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.

Overview (5 w’s): I worked in their Lehigh Valley Fulfillment Center for a year altogether and I served as Morning Call reporter Spencer Soper’s inside informant before, during, and after the investigation ran. Check this out if you haven’t already. I’m proud to have been a part of this story, perhaps the first anti-Amazon piece that really stuck.

Paul K. Haeder: Why’d you become a source for a news expose on this Amazon policy of sweatshop labor?

Nichole Gracely: I wanted to see Amazon exposed and I lacked the time and resources to write my own story. Peak 2010 was a nightmare and I accumulated demerit points due to snow-related absences and was terminated in February 2011.

Here I reference a story — “Erroneous emails lead some applicants to believe they had jobs when they didn’t.

July 23, 2011 by Spencer Soper, The Morning Call

“If you apply for a job at Amazon.com’s Lehigh Valley shipping hub, be careful. Especially if you’re about to quit a different job to work there.”

I contacted Soper immediately after I read the above article and urged him to investigate further. He later contacted me as a source and I requested anonymity because I planned to return to Amazon in August as an ISS temp for Peak 2011. I trusted him immediately because of the questions he asked when we first spoke.

I was inside Amazon’s warehouse to witness management’s damage control measures in the wake of the bombshell expose. “Inside Amazon’s Warehouse” ran on Sep 18, 2011 and I was hired directly by Amazon in October.

The following is my anonymous contribution to the story:

One temporary warehouse worker who started last year said a major selling point was that the assignment could lead to a permanent job with Amazon. Workers had meetings with their ISS managers at the start of each shift. During those meetings, Amazon managers would come and deliver a pep talk, encouraging the temporary workers who wore white badges to work hard if they wanted to get permanent positions and wear a blue badge, she said.

“They said, ‘We don’t care if you’ve been here for two months or for two weeks. If you work hard, we’ll notice and you’ll get converted to a blue badge,’ ” she said.

The number of permanent positions available was always vague, and it was difficult to get a straight answer about hiring, she said. Managers would say Amazon would be hiring “a significant number” of ISS employees to permanent positions.

“They said it on a semi-daily basis,” she said. “They really dangled it and made it seem like this wonderful possibility if we just worked harder … especially when there were a bunch of new hires hungry for a new job.”

She worked in the warehouse for six months and didn’t see any of her temporary colleagues converted.
ISS promoted her to ambassador, a position that trains new workers. Still, she was terminated shortly after the holiday rush ended for missing work during snowstorms, she said.

“It became clear that they did not want to hire people. They wanted to let people go,” she said. “They said they wanted the best people for ambassadors. I was an ambassador and I was not hired.”

I was pleased with how he handled my contribution, thankful to him and the editors at the Morning Call for the story, and amazed that it received national attention. Amazon has been protested for myriad reasons and the Morning Call ran the first article that crashed corporate’s party. Amazon’s arrogance was staggering and I still can’t believe that they did not envision any potential repercussions for the way they had abused thousands of workers. Amazon clearly enjoys immunity on so many levels so the arrogance fits neatly into a much larger, violent class structure.

The heat and cold received too much emphasis, and it was easy for callous detractors to mention kitchens and other hot workplaces while the more egregious offenses, the systemic issues, were obscured. I know that other workers have it worse, and even I’ve had jobs that were worse. There is something deeply unsettling about Amazon, and I was most profoundly distressed on a psychological and spiritual level while I worked there. Misanthropy and dehumanization; bitter class struggle; intelligence routinely insulted; mocked; punished for our powerlessness. The way Amazon handled the heat, fire pulls, and arson certainly demonstrates its ability to disregard workers’ humanity, and very poor decisions were made. There is so much more to the story! I don’t believe that greater compensation alone would improve Amazon’s workplace, though it would definitely be a start because most workers’ entire paychecks are spent before payday.

PKH: What does Amazon’s policies in the warehouse say about Amazon on a larger frame?

NG: Amazon is misanthropic to the core. Immature, destructive, sociopathic. Everything is for the shoppers and shareholders. Anyone with money is lavished in excess, workers are squeezed and punished for their powerlessness. Amazon is launching the People’s Production Company? Here we have another instance of Amazon’s Orwellian abuse of language –Amazon is not for the People in any way. They should focus on what they do best. Why do they try to be everything to everyone? What is this game Amazon (Bezos)? Amazon could be a life-giving river. Now, everything they do is toxic –venture capitalists and other nefarious influences decide for Amazon.

PKH: How can we get people to fight back and to blow the lid on this sort of corporate abuse when most Americans—150 million—are living at or near poverty?

NG: I honestly don’t know, and that is why I must connect with anyone who will fight against injustice. I don’t have much fear these days. Acquiescence is not an option. We must improve our social bonds. I’m most hopeful because I don’t see youth falling into the same race-baiting traps as their forbears. Racism is manufactured by the elite, at least that is my view. The kids are alright! We must improve literacy, however. Literacy is imperative and I am most troubled by America’s lack of literacy. We’re also terribly fragmented and our relations are less than harmonious and that is a problem. Families, communities, and schools are weak and must be strengthened.

PKH: What are your goals for the next few years, personally and as far as activism goes?

NG: Work with workers for improved conditions. Learn Spanish. Live and write. People tell me stories, and you would not believe what I hear. I’d like to write a series similar to Studs Terkels’ Hard Times because I hear more and more that must be documented. Keep an eye on AFRICOM and Academi. Strengthen bonds. Find my people. No more isolation. No more abuse. Community gardening. I believe that every connection forged against all odds is a potential revolution.

PKH: Is there a “typical worker” at these warehouses, or some common demographic or character list you can pinpoint? If so, what is that?

NG: Amazon’s warehouse is the most diverse work setting I have ever experience, and that is what I liked about it most. Anyone working there as a temp, or even an Amazon associate to a lesser extent, is disenfranchised and powerless – that’s what we all had in common.

PKH: What’s it like back east, in Penn., for youth, for people of color, women, the labor movement?

NG: All are threatened. Pennsylvania Governor Corbett is most pro-biz and his budget cuts are savage. I think that his support may have something to do with Amazon’s arrogance. Look into fracking in Pennsylvania for further proof that our state is being whored out to the big interests.

Story – “Amazon.com Sends Corbett a ‘Thank You’ for PA Budget”

“Supporting the growth of Pennsylvania’s economy and specifically the creation of secure jobs for our residents is a high priority,” said Kelli Roberts, a spokeswoman for Governor Tom Corbett. “This begins with the recent passage of a responsible state budget that does not raise taxes and the passage of tort reform. Both give business the stability they need to stay, relocate and grow in the commonwealth.”

PKH: Any comments about the Amazon pieces in the Morning Call and Mother Jones or Seattle Times that you’d like to illuminate?

NG: They are remarkably accurate.

PKH: What sort of transformation, if any, has this entire news report(s) thing done to you?

NG: I followed the discussion boards closely and it was heartening to read that a significant number of people were truly outraged by what they read, and that they planned to boycott. The return to investigative journalism is exciting and I hope that the success of these stories will compel smaller, community-oriented publications to investigate and report corporate and workplace abuse. I was also amazed by how quickly the Morning Call story spread and the attention it received. Soper could have written the same article ten, twenty years ago and it may not have been read outside the Lehigh Valley. Technology facilitated connections and I was able to connect with reporters and participate in labor discussions. It was all very exciting. I don’t place complete faith in technology and activists must have networks in place to stem the threat of executive decisions and potential communications’ disruptions. I’m done with Facebook after it goes public.

Amazon’s workers are no longer invisible. Foxconn’s workers are no longer invisible. The public now knows that the Tech industry utilizes a tremendous amount of human labor and that these corporations that everyone thought were so hip and cutting edge are really no different than the old bosses. I’m sure that a lot of middle-class liberals were dismayed to hear that it is no more ethical to shop Amazon than it is Wal Mart.

Name — Nichole Gracely
Age — 35
Hometown — Grew up outside Schnecksville, Pa. I taught ESL in South Korea for more than two years, traveled Asia, been around the Caribbean and zig-zagged the U.S. I worked at the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago Brauhau. I was a Sales Representative at REI in Eugene, Oregon. I currently live in Bethlehem, Pa. I’ve been around. The east coast is definitely not for me and it’s time to move.
Family — My mother passed away in February 2007 and her passing (combined with a mean economy) was a terrible setback. And so I went to Amazon with a positive attitude because I liked Amazon before I worked there. I like to do physical labor, feel comfortable among other laborers, and the pay was comparable to what I would have earned in an office at the time.
School(s) –MA in American Studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.(2011). BS in Journalism at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.Va.(1998). News-editorial focus, Sociology minor.
Immediate goals — Find my voice.
Down the road goals — Share.
Definition of social justice — Dignity for workers. Dignity for all. No rights should be granted to one group at the expense of another. It is more than mere economics — we’ve got to recognize our shared humanity. Working at Amazon felt a little too much like H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. One day I overheard a young girl on Amazon’s warehouse floor ask: “Why they be hating on us?” Good question.
Define “living wage” to the One Percent — We work hard and deserve more than a meager existence. Workers should not live paycheck to paycheck and constantly worry that everything can be taken away at any time for whatever reason. We need a national healthcare system. Now!

May in Georgia…In this age of climate chaos, the local flora comes to bloom a full month earlier than in decades past. This season, magnolias and hydrangeas blossomed in early May. Their petals opened to the world as my father’s life is fading. The magnolia petals have grown heavy; his body is shrinking. Soon he will drift from this world…carried by the scent of late spring blossoms.

In our once laboring class neighborhood, McMansions blot out the late spring sun. In the arrogant shadow of these shoddily constructed, bloated emblems of late capitalism, the neighborhood’s remaining 1950′s single level, brick homes seem to recede…fading like memory before the hurtling indifference of passing eras.

In late spring, veils of pollen merge with shrouds of Atlanta traffic exhaust. Timeless nature has awakened as the noxious capitalist certainties underpinning the aberration known as the New South are dying.

Hospice has arrived in the home of my father.

A death vigil has begun, as well, for our culture.

Lost, starving, wailing into a void of paternal abandonment, my father, left on the doorstep of a Baptist church adjacent to an Indian Reservation in rural Missouri, arrived into this keening world. Now, he is refusing to eat and is wailing, once again, into an abyss of helplessness…His bones, eaten by cancer, and his bowels seized up by the side effects of opiates, he is starving himself to death.

He now lies in his bedroom; his sight…set on the undiscovered realm of death. This world denied him succor; now Death offers the embrace that he was denied (and later) refused, as he proceeded through this life in a resentful fury, his wounds cauterized by rage-lit flames.

Now, I must comfort him…as he did me, when I was a child, seized by night terrors…that he both placated and caused.

He whimpers into the air of the small home that he once shook with rage. Now, betrayed by his body, and again orphaned by fate, he will soon leave this world — a place from which he was perpetually estranged.

I hope the womb of night will bestow a peace upon him that was denied to him by this world. I hope whatever dawn he meets will hold him in an embrace so all encompassing and gentle that he will shed his compulsion to bristle and retreat. I hope he will, at long last, know he was loved.

My father was born on an Indian reservation and abandoned on the doorsteps of a Baptist church in rural Missouri in the early years of the Great Depression. A Jewish mother and Protestant father adopted him. In those days, it was a standard practice of adoption agencies to offer up for adoption children of so-called mixed ancestry to interdenominational couples. Caucasian babies, the conventional wisdom of the time presumed, would carry a stigma for life from being raised in a home headed by such social deviants.

My mother escaped Hitler’s Germany (barely) on a Kindertransport. My wife is from the rural South Carolina Low Country. She’s a flat-lander, a swamp bunny. As for myself, I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. I’m an accidental Hillbilly…The lay of the land endowed me with a hill country perception of existence, yet I appreciate the mode of being evinced in places like Charleston and New Orleans…the humidity slowing down the pace of life…the mind as a gnat flurry.

My blood, as is the case with all of us, is composed of ancient oceans that long to know land and sky. On a personal basis, my atavistic blood is a sea of diverse ethnic consanguinity that meets the shore of a global polis. The waves of this body of water are changeable…sometimes, caressing the shoreline… placid, at ease in the world; sometimes, agitated and enraged by what I witness…becoming a series of antagonistic waves crashing against the insensate rocks of the mindless social circumstances that damaged my father so.

Soon, my father will return to the vast ocean of eternity. I consider it my duty to sing the song of my blood…to compose and give voice to sacred hymns, both of the personal and the collective.

This is my poet’s prayer: Life rose from ancient oceans so that mollusks could gaze upon the evening sky. Likewise, we emerged from the cosmic brine to know physical embrace…made resonate because of its finite nature — the loving limits imposed by Time. Accordingly, the immaterial longs for the caress of the summer breeze and to rage into a winter wind. Spiritus Mundi is dependent on us to cultivate our individual souls…to have our blood sing biographical ballads to audiences gathered in Eternity.

My father’s song is almost at its end.

The endless song continues.

A song of tribute to the life of my father (or, for that matter, any human life) must combine elements of a fight song and a love song. One must love life enough to take a stand in its behalf.

During the Great Depression, my father was (again) left fatherless when his adopted father suffered a debilitating stroke, resulting in a protracted decline that left their small family penniless and homeless. Consequently, my father, along with his nearly incapacitated father and his mother managed to make their way from rural Missouri to Cleveland, Ohio, and then went on to find lodging with members of his mother’s family who had settled in Birmingham, Alabama, where shortly thereafter his father died.

In the Deep South, the dark hue of my father’s Native American skin marked him for abuse by belligerent locals. Although he had been deprived of detailed knowledge of his ancestry, his Comanche blood resisted intimidation. His tormentors wounded him deeply, but they also succeeded in opening deep reservoirs of ancestral rage.

My father harbored an abiding animus to bullies — a trait he bequeathed to me by both blood and circumstance.

Apropos: At the foot of Broadway, on May Day, I stood near a bristling array of NYPD officers who were tasked with the crucial mission of protecting the statue of Wall Street’s iconic “Charging Bull” — where I heard one of the witless, uniformed thugs, through a smirk, opine, “These rich, lazy bums go to college and study women’s studies and the history of Negroes — then come out here in the real world and whine that they can’t get a job…These brats should have thought about what they’re going to do in life when they were in school.”

I turned to face him and averred, “I guess they could follow your example and they could stand here on Wall Street…stroking a billy club…protecting ultra-wealthy criminals and their ill-gotten riches.”

Of course, he responded by calling me a socialist.

Even though that was, most likely, the first accurate statement he posited all day, I replied, “As opposed to following your noble example: choosing to spend your days as a mindless fascist bully?”

His smirk still in place, he spat, “As if you even know what a fascist is!”

I replied, “As a matter of fact, I do, and you, being posed as you are in front of that bull [with its bronze form cast to crouch in a stance of impending aggression; its form, permanently locked in a position of myopic fury] will serve as a perfect backdrop for me to illustrate the situation. Mussolini, who knew a bit about the subject, proclaimed fascism to be the merger of the corporation and the state. Therefore, since it follows that the state pays your salary, and you spend your days protecting the corporate order… that you, to a jackboot, fit the profile of a fascist…Don’t you now?”

At that, his smirk solidified into a mask of belligerent stupid. He slapped his truncheon into his meaty palm, and told me that if I knew what was good for me I better move along.

I told him that he was probably right, due to the fact, I suspect, he could very accurately and with much relish impart to me the true nature of fascism with that nightstick of his.

His lipless, reptilian grin indicated he would be more than happy to take a personal interest in tutoring me on the subject.

The ghetto that you built for me is the one you’re living in.

— Bob Dylan, Dead Man, Dead Man

But the fight is not with this individual enforcer of the present, doomed order. The encounter is emblematic of what those who devote themselves to the unfolding struggle are up against: an armed and fortified wall of sneering arrogance — a violent, human torrent of surging ignorance.

For us, the living, breaching Death’s wall, possessed of the intention of changing its implacable order, is, of course, impossible — but challenging the present, calcified order — a death-addicted arrangement, created and maintained by mortal men that has existed well past its given and rightful time — has become imperative.

For my father, the struggle is nearly at its end; for those of us who remain in this breathing world, the struggle has just begun.

Sometimes these land use, transportation, design review, and economic development meetings in Seattle make me feel as if I had just been pushed out of some policy wonk’s Leer jet 35,000 feet up, without a parachute or O2. They all have these great raster maps and scatter plots, the visual language of geographical information systems, the “urban lingo” to advance their techniques and typology-loving aspirations.

That is the problem – no, isn’t it!  Another group of silo-ed people self-replicating and forcing through with their elitist and non-community participatory design stuff that is the staff of their lives: making money as developers, architects and builders from the Titans of industry like Amazon’s $19.3 billion dollar wonder Jeff Bezos or the bio-tech-Frankencrop monster called Monsanto.

I listen and wonder where all my planning classes and community development practice sessions as a lowly master’s candidate finishing up with an urban planning degree will go when I listen to one wonk after another wonk tell the crowd all these great things about three skyscrapers coming to Seattle’s skyline.

You see, they are  planning only for “use” as opposed to planning for people, and when I ask the lowly city planner questions to this effect, she cites “this isn’t the proper meeting to discuss those issues . . . that public planning process already took place.”

Post modern sensibilities have shunted the sides of the same coin into entirely different realms of emphasis and possibilities. Inevitably, one and most important one  – social planning – gets the short shrift.

What I have learned, all planning activities should serve the needs and interests of people; however, the modern reductionist tendencies have  sluiced the disciplines, professions, and thinking into distinct troughs of specialization. Continually, I run into this attitude on the part of planners (and developers, elected officials, and other community “stakeholders”) that not only follows the money, but takes on the  “land use, not people” approach.

Social dimensions from most planning activities are then stripped away, so the meetings almost always focus on financial (profit risks) , technological, material, and environmental considerations. For any sensible person, we should be fully encompassing the underlying needs and behaviors of human beings. That should apply to ALL planning – community, land use, transportation, education, environmental and agricultural.

There are incredible amounts of data mining these young Turks do in order to make a case for this type of urban development or that sort of transportation corridor. Sometimes this leaves the engaged viewer – public – way off the scale of where they fit in, where communities tie in.

These planning wonks, in their high-tech offices, produce some of the most colorful, detailed and smart-looking reports and plans from their 35,000 foot perches.

One recent case illustrates how planning today – architecture, too – might be working two sides of very different tracks. The project planned for downtown Seattle, the so-called Denny Triangle, is 3.3 million square feet of Amazon.dot office-headquarters buildings, squeezed into the West Lake area, near the other dozen or so Amazon buildings in the area that add up to a million square feet of whatever Amazonians do.

Let’s look at the Seattle Downtown Design Review Board meeting where the public was seated and standing in a packed City Hall room to see for the first time an anchor project for the downtown West Lake area – Amazon’s campus expansion. We’re talking more than 3.3 million square feet, with three 500-foot high rises in an area that has seen in the past 17 years a huge influx of techy types, from IT to biotechnology.

Restaurants have proliferated, including three from notable Tom Douglas. Bar tabs have risen. The price of housing has gone out the roof. The level of hubris inside the offices and at the businesses frequented by these so-called knowledge workers, the misanthropically-dennoted “creative class” of Richard Florida fame (see – Rise of the Creative Class and another, Cities and the Creative Class,  is stupifying.

While the Amazon warehouse fiasco had already been published months earlier in both Lehigh, Pennsylvania’s Morning Call and Mother Jones magazine and then just recently here, by the Seattle Times, this event was attended by mostly planning and architect types.

However, there were a few in attendance unwilling to let Amazon off the hook even at this staid and rather all-business design meeting. Some in the crowd I knew, and I was with them, as well as being there as a private citizen with some planning background. Working Washington – an offshoot of SEIU – positioned around eight activists in the crowd.

The City’s land use planner in attendance, Lisa Ritzick, seemed a bit taken aback by the throng of people hovering over the architectural renderings and maps of the proposed Amazon base that includes a 2,000 seat auditorium. She reiterated the downtown design guidelines would only encompass architectural design elements, and not environmental or community elements, or lack thereof.

The architect, John Savo, representing NBBJ, the same firm that designed the Gates Foundation’s $500 million campus nearby, plowed through these three block locations, discussing with unabashed confidence FARs (floor area ratios), Class One  & Two Pedestrian Street categories, sun pockets, urban rooms, and view blockages.

NBBJ, an international firm, had its Power Point ready and the three dimensional scaled down models, with interchangeable blocks representing three main alternatives/possibilities.

One big contentious issue seemed to be the vacation of alleyways in the design features. Since the zoning permits buildings of 500-foot heights, and since the three blocks are a bit smaller than traditional city blocks, the idea of being a good neighbor played into the NBBJ design work, Savo said.

We’re talking about views of the Puget Sound and Olympics, 3,000 underground parking spaces and thousands of additional people employed by the Internet retailer. NBBJ’s two presenters harped on the idea of small (insignificant) public spaces that would “allow” passage around the three block complexes.

Some in the crowd, during the public discussion, were concerned about what Amazon-NBBJ was doing to either “make or demolish” the community around the proposed sites part of the plan. Pagnesh Parikh, an architect on the Seattle Design Review Board, posited the questions about how NBBJ and Amazon intended to address the effects of the proposed campus site on surrounding buildings and the community.  The query seemed to stump the two NBBJ architects.

Another interested public attendee who works in a building near the proposed site –  which would include demolition of several buildings — was concerned about the large area of effacement on the three high rises and just how inviting the public spaces would be.

My questions were more pointed, as I addressed the Design Review Board to continue pressing several issues:

a) stronger design and architectural features that would create much more public space, both in size and breadth, maybe even green spaces atop two smaller buildings;

b) the issue of how the public could engage in or use the auditorium; and,

c) whether Amazon would consider finding several locations in the Seattle area to site their retail offices and incubators, sort of an economic development model seeding in some strong neighborhoods like Beacon Hill or Rainer Beach that would benefit from Amazon’s presence as a multiplier for housing, retail and activities.

Then, my brothers in arms from Working Washington went at the design review board with humorous questions about Amazon’s business practices tied to recent stories of Amazon warehouses in Pennsylvania and Nevada functioning like sweatshops. Several pressed the architects and Design Review Board to check on the Amazon’s amazingly small annual tax rate of 5.5 percent.

I was wondering where those lingering questions would come from, those tied to the absolutely odd nature of Amazon.dot.com fighting paying sales taxes while bricks and mortar stores keep paying to help fund the very same infrastructure Amazon uses to package and ship their goods. Or where the community activists were to demand more concessions from Amazon to do much better and innovative “things” for the public in these proposed blocks.

As a final note, I take a bit from the Project for Public Places about the problems dealing with high rises:

Tall buildings affect cities in two different ways that have almost nothing to do with each other. One is as sculptural objects framed in the sky, where their impact is artistic or symbolic. The other is where the buildings meet the ground and create either pleasant or oppressive spaces where people walk and congregate. Architects regularly misfire with big buildings that are bad by both measures, but the tendency is to fail more often and more egregiously at street level.

One reason is that it’s fairly difficult to make a 500-foot-high building seem humane and welcoming to a 5-foot-something biped approaching it. The other is that a building’s owners are naturally more concerned with the way the building reads in the skyline, because that’s where its marketable image gets fixed in the public eye.

Seattle’s skyline and view-shed keep changing, and many older timers think its not for the best, no matter how dense the downtown gets.

Some were manufactured overseas by companies owned by non-American manufacturers. The Kia Sedona, with 24,047 sales, was built in South Korea, Russia, and the Philippines. The MAZDA5, with 19,155 sales, was built in China, Japan, and Taiwan.

Some minivans from Japanese companies were built in the U.S., but by non-unionized workers. Honda sold 107,068 Odysseys built in Alabama. Toyota Siennas, built in Indiana, went to 111,429 persons. The Nissan Quest, built in Ohio, had 12,199 sales.

Only three minivans were built by unionized workers, but they were made in Canada by members of the Canadian Auto Workers. The Dodge Grand Caravan, with 110,996 sales; Chrysler Town & Country, with 94,320 sales; and the VW Routan, with 12,473 sales, all share the same basic body; most differences are cosmetic. GM and Ford no longer produce minivans.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) suggests that members who wish to buy minivans buy one of the three Chrysler products because much of the parts are manufactured in the United States by UAW members.

All cars, trucks, and vans from GM, Ford, and Chrysler are produced by union workers in the U.S. or Canada. The Japanese-owned Mitsubishi Eclipse, Spyder, and Galant, and the Mazda6 are produced in the U.S. under UAW contracts; neither company makes minivans. All vehicles produced in the U.S. have the first Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) as a 1, 4, or 5; vehicles produced in Canada have a 2 as the first VIN number.

Founded in 1935, the UAW quickly established a reputation for creating the first cost-of-living allowances (COLAs) and employer-paid health care programs. It helped pioneer pensions, supplementary unemployment benefits, and paid vacations.

It has been at the forefront of social and economic justice issues; Walter Reuther, its legendary president between 1946 and his death in 1970, marched side-by-side with Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez, and helped assure that the UAW was one of the first unions to allow minorities into membership and to integrate the workforce. Bob King, its current president, a lawyer, was arrested for civil disobedience, carrying on the tradition of the social conscience that has identified the union and its leadership.

The UAW doesn’t mind that corporations make profits; it does care when some of the profit is at the expense of the worker, for without a competent and secure work force, there would be no profit. When the economy failed under the Bush–Cheney administration, and the auto manufacturers were struggling, the UAW recognized it was necessary for the workers to take pay cuts and make other concessions for the companies to survive.

But not all corporations have the social conscience that the UAW and the “Big 3” auto manufacturers developed. For decades, American corporations have learned that to “maximize profits,” “improve the bottom line,” and “give strength to shareholder stakes” they could downsize their workforce and ship manufacturing throughout the world. Our companies have outsourced almost every form of tech support, as well as credit card assistance, to vendors whose employees speak varying degrees of English, but tell us their names are George, Barry, or Miriam. Clothing, toys, and just about anything bought by Americans could be made overseas by children working in abject conditions; their parents might make a few cents more, and in certain countries would be thrilled to earn less than half the U.S. minimum wage.

Americans go along with this because they think they are getting their products cheaper. What they don’t want to see is the working conditions of those who are employed by companies that are sub-contractors to the mega-conglomerates of American enterprise. These would be the same companies whose executives earn seven and eight-figure salaries and benefits, while millions are unemployed.

But, Americans don’t care. After all, we’re getting less expensive products, even if what we buy is cheaply made because overseas managers, encouraged by American corporate executives, lower the quality of materials and demand even more work from their employees.

Walk into almost every department store and Big Box store, and it’s a struggle to find clothes, house supplies, and entertainment media made in America. If you do find American-made products, they are probably produced in “right-to-work” states that think unionized labor is a Communist-conspiracy to destroy the free enterprise system of the right to make obscene profits at the expense of the working class.

We can wave flags and tell everyone how much more patriotic we are than them, but we still can’t buy a minivan made in America by unionized workers—even when the price is lower than that of the non-unionized competition.

• Sales figures of minivans are from Edmunds.com. Also assisting was Rosemary Brasch.

Sometimes, a movie “review” is a catharsis, or just both barrels aimed at the aimless prognostication of filmmakers co-opted by the growth paradigm and enamored by the so-called “creative class.”

I’ll tackle both hernia-inducing topics in several more stories to come, but first some observations while going to and leaving the film, Urbanized.

Irony: Going to see the film Urbanized, at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle and witnessing in just a few miles of driving from Beacon Hill during the Snow-ageddon of 2012  tow trucks lifting hybrid autos onto flatbeds; Seattle PD patrol vehicles slipping and sliding; a few ice falls by pedestrians; the dull roar of Interstate 5 muted significantly because Seattle shuts down after three-quarters of an inch of snow.

Reality: City life, with pho venders literally raking the sidewalks with garden tools, kids using sled discs to get airtime on unplowed streets normally clogged with Amazon.com employees, and lots of people out and about taking snapshots of their snow-covered automobiles (only three inches of the white stuff!) in this rare winter wonderland.

Observation: Cool, hip Capitol Hill, with all the trendy coats, boots and Dr. Zeuss hats on a growing legion of lifestylism experts who yak it up about their love of Obama, how that civet defecated coffee is “so decadent” at $600 a pound, and how Thomas Friedman is really a smart guy. The only thing missing this night at the movies? The lower half of the 99 percent huddling in drafty apartments trying to keep down the obscene Puget Sound Electric bills; the homeless guys with pretty pun-filled “will wash your SUV for a fee” cardboard signs pissing off metro-sexual guys on their way to pedicures; the feral cats and dogs looking for out-of-date sushi dumped out back. Even the rats were smart enough to hunker down.

As a journalist who’s seen Tucson, Phoenix, El Paso, New Mexico and much of Southern California turn into  metastasized suburban sprawl nightmares;  someone who’s tried to crack the code of  less than creative bureaucratic, careerist city planners and engineers as a beat reporter; and a planning practitioner who ended up with a graduate degree in urban and regional planning emphasizing sustainability –  going to an 80-minute film about our urban world ( more than 50 percent of global population is living in cities as of 2011) is going to be wrought with skepticism.

The 2011 Gary Hustwit film, titled Urbanized,  has a few strengths and many gaps, not so much attributed to which cities were featured and not highlighted, but hobbled by how the filmmaker sheds light on the urban reality of city planners, architects, the Mayor Bloombergs or Dalys of the world, and all those developers and their sycophants in the Chamber of Commerce who are beholding to Wall Street and “the” banks.

That collective build-pave-raze elan is under-girdered in an undying faith in unsustainable growth (economic and population) paradigms in Hustwit’s  documentary. The confidence in the minds and motives of the vaunted few making decisions for several billion citizens’ well beings (or our increasingly impoverished lives) not just pertaining to the here and now or the immediate future, but seven generations out, is grotesque.

The film could have been oh so much more at this bizarre time of the vanguard still blathering on about incrementalism when it comes to planning cities around the inevitable – peak oil, food shortages, Diasporas, climate instability and resource hoarding.

It’s difficult for me to sit still in a film like Urbanized, or when viewing the PBS series, e² , what was touted as “a critically acclaimed, multipart PBS series about the innovators and pioneers who envision a better quality of life on earth: socially, culturally, economically and ecologically.”

It’s because I started out as a 16-year-old (1973) in Tucson working against the rampant scouring of the Sonora desert, all the way into the magnificent Santa Catalina Mountains, where I hiked alongside black bear, puma, mule deer, dozens of reptile and avian species in what has to be the most diverse and abundant desert in the world. We’re talking about canyons and season springs and caves and immense verdant miles and miles of ocotillo and palos verdes.

I began seeing the light when informed, well-spoken community groups hit stonewall after stonewall going to politicians and land use departments demanding an end to the bulldozing and fracturing of vital, abundant ecosystems (Center for Biological Diversity started in Tucson).

I’ve been on tasks forces looking at sustainability, peak oil, food security and climate change up in the Pacific Northwest.  I’ve had some killer guests on my radio show which ran on a community radio FM radio station, the last and largest population-wise license approved by “There is Yellow Cake” Colin Powell’s son the old FCC chairman, Michael Powell.

Folk like Richard Heinberg (Peak Everything) and Post-Carbon Institute’s David Lerch talked about sustainability and sustainability-lite. James Howard Kunstler (Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency) and Bill McKibben (The End of Nature) talked about the political realities of a one-party America never forcing the issue of true economic and urban development. David Suzuki (renowned Canadian author, environmentalist, and documentarian) and Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers) talked about how far away the average Westerner was to understanding the truly monumental problems cities will face because of climate change.

I’m seeing more and more limited sight and broken thinking tied to so-called renewable energy and climate change and sustainability initiatives by corporations and municipalities. But documentary-makers?

How can people with film-making credentials and the backing miss so much in a film? Those were the underlying questions I had throughout the 80 minutes of Urbanized. I could not stop thinking about what all the greenwashing cities and proponents of smart growth have done over the past thirty years, skewing even more the conversation about cities’ survival.

Hell, I was wondering where the dystopia of The Road could fit into Urbanized.

All these emotions flooded me in my frustration while watching the film, especially since I had just spent a week in Vancouver, Canada, attending what is called The UBC Summer Institute on Sustainability Leadership. It was there where I ran into the same kind of thinking – technology and the hyper-developers and architects will get us all out of climate change’s way.  That’s another essay in DV, soon to come.

The stuff I’d been working on tied to this idea of “the new black is green” that eco-pornographers and the corporate-modeled environmental groups like the Sierra Club are shilling I couldn’t shake while sitting through the film.

The film Urbanized is really looking at cities from the One percent/Twenty-nine percent perspective (I’ve come to come up with the Thirty Percenters as the dividing line in my frame for this Occupy movement). The fact is so much could have been learned by Urbanized’s director from the great trilogy by Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger.

Glawogger looked at the the underclass in Mexico City, Bombay, Moscow and New York in Megacities (1998); and then manual labor at the beginning of  this century through the blood, sweat and tears of coal miners in the Ukraine, ship dismantlers in Pakistan, slaughterers in a Nigerian stockyard and sulfur harvesters on an Indonesian mountain in Working Man’s Death  (2005); and then in Glawogger’s  latest feature, Whores’ Glory, he explored the streets of New York, Mumbai, Moscow, and Mexico City — the “megacities” in his three-punch uppercut to view the new realities of the 21st Century.

We’re turning into urban dwellers, human rats, farther and farther away from farming and what could have been intentional communities far and wide, sustainable, compact, supported by agrarian ingenuity and smaller and smaller human footprints with dynamic, active cultural structures.

Instead, we are in a rush to get wired-in, carting our families and belongings into the centers of employment, and some of the outfall is more anxiety  about being out in rural-scapes. The Thirty Percent has facilitated this uneven takeover of our lives. Small towns are drying up all over North America, and what were small towns near cities have turned into gated communities and suburban ghettos about to be annexed into bigger and bigger concentrations of people moving endlessly in cars to cobble together a living working two or three part-time jobs.

This is the 70 percent I consider the real defining group that the Occupy movement alludes to by invoking the 99 Percent jingo.

As an out of work planner in  Seattle – a city not very dynamic when it comes to outside the box thinking in terms of “urban and regional planning” – I understand one back story: throughout the 1970s and 1980s many city planning offices were gutted and the smart practitioners and innovators ended up in private development. So, it’s not so surprising to see how  developers have been setting the agenda for city planning,  especially in smaller towns or Sun Belt cities.

The film Urbanized is a broad brush stroke canvas expression of the design and development of urban centers, touching briefly on the hot button issues Seattlites know so very well – transportation, crime, public spaces, city planning, architecture, energy consumption. Hustwit adds to that the bastard child created from the union of  “free trade,” unbridled capitalism,  consumer-driven development, and corporatocracy – slums, both inner-city  and on the outskirts of the world’s most highly populated and growing cities.

Here’s the missing debate in films like Urbanized: while a total of 227 million people rose out of slum conditions from 2000 to 2010, thanks largely to policies in China and India, according to the UN Human Settlements Programme, also called UN-Habitat, slums are the biggest “impediment” for urban developers.

For some, this is a rare success in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As such, MDG 7, Target 11, UN members pledged to “achieve significant improvement” in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

These incremental steps, or the one step forward, two steps back, looks pretty tough on the poorest of city dwellers:  from 2000-2010, the absolute numbers of slum dwellers increased from 776.7 million to 827.6 million.

“Cities are growing faster than the slum improvement rate,” said Gora Mboup, a Senegalese who co-authored the report, State of the World Cities 2010/11: Bridging the Urban Divide, issued two years ago.

Half of the increase of 55 million extra slum dwellers came from population growth in existing slum homes; a quarter by rural flight to the cities; and a quarter by people living on the edge of cities whose homes became engulfed by urban expansion. It’s this urban ballooning that both creates slums and threatens those slum dwellers who at least in some cases have patched-together roofs over their heads in these communities that end up taking hold, like the parachuting seeds of dandelions.

Along the US-Mexico border, they are called colonias.

UN-Habitat warned in March 2010:

Short of drastic action, the world slum population will probably grow by six million each year, or another 61 million people, to hit a total of 889 million by 2020.

We’ve been talking about these basic urban topics for decades in the planning and community development fields:

• in 40 years – 2050 – 75 percent of the world’s population will live in cities;
• infrastructure and city services in most cities were designed for people who were middle income or higher;
• cities have been prioritized for private space and automobiles;
• there is a movement toward greater citizen involvement – participatory planning;
• resiliency is key in order for civilization to shift into new living arrangements precipitated by resource shortages, climate change and pollution;
• progressive action and plans have to be contained in not only the planner’s toolbox, but in the politician’s and CEO’s as well; and,
• cities account for 75 percent of energy used/burned and 75 percent of global greenhouse gasses.

For a general audience, Urbanized might be news or compelling, though too much in the documentary comes from the mouths of architects, engineers, politicians and planners, and not enough from community groups and citizen participants in their cities’ designs.

Gary Hustwit understands the limitations of working on a film dealing with the “morphology of cities” with so much of the back story left out:

There are so many cities we couldn’t go to that are not in the film. Our approach with ‘Urbanized’ was not to look at specific cities. It was to look at specific, universal issues and then look at specific projects around the world. Universal issues that face all cities: We all need a roof over our head, we need clean water and sanitation, we need mobility and ways to get around, we need some place to work and we need places to relax. Whatever you want to talk about in a city, it all pretty much boils down to one of those five issues. Then we look at how different cities are dealing with them. In a way, we are making a composite city. I couldn’t think of any other way to structure it.

The film doesn’t look at the price of depopulating rural villages and towns. The concept of permaculture and permanent cultures tied to agrarian work, marketing and food processing is never touched upon. What about the price of urbanization around the absolutely astounding farmer suicide rate in India –  where a quarter of a million farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years? Think of one farmer committing suicide every 30 minutes. Why? City life, city thinking.

Agriculture in India is subject to global markets in this push for  economic liberalization. Emphasis has been placed on building and retrofitting cities in India, so removal of agricultural subsidies and the opening of Indian agriculture to the global market have increased costs – through bigger and bigger farmer loans — while also reducing yields and profits for many farmers. Some of that is tied to seed and biotech fascism around such companies as Monsanto, or the heavy price pumping water from historically significant aquifers for bottling companies like Nestle and CocaCola?

In the film, we do see Paris, New York, the slums of Mumbai, the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the bike lanes of Bogotá, Colombia, lighted walkways in Apartheid-cleaved townships on the outskirts of Cape Town, a new housing project in Santiago, Chile, the depopulating Detroit (once 1.4 million folk, down to 386,000) and the shame of New Orleans almost seven years after a category three hurricane hit..

It’s no criticism of the film that it was finished before the public power of the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement, but Hustwit in a recent interview ramified the impact of public participation in public spheres:

Attitudes about what the priorities of a city should be and whom city space should benefit are changing. And it had to come as a result of people literally taking the space back. All the public-private plazas in New York City are a perfect example of space being sold off to the highest bidder, when really the city should step in and preserve more of this space for public use.

It’s clear that Seattle should have tackled the issues Jim Diers brought to the fore as Seattle’s  first director of Department of Neighborhoods in 1988 and serving under three mayors for 14 years. His book, Neighborhood Power: Building Community the Seattle Way, is about community participation and organizing, Sal Alinsky-style. His book and philosophy has been scrutinized by other cities, including Austin, Texas.

Alas, community now is about defined locations of gentrification, gated communities, and the poor and lower middle class in the suburbs, making huge emotional, economic and sustainability sacrifices at the hands of sub-living wages, two or three jobs and a closed loop of driving from the hinterlands – those suburban ghettos – to places in the metropolitan areas for work.

Movies about the welfare of culture, mankind, our organizing tools to stave off war, injustice, environmental calamity and die off should be long, provocative and from the heart. Urbanized seems 20 years behind the times in many ways, sort of a peek into the minds of rarefied designers, architects and planners.

Those planners and designers and wonks are living in a Richard Florida fantasy land of this creative class of high tech gurus and support engineers who supposedly make cities work, and make them interesting, artistic, bohemian, and where all the “cool, hip, liberal Obama-supporting types” create the great cities of the present and future.

This is not a film that posits much from Jane Jacobs thinking, either from her work in 1961, Death and Life of Great American Cities or Dark Age Ahead (2004).

In this latter book, her main focus is on “the five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm.” Those pillars can be applied to most Westernized or non-Western societies — the nuclear family (but also community); education; science; representational government and taxes; and corporate and professional accountability. While Dark Age Ahead is pessimistic in a good way, her conclusion is more buoyant than all of her critique up to that point:

At a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy. Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true.

We live in a time when on one hand a mayor like Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel may speak the new urbanism language of developers, architects, and strategic planners, but he is Occupy Chicago’s worst enemy, using mass arrests, suspension of the valued one phone call in prison and distaste for nurses and teachers to “plan his city.”

Emanuel is like many mayors in the US, tied to the machinations of developers, financiers, and  private planners: lots of talk about enterprise zones/urban cores, carbon footprints, sustainable jobs, green infrastructure, and smart growth, but also, as Emanuel is proposing, criminalizing the act of expressing dissent, minimizing the time and place where people can protest, giving police more authority to suppress protesters, and adding extensive rules and restrictions that bureaucratize the process of obtaining a permit and severely limits the “fluidity” of demonstrations.

Urbanized barely scratches the surface, and no matter how “cool” or technologically awe-inspiring some aspects of  mega cities of the world seem, a few billion people are protesting the toil, pollution, lack of wages, and unbelievably inhumane treatment galvanized by this  creative class Gary Hustwit highlights in his film who seem to think they have the final say in the plans for our world’s cities’ futures.

Hell, most places in the US are so broken more and more college graduates are lining up at food banks, a 100 million feral dogs and cats roaming the streets just might be subject to police shoot-to-kill policies as animal control units are gutted (see Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s plan for stray dogs), and grand schemes like a $4.2 billion deep bore tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle get approved to placate the waterfront-lusting developers.

The irony behind Urbanized’s implicit ending, as illustrated in an October 2011 interview of Hustwit in the journal  Design Observer, is a  case study in  his next documentary, a subject caught in the shadow in the towering skyscrapers of our urbanized world – rural life.

When I went to interview Rem Koolhaas [world-renowned Dutch Architect] — and it took months and months for us to get him scheduled — we finally sat down, and we talked a little before the interview started. And I said we are going to talk about cities. And the first thing Rem says is: You know I’m not really thinking about cities anymore. Now that 51 percent of people live in cities, what I’m really interested in is all these spaces that we are leaving behind in the countryside.

This maybe a fun projection of the next movie to come for Hustwit, but the absurdity of our times are underway when it comes to the ultimate city, as Will Doig of Salon.com writes in a piece, “Science Fiction No More: The Perfect City is Under Construction”:

And so it will be with cities like PlanIT Valley, currently being built from scratch in northern Portugal. Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere “smart city” — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention.

We saw an opportunity … to go create something that was starting with a blank sheet,” said PlanIT Valley creator Steve Lewis, “thinking from a systems-wide process in the same way we would think about computing technologies.

Oh no, that’s a whole other essay-article I’ve got to get my arms around and pen, and soon. The entire creative class and knowledge worker saving the world mentality of our time, at least in many of the megacities and smaller ones like Seattle or San Francisco, ties into this PlanIT Valley hyper-homeland security, nanny-sitting, dead-creativity world of the blasé.

This is the very thinking that Jacobs decried and James Howard Kunstler dissects. Is this really the world’s attitude toward modern technology and city-building and city-living, as Mark Shepard, an architect and the author of Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, states?

“From a tech perspective, we’re not really selling products and services anymore. We’re selling lifestyles,” he says.

See Urbanized  after you rent the movie, The Age of Stupid. After you watch, The End of Suburbia. It’s easy to end a movie review about planning with a thousand quotes, but I’ll put two down from creative folks, real ones, and not planners:

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

— Edward Abbey, writer, essayist, novelist (1927-1989)

A common mistake people make when trying to design something foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

— Douglas Adams, author, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1952-2001)

Sanford (Sandy) Weill was the driving force in shattering the Glass-Steagall Act, which for decades had prohibited Wall Street investment firms from gambling with their depositors’ money. Its reversal opened the gates for the housing crisis in 2008, the plague of foreclosures devastating our communities and the economic recession that has stolen our children’s future. Mr. Weill thus enabled the merger that created Citigroup, a major player in the criminal banking practices thereby unleashed. Given his unquestioned responsibility in this, Time Magazine recently included Weill’s name in its list of the “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis.”

A major purveyor of toxic subprime mortgages, Citigroup required $45 billion in government investment and a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets to avoid bankruptcy; yet Sandy Weill retired an incredibly wealthy man shortly before the “banking collapse he helped engineer” required a tax-payer bail-out. Now Mr. Weill is being rewarded with a degree in Humane Letters for his donation of 12 million of his ill-gotten dollars to complete SSU’s construction of the controversial Green Musical Center. SSU Sociology Professor Peter Phillips asks, “Is this a doctorate honoring anything besides being the largest recent donor to the Green Music Center? It seems to smack of buying the honor instead of earning it.”

In fact, many of the students in the SSU graduating class this year are leaving school saddled with Citigroup student loans, all part of the trillion dollar student loan debt from which graduates across the nation will be struggling for years to escape. The courageous obligation to protest Weill’s honorary degree is made quite clear in graduating SSU student Melanie Sanders’ words: “I must now call my grandma and explain that I will be protesting at my graduation ceremony. I am personally offended that he will be at my graduation and receiving a degree.”

Many attribute this offensive gesture to the stewardship of SSU President Ruben Armiñana. They argue that, by honoring a man who, in the process of amassing his fortune, has inflicted so much suffering and destruction on countless lives – including many in this very graduating class – Armiñana has betrayed the integrity of the California State University system and its mission. The Day of Shame on Sonoma State University is an urgent action organized to give people an opportunity to demonstrate their outrage and publicly denounce the arrogance, greed and fraud that has inverted our social contract and hi-jacked the American Dream as the entitlement of the few, at the expense of the many.

According to organizer Shepherd Bliss, “Seating for 4,000 guests will be set up to accommodate those wanting to be present for 1000 graduates in the morning and another 1000 in the afternoon. This would be an important audience to educate and mobilize, helping them connect the necessary dots between a prominent one percenter and his victims.”

The “Day of Shame on Sonoma State University” starts at noon on the SSU campus at 1801 East Cotati Ave, Rohnert Park, on May 12, 2012. Please respect our commitment to non-violent assembly and protect the integrity of this graduation ceremony, deploying your creativity to inform and articulate compassionate resistance, and honoring the dignity of this treasured moment for students and their families by dressing appropriately in black.

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.

Or how about a poem that will explode
In the face of the corrupt, even if it kills
The poet as he’s writing it. Swallow this.

As ship lists and drones fire, we
Don’t need poetry as earworm,
But as tasseled cushion for ass
Of Goldman Sachs CEO, to blow
Up his rottenness, we demand

Poetry waterboarded onto the lying,
Smug and top-shelf mug of the Prez,
At a White House soiree, and beamed
On well-starved PBS, as foreclosed
Citizens cheer while chewing
Leftover Chef-Boy-a-Poem.

Funded by the maker of Prozac and Cialis,
American poetry puts you to sleep with a boner.
I mean, shit, you can’t make shit like this up,
So it’s high time for a John Brown poetry to surge
From the flooded basement of our cranium, as
Real John Browns sally forth to retake the real,
Rout nonsense and reclaim our definition.

*****

To think is to act, now, so,
Like any foreign nation, you
Can also be preempted from
Your future crimes. If you don’t
Believe me, just ask the FBI
Agent you’re lying next to,
Under or above. He or she
Can kill you in the dark, in silence,
And that’s no Middle Eastern joke.

Well, then, I’m a thought criminal,
A terrorist, since I fantasize always
About neutralizing the bad guys.
Soon as I close my eyes, I see
Skyscrapers being imploded
And freefalling into their huge
Criminal footprints and scattering
Fraudulent investments and mortgages.

I fancy myself stepping over corpses
Of tax-dodging and looting CEOs,
War profiteers and propagandists,
The ones who keep feeding us lanky dogs
Dryhumping homing soldiers, but don’t show
Those who are killed, maimed or tortured
By these same guys and gals next door.

Dumped from the imperial meat grinder,
They’ll become your police or panhandle
From neocons and libtards, even occupiers,
And though a terrorist, I’ll give them a buck.
“Man, you’ve been had!” If anything, I wish
I was a better fighter, so I could join other fighters
To combat real terrorists, with their real weapons.

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.

The payment of taxes is not a pleasant task. Often, there is a feeling of managed theft being committed, a violation of pocket exercised by anonymous agents.  The individuals who collect tax are less popular than pox doctors or manic, jaw drilling dentists.  But the payment of tax, if we are to take the view put forth by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is the sacrifice one pays for a civilised society, a necessary tariff that prevents us turning into savages.

The antithesis of such a society is the corporate jungle world that Apple inhabits.  There, in true Hobbesian fashion, Apple rules with a degree of impunity, avoiding filling treasuries, both in the US and elsewhere, and forging a global network of suppliers it refuses to disclose.  The response by Apple is to blame the insatiable consumer.  In the words of an unnamed Apple executive, “You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product each year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards”. (NYT, January 26)

The last thing on the mind of Apple officials is forking out for a tax bill and replenishing the milk of human kindness with community projects.  Particularly devastating on this score are the tax receipts from corporations at the state level.  As a joint report between the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and Citizens for Tax Justice notes, state corporate taxes as a share of Gross State product have halved over the last 25 years to 0.28 percent of GSP.

The report titled Corporate Tax Dodging In the Fifty States, 2008-2010, makes rather glum reading.  In 2009, 32 companies paid no state income tax. Between 2009 and 2010, 265 companies on the Fortune 500 corporations list paid state income taxes equal to a paltry 3 percent of their US profits. The authors summarise the implications of their study – “the trickle down impact of federal corporate tax cuts, ill-advised tax “incentives” intentionally enacted by state lawmakers, and unintended tax shelters created by companies armed with creative accounting staffs.”

Apple’s own behaviour is hardly surprising, given the assortment of tics and allergies America’s politicians simulate when confronted by the issue of taxation.  Talk about tax – that is, attempts to increase receipts – is less popular than a discourse on garbage collection.  Last year, South Carolina Nikki Haley suggested that the state’s corporate income tax would be gradually repealed.  Florida and Arizona have voiced similar suggestions.  The erosive nexus between state income tax and federal taxes is there for all to see. The tax collector has been run out of town.

The tax platform Apple endorses simply receives a shrug from political advisors and members of Congress. So Apple showed the business acumen to move operations to Nevada.  Or Ireland.  The beast of competition must thrive – that before anything else.  Advantages to opponents must be avoided – corporate America is a vicious, uncongenial place.  Indeed, the underlying conservative approach to Apple is that tax avoidance is a patriotic duty, exercised in order to conserve profits that can, in turn, push prices down and stimulate employment.  This is ideology as fantasy, not so much voodoo as mind altering.

Such attitudes suggests less the triumph of competition than the spirit of anti-competition.  Christopher Newfield, writing for Huffington Post (April 30), suggests that Apple, by virtue of its stance on taxation, is inherently disposed to anti-innovation, profiting by a tax system it helped build and undermining the distribution of resources to parts of the ‘iEconomy’. That is a true recipe for the de-civilising of society.

On learning of Korten’s Club of Rome membership, I asked my self whether a true anti-corporatist would join a Round Table organization of corporate elites. The business executives who participate in Round Table think tanks are legally obligated to make profits and shareholders their highest personal and professional priority. In essence this demands that they do everything in their power to suppress wages, benefits, income tax and environmental regulations. In fact, I can envision no beneficial role whatsoever for corporate think tanks in a truly democratic society. No society run by its own citizens is going to allow upper 1% and the so-called intellectuals who work for them to decide how they rest of us should live.

The History of the Club of Rome

An Internet search reveals there are four main sources of information about the Club of Rome (COR): the Club of Rome website; Lyndon Larouche’s prolific attacks against the Club of Rome; Illuminati and New World Order sites drawing on Larouche’s work; and various climate change denial sites, which portray the entire sustainability movement as an anti-growth conspiracy originating with the COR. The climate change denial movement receives major financial support from billionaire oil barons David and Charles Koch and the Big Coal lobby.¹ I suspect many of the New World Order websites also receive a significant chunk of corporate funding, though this is more difficult to trace.

The Club of Rome grew out of a 1965 international conference called “The Conditions of World Order.” It was held on oil magnate David Rockefeller’s private estate in Bellagio Italy. It was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (a well-known CIA front.² ), the Ford Foundation (another well-known conduit for CIA funding), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Twenty-one “scholars, writers, and scientists” attended this preliminary conference. They issued a report stating that the risk of “nuclear conflagration” made it “incumbent upon intellectuals of the world to play a decisive role in the formation of pressure groups in favor of world order.”

Italian industrialist Aurelie Pecei (major shareholder in Fiat and Italian telecom giant Olivetti), called a follow-up conference, again at Bellegio, in 1968. This second conference resulted in the creation of the Club of Rome (COR), a “think tank” of 75 scientists, industrialists, economists, heads of state and four token liberals: peace activist Norman Cousins; co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) Betty Friedan; Jean Houston, author and pioneer in the “human potential” movement, and Amory Lovins, the environmental scientist who went on to found the Rocky Mountain Institute (dedicated to fostering sustainable business development models).

Limits to Growth

According to the Club of Rome website, their mission is to “maintain a thorough interest” (translation: to lobby governments) in environment and resources, globalization, world development, social transformation (translation: using propaganda to influence popular thinking), and peace and security. They are best known for their 1972 book Limits to Growth, which the COR commissioned a group of MIT researchers to write. Using a mathematical model based on “system dynamics” they examined the future evolution of the global economy by tracking a number of variables across a variety of possible future scenarios. Their conclusion: unless specific measures were taken, the world’s economy would likely collapse some time in 21st century. This collapse would be caused by a combination of resource depletion, overpopulation, and growing pollution.

Attacked Across the Political Spectrum

Limits to Growth raised enormous interest, selling at least twelve million copies in thirty languages. The 1973 oil crisis, a year after its publication, seemed to confirm the authors’ predictions about the global economy’s vulnerability to resource scarcity. The book, which had major influence over the Carter administration, was totally repudiated by later neoliberal leaders (e.g. Reagan and Thatcher) who came to power promoting an unlimited growth agenda. The Catholic Church attacked Limits to Growth for the emphasis it placed on controlling overpopulation. Likewise the John Birch Society and other extreme right groups attacked it for being part of a liberal Rockefeller-initiated conspiracy to create a world government. Even the political left attacked it as a scam to convince workers that a proletarian paradise was impossible.

The most vicious attacks against the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth originated from a former leftist turned right-wing fascist and would be FBI/CIA collaborator.S³ Larouche, a prolific researcher, brags about the letter he received from Club of Rome attorneys, threatening him with legal action.⁴

The Club of Rome and the New World Order

Larouche seems to be the main source of claims that the Club of Rome (COR) is part of a 300-year-old secret sect called the Illuminati and is responsible for a variety of depopulation schemes, as well as a plot to establish a one world government. Much of the inflammatory language on New World Order (NOW) sites is attributed to the Club of Rome but actually originates from Larouche publications.

One example is the 1980 “Global Future: A Time to Act,” which stresses the importance of enacting population policies. Numerous New World Order websites claim this report calls for sterilization and abortion. The original report, available from Law Digital Commons, makes no mention whatsoever of either. This claim actually originates from a 1982 article in Laroche’s Intelligence Review called “Global 2000: Blueprint for Suicide.”

Do Corporations Fund Right Wing Conspiracy Websites?

The owners of these right-wing websites are often dismissed as deluded paranoids. However the consistency of the messages promoted suggests a more sinister and coordinated propaganda agenda. These sites play an important role in discrediting legitimate academic and journalistic research into genuine government crimes (also known as SCADS or State Crimes Against Democracy). Moreover, blaming all the ills of the world on secretive fraternal groups, be they Illuminati, Freemasons, Rothschilds, or Knights of Malta, is very effective in diverting attention from the far more important role corporate lobbies play in undermining the so-called democratic governments of industrialized countries.

The paranoid urban legends created by these right-wing sites also camouflage the reality that the Club of Rome is a powerful anti-democratic group run by corporate elites. Although its membership is a matter of public record, there is also no question that meetings between corporate elites and lawmakers exert major influence on the government and public policy.

Club of Rome Predictions Come True

Over the past few years, skyrocketing energy and food costs, melting ice caps, and unrelenting economic turmoil have clearly borne out the dire predictions Limits to Growth made in 1972. Ironically, Lyndon Larouche and other New World Order critics have also been vindicated (to some extent), owing to the regional and global economic consolidation that has occurred with the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the European Union (EU), the single-currency Eurozone and the western hemisphere trading bloc known as the Free Trade of the Americas Area (FTAA). Most New World Order websites cite the 1973 Club of Rome report entitled “Regionalized Adaptive Model of the Global World System: and their 1976 book Mankind at the Turning Point. Both propose dividing the world into ten regional entities (North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the rest of the developed word, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, South and Southeast Asia and China) under a single global government.

Are There Natural Links Between the COR and the Sustainability Movement?

So where does David Korten stand in relation to all this? To his credit, Korten has invested substantial personal wealth in the Positives Futures Network and Yes! Magazine. Yet the fundamental themes of his writing and presentations suggest he is unlikely to be manning the barricades any time soon. At present, the anti-corporate movement seems to be split into two main camps. The first believes that the corporatocracy can be brought down by convincing a critical mass of people to withdraw from the corporate economy by forming their own regional and local networks based on sustainable models of development and democratic self-governance. The second, for which environmental activist Derrick Jensen is a major spokesperson, believes that the corporate elite will destroy the earth’s biosphere long before this transformation is complete — through catastrophic climate change, mass species extinction, nuclear Armageddon and/or continued poisoning of our air, water and food with life threatening toxic chemicals. Jensen argues, in the book Endgame and the recent film End:Civ Resist or Die, that the powerful corporate elites must be stopped, by force if necessary. In contrast, Korten appears to be solidly in the first camp. His writings and presentations cover a range of topics about building the community networks necessary to support the post carbon world he envisions. Yet they are short on strategic vision about the best way to bring about this new, non-corporate society.

Currently there seems to be plenty of room for both camps in the anti-corporate movement. However as the Occupy and global anti-austerity movement continue to grow in size and influence, Koreten and other sympathetic members of round table elites such as the Club of Rome will be forced to make a choice: whether to side with those of us willing to actively engage in dismantling capitalism or with the police and military personnel who will seek to shoot us down in the streets.

1. See “Koch Brothers funding climate change denial machine” and “Climate change denial research.”
2. See “The CIA and the cultural cold war revisited.”
3. ee Lyndon Larouche watch.
4. See Club of Rome Complaint.

Fourteen years ago when the Swedish hardcore four-piece split up, it was a bit unceremonious. Punk bands have a propensity for going out with a whimper rather than a bang. Their final US gig was in a Harrisonburg, Virginia basement and was shut down by the local police. Not exactly befitting a band who had named their album The Shape of Punk to Come.

Since then, however, the title has proven correct. Odd time-signatures, alternate tunings, electronic sampling and the usage of revolutionary Situationist imagery made Shape far from your typical punk album. It was more in the vein of the Clash or Nation of Ulysses–using the spirit of punk as an excuse to subvert some of the genre’s most ingrained standards. Hardly a surprise then, that like Nation of Ulysses and Fugazi, Refused were political revolutionaries too.

The Shape of Punk to Come is now regarded as one of the most influential albums ever made–not just in punk, but music as a whole in the last 25 years. The “new noise” that the group attempted to forge (“how can we expect anyone to listen if we’re using the same old voice?”) clearly resonated with more than a few people out there.

To be sure, the members of group haven’t been twiddling their thumbs since its demise. Some went back to school and got degrees or started new bands. Dennis Lyxzen, the group’s frontman, formed the (International) Noise Conspiracy and continued to explore that indescribable nexus between rock and revolution. There was always, however, a feeling of that “we never did The Shape of Punk to Come justice back when it came out.”

Indeed, there does remain a lot of unfinished business. Namely that business itself has gotten a lot uglier, a lot more cut-throat and brutal even as it’s proven itself to be a lot more resilient. When Refused called it quits in 1998, it was easy to think that the whole rotten system was on its last legs. The Asian economy was in shambles, and the revolutionary rumblings in Indonesia might be spreading. The general strikes in France a few years before had given rise to a slogan: “the world is not for sale.” Globalization was being proven a sham, and a world-wide movement was taking shape that made it seem a more humane order was right around the corner.

As we all know now, that’s not exactly how it played out. Even as Refused’s star ironically continued to rise in the years after their breakup, humanity’s prospects got dimmer. The alter-globalization movement sputtered out as America puffed its chest into Afghanistan and Iraq. Even as capitalism hobbled its way through the panic of ‘08, it managed to be arrogant and brazen. They created the crisis, and yet we bear the brunt.

Alongside this is the interminable decline of the big-time music industry. It bears mentioning that even as The Shape of Punk to Come became near iconic among musical misfits of varying stripes, Refused were never on any of the “big four” record labels. The condescending, formulaic and whitewashed approach of label CEOs doesn’t square with reality for most people.

And so the amazing thing about Refused getting back together in the here and now isn’t how ill-timed and hackneyed it so often seems to be when bands reunite. Quite the opposite; if anything, the songs of Shape are more relevant, more hard-hitting, more resonant than they’ve ever been. Yesterday’s buzzwords of “national security” and “war on terror” have been pushed to the side in favor of “occupy,” “indignados” and “Tahrir.” In straightforward terms, the same people whose fates appeared sealed just a few years ago have found a voice; the impossible has now, once again, become possible.

One of the common slogans of the Situationists by whom Lyxzen and company have long been inspired is the “revolutionizing of everyday life.” In other words, even the most mundane and apparently co-opted entities under this system have the potential to be turned back in on itself, re-appropriated for the cause of true liberation. There might be more than a little truth to this. Recent surveys have revealed that despite the inexorable fall in both living standards and album sales, ticket sales — even to expensive mega-fests like Coachella — continue to rise.

It doesn’t take too much speculation to figure out why: in a world where so much is denied, even a vague experience of affirmation and communal feelings has no price tag. Cynical booking agents and promoters might laugh at a band playing Coachella having “a bone to pick with capitalism.” But when they make it clear that they also have “a few to break,” there’s a good bet that many of this forgotten generation felt it in every fiber of their being. Indeed, a world of affirmation might be worth a few fractured knuckles.

Shotwell’s writing is humorous, acerbic and to the point. As part of a democratic movement in the UAW, he was one of many that fought hard to prevent the tidal wave of layoffs, plant closings and destruction of benefits the union leadership not only allowed but seemed to encourage. The missives published in this book are the textual equivalent to the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) Mr. Block cartoons. For those who aren’t aware of Mr. Block, let me quote IWW agitator Walker C. Smith:

Mr. Block is legion. He is representative of that host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire; he is patriotic without patrimony; he is a law-abiding outlaw… [who] licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him… the personification of all that a worker should not be.

In other words, Mr. Block was a satirical character created to call attention to workers and union bosses who identified with the owners and management at the expense of their fellow workers.

Autoworkers Under the Gun makes it very clear how the auto industry’s exorbitant payments to its executives and management, combined with a penchant for bankruptcy, destroyed it. Calling globalization a “four bit word for sweatshop,” Shotwell points out how CEOs and their co-conspirators control the discussion about the economy by blaming the workers for wanting to earn a living and pension. As most readers know, the other part of this scenario involves those executives purposely downsizing the corporation by moving jobs offshore. His biting commentary reminds the reader how intentional this entire process is.

Unlike most mainstream reporting on the demise of the auto industry, Shotwell gives the reader the view from the shop floor. It’s not just the harassment from management he describes, he also tells stories about workers using their power to fight back. After one particular attack on management’s machinations to undermine the workers and their union that drew a strong reaction from the bosses, Shotwell arrived for his shift to find his machine taken apart in a show of solidarity. Without that machine, the line was shut down for the entire shift.

Questioning the value of strikes that are not industry wide because of the International’s cowardice or because of the law, Shotwell urges workers to consider alternatives like occupations and working to rule. The point of the former is to prevent management from closing factories. After all, they can’t close a building if people are inside it. Working to rule, meanwhile, has multiple effects. It slows down the speedups imposed by management to increase production while also preventing shop closures. In addition, working to rule can create overtime or, even better, the necessity to hire more people. The underlying point of both tactics is to emphasize that it is the workers who run the factory, not the CEOs and their minions.

It was more than a year ago that thousands of Wisconsin workers and supporters occupied the Capitol building in the city of Madison. The reason for the occupation was to try and prevent the anti-worker governor and legislature from passing legislation that would end collective bargaining for all state employees except firefighters and state police, end dues check-off from paychecks, and force unions to re-certify every year. Under the guise of solving a budget crisis (that was created by giving mammoth tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy in Wisconsin), this bill was forced through the legislature despite the protests. Nonetheless, the protests were a welcome reaction to the never-ending attacks on working people in the United States.

Naturally, a few books have been published about this event, now known as the Wisconsin Uprising. Of those texts that wrote favorably, most have done a fairly decent job of describing the flow of the protests, the workers culture that was celebrated, and the intense feeling of solidarity felt by the participants. Not all have done as good of a job analyzing why the protests failed and what they mean for the future of workers’ movements in the United States.

There is one entry; however, that does broach both of these subjects with some depth. Titled Wisconsin Uprising, this book, edited by labor writer Michael Yates, provides a genuinely left analysis. The collection of essays is divided into two main sections, one discussing the protests, their background and their organization. The other discusses the future of workplace organizing in the wake of the legislation’s success and the concomitant attacks on working people around the world.

The first section takes its subject and looks at the international aspects of the protest (austerity protests in Greece, Britain, etc.), its roots in capitalist crisis, and the lack of resistance experience among protesters. It was this latter element that gave the protesters false hope regarding the role police play, as well as the role unions play. Indeed, much like the points made in Shotwell’s text, union leadership often concedes benefits, conditions and wages just to keep union dues structure intact and their paychecks coming in. This strategy eventually backfires because it weakens the unions in the eyes of the workers. Seeing this, corporations and governments attack unions, hoping to further weaken their standing in the eyes of members. Once the union has been defanged, as occurred in Wisconsin after the aforementioned legislation was rammed through in the middle of the night, the rank and file often stops paying dues out of fear or after drawing the conclusion that the union has no power.

The solution to this is simple. Like Shotwell emphasizes in his book, the best response to the attacks on workers and their unions is simple: more actions, more solidarity and less complacency. The most positive conclusion to be drawn from the Wisconsin uprising is that there is an understanding in the United States that workers not only are being screwed, but that they will fight back. The narrative here echoes the hope found in other books about the uprising in Wisconsin and the occupy movement that followed. However, it tempers that hope with an understanding of what labor is up against in this latest battle with capital. It is an understanding that comes from the years of experience between the collection of contributors and their leftist comprehension of how monopoly capitalism works.

Shotwell explains why Wisconsin happened in a piece discussing concessions when he writes:

The nation that kicked off the struggle for the eight hour day is logging more hours than any modern .industrialized nation on earth. Every household needs two wage slaves and every wage slave needs a vehicle to keep them on the treadmill. The turmoil is designed to foil collective action. The degradation of workers is not natural, accidental or unavoidable. It is a plan. Put the jigsaw pieces together and the picture is clear as glass and sharp as pain.

The complementary reason to Shotwell’s concise explanation of neoliberal capital’s plan for the world is that workers ignored the writing on the wall as long as it happened to someone else, while those that were unionized saw themselves as clients of the union when they needed to be fighters in solidarity with those that were the “someone else.” Check out these books for their analysis, their insight and their rabble rousing. Then go do some rabble-rousing of your own.

Government reforms would go a long way toward slowing our decline and even reversing it eventually. Government reform could take away the enormous favors it bestows on corporate America, favors sometimes so large that they keep otherwise drowning corporations afloat. But government is intransigent and will continue to be corruptible at the hands of corporate America. More attention therefore needs to be turned toward corporate reform.

Furthermore, while corporate America may be too obtuse or complacent to realize it, their own reform may be good for them in the long run. As an organizational psychologist for nearly half a century I know how inefficient the corporate organizational structure is and how poorly corporations are run. Most of them would probably have a very tough going if they lost government handouts and hands-off corporate wrongdoing. A corporation that was properly organized and well run with the proper standards of performance and self accountability ought to be able to make up for its ill begotten profits.

Corporate America: An Overview

Big government is undeniably too big yet it is dwarfed by the number of corporations and their people and is totally overpowered by corporate America (if corporate reform were a success, there would be no excuse for a bloated and massive government). Corporate America is very heterogeneous spread as it is across many different manufacturing and service industries yet has a common goal of advancing itself regardless of the means. There are about 17,000 corporations in corporate America if we arbitrarily define any of its corporate members as having over 500 employees.

Since size, corruption and abusive power usually go together we ought to divide corporations or their industries into three categories of size, small, medium, and large as modified by the scale of harm done and assign reform priorities accordingly.

As big and powerful as it is overall, Corporate America nevertheless accounts for only about 20% of all businesses in America. The rest is referred to as small business, but it is not small in the size of its total workforce. Small business employs far more people than do corporations. Small business, if it would unite into a coordinated counterforce could be a powerful opponent of the entire corpocracy.

Corporate America’s Allies: An Overview

Not counting its “marriage partner,” that is, government, corporate America has many allies it can depend on to further its interests either by supporting and/or accepting them: the touts and shills; the cultists; NGOs; small business; compromised professions and sciences; the bystanders; and even foreign enemies. With the possible exception of the bystanders, an ally benefits directly or indirectly from its explicit or tacit alliance with corporate America. An ally that is explicit and very active in its support of corporate America ought to be considered accomplices in contrast to tacit and passive allies. Any corporate reform strategy must include corporate America’s accomplices or risk being blindsided by them.

Touts and Shills. They are a motley lot of accomplices and the difference between a tout and a shill isn’t always clear cut. Touts (that’s what Winston Churchill called lobbyists) are hired and paid to swarm inside government and lobby it for their clients. Anyone, any organization, any association can be a shill. Even politicians or judges can be shills. As a matter of fact, if you want to call government the biggest shill, I won’t disagree with you.

A shill’s focus is usually not as laser beamed as a tout’s. Shills generally offer paeans to the corpocracy and its conservative, free-market ideological underpinnings. Think of shrill shills like ideologically blinded, ranting and raving radio talk show hosts as an extreme example. Touts, on the other hand, concentrate on getting specific favors for particular corporate members of the corpocracy, be they a certain corporation or a particular industry.

Consider the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an extremely influential shill and tout. As I wrote in the December 13, 2011 issue of OpEdNews.com the USCC was instrumental in furthering the imminent US Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell’s “battle” plan to revive a dormant corporate America. The USCC has been called by the authors of a Washington Post story the “goliath of the lobbying world,” making Big Pharma look like a piker.

Shills that I’ll lump together include: talking-head pundits and the rabble rousers shouting into a mike; “Erudites” squirreled away in think tanks authoring corporate gospel; and “front” groups, whose purpose is to mask corporate intent and consequences and call them what they are not. Then there are in varying shades of shill the business and law schools that mint the new recruits for the managerial and executive ranks throughout corporate America and supply it with lawyers paid well to argue the legality of any corporate action no matter how harmful.

The cultists. One of the most insidious cults is the “cult of growth,” preferably fast growth, every quarter. The cultists in it generally aren’t shrill shills but their views on, and promotion of, unbridled growth sometimes go to the extreme and the actions sometimes condoned for achieving growth go to the extreme. In this cult are mostly mainstream economists, management gurus, and speculative investors and their brokers. There is even a politically activist organization called the “Club of Growth” that is for bridled taxes and unbridled growth.” This cult helps fuel corporate America’s wrongdoing by reinforcing speculative investing, globalization, environmental exploitation and what author Roger Terry in his book calls a kind of “economic insanity.”

Another cult is the conservatives who mostly occupy the right wing of the once proud Republican Party that called Abraham Lincoln its first U.S. President. This Party has become, says the Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, a strident group of malcontents “acting out of pure spite like a ‘bratty 13-year-old.” They spew provocative and deceitful exhortations and slogans (e.g., “let’s reload,” “don’t tread on me,” “freedom works”) and are against government solutions, particularly social welfare (so miserly it is dwarfed by corporate welfare).

“Anticorpocracy” NGOs. What you see is not necessarily what you get when it comes to the realm of NGOs that purport to be opposed to one or more facets of the corpocracy. In the February 23, 2012 issue of OpEdNews.com I wrote about my frustrating experience in trying to get what I call “two-fisted democracy power” organized and unleashed, and I included profiles of two financially well-endowed and large NGOs that appear to depend more for their existence on the corpocracy’s continuation than on ending it and reclaiming democracy. I had been forewarned about this and so I expect I will encounter many more compromised NGOs as I continue contacting them. If they refuse to unite or at least coordinate their separate government reform initiatives, then putting more emphasis on corporate reform becomes paramount.

Small business. Small business is no longer the backbone of our economy. Its backbone has been crushed. It has become both a victim of, and to some extent a compromised ally, corporate America.

Compromised professions and sciences. Probably the most shameful of this diverse lot are people of the cloth; that is, the religious profession. It is full of “pulpiteers” who mouth scripture and generalities about sin for fear of alienating those in the pews who put profit and power before honor when not in a house of worship. Next would have to be the legal profession, especially its corporate lawyers who specialize, to take an excerpt from the title of Ralph Nader and Wesley Smith’s book, in the “perversion of justice.” Next might be the mainstream journalism profession that has been compromised by the media magnates. I would also not leave out most of the other professions as well as the sciences because they have been compromised in various ways such as receiving government and corporate funding. Society tends to place far too much unguarded trust in the performance of professions and sciences because of their education, training, and standards of performance.

The bystanders. This passive and amorphous lot usually known as the silent majority is the most populous of all the allies. It includes fatalistic people, cowed and fearful people; bamboozled and distracted people; and exhausted people too busy trying to eke out a living.       

Foreign enemies. This is not a mistaken inclusion here. Sociology professor Charles Derber contends in his book, Regime Change begins at Home that “—today’s regime (aka today’s corpocracy) “can survive only by practicing a foreign policy of bad faith that [he calls] ‘marry-your-enemy.’” Carrying out this policy fattens the defense industry, including beefing up its sale of arms (the U.S. is the world’s top arms seller); opens up, protects, and expands corporations’ foreign markets and exploitation of natural resources (oil and minerals) and cheap labor; keeps politicians in office; and distracts the American public from growing socio-economic deterioration at home

Finding the Scoundrels

There are dozens of non-governmental watchdogs monitoring various industries, their corporations, and to some extent their accomplices (e.g. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, certain think tanks, etc.)

Vetting over 17,000 corporations and countless accomplices (allies that actively aid and abet scoundrel corporations) would be silly. Relying on a random sampling of them would net a catch of scoundrels, but the overall goal of ending the corpocracy and reclaiming democracy obviously must not be left to chance. The best approach would be a coordinated search among many existing watchdog groups.

Here is a suggested plan these groups could follow for vetting corporate America and its accomplices:

1. Set a threshold of wrongdoing. There are so many ethical values and so many harmful ways to breech them that the severity of the harm done needs to be graded, starting with determining whether there is any reasonable evidence that harm has occurred in the first place. For each of the three dimensions of harm — psychological, physical, and economical — there needs to be a consensus on a threshold of harm that excludes immaterial consequences. Determining the thresholds would be very easy to do but necessary. There is plenty enough reform work to do without getting bogged down in trivia.

2. Name the obvious first. Some industries, their corporations, and their allies do not need to be vetted. They are the most rotten apples in the barrel. Offhand, I can think of six. Merchants of death, such as corporations in the “defense” industry would be first. Second would be the nuclear industry and its corporations. Third would be the agribusiness industry because of its poisoning of our food and drinking water. The fourth would be the financial “disservices” industry and its gangsters. The fifth would be the pharmaceutical industry where health often takes a backseat to wealth. The sixth would be certain allies like the trade lobbies (e.g., for the defense and pharmaceutical industries) and the USCC.

3. Vet the rest. Doing this will take some time so this is a good place to mention Jamie Court’s “corporateer quotient” that he wrote about in his book, Corporateering and who is president of Consumer Watchdog. The quotient is derived from answers to 18 questions (e.g., “what percentage of total expenditures is spent on political contributions and trade lobbying”). His questionnaire or some adaptation of it could be used in the vetting process while keeping in mind the complication, as Court does, that not many of the answers are publicly available even though “none of the questions are trade secrets.”

4. Don’t overlook any saints. There surely must be a few honorable exceptions among corpocracy America and its allies who could conceivably serve as inspiring exemplars. The search might turn out embarrassing though. I remember, for example, the pundits who were featured in a business magazine after having extolled Enron very shortly before that corporation imploded from its own misdeeds. An exemplary corporation therefore ought to be one that has passed rigorous screening.

Onward to Corporate Reform

Watchdogs that only watch are nothing more than lapdogs. We Americans ought to have had enough of an over-fed, lazy-fed lapdog that lets corporate America exploit and harm us. Once the vetting is done, therefore, a strategic approach to reforming the scoundrels needs to be planned and pursued.

How Not to Proceed: Three Stories of Mice at the Table with Hungry Cats

Confrontation, collaboration and/or compromise are stances instigators of corporate reform might take toward corrupt industries and their corporations. I will tell you three short stories of collaboration and compromise. The lesson taken from them is that mice should never sit down at the table with hungry cats.

The “apparel industry partnership.” Several unions, human rights groups, and religious groups sat down at the table with the apparel industry to seek a compromise solution on curbing or controlling sweatshops. Guess who got suckered and walked away with nothing?

The Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics.  Its mission is to bring “together leaders from business and academia to—renew and enhance the link between ethical behavior and business practice through executive education programs, practitioner-focused research and outreach.” Do you know anything about the Business Roundtable? If you do, you know which “partner” carries the day.

Peace through commerce. This is the partial title of a book I reviewed a year ago. Its editor advocates collaborations between multinational corporations and NGOs aimed at reducing violence. The editor lets various contributors illustrate with true stories their collaborations in several different countries.  The cited corporations mostly have a history of corruption and the illustrations clearly tell me that the editor, the NGOs, and the contributors (except for contributors who were executives in corporate PR departments) were hoodwinked.

A Possible Strategy for Instigating Corporate Reform

1. With the exception of the death merchants, for each of the industries and their corporations with records of the most harmful wrongdoing a large strike force cadre of NGOs and the most relevant movement(s) would be established. Where a bona fide movement did not exist the cadre would be responsible for developing one (possibly relying on the guidance of authoritative sources such as Si Kahn and his book Organizing guide for grassroots leaders). A large cadre would also be established for allies that are common to all of the industries such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and think tanks. This strategy of using specific cadres would represent a modified and scaled-down version of my two-fisted democracy proposal.

2.  For each selected industry the corresponding cadre would target specific corporations and any specific allies unique to them. Priorities in order and timing of the confrontations would depend on the behavioral profiles of the corporations and their allies.

3. The different cadres would coordinate their plans and strategies but tailor them as necessary to the specific nature of each target. All of the cadres should collaborate in planning and carrying out a campaign of blitzing the public about their entire venture and soliciting support for it (such as joining in any planned massive demonstrations or boycotts).

Once a cadre was ready it would begin confronting its target corporations/accomplices, escalating the confrontation to a more aggressive stage if the corporation’s response in the previous step was unsatisfactory.

4. In the initial confrontation, regardless of whether the corporation/accomplice had been a target before, a certified letter would be sent to the corporation’s CEO and chair of the board of directors with a copy to any accomplice.

Letters to corporations that have already been confronted by activists would reflect that fact. The letters would also a) present an assessment of each corporation’s profile of  wrongdoing along with a request for a self-assessment to be made such as completing the questionnaire developed by Jamie Court and introduced in his book, Corporateering;  b) make the case for why the corporation should reject the corpocracy and undertake self-reforms such as those I suggested in my first book, Tall Performance from Short Organizations Through We/Me Power and in my most recent book, The Corporacy and Megaliio’s Turn Up Strategy; c) advise the corporation to repair major harms its actions have caused; and d) advise the corporation to resolve whatever longstanding or current issues have already been raised by activist groups. The notice would close by requesting a response within one month and saying the response would influence the cadre’s next steps.

5. Complying corporations, if there are any, would be closely monitored and issued progress reports until, and if, it was cleared by the cadre. Recalcitrant corporations would be hit by a barrage of escalating confrontations that would include massive boycotts, massive protest demonstrations, lawsuits, blitzing the public with publicity, and telling the obsequious, relevant government agencies to get on board pronto with the reformers, not their targets.

Is Corporate Self-reform Realistically Possible?

My answer is “yes” if corporations are aggressively confronted; if they are shown models of properly organized and run corporations, along with any real exemplary corporations; and if the monitoring and pressure never ease or cease until there is the right kind of self reform.

The Special Case of the Death Merchants

I will close with this sobering thought. If the death merchants and their government pawns aren’t stopped. they will eventually be the death of America. This part of the corpocracy is the one part where it will be absolutely imperative to organize and unleash a (civil) war on war. The only way to do this would be to confront not only the “defense” industry but also those parts of our government that depend the most on militarism and endless wars.