Actually what’s complicated is the trickery involved. The unemployment rate that we have delivered to us from the usual outlets/suspects is not the same creature it was prior to 1994. Back then, people who flat gave up looking for work were still counted in the numbers. Now they are invisible. The carefully titrated rate also doesn’t include the underemployed—individuals who perhaps want to work full-time but aren’t provided with that option. As individuals fall off the rolls they fall into a void. Our single digit unemployment rate is actually around 22% if measured in the pre-1994 reality-based math. If you aren’t already aware of the site, shadowstats.com does a marvelous job exhibiting the gritty truth.

I think if you try to follow what I’m saying, you’ll realize that by subtracting the permanently discouraged job seeker, and ignoring the partially employed poverty level toilers, you’ll realize the only uptick in job growth was in oiled up slave boys for Madonna’s half-time show. I was embarrassed to know that, but it doesn’t stop me from bringing you the facts because I care. Sadly by the time the vo-tech greased up slave boy programs graduate their newly inflated classes (excited about the potential jobs)– most benefit to cost ratios will be gone due to the glut in the market. It’s all glamorous until you’re forced to take the 14 hour a week job cleaning pools with a god damn gold plated codpiece (that rusts — it’s not real gold). You’re there dragging the skimmer as you wonder how you’ll pay that 94,000 to Sallie Mae.

But perhaps you will look for a sympathetic ear from your president. President Obamney (really, like it matters which one wins if you opt for one of those clowns. Let’s just call ‘em Obamney). If you tell him your sad tale, he might say “interesting” in regard to your plight. That’s what happened when the current president fielded questions from the populace the other night. Jennifer Wedel was gauche enough to ask the president why H1-B visas were still being provided for foreign workers in areas such as engineering, when citizens like her husband (a semi-conductor engineer) could not find work. As you may have heard, Obama found that to be “interesting”.  He was under the assumption that job growth was a’booming in those areas. He really used that bland word in response to the woman’s question.

What I find “interesting” is that with the overall colossal increase in worker productivity over the last several decades, the time needed to be invested in work—that is, to obtain food and shelter, has not reflected any benefit to the more productive employees. Hell, shouldn’t a person be able to work 20 hours a week with those advances –with available employment for all those who desire it? No. Of course not. Because all of the advances and toil has only equaled a boon for the very top. The extra money freed up has only trickled upward.

Believe it or not, Kellogg cereal company implemented a 30 hour work week back in 1930. By many accounts, individuals enjoyed the increase in time with their family and became more involved in the community. But that was 1930. This is 2012.  Of course, things should get worse all the time! Well, that 30 hour per week notion was erased by World War 2 and the subsequent frenzied boom years. But it’s amazing that this is such a buried experiment in the annals of labor. It’s been treated as something of a natural law, akin to gravity, that workers are to become more productive, but never are given the reward of less work. The hamster wheel turns faster and faster. We all know people who work a couple of jobs, sometimes by necessity, sometimes not. You have to wonder about the deathbed realizations that entire swaths of real living weren’t achieved, but 60 hour workweeks were.

I’m pretty certain that Obama does find it “interesting” that unemployment is rife even in the engineering field. It seems highly unlikely that this is an accident. Just as it is with lower skilled jobs, an influx of foreign labor serves to create a downward pressure on wages. We now have a terrified workforce, one that will largely not complain, and will tolerate increasing loads because “at least we have a job”. I would bet this is why something akin to the Depression era WPA hasn’t been created. It certainly doesn’t seem to be due to fiscal responsibility.

We bleed money on foreign soil, losing funds and ethics as the military-industrial complex adds rolls of fat. Frenzied spending still goes on even with superficial “cuts” to defense. The cuts that do seem to keep coming with regularity and depth are the ones that hit social safety nets. Those serve to enhance the fear in the populace.  The workers become more docile and horrified of unemployment. A WPA program would exert pressure in the opposite direction and we can’t have that. It’s all very…..interesting.

But here’s to hoping…hoping at some point there’s a realization that people are more than cogs of production to be manipulated by fear and social Darwinism. And we are all guilty of viewing people as a subset of their occupation — that’s kind of been the American way. There is that omnipresent question “what do you do?” As if that’s the core defining feature of a human. With rampant unemployment, perhaps those boundaries will blur. That along with a person’s worth being measured in ever increasing “productivity”– with the casting off of those ragged, unemployed outliers. people that they don’t even bother counting any longer.

But for now, the gluttonous use of natural resources extends to what they consider the aptly named human resources. It’s a short sighted, soulless plunder that has to stop. And I’m sure at some point it will.

Inevitably, after peeling past the pre-programmed slogans Ron Paulistas bring with them, you will discover a person – generally white and overwhelmingly male – looking for some alternative to mainstream politics. Ever susceptible to slick marketing campaigns thanks to a solid diet of American television, these zealots have bought it hook line and sinker in a typical conspiratorial fashion. The lynchpin is the Federal Reserve, a seemingly mysterious institution, which in the world of Ron Paul politics stands in as a more acceptable substitute for the variety of other conspiracy theories floating through far-right America including the Bilderbergs, the rich as secret lizard people and the Masons.

Yet, the idea that Ron Paul offers a kind of alternative to mainstream politics falls apart quite easily upon inspection. There are three primary reasons for this – two relate to Paul himself and the other is a function of mainstream politics more generally. In the end, it is more accurate to say that Ron Paul is mainstream politics unmasked, a raw version of what both Democrats and Republicans desire to become if left to their own devices.

Key to this is seeing Ron Paul economics for what they are. Forget the Fed. Leave aside all the slogans about “living within our means” and “punishing generations with debt” for a moment. Ron Paul is the most pro-corporate politician in the Presidential race. His economic policies would further unleash multinational corporations and the 1% who own them onto American society – with absolutely no restraints. Paul is virulently anti-union in part because unions give workers a collective identity in order to regulate worksites. He opposes government regulation on employers since he connects their activity to his notion of “liberty.” And he has repeatedly associated taxation, even taxation of the corporate world, as an affront to freedom.

Taken together, Ron Paul’s notion of economic liberty is an only slightly disguised version of the hyper-neoliberal ideas that have been circulating since the 1980s. What is different now is that the circulation is taking place in the aftermath of an economic crisis that has unmasked the bankruptcy of the very idea Paul is promoting – capitalist economics. Although Paul presents his economic proposals as alternative non-mainstream notions, they fit perfectly inside the rise of the multinational corporations and the deep enrichment of the 1%. Albert Einstein offered the best bit of advice on how to deal with folks like Ron Paul when he said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Giving corporate America a free hand to rampage through our economy, our communities and our environment is more of the same.

Ron Paul supporters mix this pro-corporate economic package with a fairly typical set of reactionary social policies. He has opposed any legislation in support of gay marriage on the Federal level and was neutral on the “don’t ask don’t tell” seeing the problem as less one of discrimination and more of “seeing people as part of groups.” Paul’s positions on race are even murkier due to his frequent open associations with white supremacists and the general acceptance of his ideas amongst this repugnant community. But his most explicit reactionary position is reserved for gender, more specifically the issue of sexual harassment. Here, Paul claims that anything less than penetration does not qualify as sexual harassment – words don’t matter. Females who file sexual harassment suits are, according to Paul, oppressing others. They should, instead, just exercise their right to choose a different job. Misogynist victim blaming at its worst.

The final reason that Ron Paul is not an alternative is the very reason that links him to mainstream politics. Just like Obama, Romney and Gingrich, he offers no concrete plans to address the problems that most affect people’s everyday lives. He doesn’t have a serious plan for housing. He would, just as his counterparts, continue the failed capitalist housing policies, probably adding some rhetorical flair about the liberty and freedom built into the feelings of anxiety most Americans feel when it comes to housing. His education policy is similarly irresponsible. Paul chooses to devolve education decisions onto state and local government while giving private enterprises a strong hand in further commodifying education in America. And on health care, his policies are merely a pumped up version of the pro-market policies of his Democratic and Republican counterparts.

Although Paul’s foreign policy position is trumpeted as being far off from his Republican counterparts, it contains many mainstream elements. Paul himself is always quick to indicate that his “non-interventionist” position does not mean that he wishes to radically transform the US military. He constantly issues the call for a “strong national defense” which translates into a well-funded military. As he stated directly in a recent interview, “My Plan to Restore America does not cut one penny of defense.”

Unfortunately, Liberals and even some Greens have taken the anti-war bait and Ron Paul has been able to make coalitions with otherwise ideological opponents such as Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader. This has given Paul some cred among anti-war types while creating confusion between having a position against military intervention and being anti-militarist.

While the “Ron Paul as alternative” charade rolls along, candidates carrying ideas clearly outside of the mainstream struggle to carve out some media attention. One is from my own organization, the Socialist Party USA – Stewart Alexander. Alexander is running campaign for President on a platform filled with radical ideas that would address many of the problems raised by the 2008 economic crisis. He has some new medicine for an old illness.

On economics, the Alexander/Mendoza campaign recognizes the destructive role of the 1%. Creating a progressive tax structure that captures the wealth at the top of society, designing a banking system that works like a highly regulated public utility and addressing the unemployment crisis by viewing a job as a human right means transforming an economic system that has failed the 99%. Similar proposals to open the education to all, to preserve our precious natural resources and to fund a worker owned and managed cooperative sector are clearly different than the re-hashed blather being served up by mainstream politicians.

Economic democracy is also connected to personal freedom. The Alexander/Mendoza campaign is one of the few that recognizes just how corporate power prevents Americans from fully exercising their civil rights. Corporations are not people and people need a voice – a voice that will be unchained as a result of electoral reform, the breaking up of media monopolies and the campaign’s support of people’s right to self-determination whether it be through marriage, adoption or alternative family structures.

Finally, Stewart Alexander is offering a radically different approach to the military. He is a passionate anti-militarist. Both he and his running mate, the ex-Marine, Alex Mendoza know the wasteful destruction that the US military has created. The pair call for a closing of all foreign bases, an end to security state measures and, unlike Ron Paul, an immediate 50% reduction in the military budget. They understand that anti-militarism is about more than opposing intervention – it is about re-thinking how our country relates to the rest of the world.

So, as the Presidential campaign heats up, it is important to see past the media spin – especially when the spinning is done in order to create false alternatives. The Obama campaign will certainly begin its own campaign to present their candidate as offering solutions beyond the mainstream. Such claims will be every bit as shallow as the notion that Ron Paul offers some new set of ideas worthy of the mantle of being alternative. There are some alternatives out there and their voices need to be heard. One of them will be running red, on the ticket of the Socialist Party USA and carrying with him the hope of moving past the miserable future created for us by capitalism.

In recent years, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession, it has become clear to many Americans that their country is composed of two different societies with clashing interests — a very small minority in possession of great wealth and power, and everyone else, with some getting by and many falling by the wayside.

As a consequence, large numbers of people now perceive to one degree or another that big money not only manipulates most elections but influences a great many of the politicians and bureaucrats who craft legislation and execute the policies of the U.S. government. Awareness is spreading that crony capitalism —the corporations, banks and Wall Street — controls the economic system which shapes the political system where decisions are made.

But the beat goes on, of course, until mass consciousness transforms into mass action.

In domestic politics, 2012 opened with the Republican Party’s three-ring circus in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the initial contests  to select a presidential nominee. On display is the most bizarre collection of clowns in recent political history. At this stage the battle is between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who is still favored for now. The struggle within the GOP between ultra right and ultra right “lite” will be determined soon, signaling the start of the best election money can buy.

Which ever party wins in November — and we think President Barack Obama will be reelected — the contest is not between right and left but between right/far right and center right. No matter what the result, progressive change will not be the product. The best outcome might simply be keeping the crazies at bay.

In international affairs, the year opened with U.S. cannon shots aimed just above the heads of America’s multifarious enemies, identified as being mainly in Asia and the Middle East, warning them not to mess with Uncle Sam, as though they were about to.

As the shots reverberated, the American people were told:

Good morning, everybody. The United States of America is the greatest force for freedom and security that the world has ever known. And in no small measure, that’s because we’ve built the best-trained, best-led, best-equipped military in history — and as Commander-in-Chief, I’m going to keep it that way….

These “reassuring” hyper-nationalist words from the Commander-In-Chief were expressed January 5 during a visit to the Pentagon to explain Washington’s dangerous new war policy. A secondary purpose of the plan is to facilitate Pentagon spending cuts in the next decade, but future allocations will not drop one penny below George W. Bush’s bloated war budgets.

Abruptly, the U.S. is supposed to be confronted with a “threat” from China, necessitating that the Pentagon surround that country with even more of its far superior  weaponry, more troops, battle fleets heading in closer proximity, surveillance aircraft, space weapons and long range nuclear missiles.

All this is part of Obama’s recent “pivot” to Asia, as though we ever left, the main goal being to weaken China within its own natural sphere of interest in order to secure Washington’s need to remain global top dog. China is no military threat to the U.S. today or in the future, given the Pentagon’s two-decade head start in all the technologies of conflict, and the fact that America’s war budget is, and will remain, many times that of China.

In addition, there seems to be an imminent “threat” to our way of life from Iran, as well as the continuing “threat” to U.S. democracy from some poor tribes in Afghanistan.

Actually, according to “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” the document explaining the new war plan, the U.S. faces additional “threats” throughout the world, specifically including (aside from those mentioned): Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and  “elsewhere” (our guess is Africa, where Obama’s already inserting troops). Primary regions to worry about, says the Pentagon plan, are South Asia, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Northeast Asia, Eurasia, Southeast and East Asia, plus future, unforeseen demands.

Despite all these “threats,” which are largely invented to justify war spending and keep the American people supportive of the militarism that now pervades our society, Obama twice mentioned in his speech the “tide of war” is receding. But if that is true, why station 40,000 troops in countries around Iraq after withdrawal? Why deploy attack-ready bombers and Navy aircraft carriers near Iran? Why keep nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and make demands on Kabul to allow thousands more to remain indefinitely after the planned “withdrawal” in 2014?

The U.S.-Israeli crusade against Iran may result in an attack this year. The New York Times reported January 12 on an “accelerating covert campaign against Iran consisting of assassinations and bombings. The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim January 11 when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.”

On January 14, Iran charged the U.S. and Israel were behind the scientist’s murder. That same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was worried that Israel will attack Iran before the U.S. gives a go-ahead. But four days later the Times reported Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared “any decision on a possible pre-emptive military strike on Iranian targets was ‘very far off.’” Stay tuned, the year’s just started.

The American people are supposed to be safer this new year because President Obama just signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act allocating $662 billion in military spending in 2012 (plus an equal amount for other “national security” purposes in other budgets).

Civil liberties groups criticize the Pentagon bill because it also authorizes an “indefinite detention” clause that is one more step toward a police state. Obama’s civil liberties record is worse than that of his predecessor because he retained Bush’s excesses and added his own.

A few days after Obama’s bragging about the “best-trained” military, the Pentagon and the secretaries of defense and state were forced to publicly apologize in the wake of an international uproar over circulation of a video showing four U.S. Marines jovially urinating on the corpses of Taliban suspects. A couple of days later a U.S. military legal officer recommended that PFC Bradley Manning face a court martial for transferring documents including evidence of U.S. war crimes to the whistle blowing website WikiLeaks. And so it goes, day by day into 2012.

Washington maintains that the Great Recession ended in June 2009 and the economy is on the mend. Stock prices are up, corporate profits are zooming, and the wealthy are exhausting the nation’s supply of money bags.

The corporations, banks and Wall St. have been abundantly helped through the tough times by the Obama Administration, but little help has trickled down to average working families. Recession conditions will continue in 2012 for much of the “bottom” 80% of the U.S. population, including high unemployment, more foreclosures, and stagnant wages. Half the families in our Land of Opportunity are low income or poor.

Early in January, the new Pew Research Center survey of 2,048 adults contained a most unusual result. It found that 66% of the people in our “classless society” believe there are “very strong or strong conflicts between the rich and the poor” in the U.S. This is big news, evidently based on growing comprehension of what are, in fact, class differences.

The top 1% now possess more than 50% of all privately held assets in the U.S. (Assets are everything you own including cash, car and house minus debts.) The top 20% possess 85% of all assets. This means the bottom 80% of the people have accumulated only 15% of the assets (including the bottom 40%, who have no assets at all because they owe more than they own).

However, there is one aspect of our system that is said to prove beyond doubt that all Americans — rich and poor alike — are actually equal in our society where it really counts. We speak of each citizen’s right to vote in the quadrennial selection of a Commander-in-Chief, known popularly as the presidential election.

President Obama has transformed his rhetoric into that of liberal populism for the duration of the campaign. He now talks about having government intervene to help reduce inequality and help build a more “equitable” society, not that it’s going to happen. He now even tut-tuts about crony capitalism.

Obama sure sounds even more progressive than when he was a “change-we-can-believe-in” candidate in 2008. This was before governing as a center-right patron of the ruling establishment for the last three years, ignoring poor, low income and minority Americans as though they didn’t exist, initiating a completely failed program for the millions who have been foreclosed, and changing little to nothing, even in his first two years when the Democrats controlled the House as well as the Senate.

Probable opponent Romney has undergone a similar opportunist transformation in the opposite direction in order to obtain the GOP nomination. He’s now campaigning as a right/far right populist this year after governing Massachusetts as a health care moderate conservative and who earlier supported abortion, and gun control, among many flip-flops. Gingrich has always been an ultra-reactionary hypocrite going back to the early 1990s in the House, and hasn’t seen the need to adopt a new persona for 2012.

The main reason we believe Obama will be reelected has nothing to do with his record as president. It is that the Republicans have gone so far to the political right, and have acted like such obstructionist buffoons in Congress, that the crucial independent vote will lean toward the center-right. The Democratic leadership hopes Gingrich becomes the candidate because he’ll campaign as a far rightist while they fear Romney may moderate some of his rhetoric. But even so, Obama’s nearly $1 billion war chest should finish him off.

Assuming Obama does return to power, we know now, as in the 2008 campaign, that a “liberal” will not be occupying the Oval Office for the next four years. The pro-99% rhetoric will stop at the second term White House door.

American politics is quite different today than when the Democratic Party adopted a center left configuration for a few years in the 1930s and 1960s. However, in terms of the gradations of political “evil,” the center right is a “lesser evil” to the right/far right, given the two conservative options for electing a president offered the American people by those who run the show, though it’s a dismal commentary on democracy.

In the present era it is certainly legitimate to worry about the direction American politics is heading domestically, coupled with a probable global future of more wars, more poverty and environmental disaster. We worry deeply about the problems that will confront our, and all, today’s children and grandchildren.

However, we retain unshakable confidence in what the masses of people can accomplish under difficult conditions when they become united, organized, disciplined and committed to the struggle for a better, equal and cooperative society, and a peaceful, environmentally sustainable world.

This option for substantive transformation beckons. It is the objective requirement of our times if we are to avoid a catastrophe down the road. A decisive turn to the left is essential and possible. It could revolutionize society and change the world to benefit all the people.

Despite the subterfuge of freedom and democracy, the rights of corporations have consistently superseded the sovereign rights of the individual and those of the community. Labor history and a litany of environmental catastrophes bear this out. For instance, everywhere one looks government agencies “ostensibly created to protect the public welfare” are allowing hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale, even when it poisons municipal drinking water and causes incalculable harm to the environment.

Our diverse forests are commodified, measured in board feet to be clear-cut and off-shored at prodigious bargain rates, like a liquidation sale. World class biodiversity is yielding to desertification and monoculture. Money changes hands. The few are getting rich at the expense of the many. The world and the people who live in it are treated like products to be exploited. We are told that nothing is sacred, save for the dollar and markets.

Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that no human being, including corporate CEOs and members of Congress, can live without potable water or breathable air. We are literally sacrificing the Earth’s life support systems and mortgaging the future, while attempting to satiate the greed of a few grotesquely wealthy individuals. Through lifelong indoctrination, Americans are persuaded that self-interested greed is in their best interest.

The rich and powerful have decreed that corporate profits “the Holy Grail of American capitalism” are more precious than life itself. The remorseless people in power are without conscience. History confirms that sociopaths do not hesitate to take what they want from their unsuspecting victims by any and all means.

But surely, even among Friedmanites, it must be allowed that some things cannot be commodified or bought and sold. For instance, clean air and potable water are the birthright of every living organism. These are necessities that belong to the commons; they cannot ethically be privately owned. In contrast to this assertion, two edicts of modern capitalism are private ownership and the commodification of workers and nature.

Capitalism, and the market fundamentalism that is associated with it, has stripped bare the Earth’s biodiversity and substituted a world of commodities in its stead. What we see and think we know is not real. It is the product of marketing and perception managers — a hologram.

There is growing conflict between capitalism and the planet’s ecology, its essential life support systems. A fierce struggle between capital and democracy is in progress. The booted foot of capitalism is pressing upon the throat of democracy. We inhabit a dying world and are inheriting dying freedoms. Corporate greed and over-population is the culprit. Conflict is everywhere.

Virtually all of the social upheaval, inequality, and environmental problems of today in some way ensue from capitalism, including overpopulation and armed aggression. Capitalism requires continuous economic expansion and a burgeoning market for consumers. This is simply not possible on a finite planet.

These tensions are manifested no more clearly than throughout the coal belt and mountains of West Virginia, where I make my home. Here, mountains are cleared of forests before being blown to smithereens in order to cheaply extract coal to enrich Massey Energy Corporation. The process, known as mountaintop removal, has poisoned streams, altered their courses, and changed the contours of the land and its hydrology. It has devastated both human and biological communities while filling the coffers of the timber and coal industries.

Conventional underground mining has claimed the lives of thousands of coal miners trying to scratch out a modest living from the Earth. At times, it has led to armed conflict between miners and the Pinkertons hired by the mining companies in places like Matewan and Blair Mountain.

In West Virginia, King Coal and the gas and oil industry run the state’s legislature. The government is effectively owned by corporate lobbyists. As a result, it is futile to make legal and moral appeals to government for redress of our grievances. If we limit ourselves to the tools that our oppressors provide us, the entire region will become a sacrifice zone. Working people and the poor make the sacrifices; billionaires and industry carry off the profit. We are left to deal with the aftermath.

The illusion of democracy “including voting in the absence of meaningful choice” is a poor substitute for direct action and anarchy. Democracy cannot flourish in the sterile soil that capitalism leaves in its wake. Either we have democracy or we have capitalism, or we create something entirely different. Radically opposing ideas cannot be reconciled.

Modern humans inhabit a human-engineered world of absurdities and contradictions. Regardless of the Supreme Court’s assertions, corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Every sentient human being knows this. However, the law says otherwise. We must deny the corporate state that victory by refusing to capitulate.

The struggle for community rights, egalitarianism, and social, economic, and environmental justice must occur outside of the system that creates inequality and fosters wanton destruction of the commons. Countless species of plants and animals that provide essential ecological services are being eliminated to create space for strip malls, gated communities, gambling casinos and golf courses. As a result, ecological and economic catastrophe loom. We are facing global famine in an anthropocentric over-heated world.

Globally, wealthy multinational corporations are gorging themselves on the biological and mineral wealth of the commons. What could be more absurd or unethical?

The brainchild of Adam Smith, capitalism, which replaced feudalism during the French Revolution, is founded upon demonstrably false premises, many of which were unknown in Smith’s time. Nevertheless, classically trained economists assert that capitalism is a primal force of nature rather than the defective human construct that it is. Modern capitalism has produced pathological symptoms and endorsed an ethos that is antithetical to life and to liberty. It is killing the world and foreclosing evolutionary possibilities.

Indeed, ethical considerations aside, and speaking purely from a biological perspective, one may emphatically state that modern capitalism is an aggressive cancer that is devouring its host. But most of us are in denial. People like me are asked not to utter the “C” word in public spaces. It might offend the well-intentioned believers. Whenever this occurs I am reminded of Thoreau, who uttered, “Any truth is better than make believe.” . One has an ethical obligation to state what one knows succinctly and clearly.

It is not in dispute that the ideology of constant expansion on a finite planet is contradicted by inviolable ecological dictums — among them, carrying capacity, ecological overshoot, and die-off. But classical economists act as if these laws do not apply, or they are mysteriously overridden by the irrational exuberance of capitalism.

In reality, every political economy is underlain by ecology and by living, evolving, biological systems. Ecology is the only economy that really matters.

By possessing even a modest degree of ecological literacy, one can make some revealing predictions with mathematical certainty. For example, the continuation of capitalism as the primary political economy can have one of two possible outcomes: the virtual destruction of the biosphere, meaning the death of the host organism, or the abolition of the capitalist system.

What would a post-capitalism world look like and how might it work?

Global capitalism, with its dependence on the availability of cheap fossil fuels and petrochemicals for food production, must give way to small-scale local economies and organic agriculture. Food must be locally grown and, as far as possible, other necessities locally produced. The age of cheap fossil fuels is ending. Industrialized man must bravely confront his addictions and embrace sobriety or he will self-destruct.

It is said that nature bats last. Humans do best when they emulate natural systems that have evolved over eons of time.

A moneyless economy based upon need must supplant the current profit-driven system of exploitation. Accordingly, goods and services may then be exchanged without the conduit of markets. These exchanges would be of equal value and thus inherently fair.

The classic business models will be replaced by worker-owned and worker-operated cooperatives. In this arrangement, workers – not a board of directors – make all of the business decisions. They share the risks and benefits and distribute the surpluses of production, while significantly reducing the work day and the work week. A portion of the surpluses of production is allocated to the betterment of the community and to the protection of the commons.

New economic models must be predicated upon ecological principles or they will fail. Existing alternatives to capitalism, such as Spain’s Mondragon Worker Cooperative, must be critically analyzed and evaluated as a model that could, with modifications, be implemented elsewhere.

There is no better teacher than evolution and natural selection. History confirms that the most revolutionary ideas are occasionally the oldest. For instance, anthropological studies indicate that early Homo sapiens evolved by implementing egalitarian principles into their tribal clans. People and the cultures they create must either evolve or perish.

The egalitarian societies of the future will look radically different from the capitalism of today. Political campaigns and elections will recede into history and quickly forgotten. Evolved societies do not need leaders or elected officials.

Every member of an egalitarian community is a leader. Power flows in a circular form rather than a linear, top-down hierarchy. It is derived directly from the people. There will be no social or economic stratification. No one shall have privileges or rights that are denied to others. Every member of the community must be equally empowered and equally valued. All people will have equal access to opportunity. Health care and higher education, like pure water and clean air, will be regarded as a right of birth and provided without cost.

Direct action will replace voting in political elections. Rather than consent to be governed, sovereign people can create the world they want to live in. In communities where people are empowered and where they have an equal stake, they will want to participate. Everyone brings something to the table. Everyone contributes and all of society benefits.

Communities will become as interconnected and interdependent as ecological systems. But each will remain autonomous within the larger matrix of nature. States and nations as we know them may eventually recede into history and disappear.

Rather than the callous competition and exploitation nurtured by capitalism, communities can be organized around the principle of cooperation and social need. As in healthy ecosystems, the welfare of the individual is dependent upon the well-being of the community — and vice versa. No one will be left behind. All of us shall rise together.

All living organisms share a common origin and a common destiny. Ecology and economy must merge into an integrated natural system suited to long-term survival in a world already ravaged by industrialized man. Ecological and social healing must be part of the process of building sustainable communities.

The transition from capitalism to cooperation will be neither smooth nor easy. There will be many false starts. At first, there will be fierce resistance to revolutionary change. People cling to the familiar and the comfortable, to what they know, even when the dominant paradigm and popular culture does them harm.

The first tentative steps of a journey are often the most difficult. There are no clear blueprints to follow. There will be trepidation and uncertainty. But we must commit to beginning. The alternative is oblivion. But if we embark on the voyage the survival of the species, and a new age of enlightenment will be possible.

Engels will compare his and Marx’s “bastard” progeny with the “legitimate” progeny of Herr Dühring with respect to economic production in this chapter. Dühring rejects any notion of the capitalist production system which claims that economic crises are due to the very nature of the structure of capitalism itself. That is a Marxian fantasy.

For Dühring, Engels says, “crises are only occasional deviations from ‘normalcy’ and at most only serve to promote ‘the development of a more regulated order.’” The Marxists maintain, au contraire, that crises are caused by over-production and this is a structural fault within the capitalist system itself. But Dühring rejects this and writes that the real reason for crises is, in his words, “the lagging behind of popular consumption … artificially produced under-consumption … with the natural growth of the NEEDS OF THE PEOPLE (!), which ultimately make the gulf between supply and demand so critically wide.”

To this Engels replies that the masses have been forced to under-consume throughout history and in every economic system based on class exploitation, therefore under-consumption is not some artificially produced phenomenon but something all class societies share — i.e., that the exploited class never has the value of its yearly production returned to it at the end of the year. The crises of industrial capitalism, however, only date from the the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Thus, Engels concludes, it is under capitalism that periodic economic crises come into the world and while under-consumption of the masses is a PREREQUISITE it is not the CAUSE of crises. And knowing this, he says, “tells us just as little why crises exist today as why they did not exist before.”

Dühring, in fact, does not think mass markets are all that important anyway. He himself says that capitalist production happens to “depend for its market mainly on THE CIRCLES OF THE POSSESSING CLASSES THEMSELVES.” His confusion becomes only more apparent when he follows up on this by claiming that the most important industries (this is the 1870s remember) are cotton and iron production. But, Engels points out, the production of these two is entirely dependent on a mass market and the possessing class make up only an “infinitesimally small degree” of its market.

Engels then points out that capitalism, by it very need to grow and expand, brings about crises. He says, for example, in England there is just one small town (Oldham) that from 1872 to 1875 doubled its production of spun cotton [the number of its spindles went from 2.5 to 5 million] and this is just one of a dozen small towns around Manchester. Oldham, by the way, produced as much spun cotton as ALL of Germany (including Alsace). This was happening in towns all over Great Britain.

It thus shows “deep-rooted effrontery” on the part of Herr Dühring to blame the English masses for under-consumption rather than the capitalists for over-production when it comes to “the present complete stagnation in the yarn and cloth markets.”²

Engels ends his critique of Herr Dühring’s views on crises but gives a few quotes that demonstrate that Dühring has no idea about capitalism as an economic system but sees everything in terms of the behavior of individuals. If over-speculation and the unplanned building of private factories are responsible for crises we must see that as simply “the ordinary interplay of overstrain and relaxation” of the system and look closely at “the rashness of individual entrepreneurs and the lack of private circumspection” as one of the causes.

The only “rashness” here, Engels maintains, is the habit of turning the facts of economics into “moral reprobation.” This is a problem of our times as well, not just the time of Engels. How often do we hear talk about our current crisis as a product of “greed” on the part of Wall Street bankers and that they should pay their “fair share” of taxes and such rubbish as if the decay of capitalism is a moral disorder on the part of the ruling class instead of a structural disorder that requires the replacement of the system rather than remedial Sunday school classes for the capitalists.

But all this has been treated of in the previous chapter of Anti-Dühring and Engels wants to move on (Cf. “Frederick Engels on the Theoretical Development of Modern Capitalism” in the November 2011 Political Affairs). Engels will now turn his attention to Dühring’s new system of viewing socialism which is called “the natural system of society.”

Dühring bases his system of socialism on what he calls the “universal principle of justice” which applies everywhere and is independent of historical and economic facts. This is enough to disqualify it as idealistic nonsense but Engels wants to philosophically pepper spay Dühring for having the gall to attack Marx for being unclear and fuzzy as to what type of socialism he believes in. It appears that the demands made in the name of the workers in the Communist Manifesto are “erroneous half measures” far inferior to Dühring’s ideas which represent “a comprehensive schematism of great import in human history.”

Marx, according to Dühring, thinks of socialism as “nothing more than the corporative ownership by groups of workers … an ownership that is both individual and social.” Engels is upset because this is far from anything Marx has suggested and in truth actually applies to the system that Dühring has concocted.

Dühring advocates a federation of independent economic communes which compete with one another and which have absolute freedom of movement from one commune to another. In this crazy system the wealthy successful communes will out compete the poorly run communes which will become defunct as the people will all end up moving to the well run ones.

Production within the communes stays the same as production in the past — i.e., the communes are still capitalist in nature even though controlled by the workers. So the greatly touted natural system of justice and the new socialism amounts to the fact, Engels says, that “the commune takes the place of the capitalists.”

What are Dühring’s views on the most basic form of all hitherto existing methods of production — i.e., the division of labor? With respect to the primary division, that between TOWN and COUNTRY (or industry and agriculture) he has little to say beyond some common place remarks about its “inevitable” nature and the possibility of overcoming it in the future. Thin gruel from Engels’ point of view.

When it comes to the modern division of labor in trade and industry Dühring is very vague and only says that we have an “erroneous division of labor” and that all will be remedied in the future “as soon as account is taken of the various natural conditions and personal capabilities [of the workers].” Engels doesn’t say so, but Dühring’s views here are suspiciously similar to those of Plato in the Republic and very far from the socialist analysis of Marx to which Engels now turns.

Marx tells us that in all societies where production springs up “spontaneously” (including capitalism) we discover the means of production dominate the people not the other way around. The first great division of labour saw the development of towns and cities surrounded by peasant agriculturalists. This division has doomed rural people for thousands of years, Marx says, to “mental torpidity” and enslaved the town dwellers to their own specialized trade. This “stunting” of humanity increases with the increase of the division of labor.

Under capitalism the workers become tied to their machines and to one specific function and one tool. Capitalism, Marx says in Das Kapital “converts the laborer into a crippled monstrosity. by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts…. The individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation.” How much this has been alleviated by the modern day union movement varies from country to country and in proportion to the percentage of workers who are unionized. The large number of working people in the US for example, that vote Republican shows that “mental torpidity” is not confined to the rural populations of Texas, Iowa or Alaska (to name a few).

It is not just the workers who suffer under the present day division of labor but also, Engels says, the “empty-minded bourgeois” chasing after profits (Donald Trump comes to mind), the lawyers dominated by “fossilized legal conceptions” and so-called “educated classes” of society plagued by “local narrow-mindedness” and “mental short-sightedness”– just think of the tribe of Sunday morning news pundits paraded before the public by all the major TV networks, or the platoons of professors giving advice about everything under the sun and hardly agreeing on anything other than that capitalism is still the best of all possible economic formations.

But how are we to overcome this division of labor and the consequent alienation of humanity from its potentials and possibilities? One way only says Engels: “in making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production.” In other words, socialism based on central planning and most importantly — a feature historically absent in 20th century socialist societies due to their premature appearance in economically backward conditions — planning democratically controlled and carried out by the working people themselves. The former alienating division of labor will be done away with as “society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed.”

Engels says that this is not just a “fantasy” or a “pious wish.” He maintains that the state of industrial development in the 1870s is so advanced that society could “reduce the time required for labour to a point which measured by our present conceptions, will be small indeed.” This figure needs to be actually quantified — but the point is all the goodies needed to live and thrive could be created with people just working a few hours a week and with no one being chained to any one boring and unsatisfying job. The growth in productivity since Engels’ day must make this even more true today.

Engels quotes Das Kapital: “The employment of machinery does away with the necessity of crystallizing this distribution [of labor-tr] after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant annexation of a particular man to a particular function. Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work….”

Modern capitalism with its constant crises and dislocations of industrial centers and working people and financial catastrophes makes, Marx says, it necessary that we posit as a “fundamental law of production, variation of work” so that modern workers have to be ready to change jobs and learn new skills or leave the labor market. This disrupts lives and threatens widespread social disorder. Only socialist planning and a system that puts people before profits can prevent society from self destructing under the contradictions generated by the present capitalist world market which, in the name of profits first and people last, fragments both human individuals and their social relations with others which inevitably results from the private appropriation of socially created wealth.

Engels also says that the abolition of capitalism and the development “one single vast plan” which harmoniously “dovetails” industry and the means of production so that the differences between town and country are overcome is a prerequisite to overcoming environmental degradation and “present poisoning the air water and land.” To this must be added the current disaster of human induced global warming which simply cannot be dealt with as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system. This problem was not seen in Engels’ day and now, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of impending doom, the various capitalist powers are unwilling to take the drastic regulatory measures needed to deal with the problem.

Engels maintains that none of these claims he is making is “utopian” but that they are logical conclusions of scientific central planning and the abolition of the difference between town and country. It looks as if the towns, or rather the great cities (such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, etc., etc., will have be abolished as well! Engels says that it “is true that in the huge towns civilization has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of.” But, “the great towns will perish.”

No, this is not Pol Pot, it is Frederick Engels and he is saying this because he envisions a complete redistribution of the population under socialism in order to get the “most equal distribution possible of modern industry.” So the abolition of the separation of town and country means the abolition of the cities. They must and will be eliminated “however protracted a process it may be.” This might just be a little too “utopian” and perhaps with the progress of science and communications since the 1870s, especially the growth of the internet, the contradictions between town and country can be resolved without offing the Big Apple.

In any event, leaving the abolition of cities aside, the point Engels wants to make is that Dühring’s view of socialism leaves out of account that building socialism will necessitate “revolutionizing from top to bottom the old method of production and first of all putting an end to the old division of labour.” Dühring thinks that the state can just take over production as is and harmonize it to people’s “natural appetites and personal capabilities.” He also thinks the division between town and country is natural and inevitable and has no plan for putting an end to the alienation and crippling of human capabilities that result from this division.

So much for Engels’ critique of Dühringian socialism’s handling of production. In the penultimate chapter of Anti-Dühring Engels will discuss the problems of distribution.

1. Anti-Dühring Part III Chapter III “Production.”
2. Engels is referring to an economic crises of the 1870s.

There would be no economy without a constant inflow of natural resources like the sun and the atmosphere, the soil, the seas, fossil fuels, minerals, etc throughput in the system. Most classical economists had their vision of a “stationary state” — the ontological destination of economic growth and development constrained by the planet’s population exploration vis-à-vis finiteness of arable land and the exhaustibility of non-renewable resources. Humanity does not produce these “fictitious commodities” but exploits them, as observed by Karl Polanyi in his pathbreaking treatise The Great Transformation (1944). Simply by holding title to a portfolio of real property, without any effort to increase their value, one could quickly turn a profit from social investments, as revealed in classical prudence. Karl Marx’s entire critique of political economy is based on the contradictions between use value and exchange value. Marx established that the soil had no “indestructible powers,” as it could be degraded leading to ecological destruction.

Marxism was never a major force in United States. The primary challenge to the classical tradition came from what has since come to be known as neo-classical economics. The classical tradition of economic thought was ably synthesized and represented by one dominant figure of the age in America: Henry George. His 1879 book, Progress and Poverty sold more copies throughout the world than any book till that time except the Bible. George propagated that conflating land into capital allowed land rent to be concealed and diluted and the undeserving windfalls accrued to “leisure class” speculators and led to depression of labour wages at the margin. Following the classical tradition, George recognized that there is no justification for the titleholders to reap the return of what society has invested. George advocated for a progressive tax because land was mostly concentrated among the wealthy. Mason Gaffney in his 1994 book The Corruption of Economics has described how most influential oligarchy in late nineteenth century America, the railroad barons exerted their manipulative power to preempt the possibility of any rent extracted from land use. Leading Economics scholars engaged in establishing the American Economic Association (AEA) were induced to change definitions and to initiate two-factor (capital and labour) neoclassical economics denying land and natural resources’ contribution in production process. To oppose and alienate George from the domain of economics had been the preoccupation to the founding members of the AEA that fetched a grand success.

Frederick Soddy, recipient of Chemistry Nobel Prize in 1921, considered economics a pseudoscience requiring a paradigm shift and offered an alternative perspective on economics, rooted in the laws of thermodynamics. Contrary to mainstream belief, economy used to draw energy from outside itself and thus incapable of generating infinite wealth. Sody’s critique has been furthered by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in his magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971). Georgescu-Roegen considered the economy as a living system that used to draw from its environment valuable or low entropy matter and energy adjusted by equal quantity of polluting high entropy matter-energy back to the environment.

Classical economics was concerned about scarcity of savings as well as dangers of overconsumption. Thomas Malthus was a remarkable exception within the classical tradition who promoted the idea that underconsumption causes recession. Based on Malthusian conviction, J.M. Keynes came forward to reverse under-consumption and oversaving during the Great Depression of the 1930s in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. (1936) that government spending and subsidized consumer spending can compensate for “demand deficiencies”. Keynesian revolution aimed at long-term growth of national income through consumption, investment, incremental capital/output ratio without considering physical and energetic realities. An American economist Murray Rothband observed that Keynes “possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.” Keynes’ misrepresented Say’s Law as “supply creates its own demand” as if it were a quotation from J.B. Say. Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) had initiated the mathematization of economics in a grand scale that provided the power to confuse the outsiders along with the economists incapable to cope with “competitive inflation of rigour”. The novelty of Milton Friedman’s essay, “The Methodology of Positive Economics” (1953), was in innovating the immateriality of background assumptions. According to another main proponent of neoclassical school of economics Robert Solow, technology has been the determinant factor of economic growth. Subsequent research has observed that Solow has failed to assess the energy processes of consumption, transformation, and depletion, though these factors are inseparable from the growth of industrial production.

Thus the treadmill of production, founded on the eternal law of capitalist circulation: supply creates its own demand, drives the expansion of production and consumption synergistically. The zero-sum game has its obvious tolls on wretched teeming millions mostly of the “other” world. Andre Gunder Frank elaborated his earlier “Development of Underdevelopment” thesis in a 2001 paper based on multilateralism and entropy on how the structure, process and transformation of the world-system generate the new wealth and poverty of nations. Entropy is dispersed from the more “ordered” regions and sectors of the global world economy to other less “ordered” regions that are obliged to absorb the entropy dissipated in their direction by the more “ordered” one. Global biophysical transformation engenders localized stresses in the forms of coastal erosion, ice melt, and infertile land and deteriorating water sources. Thus fast liquefying of Arctic cryosphere, causes matching rise in sea-beds that will result in submerging of several small-island states in Pacific and Indian Ocean by the end of twenty-first century. The catastrophic ecological crises manifested by growing human strive for higher per-capita consumption, the only indicator of economic growth, by deploying ruthlessly limited resources stored in a finite and fragile planet. Thus the project to divert Economics from the road to flourish as a disciplined study of humans’ economic activities in the broader socio-ecological context to a mere vocational training equipped with quantitative tools had been completed. A “boutique” or more aptly, a “comprador” economics had elevated to full-swing marginalising political and methodological plurality. Margaret Thatcher’s famous assertion that ‘there is no alternative’(TINA) and Francis Fukuyama’s equally famous verdict of ‘End of History…’ trumpet the advent of a particular political and economic system as the final destination of humanity’s socio-cultural evolution.

The global financial crisis surfaced in 2000s, apparently as a consequence of sub-prime housing mortgage practices in USA, has its root in growing disjuncture between the real economy of production and the paper economy of finance. As early as in 1920s, Soddy argued that the financial system could increase the public and private debts and mix-up this expansion of credit with the creation of real wealth. But growth of production and growth of consumption imply growth in the extraction and final destruction of fossil fuels. The obligation to pay debts at compound interest could be fulfilled either by inflation or economic growth. But economic growth is fallaciously measured because it is based on undervalued exhaustible resources and unvalued pollution. The myth of unlimited economic growth has all along been justified with unrealistic assumptions and “evergreen” predictions. Vested interests from late nineteenth century American railroad oligarchy to vanguards of Washington consensus have promoted the pseudoeconomics quixotically empowered to dominate academics and policy. Foucauldian knowledge-power discourse reminds us that if the values and political implications underlying the “growth business-as-usual” do not ensure how to protect the society, we can refuse to accept their imperatives and develop alternative epistemology.

Some things should be uninvented – DES, HRT, GMOs, hexachlorophene in infants’ soap, nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons, etc. Now a new threat, the Smart Grid and Smart Meters. If these are good ideas, why is the free market not providing them? Why the need for taxpayer funding? The fact that this industry must depend on taxpayer money is just one of many reasons it is suspect.

The May 20, 2011 Sandia Labs News Release reported that 69.3 Million has been granted for Smart Meter implementation in Vermont.

During a December 2011 news conference Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin and Senator Bernie Sanders announced their support of a 15 million dollar government grant to Sandia Labs. The grant is to be used for implementation of Smart Meter technology in Vermont. This is a perfect example of Corporate Welfare. Sandia has a long, fascinating history.

From the Sandia website:

…Sandia National Laboratories’ roots lie in World War II’s Manhattan Project and its history reflects the changing national security needs of postwar America. Sandia’s original emphasis on ordnance engineering — turning the nuclear physics packages created by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories into deployable weapons — expanded into new areas as national security requirements changed. In addition to ensuring the safety and reliability of the stockpile, Sandia applied the expertise it acquired in weapons work to a variety of related areas such as energy research…

Is it really a good idea to put the national electric grid under the control of any corporation? How about a corporation with a history of war and destruction? There are many unanswered questions.

The Smart Grid is the opposite of the movement toward sustainable communities and transition towns. Control of the grid should be local. When power outaqes occur, and they will, the smaller the area of the black-out the better. The larger the area, the more difficult it is for any emergency response. This puts large populations at risk for property damage and death. In September 2011 a large power outage affected more than 5 million people in California, Arizona, and Mexico. In recent years, an ice storm caused a large power outage in northern New York State. Farmers were among those affected. Eventually farmers were able to access generators for milking machines on rural farms.

One of the big issues in Vermont is the lack of generators. When power goes out, individual home owners are on their own. Some home owners have purchased generators. Most cannot afford the high price. Estimates range upwards of $5000 for a hard wired generator that will allow a furnace to heat a home and prevent property damage. The damage caused by frozen pipes can be extensive. Also, there are health concerns for those who need electricity to power medical devices.

One of the most relevant questions is: why do we need a Smart Grid? Who will benefit? The first duty of a corporation is to its share holders. Profit and the bottom line trump consumer protection. In Vermont there is a history of this. For example, CVPS moved all of its emergency repair vehicles out of Bennington. The vehicles are now garaged many miles away in Sunderland. This decision to garage the vehicles in a less densely populated area was based on the corporate bottom line. That is understandable. It is not the duty of corporations to be benevolent. This is the way the capitalistic system works. The move of the vehicles has placed many homes at risk – especially during winter storms. This risk continues today.

Why the rush to an unproven technology? Will the cost per kilowatt go down for the consumer? Will there be privacy concerns? Who will have access to power consumption data of individual homes? For anyone with access, it will be easy to see which homes are occupied and when they are unoccupied. Will every home now need to be protected with battery powered burglar alarm systems?

Besides questions about the Grid, there are questions about Smart Meters. In some areas of the country they are illegal. There are questions about the synergistic consequences of additional EMF pollution in the environment. There have been reports of health devices and other electronic equipment being affected. Some believe that Smart Meters can cause cancer. All of the science is not yet in. It will take years. In the meantime, should people be used as guinea pigs for this big experiment? How much more would be accomplished if the science and money were dedicated to conservation and alternative sources of power? Every dollar spent on the Smart Grid is a dollar that is not available for other efforts.

There is another issue: that of the lack of a democratic process. In Vermont those who opt-out of the Smart Meter implementation will be charged an additional fee every month. It is reported that in Maine there is a one-time $40 opt-out fee. Op-out fees feel a little like blackmail. So far, the people have had no say in this controversy.

Maybe the most important reason to oppose Smart Grid technology, is that it places too much power in the hands of too few. Imagine bringing down the grid and the chaos that would result. No power. No refrigeration for the food supply in the summer. No heat to keep people alive in the northeast during winter. No transportation. No gas – it could not be pumped. No water – it could not be pumped.

A terrorist attack on the grid, is not the issue. Mistakes happen. Disgruntled workers react. Maybe the most sure thing is that technology fails. Sooner or later all technology fails. This is not a zero defects industry. If the unplanned shutdown damages large industrial turbines and generators, it could take many months to replace them. Think about many months without electricity.

Maybe the Smart Grid will be the greatest political-engineering feat of all time, or maybe not. Imagine just one flick of the switch and the entire system is brought down. This could be the end of everything – the real Armageddon. No food. No communication. No Internet. No life as we know it. Engineered back to the Stone Age without the survival skills that our Stone Age ancestors had.

Early in 2011, we received a surprising invitation from the Financial Times Lexicon. A reader had suggested that an entry on differential accumulation be added to the Lexicon, and the online content developer asked us if we would be willing to write it.

Our first thought was that this must have been a mistake. The FT speaks for capital. Like all mainstream financial media, its theoretical-ideological baseline is staunchly neoclassical (plus ‘distortions’ to account for the disobedient facts). Occasionally, it allows the odd piece by a soft-Keynesian, but that tends to be the far-left marker. Rarely if ever would you read in this newspaper a real critique of capitalism, let alone one that goes to the root (unless you include in this category Op-Ed pieces by Wall-Street-warriors-turned-social-activists and other converts specializing in the ‘social justice’ niche). All things considered, it wasn’t the natural outlet for our analysis of dominant capital, modes of power and strategic sabotage. Not by a long shot.

So how did we get invited?

Simple. The content editor received a request for an entry on ‘differential accumulation’. Naturally, he didn’t know what the term meant, so he searched it on Google and found The Bichler & Nitzan Archives. At that point, he should have taken the time to read a bit. Had he done so, he would have realized that this was the wrong subject to pursue. But slaving for the FT, he had already seen it all. He knew all the tricks of self-promotion, all the ways of making banality look like novelty, all the paths to a reinvented wheel. There was nothing Bichler & Nitzan, whoever they were, could possibly teach him. So instead of reading, he passed the buck and asked us to write the entry. It wasn’t too much of a risk. If the piece ended up being a misfit, he could always flip-flop and refuse it.

We knew all about such flip-flops. Over the years, we have received enough invitations-turned-rejections to work out the template. The cycle typically comprises three stages. It begins with our receiving an enthusiastic, flattering letter asking us to make an original contribution. It continues with a steady stream of encouragements and inquiries about delivery time. And it ends with a prolonged silence, after the editor realizes he got more than he had bargained for: a piece too creative for its own good and clearly unfit for print.

Still, the invitation was tempting. This was not some obscure academic journal, or a marginal newspaper. It was the Financial Times Lexicon. Posting a permanent entry there could help us present radical ideas to a very large conservative audience. And the time seemed right. As one FT writer put it, the ongoing crisis has robbed capitalists of their ‘intellectual compass’, and intellectual confusion often opens the door for radical alternatives. Maybe this was our chance?

We decided to test the water. We asked the content developer how long the article could be: ‘as long as you wish’, he replied (virtual bytes cost nothing). We inquired whether we could incorporate figures and charts: ‘yes’, he said (visuals always sell well). We emphasized that our entry would offer a new approach: he had no objection whatsoever (tomorrow it will be flushed down with the rest of yesterday’s news). He did warn us, though, that the FT does not pay for contributions: we never thought of asking for money (suckers). The whole exchange seemed amicable, and the content developer was encouraging, even enthusiastic. And besides, we had nothing to lose but our chains.

We worked on the piece, and the content editor, fulfilling his role in the script, kept sending us encouraging queries. By the end of March, the piece was completed, and we delivered it safely to the FT. The editor replied promptly, promising to examine it ‘as soon as he can’. And then he fell silent. Ten days later, having heard nothing, we wrote to inquire. The editor apologized for not writing. He was ‘busy’ and would reply ‘as soon as he can’. Another two weeks passed, and we sent another email. It was a ‘busy time again’, we learnt, but the editor promised to look at the definition in the ‘next couple of weeks’. Those two weeks came and went, and when the silence persisted, we sent another friendly query. This time, the reply was automatic: the editor was out of the office. We waited patiently for the standard two-week period and wrote again. The editor, forever polite, apologized. He needed more time – but not to worry, he would definitely get back to us ‘within the next two weeks’.

We were getting ready for yet another two-week period, but then we noticed that there was a footnote to the email. The content editor must have realized we weren’t getting the message, so he decided to be a bit blunter: ‘Please note that some of our FT readers do not speak English as a first language, so definitions must be clear’.

And then it dawned on us.

The problem wasn’t our ideas. It was our words: they were simply too complicated. Power, sabotage, dominant capital, and differential accumulation – these are difficult words. They challenge one’s worldview. They rattle the mind. They can even make you think. And that, the content developer insinuated, is not what we need in our Lexicon.

What we need are clear words. Conventional words. Words like ‘free competition’, ‘productive investment’, ‘profit maximization’, ‘deregulation’, ‘efficient markets’ and ‘sound finance’. Words that can help us standardize the FT readership. That is what we need.

And so, we lost our chains and set our article free. You can read it below, with no FT strings attached.

The concept of differential accumulation is part of a new approach to the study of capitalism. This approach, first developed by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, emphasizes the primacy of power rather than of consumption and production. The emphasis on power accentuates the centrality of relative rather than absolute measures and of disaggregate rather than aggregate methods. It focuses attention not on the quest for profit maximization by capital in general, but on the drive for differential accumulation by dominant capital in particular.

The Conventional Dual View

In the conventional view, epitomized by the neoclassical doctrine, capital belongs to the productive-material sphere of the ‘economy’. When free from outside ‘distortions’, the economy is an autonomous sphere, clearly demarcated from other spheres of society. It has its own laws, logic and purpose. Driven by the mechanical forces of supply and demand, energised by the quest for equilibrium, disciplined by competition and pushed forward by individualism, the ultimate achievement of the economy is utilitarian: it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain.

The principles of the economy negate hierarchy: they defuse all power relations through voluntary market clearing. Power certainly exists, but it exists mostly ‘outside’ the economy proper, primarily in the realm of politics and state. Governments never tire of imposing their power on the economy. They ‘intervene’ by using taxes and subsidies, regulation and discrimination, public spending, tariffs and levies, among other strategies. But since the interventions are always ‘exogenous’, coming from outside the economy, their outcomes are always sub-optimal, by definition.

The Great Depression softened this fundamentalist division. After the 1930s, the strict separation between economics and politics gave way to a synthetic compromise: government was given a positive ‘macroeconomic’ role, adjacent to the ‘microeconomic’ role of individual consumers and firms. But the new synthesis didn’t change the meaning, position and logic of capital: it remained a productive-material entity, located in the economy and subject to its strict laws.

The neoclassical doctrine sees capital as a dual entity. Capital is both productive capacity and market value, a ‘real’ thing whose material quantity is reflected in its ‘nominal’ price. On the face of it, modern capitalist decisions are driven by finance; but according to the dual view, in the final analysis finance is a derivative of production. From this perspective, the dollar market value of General Electric’s stocks and bonds mirrors the company’s overall productive capacity. When GE’s productive capacity increases – when it adds more factories, when it improves its plant and equipment, when it increases its knowhow – the real quantity of its capital grows, and that real growth causes a corresponding increase in the company’s dollar market value. And conversely – when the company neglects to boost its productive capacity, its real accumulation falters; and as real accumulation decelerates, the company’s dollar market value follows suit.

This real-nominal correspondence is merely a first approximation: it holds only in the ideal world of perfectly competitive equilibrium. The actual world, though, even according to neoclassicists, is rarely if ever in a perfectly competitive equilibrium. Unlike the models, reality is besieged by disequilibrium, irrationality and distortions, and these imperfections cause the nominal magnitude to mismatch and deviate from the real one.

This account, argue Bichler and Nitzan, is deeply problematic for at least two reasons. The first reason is theoretical. Capital, they say, is simply not a dual entity. Contrary to the conventional view, it has only one quantity: its nominal dollar value on the stock and bond markets. And that’s it. There is no underlying ‘real’ quantity to be examined, let alone measured. And without a real quantity, there is nothing for the dollar value of capital to match or mismatch.

Economists might find this later claim nonsensical: after all, most countries provide detailed quantitative estimates of their ‘real capital stock’, so how could one say that these quantities do not exist? According to Bichler and Nitzan, though, these estimates, popular as they may be, do not – and indeed cannot – measure the real capital stock. In order to know the quantity of real capital, the statisticians have to sum up the quantities of individual ‘capital goods’ – plant, equipment, and infrastructure, as well as patented knowledge and goodwill, among other things. And this aggregate, say Bichler and Nitzan, is impossible to compute. According to neoclassical theory, the aggregate of capital goods, like every basket of commodities, is measured in terms of the utils it supposedly generates. But ‘utils’ are fictitious quanta that cannot be observed, let alone measured.

So in practice, argue Bichler and Nitzan, the statisticians go in reverse: they use the dollar price of capital goods to ‘reveal’ their so-called productive quantity (i.e., their ability to generate utils). The first step in this process is to pick a point in time and claim it represents perfectly competitive equilibrium. The second step is to assume that, in a perfectly competitive equilibrium, the nominal dollar value reveals the real quantity of capital (so if the dollar price of a patent X is ten times bigger than that of machine Y, X must have ten times as much real capital as Y). The third step is to use these nominal values as weights with which to aggregate the different capital goods into real capital (multiplying the number of capital goods in each category by their dollar value and summing the results). And the fourth and final step is to announce that the nominal magnitude that emerges from this procedure is the quantity of real capital (read its util-generating capacity). But since perfectly competitive equilibrium and the utils this equilibrium is said to ‘reveal’ are all fictitious entities, the resulting measure of real capital is devoid of any real meaning.

The second problem of the real-nominal view is empirical. In practice, the oscillations of finance seem to have little to do with those of productive capacity – even when capacity is measured in nominal dollars (rather than in so-called real terms). To see the problem, note that, according to the conventional creed, the deviations of finance from real capital, however large, tend to be pro-cyclical. In general, the market value of capital is expected to overshoot real accumulation during a boom and undershoot it in a bust. In the first case, euphoria inflates a speculative bubble; in the latter case, panic deflates it.

But the evidence, at least in the United States, doesn’t sit well with this pro-cyclical convention. Figure 1 contrasts two growth series (based on nominal dollar data, since the ‘real’ measures are fictitious). The thick line shows the rate of growth of the productive capacity of U.S. corporations as measured by the current replacement cost of their fixed assets. The thin line shows the rate of growth of the dollar market value of U.S. corporate stocks and bonds. And here lies a puzzle: the growth of corporate market value, instead of moving in tandem with – and possibly amplifying – the growth of ‘real’ assets, appears to move in exactly the opposite direction. The figure shows a systematic, long-term counter-cyclical pattern in which the market value of corporations accelerates exactly when the dollar value of their ‘real’ capital decelerates, and vice versa.

Now, since capitalist decisions are driven by finance, this inversion, say Bichler and Nitzan, means that theorists of accumulation have to make a hard choice: they can stick to the conventional dual view and end up being unable to explain what drives capitalists, or they can go back to square one and develop a new framework altogether.

Capitalization Reconsidered

Bichler and Nitzan take the second route. Their starting point is the meaning of capitalism. In their framework, capitalism is not a mode of consumption and production, but a mode of power: a totalizing regime that defines, shapes and regulates the general trajectory of society.

The centre of this regime is the institution of capital. Earlier modes of power were organized through the complex codes of religion, kingship, feudal servitude and castes, among others. The capitalist mode of power replaces these complex codes with a universal logic: the power logic of capital. Now, in conventional theory, capital is a narrow economic entity that produces goods and services for its individual owners. But according to Bichler and Nitzan, this portrayal is deeply deceiving. Capital, they say, is not a productive entity but the key power institution that regulates capitalist society. Its language is not utilitarian, but financial. The ever-changing quantities of finance – expressed as capitalization – reflect not the capacity of capital goods to produce well-being, but the power of capitalist owners to constantly reshape the course of their society in their own interest. The logic of finance and capitalization is the anonymous, undifferentiated mechanism through which they control society.

Capitalization represents the discounting to present value of risk-adjusted expected future earnings, and each of its symbolic components – the expected future earnings, the risk that capitalists associate with these earnings, and the normal rate of return that they use to bring them to present value – is a manifestation of organized power.

The primacy of power, say Bichler and Nitzan, is built into the concept of private ownership. The very concept implies exclusion and deprivation. In this sense, private ownership is a negative, not a positive, entity. It is based not on the ability to produce, but on the capacity to incapacitate. It is wholly and only an institution of exclusion, and institutional exclusion is a matter of organized power. Of course, exclusion does not have to be exercised. What matter here, argue Bichler and Nitzan, are the right to exclude and the ability to exact pecuniary terms for not exercising that right. This right and ability are the foundations of accumulation. They enable capitalists to profit greatly from mismanaging the world’s ecosystem, from making society more unequal and from blocking the development of humane alternatives – and to do all that under the guise of ‘scientific management’ and the ‘efficient allocation’ of resources.

Capital, Bichler and Nitzan claim, is nothing but organized power. This power, they say, has two sides: one qualitative, the other quantitative. The qualitative side comprises the many institutions, developments and conflicts through which capitalists constantly creorder – or create the order of – their society; that is, the processes through which they shape and restrict the social trajectory in order to extract their tributary income. The quantitative side is the universal algorithm that integrates, reduces and distils these numerous qualitative processes down to the monetary magnitude of capitalization.

In principle, every stream of expected income is a candidate for capitalization. And since income streams are generated by social entities, social processes, social organizations and social institutions, we end up with capitalization discounting not the so-called sphere of economics, but potentially every aspect of society. Human life, including its social habits and its genetic code, is routinely capitalized. Institutions – from education and entertainment to religion and the law – are habitually capitalized. Voluntary social networks, urban violence, civil war and international conflict are regularly capitalized. Even the environmental future of humanity is capitalized. Nothing escapes the eyes of the discounters. If it generates expected future income, it can be capitalized, and whatever can be capitalized sooner or later is capitalized.

Business and Industry

What is the object of capitalist power? How does it creorder society? According to Bichler and Nitzan, the answer begins with a conceptual distinction between two spheres: the first is the creative/productive potential of society – or what American political economist Thorstein Veblen called ‘industry’; the second is the realm of power, which, in the capitalist epoch, takes the form of ‘business’. Veblen conceived of industry as the collective knowledge and effort of humanity, a sphere that is inherently cooperative, integrated and synchronized. Business, in contrast, isn’t collective; it is private. Its goals are achieved through the threat and exercise of systemic prevention and restriction – that is, through strategic sabotage. The key target of this sabotage is the resonating pulse of industry – a resonance that business constantly upsets through built-in dissonance.

Bichler and Nitzan illustrate this interaction of business and industry conceptually and empirically. Conventional economics, they say, postulates a positive relationship between production and profit. Capitalists, the theory argues, benefit from industrial activity; and, therefore, the more fully employed their equipment and workers, the greater their profit. But if one thinks of capital as power, exercised through the strategic sabotage of industry by business, the relationship becomes nonlinear – positive under certain circumstances, negative under others.

This latter relationship is exemplified, hypothetically, in Figure 2. The chart depicts the utilization of industrial capacity on the horizontal axis against the capitalist share of income on the vertical axis. Now, up to a point, the two move together. After that point, the relationship becomes negative. The reason for this inversion can be explained by looking at extremes. If industry came to a complete standstill at the bottom left corner of the chart, capitalist earnings would be nil. But capitalist earnings would also be zero if industry always and everywhere operated at full socio-technological capacity – depicted by the bottom right corner of the chart. Under this latter scenario, industrial considerations rather than business decisions would be paramount, production would no longer need the consent of owners, and these owners would then be unable to extract their tributary earnings. For owners of capital, then, the ideal Goldilocks condition, indicated by the top arc segment, lies somewhere in between: with high capitalist earnings being received in return for letting industry operate – though only at less than full potential.

Figure 3 operationalizes this thought experiment for the United States since the 1930s. The horizontal axis approximates the degree of sabotage by using the official rate of unemployment, inverted (note that unemployment begins with zero on the right, indicating no sabotage, and that, as it increases to the left, so does sabotage). The vertical axis, as before, shows the share of national income received by capitalists.

And the empirical picture seems very close to the theoretical one. Like in Figure 2, the best position for capitalists is not when industry is fully employed, but when there is considerable unemployment – in this case, around 7 per cent. In other words, the so-called ‘natural rate of unemployment’ and ‘business as usual’ are two sides of the same power process: a process in which business accumulates by strategically sabotaging industry.

Differential Accumulation and Dominant Capital

Now, power, argue Bichler and Nitzan, is never absolute; it’s always relative. For this reason, both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of capital accumulation have to be assessed differentially, relative to other capitals. Contrary to the claims of conventional economics, say Bichler and Nitzan, capitalists are driven not to maximize profit, but to ‘beat the average’ and ‘exceed the normal rate of return’. Their entire existence is conditioned by the need to outperform, by the imperative to achieve not absolute accumulation, but differential accumulation. And this differential drive is crucial: to beat the average means to accumulate faster than others; and since the relative magnitude of capital represents power, capitalists who accumulate differentially increase their power (to emphasize, for Bichler and Nitzan capitalist power relates not to the narrow neoclassical notion of ‘market power’, but to the broad strategic capacity to inflict sabotage).

The centrality of differential accumulation, claim Bichler and Nitzan, means that the analysis of accumulation should focus not only on capital in general, but also and perhaps more so on dominant capital in particular – that is, on the leading corporate-state alliances whose differential accumulation has gradually placed them at the centre of the political economy.

Figure 4 plots the differential accumulation of dominant capital in the United States since 1950. Dominant capital is approximated here using two slightly different measures: one is the largest 100 firms in the Compustat universe (comprising firms listed in the United States); the other is the largest 100 U.S. firms in the Compustate universe (comprising firms that are both incorporated and listed in the United Sates). The constituents of each group are determined annually on the basis of market capitalization (the reason for using two different measures is that aggregate data for market capitalization cover all listed firms regardless of their country of incorporation, whereas the aggregate profit data of the national accounts pertain only to U.S.-incorporated firms). The chart shows two differential series – one for capitalization, based on the first definition of dominant capital, and another for net profit based on the second definition of dominant capital.

Differential capitalization denotes the ratio between the average market value of dominant capital (U.S.-listed firms) and the average market value of all U.S.-listed firms. The series shows that, during the 1950s, a typical dominant capital corporation had 7.4 times the capitalization (read power) of the average listed company. By the 2000s, this ratio had risen to 35.5 – nearly a fivefold increase.

This measure, though, significantly underestimates the power of dominant capital. Note that the vast majority of firms are not listed. Since the shares of unlisted firms are not publicly traded, they have no ‘market value’; the fact that they have no market value keeps them out of the statistical picture; and since most of the excluded firms are relatively small, differential measures based only on large listed firms end up understating the relative size of dominant capital.

In order to get around this limitation, Bichler and Nitzan plot another differential measure – one that is based not on capitalization but on net profit – and that measure includes all U.S.-incorporated firms, listed and unlisted. The computational steps are similar. They calculate the average net profit of a dominant-capital corporation (the total net profit of the top 100 Compustat companies incorporated and listed in the United Sates divided by 100); they then compute the average net profit of a U.S. corporation (total corporate profit after taxes divided by the number of tax returns of active corporations); finally, they divide the first result by the second.

As expected, the two series have very different orders of magnitude (notice the two log scales). But they are also highly correlated (which isn’t surprising, given that profit is the key driver of capitalization). This correlation, say Bichler and Nitzan, means that we can use the broadly based differential profit indicator as a proxy for the power of dominant capital relative to all corporations. And the result is remarkable. The data show that during the 1950s, a typical dominant capital corporation was 2,586 times larger/more powerful than the average U.S. firm. By the 2000s, this ratio had risen to 22,097 – nearly a ninefold increase.

Capital as Power in Middle-East Energy Conflicts

Bichler and Nitzan’s research offers various historical studies of differential accumulation in which they examine the quantities and qualities of capital as power. One of these is their work on the Middle East. Figure 5 shows the differential performance of the world’s six leading privately owned oil companies relative to the Fortune 500 benchmark. Each bar in the chart shows the extent to which the oil companies’ rate of return on equity exceeded or fell short of the Fortune 500 average. The gray bars show positive differential accumulation – i.e. the per cent by which the oil companies exceeded the Fortune 500 average. The black bars show negative differential accumulation; that is, the per cent by which the oil companies trailed the average. Finally, the little explosion signs in the chart show the occurrences of ‘Energy Conflicts’ – that is, regional energy-related wars.

Now, conventional economics, say Bichler and Nitzan, has no interest in the differential profits of the oil companies, and it certainly has nothing to say about the relationship between these differential profits and regional wars. Differential profit is perhaps of some interest to financial analysts, and Middle-East wars are the business of experts in international relations and security analysts. But since each of these phenomena belongs to a completely separate realm of society, no one has ever thought of relating them in the first place. And yet, these phenomena, argue Bichler and Nitzan, are not simply related. In fact, they could be thought of as two sides of the very same process – namely, the global accumulation of capital as power. They point to three remarkable relationships depicted in the chart.

• First, every energy conflict was preceded by the large oil companies trailing the average. In other words, for an energy conflict to erupt, the oil companies first had to differentially decumulate – a most unusual prerequisite from the viewpoint of any social science.

• Second, every energy conflict was followed by the oil companies beating the average. In other words, war and conflict in the region, which social scientists customarily blame for ‘distorting’ the aggregate economy, have served the differential interest of certain key firms at the expense of other key firms.

• Third and finally, with one exception, in 1996-7, the oil companies never managed to beat the average without there first being an energy conflict in the region. In other words, the differential performance of the oil companies depended not on production, but on the most extreme form of sabotage: war.

According to Bichler and Nitzan, these relationships, and the conclusions they give rise to, are nothing short of remarkable. First, the likelihood that all three patterns are the consequence of statistical fluke is negligible. In other words, there must be something very substantive behind the connection of Middle-East wars and global differential profits.

Second, these relationships seamlessly fuse quality and quantity. In their research on the subject, Bichler and Nitzan show how the qualitative power aspects of international relations, superpower confrontation, regional conflicts and the activity of the armament and oil companies, on the one hand, can both explain and be explained by the quantitative global process of capital accumulation, on the other.

Third, all three relationships have remained stable for half a century, allowing Bichler and Nitzan to predict, in writing and before the events, both the first and second Gulf Wars. This stability suggests that the patterns of capital as power – although subject to historical change from within society – are anything but haphazard.

Links

• The Bichler & Nitzan Archives.
• Bichler Shimshon and Jonathan Nitzan (2004) ‘Dominant Capital and the New Wars’ Journal of World-Systems Research (10:2).
• Nitzan, Jonathan and Shimson Bichler (2002) The Global Political Economy of Israel (London and Sterling VA. Pluto Press).
• Nitzan, Jonathan and Shimson Bichler (2006) ‘New Imperialism, or New Capitalism?’ Review (XXIX: 1).
• Nitzan, Jonathan and Shimshon Bichler (2009) Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (London and New York: Routledge).
• Thorstein Veblen (1904; 1975) The Theory of Business Enterprise (Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley, Reprints of Economics Classics).

Many of the major institutions and economic relations which were cause and consequence of world and regional capitalist expansion over the past three decades are in the process of disintegration and disarray. The previous economic engines of global expansion, the US and the European Union, have exhausted their potentialities and are in open decline. The new centers of growth, China, India, Brazil, Russia, which for a ‘short decade’ provided a new impetus for world growth have run their course and are de-accelerating rapidly and will continue to do so throughout the new year.

The Collapse of the European Union

Specifically, the crises-wracked European Union will break up and the de facto multi-tiered structure will turn into a series of bilateral/multi-lateral trade and investment agreements. Germany, France, the Low and Nordic countries will attempt to weather the downturn. England – namely the City of London, in splendid isolation, will sink into negative growth, its financiers scrambling to find new speculative opportunities among the Gulf petrol-states and other ‘niches’. Eastern and Central Europe, particularly Poland and the Czech Republic, will deepen their ties to Germany but will suffer the consequences of the general decline of world markets. Southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy) will enter into a deep depression as the massive debt payments fueled by savage assaults on wages and social benefits will severely reduce consumer demand.

Depression level unemployment and under-employment running to one-third of the labor force will detonate year-long social conflicts, intensifying into popular uprisings. Eventually a break-up of the European Union is almost inevitable. The euro as a currency of choice will be replaced by or return to national issues accompanied by devaluations and protectionism. Nationalism will be the order of the day. Banks in Germany, France and Switzerland will suffer huge losses on their loans to the South. Major bailouts will become necessary, polarizing German and French societies, between the tax-paying majorities and the bankers. Trade union militancy and rightwing pseudo-‘populism’ (neo-fascism) will intensify the class and national struggles.

A depressed, fragmented and polarized Europe will be less likely to join in any Zionist inspired US-Israeli military adventure against Iran (or even Syria). Crisis ridden Europe will oppose Washington’s confrontationalist approach to Russia and China.

The US: The Recession Returns with a Vengeance

The US economy will suffer the consequences of its ballooning fiscal deficit and will not be able to spend its way out of the world recession of 2012. Nor can it count on ‘exporting’ its way out of negative growth by turning to previously dynamic Asia, as China, India, and the rest of Asia are losing economic steam. China will grow far below its 9% moving average. India will decline from 8% to 5% or lower. Moreover, the Obama regime’s military policy of ‘encirclement’, its economic policy of exclusion and protectionism will preclude any new stimulus from China.

Militarism Exacerbates the Economic Downturn

The US and England will be the biggest losers from the Iraqi post war economic reconstruction. Of $186 billion dollars in infrastructure projects, US and UK corporations will gain less than 5% (Financial Times, 12/16/11, p 1 and 3). A similar outcome is likely in Libya and elsewhere. US imperial militarism destroys an adversary, plunging into debt to do so, and non-belligerents reap the lucrative post-war economic reconstruction contracts.

The US economy will fall into recession in 2012, and the “jobless recovery of 2011” will be replaced by a steep increase of unemployment in 2012. In fact, the entire labor force will shrink as people losing their unemployment benefits will fail to register.

Labor exploitation (“productivity”) will intensify as capitalists force workers to produce more, for less pay, thus widening the income gap between wages and profits.

The economic downturn and growth of unemployment will be accompanied by savage cuts in social programs to subsidize financially troubled banks and industries. The debates among the parties will be over how large the cuts to workers and retirees will be to secure the ‘confidence’ of the bondholders. Faced with equally limited political choices, the electorate will react by voting out incumbents, abstaining and via spontaneous and organized mass movements, such as the “occupy Wall Street” protest. Dissatisfaction, hostility, and frustration will pervade the culture. Democratic Party demagogues will scapegoat China; the Republican Party demagogues will blame the immigrants. Both will fulminate against “the Islamo-fascists” and especially against Iran.

New Wars in the Midst of Crises: Zionists Pull the Trigger

The “52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations” and their “Israel First” followers in the US Congress, State Department, Treasury, and the Pentagon will push for war with Iran. If they are successful it will result in a regional conflagration and world depression. Given the extremist Israeli regime’s success in securing blind obedience to its war policies from the US Congress and White House, any doubts about the real possibility of a major catastrophic outcome can be set aside.

China: Compensatory Mechanisms in 2012

China will face the global recession of 2012 with several possibilities of ameliorating its impact. Beijing can shift toward producing goods and services for the 700 million domestic consumers currently out of the economic loop. By increasing wages, social services, and environmental safety, China can compensate for the loss of overseas markets. China’s economic growth, which is largely dependent on real estate speculation, will be adversely affected when the bubble is burst. A sharp downturn will result, leading to job losses, municipal bankruptcies and increased social and class conflicts. This can result in either greater repression or gradual democratization. The outcome will profoundly affect China’s market-state relations. The economic crisis will likely strengthen state control over the market.

Russia Faces the Crisis

Russia’s election of President Putin will lead to less collaboration in backing US promoted uprisings and sanctions against Russian allies and trading partners. Putin will turn toward greater ties with China and will benefit from the break-up of the EU and the weakening of NATO.

The western media backed opposition will use its financial clout to erode Putin’s image and encourage investment boycotts though they will lose the Presidential elections by a big margin. The world recession will weaken the Russian economy and will force it to choose between greater public ownership or greater dependency on state funds to bail out prominent oligarchs.

The Transition 2011-2012: From Regional Stagnation and Recession to World Crises

The year 2011 laid the groundwork for the breakdown of the European Union. The crises began with the demise of the Euro, stagnation in the US and the outbreak of mass protests against the obscene inequalities on a world scale. The events of 2011 were a dress rehearsal for a new year of full scale trade wars between major powers, sharpening inter-imperialist struggles and the likelihood of popular rebellions turning into revolutions. Moreover, the escalation of Zionist-orchestrated war fever against Iran in 2011 promises the biggest regional war since the US-Indo-Chinese conflict. The electoral campaigns and outcomes of Presidential elections in the US, Russia and France will deepen the global conflicts and economic crises.

During 2011 the Obama regime announced a policy of military confrontation with Russia and China and policies designed to undermine and degrade China’s rise as a world economic power. In the face of a deepening economic recession and with the decline of overseas markets, especially in Europe, a major trade war will unfold. Washington will aggressively pursue policies limiting Chinese exports and investments. The White House will escalate its efforts to disrupt China’s trade and investments in Asia, Africa and elsewhere. We can expect greater US efforts to exploit China’s internal ethnic and popular conflicts and to increase its military presence off China’s coastline. A major provocation or fabricated incident in this context is not to be excluded. The result in 2012 could lead to rabid chauvinist calls for a costly new ‘Cold War’. Obama has provided the framework and justification for a large-scale, long-term confrontation with China. This will be seen as a desperate effort to prop up US influence and strategic positions in Asia. The US military “quadrangle of power” – US-Japan-Australia-South Korea – with satellite support from the Philippines, will pit China’s market ties against Washington’s military build-up.

Europe: Deeper Austerity and Intensified Class Struggle

The austerity programs imposed in Europe, from England to Latvia to southern Europe will really take hold in 2012. Massive public sector firings and reduced private sector salaries and job opportunities will lead to a year of permanent class warfare and regime challenges. The ‘austerity policies’ in the South, will be accompanied by debt defaults resulting in bank failures in France and Germany. England’s financial ruling class, isolated from Europe, but dominant in England, will insist that the Conservatives ‘repress’ labor and popular unrest. A new tough neo-Thatcherite style of autocratic rule will emerge; the Labor-trade union opposition will issue empty protests and tighten the leash on the rebellious populace. In a word, the regressive socio-economic policies put in place in 2011 have set the stage for new police-state regimes and more acute and possibly bloody confrontations with workers and unemployed youth with no future.

The Coming Wars that End America “As We Know It”

Within the US, Obama has laid the groundwork for a new and bigger war in the Middle East by relocating troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrating them against Iran. To undermine Iran, Washington is expanding clandestine military and civilian operations against Iranian allies in Syria, Pakistan, Venezuela, and China. The key to the US and Israeli bellicose strategy toward Iran is a series of wars in neighboring states, worldwide economic sanctions, cyber-attacks aimed at disabling vital industries, and clandestine terrorist assassinations of scientists and military officials. The entire push, planning, and execution of the US policies leading up to war with Iran can be empirically and without a doubt attributed to the Zionist power configuration occupying strategic positions in the US Administration, mass media and ‘civil society’. A systematic analysis of American policymakers designing and implementing economic sanctions policy in Congress finds prominent roles for such mega-Zionists (Israel-Firsters) as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard Berman, Dennis Ross in the White House, Jeffrey Feltman in the State Department, and Stuart Levy, and his replacement David Cohen, in the Treasury. The White House is totally beholden to Zionist fund raisers and takes its cue from the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organization.

The Israeli-Zionist strategy is to encircle Iran, weaken it economically and attack its military. The Iraq invasion was the US’s first war for Israel; the Libyan war the second; the current proxy war against Syria is the third. These wars have destroyed Israel’s adversaries or are in the process of doing so. During 2011, economic sanctions, which were designed to create domestic discontent in Iran, were the principle weapon of choice. The global sanctions campaign engaged the entire energies of the major Jewish-Zionist lobbies. They have faced no opposition from the mass media, Congress or the White Office. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) has been virtually exempt from criticism by any of the progressive, leftist and socialist journals, movements or grouplets – with a few notable exceptions.

The past year’s re-positioning of US troops from Iraq to the borders of Iran, the sanctions and the rising Big Push from Israel’s Fifth Column in the US means expanded war in the Middle East. This likely means a “surprise” aerial and maritime missile attack by US forces. This will be based on a concocted pretext of an “imminent nuclear attack” concocted by Israeli Mossad and faithfully transmitted by the ZPC to their lackeys US Congress and White House for consumption and transmission to the world. It will be a destructive, bloody, prolonged war for Israel; the US will bear the direct military cost by itself and the rest of the world will pay a dear economic price. The Zionist-promoted US war will convert the recession of early 2012 into a major depression by the end of the year and probably provoke mass upheavals.

Conclusion

All indications point to 2012 being a turning point year of unrelenting economic crisis spreading outward from Europe and the US to Asia and its dependencies in Africa and Latin America. The crisis will be truly global. Inter-imperial confrontations and colonial wars will undermine any efforts to ameliorate this crisis. In response, mass movements will emerge moving over time from protests and rebellions, and hopefully to social revolutions and political power.

After Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Istanbul mayor from 1994 to 1998, established the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the year 2001 and subsequently won a victory in the 2002 election, a new Turkey successfully emerged from a severe economic crisis and its runaway inflation. Since becoming Prime Minister in 2003, Erdogan has diverged from the post-Ottoman laicism (secular), authoritative, and nationalist philosophy of the Turkish Republic’s founder, Kemal Ataturk, and steered Turkey in a direction more consistent with western democratic philosophy.

What enables this nation to operate independently and grow in a dependent and declining western world? Can it sustain its growth? Can it reject Kemalism without military interference? These are only three of many questions concerning Turkey’s foreign, economic and social policies, all of which contain contradictions, doubts, and problems. Problems? Turkey excels in problems. There is the Kurdish problem, Cyprus problem, Islamic influence problem, writing a new Constitution problem, relations with adjacent nations problem, entry to the European Union problem and of course, problems with Israel and the United States

A trip through Turkey, sponsored by the Washington based Rumi Forum, an interfaith and peace organization, featured meetings with parliamentarians, journalists, academics and businessmen, and provided insight into Turkey’s (1) ability to confront its problems, (2) strength to continue an independent path, and (3) role as a model for the Arab nations that are struggling from a revolutionary spring into a bright and peaceful future. Istanbul revealed the ‘think tanks that define the present.” Ankara provided the parliamentarians that shape the future. In Sanliurfa and Gaziantep, one learns of an ancient past and gains insight into Turkey’s nationwide progress and the role of its Kurdish community.

A discussion of Turkey starts with its youth.

A modern country

New airports, new super highways, massive construction of modern buildings in expanding cities that now contain 75% of the population with a median age of 28.5 years, highlight the growing Turkey.

A western oriented nation reflects a Mediterranean appearance. Buildings, offices, restaurants, hotels and institutions use warm colors; brown, beige, orange, together with neutral white, black and lilac; colors associated with steadfastness, simplicity, friendliness, and dependability. The warm colors made large rooms look cozier, while the orange proved mentally stimulating as well as sociable.

A subjective appraisal notes a nation of hard working purposeful and dedicated people, well organized and progressive. Turkey reflects vision and mission. Youthful representatives satisfied the vision.

Faik Tunay, at 30 years, is the youngest parliamentarian for the The Republican People’s Party (CHP). The CHP is the oldest political party of Turkey and is currently the main opposition in the Grand National Assembly. Best described as a modern social-democratic party, it is faithful to the principles of Kemal Ataturk, the Party’s founder.

The deputy for Istanbul, member of the Foreign Affairs committee, speaks five languages, and has been invited by the Eisenhower Institute to visit America, In addition to being an elected member of the Grand National Assembly, he is involved in several family businesses and some of his own – construction, agriculture, advertising. His ambition – although born as a White Turk, a member of a privileged class, he wants to leave as a Black Turk, as a member of the masses.

The youngest member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly is only 27 years old, one of three members under 32 years of age. Bilal Macit represents an Istanbul district for the AKP, but insists he represents the state and not the civil authority, does not represent youth nor will limit his activities to youth policies. He has traveled widely, matured in a global world and learned to think independently. Cognizant that his Party’s leader changed politics, Parliamentarian Macit won’t allow his independent attitude to harm the Party. Surprisingly, he offered the opinion that youth does not represent the Arab revolutionary movements, suggesting the movements are more complex and widely distributed. The youthful parliamentarian attributes some of his success to his previous association with the Young Civilians, a movement he helped to found.

Young Civilians

Fatih Demirci, who graduated with a manufacturing system engineering degree and is now an Istanbul entrepreneur, is another 27 year-old founder of the Young Civilians and still an active member. At a dinner meeting, he explained the operations of the organization whose name indicates its thrust — contrasts to Kemal Ataturk’s Young Turks who led the 1908 revolution and the Young Officers who won Turkey’s independence.

Organization? The Young Civilians have no formal organization. Corresponding by Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, they gather compatriots at demonstrations. Their symbol is the sneaker, a sharp difference from the military boot that shaped the nation. Similar to America’s flower children of the 1960′s with a dash of France’s 1968 rebel Cohen-Bendit’s “Ask for the impossible,” the Young Civilians “demand the possible but perfect.”

They grimace at any military or nationalist demonstrations, such as the May 19 Youth and Sports Day national holiday. On that day, in 2003, the group organized its first gathering at Parliament to protest the style of the festivities and become known. They became well known, even internationally, with coverage by the New York Times. Reducing military appearance in social and political life, gaining equal rights for all forty-two ethnicities, and no-holds barred allowance for religious and national expressions dominate their thinking. Removing visa requirements and opening the border between Armenia and Turkey would please them.

Will the Young Civilians (who are growing older) be only a humorous irritant to Turkey’s elite or will it become a serious movement that contributes to all Turks embracing one another with equal expression, regardless of religion or ethnicity? Does the answer lie with the flowering of the flower children of the American 60′s, who became more conservative as they moved on in years?

The Young Civilians might already be superfluous. The Kemalism they want defeated and the military coup they fear are quickly being subdued with no appearance of immediate revival.

Kemalism

After Kemal Ataturk died in 1938, almost any government that threatened the principal tenets, the six arrows of Kemalism, triggered a military coup.

Republicanism–a broadly based republican system.
Nationalism–a distinctly Turkish identity
Populism–a more classless society
Revolutionism–wholesale, rather than gradual, change
Laicism-cancellation of the power of religion in the state, and
Statism–state-led development of the economy and society

were inviolate until the AKP gained power.

Prime Minister Erdogan’s instant and bold challenge in 2003 to the tenets of Kemalism did not provoke a military coup. Nevertheless, the military and allied Kemalists have been accused of preparing a conspiratorial response in 2007 that was uncovered in 2009.

Why did Erdogan proceed so boldly and why was it difficult for the military to instantly respond to the AKP’s removal of several of the six arrows of Kemalism from its quiver? AKP parliamentarian Bilal Macit explained; “Before 2002, the military exercised control of most facets of society except for the economic system. Their political and social control promoted economic stagnation and decline.” Erdogan’s deft handling of the economy apparently impressed much of the military to favor his administration.

Markar Esayan, editor of the independent Taraf newspaper, suggested that the Prime Minister correctly gauged a change in society and recognized he had wide support. The year 2002 is now a milestone in Turkish history – the year the military was no longer the principal authority.

Mesut Ulker, a former army colonel, presently a strategist for a think tank and a well-known television personality, added a simple comment: ‘The army has rapidly changed.”

Professor Dr. Yasin Aktay, Director of the Institute of Strategic Thinking, summarized the situation in a strategic context: “The shift of the population to urban areas created an expanding middle class with new social demands. The population requested an allocation of resources, a new identity and a new constitution. The ideological state (Kemalism) with its stress on Turkic identity and secularism created problems.”

Yusuf Acar, Zaman newspaper journalist and world news editor for magazine Aksiyon, echoed the decline of Kemalism and military domination. “Power has shifted to president office #1, Parliament as #2, and then the military. Nevertheless, the state still comes before the citizen.”

A journalist for Zaman, which has become one of Turkey’s principal newspapers, with a circulation of about one million, might be prejudiced in its observations. Yusuf Acar admits Zaman is often accused of being a government supporter and receiving assistance. However, except for sharing a state run television station and agency with the government, he denies the state has any involvement with the newspaper.

Ozcan Yeniceri, previously a university professor, and presently a parliamentarian for MHP (The Nationalist Movement Party) speaks passionately and in great length on all topics. By gaining 53 seats in the 2011 general elections, his Party remained the third largest parliamentary group. Previously characterized as an ultra-nationalist party, which has recommended martial law in Kurdish territory, the MHP has tempered its extremist views.

In Ozcan Yeniceri’s opinion, nationalism has ontological meaning, a striving for security, and struggle for independence. It unites the country against invading forces. He considers his Party is less nationalistic than that of President Obama and would not resort to the killing of leaders that Obama has done. (Evidently referring to the assassination of Osama bin Laden and NATO attempts on Moammar Gadaffi’s life.) “Liberal criticisms about the establishment of the Republic are wrong in the claim that Ataturk did not introduce democracy. Ataturk was a pragmatic and not actually a Kemalist. He understood the times and adapted. Turkey’s divisions have been between left and right with left defined as communist and right defined as capitalist. Now there is a rapid change in democracy in all areas with an increase in human rights.”

Kemal Ataturk’s framed portraits still adorn the walls of public sector rooms and halls. Gigantic banners and posters of his image are noticeable. Prime Minister Erdogan has wisely retained the reverence to Turkey’s George Washington but abruptly replaced Ataturk’s nationalist and statist policies with an agenda more compatible with the global system and more in harmony with democratic dictates.

Nevertheless, the AKP, despite its widespread support, still has severe antagonists. The charge of an ongoing coup against the government has resulted in mass arrests of well known public figures, has divided the National Assembly and disturbed leaders from several sectors of society. In mid-November 2011, after several judicial reviews and hearings, a 264-page indictment accuses 143 suspects, 66 of them in pre-trial detention, with an attempt to overthrow the government.

The indictments have provoked a question: Is Erdogan using tactics similar to those of the military forces, exaggerating threats to squash opposition? Will the trial of civilians and officers associated with Operation Sledgehammer destabilize the stable nation?

Operation Sledgehammer

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists that nobody has been jailed in Turkey because of their profession as a journalist; only due to their membership in an illegal organization. Others are skeptical.

Markar Esayan and his independent Taraf newspaper received credit and fame for exposing the proposed 2007 coup, which had as objectives: undermine the stability of the AKP and create chaos. Esayan would not expose those who presented his newspaper with the documents, but insisted they were authentic and with signatures of known generals. He said plans had been made to bomb two major mosques in Istanbul, assault a military museum by people disguised as fundamentalists, and increase tension with Greece by instigating dogfights between the fighter planes of the two countries over the Aegean Sea. The allegations included shooting down a Turkish plane and blaming it on Greece. Subsequently, he said, prosecutors found supporting documents at military headquarters.

Faik Tunay senses that the revelations spurred citizens to support Erdogan and harmed opposition Parties. Although he believes the alleged coup plotters should be punished, he senses some plotters, especially journalists, have been accused only because of personal association with alleged plotters — guilt by association.

Zaman’s Yusuf Acar said that the “society did not accept reports of military intervention,” but after “armaments in a military home were found to match some terrorist activities, belief became widespread. Changes became apparent when the Prime Minister chaired the Military Council and the General Chief of Staff no longer stood at his side.”

Professor Dr. Yasin Altai claimed that the military often created problems to justify its existence. He has been spied upon and a file prepared on him. Now the civil can try the military.

All top generals, one of whom died, resigned. Some interpreted the resignations as an attempt to create anarchy, others as a protest to the arrests.

What seems to many as an obvious and serious plot against the government, which must be dealt with in a legal manner, is viewed by others as a bumbling proposal by a few who drew others in with arguments and not with definite alliances. All words and no action. So where is the plot?

The decline of Kemal Ataturk’s political course and weakening of the military dictates a new direction. Can that direction continue without a new constitution? What constitution? The subject is being vigorously debated.

The Constitution

A commission, composed of representatives from the three major Parties and a pro-Kurdish group, has been appointed to prepare a Draft Constitution. One limiting factor: each article must be approved unanimously, an impossible task. Without a new constitution, Kemalism cannot be entirely decomposed. Without a new Constitution, it is doubtful Turkey can gain admittance to the European Union.

The Young Civilians want a total change and absolutely new constitution. Bilal Macit noted that it is difficult to change the first three articles of the constitution; secular, socialist, modern. Article 4 of the present Constitution declares the immovability of the founding principles of the Republic defined in the first three Articles and bans any proposals for their modification. Regardless, Macit claims that no division exists between secularists and Islamists. Both want a pluralist society.

If the Constitution is modified, will it contain some references to Sharia Law? The Kemalists and western world have one question in common: To what extent is the AKP an Islamic Party?

The Islamic Party

A consensus rejects the AKP as an Islamist party. Nothing in its agendas, in its cabinet, and in its operations suggests a relation with an Islamic movement.

Nasuhi Güngör, columnist for the Star newspaper, said that the AKP “no longer represents Islamic identity,” and he should know. He admits that the Star, which has a moderate circulation of 130K daily, is owned by businessmen aligned with the government and, although critical at times, still close to the AKP. “Many AKP members practice Islam and believe that forward movement requires affiliation with Islam. However, they don’t go beyond believing that the Islamic religion can play a satisfactory role in society and wanting its adherents to be able to practice the religion in accord with their own rules.” One clue, Güngör noted, is that the AKP has not brought the wearing of the scarf issue to the table, perceiving it as human rights rather than religious issue. If the AKP raised the issue then it would be marked as an Islamic Party.

Although Turkey might not be considered an Islamic run nation, will its identification with the Islamic religion serve as a model for the newly liberated Arab nations?

Turkey as role model

The world expects the Turks to guide the Arab revolutions in the same direction as Erdagon’s movement. Consensus does not adhere to that theme and has Turkey envisioning itself only as another European a nation. Rather than being a role model, Turkey wants absolute friendship with Arab neighbors, a lack of which distracted the Ottoman Empire and impeded progress of the Kemalist programs.

Star Daily journalist Güngör, who is the newspaper’s expert on the Middle East, believes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has close similarities to the incipient AKP, but has never governed and is 30 years behind the AKP operations. He declared that if any of the Islamic parties gain control in the Arab nations, and they have already in Tunisia and Morocco (whose Islamic Party is also named Justice and Development), that country will make a big mistake.

His views on Hamas and Hezbollah are sanguine. Both, he claims, are maneuvered by Iran and are too militaristic. Nevertheless, he recommends that Turkey continue its relationship with Hamas.

Zero problems with neighbors

As others have said: “Turkey’s pursuit of zero problems with neighbors has morphed into zero neighbors without problems.”

All commentators agreed that Turkey has failed in this pursuit. Turkey has problems with neighbors and this is partly due to its own initiatives and independent policies. PM Erdogan’s commendable moral imperative, which identifies friendship with moral agendas rather than with what one nation can do for the other, creates misperceptions and misconceptions.

Misperception of the moral imperative solicits charges of arbitrary judgment of others and intention to establish a neo-Ottoman agenda. Erdogan has a misconception that these policies can succeed in a world of mistrust and self-interest.

Trespassing on Iraq sovereignty by engaging in military attacks on Kurds in Northern Iraq, requesting the resignation of Syria’s President Bashar Assad, demanding Israel apologize for the killing of Turkish citizens during an attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, installing NATO missile radar detection equipment to deter Iran, and refusing to pay compensation to Bulgaria for Ottoman eviction of Bulgarians in eastern Thrace, are only a few examples of Turkey’s conflicts with neighbors.

MHP Parliamentarian Özcan Yeniceri described the policy. “Turkey previously consulted the Pentagon for regulating its relations with Iran, Russia and others. After the fall of the Soviet Union, everything changed, and this allowed Turkey to reach potential. Still, its relations with the U.S. hindered relations with neighboring nations.”

And a host of other problems: resolution of the Kurdish question, entry into the European Union, and engagement with Israel and its principal supporter.

The Kurdish

Strategists outside of Turkey consider the Kurdish insurgency as Turkey’s number one problem. Despite continuous attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), punishing government counterattacks, and arrests of suspected PKK associates, correspondents considered the Kurdish question to be a declining problem. They noted that the Kurdish population is no longer demanding separation, feel more Turkic and sense the government is addressing their grievances. Turkey’s minority of 20 million does not maintain a unique Kurdish language and many dialects are prevalent. As for the Kurds being an organized ethnicity with direct relations in several nations, the Turkish Kurds don’t directly relate to the Kurdish populations in the other nations of Syria, Iraq and Iran. Kurdish irredentism is irrelevant to Turkey’s Kurds.

No longer considered to be a military problem, the Kurdish situation is defined as a civil and human rights problem. Former army colonel Mesut Ulker expressed the opinion succinctly: “It is a civic problem that will be resolved in 2-3 years.”

MHP Parliamentarian Ozcan Yeniceri presented a more rigorous analysis: “One third of the population has Kurdish relatives, intermarriage between ethnicities is high, and Kurds are well integrated. The Kurdish independence problem appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union, when new states formed. Nationalist Kurds asked: ‘Why not a Kurd state?’

“The PKK thought that after reforms, the government would become weak, eventually collapse and the country would divide into several divisions. Demands for democracy and freedom are not essential for the Kurds. They are only a Trojan horse. Nevertheless, the government should acknowledge rightful claims, and the conditions of the Kurds are showing improvement. Demand for a separate Kurdish language to be used in all facets of everyday public life comes from the PKK movement. In response the government has granted a Kurdish language television station, which broadcasts cultural programs.” Dunya TV has a satellite channel, and a footprint that reaches to Kurdish speaking peoples in all adjacent countries.

Ozcan Yemceri believes in equal rights for all ethnicities and private courses for Kurds, in their own language, which the government now allows. He closed with a wry remark: “America might face similar problems with its own minorities,” evidently referring to the multicultural and multilingual aspirations of Hispanic groups.

Apparently, the Turks believe that as their democracy develops it will encompass all minorities and diminish ethnic demands for separation. Developments in the Balkans, Iraq and Spain have not substantiated that belief.

European Union

As a member of the European Customs Union, Turkey has common tariffs in trade with EU nations. Petitioning the European Union for complete admission has faltered. Now, observers note that due to the contrast between Turkey’s growth and strength and a weakening Europe, it might no longer be favorable to Turkey to become a EU member.

Parliamentarian Bilal Macit agreed: “It is not important.”

Dr. Burak Erdenir, Deputy Undersecretary at Ministry for EU affairs, disagreed.
Three reasons for his intransigence:

(1) As a member of the Customs Union, Turkey is part of the decision taking but not part of the decision making.
(2) The European Union has been incorrect in its behavior towards Turkey and that behavior must be corrected.
(3) The EU process is supported by all political Parties

Dr. Erdenir spoke frankly. “EU refusal to grant admission to Turkey is entirely due to prejudice. To achieve candidate status, 35 articles must be approved. Seventeen are constantly blocked. Although Bulgaria and Romania have been given admission, Turkey is refused. The EU believes Turkey is too big, too poor, and too Muslim. The Austrians in particular have a mindset that that equates today’s Turkey with that of the Ottoman Empire 18th century attack on Vienna.

“However, things have changed. Turkey has the sixth largest economy in Europe, 159 universities, and the most stable economy. The EU has lost credibility and behaves dishonestly.”

Israel and America

Commentators condemned Israel for its policies towards the Palestinians and criticized the United States for its support of Israel and for its other Middle East policies. From observations, Israel has little support in Turkey, regardless of Party affiliation.

CHP Parliamentarian Faik Tunay included discussions of U.S. foreign policy as one factor in his Party’s quarrelsome manner. Despite Erdogan’s angry attitude towards Israel, which he supports, he claims the U.S. supports the AKP. His validation – Due to the AKP government, demonstrations against U.S. involvement in Iraq were limited.

MHP Parliamentarian Özcan Yeniceri established Israel and its support by the United States as the prime foreign policy issues. “The American image is deteriorating internationally and includes instability within NATO, in which the US has played a key role. The direction of its fight with Radical Islam and Al Qaeda will soon include all Islam. The U.S. shouldn’t be a military empire, but should base policies on values. U.S. mentors have become the Evangelists and Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.

The U.S. interfered in Iraq and now tries to restrict Iran in its developments. Unlike Iran, the U.S. has the nuclear weapon and has used it, signs of hypocrisy and loss of credibility. The same can apply to Israel. If the U.S. changed its policy in regard to Israel, the region will change drastically. The effort would be a game changer.”

Two industrialists, who manufacture food containers for export to European nations, posed a simple question: ‘Why can’t Israel be satisfied with its nation to the Green Line? Why is it constantly expanding?”

Economy

Officials from TUSKON, the Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists Worldwide, which has offices in major cities worldwide, highlighted Turkey’s economic progress. Since the AKP achieved governance, GDP and exports have tripled, while the inflation rate has fallen from 30 percent to 7.5 percent. Unemployment, which had been 14 percent in 2010, has dropped to 9.5 percent. A GDP of 735 billion dollars places Turkey 17th in the world and 7th in Europe, excluding the Russian federation. An export driven economy has increased exports to 135 billion dollars.

All the statistics are moving in proper directions, and although the inflation rate, interest rate (6%) and unemployment are high by western standards, they are acceptable by Turkish standards. Actually, the real interest rate (interest rate minus inflation) is negative, a deflationary anomaly that was not explained, and could hinder investment. Another major concern is the monotonically increasing negative trade balance, which was 42 billion dollars (2010).

If a fall in the European economy intensifies the negative trade balance, negative real interest rate, and relatively high unemployment rate, Turkey’s growth could come to a screeching halt. The vigorous economy has fragile elements.

Conclusion

Few, if any world leaders, have received as much admiration from the domestic and international public as has Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His open manner, sincerity and moral challenges contrast with the covert, duplicitous and self subscribing attitudes of most world leaders. If his policies are out of step with most nations, they might prove that in the present global environment an independent course is a route to success.

• Europe’s and America’s economies falter. Turkey continues with rapid growth.
• Nations split apart from nationalism. Turkey enhances national identities.
• Western nations sanction Iran. Turkey increases trade with the Islamic state.
• Military control increases in most nations. Military control is constrained in Turkey.
• China and other fast growing nations pursue statist polices. Turkey eschews statism.

As in most nations, continued governing by the AKP depends upon the continued success of its economic policies. With Europe being the primary source for Turkey’s exports, a forecasted faltering of the European Market could drastically affect Turkey. Or will it? Is it possible that Erdogan’s pragmatism will lead Turkey to realign allegiances and markets and shift them to Iran and Russia, trading finished products for energy supplies? Turkey seems to be in the driver’s seat.

But not entirely. The AKP needs prosperity to advance democracy, which will enhance civil and human rights and prevent the electorate from considering Kemalism as an antidote for Turkey’s problems.

Kemalism will soon be proved as either past history or a spoke in the cycles of history. As the wheel turns, will Kemal Ataturk’s visions and policies return and challenge another Turkish Republic? The verdict is still not rendered.

On December 7, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the Beyond the Border Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness Action Plan. The new deal focuses on addressing security threats early, facilitating trade, economic growth and jobs, integrating cross-border law enforcement, as well as improving infrastructure and cyber-security. It will act as a roadmap with different parts being phased in over the next several years. This includes the creation of various pilot projects. Many aspects of the agreement will also depend on the availability of funding from both governments. In addition, the two leaders issued a separate Regulatory Cooperation Council Action Plan that sets out initiatives whereby the U.S. and Canada will seek greater regulatory alignment in the areas of agriculture and food, transportation, environment, health, along with consumer products.

At a Joint News Conference, President Obama declared that, “Canada is key to achieving my goal of doubling American exports and putting folks back to work. And the two important initiatives that we agreed to today will help us do just that.” He went on to say, “we’re agreeing to a series of concrete steps to bring our economies even closer and to improve the security of our citizens.” Obama also added, “we’re going to improve our infrastructure, we’re going to introduce new technologies, we’re going to improve cargo security and screening.” Prime Minister Harper proclaimed that, “These agreements create a new, modern order for a new century. Together, they represent the most significant steps forward in Canada-U.S. cooperation since the North American Free Trade Agreement.” He explained that, “The first agreement merges U.S. and Canadian security concerns with our mutual interest in keeping our border as open as possible to legitimate commerce and travel.” Harper described how, “The second joint initiative will reduce regulatory barriers to trade by streamlining and aligning standards.”

Some of the measures found in the Beyond the Border action plan include conducting joint, integrated threat assessments; improving cooperative law enforcement capacity and national intelligence- and information-sharing; cooperating on research and best practices to prevent and counter homegrown violent extremism; working to jointly prepare for, and respond to, binational disasters and enhancing cross-border critical infrastructure protection and resilience. Other facets of the deal will work towards adopting an integrated cargo security strategy; implementing entry and exit verification; establishing and verifying the identity of foreign travellers to North America; better aligning Canadian and U.S. programs for low-risk travellers and installing radio frequency identification technology at key border crossings.

As part of the agreement, both countries will “implement two Next-Generation pilot projects to create integrated teams in areas such as intelligence and criminal investigations, and an intelligence-led uniformed presence between ports of entry.” This will build on past joint law enforcement initiatives such as the Shiprider program and the Integrated Border Enforcement Teams. The Next-Generation pilot projects are scheduled to be deployed by the summer of 2012. In September, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder revealed plans that would allow law enforcement officers to operate on both sides of the border. He announced that, “the creation of ‘NextGen’ teams of cross-designated officers would allow us to more effectively identify, assess, and interdict persons and organizations involved in transnational crime.” Holder also commented that, “In conjunction with the other provisions included in the Beyond the Border Initiative, such a move would enhance our cross-border efforts and advance our information-sharing abilities.”

In his article, How the U.S. blackmailed Canada, Gar Pardy stressed that as part of a North American security zone, “Canadian security institutions will be more closely integrated with those of the United States.” While addressing the Beyond the Border declaration and the subsequent action plan, he highlighted the fact that, “these are not formal treaties or even formal agreements, although there could be greater formality in the future.” Pardy also noted, “Nowhere in the documentation resulting from the two meetings are there suggestions the people of Canada will be provided with detailed information on which judgments can be made on the wisdom of this consensual agreement negotiated in the backrooms of both capitals.” Instead he cautioned that, “the troublesome details implicit in the agreement will be hidden behind the wall of national security.” Pardy argued that in the process, “Canada sold its national security independence in exchange for hoped-for minor changes to American border restrictions.” He concluded that, “It is not an overstatement to suggest the United States blackmailed the government of Canada into making this deal. It was the American way or no way.”

The Council of Canadians have also strongly rejected the new border deal. They have challenged the notion that, “proper privacy protections can be achieved between Canada and the U.S. without significantly diluting stronger Canadian laws and norms.” Citing privacy concerns associated with the U.S. Patriot Act, the organization emphasized that, “the proposed new entry-exit system for travelers needs the greatest scrutiny by Canadian parliamentarians, security and privacy experts.” The Council of Canadians also criticized, “the government for hiding behind a sham public consultation and implying that this should clear the way for implementation of the action plan.” In August, the Conservative government released two reports which summarized online public input received concerning regulatory cooperation, as well as perimeter security and economic competitiveness. While improving the movement of trade and travel was the priority for business groups, many individuals expressed concerns over the loss of sovereignty, along with the protection of personal information.

When it comes to regulatory convergence, Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians agreed that, “Standardization can be a good thing when standards are high,” She conceded, “The problem is standards aren’t higher in the U.S. in many cases.” Barlow also acknowledged that, “Already Health Canada and other agencies consider harmonization with U.S. standards to be a more important consideration than the real safety of our food. This perimeter deal cements that skewed priority list.” There are fears that it could erode any independent Canadian regulatory capacity and weaken existing regulations. Part of the SPP agenda called for improving regulatory cooperation which resulted in Canada raising pesticide limits on fruits and vegetables. Regulatory integration threatens Canadian sovereignty and democracy. Further harmonization with the U.S. could result in Canada losing control over its ability to regulate food safety. This could also lead to a race to the bottom with respect to other regulatory standards.

By all accounts, big business is the winner in the new trade and security perimeter deal. Maude Barlow explained that, “this process has been set up to accommodate one sector of our community and that is big business.” In advance of the action plans being unveiled to the public, business stakeholders were briefed on the specifics. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives, an organization that lobbies the government on behalf of Canada’s largest corporations has given it their stamp of approval. The U.S. and Canadian Chambers of Commerce also applauded the new vision for border and regulatory cooperation. When it comes to negotiations on the border security agreement, Barlow confirmed that, “the big business community was the only sector at the table with government and guided the process from the beginning.” This was also the case with the now defunct SPP. Big business was a driving force behind the initiative which led to the creation of the North American Competitiveness Council to ensure that corporate interests were being addressed.

In her article, Maude Barlow also warned that when it comes to the perimeter deal, “Canada is essentially giving up policy control in the key areas of privacy, security, immigration and surveillance in order to entice the U.S. to loosen controls at the border.” She stated, “it is likely to lead to a wholesale replacement of Canadian privacy and security standards with American ones, set by Homeland Security.” When it comes to information being collected and stored, Barlow questioned whether it will be, “used as a form of social control, to identify not terrorists, but activists and dissenters of government policy.” She insisted that, “We must call on our government to create a full public and Parliamentary debate before this deal becomes operational.” From the beginning, the whole process has lacked transparency with no congressional or parliamentary oversight. This has drawn comparisons to the SPP which was shrouded in secrecy and fueled by fears over the loss of sovereignty that finally led to its downfall. We can only hope that this latest endeavour will meet the same fate. With the 2012 U.S. election cycle about to get into full swing, the new bilateral deal could get lost in the shuffle.

While the perimeter agreement is being sold as vital to the safety and prosperity of Canadians and Americans alike, there is little doubt that it will mean a tradeoff between sovereignty and security. Any deal which gives the Department of Homeland Security more personal information poses a serious risk to privacy rights. As both countries move forward, perimeter security will be further defined and dominated by American interests. This could force Canada to comply with any new U.S. security measures, regardless of the dangers they may pose to civil liberties. A North American Homeland Security perimeter goes well beyond keeping people safe from any perceived threats. It is a means to secure trade, resources, as well as corporate interests and is a pretext for control over the continent. Ultimately, the U.S. wants the final say on who is allowed to enter and who is allowed to leave.

The occupations of public space have already done a great deal to lift the veil of lies.  People are now more aware than ever that the wealth divide is caused by a rigged economic system of crony capitalism and that we can create a fair economy that works for all Americans.  We are also aware that many of our fellow citizens are ready to take action – extreme action of sleeping outside in the cold in a public park.  And we also now know that we have the power to shift the debate and force the economic and political elites to listen to us. In just a few months we have made a difference.

Occupying public space involves a lot of resources and energy that could be spent educating, organizing and mobilizing people in much greater numbers.  There is a lot to do to end corporate rule and the challenges of occupying public space can divert our attention and resources from other responsibilities we have as a movement.

When we were organizing the Occupation of Washington, DC – before the occupation of Wall Street began – we were in conversation with movements around the world.  The Spanish Indignados told us that an occupation should last no more than two weeks.  After that it becomes a diversion from the political objectives.  The occupation begins to spend its time dealing with poverty, homelessness, inadequately treated mental illness and addiction – this has been experienced by occupies across the country.

Occupying for a short time accomplishes many of the objectives of holding public space – the political dialogue is affected, people are mobilized and all see that fellow citizens can effectively challenge the corporate state.  Staying for a lengthy period continues to deepen these goals but the impacts are more limited and the costs get higher.

What to do next?  The Occupy Movement needs to bring participatory democracy to communities.  Occupiers should develop an aggressive organizing plan for their city.  Divide the city and appoint people to be responsible for different areas of the city.  Depending on how many people you have make these areas as small as possible.  Develop plans for house-to-house campaigns where you knock on doors, provide literature, ask what you can do to make their lives better.  Do they need snow removed?  Clothes?  If so, get the occupy team to fulfill their needs, find used clothes, clean their yard – whatever you can do to help.  This shows community and builds relationships.

Plan a march through the different communities in the city.  Make it a spectacle. Have a marching band.  Don’t have one – reach out to local school bands. Organize them.  Create floats, images and signs.  Display yourselves and your message.  Hand out literature as you march. Let people know what the occupy stands for, that they should join us in building a better world for them and their families.

Plan public General Assemblies in communities across the city.  Teach people the General Assembly process, the hand signals, how to stack speakers, how to listen and reach consensus.  Learn the local issues.  Solve local problems.  Again, build a community that works together to solve problems.

Let people know about the National Occupation of Washington DC (NOW DC), the American Spring beginning on March 30th.  Organize people to come, share rides, hire buses, walk, ride a bike – get people to the nation’s capital to show the united force of the people against the rule of money.  This will be an opportunity to display our solidarity and demand that the people, not money, rule.

How rapidly a movement makes progress is hard to predict. It is never a constant upswing of growth and progress. We may be in for a sprint, or more likely, a marathon with hurdles. If you are hoping for a sprint, note that the deep corruption of the government and the economy has left both weaker than is publicly acknowledged. It may be a hollowed out shell ready to fall.

But this may also take years to accomplish.  Take the timeline of the Civil Rights movement: in 1955 Rosa Parks sits in the front of the bus, not until five years later in 1960, do the lunch counter sit-ins begin. Not until three years later in 1963 does Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lead a march on Washington for the “I have a Dream” speech. No doubt the time between Rosa Parks and the lunch counter sit-ins and Civil Rights Act passing in 1964 seemed slow to those involved.  Looking back it was rapid, transformational change.  In fact, the movement grew in fits and starts and had roots decades of activity before the 1950s.  In those times of seeming lull, work was being done to educate and organize people that led to the big spurts of progress.

Older movements, when communication was slower, have taken even longer. The women’s suffrage movement held its first convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY.  Twenty years later, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1913, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns formed the National Women’s Party to work for a constitutional amendment to give women the vote. Finally, in 1919 the federal woman’s suffrage amendment, originally written by Susan B. Anthony and introduced in Congress in 1878, was passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate, sent to the states for ratification and signed into law one year later.

With mass media, and especially the new democratized media of social networks, the Internet, anonymous leaks and independent media, it is very likely the end of the rule of money will come more quickly.  If we focus on our goal, act with intention and use our energy and resources wisely victory will come sooner.

Our challenge to corporate power has roots.  The Project on Corporations Law and Democracy was founded in 1995.  In 1999 the protests against the World Trade Organization occurred in Seattle. In 2000, long-time crusader against corporate power, Ralph Nader, ran his first full presidential campaign and continues to challenge corporatism.  This decade has been called the “Great Turning,” which Joanna Macy has defined as “the shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.” “America Beyond Capitalism” by Gar Alperovitz, just printed its second edition, five years after the first, documenting the evolution of the developing democratized economy. These are some of the foundations on which the Occupy Movement is building as the unfairness and insecurity of corporate capitalism becomes evident to all. Our roots are deeper than the few months of our existence.

The elites are foolish to think they will stop this movement by closing occupations.  The Occupy Movement will evolve in new and unpredictable ways that will make the elites wish for the days of mere public encampments. The 1% should know they will be held accountable. The people have found their voice and will not be silenced. The era of the rule of money is nearing its end.

The Occupy Movement, fueled by the indignation of vast numbers of people who are increasingly disenfranchised and displaced by the modern marketplace economy, recognizes the primacy of place in social change that moves us toward a just and sustainable future. This aspect of the movement is articulated by the physical occupation of public spaces, and more recently of homes that have been foreclosed with their occupants evicted by a corrupt banking system.

The primacy of place in the movement reminds us that when people are denied access to the primary productivity of the land and the seas, they are relegated to a status of enforced dependency on an abstract marketplace primarily constructed to serve the interests of the rich and the powerful. The Movement’s emphasis on space also reminds us that we cannot live entirely within the realm of the abstract idea of the marketplace. We need real food, non-virtual water, wearable clothing, and shelter — all made available to us through the natural processes of the earth, captured and molded by human effort.

In what is perhaps a first step in (re)connecting with place in a world where the fantasy of an endlessly growing and satisfying marketplace is crumbling, the Occupy Movement articulates vital needs for human dignity: the need for efficacy — to be heard and to have one’s welfare and voice taken seriously within collective processes of decision making and action — and the need for dignified and adequate means to obtain physical sustenance to satisfy one’s basic needs. Both of these needs converge in the concept and construct of place.

Reviving place as a focal point of human life and community is essential to social justice and sustainability. When I invoke place in this context, I conceptualize it as a nexus of physical space (both the natural world and the built environment) and community life (that includes economic activity, interpersonal relationships between people and between people and environments, cultural identity and expression, and governance processes). We make our places, and our places make us. Place is a reciprocal relationship that continually emerges through the forces of nature and human activity.

In the techno-world of modern industrial societies, many of us have lost sight of place as an organizing principle in our lives. We find that virtual spaces may indeed satisfy many of our needs as environments for building social bonds and friendships and for purchasing just about anything we might need or want (as long as we have the money to do so, of course), but we still rely physically upon tangible places that provide the necessities of life, even if our needs are mediated and obscured by the modern phenomenon of the marketplace.

Whether we recognize it or not, we are intimately connected to places, though in the globalized world, the reciprocal bonds between people and place, once paramount to the processes of community prosperity and health, have largely been broken. We abuse the land and the sea, sometimes without even knowing it, but because we need nature, we cannot completely sever our ties to places.

Take, for example, our water. It comes to us through processes of the earth that occur in some particular place, even though most of us know little of the detail of how water appears in our taps. Food offers another example. Since we, as yet, only metaphorically eat words, our food must be raised, cultivated, hunted, or gathered from particular places with particular environmental characteristics, and most often it must be cared for and harvested by people living in those environments. Both food and water derive from particular social and ecological contexts. They are not abstractions, and their concreteness bonds us with natural and social processes that are hidden behind the facades of grocery store shelves and Internet shopping malls — the “places” where we make the purchases that support the way we live and provide the things we need to stay alive.

We live a paradox in which intimate physical relationships to nature and social processes of production are juxtaposed with ignorance and neglect of the places and people who sustain us. Our very lives are in the hands of people and ecologies that may be entirely foreign to us intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. We may never see the face of one person who has picked the bananas we eat throughout our lives, but we are connected to the banana pickers and to the ecology of the banana fields from which the fruit comes. Through our bodily existence and our own internal ecologies, we are connected to others and nature. In many ways, we are others and nature, for without them we would cease to exist.

And as human-caused depletion and damage of the natural world continues, the threat has become ever present: we may indeed cease to exist without a radical (re)conceptualization of, and (re)connection to, place.

Many indigenous societies have conceptualized the fundamental relationship between humans and nature as reciprocal, believing that people must respect and care for nature if nature is to provide for people. We cannot allow the continued plunder of the land and the sea to take place in our name, masked behind images of clean and orderly grocery store shelves, spotless storefront windows, and online shopping centers. I’m also convinced that we won’t protect that which we don’t know, and consequently don’t value. It takes years of paying attention and continual, mutual interaction to know a place, both the human community that is part of the place and the natural world within which that community is embedded. Growing into a place is a long term process of relationship building, and to do it well, we will need to learn to stay in place. In a world where careerists are rewarded for their willingness to relocate, this is no small challenge.

But we will have to stay put if we are to learn what we need to know to live sustainably on the land. To recover the health of our damaged places, we will need to learn what can and can’t be done sustainably within particular environments, and we will have to end the process of robbing that which we need from other places because as we deplete distant places, we threaten the survival of other people and the health of the biosphere — we behave as tyrants, and we threaten both nature and our own existence. We will need to (re)learn the art of neighborliness and of working together in spite of our differences, and we will need to make decisions embedded in a context of our love for each other and for place — and rooted in a desire to sustain that which we love beyond our short lifetimes. It’s time to rejoin the community of life, to belong in mutually sustaining ways. We need to (re)construct places in ways that bring to an end this era of loneliness.

The process will not be easy, especially because so much social power has been concentrated for so long in so few hands. But at least people around the world are recognizing this reality and working to change it. People are seeing the concentration of power and wealth itself as perhaps the central driver for social injustice in the globalized world. This recognition is a huge step in the right direction. It’s also important to recognize that virtually all of the processes that contribute to (re)building healthy places also serve to devolve social power to local contexts.

The (re)conceptualization and (re)construction of place can be both challenging and exhilarating. It’s an endeavor that can take many forms that coalesce in a long term process of articulating who we are in place — community gardens; potluck dinners with neighbors; bioregional resource management; reading, study, and discussion circles; governance work in local politics or in community organizations; farmers markets; community art and theater projects, formal and informal education; developing and using local currencies; localized production, retail, and banking; localized renewable energy generation; and simply authentic listening among friends and neighbors – any activity that helps to build a sense of community and to increase the provision of basic needs from localized sources. Community building and (re)localization of our economies will help us build the resiliency that we will need to weather the converging crises of climate change, peak oil production, and economic instability.

The Occupy Movement may well be the introduction to a new story about who we are in place. The plot line for this story will be grounded in communities and bioregions, not in the marketplace. And it’s a story for which there is no final draft. Chapters will be written and rewritten over time, and if we can write them in ways that continually deepen our efficacy, improve the health of our environment, and strengthen reciprocal ties between ourselves and our places, we just might come to occupy a place called home.

•  This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.

After going from defeat to defeat on the periphery of world power and not satisfied with running treasury-busting deficits in pursuit of empire building against economically weak countries, Obama has embraced a policy of encirclement and provocations against China, the world’s second largest economy and the US’s most important creditor, and Russia, the European Union’s principle oil and gas provider and the world’s second most powerful nuclear weapons power.

This paper addresses the Obama regime’s highly irrational and world-threatening escalation of imperial militarism. We examine the global military, economic and domestic political context that gives rise to these policies. We then examine the multiple points of conflict and intervention in which Washington is engaged, from Pakistan, Iran, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba and beyond. We will then analyze the rationale for military escalation against Russia and China as part of a new offensive moving beyond the Arab world (Syria, Libya) and in the face of the declining economic position of the EU and the US in the global economy. We will then outline the strategies of a declining empire, nurtured on perpetual wars, facing global economic decline, domestic discredit and a working population reeling from the long-term, large-scale dismantling of its basic social programs.

The Turn from Militarism in the Periphery to Global Military Confrontation

November 2011 is a moment of great historical import: Obama declared two major policy positions, both having tremendous strategic consequences affecting competing world powers.

Obama pronounced a policy of military encirclement of China based on stationing a maritime and aerial armada facing the Chinese coast – an overt policy designed to weaken and disrupt China’s access to raw materials and commercial and financial ties in Asia. Obama’s declaration that Asia is the priority region for US military expansion, base-building and economic alliances was directed against China, challenging Beijing in its own backyard. Obama’s iron fist policy statement, addressed to the Australian Parliament, was crystal clear in defining US imperial goals.

Our enduring interests in the region [Asia Pacific] demands our enduring presence in this region … The United States is a Pacific power and we are here to stay … As we end today’s wars [i.e. the defeats and retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan] … I have directed my national security team to make our presence and missions in the Asia Pacific a top priority … As a result, reduction in US defense spending will not … come at the expense of the Asia Pacific.¹

The precise nature of what Obama called our “presence and mission” was underlined by the new military agreement with Australia to dispatch warships, warplanes and 2500 marines to the northernmost city of Australia (Darwin) directed at China. Secretary of State Clinton has spent the better part of 2011 making highly provocative overtures to Asian countries that have maritime border conflicts with China. Clinton has forcibly injected the US into these disputes, encouraging and exacerbating the demands of Vietnam, Philippines, and Brunei in the South China Sea. Even more seriously, Washington is bolstering its military ties and sales with Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, as well as increasing the presence of battleships, nuclear submarines and over-flights of war planes along China’s coastal waters. In line with the policy of military encirclement and provocation, the Obama-Clinton regime is promoting Asian multi-lateral trade agreements that exclude China and privilege US multi-national corporations, bankers and exporters, dubbed the “Trans-Pacific Partnership.” It currently includes mostly smaller countries, but Obama has hopes of enticing Japan and Canada to join …

Obama’s presence at the APEC meeting of East Asian leaders and his visit to Indonesia in November 2011 all revolve around efforts to secure US hegemony. Obama-Clinton hope to counter the relative decline of US economic links in the face of the geometrical growth of trade and investment ties between East Asia and China.

A most recent example of Obama-Clinton’s delusional, but destructive, efforts to deliberately disrupt China’s economic ties in Asia, is taking place in Myanmar (Burma). Clinton’s December 2011 visit to Myanmar was preceded by a decision by the Thein Sein regime to suspend a China Power Investment-funded dam project in the north of the country. According to official confidential documents released by WilkiLeaks the “Burmese NGO’s, which organized and led the campaign against the dam, were heavily funded by the US government.”² This and other provocative activity and Clinton’s speeches condemning Chinese “tied aid” pale in comparison with the long-term, large-scale interests which link Myanmar with China. China is Myanmar’s biggest trading partner and investor, including six other dam projects. Chinese companies are building new highways and rail lines across the country, opening southwestern China up for Burmese products and China is constructing oil pipelines and ports. There is a powerful dynamic of mutual economic interests that will not be disturbed by one dispute.³ Clinton’s critique of China’s billion-dollar investments in Myanmar’s infrastructure is one of the most bizarre in world history, coming in the aftermath of Washington’s brutal eight-year military presence in Iraq which destroyed $500 billion dollars of Iraqi infrastructure, according to Baghdad official estimates. Only a delusional administration could imagine that rhetorical flourishes, a three-day visit and the bankrolling of an NGO is an adequate counter-weight to deep economic ties linking Myanmar to China. The same delusional posture underlies the entire repertoire of policies informing the Obama regime’s efforts to displace China’s predominant role in Asia.

While any one policy adopted by the Obama regime does not, in itself, present an immediate threat to peace, the cumulative impact of all these policy pronouncements and the projections of military power add up to an all out comprehensive effort to isolate, intimidate and degrade China’s rise as a regional and global power. Military encirclement and alliances, exclusion of China in proposed regional economic associations, partisan intervention in regional maritime disputes and positioning technologically advanced warplanes, are all aimed to undermine China’s competitiveness and to compensate for US economic inferiority via closed political and economic networks.

Clearly White House military and economic moves and US Congressional anti-China demagogy are aimed at weakening China’s trading position and forcing its business-minded leaders into privileging US banking and business interests over and above their own enterprises. Pushed to its limits, Obama’s prioritizing a big military push could lead to a catastrophic rupture in US-Chinese economic relations. This would result in dire consequences, especially but not exclusively, on the US economy and particularly its financial system. China holds over $1.5 trillion dollars in US debt, mainly Treasury Notes, and each year purchases from $200 to $300 billion in new issues, a vital source in financing the US deficit. If Obama provokes a serious threat to China’s security interests and Beijing is forced to respond, it will not be military but economic retaliation: the sell-off of a few hundred billion dollars in T-notes and the curtailment of new purchases of US debt. The US deficit will skyrocket, its credit ratings will descend to ‘junk,’ and the financial system will ‘tremble onto collapse.’ Interest rates to attract new buyers of US debt will approach double digits. Chinese exports to the US will suffer and losses will incur due to the devaluation of the T-notes in Chinese hands. China has been diversifying its markets around the world and its huge domestic market could probably absorb most of what China loses abroad in the course of a pull-back from the US market.

While Obama strays across the Pacific to announce his military threats to China and strives to economically isolate China from the rest of Asia, the US economic presence is fast fading in what used to be its “backyard”: Quoting one Financial Times journalist, “China is the only show [in town] for Latin America.”⁴ China has displaced the US and the EU as Latin America’s principle trading partner; Beijing has poured billions in new investments and provides low interest loans.

China’s trade with India, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan and Vietnam is increasing at a far faster rate than that of the US. The US effort to build an imperial-centered security alliance in Asia is based on fragile economic foundations. Even Australia, the anchor and linchpin of the US military thrust in Asia, is heavily dependent on mineral exports to China. Any military interruption would send the Australian economy into a tailspin.

The US economy is in no condition to replace China as a market for Asian or Australian commodity and manufacturing exports. The Asian countries must be acutely aware that there is no future advantage in tying themselves to a declining, highly militarized, empire. Obama and Clinton deceive themselves if they think they can entice Asia into a long-term alliance. The Asian’s are simply using the Obama regime’s friendly overtures as a ‘tactical device,’ a negotiating ploy, to leverage better terms in securing maritime and territorial boundaries with China.

Washington is delusional if it believes that it can convince Asia to break long-term large-scale lucrative economic ties to China in order to join an exclusive economic association with such dubious prospects. Any ‘reorientation’ of Asia, from China to the US, would require more than the presence of an American naval and airborne armada pointed at China. It would require the total restructuring of the Asian countries’ economies, class structure, and political and military elite. The most powerful economic entrepreneurial groups in Asia have deep and growing ties with China/Hong Kong, especially among the dynamic transnational Chinese business elites in the region. A turn toward Washington entails a massive counter-revolution, which substitutes colonial ‘traders’ (compradors) for established entrepreneurs. A turn to the US would require a dictatorial elite willing to cut strategic trading and investment linkages, displacing millions of workers and professionals. As much as some US-trained Asian military officers, economists, and former Wall Street financiers and billionaires might seek to ‘balance’ a US military presence with Chinese economic power, they must realize that ultimately advantage resides in working out an Asian solution.

The age of Asian “comprador capitalists” willing to sell out national industry and sovereignty in exchange for privileged access to US markets is ancient history. Whatever the boundless enthusiasm for conspicuous consumerism and Western lifestyles, which Asia and China’s new rich mindlessly celebrate, whatever the embrace of inequalities and savage capitalist exploitation of labor, there is recognition that the past history of US and European dominance precluded the growth and enrichment of an indigenous bourgeoisie and middle class. The speeches and pronouncements of Obama and Clinton reek of nostalgia for a past of neo-colonial overseers and comprador collaborators – a mindless delusion. Their attempts at political realism, in finally recognizing Asia as the economic pivot of the present world order, takes a bizarre turn in imagining that military posturing and projections of armed force will reduce China to a marginal player in the region.

Obama’s Escalation of Confrontation with Russia

The Obama regime has launched a major frontal military thrust on Russia’s borders. The US has moved forward missile sites and Air Force bases in Poland, Rumania, Turkey, Spain, Czech Republic and Bulgaria: Patriot PAC-3 anti-aircraft missile complexes in Poland; advanced radar AN/TPY-2 in Turkey; and several missile (SM-3 IA) loaded warships in Spain are among the prominent weapons encircling Russia, most only minutes away from it strategic heartland. Secondly, the Obama regime has mounted an all-out effort to secure and expand US military bases in Central Asia among former Soviet republics. Thirdly, Washington, via NATO, has launched major economic and military operations against Russia’s major trading partners in North Africa and the Middle East. The NATO war against Libya, which ousted the Gaddafi regime, has paralyzed or nullified multi-billion dollar Russian oil and gas investments, arms sales and substituted a NATO puppet for the former Russia-friendly regime.

The UN-NATO economic sanctions and US-Israeli clandestine terrorist activity aimed at Iran has undermined Russia’s lucrative billion-dollar nuclear trade and joint oil ventures. NATO, including Turkey, backed by the Gulf monarchical dictatorships, has implemented harsh sanctions and funded terrorist assaults on Syria, Russia’s last remaining ally in the region and where it has a sole naval facility (Tartus) on the Mediterranean Sea. Russia’s previous collaboration with NATO in weakening its own economic and security position is a product of the monumental misreading of NATO and especially Obama’s imperial policies. Russian President Medvedev and his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov mistakenly assumed (like Gorbachev and Yeltsin before them) that backing US-NATO policies against Russia’s trading partners would result in some sort of “reciprocity”: US dismantling its offensive “missile shield” on its frontiers and support for Russia’s admission into the World Trade Organization. Medvedev, following his liberal pro-western illusions, fell into line and backed US-Israeli sanctions against Iran, believing the tales of a “nuclear weapons program.” Then Lavrov fell for the NATO line of “no fly zones to protect Libyan civilian lives” and voted in favor, only to feebly “protest,” much too late, that NATO was “exceeding its mandate” by bombing Libya into the Middle Ages and installing a pro-NATO puppet regime of rogues and fundamentalists. Finally when the US aimed a cleaver at Russia’s heartland by pushing ahead with an all-out effort to install missile launch sites 5 minutes by air from Moscow while organizing mass and armed assaults on Syria, did the Medvedev-Lavrov duet awake from its stupor and oppose UN sanctions. Medvedev threatened to abandon the nuclear missile reduction treaty (START) and to place medium-range missiles with 5 minute launch-time from Berlin, Paris and London.

Medvedev-Lavrov’s policy of consolidation and co-operation based on Obama’s rhetoric of “resetting relations” invited aggressive empire building: Each capitulation led to a further aggression. As a result, Russia is surrounded by missiles on its western frontier; it has suffered losses among its major trading partners in the Middle East and faces US bases in southwest and Central Asia.

Belatedly Russian officials have moved to replace the delusional Medvedev for the realist Putin, as next President. This shift to a political realist has predictably evoked a wave of hostility toward Putin in all the Western media. Obama’s aggressive policy to isolate Russia by undermining independent regimes has, however, not affected Russia’s status as a nuclear weapons power. It has only heightened tensions in Europe and perhaps ended any future chance of peaceful nuclear weapons reduction or efforts to secure a UN Security Council consensus on issues of peaceful conflict resolution. Washington, under Obama-Clinton, has turned Russia from a pliant client to a major adversary.

Putin looks to deepening and expanding ties with the East, namely China, in the face of threats from the West. The combination of Russian advanced weapons technology and energy resources and Chinese dynamic manufacturing and industrial growth are more than a match for crisis-ridden EU-USA economies wallowing in stagnation.

Obama’s military confrontation toward Russia will greatly prejudice access to Russian raw materials and definitively foreclose any long-term strategic security agreement, which would be useful in lowering the deficit and reviving the US economy.

Between Realism and Delusion: Obama’s Strategic Realignment

Obama’s recognition that the present and future center of political and economic power is moving inexorably to Asia, was a flash of political realism. After a lost decade of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars in military adventures on the margins and periphery of world politics, Washington has finally discovered that is not where the fate of nations, especially Great Powers, will be decided, except in a negative sense – of bleeding resources over lost causes. Obama’s new realism and priorities apparently are now focused on Southeast and Northeast Asia, where dynamic economies flourish, markets are growing at a double digit rate, investors are ploughing tens of billions in productive activity and trade is expanding at three times the rate of the US and the EU.

But Obama’s ‘New Realism’ is blighted by entirely delusional assumptions, which undermine any serious effort to realign US policy.

In the first place Obama’s effort to ‘enter’ into Asia is via a military build-up and not through a sharpening and upgrading of US economic competitiveness. What does the US produce for the Asian countries that will enhance its market share? Apart from arms, airplanes and agriculture, the US has few competitive industries. The US would have to comprehensively re-orient its economy, upgrade skilled labor, and transfer billions from “security” and militarism to applied innovations. But Obama works within the current military-Zionist-financial complex: He knows no other and is incapable of breaking with it.

Second, Obama-Clinton operate under the delusion that the US can exclude China or minimize its role in Asia, a policy that is undercut by the huge and growing investment and presence of all the major US multi-national corporations in China, who use it as an export platform to Asia and the rest of the world.

The US military build-up and policy of intimidation will only force China to downgrade its role as creditor financing the US debt, a policy China can pursue because the US market, while still important, is declining, as China expands its presence in its domestic, Asian, Latin American and European markets.

What once appeared to be New Realism is now revealed to be the recycling of Old Delusions: the notion that the US can return to being the supreme Pacific Power it was after World War Two. The US attempts to return to Pacific dominance under Obama-Clinton with a crippled economy, with the overhang of an over-militarized economy, and with major strategic handicaps. Over the past decade the United States foreign policy has been at the beck and call of Israel’s fifth column (the Israel “lobby”). The entire US political class is devoid of common, practical sense and national purpose. They are immersed in troglodyte debates over “indefinite detentions” and “mass immigrant expulsions”. Worse, all are on the payrolls of private corporations who sell in the US and invest in China.

Why would Obama abjure costly wars in the unprofitable periphery and then promote the same military metaphysics at the dynamic center of the world economic universe? Does Barack Obama and his advisers believe he is the Second Coming of Admiral Commodore Perry, whose 19th century warships and blockades forced Asia open to Western trade? Does he believe that military alliances will be the first stage to a subsequent period of privileged economic entry?

Does Obama believe that his regime can blockade China, as Washington did to Japan in the lead up to World War Two? It’s too late. China is much more central to the world economy, too vital even to the financing of the US debt, too bonded up with the Forbes Five Hundred multi-national corporations. To provoke China, to even fantasize about economic “exclusion” to bring down China, is to pursue policies that will totally disrupt the world economy, first and foremost the US economy!

Conclusion

Obama’s ‘crackpot realism,’ his shift from wars in the Muslim world to military confrontation in Asia, has no intrinsic worth and poses extraordinary extrinsic costs. The military methods and economic goals are totally incompatible and beyond the capacity of the US, as it is currently constituted. Washington’s policies will not ‘weaken’ Russia or China, even less intimidate them. Instead it will encourage both to adopt more adversarial positions, making it less likely that they lend a hand to Obama’s sequential wars on behalf of Israel. Already Russia has sent warships to its Syrian port, refused to support an arms embargo against Syria and Iran, and (in retrospect) criticized the NATO war against Libya. China and Russia have far too many strategic ties with the world economy to suffer any great losses from a series of US military outposts and “exclusive” alliances. Russia can aim just as many deadly nuclear missiles at the West as the US can mount from its bases in Eastern Europe.

In other words, Obama’s military escalation will not change the nuclear balance of power, but will bring Russia and China into a closer and deeper alliance. Gone are the days of Kissinger-Nixon’s “divide and conquer” strategy pitting US-Chinese trade agreements against Russian arms. Washington has a totally exaggerated significance of the current maritime spats between China and its neighbors. What unites them in economic terms is far more important in the medium and long-run. China’s Asian economic ties will erode any tenuous military links to the US.

Obama’s “crackpot realism” views the world market through military lenses. Military arrogance toward Asia has led to a rupture with Pakistan, its most compliant client regime in South Asia. NATO deliberately slaughtered 24 Pakistani soldiers and thumbed their nose at the Pakistani generals, while China and Russia condemned the attack and gained influence.

In the end, the military and exclusionary posture toward China will fail. Washington will overplay its hand and frighten its business-oriented erstwhile Asian partners who only want to play off a US military presence to gain tactical economic advantage. They certainly do not want a new US instigated Cold War dividing and weakening the dynamic intra-Asian trade and investment. Obama and his minions will quickly learn that Asia’s current leaders do not have permanent allies — only permanent interests. In the final analysis, China figures prominently in configuring a new Asia-centric world economy. Washington may claim to have a ‘permanent Pacific presence,’ but until it demonstrates it can take care of its “basic business at home,” like arranging its own finances and balancing its current account deficits, the US Naval command may end up renting its naval facilities to Asian exporters and shippers, transporting goods for them, and protecting them by pursuing pirates, contrabandists and narco-traffickers. Come to think about it, Obama might reduce the US trade deficit with Asia by renting out the Seventh Fleet to patrol the Straits, instead of wasting US taxpayer money bullying successful Asian economic powers.

1. CNN.com, Nov. 16, 2011.
2. Financial Times, Dec. 2, 2011, p. 2.
3. FT, December 2, 2011, p.2.
4. FT, Nov. 23, 2011, p.6.

A slump occurs when “capacity outstrips demand” – that is to say, when people can no longer afford to buy all that is being produced. This is inevitable in a capitalist system, where productive capacity is privately owned, because the global working class as a whole are never paid enough to purchase all that they collectively produce. As a result, unsold goods begin to pile up, and production facilities – factories and the like – are closed down. People are thrown out of work as a result, their incomes decline, and the problem gets worse. This is exactly what we are seeing happen today.

In these circumstances, avenues for profitable investment dry up – the holders of capital can find nowhere safe to invest their money. For them, this is the crisis – not the unemployment, the famine, the poverty etc (which, after all, remain an endemic feature of the global capitalist economy even during the ‘boom times’, albeit on a somewhat reduced scale). The governments under their control – through ownership of the media, currency manipulation and control of the economy – must then set to work creating new profitable investment opportunities.

One way they do this is by killing off public services, and thus creating opportunities for investment in the private companies that replace them. In 1980s Britain, Margaret Thatcher privatised steel, coal, gas, electricity, water, and much else besides. In the short term, this plunged millions into unemployment, as factories and mines were closed down, and in the long term it resulted in massive price rises for basic services. But it had its intended effect – it provided valuable investment opportunities (for those with capital to spare) at a time when such opportunities were scarce, and created a long term source of fabulous profits. This summer, for example, saw the formerly publicly owned gas company Centrica hiking its prices by another 18% to bring in a £1.3billion profit. The raised prices will see many thousands more pensioners than usual die from the cold this winter as a result, but gas – like all commodities in capitalist society – is not there to provide heat, but to increase capital.

In the global South, privatisation was harsher still. Bodies like the IMF and the World Bank used the leverage provided by the debt-extortion mechanism (whereby interest rates were hiked on unpayable loans that had rarely benefited the population, often taken out by corrupt rulers imposed by Western governments in the first place) to force governments across Asia, Africa and Latin America to cut public spending on even basics such as health and education, along with agricultural subsidies. This contributed massively to the staggering rates of infant mortality and deaths from preventable disease, as well as to the AIDS epidemic now raging across Africa. But again the desired end for those imposing the policies was achieved, as new markets were created and holders of giant capital reserves could now invest in private companies to provide the services no longer available from the state. The profit system was given a new lease of life, its collapse staved off once again.

The World Bank’s closure of the Indian government’s grain rationing and distribution service, for example, meant that a scheme providing affordable grain to all Indian citizens was closed down, allowing private companies to come in and sell grain at massively increased prices (sometimes up to ten times higher). Whilst this has led to huge numbers of Indians being priced out of the market, and a resulting 200 million people now facing starvation in India, it has also led to record profits for the giant private companies now holding the world’s grain stocks – which is the whole point.

This round of global privatisation from the 1980s onwards, however, was so thorough that when the 2008 crisis hit, there were few state functions left to privatise. Creating investment opportunities now is much trickier than it was thirty years ago, because so much of what is potentially profitable is already being thoroughly exploited as it is.

In Europe, what is left of public services is hastily being dismantled, as right wing political leaders happily privatise what is left of the public sector, and currency speculators use their firepower to pick off any country that attempts to resist. David Cameron, following the path forced on the global South over recent decades, for example, is busy opening up Britain’s National Health Service to private companies, and massively cutting back on public service provision for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and the jobless.

In the global South, however, there is little left for the West to privatise, as successive IMF policies have long ago forced those countries in their grip to strip their public services to the bone (and beyond) already.

But there is one state function which, if fully privatised across the world, would make the profits made even from essentials such as health care and education look like peanuts. That is the most basic and essential state function of all, indeed the whole raison d’etre for the state: security.

Private security companies are one of the few growth areas during times of global recession, as growing unemployment and poverty leads to increased social unrest and chaos, and those with wealth become more nervous about protecting both themselves, and their assets. Furthermore, as the Chinese economy advances at a rate of knots, military superiority is fast becoming the West’s only “competitive advantage” – the one area in which it’s expertise remains significantly ahead of its rivals. Turning this advantage, therefore, into an opportunity for investment and profit on a large-scale is now one of the chief tasks facing the rulers of Western economies.

A recent article in the Guardian noted that British private security firm Group 4 is now “Europe’s largest private sector employer”, employing 600,000 people – 50% more than make up the total armed forces of Britain and France combined. With growth last year of 9% in their “new markets” division, the company have “already benefited from the unrest in north Africa and the Middle East.” Group 4 are set to make a killing in Libya, following the total breakdown of security, likely to last for decades, resulting from NATO’s incineration of the country’s armed forces and wholesale destruction of its state apparatus. With the rule of law replaced by warfare between rival gangs of rebels, and no realistic prospect of a functioning police force for the foreseeable future, those Libyans able to manoeuvre themselves into positions of wealth and power will likely have to rely on private security for many years to come.

When Philip Hammond, Britain’s new Defence Secretary and a multi-millionaire businessman himself, suggested that British companies “pack their suitcases and head to Libya”, it was not only oil and construction companies he had in mind, but private security companies.

Private military companies are also becoming huge business – most famously, the US company Blackwater, renamed Xe Services after its original name became synonymous with the massacres committed by its forces in Iraq. In the USA, Blackwater has already taken over many of the security functions of the state – charging the Department of Homeland Security $1000 per day per head in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, for example. “When you ship overnight, do you use the postal service or do you use FedEx?” asked Erik Prince, founder and chairman of Blackwater. “Our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service”. Another Blackwater official commented that “None of us loves the idea that devastation became a business opportunity. It’s a distasteful fact. But that’s what it is. Doctors, lawyers, funeral directors, even newspapers – they all make a living off of bad things happening. So do we, because somebody’s got to handle it.”

The danger comes when the economic climate is such that the world’s most powerful governments feel they must do all they can to create such business opportunities. During the Cold War, the US military acted (as indeed it still does) to keep the global South in a state of poverty by attacking any government that seriously sought to challenge this poverty, and imposing governments that would crush trade unions and keep the population cowed. This created investment opportunities because it kept the majority of the world’s labour force in conditions so desperate they were willing to work for peanuts. But now this is not enough. In slump conditions, it doesn’t matter how cheap your workforce is if nobody is buying your products. To create the requisite business opportunities today – a large global market for its military expertise – Western governments must impose not only poverty, but also devastation. Devastation is the quickest route to converting the West’s military prowess into a genuine business opportunity that can create a huge new avenue for investment when all others are drying up. And this is precisely what is happening.  David Cameron is, for once, telling the truth, when he says “Whatever it takes to help our businesses take on the world – we’ll do it.”

As The Times put it recently, “In Iraq, the postwar business boom is not oil. It is security.” In both Iraq and Afghanistan, a situation of chronic and enduring instability and civil war has been created by a very precise method. Firstly, the existing state power is totally destroyed. Next, the possibility of utilising the country’s domestic expertise to rebuild state capacity is undermined against by barring former officials from working for the new government (a process known in Iraq as “de-Ba’athification”). Linked to this, the former ruling party is banned from playing any part in the political process, effectively ensuring that the largest and most organised political formation in each country has no option but to resort to armed struggle to gain influence, and thereby condemning the country to civil war. Next, vicious sectarianism is encouraged along whatever religious, ethnic and tribal divisions are available, often goaded by the covert actions of Western intelligence services. Finally, the wholesale privatisation of resources ensures chronically destabilising levels of unemployment and inequality.  The whole process is self-perpetuating, as the skilled and professional sections of the workforce – those with the means and connections – emigrate, leaving behind a dire skills shortage and even less chance of a functioning society emerging from the chaos.

This instability is not confined to the borders of the state which has been destroyed. In a masterfully cynical domino effect, for example, the aggression against Iraq has also helped to destabilise Syria. Three quarters of the 2 million Iraqi refugees fleeing the war in their own country have ended up in Syria, thus contributing to the pressure on the Syrian economy which is a major factor in the current unrest there.

The destruction of Libya will also have far reaching destabilising consequences across the region. As the recent United Nations Support Mission in Libya stated, “Libya had accumulated the largest known stockpile of Manpads [surface-to-air missiles] of any non-Manpad-producing country. Although thousands were destroyed during the seven-month Nato operations, there are increasing concerns over the looting and likely proliferation of these portable defence systems, as well as munitions and mines, highlighting the potential risk to local and regional stability.” Furthermore, a large number of volatile African countries are currently experiencing a fragile peace secured by peacekeeping forces in which Libyan troops had been playing a vital role. The withdrawal of these troops may well be damaging to the maintenance of the peace. Similarly, Libya, under Gaddafi’s rule, had contributed generously to African development projects; a policy which will certainly be ended under the NTC – again, with potentially destabilising consequences.

Clearly, a policy of devastation and destabilisation fuels not only the market for private security, but also for arms sales – where, again, the US, Britain and France remain market leaders. And a policy of devastation through blitzkrieg fits in clearly with the big three current long term strategic objectives of Western policy planners:

1. To corner as large a share as possible of the world’s diminishing resources, most importantly oil, gas and water. A government of a devastated country is at the mercy of the occupying country when it comes to contracts. Gaddafi’s Libya, for example, drove a notoriously hard bargain with the Western powers over oil contracts – acting as a key force in the 1973 oil price spike, and still in 2009 being accused by the Financial Times of “resource nationalism”. But the new NTC government in Libya have been hand picked for their subservience to foreign interests – and know that their continued positions depend on their willingness to continue in this role.
2. To prevent the rise of the global South, primarily through the destruction of any independent regional powers (such as Iran, Libya, Syria etc) and the destabilisation, isolation and encirclement of the rising global powers (in particular China and Russia).
3. To overcome or limit the impact of economic collapse by using superior military force to create and conquer new markets through the destruction and rebuilding of infrastructure and the elimination of competition.

This policy of total devastation represents a departure from the Cold War policies of the Western powers. During the Cold War, whilst the major strategic aims remained the same, the methods were different. Independent regional powers in the global South were still destabilised and invaded – and regularly – but generally with the aim of installing ‘compliant dictatorships’. Thus, Lumumba was overthrown and replaced with Mobutu; Sukarno with Suharto; Allende with Pinochet; etc, etc. But the danger with this ‘imposed strongmen’ policy was that strongmen can become defiant. Saddam Hussein illustrated this perfectly. After having been backed for over a decade by the West, he turned on their stooge monarchy in Kuwait. Governments that are in control can easily get out of control. However, for as long as these strongmen were needed for the services provided by their armies (protecting investments, repressing workers struggles, etc), they were supported. The crisis now underway in the economies of the West, however, calls for more drastic measures. And the development of private security and private mercenary companies mean that the armies provided by these strongmen are starting to be deemed no longer necessary.

Congo is a case in point. For three decades, the Western powers had supported Mobutu Sese-Seko’s iron rule of the Congo. But then, in the mid-90s, they allowed him to be overthrown. However, rather than allowing the Congolese resistance forces to take power and establish an effective government, they then sponsored an invasion of the country by Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Although these countries have now largely withdrawn their militias, they continue to sponsor proxy militias which have prevented the country seeing a moment’s peace for nearly fifteen years, resulting in the biggest slaughter since the end of the Second World War, with over 5 million killed. One result of this total breakdown of functioning government has been that the Western companies that loot Congo’s resources have been able to do so virtually for free. Despite being the world’s largest supplier of both coltan and copper, amongst many other precious minerals, the total tax revenue on these products in 2006-7 amounted to a puny £32 million. This is surely far less than what even the most useless neo-colonial puppet would have demanded.

This completely changes the meaning of the word ‘government’. In the Congo, the government’s best efforts to stabilise and develop the country have so far proved no match for the destabilisation strategies of the West and its stooges. In Afghanistan, it is well known that the government’s writ has no authority outside of Kabul, if there. But then, that is the point. The role of the governments imposed on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, like the one they are trying to impose on Syria, is not to govern or provide for the population at all – even that most basic of functions, security. It is simply to provide a fig leaf of legitimacy for the occupation of the country and to award business contracts to the colonial powers. They literally have no other function, as far as their sponsors are concerned.

It goes without saying that this policy of devastation is turning the victimised countries into a living hell. After now more than thirty years of Western destabilisation, and ten years of outright occupation, Afghanistan is at or very hear the bottom of nearly every human development indicator available, with life expectancy at 44 years and an under-five mortality rate of over one in four. Mathew White, a history professor who has recently completed a detailed survey of the humanity’s worst atrocities throughout history, concluded that, without doubt, “chaos is far deadlier than tyranny”. It is a truth to which many Iraqis can testify.

It tells us something that has now become common knowledge; namely, that people have lost faith in the democratic process.  Politicians and society, all of us, the 99% and the 1% must take heed.  People do not like this government, but they do not have much faith in Labour either.  This explains why the Labour party is not benefiting from the dire economic situation we find ourselves in.   Labour is not trusted. Their so called “light touch regulation” was an abdication of their responsibility to control the explosion of a debt-fuelled economy, and the voracious greed of the “moneymen” that brought the country into this sorry state.

Some commentators blame Labour’s difficulties on choosing the wrong leader, Ed Miliband.  I think it is the lack of credible policies that lie at the heart of the problem for Labour.   It has no vision.  It has articulated no alternative policies that are up to the job of tackling the immense problems faced by capitalism today.

Do they have a policy on bringing a fairer distribution of wealth in a rich country like Britain? A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), referenced in the Guardian, concludes that “income inequality among working-age people has risen faster in Britain than in any other rich nation since the mid-1970s.” What are their policies on reducing unemployment, particularly among the young, that has now topped one million?  What are their policies on reforming the banks and financial institutions? What are their policies to bring a more equitable balance between capital and labour? What are their policies to address the democratic deficit by wresting control from the “moneymen”?

Is it any wonder that people have lost faith in changing the status quo through the democratic process?  As for the LibDems, who appeared more radical than Labour when not in government, a whiff of ministerial posts was enough for them to jettison any radicalism they may have had!

Fresh radical thinking is needed if we are to avoid the alienation of large numbers of our young to the detriment of us all.  It is imperative to show the electorate that change can come through the ballot box.  It is imperative to show that politicians are willing and able to challenge the tyranny of the “moneymen”.

By acceding to the demands of financiers, politicians are being forced to move away from democratic oversight, towards appointing unelected former financial technocrats and bankers to directly run the economies of Europe.  Most people know that they and people like them were pulling the strings anyway behind the scenes, but that was not enough for the IMF, the ECB, the EU, Hedge Funds, Rating Agencies…etc.  Such technocrats are now in charge in Greece and Italy.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, commenting on “Reading the Riots” report, writes in the Guardian:

The big question Reading the Riots leaves us with is whether, in our current fretful state, with unavoidable austerity ahead, we have the energy to invest what’s needed in family and neighbourhood and school to rescue those who think they have nothing to lose. We have to persuade them, simply, that we as government and civil society alike will put some intelligence and skill into giving them the stake they do not have. Without this, we shall face more outbreaks of futile anarchy, in which we shall all, young and old, be the losers.

The Labour Party would do well to start from the words of the Archbishop, and devise and articulate policies to rescue our country from a course that is likely to rupture the cohesion of our society.

When I reflected on what I had witnessed and learned while researching in 120 countries (as well as at the World Bank and many UN agencies) and filming in 69 of them, I let commonsense be my guide. It led me to the conclusion that capitalism was not of itself the problem. It was the short-sighted and stupid way Western capitalism was managed.

Now I’ll put some flesh on that bone.

By the early 1970’s truly informed development experts were drawing attention to the fact that our one small planet was divided into two worlds – the Rich World containing about 20% of humankind (and known in development jargon as the North), and the Poor World containing about 80% of humankind (and known in development jargon as the South).

In the Poor World an estimated 15 million children under five were dying each year from malnutrition and related and easily preventable diseases such as diahorrea, measles and whooping cough – in a word poverty, abject poverty. And an estimated 300 million more were born brain damaged because of malnutrition in the wombs of their mothers. But those statistics told only a part of the story. The majority of the human inhabitants of Planet Earth were living on the margins of life, without some and in many cases all of the basic necessities for life – shelter, adequate nutrition, clean water, health care, education and work/job opportunities. On each and every continent I asked the poorest parents what was the one thing they most wanted. This was before the age of the mobile telephone and I expected many of them to say a television or some such gadget. What they all said in their various ways echoed one of the poorest Indian women. Her answer was, “Education for my children so they don’t have to live like animals as we do.”

The rich nations were creating their wealth by selling goods and services. It followed that if this wealth creating process was to have a sustainable future and Rich World citizens were to enjoy ever rising material standards of living as promised by their politicians, the global market place needed more and more consumers with the purchasing power to buy what the Rich World nations had to sell.

If the managers of Western capitalism (corporate chiefs, bankers and politicians) had not been short-sighted and stupid, they would have said to themselves something like the following. “If we don’t now invest in the development of the poor of the world and bring them progressively into the market place with purchasing power, we are going to run out customers in the numbers needed to buy what we have to sell in order to sustain our system.”

If the necessary investment had been made over 10, 15 and even 20 years, (it would have needed that amount of time in order to guarantee that the money and other development assistance provided could be absorbed and put to best use with minimum corruption), victory in the war against global poverty and underdevelopment – the only war that matters – would have been assured. To give just one example… The disastrous population drift from the rural areas where there was a future to the urban centres where there was not and is not a future for many of the drifters could have been halted and even reversed.

Making the investment needed on the necessary scale would have meant that the investing Rich World nations would not have grown so rapidly and their citizens would have had to accept a little less in the way of ever rising material standards of living, but that would have been a small price to pay for giving Western capitalism a sustainable future and all of our children wherever they live the prospect of a future worth having. (Whereas today they do not have a future worth having).

Instead of starting down the road to making capitalism work for the benefit of all in global terms, the system’s Western managers opted to keep things going by flooding the Rich World with credit cards to enable its citizens to live beyond their means and get deeper and deeper into debt. “I need” was replaced with “I want”. (My working class father used to say to me, “Boy, if we can’t afford it, we don’t look in the shop window.”)

There was bound to come a time when Rich World citizens simply could not afford to go on buying on the scale needed to keep Western consumer capitalism going.

Then, partly to fuel debt-driven consumer and government spending, the greed-driven, totally irresponsible bankers drove the final nail into Western capitalism’s coffin by playing their leveraging games, producing debt instruments with a face value of hundreds of trillions of U.S. dollars but which were not backed and supported by real assets. (A good friend of mine was the senior risk manager for one of the world’s biggest banks headquartered in London. She told me that for five years she and her team tried to warn top management that leveraging with Mickey Mouse instruments was creating a catastrophe, but top management didn’t want to listen. It was focused only on bonuses).

If Jeremy Clarkson had said that banking chiefs should have been taken out and shot in front of their families, I would have smiled and said to myself, “If only.”

And I would not have bailed out the banks with taxpayers’ money. I would have let them go bust. (The first rule of capitalism is supposed to be that if you get it wrong you go bust). But before making that decision public I (as prime minister) would have said to my people something like the following. “Don’t panic. The money we would have to put into bailing out reckless and irresponsible banks will instead be used to create a new national bank which, rather like the High Street banks of the old days, will exist only to serve the needs of their customers.”

There’s no question that banking chiefs were short-sighted, greedy and stupid, but… They were not the architects of what future historians will call the crash of Western capitalism. They, the architects, were the politicians who deregulated the banks and financial markets. The leading architect was Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. On 27 October 1986, she initiated the “Big Bang” in the City of London, the sudden deregulation of the banks and financial markets. In the name of “financial liberalism” she truly believed that markets would work better, more efficiently, if they were free of rules and restrictions. In her view millions of decisions made every day by traders in a free market would be better for all of us than decisions that had to be made with reference to rules and regulations drawn up by committees of the great and the good.

Though I might be exaggerating to make a point and may be misrepresenting her to some extent, she seemed to be saying, “We need not bother too much with our old industries and ways of creating wealth, the banks and the markets will do it for us.”

Events were to prove that she could not have been more naive and more wrong, but before they did American presidents starting with Ronald Reagan had followed her lead.

My understanding of the situation today can be summarized as follows. The debts of Western governments are so big that no Western country will be able to generate the growth and so the money needed to repay them. On that basis I can see only two scenarios for the future.

One is that in order to repay the debts, governments slash expenditure across the board, cutting, cutting and cutting back massively on budgets for everything including state pensions and social welfare benefits and services. Unemployment rises to unthinkable levels and living standards plunge to unacceptable levels. Eventually the citizens revolt and violence escalates. What passes for democracy is shut down and martial law is established. Orwell’s 1984 finally arrives. (Soon after Edward Heath ceased to be prime minister, my wife and I had lunch with him. I asked him what his biggest fear for the future was. I expected it to be related to global poverty because he had been a member of the Brandt Commission which studied it. His reply, calm in delivery and matter of fact in tone, was, “That Britain will become the first police state in the democratic world.”)

In the other scenario all debts, including mortgages on homes, are written off and we all start again.

By definition a re-start would have to be based on a rock-solid commitment to fairness with a real intention to make capitalism work for the benefit of all.

This idiot is in quite good company. American Martin Weiss is the founder of the Weiss Rating Agency (WRA). In his latest presentation he makes the following claims about his agency’s astonishing success in predicting economic disasters of the past 40 years, a claim which is confirmed by all the major American newspapers and economic journals.

Months in advance WRA warned about the S&L crisis of the 1980’s; the great insurance company failures of the 1990’s; plus the great “Tech Wreck” of the early 2000’s.

WRA was the only firm in the world to warn of the financial crisis of 2008 more than a year in advance, specifically naming nearly every major company that later collapsed.

Today Martin Weiss says this:

Barring a miracle, an historic, world-changing event is about to end the American way of life as we know it. This monumental event will plunge vast numbers of families into the nightmare of poverty, homeless and hunger. In a worst case scenario you will see soaring crime, the confiscation of property, the suspension of civil rights, and even the enforcement of martial law by the U.S. military.

The world-changing event he is anticipating is a decision by China to stop buying U.S. debt, which will mean, he says, that America will no longer be able to borrow money; and that, he adds, will see the beginning of “America’s Financial Doomsday”.

My own biggest fear which I have been expressing to friends in private for a number of years is that the unfolding economic crisis may take us all the way to World War 111. It could happen for two related reasons. One is the need of governments to deflect the attention of their own people away from the mess within. The other is the need to have an outside party to blame. There’s a case for saying that some American politicians are already setting up China for blame.

We shall see…

Footnote

European plans to bring in tough budget controls are irrelevant, even a farce. They are designed to stop the present unfolding catastrophe from happening again, but they won’t do anything to solve the present debt crisis. European leaders are shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

The camps are important free-speech centers, a long overdue mass protest of the capitalist austerity program. Hopefully, the movement will be able to turn the tide against the police crackdown.

But, looking beyond the haze of tear gas, occupiers are starting to ask, “What’s next?” How can the Occupy movement create desperately needed change?

The movement’s amazing potential will be squandered if it does not develop past existence as a network of utopian, process-obsessed symbolic encampments. Or “victory” is reduced to settling for a few surface reforms — higher taxes on stock transactions or slaps on the wrist for Wall Street crooks.

To avert this, the mobilization needs to consciously evolve beyond its current orientation, “We are the 99 percent.” That’s a slogan anyone can embrace, from the CEO of Men’s Wearhouse to tea partiers and head-busting police.

Race and sex matter

For the mobilization to make a deep and lasting impression, the survival issues of the bottom of the 99 percent have to move to the top of the agenda. Putting the focus there will raise the movement’s sights, because the needs of those who are most oppressed challenge the very foundations of capitalism — a system dependent on their unequal status.

For this to happen, the leadership of women, immigrants, and people of color, especially women of color, is critical.

These are people disproportionately hurt by the Great Recession, experiencing far higher rates of joblessness, home foreclosures, and poverty. Whether it’s cancer rates or incarceration, they suffer more.

In giving their concerns priority, the movement of “the 99 percent” will actually unify greater numbers of people. The survival needs of people who have the least — like a living wage job, health care, retirement security — are also basic to everyone’s survival, and capitalism is putting them out of reach for more and more people.

Placing a political focus on women and people of color means developing a program and demands that can bridge the multiple divisions that capitalism is so expert at creating. In turn, embracing the leadership of women and people of color will help the Occupy movement evolve into a fighting force for real change. And the good news is that this leadership already exists.

When Occupy Wall Street was two weeks out of the gate, the New York People of Color working group formed. Asian American tenant organizers are involving occupiers in protesting greedy landlords in Chinatown. Occupy Harlem is fighting police policies that target Blacks and Latinos.

In Occupy Philly, Black women are campaigning against a racist youth curfew law and connecting it to Pennsylvania’s penchant for funding prisons over schools and community programs. And in Colorado, the American Indian Movement’s platform for indigenous rights was adopted by Occupy Denver.

Across the U.S., people of color are forming Occupy the Hoods and caucuses that enable them to intervene on issues such as police violence — issues often new to white occupiers. Women, queer, and transgendered activists are likewise pushing their concerns forward through caucuses and teach-ins.

These working groups and actions amplify perspectives that are routinely brushed under the rug by the 1 percent. A next step is to bring this leadership front and center.

The power of labor

Just as issues of women and people of color too often get lost in the shuffle without conscious leadership, the movement risks co-optation without the grass roots of organized labor centrally involved.

This doesn’t mean letting union officials take over, as some young protesters fear. For rank-and-file unionists it does mean bringing labor’s struggles to the Occupy movement, while pushing unions and labor leaders to defend it.

For unionists, Occupy Wall Street offers a historic opportunity to build the independent and radical working-class movement that organized labor must develop to remain alive.

The November 2 general strike in Oakland, Calif., is the clearest example yet of the power of a movement uniting workers and the disenfranchised.

Spurred by the violent dispersal of Occupy Oakland, including the police assault against an Iraq War veteran, and by the corporate attack against longshore workers in Longview, Wash., labor activists agitated for a general strike. The idea caught fire, and the Occupy Oakland general assembly approved it.

The action drew up to 30,000 people and shut Oakland’s port. Occupy Oakland adopted compelling demands for the strike put forward by leftists and unionists, including “end police attacks on our communities” and “defend Oakland schools and libraries.” The strike indicted “an economic system built on inequality and corporate power that perpetuates racism, sexism and the destruction of the environment.”

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union, with seasoned Black and radical leadership in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, helped pave the way for this. In the past, Local 10 has shut the port to protest the Iraq War and police murder of Oscar Grant. Occupy Oakland built on this legacy.

A strong next step for the Occupy movement would be to start new occupations at state Capitols to fight budget cuts — to confront the government enabler of Wall Street. Joining with the organized, collective power of labor could make this happen.

Moving forward with a united front

To build for sustained actions, the best vehicle is the united front. This is a powerful alliance of different political tendencies with a working-class program and leadership.

The united front is the direction to go for Occupy activists who are rightfully worried their movement will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or Madison Avenue. With labor and the disenfranchised united, it is highly unlikely that the agenda will be confined to cosmetic reforms or cheerleading Democrats who “feel our pain.”

As the 2012 election season nears, movement opportunists will zero in on the Occupy movement to funnel it into status-quo election campaigns. If the occupations orient to the needs of the most oppressed and fuse with the power of labor, 2012 can be a year where fed-up people in the U.S. did more than just occupy — they started to fight back and win.

• This article first appeared in the Freedom Socialist newspaper.

When these bills move through the Congress, they are so enormous and yet so routine that almost all attention is drawn to one or more peculiarly putrid or pretentiously benevolent little attachments. Either the bill simply must be passed because it contains hurricane relief or veterans aid or unemployment insurance or because it finally allows GLBT Americans to join in our crusades of mass murder. Or, alternatively, the bill desperately needs amending because it sanctions torture or lawless imprisonment or expands an especially hated war or an especially transparent investment in unwanted weaponry manufactured by some campaign donor. But the underlying insanity of the bill itself never makes it into the corporate conversation.

In the case of this latest National Defense Authorization Act, there has been a toothless rhetorical amendment passed asking the president to end his warmaking in Afghanistan in something less than three years if it’s not too much trouble. But that positive measure has been absolutely overwhelmed in what little discussion of the bill exists by a section of the bill giving presidents and the military the power to lock you away without any of the process guaranteed you by the U.S. Constitution. Now, President Obama may veto the bill because he would prefer that section to be even worse than it is. He has expressed concern that it limits, rather than expands, his options. He should veto it because it rips out the heart of our Bill of Rights and grinds it into the dirt.

But a bill like this should not be passed simply because the latest erosion of our civil liberties is removed and the even worse un-codified understanding and practice is left to continue. A bill like this one should be rejected in its entirety. This bill kills human beings in large numbers, endangers us all through encouragement of foreign hostility, contributes to the development and proliferation of genocidal weaponry, creates massive environmental destruction, advances a foreign policy built around an unsurvivable energy policy, funds both sides of an unending Afghan occupation, funds prisons where we already hold many hundreds of men behind bars without charge or trial, and gives presidents de facto power to ignore our rights for the duration of a global war that has no end. And this bill destroys our economy through unfathomable wasteful spending in the midst of a manufactured deficit crisis and an actual humanitarian crisis at home and abroad.

Military spending is worse for job creation and retention than any other kind of spending or even tax cuts. Jobs is not the silver lining in militarism. There is a choice that confronts us between militarism or jobs, militarism or human services, militarism or a safety net for the ill and the elderly and the impoverished. We’re dumping over a trillion dollars a year into “security” spending in “defense” and other bills combined, well over half of discretionary spending. The deficit “crisis” is not the creation of sick people getting old and multiplying without having had the decency to bribe their way into major government contracts or bailouts from the Federal Reserve. Single-payer health coverage, not cuts to Medicare, is the solution there. The deficit is not purely the result of the Obama tax cuts (sorry, Bush is gone now) or of the bad economy. There is a way to improve the actual economy by spending existing public dollars in different ways.

In 1963, Senator George McGovern and House members F. Bradford Morse and William Fitts Ryan introduced a bill that gained significant support and hearings and would have begun a process of economic conversion from a war economy to a peace economy, retraining and re-employing anyone thrown out of work in the process. Meanwhile, the military was secretly beginning a war in Vietnam, and certain elements were plotting to blow President Kennedy’s brains out of the back of his head. We took a turn for the worse, and economic conversion has never seriously begun. Yet, for decades members of Congress had the decency to at least propose it.

Here’s a bill introduced 20 years ago, in 1991. Do some of the names on the bill look familiar? Waters, Pelosi, Schumer, Slaughter, McDermott, Markey, Panetta (yes, Panetta), Lewis, Pallone, Towns, Berman, Payne, Waxman, Boxer, Wyden, etc. Here’s a solution backed by these people 20 years ago, more desperately needed now, and not under consideration. That’s not their fault. They are cogs in a money-marinated machine. It’s our fault.

In the absence of an overall conversion-to-sanity-and-sustainability bill, there is a related bill that has been introduced in the current Congress: “The Nuclear Weapons Abolition and Economic and Energy Conversion Act of 2011″ introduced by Eleanor Holmes Norton. This bill is a concise thing of beauty which says:

(a) In General- The United States Government shall–

(1) by the date that is three years after the date of the enactment of this Act, provide leadership to negotiate a multilateral treaty or other international agreement that provides for –

(A) the dismantlement and elimination of all nuclear weapons in every country by not later than 2020; and

(B) strict and effective international control of such dismantlement and elimination;

(2) redirect resources that are being used for nuclear weapons programs to use–

(A) in converting all nuclear weapons industry employees, processes, plants, and programs smoothly to constructive, ecologically beneficial peacetime activities, including strict control of all fissile material and radioactive waste, during the period in which nuclear weapons must be dismantled and eliminated pursuant to the treaty or other international agreement described in paragraph (1); and

(B) in addressing human and infrastructure needs, including development and deployment of sustainable carbon-free and nuclear-free energy sources, health care, housing, education, agriculture, and environmental restoration, including long-term radioactive waste monitoring;

(3) undertake vigorous, good-faith efforts to eliminate war, armed conflict, and all military operations; and

(4) actively promote policies to induce all other countries to join in the commitments described in this subsection to create a more peaceful and secure world.

(b) Effective Date- Subsection (a)(2) shall take effect on the date on which the President certifies to Congress that all countries possessing nuclear weapons have–

(1) eliminated such weapons; or

(2) begun such elimination under established legal requirements comparable to those described in subsection (a).”

If you’re going to begin conversion with one sector, why not start with the worst? The answer does not ultimately lie in backing a particular bill so much as in educating, mobilizing, changing the public discourse, and applying nonviolent pressure. But there are bills that exist or could easily be made to exist that merit our unqualified support.

Either we will move the money from where it destroys to where is sustains life, or our civilization will meet the fate Kennedy met in Dallas.

According to a 2010 AFL-CIO analysis of 299 U.S. companies in the S&P 500, average gross CEO pay was about 11.4 million dollars, 343 times the median wage (the widest gap in the world). Banksters, big agribusiness and corrupt lawmakers make healthy food inaccessible for growing numbers of people around the world while basic health care continues to become prohibitively expensive thanks to bloated medical, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile corporate-owned media distracts and disinforms the masses just enough for the top-heavy self-destructively corrupt system to drag on a little longer.

So when a group of activists (organized largely through the internet and social media) took a stand to occupy Wall Street, they also occupied the collective imagination. Occupiers’ critiques of corrupt political and economic systems are nothing new but today they’re so transparently and demonstrably true, occupation sites spread like wildfire across the country and world faster than the establishment’s concerted efforts to extinguish it with propaganda and violent coercion.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) represents another tipping point for international outrage in the context of a global struggle for justice and democracy. From late last year mass anti-austerity protests swept through European and Mediterranean countries while earlier this year Arab Spring revolutionary movements sprang up in the Middle East and North Africa (which I previously wrote about here) and in some cases continue today. Though there’s differences in the nature of the situations and struggles, what’s shared in common is growing awareness and desire to put an end to mass suffering and injustice due to neoliberal policies dictated by powerful institutions.

Such institutions include Wall Street, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the U.S. Government, and all other governments and organizations they’re aligned with and/or have influence over. Their policies include elimination of trade barriers, regressive taxation, private central banks, budget cuts for social services, privatization of public resources and deregulation.

The top 1% would like us to believe these measures are necessary to strengthen the economies of nations and improve government efficiency but in reality it has done the opposite. There’s overwhelming evidence from around the world linking neoliberalism to erosion of democracy and national sovereignty, militarism, increased corruption and wealth disparity, weakened infrastructures, widespread unemployment and poverty, inflation, worker exploitation, and environmental degradation.

Because wealth and power of big banks and corporations drastically increases under this system, the 1% would also like us to think no alternatives are possible. However, following a long tradition of dissident movements, OWS owes its existence to the desire to create alternatives that put people over profits.

Like all evolving social movements, Occupy Wall Street isn’t perfect. They’ve made strategic mistakes and have internal struggles but have also shown remarkable determination and ability to learn and adapt. One of the most common critiques leveled against OWS is “they lack focus and need a specific list of demands.” Such criticism is unavoidable for organizations that are not single-issue but seek to change a complex system responsible for multiple interrelated problems.

The structure of OWS also confuses people because unlike hierarchical models most are familiar with, occupiers tend to be open-source, decentralized and collaborative. Decisions are made through General Assemblies using a process of consensus decision making, a form of participatory democracy. As with most forms of direct democracy it’s often a slow and difficult, but far more open and inclusive to a diversity of voices than republics and non-democratic systems. It also ensures that the decisions made benefit as many people as possible as equally as possible.

What critics forget is that America’s forefathers (all wealthy white men) didn’t get around to drafting a constitution and declaration of independence until after the revolution. OWS might not yet have an official list of demands but it’s not difficult to find statements and documents online to get an idea of their values and goals, such as the NYC General Assembly’s Principles of Solidarity.

Other common charges against the Occupy Movement frequently parroted by corporate news include “protesters are too lazy to get a job”, “they’re just a bunch of dirty hippies” and “they’re looking for a confrontation with police”. These stereotypes can be dispelled simply by visiting an occupation site or talking to people at OWS rallies. Judging from the people I’ve met and heard interviews with, many have part time positions while others include students seeking jobs with which they can pay off student loans. Some unemployed activists were recently laid off and are still searching for jobs. To put their situation in perspective, in the sixties the unemployment rate was just over 4% while today the rate has more than doubled. When counting workers who are “underutilized” and “marginally attached”, the rate jumps to 16.7%. Out of the approximately 14 million unemployed in America, 46%, or over 6 million have been unemployed for 6 months or longer. In some cases unemployed homeowners at risk for foreclosure are trapped by underwater mortgages and couldn’t relocate even if they did find jobs elsewhere.

Though in our current system most of us need jobs and wages to access basic needs like food, shelter and clothing, all could be provided for free with just a fraction of the current number actually working. Approximately 60,000 tons of food is wasted annually to keep prices high while banks faced with a glut of foreclosed homes demolish them to avoid taxes, maintenance costs and devalued markets. Companies such as H & M and Walmart have even been caught destroying unused clothing. More jobs might encourage more complacency but would do nothing to resolve structural problems such as overproduction outstripping demand, wealth disparity, devastating economic bubbles, corporate monopolization, and a culture of greed and hyperconsumerism.

What could be a solution is a better socio-economic system, the creation of which is one of the Occupation’s fundamental principles of solidarity.

Ad hominem attacks against OWS regarding hygiene and appearance initially struck me as oddly childish and superficial. Camping without a shower would have the same effect on anyone and it has nothing to do with the issues. Then I recalled how characterizing groups as “dirty” and subhuman is typical of ruling elites’ tried and true “divide and conquer” strategy. In this case it seems like an attempt to prevent the average corporate news consumer from paying attention to the ideas of OWS and identifying with them as part of a unified 99%.

A leaked memo from a lobbying firm has already confirmed an $850,000 proposal to spread “negative narratives” about the Occupy Movement. Occupiers are also certainly not all hippies. OWS includes people representing a wide spectrum of backgrounds and ideologies. Many tend to be on the progressive side but I’ve also met libertarians at Occupy events holding some beliefs associated with the Tea Party. Not surprisingly, at a recent joint Occupy/Tea Party forum in Memphis, the two groups clashed on certain issues but also found points of agreement such as frustration regarding unresponsiveness of government to average citizens and opposition to bank bailouts and crony capitalism.

With further conversation the groups may find many other common interests such as ending perpetual wars on terror and drugs, eliminating NAFTA and similar unfair trade agreements, abolishing or restructuring the Federal Reserve, prohibiting militarized police state tactics, protecting civil liberties, creating fair election and mass media systems, and keeping pollutants out of our air, food and water. These are shared goals that 99% of the rest of the world could agree with as well.

Most critics who accuse OWS of trying to pick a fight with police usually don’t understand the purpose of non-violent civil disobedience and believe more conventional channels of political expression such as voting or letter writing are enough to fix the system. A central insight of OWS is that our problems go beyond politics to sources of power and wealth gaming the system and are, in fact, part of the same beast. Unfortunately voting and letter writing in themselves can do little to counteract massive amounts of money used to finance campaigns, shape legislation, and influence politicians and public opinion. When there are no longer true avenues of political and judicial redress, civil disobedience is exactly what is needed. It’s a tactic that has been used with great success in the Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam War and Women’s Suffrage movements as well as the American Revolution. Critics who complain about tax dollars wasted on policing Occupy sites need to remember that city officials decide how to spend that money (and how much violence police use).

There has been incidences and allegations of sexual assault occurring on or near OWS camps reflecting a sad reality of our patriarchal society that even within groups trying to change the society it could still happen. Though a relatively rare occurrence, it’s a serious issue more OWS General Assemblies need to openly address and create preventative measures for as some have already done.

Conservative news channels like FOX focus disproportionately on reported crimes and isolated incidents associated with the Occupy Movement to create a false image of police simply defending themselves and the community. If that seems far-fetched, just google keywords “fox news” “ows” and “violence”. Other corporate news also cover such incidents in addition to police violence but usually within a limited context and far less air time than similar protests in the Middle East.

Independent and alternative media (including citizen journalists using social media, blogs and YouTube) have been by far the source of the most detailed and comprehensive coverage of OWS. Without independent cameras on the street, fewer people would have known about the mass pepper spraying, beating, tasering and rubber bullet shooting (all effectively forms of mass torture) of peaceful protesters across the country.

Numerous videos and accounts can be found online revealing a pattern of coordinated violent crackdowns at all major Occupy sites including New York, Atlanta, Nashville, Austin, Denver, Berkeley, U.C. Davis, Portland, and Seattle (where among the victimized crowd were an 84 year old activist, a Methodist Pastor in clergy robe, and a young pregnant woman who miscarried a week later). Or how in Oakland, Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen suffered a fractured skull from a gas canister shot at close range and 8 days later Afghanistan and Iraq War vet Kayvan Sabeghi was beaten by police while trying to return home. Unnecessary indiscriminate and excessive police brutality is nothing new, but citizens now have a greater ability to document and report it than ever before without censorship and distortion.

Such incidences of violent police provocation could have escalated to wide-scale riots were it not for the self-control of the Occupiers and their determination to remain a peaceful movement. They understand that besides being in a struggle for survival, they’re involved in a philosophical struggle for the hearts and minds of the world. To resort to violence would be to adapt the mentality of the oppressors and be maligned as threats to national security (though that’s often how they’re treated by the State).

Police and military are well armed and trained to deal with violence but they’re not prepared to deal with public shaming and unarguable facts that may someday override orders, threats and conditioning from the 1%. There’s probably nothing ruling elites fear most than an awakened 99% united in solidarity, including people of all political and religious persuasions, occupations, races, and nations. Once that happens, one percenters know it’s “game over” so we should expect them to do everything in their power to divide and conquer, especially if, as recent research has theorized, some of them may be literally psychotic.  To counteract this effort, it’s more important than ever to think critically and stay informed. Be aware that it’s perfectly legal for corporate news media to lie and there’s plenty of sources online to find more accurate and up-to-date information.

Better yet, visit a local Occupy site or event to get firsthand knowledge about who they are and what they believe in. By becoming, in effect, a citizen journalist you’ll be well equipped to challenge common fallacies about OWS when talking to family, friends, coworkers and strangers. Whether they realize it or not, we’re all in it together.

A Global Occupation may not bring utopia (probably nothing ever will), but it’s the best opportunity yet to prevent our world from falling further into dystopia.