no incentive, pay increase, etc). This time, they made it difficult for me to point out. I wanted out, though, so I could speak about my experience. All Amazon employees sign a vaguely-worded confidentiality agreement and we’re not allowed to talk to the press. I spoke to Soper before I went back and while I was ISS, temps don’t have to sign anything.

I would hope that Amazon (Bezos) now recognizes its workers’ humanity. It often felt like bad sci-fi, like I was part of some brutalized underclass and that we were being mastered by Tech types who don’t really give a shit for anyone or anything—just numbers, that’s it, numbers.

Yes, I’m a failure as a capitalist, I get it, and myself and my Amazon co-workers are clearly not faring well in this game. Bezos is winning, I get it, he’s smart, he may even be a genius, sheessh! I became really disgusted with him when I read all the Bezos worship headlines while I worked there (Forbes has a serious hard-on for the guy).

CEO worship is sickening. He takes all the credit for Amazon’s success in everything I read about Amazon, he’s like some sort of quasi-spiritual leader, and it was really tacky the way he was being promoted in the wake of Jobs’ death. “Is he the next Steve Jobs?” people were asking. Give me a break. He’s not a self-made man like media lead us to believe. He has gotten to where he’s at because tens of thousands of workers have made tremendous life sacrifices. I try to remember his humanity—it’s hard, though.

Bezos once said that the workweek minimum should be sixty hours and I could not disagree more. We should be working less, not more, and for greater compensation; that is, if we wish to restore any kind of economic equilibrium. I’m not an economist so don’t quote me on that.

The Amazon model seems counter-intuitive to me and they could destroy capitalism as we know it; problem is, we’re going to be longing for the good old days of capitalism if it’s somehow replaced by everything that Amazon embodies. Tech is supposed to liberate, not enslave. I do not place much faith in Tech, especially after working at Amazon and reading about Apple products and how they’re made. My apartment was broken into and my Macbook was stolen while revelations of Apple’s labor abuse were surfacing and I was actually glad to be rid of the thing.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon hired 28,000 additional workers last year and it terrifies me to think that more and more individuals are submitting to corporat(ist) Amazon’s command. I know how they operate and I will never remove them from my sight. And, it became clear to me that the federal government has their hands all over Amazon and I’d like to further investigate my hunch that Amazon has been designated as some social shopping service/government works program.

PKH: As a sort of pun, can you credit all that hard work at the warehouse as something gained by the Amazon way and whip cracking?

NG: I arrived at Amazon with a work ethic that would make Bezos smile. I consistently exceeded rate requirements and there were nights I could have napped a couple of hours or gone home after lunch and I still would have made rate for the night. I wasn’t provided any incentive to exceed rate. It didn’t take long for me to think that Bezos was running some kind of boot camp. I later read that Amazon actively recruits ex-military personnel to manage their warehouses, and that may explain why it was common for our managers to bark and holler and carry on in ways that I’ve never witnessed in any other workplace. I always empathized with management, no matter how badly they behaved, because they’re under tremendous pressure, subjected to endless hostility, and they’re overworked and under-compensated.

PKH: What is Lehigh, Pennsylvania, like, in a nutshell?

NG: Also, the Lehigh Valley is predominantly Pennsylvania German and Hispanic and the two groups don’t mix well. I prefer my Hispanic neighbors and don’t venture far from Bethlehem’s depressed Southside because I’m in conservative country as soon as I step out.

PKH: You mentioned that “alien-like” feeling working at the Amazon Fulfillment Center.

NG: I attempted a subtle segue here, Bezos is alien and at the same time he seemed ever-present in the warehouse once I learned more about him. I said “Chairman Bezos” because there’s something oddly Mao-like about him. Check this Economist link.

What do you make of the photo? My next piece will be about alienation and Amazon. So, everything is alien there, it’s very strange. Most workers never worked for a mega-corporation, a Tech company nonetheless, and so that definitely contributes to the alien quality of the place, the discomforting reality that most warehouse workers could never understand and articulate.

PKH: Okay, what do you think of the title, “Where Santa’s Helpers Work 24/7, 365 Days a Year … ”?

NG: During Peak 2010 they did operate 365 days a year, not Peak 2011. New Fulfillment centers were built in the interim and I think that was why Peak 2011 was slower at the LV FC. And/or maybe the boycott achieved something. And/or maybe disposable incomes are drying up. I handled millions of consumer products there, and I can say that their customers must have disposable income to be making these purchases. Amazon’s 1st quarter earnings report is questionable.

PKH: Then, what about the sub-title to your piece? “Come High Water, Come Fire, Come Exhaustion – The Amazon Way is America’s Way”

NG: Yes, definitely … I’m talking to and overhearing more people, regardless of their job or industry, who complain that their employers are demanding more and more and compensating less. Workers are being squeezed everywhere.

Seventy-seven-years-old, Jimbo had a vending business selling pretzels, among other stuff, and worked at a factory making vent windows for Ford trucks. Like me, he has also washed windows, making a few bucks per job. In winter, water would sometimes freeze nearly as soon as it’s splashed on the pane, but thanks to global warming, this is becoming less of a problem.

A Chicago bus stop billboard: “I’m all for global warming if it will keep the city from being so damn cold.” Across the street is the Greenway Self Park garage, with a green VW bug emitting green leaves instead of ozone-killing exhaust on its very cool, I guess, sign.

Born and raised in Kensington, Jimbo still lives there. He gets $780 a month in Social Security, but his rent eats up $760. So much for piece-of-shit Kensington?! What in the fuckin’ UN is this world coming to? If I want to be chased around by goons toting submachine guns, then body slammed onto the ground, I’ll go to Chicago during the NATO summit.

With only 20 bucks a month to diddle with, Jimbo must beg, though he can also move to a cheaper neighborhood, such as the exburbs of Kabul or Baghdad, for example, but since he’s already well into his post-Cialis years, I don’t think Blackwater would hire him.

“Jimbo,” I said, “I keep hearing that black women are the most generous at giving money on the streets. Is that true?”

“Absolutely!”

“Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know, but I think it’s because they’re more used to taking care of people.”

“Hummm. What about guys in suits? Do they give you money?”

“Those guys are the worst! Most of them won’t come near me because they think I might give them a disease or something.”

“That’s interesting.”

“The regular people, the working class people, are the ones who give me money. Black people give me money.”

“All black people, or just black women?”

“All black people, but, like you said, black women are the best. When I grew up in Kensington, I was told that black are this and that, that they’re no good, but now that I have to beg, I can tell you that black people treat me very nice.”

For over a century, Kensington had dozens of factories cranking out machine parts, carpets, textiles and glass. Now, it is an unholy mess, like all former industrial enclaves across America. Jimbo, “Many of my neighbors in Kensington get a government check at the beginning of each month, then a week later, they’re broke. You should go up there and see how it is.”

“I’ve been up there, many times.”

“You’ll see how how bad it is, the drug dealing.”

“And the prostitution.”

“Yes, that too. When people are broke, they’ll do anything. There used to be so many factories up there, but they’re all gone.”

In Kensington, a flyer is taped to a pillar of the elevated train, “HEALTH ALERT!!! THERE IS A prostitute By the name of SHERI Pitts that is HIV Positive. If you know her whereabouts please contact the Health Department. Description: 5’4” 95 lbs Blk Female. Tatoo on left Arm “Chocolate Sheri.” Tattoo on Right (Butt) Cheek “Sexy.” #173-60-6501. She NEEDS to be Stopped. She is spreading this Desease!!!”

The next time you’re in Kensington to help out the local economy, shine a flash light on her left cheek, and if you can make out “Sexy” in tribal, shaman, precious, voodoo or gothic script, just calmly smile and say, “I’m sorry, Chocolate, but it doesn’t look like our loving union can be gracefully consummated this night, or the next, or ever, though as a member of NATO, that master alliance of pale and well-armed people, I will try and try again. Oh, fuck it, let’s just fuck! Since it was me who made you sick in the first place! We’re destined for this death embrace, you maroon terrorist seductress!”

I’m sorry to use intercourse as an analogy for aggression, but I was railroaded into it by English itself, for what other language is so promiscuous with such couplings, as in I will fuck you up, fuck you over or fuck with you? In English, to fuck is to hate, if not kill, as in fuck Libya, Syria and Iran, or, if you prefer, fuck Israel, Wall Street, the CIA and the Pentagon!

In Chicago, white masters are plotting on how to fuck with us all, including the lower whites. As expected, they’ve framed a few white youths and locked them up on bogus charge of terrorism. This is to condition the public to see poor whites, especially those with tattoos, nose rings or dread locks, as also the enemy. Like brown foreigners and native blacks, young disaffected whites will be branded as indiscriminate mass murderers who just want to blow things up because they hate “our way of life.” Thanks to the FBI, they have been prevented from collapsing a bridge in Cleveland and torching Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters, but they might go after your local strip mall or International House of Pancakes next. If not dealt with most severely, they’ll splatter corn-syrup all over your transfat-padded faces! Instead of getting a job giving blow jobs, for example, these confused whiners would rather enlist in Occupy, which, the gobblement will soon tell you, is actually an offshoot of Al Qaeda supported by Iran and a trust fund left behind by Bin Laden.

Meanwhile, Jimbo begs because he can’t pay his bills otherwise. He also admits that he likes to sit in a cheapo restaurant every now and then to enjoy a $7 hoagie or cheesesteak, some fried chicken or a plate of pork lo mein, “So I can live like a real white man!”

Today, material conditions for the vast majority of working people have sharply deteriorated as the capitalist class shifts the entire burden of the crisis and the recovery of their profits onto the backs of wage and salaried classes. One of the striking aspects of this sustained and on-going roll-back of living standards is the absence of a major social upheaval so far. Greece and Spain, with over 50% unemployment among its 16-24 year olds and nearly 25% general unemployment, have experienced a dozen general strikes and numerous multi-million person national protests; but these have failed to produce any real change in regime or policies. The mass firings and painful salary, wage, pension and social services cuts continue. In other countries, like Italy, France, and England, protests and discontent find expression in the electoral arena, with incumbents voted out and replaced by the traditional opposition. Yet throughout the social turmoil and profound socio-economic erosion of living and working conditions, the dominant ideology informing the movements, trade unions and political opposition is reformist: Issuing calls to defend existing social benefits, increase public spending and investments, and expand the role of the state where private sector activity has failed to invest or employ. In other words, the left proposes to conserve a past when capitalism was harnessed to the welfare state.

The problem is that this ‘capitalism of the past’ is gone and a new more virulent and intransigent capitalism has emerged forging a new worldwide framework and a powerful entrenched state apparatus immune to all calls for ‘reform’ and reorientation. The confusion, frustration, and misdirection of mass popular opposition is, in part, due to the adoption by leftist writers, journalists, and academics of the concepts and language espoused by its capitalist adversaries: language designed to obfuscate the true social relations of brutal exploitation, the central role of the ruling classes in reversing social gains and the profound links between the capitalist class and the state. Capitalist publicists, academics and journalists have elaborated a whole litany of concepts and terms which perpetuate capitalist rule and distract its critics and victims from the perpetrators of their steep slide toward mass impoverishment.

Even as they formulate their critiques and denunciations, the critics of capitalism use the language and concepts of its apologists. Insofar as the language of capitalism has entered the general parlance of the left, the capitalist class has established hegemony or dominance over its erstwhile adversaries. Worse, the left, by combining some of the basic concepts of capitalism with sharp criticism, creates illusions about the possibility of reforming ‘the market’ to serve popular ends. This fails to identify the principle social forces that must be ousted from the commanding heights of the economy and the imperative to dismantle the class-dominated state. While the left denounces the capitalist crisis and state bailouts, its own poverty of thought undermines the development of mass political action. In this context the ‘language’ of obfuscation becomes a ‘material force’ – a vehicle of capitalist power, whose primary use is to disorient and disarm its anti-capitalist and working class adversaries. It does so by co-opting its intellectual critics through the use of terms, conceptual framework and language which dominate the discussion of the capitalist crisis.

Key Euphemisms at the Service of the Capitalist Offensive

Euphemisms have a double meaning: What terms connote and what they really mean. Euphemistic conceptions under capitalism connote a favorable reality or acceptable behavior and activity totally dissociated from the aggrandizement of elite wealth and concentration of power and privilege. Euphemisms disguise the drive of power elites to impose class-specific measures and to repress without being properly identified, held responsible and opposed by mass popular action.

The most common euphemism is the term ‘market’, which is endowed with human characteristics and powers. As such, we are told ‘the market demands wage cuts’ disassociated from the capitalist class. Markets, the exchange of commodities or the buying and selling of goods, have existed for thousands of years in different social systems in highly differentiated contexts. These have been global, national, regional and local. They involve different socio-economic actors, and comprise very different economic units, which range from giant state-promoted trading-houses to semi-subsistence peasant villages and town squares. ‘Markets’ existed in all complex societies: slave, feudal, mercantile and early and late competitive, monopoly industrial and finance capitalist societies.

When discussing and analyzing ‘markets’ and to make sense of the transactions (who benefits and who loses), one must clearly identify the principle social classes dominating economic transactions. To write in general about ‘markets’ is deceptive because markets do not exist independent of the social relations defining what is produced and sold, how it is produced and what class configurations shape the behavior of producers, sellers and labor. Today’s market reality is defined by giant multi-national banks and corporations, which dominate the labor and commodity markets. To write of ‘markets’ as if they operated in a sphere above and beyond brutal class inequalities is to hide the essence of contemporary class relations.

Fundamental to any understanding, but left out of contemporary discussion, is the unchallenged power of the capitalist owners of the means of production and distribution, the capitalist ownership of advertising, the capitalist bankers who provide or deny credit and the capitalist-appointed state officials who ‘regulate’ or deregulate exchange relations. The outcomes of their policies are attributed to euphemistic ‘market’ demands which seem to be divorced from the brutal reality. Therefore, as the propagandists imply, to go against ‘the market’ is to oppose the exchange of goods: This is clearly nonsense. In contrast, to identify capitalist demands on labor, including reductions in wages, welfare and safety, is to confront a specific exploitative form of market behavior where capitalists seek to earn higher profits against the interests and welfare majority of wage and salaried workers.

By conflating exploitative market relations under capitalism with markets in general, the ideologues achieve several results: They disguise the principle role of capitalists while evoking an institution with positive connotations, that is, a ‘market’ where people purchase consumer goods and ‘socialize’ with friends and acquaintances. In other words, when ‘the market’, which is portrayed as a friend and benefactor of society, imposes painful policies presumably it is for the welfare of the community. At least that is what the business propagandists want the public to believe by marketing their virtuous image of the ‘market’; they mask private capital’s predatory behavior as it chases greater profits.

One of the most common euphemisms thrown about in the midst of this economic crisis is ‘austerity’, a term used to cover-up the harsh realities of draconian cutbacks in wages, salaries, pensions and public welfare and the sharp increase in regressive taxes (VAT). ‘Austerity’ measures mean policies to protect and even increase state subsidies to businesses, and create higher profits for capital and greater inequalities between the top 10% and the bottom 90%. ‘Austerity’ implies self-discipline, simplicity, thrift, saving, responsibility, limits on luxuries and spending, avoidance of immediate gratification for future security – a kind of collective Calvinism. It connotes shared sacrifice today for the future welfare of all.

However, in practice ‘austerity’ describes policies that are designed by the financial elite to implement class-specific reductions in the standard of living and social services (such as health and education) available for workers and salaried employees. It means public funds can be diverted to an even greater extent to pay high interest rates to wealthy bondholders while subjecting public policy to the dictates of the overlords of finance capital.

Rather than talking of ‘austerity’, with its connotation of stern self-discipline, leftist critics should clearly describe ruling class policies against the working and salaried classes, which increase inequalities and concentrate even more wealth and power at the top. ‘Austerity’ policies are therefore an expression of how the ruling classes use the state to shift the burden of the cost of their economic crisis onto labor.

The ideologues of the ruling classes co-opted concepts and terms, which the left originally used to advance improvements in living standards and turned them on their heads. Two of these euphemisms, co-opted from the left, are ‘reform’ and ‘structural adjustment’. ‘Reform’, for many centuries, referred to changes, which lessened inequalities and increased popular representation. ‘Reforms’ were positive changes enhancing public welfare and constraining the abuse of power by oligarchic or plutocratic regimes. Over the past three decades, however, leading academic economists, journalists and international banking officials have subverted the meaning of ‘reform’ into its opposite: it now refers to the elimination of labor rights, the end of public regulation of capital and the curtailment of public subsidies making food and fuel affordable to the poor. In today’s capitalist vocabulary ‘reform’ means reversing progressive changes and restoring the privileges of private monopolies. ‘Reform’ means ending job security and facilitating massive layoffs of workers by lowering or eliminating mandatory severance pay. ‘Reform’ no longer means positive social changes; it now means reversing those hard fought changes and restoring the unrestrained power of capital. It means a return to capital’s earlier and most brutal phase, before labor organizations existed and when class struggle was suppressed. Hence ‘reform’ now means restoring privileges, power, and profit for the rich.

In a similar fashion, the linguistic courtesans of the economic profession have co-opted the term ‘structural’ as in ‘structural adjustment’ to service the unbridled power of capital. As late as the 1970’s, ‘structural’ change referred to the redistribution of land from the big landlords to the landless; a shift in power from plutocrats to popular classes. ‘Structures’ referred to the organization of concentrated private power in the state and economy. Today, however, ‘structure’ refers to the public institutions and public policies, which grew out of labor and citizen struggles to provide social security, for protecting the welfare, health and retirement of workers. ‘Structural changes’ now are the euphemism for smashing those public institutions, ending the constraints on capital’s predatory behavior and destroying labor’s capacity to negotiate, struggle or preserve its social advances.

The term ‘adjustment’, as in ‘structural adjustment’ (SA), is itself a bland euphemism implying fine-tuning , the careful modulation of public institutions and policies back to health and balance. But, in reality, ‘structural adjustment’ represents a frontal attack on the public sector and a wholesale dismantling of protective legislation and public agencies organized to protect labor, the environment and consumers. ‘Structural adjustment’ masks a systematic assault on the people’s living standards for the benefit of the capitalist class.

The capitalist class has cultivated a crop of economists and journalists who peddle brutal policies in bland, evasive and deceptive language in order to neutralize popular opposition. Unfortunately, many of their ‘leftist’ critics tend to rely on the same terminology.

Given the widespread corruption of language so pervasive in contemporary discussions about the crisis of capitalism the left should stop relying on this deceptive set of euphemisms co-opted by the ruling class. It is frustrating to see how easily the following terms enter our discourse:

Market discipline – The euphemism ‘discipline’ connotes serious, conscientious strength of character in the face of challenges as opposed to irresponsible, escapist behavior. In reality, when paired with ‘market’, it refers to capitalists taking advantage of unemployed workers and using their political influence and power lay-off masses workers and intimidate those remaining employees into greater exploitation and overwork, thereby producing more profit for less pay. It also covers the capacity of capitalist overlords to raise their rate of profit by slashing the social costs of production, such as worker and environmental protection, health coverage and pensions.

Market shock – This refers to capitalists engaging in brutal massive, abrupt firings, cuts in wages and slashing of health plans and pensions in order to improve stock quotations, augment profits and secure bigger bonuses for the bosses. By linking the bland, neutral term, ‘market’ to ‘shock’, the apologists of capital disguise the identity of those responsible for these measures, their brutal consequences and the immense benefits enjoyed by the elite.

Market Demands – This euphemistic phrase is designed to anthropomorphize an economic category, to diffuse criticism away from real flesh and blood power-holders, their class interests and their despotic strangle-hold over labor. Instead of ‘market demands’, the phrase should read: ‘the capitalist class commands the workers to sacrifice their own wages and health to secure more profit for the multi-national corporations’ – a clear concept more likely to arouse the ire of those adversely affected.

Free Enterprise – An euphemism spliced together from two real concepts: private enterprise for private profit and free competition. By eliminating the underlying image of private gain for the few against the interests of the many, the apologists of capital have invented a concept that emphasizes individual virtues of ‘enterprise’ and ‘freedom’ as opposed to the real economic vices of greed and exploitation.

Free Market – A euphemism implying free, fair and equal competition in unregulated markets glossing over the reality of market domination by monopolies and oligopolies dependent on massive state bailouts in times of capitalist crisis. ‘Free’ refers specifically to the absence of public regulations and state intervention to defend workers safety as well as consumer and environmental protection. In other words, ‘freedom’ masks the wanton destruction of the civic order by private capitalists through their unbridled exercise of economic and political power. ‘Free market’ is the euphemism for the absolute rule of capitalists over the rights and livelihood of millions of citizens, in essence, a true denial of freedom.

Economic Recovery – This euphemistic phrase means the recovery of profits by the major corporations. It disguises the total absence of recovery of living standards for the working and middle classes, the reversal of social benefits and the economic losses of mortgage holders, debtors, the long-term unemployed and bankrupted small business owners. What is glossed over in the term ‘economic recovery’ is how mass immiseration became a key condition for the recovery of corporate profits.

Privatization – This describes the transfer of public enterprises, usually the profitable ones, to well-connected, large scale private capitalists at prices well below their real value, leading to the loss of public services, stable public employment and higher costs to consumers as the new private owners jack up prices and lay-off workers — all in the name of another euphemism, ‘efficiency’.

Efficiency – Efficiency here refers only to the balance sheets of an enterprise; it does not reflect the heavy costs of ‘privatization’ borne by related sectors of the economy. For example, ‘privatization’ of transport adds costs to upstream and downstream businesses by making them less competitive compared with competitors in other countries; ‘privatization’ eliminates services in regions that are less profitable, leading to local economic collapse and isolation from national markets. Frequently, public officials, who are aligned with private capitalists, will deliberately disinvest in public enterprises and appoint incompetent political cronies as part of patronage politics, in order to degrade services and foment public discontent. This creates a public opinion favorable to ‘privatizing’ the enterprise. In other words ‘privatization’ is not a result of the inherent inefficiencies of public enterprises, as the capitalist ideologues like to argue, but a deliberate political act designed to enhance private capital gain at the cost of public welfare.

Conclusion

Language, concepts, and euphemisms are important weapons in the class struggle ‘from above’ designed by capitalist journalists and economists to maximize the wealth and power of capital. To the degree that progressive and leftist critics adopt these euphemisms and their frame of reference, their own critiques and the alternatives they propose are limited by the rhetoric of capital. Putting ‘quotation marks’ around the euphemisms may be a mark of disapproval but this does nothing to advance a different analytical framework necessary for successful class struggle ‘from below’. Equally important, it side-steps the need for a fundamental break with the capitalist system including its corrupted language and deceptive concepts. Capitalists have overturned the most fundamental gains of the working class and we are falling back toward the absolute rule of capital. This must raise anew the issue of a socialist transformation of the state, economy and class structure. An integral part of that process must be the complete rejection of the euphemisms used by capitalist ideologues and their systematic replacement by terms and concepts that truly reflect the harsh reality, that clearly identify the perpetrators of this decline and that define the social agencies for political transformation.

For those unfamiliar with the American University Corporate Complex, the adjunks are the people with higher degrees: Masters, ABDs, All But Dissertations, (have completed all of their doctoral course work including exams, or referred to secretly as unemployable Doctors in the Humanities), which teach regular university courses as professors do, and most importantly — work for wages that are comparable to prison labor stipends. So why do such people with advanced university degrees do such things?

I too crawled back into such dignity killing adjunk work after receiving my doctorate degree. The reason I sacrificed my self-respect was for starting up my ‘new career’ in welding after receiving a useless six-year doctoral degree in history. I chose a community college that offered a course in the manual arts, where there are still some jobs left under monopoly capitalism, and where the pay is often a lot better than many first year assistant professorships. I mean a starting wage at around 50,000 dollars per year. I thought that I would receive one of my manual arts courses for free if I taught an adjunk course for the community college administrators. Well, this used to be the case in the past, but this time around, I only got a few hundred dollars subtracted from my expensive welding course tuition.

I taught the adjunk course for the community college administrators thinking that it would be easy with little or no supervision. They forced me to use their own pre-made course syllabus and their own pre-ordered course textbook. I ignored both during that semester of teaching, but I was soon harassed on all sides by the administration. When they offered me a course for a later semester in my area of doctoral specialty, I was deeply shocked with the new requirements. The dean told me honestly that I had to cover the over 30 plus ‘course outcomes’ for the class. In my previous educational experience, I had never heard of such state mandated ‘course outcomes’ for a university level course. She printed out the course outcomes for me, and told me that I should look them over.

I looked over the ‘course outcomes’ for about ten minutes and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to rip them up. I actually placed the copies in my personal fraud and scam folder. After reading over those outcomes, it was obvious to me that some state bureaucratic hack had written the course outcomes for an area of study that he or she knew nothing about. The person who wrote them obviously knew nothing about the recent historiography in my field. The many outcome themes related to a bad Social Studies course that they tend to give in American public high schools.

After thinking over such outcomes, I began to shudder. It was obvious that the state community college system did not want any critical thinking or real learning to take place inside of the classroom. Instead, they wanted a pathetic wage slave with no self-respect to teach a bunch of rote crap with lots of useless busy work for the students. I thought: the poor students that have had to sit through such a waste of time — and they had to pay lots of money for this! I rejected the offer to teach such a course, and the course went for the same dismal pay as before: 1,000 dollars for four months of teaching. How did American higher education end up like this?

Most of us have used the American university system as students. I lived in it for many years, until I graduated with my PhD inside of a futile humanities program.  A PhD in history opened my mind to new ways of thinking, and I can do research inside of an archive, but as of yet, there is no job for me. I know that I am not the only one stuck as a PhD with no work, and I also know that a few other PhD holders have ultimately found the long desired tenure track, assistant professor position. The actual problem is not I, nor is it the PhD degree. It is an American academy, or a higher education system that has become another corporate complex inside of the global, monopoly capitalist order.

Important questions are in order: why are so many students in debt and without any means to pay the debts back? Why are so many parents fed up with the added on costs of tuition, when the services at the colleges and universities seem to go down for their sons’ and daughters’ education? Why does tuition and other fees keep rising when the students take longer to graduate?

The answer to all of these questions, and the reason why there are so many unemployable PhDs, is due to the corrupt administrators that run both the private universities and the pseudo, state ‘non-profit’ ones. They have successfully transformed the academic world of the university into one of the shameless scams of the new American economic nightmare. The US university system is now up there with cash checking centers and money stores, Wall St. hustlers, bank card and account user fees, variable rate bank mortgages with little money down, and used car dealership leasing agreements. The disaster of the US academy is neither due to professor teaching costs, nor due to athletic program costs. Rather, look to those administrators’ six figure salaries and full round of benefits.¹

At the university where I graduated from with my PhD, every Saturday night, the president received specially catered meals at his ‘home,’ which the university paid for completely. The president also received the free use of a car with free parking right by his office, a subsidized house paid by the college funds, special box seats with a fully loaded catered table with alcohol at sporting events, and a luxurious office in the oldest and prettiest building on campus. This was only the president. Imagine what his six figure salary assistants received, then the provosts, the assistant provosts, the deans and the assistant deans. Now tally up the salaries and perks of the multiple administrator-director parasites on every American university campus, everything from ‘affirmative action director’ to ‘foreign student services director’ to ‘alcohol and drug abuse director.’

In a political culture that make a fetish out of democracy, the American higher academy is a hierarchy that resembles the Vatican or the Pentagon — and it is even more ‘byzantine’ than the local City Hall. First, there are the ‘trustees’ or in the case of the state entities, ‘regents.’ Then their appointees: chancellors and presidents. The presidents then appoint their assistants and the next group in line, provosts, assistant provosts, and they in turn appoint, deans and assistant deans, and then they in turn appoint the various directors around campus. There’s no democracy there. All of these positions do two things: they delegate, or really hand down, their workloads onto the people below them and they all make good salaries in the six figure range. These positions have continued to grow astronomically at all universities and colleges. In higher education institutions where the main service is educating students, almost none of them teach.²

The administrators are definitely not dumb, however. They are actually the smartest ones on the campuses. During the 1980s when the reaction on university campuses began to mount, administrators, in collusion with state authorities, began to set up the campus police brigades. They ate donuts like other cops — and most importantly, they had the same legal rights as local cops. No more Sixties crap was the hidden code. At first, campus police forces arrested working class, African-American kids and other lower class drifters that ventured onto the well-cut green lawns, or the privileged space of ‘the campus.’ College kids with white skin privilege could still drink underage and smoke their weed in their dorm rooms. But like all methods of gradual repression, and especially in the United States, this would soon change.

Now the police regularly arrest these same paying students for various infractions that are not crimes in most other countries around the world.³ The United States is the only country in the world with such university police forces and that regularly arrest the same paying customers who study there! This method worked so well that now many community colleges have similar cop gangs. And just like the administrators, regular university cops on the beat make six figure salaries with the full round of benefits.⁴

What about the tenured professors? They will make six figure salaries after working for over 20 years in the institution. Unfortunately, they often behave as scared, cowardly and institutionalized drones. The tenure system makes them that way. They have had to walk lightly into such a tight system, so that they never offended anybody in order to receive their tenure security blanket. They have had to obey commands for over twenty years of previously schooling. They are well-trained intellectuals and have transformed themselves into the high managerial class on the campuses. There are very few ‘tenured radicals’ left. The ones that do stay in the system, have to moderate and internally police themselves; i.e., Angela Davis, or they end up fired; i.e., Ward Churchill.

Ward Churchill wasn’t the only one. Think Sami Al-Aran, professor and Palestinian rights activist fired from the University of South Florida before moving into the American gulag, or the professor, Norman Finklestein, ‘denied tenure,’ or politely fired due to his exposure of the Zio-Nazi movement. And there are many others, albeit less known, that have suffered under such a cruel system. At my own university where I received the doctorate curse, a ‘tenured’ professor with an Arabic sounding name publicly exposed the practices of animal cruelty within the university. The university administrators used every overt and covert action to kick him out. Finally, a new president arrived on campus. He simply called in the campus police, and the campus police ordered him to vacate his office immediately.

The American college-university, six figure salary club definitely has its perks – and they can fire and hire at will. The college campus has become their sacred garden of delights.

1. Stripling, Jack and Fuller, Andrea, “Presidents Defend Their Pay as Public Colleges Slash Budgets,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2011.
2. Gonzalez, Yvonne, ” ASU Calls Goldwater Report Seriously Flawed,” State Press, August 23, 2010.
3. Henderson, Kelli, “Students with unattended tickets could face arrest by campus police,” The Collegian Online, May 17, 2012.
4. Bousquet, Marc, “What UC-Davis Pays for Top Talent,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 19, 2001.

Despite these election results, parties representing financial interests and the corporate media insist that austerity measures must go ahead.  At a time when real wages are steadily declining and unemployment has reached levels not seen for more than fifty years, the supporters of finance capital insist that the problem is public debt. They demand cuts to social services, public employment and wages and salaries.

For majorities who depend on income from labour—not on profits from capital—austerity is not a solution.  It is the problem. The one per cent, or 0.1 per cent, who depend on income from capital, insist the people are wrong. The interests of capital, regardless of the costs to others, must come first.

Austerity has led to steadily rising unemployment and declining markets in most European countries. Its most devastating effects are in Greece.  Public employment, pensions and other social services have been gutted. The country’s assets are being plundered.  Public utilities are being sold off to corporations from other countries. A quarter of the population—half of people under thirty—are unemployed. Still the supporters of capitalist interests claim that Greece has been living beyond its means.  The only way that the country can expect to get any new money is if it cuts back its profligate spending.

In fact, Greece is one of the poorer countries in Europe.  Its social services do not come close to matching the coverage, quality or cost of the social services of more prosperous countries like Germany and France. The funds that Greece gets if it agrees to austerity measures do not go to Greece, but to the banks that hold the credits that were used to pay for past government expenditures—including the Olympics. The banks that hold these debts are mainly in Germany and France and but also in the U.K., U.S., Switzerland, and elsewhere.

Faced with a 60 per cent vote against austerity in Greece, the capitalist strategy is to hope that the lure of power can induce enough of the elected representatives to switch sides and support the proposed cuts.  What the people of Greece are being pushed to do is to accept rising unemployment and worsening poverty to sustain global financial interests.  Past Greek governments can be blamed for allowing the country to descend into a state of debt peonage, but the primary blame is with the global financial institutions.  Due diligence would have made it clear that Greece could not realistically pay back the money loaned, even at the original low interest rates. As these loans were renegotiated at predictably higher rates it should have been obvious that paying back the loans was impossible.

Greece is a repeat of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage debacle. Low income, often unemployed people were enticed to purchase homes with little or no down payment at interest rates which for the first year or so were attractively low. The borrowers may or may not have been told that these rates would shortly rise dramatically, making it nearly impossible for these loans to ever be repaid. U.S. financial institutions who engaged in these irresponsible lending practices have not been held to account. European financial interests, backed by the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and transnational capital generally, continue on, pursuing their interests at the expense of public employees, social services, union conditions, and consumer income.

The book begins by describing the gift economy that has characterized all primitive cultures. Public gift giving was a major social ritual in all early societies. It was the primary mechanism early human communities employed to satisfy basic survival needs. As civilizations became more complex, gift exchange and barter were impractical over long distances. Therefore, money was introduced as a common medium of exchange. By tracing the western conception of money back to its earliest origins in ancient Greece, Eisenstein makes a strong case that the money system itself is responsible for rapacious growth and resource depletion, greed and the demise of community.

The Illusion of Scarcity

An early artifact of the introduction of money is the mistaken belief that the basic necessities of life are in short supply. This illusion underpins all western economic theory. In fact, many textbooks define economics as the study of human behavior under conditions of scarcity. As Eisenstein points out, this is a ludicrous notion in a world in which vast quantities of food, energy and raw materials go to waste. He links the illusion of scarcity to the illusion of the “discrete and separate self.” This, in turn, stems from the concept of personal wealth and the privatization of communally owned land. Prior to Roman times, land, like air and water, was considered part of the commons and couldn’t be owned. Under Roman tradition, there was no way for an individual to legitimately take possession of common lands. Thus the Roman aristocracy must have seized it by force, just as the English stole the communally owned lands of Native Americans.

Debt, Commodification, and Perpetual Growth

Sacred Economics argues that what economists commonly refer to as growth is the expansion of scarcity into areas of life once characterized by abundance. Fresh water, which was once abundant, has become scarce following its transformation into a commodity we have to pay for.

The fractional reserve banking system, which allows bankers to create money out of thin air – through loan generation – accentuates the pressure to convert more and more of the commons into commodities. Because the debt and interest created is always greater than the money supply (current global debt is estimated at $75 trillion, in contrast to global wealth of $30 trillion), there is always constant pressure to produce more goods and services to repay it. This explains why there are always people willing to cut down the last forest and catch the last fish.

As natural resources, such as fossil fuels, minerals, forests, fish and water, are rapidly converted to commodities, a similar transformation occurs in the social, cultural and spiritual commons. Stuff that was free throughout all human history – stories, songs, images, ideas, clever sayings – are copyrighted or trademarked to enable them to be bought and sold.

According to Eisenstein, the main reason for the world’s current financial crisis is that we continue to face mountains of increasing debt – yet have run out natural, cultural, social and spiritual capital we can convert to money to repay it.

The Case for Negative Interest Money

Eisenstein argues that capitalism, like the monetary system, has ceased to serve the interests of the vast majority of humankind. However, he disagrees with a “Marxist” solution, in which capitalist infrastructure is totally dismantled. He believes major economic change can occur through gradual evolution. In addition to advocating for relocalization of economic and political power away from central government – to cities, states and regions – he also supports the creation of local “negative interest” currencies, first introduced during the Great Depression in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Negative interest money was first proposed by Delvio Gisell in 1906 in his book Natural Economic Order. Gisell called it “free money” because it allowed people to exchange goods and services without paying interest to the owners of money (banks) for the right to do so. A negative interest system involves “demurrage” or natural decay in the value of money. If you know that a $100 bill will only be worth $90 in a year’s time, you have a powerful incentive to exchange it for goods and services.

In the 1920s, a negative interest currency called the Wana circulated in Germany. Towns that used the Wana had plenty of money for business expansion, workers’ salaries and public infrastructure and services – in contrast to towns that relied on the Deutschmark which, owing to deflation, was in extremely short supply. Austrian and Swiss communities introduced negative interest currencies (the Worgle and the WIR) in 1932. Owing to the threat these alternative currencies posed to banks and wealthy elites, the German and Austrian governments banned the Wana and the Worgle in 1932-33. The WIR is still in circulation in Switzerland but no longer operates as a negative interest currency. During the post-World War II boom, the demurrage was eliminated to prevent the Swiss economy from overheating.

In the US more than 100 cities were preparing to launch demurrage currencies – to stimulate local communities ravaged by the Great Depression – when Roosevelt came to power in 1932. Roosevelt, who recognized the enormous threat this posed to central government, banned all “emergency currencies” by executive decree (as Thaddeus Russell writes in A Renegade History of the United States, Roosevelt set the dangerous and unconstitutional precedent of circumventing Congress to enact laws by executive order).

The main advantages of negative interest currency are:

1. Money ceases to be scarce. As it becomes easier for small businesses to access money, jobs are created and people resume purchasing goods and services. Because the new currency is commons-based (see below), higher prices for ecologically harmful products serve as a brake their production.
2. The ready availability of money eliminates the fear of never having enough, reducing greed to acquire more, one of the main causes of income inequality.
3. Debts become easier to repay. People only pay back the original loan, without the compound interest.
4. There ceases to be any incentive for corporations to convert natural resources to profit, as cash profits rapidly decline in value.
5. Banks have more incentive to fund ecologically and socially beneficial projects with a low rate of return. They lose less by lending negative interest money than by allowing it to accumulate.
6. As money loses its value and importance, there is gradual resurrection of both the gift economy and the commons, in which people work for a “social dividend” in the form of public recognition. Eisenstein sees this process already beginning with the thousands of volunteers who donate their time to create and upgrade Open Source software, Wikipedia and books, films, songs and blogs they share freely as part of the Creative Commons.

Using State Banks to Issue Negative Interest Currencies

Eisenstein can see great benefit in local, regional and state governments issuing negative interest currencies to stimulate local business development and job creation, just as the Wana, Worgle and WIR did during the Great Depression. He applauds Ellen Brown’s work in campaigning for publicly owned state banks. At present, seventeen states have introduced legislation to create publicly owned state banks, funded by interest free tax revenue rather than Wall Street. These publicly owned banks would be in an ideal position to issue local negative interest currencies.

How a Commons-Based Currency Would Work

Rather than backing them with gold or silver, Eisenstein proposes that demurrage currencies work like bearer bonds and be redeemable for the right to “deplete the commons.” Businesses could exchange them, in other words, for the right to create an agreed amount of pollution or to deplete an agreed amount of a natural resource. Because these pollution/resource depletion quotas would be extremely expensive, corporations would be forced to internalize” (i.e. absorb the cost) of environmentally harmful production, rather than “externalizing” it (i.e. making the public pay) as they do currently.

New Zealand economist Deirdre Kent has proposed using land to back locally created negative interest currency. Under her proposal, local government would issue negative interest vouchers as a “loan” to prospective home buyers. The vouchers could be used to repay these “loans,” pay property taxes (known as “rates” in British commonwealth countries) or purchase goods and services from local businesses. This would offer new home buyers a far cheaper alternative than a bank mortgage, as well as discouraging property speculation, stimulating local business and producing additional revenue for local government.

Now that the “greater calamity” has occurred, Einstein’s prescience takes on a heartbreaking dimension, because it could have been avoided. A “just and lasting compromise” was possible, and it would have benefited both peoples. Jews and Arabs could be living in harmony, mutually benefiting from their different cultural gifts. But the imposition of a Jewish state, mass immigration, and ethnic cleansing destroyed that possibility, and now they are dying from nationalism and mutual atrocities.

Worldwide we are caught in the deadly fallout of the Holocaust. It traumatized the Zionists to the extent that they lost standards of justice and ethics that had been built up over centuries. Their efforts to turn Palestine into Israel have led to 60 years of fighting that is spreading to more and more countries. This battle is a major but unstated reason for US military aggression in the Muslim world from Libya to the Philippines, and that in turn is a major but unstated reason for the global economic crisis.

Germany was the site of the previous act of this tragedy. But what unfolded there had its roots in the trauma the Germans went through in the 1920s and ’30s. At the outbreak of the Second World War, W.H. Auden looked back on the suffering imposed on the Germans by the Versailles Treaty and wrote in his poem “September 1st, 1939″: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”

The former victims become the perpetrators, now in the Mideast. We are trapped in an ongoing chain of linked cataclysms.

To understand this chain and break it, we need to view it historically. What each link has in common is powerful financial interests relentlessly fighting to expand. The First World War was primarily a struggle between the established imperial states of Britain and France and a newcomer in the game of empire, Germany. The fascism that arose in its aftermath was financed by German capitalists in order to destroy the rising socialist movement and to rearm for another war. The Second World War in Europe was a continuation of the imperialist struggle of the First, and in the Pacific it was an imperial battle between the USA and Japan for control of Asia. After the Holocaust the demands for a Jewish state were supported by the USA and Britain mainly to extend their power over the Mideast and its oil. All this aggression with its millions of shattered lives was disguised under banners of idealism, but its fundamental impulse was economic domination.

How to break the chain? War and many other forms of violence are generated by the underlying structural violence of capitalism, which is intrinsically unjust and inevitably produces conflict. This outmoded, destructive system chains us also into working to make its owners rich. To have peace and to have fulfilling lives, we need to replace it with a democratic socialist society that emphasizes the humane in humanity. As Einstein wrote, “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy.”

Who can hate creativity? Who would want less of it? No one, obviously.

But something profound has happened to the idea of creative expression in the past 20-30 years that should give us pause. For one, it’s become big business: as the globalized economy becomes more and more competitive, corporations are increasingly desperate to have their workers “create” new and different things to sell. As advertising media accelerate and slowly fill up public space, marketers are frantic to “creatively” (the people who come up with advertising ideas are actually called “creatives”) develop new ways of pitching products. And workplaces—from factories to hospitals to high tech firms to fast-food joints to schools—are all eager to “create” new products and forms of efficiency to keep the wolf at bay (usually at the expense of workers who must work longer, faster and leaner).

But it’s not just business that has embraced creativity as key to survival in the brave new world. These days whole governments have fallen in love with creativity as a means towards economic growth and social prosperity. Despite cuts to arts and culture budgets in this “age of austerity,” national, regional and local politicians pay lip service to the power of creativity not only to express people’s individuality, but to create jobs and heal communities. University of Toronto urban development guru Richard Florida has been staggeringly successful in promoting his idea of the “creative class.” He argues that the “new” post-industrial economy will reward those cities, nations and regions that foster and attract creative people, who bring with them good jobs and a better standard of living for everyone.

In a certain very limited extent this is partly true. A place that thrives with creativity is obviously more livable than one that doesn’t. But there’s a bigger problem at work. Not all places can be “creative capitals” and not everyone can be an artist in this economy – some places still need to make boring stuff, and so do most workers. More importantly, the call to embrace creativity does not typically include a call for equality, decent and meaningful work, social care and compassion, and social justice. Without also calling for these things, calls for creativity ring hollow: it is creativity for the few, not for the many.

The problem with the new hype around creativity is that it presumes that the economic system we have, with all its gross injustices and horrifying effects (global warming, child poverty, unrewarding jobs, imperial warfare, the exploitation of the third world), is inevitable. It doesn’t really imagine that everyone will get to express their creativity and enjoy the life of the artist. In
fact, the new hype over creativity actually (ironically) makes us less creative in how we think about social problems and solutions. It makes creativity an individualized thing, the “private property” of each isolated person.

But in reality, creativity is a social, socialized and socializing phenomenon: it’s something we do together as social animals. Every great creative genius was part of a community of peers and a society that supported her or him. Only when we recognize that creativity is a collaborative process (not an individual possession) can creativity help us transform our lives and our world creatively, and employ creativity for the good of everyone.

2. The creation of creativity

To understand how we ended up with the limited, individualistic idea of creativity we have today, we need to go back in history. All sorts of cultures have different ways of recognizing and valuing creative people and their accomplishments. We need to focus on the Western European worldview and its idea of creativity because it is this worldview that has shaped the world over the past 400 years, thanks to European imperialism and the spread of capitalism. Part of the imperialist project was insisting all other cultures acknowledge Europeans as the most creative “race” and see their own creative accomplishments (in the arts, sciences, theology, ecology and other fields) as childish imitations. Europeans, for instance, established schools that taught the “canon” of Great White thinkers and artists as the pinnacles of human creative achievement, reaffirming a sense of superiority that justified their “enlightened” domination of other peoples. We still study this canon, to the exclusion of many of the great works of world literature, art and science (from Arabia, Persia, China, the indigenous Americas, etc.).

So it might surprise you to learn that the European idea of creativity was, itself, created. In Shakespeare’s day, for instance, no one would have called The Bard “creative” – the word itself hardly existed in the English lexicon except to describe God’s generative powers (His creatures, His creation). Those whom we today consider “artists” were then considered more like skilled craftspeople. The originality of a play or a painting was valued far, far less than the craftsperson’s conformity to established forms and patterns. Shakespeare, like most of his contemporaries, was a plagiarist and a hack by today’s standards – he stole and sampled, he wrote for money and he earned it. Indeed, if today’s standards of “intellectual property” and copyright existed in Shakespeare’s day, he’d have been writing sonnets from the Tower of London.

It was only with the rise of global, European capitalism, that the idea of the “creative genius” emerged in Europe, largely in the 1700s. As the feudal system fell apart a new class of merchants, financiers, factory owners and middlemen started to demand “culture.” This was not “culture” as an inclusive part of community and everyday life (the ways songs, dances, and even plays used to be, for rich and poor alike) but as distinct objects or experiences that could be purchased for exclusive, private use by individuals – commodities to be consumed. This new class demanded novels, paintings, objects d’art, opera tickets and other articles of “refinement” to prove to themselves (and everyone else) that they were distinct from (and better than) the working classes, despite having no noble blood.

What made these cultural commodities (a painting, say) distinct was not so much their particular beauty or quality but the signature of an artiste, a special, unique and gifted “genius.” For a “creative” object to be valuable it needed to be singular and appear to be the true expression of the tortured soul. This is the origin of our modern idea of creativity: it was always a scam. Specialized workers called themselves artists to rip off haughty rich people.

But in doing so there was an unintended consequence. Once upon a time, art and culture was part of everyday life, everyone both created and consumed culture everyday. Creativity was part of the “social process,” the way people lived and worked together. But by the 1800s, culture was something you bought, rented or paid for, and “creativity” was generally understood to be the private property of eccentric men who tended to drink themselves to death in Paris.

3. The creativity commodity

The whole situation intensified again near the turn of the 20th century and the birth of what cultural critic and historian Walter Benjamin called “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” With film, photography, cheaper inks and printing presses, industrial manufacturing and the phonograph, culture-as-commodity became not only the property of the rich, but of everyone. By the advent of radio and television, the idea of creativity as the special property of gifted individuals (rather than social groups) was being broadcast into every home. The idea of the genius was lionized in the figures of stars and celebrities whose glamorous, aristocratic lifestyles illustrated their semi-divine status. Public schooling valourized a list of upper-class creative geniuses all students were to look up to at the same time as they denigrated everyday and working class culture as crude, simplistic and “derivative” (i.e. not creative).

Meanwhile, the opportunities for creativity in most people’s lives became increasingly scarce, even in Europe and North America. Through the 1800s independent crafts-people, peasants and working people had been swept into cities and factories where they toiled for much of their lives for a meager salary. Exhausted after a day of work, many turned to commodified culture for solace: cheap “sensation” novels, music-hall performances, and later, moving pictures. Opportunities to express oneself creatively were scanter than ever. Not only was there less time (and less money) to pursue creative expression, by this time creativity had become largely severed from community and daily life. Raising a barn, dying wool, or preparing a feast all became individualized affairs or industrialized processes. The idea of making and doing together, as a community, was suffocating. So too was the creativity of daily life. As more and more jobs and processes became systematized, concentrated and commodified, the everyday “micro” acts of creativity (the unique way a woodworker turns a piece of wood; the idiosyncratic chemistry of fibres, dyes, mordants and patterns a weaver might use; the innovative twists on and recombination of narrative a storyteller might employ) began to disappear. Meanwhile, in the colonized world, economies managed from afar left little space or room for native culture and creative workers, unless they agreed to emulate European forms.

By the mid-20th century the notion of creativity as an ivory tower on a hill was nearly complete. The industrial age had seen communities fundamentally redrawn around private homes and private lives. Women (of a certain class) were increasingly expected to stay in the home and were thought to be incapable of real creativity. Education was geared towards drilling facts into kids’ heads – creativity was seen as a dangerous threat to the social order. The strict social division of labour, where only a handful of gifted geniuses got to be “creative,” was held to be best for everyone. When the manual worker focused on doing his job and the artist doing his, all was for the best. In addition, creativity had by this time become an almost industrial product with a handful of major corporations controlling the production and consumption of music, books and film. Outside of arts and academic institutions, galleries and museums, conservatories and granting agencies effectively gate-kept the realms of “high art” from “uncivilized” intruders. The cultural markets of colonized and post-colonial countries were (and are) flooded by cheaper films, plays, books and art from the globe’s metropoles.

Meanwhile, the situation of those perceived to be “minorities” in Europe and especially North America was worse. As noted above, Euro-American ideology insisted that only white men could be real creative geniuses. Yet denied any other means of expression (or often the means to earn a living) many racialized people took up the fields of arts and culture. For instance, as cultural historian Robin D. G. Kelly argues, Blacks in the US were able to carve out a space of creativity and freedom within and sometimes against the “culture industries.” Largely this was because their creative products fed a deep and unquenchable hunger for integrity and authenticity among cultural consumers fed a steady diet of formulaic cultural mush. Unfortunately, from blues to jazz to soul to disco to hip-hop, these groups often witnessed their cultures of creative resistance commodified, mass produced and stolen by (largely white, male) corporate profiteers.

4. The rise of “creative capitalism”

Is it any wonder, then, that after the Second World War youth rebelled against that cultural system, demanding that they be allowed to express themselves creatively? The counterculture and protest movements of the 50s, 60s and 70s were, in part, based in a furious demand for a life that actually valued creativity. The best parts of these movements understood that capitalism systematically denied people’s creativity and abilities through an unjust and exploitative division of labour: most people got to do what the boss told them to do while only a few got to “be creative” (usually they were related to the boss in some way). The worst parts of these movements satisfied themselves with creating little spaces for creativity in their own personal lives through things like music, drugs and alternative living. The revolutionary feminist movement began to create spaces and processes to value women’s creative potentials and challenge the very idea of creativity as a white, male European project. In anti-colonial struggles, creativity became a key part of struggles for national liberation with artists, musicians and writers rekindling repressed creative and cultural traditions, stealing and subverting the traditions of the colonizer, or mixing and remixing the two, with revolutionary brilliance and fervour.

This era left its mark. After the 60s creativity ceased to be seen as a threat to social order and the idea that “everyone is creative” became widely accepted, especially in schools. While not in itself a bad thing, this new found acceptance of a very individualized idea of creativity had some troubling consequences. For one, it prompted what some say is a totally redesign of capitalism. In order to answer and co-opt people’s demands for greater creativity freedom in their lives, capitalism (as a whole system) began to offer more and more cheap commodities by which people could define themselves: more alternative fashions, more lifestyle products, more ways of expressing “individuality.” It even began to offer commodified opportunities for creativity, from art classes to tape recorders (a big deal in their day!). It also broke a homogeneous “mass” popular culture into commodified subcultures, which encouraged people to adopt diverse lifestyles and modes of creativity and community, but always under the broader, unquestionable domination of the “free market.” For instance, Jazz, which was once considered a radical and dangerous form of music and cultural expression very quickly became commodified as a set of consuming practices – both in terms of music and in terms of style, dress and design. Skateboard culture is a more recent example of a grassroots from of creative expression being coopted and colonized by a more diversified and clever capitalist culture. Indeed, French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have called this commodified freedom and individuality “the new spirit of capitalism,” noting that the system gains consent and legitimacy by encouraging all of us to believe we are unique, self-possessed rebels. This individualism, in turn, assists in the decay of collective institutions, from communities to the welfare state.

In the world of work, creativity became a key theme in restructuring economic life towards corporate-led “globalization.” As increasingly powerful corporate empires shifted industrial production overseas, a greater and greater share of work took place in the “flexiblized” information and service sectors. While the vast majority of this work is banal, routine and unimaginative, creativity is held up as a corporate ideal. Information technology workers are encouraged to see themselves less as digital drones and more as “creative collaborators” on shared projects. Service workers are told they are “creating positive environments” for their “clients,” rather than that they are being exploited not only for the time and labour but also for their brains and their social and emotional skills. The insistence that SubWay (one of America’s largest fast-food joints) insisted on calling their underpaid workers “Sandwich Artists” tells you a lot about just what sort of “creativity” is in store for most of us. Even if most workers don’t believe this creative bullshit there’s no denying that, in our current “Age of Austerity,” where social programs and the welfare state (health-care, pensions, employment insurance, schools, etc.) are being cut to the bone, we have all had to get a lot more “creative” just to survive the new “creative” economy!

5. The passion of the creative class

Ever those who are working in the actual “creative” sector these days aren’t doing so well. For one, jobs for designers, musicians and authors are extremely hard to come by—permanent, full time ones with benefits and pensions even more so. Most people who want to work in or for arts organizations need to be independently wealthy enough to spend months or years as unpaid “interns” to gain enough experience or connections to land even a small paying gig. Artists and other “creative” types almost always have to supplement their income with other, “un-creative” jobs, often in the service sector (waiting tables, etc.). Without a formal workplace and without a clear institutional hierarchy, artists, actors, web-designers, poets and others often lack the sorts of protections other workers (used to) enjoy. For instance, in an economy where you are constantly seeking to secure short-term contracts through personal and professional connections, issues like discrimination in the workplace (based on race or gender) or failure of employers to pay are often never pursued (who has money or time for a lawsuit?).

Today, artists and creative types are also made to serve other economic purposes as well. For instance, community activists across North America and Europe have consistently observed that when low-paid, free-thinking artists move into “quirky” poor neighbourhoods, looking for cheap rent and studio space, they are often followed by more affluent citizens seeking to “gentrify” the area, and speculate on up-and-coming properties, driving up property prices and rents and driving out the original inhabitants. Worse, in an age of cuts to municipal and government services (from community development to public infrastructure to school budgets to anti-poverty initiatives), government officials can often be enticed to fund “creative zones” or projects because they appear to offer public benefits (“social cohesion,” “entrepreneurship,” “vibrancy”) that make up for or cover over government neglect.

As British cultural critic Angela McRobbie has pointed out, the slogan that “everyone is creative” is the slogan of a broad cultural shift in our society: “artists,” she suggests, are being held up not as poverty-stricken social malcontents, but as triumphant “pioneers of the new economy.” Today, when the idea of a good, steady, life-long job seems impossible, corporate propaganda encourages us all to see ourselves as artistic souls. Instead of relying on big bureaucratic organizations like paternalistic corporations or the meddlesome “nanny-state,” we should all, like artists, rely on our personal “portfolio” of skills, passions and past accomplishments to secure short-term, no-strings-attached “gigs.”

The reality of course is that no-one feels any special passion for working three part-time jobs, and few achieve aesthetic (or any other sort of) satisfaction from working in a call centre. But the idea of the artist and the promise of creativity are today being held up as “carrots” for workers in the age of “creative capitalism.” The “stick” is the brutal discipline of the dog-eat-dog global economy.

It’s even more insidious. In our new economic situation, as digital-economy scholar Tiziana Terranova explains, many of us do “free” creative work all the time. We record music on our computers. We Photoshop images. We make video mashups. We write blogs or fan fiction. We teach ourselves digital photography. And we create what internet people call “content” and we do so because we enjoy it, and usually we share it for free. But how free is it? The internet-service providers, who are almost all big corporations, make money from our subscriptions. Google (Blogger, YouTube), FunnyOrDie and Facebook are all making money hand over fist thanks to all that “free labour.” In a funny way, our hobbies now act as free training for many jobs – free for our corporate masters that is: our ability to take and manipulate digital photographs, our competencies at social networking, our ability to type quickly, our capacity for online banking: all of these prepare us for the brave new world of work where we are competing against thousands of other people for the same few (typically bad) jobs. The Pentagon actively benefits from new recruits weaned on years of violent videogames.

Meanwhile, as we try and survive in this digital world, amidst increasingly casual and unsecure (“precarious”) employment with few guarantees about our futures, creativity becomes a highly individualized means of solace. Sure today’s economy has brought us unprecedented ways of becoming an amateur film-maker, animator, fiction writer or crafter. But was it brought us real creativity? As art critic Gregory Scholette points out, the number of people we consider artists and the range of things we consider creative practice are expanding everyday and in ways we can’t yet fully understand. And while there is a lot of potential for people to create new forms of community and empowerment, it all takes place within and as part of the expansion of global and local poverty, exploitation, and social dislocation.

Despite all this, establishment pundits and professors have declared ours an age of “creative capitalism.” Capitalism, they argue, is the best system for providing creative opportunities for everyone. Indeed, many argue that capitalism thrives on what is called “creative destruction” – the way competition forces companies to constantly reinvent themselves or go under, the way the incessant drive towards profit forces innovation and dynamism. The unseen cost of all this “creativity” is the tremendous effects on the human and natural environment as corporations compete to find new ways to cut costs (eliminating/downgrading jobs) or “externalize” their expenses by sub-contracting, globalizing or forcing governments to pay for their wrongdoing. This isn’t to mention the massive social upheaval when a firm shuts its doors or moves elsewhere because it failed to be “creative” enough, or the ecological costs of multiple corporations competing to “create” thousands of brands of almost identical products (a trip down the shampoo isle of a local drugstore is quite illuminating).

What capitalism does, in effect, is fundamentally shift what we could call the “economy of creativity”: it drastically alters what sorts of creativity we think are valuable and it focuses humanity’s creative energies towards earning ever greater profit for a few. While this system has produced many fine things, it is destroying the planet and most people’s lives because it has no broad vision of a decent future. It is driven only by irrational and pathological competition for profit, not by any compassionate and collective social vision. Imagine what the world would be like if we focused our creativity and energy towards other ends?

6. Creating a different world

Real creativity is the ability to change the world together. Or, more accurately, the ability to see our collective creative efforts realized in reality. So while today we have more opportunities than ever to “be creative,” we have less and less of an ability to actually control our fates. “Be as creative as you like,” the system tells us, “just colour inside the lines of the individualist, consumerist, capitalist system.” “You can even criticize and rage against the system – do that all you like (in fact, here’s an album you can buy whose lyrics reflect your anger and alienation),” it tells us “but nothing will ever change, and you know it.”

I’m not saying that all individual creative pursuits are dishonest or useless and worthless. Nor am I saying that the system is invincible (it isn’t), nor that we should reject the few moments of borrowed creative freedom that we do enjoy (we should). I am saying that if we really care about creativity, we need to ask ourselves what creativity really could mean.

Lets return to the abstract idea of creativity itself. While the idea of the “creative genius” might be the product of European history, it is, of course, not totally false. There have been and are creative geniuses whose work we love and cherish. But the thing we need to remember about Jane Austin, Mozart, Frida Kahlo or Miles Davis is that none of them ever existed in a vacuum. They were all part of creative communities that supported their work, or spurred their work on through competition, collaboration and criticism. Creative genius never occurs in isolation. Geniuses are manifestations of their time and place, and so is creativity.

We also need to remember that what we consider “creative” is a social phenomenon. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp took a mass-produced ceramic urinal, singed it “R. Mutt” and put it on a pedestal in a gallery and called it Fountain. This was one of the most significant moments in modern art history not because of Duchamp’s inherent creative power, but because the “work” existed in a time and a space where it could be recognized—by the public and by the artist’s peers—as creative. 25 years earlier Fountain would have been uninteligable; 25 years earlier it would have been redundant. After all, creating a perspectival drawing (eg. one with the illusion of “depth”) is something most art students learn quite early today and is not considered especially creative, but it would be considered highly creative (indeed, heretical) 500 years ago. And today’s experimental jazz would likely sound like meaningless noise (rather than creative boundary-pushing) to listeners even 50 years ago. Creativity is always a social phenomenon because creative people don’t survive except within a social environment. Beethoven could write hundreds of pieces of music because he didn’t have to do his own farming, or laundry, or manufacture his own clothing.

But on the other hand, creativity is not merely some sort of parasite, feeding on other people’s hard, boring “real” work. Creativity is work, it’s just not usually recognized as such. Work is the process by which we “reproduce” our selves and our community: it is concerted, collaborative effort to make the world go ‘round. Creativity is a fundamental part of how we work to “reproduce” our societies. Creativity lets us think about ourselves as people and as communities in new ways and provides us with a mirror for considering how things could be different. In a way, we are all being creative, all the time, just living our lives, making our way in the world. Under capitalism, all this work of reproduction, creative and not creative, is organized towards earning some people a lot of profit and keeping the rest of us in our place. And creativity is also made to serve this end.

So there is some truth to the slogan “everyone is creative.” But the real question is how we might have a society that actually values everyone’s creativity, not just the creativity of a few celebrities, or the creativity that makes money, or creativity that affords solace in an uncreative world.

Which brings us to the final point: you can be very creative under capitalism, and many people are. But real creativity, the sort of creativity that isn’t just about individual fulfillment but is about changing the world and being part of a changing world, is almost impossible under capitalism. It is a privilege reserved for a very select few, usually based on their ability to make someone else money (art dealers, the record industry, film studios, art supply stores, internet service providers, video game companies, etc.).

The fact is that capitalism doesn’t make good use of human talents, and it relies on exploitation and a fundamentally unjust division of labour, both within countries and around the world. We get to be creative on our MacBooks because children dig coltan for computer components in the Congo, because teenagers assemble touch-pads in Chinese sweatshops, because the global economy forces fthe toxic waste of computer manufacturing onto developing nations, and because we never have to deal with the consequences of mining, manufacturing, transportation and waste disposal (except in the broadest sense that digital waste is helping create a toxic planet for everyone).

Meanwhile, the same system imprisons everyone’s creativity in the prism of brutal economic “necessity.” Today’s Van Goghs are working at McDonalds. Tomorrow’s Mary Shelleys are graduating owing a fortune in student loans. Millions of creative people are in a day-to-day struggle for survival while some of the sharpest and most creative minds of our time are finding themselves dreaming up new ways of playing with money on Wall Street (a “credit default swap” is, after all, a remarkably creative product). We will see the best minds of our generation destroyed by debt, starved for time, and naked in a wearied, over-stimulated commodified cultural landscape.

Equality and autonomy are the real conditions of creativity. And equality and autonomy rely on and are grounded in creativity. Ideas of the “creative class” and the “new creative economy” celebrate creativity as an individualistic, capitalistic value. In doing so they are terribly uncreative when it comes to imagining what creativity is and what it might really be capable of.

7. Struggles for and against creativity

The struggle against the new “creative capitalism” is not very different than struggles against capitalism in other eras and in other places: people work together to win greater control over their working conditions; people create new ways of living and new communities that operate (to the best of their ability) outside the structure of capitalism; people reject the way capitalism divides people and puts them into hierarchies of race, class, gender, ability and identity; people try and take control of their governments to protect them from capitalist greed and sometimes succeed in transforming their economy and society completely. Little has changed in terms of the big scheme of struggle. But there are a few new facets to think about in this brave new world of creativity.

For one, the ruse of creativity and creative capitalism has seen capital outmaneuver many traditional institutions of workers’ power. Today, when workers are encouraged to see themselves as creative free agents and empowered economic individuals—rather than an exploited collective or community—union organizing has become very difficult. As workers increasingly flit from employer to employer and survive contract to contract, not only are they harder to organize into permanent collectivities, they often lack a shared culture and community that would foster solidarity. Creative capitalism encourages workers, both those employed in (ostensibly) creative industries (eg. film and television, web design, fashion) and in mundane jobs (services, petty management) to consider themselves as competitive individuals and to see their bosses as merely more successful or talented versions of themselves. This makes organizing around class antagonisms difficult. The failure of traditional unions to meet this challenge head-on has led to the pervasive sense that unions are relics of a different age, no longer able to defend workers’ interests in a “new” economy. But this is also due to the fact that unions have long since ceased to offer a substantive vision of a different world or economy.

Meanwhile, many creative workers like scriptwriters or performing musicians or professors, have had guild-like associations for decades, and sometimes centuries. But new media has led to grave challenges for the monopolies these groups won in years past. For instance, musicians and authors’ unions have had their solidarity undermined by the flood of competition unleashed by the internet, where today anyone can call themselves a songwriter or a journalist. Meanwhile, globalization has also seen challenges to the strength of professional associations, with new forms of competition in realms like editing and proofreading, graphics animation and architecture. Unfortunately, many artists’ associations have thrown in their lot with the employers in attempts to solidify international copyright and “intellectual property” laws, despite the fact these laws have never served artists as well as they have served major corporations.

One of the key struggles today within and against “creative capitalism” is occurring over the place of the arts and culture in today’s society. In an age of austerity, where governments are making dramatic cuts, many programs that supported creativity are being slashed. As the economic crisis deepens, people have less money to consume creative commodities. Unrestrained, the capitalist economy has little use for any artistic or cultural expression that doesn’t make someone a profit. As the government exits the picture and money dries up, the cultural “market” becomes less and less creative: creators and their sponsors gravitate towards more and more conventional, tried and true material hoping for a secure market. Fewer experimental or challenging books are published. Fewer opportunities exist for composers to try new things. Another way of thinking about it is this: all art is risk – a roll of the dice that an stylistic innovation or individual idiosyncrasy will be seen as genius and not merely insignificant or unimportant. Formerly, there used to be more help for artists and creative types from governments and even from the private sector in helping artists and creative people swallow this risk, supporting them while they took chances. Today, that margin of risk has dramatically shrunk. Only the independently wealthy or the foolishly romantic can afford to dwell with failure in the mad hope of success, as their forbearers have done for centuries.

Ironically, the fact that “creative capitalism” both depends on and encourages extreme individualism also undermines creative opportunities. To the extent people see themselves as competitive individuals they cannot see the bigger sociological picture. They are unwilling to consider the benefit of art or culture they don’t personally enjoy. As we all work more and leaner, we have less time to experiment with our preconceived ideas and tastes and we resent the imposition of other people’s creative experimentation on our lives. The cultural media and market have slowly been consolidated in the hands of five or six major multinational corporations like Disney, Time-Warner, Fox and Vivendi. Local arts, film and literature festivals starve for lack of interest from a public addicted to the cultural equivalent of fast-food.

Where people do embrace creative difference, they often do so as part of a commodified subculture where enjoying “unlistenable” music or watching art-house films gives us a sense of uniqueness and possibly community in a world of sameness and disconnection. From punk to funk, from hip-hop to skateboarding, cultures of once-authentic resistance and exprimentation have been folded into a mainstream commodified landscape that offers a valve for personal and social anxieties that is only very rarely transformative.

Unfortunately, all too often social movements participate in this game, acting more as subcultures of solace (with uniforms of dress or musical taste) than as broad-based engines of social change. Many forms of experimental culture or music also satisfy themselves with eking out a small space for limited creativity within a broader society, rather than demanding a different world—or they demand a different world only to the extent the act of demanding creates the illusion of rebellion.

More recently, the success of ideas about “creative cities” and the “creative class” has opened a new terrain of struggle. For many working in what are now considered the “creative industries” the idea that the arts could be an economic boon for cities and regions was welcome ammunition in a fight to maintain or improve meager government funding. For beleaguered cities and regions, concerned about the disappearance of factories and jobs in a “post-industrial” economy, the idea of creativity as the economic engine of the “information economy” seemed like a great fix, or at least like a cheap way to appear to be doing something. Many cities and regions invested millions of dollars in new arts facilities (often sponsored by major corporations which, for a relatively minor contribution to constructions costs, got to plaster their names all over a new opera house or art gallery). Meanwhile, in an effort to improve the “livability” and attractiveness of supposedly “creative” urban hubs, many cities accelerated plans to “clean up the streets,” ironically driving out the local character of many areas and increasing property values, both of which had attracted or fostered creativity and creative people in the first place. This “creative gentrification” has been based on a typically narrow vision of what creativity means and what sorts of people and jobs are considered creative, and often had the stated intention of using creativity as a means to raise property prices and “tidy up” neighbourhoods, thus both increasing tax revenue and decreasing the number of people in an area depending on social assistance.

Unfortunately, this approach has warmly embraced not only by local governments but also many upwardly-mobile residents who preferred to see romantically starving artists than less-than-romantically starving pan-handlers. Of course, we all want to live in a neighbourhood flourishing the creativity and vibrant energy. But the rhetoric and policy surrounding creative cities fails to make equality and the struggle against systemic injustice central to its vision. In the end, it serves real-estate developers and land-speculators far more than residents, grassroots creative workers, let alone the urban poor.

What will be key for organizers and activists fighting within and against the hype of creative capitalism, whether they are fighting worker exploitation or neighbourhood gentrification, will be acknowledging that the promise of creativity, while hollow, truly does move many people. It is precisely because our world offers so few substantive opportunities for creative expressions and efficacy that the rhetoric of creativity is so appealing. Creativity is valuable. Our task can be limited neither to pointing out that creativity is a carrot, nor showing that along with that carrot is the stick of brutal global economic terror. Nor can it be a flight into the most esoteric and self-reflexive forms of creative expression in a vain hope to avoid commodification. Instead, we need to focus on making it clear that real, deep creativity can never be achieved as an individual possession but is always a collective process, bound up with values of equality, social justice and community. In other words, the promise of creativity can only be fulfilled in a very different society than ours. Creativity must embrace its tradition, potential and promise as a key part of cultivating critical, revolutionary communities that resist capitalism, colonialism, gender oppression and racism and create fierce and sustainable alternatives within and against the status quo. Creativity is, in part, the way we refuse our current “reality” and, in a very small and often abstract way, propose or model something different. When creativity joins, supports and critiques social movements for radical change, or when it helps imagine and build the post-capitalist society of the future in the present, it is at its very best.

George Carlin had a way of revealing the truth. With his gift of irreverent satire, he softened the truth of his biting social commentary with a unique humor. He could for a short time cut through America's collective consciousness and belief systems. His performances gave the audience enough distance to not feel offended when invited to look at the truth about their own lives. Truth can hurt, especially if one has long avoided confronting it. But Carlin's truth-telling left the audience at ease. His words have become more and more relevant and seem to have a prophetic edge. Let's take a look at one popular piece where he dismantles the notion of the American Dream:

But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never … ever … EVER be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. … BECAUSE … OWNERS, OF THIS COUNTRY, DON’T WANT THAT! I’m talking about the real owners now … the BIG owners! … The Wealthy, the REAL owners!

In this performance he points out how a small percentage of America’s population, driven by narrow self-interests control the destiny of the majority. Four years after his death, in light of recent bank bailouts and massive mortgage and student loan scams perpetrated on the populace, his passionate words on stage seemed to have captured the sentiment behind the growing 99%. The Occupy Movement is a sign of people becoming aware of a more overt takeover by the wealthy elite, whom Carlin referred to as 'the owners of this country'. Carlin’s performance brought attention to the unconscious narratives that guide Americans and his piece on the American dream revealed how the constructed story brought so many under its spell.

What is the American dream? It is a concocted ethos that proclaims the idea that with simple hard work, anyone can succeed economically regardless of their class and race. Over the years, the idea of American Dream had become an essential part of American popular political culture and was normalized to the point that its validity was not even questioned. Carlin confronted this dominant idea very aggressively. He dismantled the myth of equal opportunity and revealed how it has covered up the reality of inequality and injustice with a false sense of hope.

The American dream was in a sense a transition from the blunt racism in America to the subversive subjugation of the will under corporate masters rather than slave-masters. Color lines matter goes the narrative, but the American dream offered the promise that if one worked hard enough, even black and brown people could succeed and rise in social and economic status.

In actuality, this idea of bootstrap success enslaved a majority to a system that is run almost exclusively by greed driven profit motives. Not just businessmen on Wall Street, but politicians and government officials increasingly have subjugated their autonomy to corporate elites. Carlin concluded this particular performance with the statement

The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. Its called the American Dream, … cause you have to be asleep to believe it …

Carlin was right. The American dream required a nation to fall asleep in order for it to work as a shared illusion. By collectively falling asleep to the glorious materialistic Maya of American capitalism, many have closed their eyes to the suffering of others, which is necessary to sustain this illusion of the dream back home. The victims of this illusion are found both inside and outside the country, the neoliberal world order being the most recent expression of the shadow of the American dream. People outside the US and even whole nations (currently in the Middle East) are systematically placed on the wrong side of the barrel of the gun, with the military industrial complex enforcing a globally extractive economy. In the US, the socially abandoned poor class in this country was always hidden and never meant to have any real access or voice in electoral politics or middle class advantage.

Carlin's performance showed this dream as a kind of constructed delusion that sucked a majority of the American people in. Through mass media and films, the images carried the idea of the American Dream across the nation. Mainstream media in the US, in a reality TV of corporate entertaining consumerism and false portrayal, has till now insulated people from the injustices supported and perpetrated by their own government, which itself has been effectively hijacked by transnational corporations. It is becoming more obvious that the much vaunted American Dream revealed by Carlin as an illusion is sustained by a false bipartisan framework of electoral buffoonery, where voters allow their spectrum of potential to be narrowed by a manufactured mindset of the lesser of two evils infecting a contrived political landscape.

The last couple years have been the beginning of a historical era of awakening and revelation. WikiLeaks, with its scientific journalism have cut open the mask of shielded reality concurrently with the largest economic meltdown in 80 years and helped kick-start a global movement. Leaked documents showed to the world many brutal actions of the US regime overseas carried out while the many of this nation's sleepers still hitting the snooze button. With more and more Internet based information sharing and citizen journalism, the true actions and corruption of governments and corporations are exposed and this ugly reality is becoming harder to conceal.

People are gradually coming to realize the true nature and purpose of brutal military operations overseas, invading countries for 'humanitarian' reasons, or in the name of 'bringing democracy' and 'liberating innocents from dictators'. It is increasingly clear that this is part of a larger lie. What all these countries have in common is a black sticky substance and most of the people are clearly worse off after US 'intervention'. Inhumane labor conditions and corporate exploitation of sweat shops carried out in a service to this Western exploitation and consumerism are also coming to public light. Now the fleecing of the middle class itself has left little room for the sleep to continue.

American audiences have been laughing long enough. Held in collective amusement, many still remain asleep. But this amusement is quickly coming to an end. Carlin's prophetic view is now being powerfully confirmed. When the gravity of reality hits home, laughter slowly fades, replaced with a numbing silence. More have started to feel the pain in the humor of George Carlin. It is in this silence that the Occupy Movement across the country struck a new chord. Audiences once entertained by Carlin's humor and his brash honesty are now beginning to wake up.

Who would have imagined the rise of the 99%; standing up and starting to take hold of the course of history? In the eyes of some, Carlin appeared as a simple entertainer. He inserted himself in the constrained reality of the American dream as a satirical comedian and performed his magic of truth-telling. He used the stage to mirror back the theater of our own lives, bringing laughter that serves as a safe context and catharsis for those waking up from the dreaming state of American illusion.

George Carlin is the muse for the 99%. His dry wit is now transformed into awareness, anger and passion for a greater social movement and transformation. Perhaps America lost a great comedian, but the transformative power of his humor lives on in the hearts of his audience. He was surely ahead of his time and his legacy of truth-telling is truly revolutionary.

 Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

— Hebert Marcuse¹

[A potential solution to the financial crisis is] a global neo-Keynesianism… to save capitalism from itself and from potential radical challenges from below.

— William I. Robinson²

Ice Cream and Social Change

In the midst of the slow-down of the Occupy movement in the early months of 2012, a strange creation emerged from its dense horizontal network of assemblies, spokes-councils, and working groups. Dubbed the Movement Resource Group (MRG), its nature drew controversy – and for many, condemnation – from the movement that it claimed to represent. It appeared as a vertical blip on the flat radar screen, an image of wealth operating in a space where class and rampant material accumulation were adamantly questioned.

The MRG’s aim was to act as a conduit for funding for the movement, seeking to ease Occupy “as it transitions from being a series of spontaneous actions to a more strategic national movement.”³ It was first launched by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of the progressive-minded Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. They were quickly joined by other high profile left-wing millionaires and figureheads: Anna Burger of the SEIU labor union, entertainment moguls Danny Goldberg and Richard Foos, and others. Maybe it was because Ben and Jerry’s parent company, Unilever, is a member of the much maligned American Legislative Exchange Council. Or maybe it is because the image of money cozying up to Occupy reeks of the age-old tradition of progressive co-option – a threat very real to all that seek real change. Regardless, MRG did not seem to make much headway, and attention has shifted in both the Occupy movement and the media at large to a new grassroots movement sporting the same rhetoric and tactics of its predecessor – the 99% Spring.

The brainchild of the professional left, the 99% Spring is a joint project of a myriad of organizations, ranging from the Rainforest Action Network to the Institute for Policy Studies to 350.org, all taking part in helping push their agenda far beyond Occupy, transforming its energy and ethos into a structured complex. MRG members don’t seem to be very far from the action, with Anna Burger’s SEIU and Ben Cohen’s USAction adding their support for the 99% Spring.

Critics, rightfully skeptical of power of the professional left (particularly in light of the never ending cascade of letdowns and broken promises from President Barack Obama) have repeatedly drawn attention to the pro-Democratic Party attitudes of so many in the 99% Spring Coalition. These analyses have been published in many well-known and well-read publications such as Truth-Out, CounterPunch, and others. Yet an immediate backlash against these viewpoints has come in torrents. One article put forth by PRWatch quotes one 99% Spring affiliate as saying that the criticisms are “misplaced,” while another dismisses critiques of the professional left as being akin to a “Glenn Beck rant.” ⁴

Individuals who are pointing out the obvious and glaring correlations between the promoters of this new “grassroots” movement are being labeled as conspiracy theorists or cranks, bent on seeing patterns that aren’t there and avoiding to contribute meaningfully in the push to the fix the nation and the world. Never mind that Coffee Party, a 99% Springer, was founded by an organizer from United for Obama; or that the founder of Code Pink, another coalition member, garnered between $50,000 and $100,000 for the president’s 2008 campaign. Never mind that their partner, the Working Families Party, has been a longtime endorser of Obama, even hosting an image on their website informing visitors that “voting for Obama is good.”

This article will not attempt to summarize all of the data collected by the various detractors of the 99% Spring, though I’ve compiled links to various articles below in the notes.⁵  However, it will attempt to refute the ideas that there is no ideological link between the 99% Spring and the Democratic Party and that this sudden mobilization has nothing to do with the impending round of elections. In order to do that, primarily two organizations backing the 99% Spring will be looked at: MoveOn and the AFL-CIO; their history and their extended ties will be summarized, albeit in an extremely abridged fashion. Following this, the rhetoric and mentality of the 99% Spring and their backers will be examined and placed into a wider theoretical perspective on the nature of the current capitalist epoch.

From MoveOn to Big Labor to the American Dream

At the center of the controversy surrounding the 99% Spring is the question of MoveOn’s allegiance – the “conspiracy theorists” charge that MoveOn is an unofficial astroturfing organization that acts on behalf of the Democratic Party, while other critics maintain that there has been an important “cross pollination” of ideas and rhetoric between the organization and the more radically-inclined left. These critics, however, are framing their debate strictly around the currently unfolding events, ignoring the history of MoveOn and its ongoing ties to the Democratic establishment. However, these simplistic diversionary tactics, when placed into an overarching context, fall short of proper analysis and largely negate one of the central visions of the Occupy movement; namely, that “another world is possible.”

If one doubts MoveOn’s current affiliations with Democratic politics, one needs to look no further than one of the email blasts that was sent out on April 17th by their campaign director Steven Biel. Titled “Republican Political Suicide,” it carefully navigates around outright support for President Obama, though it makes it clear that MoveOn is preparing to once again act as the grassroots wings of the upcoming reelection campaign. “In 2008, young people voted in record numbers and went for President Obama over John McCain by more than 2-to-1,” the email reads, before stating that because of Congressional gridlock and the student debt crisis, “Republicans have handed us a golden opportunity to fire up young people to vote in 2012.” Biel then unveils his organization’s plan: “To make sure young people know what’s happening, we’re launching one of the largest online ad campaigns in MoveOn history.” MoveOn then asks for $5 donations to help with their emergent strategy – one that is rooted directly in electoral politics consumed in the divisive two-party paradigm that so many in the Occupy movement have spoken out against. Yet this is not the first time, and certainly not the last, that MoveOn has worked in tandem with the Democratic Party.

Perhaps the most notable example of MoveOn’s relationship with the liberal political party was its role as a coalition member of the Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), which had begun its life as an anti-war lobby in 2007. It became rapidly apparent, however, that the AAEI was closely connected to the Democratic Party – for example, it was staffed by members of the public relations firm Hildebrand Tewes Consulting, which at the same time was working with the Obama presidential campaign. One of the firm’s founders, Steve Hildebrand, had served as the director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, while his partner, Paul Tewes, would go on to serve as then-Senator Obama’s Iowa campaign manager. Likewise, AAEI staffer Brad Woodhouse went on to act as a director of communications at the Democratic National Committee.

With the slew of connections forming to what would eventually become an extremely successful campaign for the Oval Office, eyebrows were certainly raised — grassroots protestors, working in alignment with figures from a party that had thrown its support behind the opposition’s war efforts. Despite these lingering questions raised by skeptics, the AAEI went on to rally massive support for Obama in the anti-war movement – yet in the aftermath, the president of hope and change rapidly descended into what could only be described as business as usual.

In further considering MoveOn’s ongoing ties to the Democratic Party, the best place to begin is with the long biography of Tom Matzzie, the organization’s former Washington director and perhaps one of its most important members. Matziee had been the leader of the AAEI, and is of immediate interest to the 99% Spring, as he is currently an online strategist for the New Organizing Institute (NOI). The NOI is closely connected to MoveOn, with many of MoveOn’s executives and founders operating on its advisory board. Furthermore, NOI’s Joy Cushman, who worked as the director of the Obama campaign in Georgia, is credited with having “full-time on the 99% Spring plan.”⁶

Matzzie’s skills with online organizing date back to his pre-MoveOn days, when he worked as a director for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign in 2004. Two years later, when he was officially affiliated with MoveOn, he was working in Washington politics again by running the Campaign to Defend America, a spin-off outfit from the AAEI that ran anti-Republican ads in the build-up to the 2008 election cycle. Matzzie was joined at the Campaign by MoveOn founder Wes Boyd and Jeff Blum, the executive director of Ben Cohen’s USAction. The Campaign’s pro-Democrat media blitz was heavily subsidized by the heavyweights of “progressive liberalism,” including SEIU leader and future MRG member Anna Burger; Mother Jones’ director Robert McKay; Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta ; and billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Burger, McKay, and Soros went on to act as leaders in the Democracy Alliance (a coalition of centrist philanthropists), while Podesta headed up the Obama-Biden Transition Team and runs a lobbying organization that represents megacorporations like Wal-Mart on Capital Hill.⁷

Matzzie has also served on the board of directors of Progressive Majority, a network of Democratic operators that seeks to “elect progressive champions” by “identifying and recruiting the best progressive leaders to run for office; coaching and supporting their candidacies by providing strategic message, campaign, and technical support.”⁸ While the mission statement touts their commitment to electing “people of color” and propelling new faces into Washington, the majority of Progressive Majority’s directors are directly linked to either the Democratic Party or the AFL-CIO labor union – the importance of which will be summarized momentarily. For now, however, a cursory mention of some of Matzzie’s cohorts in Progressive Majority is in order:

Karen Ackerman, a political director for the AFL-CIO.

Ellen Golombek, a former political director for the AFL-CIO, now affiliated with the SEIU.

William Lux, one of the AFL-CIO’s in the early 1990s. Following this, he served as President Clinton’s Special Assistant for Public Liaison before becoming in 1996 the Vice Chair for the Democratic National Business Council. Later, he was the co-founder of the Progressive Donor Network, a fundraising body for Democrat candidates.

Terry Liarman, elected as the chair of the Maryland Democratic Party in 2004. Prior to this he served as the National Finance Chair for Howard Dean’s 2004 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. It should be noted that prior to his loss to John Kerry, Dean was financially backed by many of the major centrist moneymen – including the aforementioned McKay, Podesta, and Soros.⁹

Clearly, Matzzie – as well as MoveOn – has historically operated in a close-knit sphere of Democratic Party organizers and operators; specifically, the people who build up campaigns by selecting the politicians, financing them, raising awareness for them, and, in short, helping them secure the White House. They are the unseen players who keep the political machine oiled and running. It is interesting to note the prominence of the AFL-CIO in this network, as big labor has been quite often viewed as an autonomous unit from Washington politics since the collapse of the New Deal politics of yesteryear. Thus, it is notable that Matzzie himself helps to bridge the gap between labor and Democrats, as he worked for the AFL-CIO in the early part of the 2000s, incorporating online activism as part of their movement building program. It might also be worthwhile to consider that MoveOn and the AFL-CIO share the same PR firm, Fenton Communications, which also represents Soros’ Open Society Institute and Ben & Jerry’s.

The AFL-CIO has been a major supporter of the 99% Spring – the name of the union’s current president, Richard Trumka, can be found on the list of signatories of the letter that initially launched the movement. But even after the AFL-CIO declared its support for this grassroots mobilization that is allegedly outside of the Democratic Party, the website OpenSecrets revealed that the union’s political action committee was working hard to raise money for Democrat candidates.¹⁰ A month earlier Trumka announced that the union was formally endorsing Barack Obama, commending him for his progressive rhetoric and passing the $800 billion stimulus package.¹¹ But rhetoric falls short without real change; as many left-wing commentators have noted countless times, Obama’s so-called reforms – the so-called “ObamaCare” and his attitude towards Wall Street – have been empty promises, nothing more than populist imagery hiding pro-business agendas. Regardless, the AFL-CIO plans on launching a strategy of “door-to-door canvassing, phone banks and registration drives to help President Barack Obama and other Democrats.”

The AFL-CIO has been no stranger to Washington; for the entire duration of its existence it has operated closely with big politics and big business in curbing radical grassroots demands for structural change. When it was simply the American Federation of Labor (it merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form the AFL-CIO in 1955), it was led by Samuel Gompers. During this time Gompers was also serving as vice-president of the National Civic Federation (NCF), a pro-collective bargaining organization that was led primarily by representatives from leading industrial and financial firms. Gompers’ boss at the NCF, the mining magnate and Republican “king-maker” Mark Hanna, had viewed the promotion of “conservative trade unions” such as the AFL as beneficial to capitalism, noting that they would “play a constructive role in reducing labor strife and in helping American business sell its products overseas.”¹²  While Republican benevolence to collective bargaining certainly seems an oddity in the modern post-Reagan world, sociologist G. William Domhoff writes that the NCF’s stance “involved a narrowing of worker demands to a manageable level.” Continuing on, he charges that collective bargaining “contained the potential for satisfying most workers at the expense of the socialists among them, meaning that it removed the possibility of a challenge to the capitalist system itself…”

In the decade following the AFL-CIO merger, the union, working in conjunction with the Kennedy administration, began to export this moderate unionism overseas through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). Funded by USAID and operating closely with the CIA, the AIFLD adopted a militantly anti-Communist perspective and assisted in a series of US-backed interventions across Latin America, including the infamous coup against Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende.¹³  Later the AIFLD underwent a transformation into the Solidarity Center, a subsidiary organization of the US government’s primary vehicle for “democracy promotion” abroad, the National Endowment for Democracy. Importantly, Trumka has served as the head of the Solidarity Center’s board of trustees – making him a de facto member of the US foreign policy establishment.

If all of these connections and ties isn’t convincing enough that the 99% Spring doesn’t bare the hallmarks of Beltway wheeling and dealing, there is the upcoming “Take Back the American Dream” conference, which is being put together by Progressive Majority and Rebuild the Dream – the latter of which is one of the key 99% Spring planners. The conference is being hosted by the Campaign for America’s Future, (CAF) which counts both Richard Trumka and his predecessor, John Sweeney, on its board of directors. Eli Pariser, MoveOn’s chairman of the board, is also an official at CAF. This is not the organization’s only tie to MoveOn; CAF is a coalition member of Healthcare for America Now, a lobbying organization for Obama’s health care plan, alongside MoveOn, Podesta’s Center for American Progress, and Ben Cohen’s USAction.

Another CAF leader, Robert Borosage, is married to Barbara Shailor, the director of the AFL-CIO’s international affairs division. He also serves alongside Tom Matzzie on the board of Progressive Majority, while an organization that he is a former director of, the Institute for Policy Studies, is part of the 99% Spring movement. He still maintains close ties with the Institute: he is currently on the board of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation, right alongside Wes Boyd and Joan Blades from MoveOn and the NOI, and Bill Fletcher, a high-ranking official in the AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the current co-chair of United for Peace and Justice – yet another 99% Spring coalition member.

While Borosage, who incidentally is one of the keynote speakers at the Take Back the American Dream conference (along with Howard Dean and Rebuild the Dream founder Van Jones)¹⁴ has been critical of Obama’s willingness to bend to corporate America’s demands, Campaign for America’s Future has not minced words about electoral agenda: “Just five months before what could be the most important set of elections in our lifetimes, thousands of progressives will convene in the nation’s capital to energize the movement to Take Back the American Dream.”

Disruption and Redirection (or the End of Neoliberalism)

Borosage’s anti-corporatist tone leads us to one of the major criticisms that defenders of the 99% Spring have of its detractors. MoveOn and its adjunct organizations such as the AFL-CIO and Rebuild the Dream have led activists to protest the corruption surrounding mega corporations, including GE and Bank of America. How can something that does try to bring these abusers of democracy to justice be a negative factor in the activist landscape? The answer to this question is more complicated, yet it is something vital to be discussed in today’s world of the perpetually evolving “flexible capitalism.”

First off, it is important to take note that MoveOn and the extended progressive network does not necessarily practice what it preaches. For example, MoveOn’s “brand-based imagery” for the 99% Spring was crafted with help from Berlinrosen, a “communications consultancy” that operates out of D.C. and New York City.¹⁵ The firm, whose Washington director is a former communications director for Obama’s 2008 campaign, lists on its website MoveOn Political Action (MoveOn’s political fundraising arm), SEIU, Healthcare for Americans Now, and Brookfield Properties as clients. Brookfield, incidentally, is the owner of the now-famous Zucotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street set up camp before its eviction in mid-November, 2011. Brookfield Properties, later revealed to be in contact with Federal agencies just prior to a raid, is in turn owned by Brookfield Asset Management – an Ontario based corporation that counts George Soros as a shareholder and is represented in Washington by a member of the Podesta family.¹⁶  If these people – all tied in one way or another to the 99% Spring – are against corporate malfeasance and are truly in solidarity with the Occupy movement, one would certainly think that they would cut monetary ties with outfits like Brookfield.

Aside from that puzzling detour, the relationship between the “professional left” and capitalism is important to look at. Recent and influential treaties, such as The Shock Doctrine and The Corporation, or the articles published in progressive magazines such as The Nation and Mother Jones, have raised awareness about the destructive tendencies of neoliberalism, showing how they dissolve national boundaries, exploit poor and undeveloped countries, and curtail representative democratic practices by buying off politicians. Yet these publications, for the most part, tend to equate capitalism with its current neoliberal incarnation, and also serve to position corporations – not the underlying structures of the capitalist mode of production – as the problem. While all these works play a critically important role, they simply do not go far enough – overall, their analysis is unfortunately superficial.

This framework – where corporations, not market economies dictated by uneven wealth distribution, finds its physical expression in the works of moderate liberal economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz. While their individual approaches may differ, all of these individuals maintain a pro-market rhetoric that avoids undermining the ultimate Washington consensus that reasons that private enterprise and individual greed is the cornerstone of equality. Stiglitz himself appeared at an Occupy Wall Street rally and told protests “The fact is that the system is not working right… Our financial markets have an important role to play.  They’re supposed to allocate capital, manage risks.  We are bearing the costs of their misdeeds.” ¹⁷  But as the Monthly Review’s Michael Yates retorts, Stiglitz is wrong: the system is working correctly. “It is working exactly as capitalist systems work.  They have always been marked by poles of wealth and poverty, periods of speculative bubbles followed by recessions or depressions, overworked employees and reserve armies of labor, a few winners and many losers, alienating workplaces, the theft of peasant lands, despoiled environments, in a word, the rule of capital.” What Yates is expressing here is a clear and undeniable truth. We cannot attack corporations solely, because they are not the cause of the problem. They are only the symptom of it.

The AFL-CIO and SEIU are also indicative of this mentality, with their perpetual protest slogan of “protect the middle class.” Such a phrase or symbol it represents clashes directly with anti-capitalist sentiments; it’s rooted in the inner-workings of the classist system and is generated solely by workplace hierarchies and capital flows that trickle down ever so slowly. It is true that the world of globalized neoliberalism is dissolving the middle class; this is the result of the breakdown of the social contracts of the Keynesian era, which allowed unionism to flourish and mild redistributive policies to take place. But look at the unofficial label given to the heyday of Keynesianism – “the Golden Age of Capitalism”. ¹⁸  It was the time when the American Dream in all of its illusionary splendor was at its peak; is it any wonder why one of the 99% Spring’s most prominent backers is Rebuild the Dream, or the Campaign for America’s Future’s upcoming conference is called “Take Back the American Dream”? It is as French economist Guy Sorman argued: “I think that the liberal society needs a welfare state… people will accept the capitalist adventure if there is an indispensible amount of social security.”¹⁹

World systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein once said that “we’ve been living in the wake of 1968 ever since, everywhere.” What Wallerstein was alluding to was the dramatic upheaval that happened across the globe in that year, with a surge of left-wing consciousness and revolutionary mobilization from America to Germany to France and beyond. For a brief moment – particularly as France was paralyzed by widespread wildcat strikes – it looked as if a victory was at hand, but it was not.

Within a handful of years the neoliberal project had begun, and capitalism was launched into its current flexible stage. As deregulation became central legislative policy and free trade agreements interconnected the globe in a myriad of ways, the newly unleashed capitalism also took on a rather curious, almost human appearance. For every public asset auctioned off, more and more “socially aware companies” spring up, for every worker protection removed, a corporation unveils an environmentally sustainable plan of action. For every transnational behemoth, there is a corporation that reworks its caste system into networks of interlocking team members. Slavoj Zizek has written about this phenomenon at length, identifying it as a capitalism tailor-made for the post-’68 world:

The new spirit of capitalism triumphantly recuperated the egalitarian and anti-hierarchical rhetoric of 1968, presenting itself as a successful liberation revolt against the oppressive social organizations characteristic of both corporate capitalism and Really Existing Socialism – a new libertarian spirit epitomized by dressed-down “cool” capitalists such as Bill Gates and the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. (emphasis in original)²⁰

French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have tackled this problem, drawing directly from the malaise that settled in their country after the revolt of ’68 lost its power. Writing in highly verbose theory-talk, they explain it by appropriating terminology from anthropology – capitalism’s power results in deterritorialization, but this is quickly reterritorialized before the process is complete. ²¹ What this means is that capitalism is destructive in an absolute sense, gobbling up and breaking down nation states, cultures, religion, social structures – all things that result in discontents or other internal tensions that threaten to undermine its functionality. But through “reterritorialization” these tensions are acknowledged and measures are taken to smooth them out, to fix them in way that surplus value can still be extracted from the dominated labor force.

Antonio Gramsci called this the “Passive Revolution”: in order to protect themselves in the long run, the capitalist elite (or certain sectors of the elite, depending on which time of business interests are threatened) bend to measures that seem contrary to their short-term benefits of the system. This is precisely what gives rise to things such as corporate philanthropy or socially aware business models and practices – and this in turn, to put it in Zizek’s words, separates the “basic ideological dispositif of capitalism” (individual greed) from “its concrete socio-economic condition.” ²²  No longer is capitalism bad; it is the people running the corporations that are bad. Capitalism, when purged of those who exploit it, can work for the betterment of all. This paradigm is reiterated by Drummond Pike, the founder and head of the Tides Foundation (a progressive philanthropy that funds many of the 99% Spring organizations), who rebuked charges that he and his colleagues were socialists by saying “Tides may be progressive, but we are enthusiastically American. Were it not for the capitalist system, not a dollar would flow through Tides.” ²³

Of course, the debate being covered here – whether or not the 99% Spring is connected with the Democratic Party – is simply a microcosm of this wider, more theoretical and abstract meditations on the shifting nuances of capitalism. These avenues of analysis do, however, provide important insight into the nature of this latest clash between the haves and have-nots.

Is it undeniable that MoveOn and its cohorts are intricately bound to a specific aspect of the political machine – the “underbelly” where PR firms, communication consultants, and brand imagery collide to build campaigns. Conducting this kind of business requires a widespread manipulation of people’s emotions by crafting images that play on people’s hopes and desires, their fear and distrust. In short, it is a sphere of politics that is based entirely in propaganda of action, aiming to mobilize mass groups across the nation into a voter base. If MoveOn and other promoters of the 99% Spring are connected to this world, immediate suspicion must be cast on their true aspirations.

The question still lingers on their anti-corporatist rhetoric, but as noted above, this does not necessarily contradict the “reterritorializations” of capitalism. During Keynesianism, the state more or less acted as a limiting agent for capital flow; it was antagonist towards capitalism for the benefit of capitalism. The state was subsequently “deterrioralized” through neoliberalism, and now we’re seeing a sort of “return of the state”. It first occurred with the outright rejection of neoliberalism with the slew of bail-outs, and now that a grassroots movement has arisen challenging these perspectives from a leftist point of view, another movement has risen to re-inject the state itself (through its emphasis on electoral politics) into a dialogue that up to this point has been driven instead by classist dispute.

With the demands of anti-corporate, localized capitalism, what is being posed is the idea of the state acting as an arbiter to limit the exponential growth of the neoliberal project. This is not a new idea – limits to capitalist growth was posed in the 1970s by the Club of Rome, a little know yet influential technocratic organization that counted some of the leading financiers and industrialists of its day as members.²⁴  More recently the Club has made some rather interesting recommendations for the future of capitalism, going beyond the idea of limiting growth: “…capitalism needs a reliable frame. It means that the trend since the late 1970s of weakening the state must come to an end and should be reversed.” ²⁵ Intriguingly, some of the founding members of the Club were leaders from the United Auto Workers union, which today is one of the backers of the 99% Spring.

So what happens now? Capitalism, in its neoliberalism form, is broken. The ongoing global financial crises reflect the inherent instability and structural defects of the transnational trade system. A return to Keynesianism and the state power may be a temporary solution, but economic legislation ebbs and flows with the changing of administrations. Keynesianism tomorrow could bring a new stability, but it will be most likely repealed at some point again and neoliberalism will return. There is also no guarantee that Democrats will ever hold to their campaign promise of economic justice; those that were roped into voting for Obama under MoveOn’s image of the senator as the anti-war candidate will tell you that words without action are nothing.

What it boils down to is simply that the question is not over whether to side with the 99% Spring or not, whether to allow co-option to take root and proliferate. The question, in actuality, concerns what kind of change we truly want to see. Is it the world of limited growth capitalism, managed by the state through representative candidates, or is it a brand new world where real democracy is realized, where power is returned to the people and the capitalist system is finally overturned?

1. Herbert Marcuse One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society Routledge Classics, 2002
2. Quoted in Michael Barker “Who Wants a One World Government?” Swans Commentary April 6, 2009
3. “Make a donation” Movement Resource Group
4. Mary Bottari,  “99% Spring has Sprung: Shareholder Actions Underway Across the Country” PRWatch, April 29, 2012 ; Bryan Farrell,  “Conspiracy Theorists takes Swings at Tar Sands Action but Misses” April 25, 2012
5. The following links are to articles criticizing the 99% Spring, as well as its earlier incarnations:  Steve Horn, “MoveOn.org and Friends Attempt to Co-Op Occupy Wall Street”, Truth-Out,  October 11, 2011; Edmund Berger,  “Strange Contours: Resistance and the Manipulation of People Power”,  Dissident Voice, December 21, 2011;  The Insider, “The Guns That Smoked: 99 Percent Spring: the Latest MoveOn Front for the Democratic Party”, CounterPunch, March 16-18, 2012; The Insider, “Fooled Again? MoveOn’s 99% Spring, Obama, and the Dems in Lock-Step”, CounterPunch, April 12, 2012; Charles M. Young,  “’Front Groups, Not Issues!’ Yes, the 99% Spring is a Fraud”,  CounterPunch, April 13-15, 2012; Edmund Berger, “Harnessing People Power: Co-Option at Work in America Today”,  Swans Commentary,  April 23, 2012
6. “Nonprofit Quarterly: The 99% Spring is Here: An Interview with Organizer Ai-jen Poo”, Change to Win Strategic Organizing Center, Tuesday, April 10, 2012
7. Podesta, as well as his organization the Center for American Progress, are discussed in my article, “Intervention Mentality and the Spectacle of Joseph Kony”,  Dissident Voice, April 14, 2012
8. “Mission Statement”, Progressive Majority
9. Walt Contreras Sheasby, “George Soros and the Rise of the Neo-Centrists”, Citizine, December, 2003
10. “AFL-CIO Worker’s Voice PAC Summary”,  OpenSecrets
11. Sam Hananel,  “AFL-CIO boosts ground support for Obama, Democrats”,  Yahoo News, March 14, 2012
12. G. William Domhoff,  The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America, Aldine de Gruyter, 1990, pgs. 72-73
13. The role of the AIFLD as an arm of US foreign policy will be covered in my forthcoming book on American democracy promotion.
14. “Speakers at Take Back the American Dream”,  Campaign for America’s Future
15. Arun Gupta,  “How to Rebrand Occupy”,  Truth-out,  April 30, 2012
16. This, curiously, has only been reported on in right-wing media outlets. See Aaron Klein, “Look whose relatives just got a $135.8 Million Energy Loan”, World Net Daily,  October 11, 2011
17. Michael Yates,  “Occupy Wall Street and the Celebrity Economists”,  MRZine, October 23, 2011
18. Meghnad Desai,  Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism Verso, 2004 pg. 216
19. Quoted in Slavoj Zizek First as Tragedy, Then as Farce Verso, 2009 pg. 26
20. Ibid., pg. 56
21. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.  Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Penguin, 2006. 6th edition
22. Zizek First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,  pg. 35
23. Drummond Pike,  “Why does the Right Hate Soros?” Politico,  October 29, 2010
24. The Club of Rome published its recommendations for a reworked capitalist economy in the 1972 book Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Today, one Club of Rome member, David Korten, is the co-founder of Yes! Magazine, which counts Rebuild the Dream founder Van Jones on its advisory board and has also published pro-Rebuild the Dream and 99% Spring material. Korten himself has gone from working with the Ford Foundation and USAID to espousing an anti-corporatist rhetoric on Occupy rallies. See Stuart Jeane Bramhall,  “The Club of Rome and the Sustainability Movement”,  Dissident Voice,  April 21^st, 2012
25. Ernst Ulrich Weizsäcker, Oran R. Young, Matthias Finger (ed.) Limits to Privatization: How to Avoid Too Much of a Good Thing, Earthscan, 2005 pg. 186

It can be argued that the concessions to the extractive MNC and local ‘leading’ classes assures stability, steady revenues and finances the incremental social expenditures which permit the re-election of the center-left regimes. In other words a de facto alliance between the “top” and “bottom” of the class structure is the unstated bases for center-left electoral successes despite the growing political divergence between the regimes and sections of the social movements.

The Progressive Camp

There is a general consensus that regimes in seven countries in Latin America form what can be called the “progressive camp”: Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru and Venezuela.

The identifying features usually attributable to regimes in these countries include: (1) their past political trajectory: most are led by former leaders and activists from social movements, trade unions or guerrilla formations; (2) their relatively independent foreign policy pronouncements especially regarding US intervention and sanctions policies; (3) their ideological rhetoric rejecting US-led regional bodies and favoring Latin American centered organizations; (4) their populist electoral campaign programs regarding social equity, environmentalism, and human rights; (5) their vehement rejection of ‘neo-liberalism’ and traditional neo-liberal personalities, parties and privatizations; (6) their strategic perspective that envisions a prolonged process of social transformation that emphasizes an agenda featuring modernization, developementalist priorities, and high levels of investment oriented toward global markets; (7) their prolonged political incumbency based on constitutional reforms permitting re-election justified by the need for completing the transformative vision.

The progressive camp has a self-image, projected inward to its electorate as representing a rupture or ‘historical’ break with the past, first with regard to the traditional neo-liberal oligarchy and secondly with the ‘statist’ left. In the case of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela they frequently resort to rhetoric evoking “21st century socialism”. The potency of the appeal to radical novelty has a limited time span dependent on the degree to which the regimes pursue policies in variance with the preceding neo-liberal regime.

The ‘Left-Right Division’ as Represented by the Progressive Camp (PC)

The perceptions of the objective and subjective divergence between the progressive camp and the right vary according to whether they emanate from official sources or from a critical empirical investigation.

According to the ideologues of the “Progressive Camp” (PC) there are at least five major policy areas which reflect the radical rupture with the traditional neo-liberal right.

(1) Nationalism: (a) the PC through renegotiations of contracts with extractive MNC secures a higher rate of taxation, increasing revenues for the national treasury; (b) via increased state investment it converts wholly owned private firms into public-private joint ventures; (c) through increases in royalty payments it lessens ‘foreign exploitation’; (d) through the greater presence of ‘local technocrats’ it increases national oversight of strategic economic decisions.
(2) Foreign Policy: The progressive camp has pursued an independent, if not explicitly anti-imperialist foreign policy. The progressive camp has established several Latin American and Caribbean regional organizations which deliberately exclude the presence of North American and European imperial countries such as ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas) and UNASUR (Union of South American Nations). The PC has rejected sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Gaza and opposed the US-backed NATO war against Libya. They criticized the US position at the Summit of the America’s meeting in April 2012 on at least three major issues – inclusion of Cuba, opposition to British colonial control of the Malvinas, and the de-penalization of drugs. The PC has expressed its opposition to US hegemony, to IMF “structural reforms” and Euro-US control over international lending institutions. With the exception of Venezuela, the PC has diversified its export markets. For example Brazil exports to the US only 12.5% of its goods and services, Argentina 6.9%, and Bolivia 8.2%.
(3) Social Policy: The PC has increased social expenditures, especially toward reducing rural poverty; increased the minimum wage; approved salary and wage increases. In a few countries they provide easy credit and financing to small and medium businesses, have given legal title to land squatters and distributed plots of uncultivated public lands as a kind of ‘agrarian reform’.
(4) Regulation: The PC has, with varying degree of consistency, imposed controls over the financial sector, regulating the flow of speculative capital and the volatility of financial markets. With regard to the extractive sector regulations have been relaxed to permit the large-scale inflow of capital and the pervasive use of toxic chemicals and genetically modified seeds by agro-business. They have permitted the expansion of mining, agriculture, and the timber industry into Indigenous people’s and natural reservations. They have financed large-scale infrastructure projects linking extractive enterprises to export outlets trespassing onto previously regulated, protected natural habitats. Regulatory norms have been harnessed to facilitate ‘productive’ extractive developmentalism and to limit the financialization of the economy.
(5) Labor Policy: has been based on a ‘corporatist model’ of business-state-trade union (tri partite) negotiations and conciliation to limit lockouts and strikes and maintain growth, exports and revenue flows. Labor policy has been conditioned by the policy of limiting budget deficits, fixing wage increases, to the rate of inflation. In line with orthodox fiscal policies, pensions for public sector workers have been frozen or reduced especially among the middle and high end functionaries. Traditional job security guarantees have been maintained not augmented and severance pay has not been raised. Strikes by public sector workers, especially among teachers, medical staff and social service workers have been frequent and have led to government mediation and marginal gains. Government policy has been oriented toward protecting managerial prerogatives, while respecting and upholding the legal status, collective bargaining rights of trade unions. Within nationalized firms, state-appointed directors rule; there is no move toward worker self-management or ‘co-management’-except in limited cases in Venezuela. The structure of labor relations follows the private corporate hierarchical model Labor has, at best, an advisory role regarding health and safety but no determining influences or investment within this corporate framework. Pressure via strikes and protest by trade unions have been necessary, frequently in alliance with community groups, to rectify the most egregious corporate violations of health and safety rules. While the progressive regimes publically eschew neo-liberal “labor flexibility” policies they have done little to expand and deepen labor prerogatives over the labor and productive process.

The principle difference in labor policy between the progressive regimes and the traditional right is the ‘open door’ to labor leaders, their willingness to mediate and grant incremental wage increases, especially of the minimum wage and generally, the reduction of harsh, violent repression.

Continuities and Similarities between Past Neoliberal and Contemporary Progressive Regimes

Writers, academics, and journalists on the Right and Center-left emphasize the difference between the progressive and the past neo-liberal regimes, overlooking the large-scale socio-economic and political structural continuities. A more nuanced, balanced, and objective analysis requires that these continuities be taken into account because they play a major role in discussing the limitations and emerging conflicts and crises facing the progressive regimes. Moreover, these limitations, based on the continuities, highlight the importance of alternative development models proposed by popular social movements.

The agro-mineral export model has demonstrated profound strategic deficiencies in its very structure and performance. The promotion of agro-mineral exports has been accompanied by the large-scale, long-term entrance of foreign capital which in turn determines the rates of investment, the sources for inputs of machinery, technology and ‘know-how’, as well as control over the marketing and processing of raw materials. The MNC “partners” of the progressive regimes have conditioned their involvement on the bases of (a) the de-regulation of environmental controls; (b) the termination of price controls and the introduction of “international prices” for sales to the domestic market; (c) freedom to control foreign exchange earnings and to remit profits overseas.

They also control decisions regarding the exploitation of mineral reserves. Expansion of production is dependent on their own global criteria rather on the needs of the ‘host’ country. As a result, despite the “re-negotiated” contracts, which the progressive regimes hail as a “giant advance” toward “nationalization”, the cumulative losses in revenues and in rebalancing the economy are substantial. If one looks beyond the agro-mineral enclave the negative impact to further development are substantial. The very limited impact that the agro-mineral model has on the economy as whole has led to occasional conflicts between the MNC and the progressive host governments. A case in point is the conflict between the nominally Spanish oil company Repsol and the Argentine government of Cristina Fernandez in April 2012. Repsol’s behavior illustrates all the pitfalls of collaboration with foreign overseas extractive corporations. Repsol refused to increase investments, claiming that local regulated prices reduced profit margins. As a result Argentina’s energy bill rose three-fold between 2010 and 2011 from $3 billion to $9 billion. Furthermore, Repsol repatriated its profits, paid high dividends to overseas stockholders and thus had little impact in creating domestic industries producing inputs or refineries to process petroleum. The attempt by the deceased President Kirchner to increase ‘national ownership’ by bringing in a local private capitalist, (the Peterson Group) had no positive impact, merely entrenching Repsol’s control. When Fernandez took majority shares in order establish public control and increase local production, the entire Eurozone leadership led by the Spanish government and the Western financial press launched a virulent campaign, threatened litigation and predicted economic disaster. The problem of ‘inviting’ foreign MNCs to invest is that it is hard to disinvite them. Once they enter a country no matter how unfavorable their performance, it is difficult to rectify or undo the damage and move onto a new public centered model of development.

All the progressive regimes with the possible exception of Venezuela have signed long-term large-scale contracts with major foreign extractive multi-nationals. Apart from the increase in royalties these agreements do not differ greatly from contracts signed by preceding right-wing neo-liberal regimes.

Evo Morales signed a large-scale exploitation contract with Jindal, an Indian multi-national to exploit the iron-mine Mutun with virtually all inputs — machinery, transport, etc. — imported and with very limited ‘industrializing’ of the raw iron ore, mostly simple iron ‘nuggets’. The bulk of Bolivia’s gas and oil is exploited by foreign MNC-public ‘joint ventures’ and is shipped abroad, leaving most of the 60% rural households without piped gas,and resulting in Bolivia’s importing most of its diesel.

Ecuador under President Correa, another leading progressive president, signed two big contracts with foreign oil groups in February 2012, despite the opposition of the majority of Indian organizations including CONAI. In Ecuador, as in Bolivia, big oil and gas companies, while raising objections to the re-negotiations of contracts leading to an increase in royalty payments and an increased presence of public officials, retain a privileged position in crucial decisions regarding management, marketing, technology and investment. Despite claims to the contrary, the leaders of the progressive regimes sign off on these strategic agreements without consulting the communities affected. Decisions are based exclusively on executive privilege. The style and substance of the distribution of the powers and privileges in the oil and gas agreements between the progressive governments and the multi-nationals are no different than what transpired under previous ‘neo-liberal’ regimes. Moreover, in both Ecuador and Bolivia many of the “technocrats” and administrators who worked under the previous neoliberal regimes play a prominent role in running the joint venture.

While progressive regimes have pursued anti-poverty programs and have registered some successes in reducing poverty levels, they do so as a result of the growth of the economy not via the redistribution of wealth. In fact, the progressive regimes have not pursued redistributive polices: income and land concentrations, including high levels of inequality remain intact. In fact the hierarchy of the class structure has not been altered and in most cases has been reinforced by the inclusion of new entrants into the upper and middle class. These include many former leaders and activists from the lower middle and working class who have entered the government as well as ‘new capitalists’ benefiting from state contract agreements with the progressive regime.

The financial system has remained intact and prospered under the progressive regimes, especially because of the regimes tight fiscal policies, build-up foreign reserves, control over government spending and low rates of inflation. Financial sector profits are especially high in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Brazil, in particular, has attracted large inflows of speculative capital from Wall Streets and the City of London because of its high interest rates relative to the rates in North America and Europe.

Alongside the concentration of ownership in the extractive and financial sector, the progressive regimes have not introduced progressive taxes to reduce the disparities of wealth. The income of the agro-business elites in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Ecuador are several hundred times that of the bulk of subsistence farmers, peasants and rural laborers. Many of latter remain subject to brutal working and living conditions. In many cases, the progressive regimes have done little to enforce the labor and health codes in the giant agro-business plantations while workers are subject to unregulated toxic chemical sprays.

If the configuration of ownership and wealth remains relatively unchanged from the neo-liberal past, the progressive governments have accentuated the tendencies toward export specialization. Under the progressive governments the economies have become less diversified and more dependent on agro-mineral and energy exports, and more dependent on large-scale long-term foreign investments for growth. State revenue and growth are more dependent on primary product exports.

The free market policies of the progressive agro-mineral export regimes have stimulated the growth of large-scale commercial activity. The commercial sector is increasingly influenced by the large-scale entrance of foreign owned multi-nationals, like Wal-Mart, who source their products overseas, undermining local-small scale producers and retailers.

The appreciation of the currency has adversely affected traditional manufacturers and the transport industry causing significant job losses especially in textiles, footwear and automobiles in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. Moreover, favorable polices promoting large-scale agro-mineral exporters has been accompanied by a credit squeeze on local small business people, especially, producers for local markets who have been bit hard by the import of cheap consumer goods (from Asia). Farmers producing food for local markets have been downgraded in the drive to expand cultivation of export crops like soya.

In summary, the progressive regimes have pursued a multi-faceted double discourse: an anti-imperialist, nationalist and populist rhetoric for domestic consumption while putting into practice a policy of fomenting and expanding the role of foreign extractive capital in joint ventures with the state and a rising new national bourgeoisie. The progressive regimes articulate a narrative of socialism and participatory democracy but in practice pursue policies linking development with the concentration and centralization of capital and executive power.

The progressive regimes preach a doctrine of social justice and equity and a practice of co-optation of social leaders and clientalism via poverty programs for the poorest sectors of society.

The progressive regimes have combined incremented income policies with large-scale structural changes, benefiting the extractive-primary sector. Stability of the PC is utterly dependent on the increasing demand for raw materials, high commodity prices, and open markets. The progressive regimes have successfully linked trade union and sectors of the peasant movement to the state and have undermined or weakened independent class organizations and replaced them with corporate tri-partite structures.

The progressives have successfully ‘reformed’ or replaced the chaotic, de-regulated, conflictual, racialist policies of their predecessors and institutionalized “normal capitalism.” They have introduced rules and procedures favorable to institutional stability, fiscal discipline, and incremental but unequal gains. In other words, the “parameters of neo-liberalism” are now effectively administered and legitimated by faux nationalism based on greater political autonomy and market diversification. Centralized executive decision making based on agreements which require extractive MNC to invest and develop the forces of production is legitimated by an electoral framework and a multi-class political coalition.

The domestic and foreign policies of the progressive extractive regimes reflect two contradictory experiences: their radical origins in the lead-up to taking power and their subsequent adoption of an agro-mineral developementalist export strategy, favored by neo-liberal technocrats. The “synthesis” of these two apparently “contradictory” experiences finds expression in the adoption of an independent, critical political position toward imperialist militarism and interventionism and economic collaboration with the agencies of economic imperialism, namely the signing of long-term and large-scale contracts with US-EU-Canadian agro-mining and energy multi-nationals. In other words, the progressive extractive regimes have ‘redefined’ or reduced imperialism to mean its state structures and policies rather than its economic components (MNC) which are engaged in the extraction of raw materials and exploitation of labor. In the same fashion, they redefine ‘anti-imperialism’ to mean opposition to political-military interventions and a ‘fair distribution’ of profits between the regime and its MNC “partner”. This redefinition allows the progressive regimes to claim popular legitimacy on the bases of periodical criticisms of the policies and practices of the imperial state while collaboration and agreements with the MNC allow the progressive regimes to retain support from domestic and overseas business interests. When a progressive regime, as is the case of Argentina ruled by Cristina Fernandez, decides to “nationalize” or more correctly secure the majority shares in Repsol, the nominally Spanish oil multi-national, the entire financial press, the European Union, and Washington denounce the move and threaten reprisals. In other words, the unstated pact between the progressive camp and the imperial regimes is that political differences are tolerable but nationalist economic measures are not acceptable. Renegotiations of contracts to increase state revenues may cause a temporary suspension of new investments but not a political confrontation. However, the public takeover of a foreign extractive firm evokes predictable hostility and retaliation from the imperial states. The Argentine progressive regime’s embrace of a policy of economic nationalism was, however, enterprise and sector specific. The Fernandez regime did not, and has no future plans, to expropriate other extractive firms, nor was the measure part of a general nationalist strategy to shift toward greater public ownership. Rather Repsol’s refusal to increase investments and production was increasing Argentina’s dependence on imported oil, which was deteriorating its balance of payments and foreign currency reserves. Repsol’s refusal to comply with Argentina’s developementalist agenda was based on the Fernandez policy of maintaining the retail price of oil for the domestic market below the international price. Repsol’s decline in production was a way of leveraging the regime to lift price controls. However, a higher petrol price would have a negative impact on industrial and private consumers, raising costs and reducing the competitiveness of the Argentine exporters and domestic producers. In effect, Repsol’s intransigence threatened to undermine the social and political balance of forces between labor and capital and between extractive exporters and popular consumers, which sustained the regimes majoritarian coalition. In brief, the measure was nationalist in form but capitalist developementalist in content.

Even so the measure polarized the global economy between the imperial west and the Latin American left, with the usual imperial satraps in Latin America (Mexico’s Calderon and Colombia’s Santos) backing Repsol.

Divisions between the Progressive Regimes and the Social Movements

Prior to coming to power via electoral processes, the progressive leaders maintained close ties and actively supported and participated in the ‘street action’ and mass struggle of the social movements. They embraced the banners of economic nationalism, ecological conservation and respect for the natural reserves of the Indigenous communities, social equality, and reconsideration of the foreign debt including the repudiation of ‘illegal debts’.

The social movements played a major role in politicizing and mobilizing the working and peasant classes to elect the progressive presidents. This convergence was short-lived. Once in power, the progressive regime appointed orthodox economic ministers to run the economy. They adopted the extractive strategy, shifted from a nationalist public sector economy, designed to diversify the economy, to a ‘mixed economy’ based on joint ventures with overseas extractive capital. First, the Indigenous communities of Peru, Ecuador, and some sectors in Bolivia went into opposition, on the bases that their interests were neglected and they were not consulted. Second, sectors of the working class and public employees struck demanding higher salaries, an increase in public spending. Small farmers and manufacturers demanded economic stimulus for family farms and local industry rather than subsidies for agro-mineral MNC, fiscal orthodoxy, and export strategies based on lower labor costs and neglect of the domestic market.

Radical trade union peasant and Indigenous leaders of the social movements called into question the entire agro-mineral extractive strategy, the distribution and administration of state revenues and expenditures. They reasserted their support for a social program embracing agrarian reform, including the expropriation of large plantations and the redistribution of land to landless peasants. Workers’ leaders called for an industrial policy to process ‘raw materials’ in order to create manufacturing jobs. Some trade unionists called for the nationalization of strategic industries and banks. However, despite some major protests, the bulk of the followers of the social movements and the majority of their leaders soon shifted from radical rejection of the extractive model to demands for a bigger share of the revenues. The progressive regimes attracted the bulk of the social leaders to tri-partite councils of conciliation to negotiate and secure incremental changes. The progressive regimes highlighted their opposition to “neo-liberalism.” They redefined it as unregulated capitalism based on low royalties and underfunding of social programs. The progressive regimes successfully divided the social movements between “utopian” radical opponents and progressive reformists. In time of social strife, the progressive regimes evoked a “left-right alliance,” charging their social critics of acting on behalf of imperialism, impervious to their own collaboration with imperial based multi-nationals. Presidential appeals, a nationalist populist discourse, and increased revenues which funded increased social expenditures weakened the left opposition. Moderate but sustained increases in anti-poverty programs and minimum wages neutralized the appeal of the radical leaders in the social movements. Despite the progressive regime’s break with its ‘radical egalitarian roots,’ it was more than able to secure large-scale mass-electoral support, based on the overall dynamic growth of the economy and steady growth of income. Both were underpinned by long-term high commodity prices.

Popular extractivist presidents repeatedly won elections by substantial majorities and were able to mobilize sectors of the moderate social movements to counter anti-extractivist social movements. The high prices of commodities and multiple opportunities for exploitation of resources attracted foreign investors despite higher royalty payments. Foreign investors were attracted by the social stability ensured by the progressive regimes in contrast to the instability of the previous neo-liberal regimes. The progressive regimes thrived on economic ties with the MNC and an electoral alliance with the lower classes.

Case Studies of Extractive Capitalism and the Progressive Camp

While the seven regimes which form the ‘progressive camp’ share a common development strategy based on the export of primary commodities there are significant differences in the levels of diversity of their economies, the nature and character of the commodities which they export, the degrees of social polarization and social cohesion and the size and scope of the opposition. In line with these differences there are also substantial differences in the degree to which the “progressive and extractive model” is sustainable or subject to upheaval or reversal.

The progressive camp can be divided in many ways: between those regimes based on charismatic leaders and extreme dependence on primary exports (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela) and those with developed industrial sectors and ‘institutionalized political leadership (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay). There are also significant differences in the degree of class and ethnic conflict: Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are experiencing significant mass resistance from substantial Indigenous communities, while in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, where the Indigenous population is sparse, there is only isolated opposition. In terms of class struggles, Bolivia, has experienced widespread protests by health, education, mining, and factory workers. Venezuela has faced lockouts and boycotts organized by the economic elite (“class struggle from above”). Ecuador faced widespread protests from the police. Most of the rest of the countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) faced limited strikes largely on wage issues. With the exception of Bolivia, the major trade union confederations work closely and collaborate with the progressive regimes; in contrast, the peasant and rural workers movements in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru have retained a greater degree of independence and militancy largely because they have been the most prejudiced by the agro-mineral export strategies. In Venezuela and Brazil, landlord’s private armies have played a major role in combatting land reform beneficiaries with relative impunity.

The most pervasive and environmental degradation has occurred in Brazil, where millions of acres of rainforest have been “cleared” during the decade of Workers Party rule. Chemical exploitation of agriculture is strong in most countries especially in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay where soya production has become a dominant crop. All the major agro-industrial exporters (Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) rely on toxic chemicals and GM seeds with numerous cases of toxic consequences for indigenous residents and their natural habitat. The issue of toxicity and environmental degradation resulting from the giant mining and timber companies has been well documented in Peru, Ecuador, and Uruguay. Overall, the greater the urban population and the more dispersed the rural communities adversely, affected, the smaller the environmental protest and the likelihood that NGO ecologists play a leading role in protest.

Since the extractive industries are outside of the major urban centers, since most of the major trade union confederations collaborate with the progressive regimes and secure incremental wage increases, and since the overall economy has been growing and unemployment has declined, macro-economic imbalances, commodity dependency and related structural vulnerabilities have not resulted in major confrontations between labor and capital. The most contentious conflicts which have occurred have been between the orthodox neoliberal elites backed by US and European powers and the progressive regimes. Several cases come to mind.

On April 12, 2002 and in December 2002-February 2003 the Venezuelan capitalist class backed by the US and Spain organized an abortive coup which was reversed and a petrol industry lockout that was defeated. An uprising in 2011 led by the police in Ecuador and an abortive coup in Bolivia were put down successfully, before they gained traction. A large-scale agro business protest in Argentina in 2008 which paralyzed the agro-export sector against an export tax ended with regime concessions.

In large part, these “class struggles from above” worked in favor of the progressive regimes because it allowed them to pose the issue as one between a popular democratic regime and a retrograde authoritarian oligarchy. As a result the progressive regimes were able to neutralize, at least temporarily, internal critics from the left. The defeat of “the Right” burnished the credentials of the progressive camp and raised their popularity.

While popular support was important in sustaining the progressive regimes against US and EU backed rightest destabilization campaigns, of equal or greater importance was the backing of the military, sectors of the business elite and extractive capitalists. The progressives by adopting “moderate policies” – including business subsidies and generous pay hikes to the military – were able to divide the elite, retain support of the military and isolate the right-wing opposition. The right-wing has remained electorally marginal and provide very limited leverage for US-EU interference and influence over the progressive agenda.

The degree of “progressiveness” within the progressive extractive capitalist camp varies substantially.

The Chavez government has advanced an anti-imperialist and socialist agenda involving the rejection of US coups, wars and blockade of independent states; it has supported the re-renationalization of oil, aluminum, and other raw material, mining, and energy sources. Its extensive agrarian reform benefiting 300,000 families is aimed at food self-sufficiency. Universal free public health and higher education and subsidized basic food prices via publicly owned supermarkets; and large-scale low-cost public housing for the poor along with literacy campaigns and the formation of thousands of neighborhood councils to adjudicate and resolve local issues have deepened and extended the socialization process

On a far lesser scale, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina have pursued independent foreign policies. Their partial and selective nationalizations are designed to increase revenues rather than as part of a long-term, large-scale strategy of transformation. They have not followed Chavez’s lead on agrarian reform and on greater enhancement of social spending on health, housing, and higher education. They offer remote, public lands of dubious quality as “land reform.” They have been advocates of incremental changes involving wage and social benefits commensurate with the rise in revenues from commodity exports and in line with the rate of inflation, Bolivia and Ecuador have dislodged land squatters and defended the major agro-business land holdings. The least ‘reformist’ regimes with the most dubious ‘progressive’ credentials are Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru (under Ollanta Humala) which have adopted a free-market agenda; they actively promote large inflows of unregulated foreign investments, degrade millions of acres of the rain forests (Brazil especially), promote agro-business and oppose agrarian reform in all of its forms, relying on the dispersion of peasants and landless to the cities, towns where they serve as a labor reserve for capital or join the low paying informal sector. These “moderate” progressive regimes have signed military accords with the US, and adopt a low profile in opposition to US imperial policies in the Middle East. Their “progressiveness” is found in their support of regional integration, their opposition to US hemispheric hegemonism (opposing the US coup in Honduras, blockade of Cuba and interference in Venezuela), and the diversification of overseas markets. Brazil leads the way in catering to Wall Street speculators and in government anti-poverty spending on minimum food baskets. Poverty reduction is matched by the spectacular growth of millionaires linked to the finance and agro-mineral export sector. The “moderate” progressives have the most egregious (and well-documented) record of ongoing environmental degradation. In Peru, Humala has given the green light to mining exploitation threatening the livelihood of thousands of peasants and local business in Cajamarca; Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rouseff, of the Workers Party, promoted the destruction of millions of acres of the Amazon rain forest and displacement of scores of Indian communities in a decade. In Uruguay, the Broad Front Presidents Tabaré Vasquez and Mujica promoted the highly polluting Botina cellulose factory contaminating the Parana River despite mass protests.

In summary, it is difficult to generalize about the performance of the progressive camp given the divergences in social and economic policies. But a “report card” of sorts can be drawn up.

All regimes have lowered poverty levels and increased dependence on agro-mineral exports and investments. All have signed and/or renegotiated contracts with extractive MNC’ few have diversified their economies. Those with a substantial industrial base (Argentina, Brazil, Peru) have suffered a severe decline in the manufacturing sector because of appreciating currencies and loss of competitiveness resulting from high prices for commodity exports. Incremental wage agreements have led to low level social conflicts in the cities (except in Bolivia), but displacement of peasants and degradation have intensified conflicts in the interior between rural communities and the MNC leading to state repression (Peru).

The social impact of the progressive regimes has the widest variation, with Venezuela registering the most far-reaching structural changes and the rest lacking any vision or project for redistributing wealth, income, or land. Their common support for regional integration is matched by important divergences in accommodation to US military policy. Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, the members of ALBA, reject military treaties, while Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru have signed military agreements with the Pentagon.

The overall economic performance is mixed. Brazil’s economy, especially its manufacturing sector, is stagnating with zero or negative growth in 2011-2012, Venezuela is recovering, but with over a 20% rate of inflation while the rest of the PC is experiencing steady growth, but increasing dependence on commodity exports to the Asian (China) market.

Alternatives to the status quo extractive economies vary enormously. In Venezuela, the regime has made diversification a high priority; the Brazilian and Argentine regimes are taking protectionist measures to promote industry with limited success especially as their policies are countermanded by the real expansion of acreage for soya production and exports. Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia talk of diversification but have avoided taking measures to shift to food production and family farming and have yet to take concrete measures to stimulate local industry via a publicly funded industrialization policy.

What makes bailouts toxic is cronyism, the coming together of government and private wealth, the spectacle of Washington doing special favors for its pals in the investment banks.

– Thomas Frank

The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships.

– Karl Polanyi¹

In What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, author Thomas Frank explored American “democracy” and working Americans puzzling proclivity to vote against their economic best interest, which meant voting for the Republican Party. Frank’s latest book, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, segues into the question of how a malfunctioning system that screws the masses manages to perpetuate itself? And why do the masses allow themselves to be screwed by the system?

The economic system is capitalism, and the political system goes hand-in-hand with molly coddling capitalism – even to the extent of bailing it out with a reverse socialism. Here was the hypocritical spectacle of right-wingers who abjure government intervention (favoring instead the rule of the market) dipping into the government coffers to bail themselves out. Frank has a knack for prose; he takes what should be palpable for all and renders it in a highly readable and engrossing fashion. He clearly presents the bailout for the economic rip-off that it was — a rip-off of working people that transferred their hard-earned money to the idle elitist class.

Frank, obviously, is highly critical of neoliberalism and so-called democracy, but unclear is what he leans toward instead. Frank would like more socialism, but would he like socialism as the system? Just how far would he like to deviate from capitalism? As an alternative to the bailout, he mentions nationalization, but does not delve into the pros and cons of a wholesale nationalization. Why?

When the ship of the elitist financial class starts taking on water, why should the common people grab the bails and hand the helm back to the incompetent navigators? This financial shipwreck should have been followed by an unyielding harangue against capitalism, and it should have provided an opening for socialism. Instead, the Right rebounded, and Frank explores how and why.

One major reason why is that the establishment produces a monopoly-media manufactured consent based in the creation and maintenance of its necessary illusions.

Right-wing media “louts” like Glen Beck and Ann Coulter (personages that Frank calls “entrepreneurs of fear”) are given generous space in the monopoly media to vent their petulant bombast while rational arguments presented by thoughtful critics are marginalized or kept out. Thus disinformation and propaganda clogs information channels; the result is myth and lies presented as truth and reality.

Frank exposes much of this, for example, the myth of small business job creation. He skewers the illogic of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, notes how conservatives have mimicked leftist characteristics, and provides “examples of conservatism’s dalliance with error.”

Frank quotes the bathos of George W. Bush: “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” Certainly it was not an abandonment of moral principles because the “free market” is without such. Nonetheless, how can one abandon the blatant contradiction of there being a “free market”?

Pity the Billionaire captures vignettes of the inversion and perversion of economic reality along with a lack of compassion by those wedded to neoliberalism. As typifying the entitled capitalist and comprador [coordinator] classes, Frank presents business reporter Rick Santelli. Santelli knows who he serves, and he turned his scorn upon the working class “losers”/victims, such as people who lost their homes to foreclosure. The message was: the system was not to blame for extending the loans; the borrowers solely were to blame for losing out.

The Tea Party movement is a collective example of misplaced wrath, but is the Tea Party wrath any more misplaced than the faith of Obama supporters? And who are these Tea Partiers — some of who, Frank tells, wear ascots?

Frank would like voters to steer clear of the Republican Party, but is the Democratic Party the preferred option? Frank fails to explore or create a space for a politics beyond the duopoly, who he well knows is entrenched in serving the interests of the elitist class.

This was a difficult review to write. Frank’s writing really engages the reader. His logic is compelling; however, at times his application of logic is lacking and leaves one feeling unsatisfied.

Consider the following scenario: If you, as a customer, walk into a store and purchase product A and find it highly unsatisfactory, will you buy product A again or buy product B? If after buying product B, and you find that it is also highly unsatisfactory, will you then return to buying product A or will you consider trying product C? Of course I am assuming that rational customers will look for a product which satisfies them. Is there any compelling reason (besides fear, which is not a reason but an emotion) as to why this same logic should not apply to political choices?

What is the Right is quite well understood. In the United States, the Republicans are the Right. However, what is the Left? What is progressivism? Is it the Democrats? Frank does not consider this; he is focused on the mind-set of conservatives who usually reside within the Republican Party.

Does daylight really fall between the duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans? On some social issues like abortion, gun control, and such, yes. However, on economic issues? Barack Obama has demonstrated (as did Bill Clinton before Obama) that neoliberalism is embraced by the political duopoly.

Frank has been highly critical of Obama’s performance as president; however, in a sense, Frank can be criticized as an enabler of Obama. Frank writes “Nothing has changed,” but one can’t help feeling that he fails to nail Obama on his lie of “Change we can believe in.” Readers of Pity the Billionaire can easily sense that voting Republican would be their undoing, but this sense of undoing does not come across as vitally in expression against the Democrats.

Since Pity the Billionaire fails to mention, for example, the Green Party, Ralph Nader, or another “third party” as an alternative to the political duopoly, one might argue that Frank surrenders to the folly of lesser evilism.² The track record of the administrations of the last five US presidents — Ronald Reagan (Republican), George H.W. Bush (Republican), Bill Clinton (Democrat), George W. Bush (Republican), and Barack Obama — has shown no substantial deviation from the neoliberal agenda; if anything, the agenda has become further implemented. Given that the Democrats and Republicans are both implementing the agenda of the financial elitist class, and given that Frank criticizes both pro-corporate political parties and the corporate-dominated economic system, why then does he not mention turning away from the political duopoly?

Frank can describe in skilful prose the faults and cracks in the system and the contradictions of society. However, can the solution be had within the political duopoly? Pity the Billionaire was ostensibly not meant to provide solutions and neither was What’s the Matter with Kansas?. These two books come across as well-written lamentations, and should the political and economic systems perpetuate, then there is the opportunity for future lamentation.

Yet Frank knows that the system wasn’t always like this. He pointed to the wisdom of the Hungarian historian Karl Polanyi expressed in his opus, The Great Transformation, which cited communalism as a natural condition of humans and rejected self-regulating markets as unnatural. Nonetheless, the Republicans and the Democrats, as desired by big business and financial interests, have undone much of the New Deal regulatory mechanisms implemented by the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Given this, then how can either the Republicans or the Democrats be entrusted to look after the interest of the masses, the 99%?

If readers are looking for an insightful, piercing, and highly readable critique into the system that fails the masses in society, then Pity the Billionaire is highly recommended. If readers are looking for a promising alternative system, then they are better off reading – despite its very dense prose – Parecon: Life after Capitalism or — the easier to read — Realizing Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism.

1. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957): 46.
2. I have written several articles on the topic of lesser evilism, including: “The Lesser-of-Two Evils,” 19 April 2004; “An Unconscionable Outcome: Chomsky and the Hopelessness of Lesser Evilism,” Dissident Voice, 9-10 October 2004; “The Utter Futility of Lesser Evilism,” Dissident Voice, 24 May 2007; “Evilism: There Is No Lesser,” Dissident Voice, 29 July 2011;

This last, the encultured view of ourselves, robs us of our class identity. Very few of us consider ourselves working class. The term has been made to seem a musty relic of the nineteenth century, synonymous with lower class, a disreputable band of losers who are to be feared and perhaps pitied, but certainly not to be identified with. Instead we are offered a hierarchy of many classes: upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle, and last and certainly least, the lumpen lower. Within these we are fragmented further by conflicting differences: ethnic, religious, gender, life style. We’re supposed to identify with our niche and our job and to strive to move up or at least not slip down in the hierarchy. But more and more of us are slipping down, losing the few securities we had. In our bewildered anger we find allies only within our isolated niche, so our struggles are ineffective.

Almost all of us are, in fact, working class. Everyone in the world who has to work for someone else for the essentials of living is working class. Only when we join together in solidarity will we succeed.

The elite have also fragmented us geographically. The most exploited are far away from the centers of power and thus invisible to us except for media images of illegal aliens storming our borders or insurgents attacking our soldiers. They live under the heel of authoritarian governments held in power by the rich nations and are forced to work under deplorable conditions. The wealth extracted from their labor has enabled the corporations to pay their employees in the home country better wages, thus minimizing discontent here and stimulating consumption of their products.

That economic arrangement is changing, however, as global competition intensifies. Selling in the world market has become more important than selling in the home country. Competing globally requires low prices, so corporations are slashing wages and benefits. The international working class is being leveled. Our task now is to unite and overthrow the elite that rules us all.

This elite is composed of many nationalities and has many internal conflicts. They even make war on each other when economics demands it. But they always recognize their overriding interests as a class, and they will do everything in their considerable power to defend those interests. We, the workers of the world, need to recognize and defend our own class interests with as much determination as our rulers.

They have designed a political system in the USA that ensures their power monopoly. The candidates of both major parties represent their interests. Through corporate financing, winner-take-all elections, ballot-access laws, and slanted media coverage, they effectively exclude alternatives.

To break free of their political control and build genuine democracy, we must delegitimize in particular the Democratic Party, which exists to channel potentially radical discontent into dead-end streets. The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements, capturing people’s hopes for fundamental changes, then burying them. It produces only superficial reforms that strengthen capitalism.

Each of us should examine the parties and organizations on the left, find one that matches our orientation, and actively support it. Just being angry at the system isn’t enough. Unless we are organized and militant, a viable alternative to the capitalist parties won’t emerge. The best program I’ve found is the Socialist Equality Party’s .

Labor unions, like the Democratic Party, have become merely reformist. They have been purged of any anti-capitalist leadership and now serve the same function on the economic front that the Democrats serve on the political front: to convince the working class to accept the dictates of capital. Union leadership collaborates with employers to worsen the conditions of their members. They have become functionaries of capitalism and are richly rewarded for it. Workers are going to have to build an independent base of power that will throw out this bureaucracy and militantly confront bosses worldwide.

The reformism pushed by the Democratic Party and the labor unions is reinforced by the liberal media. They foster the idea that the system is basically good but just has some problems that need to be fixed. This is appealing because it’s easy. Instead of revolution to replace the system, we just need to repair it.

Reforms have in the past improved a few conditions. Social Security helped stave off abject poverty in old age, and Medicare helped protect a family’s savings from catastrophic health costs. From the 1950s to the ’70s unions were able to force through higher wages and better working conditions in many industries. But these hard-fought reforms are being reversed now because of capitalism’s need to reduce prices to compete with emerging industrial powers such as China and India. The pressure of international competition is being shifted on to us, the workers, and the Democrats and unions are implementing that. In this new economic reality, reformism has become a coward’s dream, a way of avoiding the unpleasantness of protracted struggle. We need to abandon its delusion and prepare to fight for fundamental changes that will replace oligarchic capitalism with democratic socialism.

Another thread that binds us is the image of socialism that has been burned into our brains. We are continually persuaded that it means brutal dictatorship, concentration camps, no freedom, a slave state. To counter this, we need to criticize the regimes of the Soviet Union and China and point out that they weren’t socialist. The totalitarian tradition in their cultures and constant attack by the capitalist nations kept them from achieving anything close to real socialism. In many cases the government took over as the exploitative boss, and the workers had little power. Real socialism means economic democracy, where we decide together how our economic life will be organized. It puts the resources and productive capacity of the world in the hands of its people, who use them to meet human needs rather than to generate private profits for a few owners.

We are educated to serve the system: to be obedient, to respect authority, to fit into a hierarchy. We are channeled into learning skills the corporations need, and our labor has become just another commodity. Our deepest interests and talents often remain undeveloped, unrecognized even by ourselves. This won’t change until students, parents, teachers, and other workers come together and educate one another to take power.

The mass media exist to control the masses by shaping our perceptions of reality. The pap they feed us switches off our brains, so we can’t analyze society as a system. Instead of thought, we are offered a dazzling array of personal emotions and sensory stimulation to distract us from the bleak reality of our lives.

Through entertainment and news the media fixates us on physical violence, so we don’t perceive the structural violence that causes it. We get lurid, fear-arousing accounts of violence committed by ghetto youths and Muslim guerrillas accompanied with commentaries calling for tough measures to combat these vicious berserkers. We get no accounts of the structural violence of poverty and oppression that capitalism and imperialism have created there. It’s this built-in structural violence that generates the physical violence.

The corporate media exists also to stimulate greed and consumption. Capitalism divides us from one another, and the isolation imposed by this false separation generates insecurity and a sense of incompleteness. It creates hollow personalities craving to fill an inner emptiness, then it comes to the rescue by promising satisfaction through consumption. First it causes the void, then convinces us to fill it with things — beautiful, fascinating, stimulating, extraordinary, sexy things. Lots of them. And so much the better that they never really fill our needs, because then we need more of them.

Dissident Voice and other alternative publications are awaking people from the stupor induced by this mainstream propaganda. They deserve our support.

To escape from the mental manipulation, we must strive for inner self sufficiency so we won’t need all that garbage the media is selling us. This self sufficiency has its basis in our shared humanity, and if we tune in to that, the superficial substitutes of commercial products and entertainment will lose their appeal. A good way to combat such conditioning is a consumer strike. Buy as little as possible. Turn off the television. By overcoming our need for entertainment, we can develop our own authentic creativity. When we’re not consuming as much, the planet will breathe a sigh of relief. Instead of hiding behind fashion, jewelry, and cosmetics, let’s face the world as we are and let the beauty of our defiance show.

The media creates images and myths that reinforce the existing ideologies. Rugged individualism, for example, validates the “every man for himself” ethos of capitalism. The belief that we are isolated beings striving for our own gratification is an axiom of our society. Men are particularly enamored of it, taught to identify with the mountain man, the lone wolf, the entrepreneur.

The separations between people are easy to see: each of us inhabit a different body. Our connections are much more fundamental, but they are invisible, so a shallow culture like ours doesn’t perceive them. We can overcome this by centering ourselves in our connectedness and acting from it. In our lives and in our art we can demonstrate the deeper commonality that underlies our surface separations. Our genuine individuality can be best developed within this context.

Reinforcing traditional masculinity is one of the chief ways in which the elite seek to keep the working class on its side. They exploit the fact that many men cling to maleness as the last power left to them. Working-class men have almost no say over their work lives; machismo has become their only realm of agency. This is exploited by elements of the media, who portray leftists as intent on rendering traditional males extinct. Admittedly, there’s a grain of truth in this. Traditions of dominance and aggression, whether practiced by men or women, need to be resisted. The real attack on working class men, though, is coming not from leftists but from economic forces that are increasingly constricting their lives and limiting their possibilities down to low paying, exhausting jobs. The rage this generates in them is deflected by the media towards leftists, feminists, and minorities, who are actually the core opposition to those economic forces.

We need to show traditional men that socialism will give them economic security and power in the work place. When they have that, they won’t need to dominate their wives and children. If they persist in doing so, society has to prevent them from that. The dominator mentality is a pathology we must overcome.

Gender politics by itself won’t build socialism. In fact, in many cases it ends up serving capitalism. But gender studies can help break the patriarchal mold that keeps producing the same authoritarian personality type. It opens up new possibilities and fosters psychological diversity. By showing that our categories of feminine and masculine aren’t natural but cultural, it calls into question the naturalness of other institutions. It helps us see that capitalism also is not an inherent necessity but rather a product of social forces open to change. Gender subversion can lead to political subversion.

The enforcement mechanisms of society — military, police, and courts — are the bottom line of oppression. All three are licensed to kill and do so regularly. The military are the spear carriers of capitalism. Their job is to defend and expand the empire, and they slaughter millions for that goal. The police live up to their motto, To Protect and To Serve, but they are primarily protecting and serving an oppressive social structure, defending property and its owners against attacks by the deprived. The courts are run by judges who are for the most part members of the elite. They are the final arbiters of punishment, locking up anyone who threatens the system, primarily poor minorities. They have created an American gulag, an egregious, ever-growing prison-industrial complex that crushes those who dare defy its rules.

We need to show the soldiers and police they are workers too. We all have the same basic interests and the same common enemy: their employer. If we win enough of them to our side, they will stand with us rather than against us when a revolutionary situation develops. Winning the judges to our side is unlikely. Most of them are ruling class. We’ll probably just have to find some socially useful work for them, like sweeping the sidewalks.

Our rulers (yes, we really do have rulers) try to convince us that there’s no solution to humanity’s problems, no alternative to the way things are now. This is human nature. Get used to it.

Fortunately the international working class is refusing to get used to it. It is resisting this new wave of impoverishment the corporations and their governments are trying to force onto it. Our bound Gulliver is starting to awaken. It knows now it is fettered and is testing its strength against these bonds. In some places it has already broken a few. The rule of the Lilliputians is coming to an end. This won’t happen quickly, though. A long struggle lies ahead of us. But the tide has changed and is now running in our favor.

The uprising began in the Muslim world because they are under the most direct imperialist attack. It has spread to the NATO countries, the chief instigators of the attacks, because their populations are having to pay the bills for this war through social cutbacks and lower wages. As the uprising spreads globally, the elite will do everything they can to crush it. They will try to divide us and make us fight one another. They will offer tempting reforms and compromises that will allow them to maintain ownership. They will bribe some of our opportunistic leaders with promises of token power if they cooperate. They will jail us. They will even kill some of us. But if we persist, holding to a militant rather than a reformist course, we will eventually free ourselves of them and build a system that emphasizes the humane in humanity. This is our time, a historic battle for liberation.

No longer the exclusive domain of intelligence agencies, a highly-profitable Surveillance-Industrial Complex emerged in the 1980s with the deployment of the NSA-GCHQ ECHELON intercept system. As investigate journalist Nicky Hager revealed in CovertAction Quarterly back in 1996:

The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual’s e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

With the exponential growth of fiber optic and wireless networks, the mass of data which can be “mined” for “actionable intelligence,” covering everything from eavesdropping on official enemies to blanket surveillance of dissidents is now part of the landscape: no more visible to the average citizen than ornamental shrubbery surrounding a strip mall.

That process will become even more ubiquitous. As James Bamford pointed out in Wired Magazine, “the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10 to the 24th bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes–so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)”

“It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015,” Bamford reported, “reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) … Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.”

A former top NSA official turned whistleblower, William Binney, who resigned in 2001 shortly after the agency stood-up the Bush regime’s warrantless wiretapping programs (now greatly expanded under Hope and Change™ huckster Barack Obama), “held his thumb and forefinger close together” and told Bamford, “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Last week, Binney said on Democracy Now when queried whether there were any differences between the Bush and Obama administrations, “Actually, I think the surveillance has increased. In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens.”

Add to that the Transportation Security Administration’s invasion of “travel by other means,” as Jennifer Abel pointed out in The Guardian, through the agency’s usurpation of “jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit,” and it should be clear to Americans (though it isn’t) that there is no way of escaping the secret state’s callous trampling of our rights.

Commenting, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the “domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition.”

“The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation’s most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism.”

“Accepting that bargain,” Greenwald noted, “enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom–’he who does not move does not notice his chains,’ observed Rosa Luxemburg–but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice.”

But in a militarized Empire such as ours the only “choice” is to shut up, keep your head down — or else.

‘Lower Your Shields and Surrender Your Ships’

Militarist solutions to intractable social contradictions, the oft-maligned class struggle, do not appear out of the blue. Indeed, NSA’s ECHELON system, the template for STELLAR WIND and the agency’s associated email and web search database known as PINWALE, were technological responses by Western elites to challenges posed by the “excess of democracy” decried by Samuel Huntington and his cohorts in The Crisis of Democracy, published by the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission.

Social critic Andrew Gavin Marshall observed that for Huntington and the right-wing ideologues who mounted an intellectual counterattack against the democratic “excesses” of the 1960s, the “massive wave of resistance, rebellion, protest, activism and direct action by entire sectors of the general population which had for decades, if not centuries, been largely oppressed and ignored by the institutional power structure of society,” were “terrifying.”

Fast forward to today. As the global economic crisis deepens and hundreds of millions of people worldwide reject the “austerity” boondoggles of the financial sharks who brought on the crisis through massive frauds disguised as “investment opportunities,” our corporatist masters are fighting back and have turned to police state methods to prop-up their illegitimate rule.

Nor should it surprise us, as George Ciccariello-Maher pointed out in CounterPunch in the wake of last summer’s London “riots,” a mass response to police murder (coming soon to an “urban exclusion zone” near you!): “Irrational, uncontrollable, impermeable to logic and unpredictable in its movements, these undesirables have once again ruined the party for everyone, as they have done from Paris 1789 to Caracas 1989. In Fanon’s inimitable words: ‘the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be placed around the negotiating table, take matters into their own hands and start burning…’”

Call it the great fear of those lording it over the slaves down on the global plantation!

Combining attributes of Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” and George Orwell’s ubiquitous “Big Brother,” the National Security State, as it works to stave-off its own well-deserved collapse, seeks to root out and marginalize “dangerous” individuals and ideologies thereby “inoculating” the body politic from what were euphemistically called in the halcyon days of J. Edgar’s COINTELPRO operations, “subversive elements.”

It matters little whether today’s “usual suspects” are landless peasants, displaced workers, investigative journalists, civil libertarians or innocent citizens mistakenly caught in one dragnet or another: “threats” will be “neutralized” or more pointedly, in the evocative language employed by spooks: “Terminated with extreme prejudice.”

Operating alongside tried and methods — police repression and violence — contemporary crackdowns are guided by “robust situational awareness” gleaned from the wealth of personal data stored on multiple digital devices (the spies in our pockets) and in huge databases. As Cryptohippie averred: “An electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine.”

“When we produced our first Electronic Police State report,” the privacy professionals wrote, “the top ten nations were of two types:

1. Those that had the will to spy on every citizen, but lacked ability.
2. Those who had the ability, but were restrained in will.

But as they revealed in their 2010 National Rankings, “This is changing: The able have become willing and their traditional restraints have failed.” The key developments driving the global panopticon forward are the following:

• The USA has negated their Constitution’s fourth amendment in the name of protection and in the name of “wars” against terror, drugs and cyber attacks.
• The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of stopping “anti-social” activities. Their populace seems unable or unwilling to restrain the government.
• France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic control.

As Marxist critic and Situationist troublemaker Guy Debord pointed out decades ago in The Society of the Spectacle, “the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content.”

Mark that well.

Rejecting the orthodoxies and received wisdom of his day, Debord argued that “The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender ‘lonely crowds.’ With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.”

It is again worth noting that the much-vaunted “global village” which sprung to life with the widespread deployment of the internet in the 1990s, as a profit-center for the giant telecoms and a spy machine for the secret state, was, after all, a casual by-product of the Pentagon’s quest for a wartime digital communications system.

But now that every facet of daily life has become a war theater, what are we to make of the electronic walled gardens offered for sale by Apple, Facebook and Google, replete with their multitude of proprietary apps which, like Bentham’s “panopticon,” have become prisons of our own choosing?

Ponder Debord’s rigorous theorems in this light; substitute “cell phone” or “GPS” for “automobile,” and “internet” for “television” and it becomes clear pretty quickly that unbeknownst to the militarist inventors of the “digital highway” they had stumbled upon the perfect means for enabling a global control grid.

As Debord averred: “If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the ‘mass media’ that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics.”

“Internal dynamics” geared only towards its own survival and reproduction come hell or high water. Endless wars on “terror,” “drugs,” “crime,” take your pick. Prison-Industrial Complexes? Genetically-engineered plagues? Ecological collapse? Step right this way! There’s an app for that and much, much more!

Indeed, “if the social needs of the age in which such technologies are developed can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact between people has become totally dependent on these means of instantaneous communication, it is because this ‘communication’ is essentially unilateral,” that is, “the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions.”

Keep in mind that Debord’s seminal text was penned in 1967, long before the wet dreams of securocrats had been brought to life like Frankenstein’s monster. Once a disquieting and uncanny shape looming on some far-off, dystopian horizon, the world of smart phones and dumbed-down people is, simply put, an Americanized Borg cube where “resistance” is always “futile.”

The question is, in our fallen Republic does anyone even notice?