Dissident Voice » Labor http://dissidentvoice.org a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice Sun, 27 May 2012 06:17:52 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 When the Respectable Become Extremists http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/when-the-respectable-become-extremists/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/when-the-respectable-become-extremists/#comments Sun, 27 May 2012 06:17:52 +0000 James Petras http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44647 By any historical measure, whether it involves international law, human rights conventions, United Nations protocols, or standard socio-economic indicators, the policies and practices of the United States and European Union regimes can be characterized as extremist. By that we mean that their policies and practices result in the large-scale, long-term systematic destruction of human lives, habitat and livelihood affecting millions of people through the direct application of force and violence. The extremist regimes abhor moderation, which implies rejection of total war in favor of peaceful negotiations. Moderation pursues conflict resolution through diplomacy and compromise and the rejection of state and paramilitary terror, mass dispossession and displacement of civilian populations and the systematic assault on popular sectors of civil society.

In first decade of the 21st century we have witnessed the West’s embrace of the full spectrum of extremism in both domestic and foreign policy. Extremism is a common practice by self-styled conservatives, liberals and social-democrats. In the past, conservative implied preserving the status quo and, at most, tinkering with change at the margins. Today’s ‘conservatives’ demand the wholesale dismantling of entire social welfare systems and the elimination of traditional legal protection of workers and the environment. Liberals and social democrats, who in the past, occasionally, questioned colonial systems, are now in the forefront of prolonged multi-front colonial wars, which have killed and displaced millions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

Extremism, in terms of its methods, means and goals, has obliterated the distinctions between center left, center, and rightwing politicians. Moderates opposed to the current policies of subsidizing the major banks while impoverishing tens of millions of workers, are now labeled the ‘hard left,’ ‘extremists,’ or ‘radicals.’

In the wake of the government’s extremist policies, the respectable, prestigious print media have engaged in their own versions of extremism.1 Colonial wars, devastating civil society and stable cultures while impoverishing millions in the colonized country, are justified, embellished and presented as lawful and humane advances in secular democratic values. Domestic wars on behalf of oligarchies and against wage and salaried workers, which concentrate wealth and deepen despair of the dispossessed, are described as rational, virtuous and necessary. The distinctions between the prudent, balanced, prestigious and serious media and the sensationalist, yellow press have disappeared. The fabrication of facts, blatant omissions and distortions of context are found in one just as well as the other.

To illustrate the reign of extremism in officialdom and among the prestigious press, we will examine two case studies. These involve US policies toward Colombia and Honduras and the Financial Times and New York Times coverage of the two nations.

Colombia: The “Oldest Democracy in Latin America” versus “The Death Squad Capital of the World”

Following the giddy eulogies of Colombia’s emergence as Latin America’s poster boy for democracy in an April issue of Time magazine, as well as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post, the Financial Times ran a series of articles including a special insert on Colombia’s political and economic ‘miracle’ entitled, “Investing in Colombia.”2 According to the FT’s leading Latin American journalist, John Paul Rathbone, Colombia is the ‘oldest democracy in the hemisphere.’3 Rathbone’s rapturous praise for Colombia’s President Santos extends from his role as an ‘emerging power broker’ for the South American continent, to making Colombia safe for foreign investors and ‘exciting the envy’ of other less successful regimes in the region. Rathbone gives prominence to one Colombia business leader who claims that Colombia’s second biggest city, Medellín, ‘is living through its best of times.’3 In line with the opinion of the foreign and business elite, the respectable print media describe Colombia as prosperous, peaceful, business friendly, charging the lowest mining royalty payments in the hemisphere, and a model of a stable democracy to be emulated by all forward-looking leaders.

Under President Santos, Colombia has signed a free trade agreement with President Obama, his closest ally in the hemisphere.4 During the term of Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, trade unions, human rights and church groups, as well as the majority of Congressional Democrats, were successful in blocking any similar agreement because of Colombia’s sustained human rights violations. Any such opposition from the AFL-CIO and Democratic legislators evaporated, when President Obama embraced free trade, claiming a vast improvement in human rights and President Santos commitment to ending the murder of trade union leaders and activists.4

Colombia’s peace, security, and prosperity, praised by the oil, mining, banking, and agro-business elite, are based on the worst human rights record in Latin America. With regard to the murder of trade unionists, Colombia exceeds the entire world. From 1986-2011 over 60% of the all killings of trade unionists in the world took place in Colombia by combined military-police-paramilitary death squads, largely at the behest of foreign and domestic corporate leaders.5 The ‘peace’, so enthusiastically praised by Rathbone and his colleagues at the Financial Times, comes with a heavy price tag: Over 12,000 arrests, attacks, assassinations and disappearances of trade unionists occurred between January 1, 1986 and October 1, 2010.5 In that time span nearly 3,000 trade union leaders and activists were murdered, hundreds more disappeared and are assumed dead. The current Colombian President Santos was the Defense Minister under the previous President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010). In those years, over 762 trade union officials and activists were murdered by state or allied paramilitary forces.5

Under both Presidents Uribe and Santos (2002-2012), over 4 million peasants and rural dwellers were driven into internal exile and their homes and lands were taken over by big landlords, speculators and narco-traffickers.6 The Colombian government’s counter-insurgency strategy serves a dual function of repressing dissent and accumulating wealth for its supporters. The Financial Times journalists gloss over this aspect of Colombia’s ‘resurgent growth’ as they applaud the results of death-squad ‘security’, including the over $6 billion dollars of large-scale foreign investment which flowed into mining and oil regions in 2012 – in areas ‘formerly troubled by unrest.’7

Some leading drug lords, clearly linked to the Uribe-Santos regime, were jailed and extradited to the US. They have testified how they financed and elected one-third of the Congress members affiliated with Uribe-Santos party – in what the Financial Times describes as Latin America’s ‘oldest democracy.’ Salvatore Mancuso, ex-chief of the 30,000-member United Self-Defense of Colombia (AUC), described how he met with then-President Uribe in different regions of the country to give him money and logistical support for his re-election campaign of 2006. Mancuso, who led the largest paramilitary death squad army in Colombia (now fragmented but still active), also affirmed that national and multi-national corporations (MNC) financed the growth and expansion of the death squads.

What Rathbone and his fellow journalists at the FT celebrate as Colombia’s emergence as an investor’s paradise is writ large with the blood and torture of thousands of Colombian peasants, trade unionists and human rights activists. The brutal history of the Uribe/Santos reign of terror has been completely erased from the current account of Colombia’s ‘success story.’ Detailed records of the brutality of the killings and torture by Uribe/Santos sponsored death squads, describing the use of chain saws to mutilate peasants suspected of leftist sympathies are available to any journalist willing to consult Colombia’s leading human rights organizations.8

The death squads and military act in concert. The Colombian military is trained by over one thousand US Special Forces advisers. They wage counter-insurgency style war on the Colombian countryside, arriving in villages in waves of US-supplied helicopters, cordoning off targeted areas from the guerillas and then sending in the AUC and other death squads to destroy the villages, torturing and murdering peasant men, women and children suspected of being guerilla sympathizers and committing widespread rape. This state-sponsored terror campaign has driven millions of peasants out of the countryside allowing the generals and drug lords to seize their land.

Human rights advocates (HRA) are frequently targeted by the military and death squads. Presidents Uribe and Santos usually first accuse human rights workers of being active collaborators of the guerillas because of their work in exposing the regime’s crimes against humanity. Once labeled, the HRA became ‘legitimate targets’ for death squads and the military operating with complete impunity. From 2002-2011 there were 1,470 attacks against HRA, with a record number of 239 in 2011, including 49 killings under President Santos.9 Over half of the murdered human rights workers are Indian and Afro-Colombians.

State terrorism was and continues to be the main instrument of rule under Presidents Uribe and Santos. The Colombian ‘killing fields’, according to the Fiscalia General, include tens of thousands of homicides, 1,597 massacres and thousands of forced disappearances from 2005-2010.10

Courageous members of the Colombian press revealed a practice, known as ‘false positives’, numerous instances in which the military secretly kidnapped young peasants and poor urban males forcing them to dress as guerrillas, murdered them in cold blood and then displayed their bodies to the respectable Colombian and international press as ‘proof’ of Santos/Uribe’s combat successes against the guerrillas. There are 2,472 documented cases of military ‘false positive’ murders.11

Honduras: New York Times and State Terrorism

The New York Times featured an article on Honduras, emphasizing the regime’s ‘co-operation’ with the US war on drugs.12 The Times writer, Thom Shanker, describes a ‘partnership’ based on the expansion of three new US military bases and the stationing of US Special Forces in the country.12

Shanker reported on the successful operation of the Honduras Special Operations forces under the direction of US Special Forces trainers. In Shanker’s coverage, a US Congressional delegation praised the Honduran Special Operations forces ‘respect for human rights,’ quoting the US ambassador description of the Honduran regime as ‘eager and capable partners in this joint effort.’12

There are blatant parallels between the NY Times white-wash of the criminal extremist regime in Honduras and the Financial Times’ crude promotion of Colombia’s death squad democracy.

The current extremist Honduran regime, headed by ‘President’ Lobos, which invited the Pentagon to expand its military control over huge swathes of Honduran territory, is a product of the US-backed military coup that overthrew a democratically-elected liberal President on June 28, 2009, a recent historical point Shanker avoids in his coverage. Lobos, the predator president, retains control by killing, jailing and torturing his critics, including journalists, human rights advocates and lawyers, as well as now-landless peasants demanding a return of their properties after they were violently seized by Lobos’ big-landlord allies.

Following the military coup, thousands of Honduran pro-democracy demonstrators were killed, beaten and arrested. According to conservative estimates by Human Rights Watch, 20 pro-democracy dissidents were openly murdered by the military and police.13 From January 2010 to November 2011 at least 12 journalists, critical of the Lobos regime, were assassinated.

In the countryside, where NY Times reporter Shanker describes a love fest between the US Special Forces and their Honduran counterparts, 30 farm workers in northern Honduras Bajo Aguan valley were killed by death squads hired by Lobos powerful allies.14 Not one military, police or death squad assassin has been brought to justice. The original coup leader, Roberto Micheletti and his successor, President Lobos, repeatedly attacked pro-democracy demonstrations, particularly those led by school teachers, students and trade unionists. Hundreds of jailed political dissidents have been tortured. During the period of NY Times most euphoric articles on the cozy relations between the US and Honduras, the death toll among pro-democracy advocates rose precipitously: Eight journalists and a TV commentator were killed during the first 4 months of 2012.14 In late March and early April of 2012 nine farm workers and employees were murdered by pro-Lobos landlords.14 With impunity reigning in the Central American land of US military bases, no one has been arrest for these murders. The NY Times coverage of Honduras follows the Mafia rule of omega — silence and complicity.

Syria: How the Financial Times Absolves Al Qaeda Terrorists

As Western-backed Islamist terrorists savage the secular regime in Syria, the Western press, especially the Financial Times, continue to absolve the terrorists use of huge car bombs, which have killed and mutilated hundreds of Syrian citizens. With crude cynicism Western reporters shrug their shoulders and parrot the claims of the London-based anti-regime propagandists, that the Assad regime was destroying its own cities and killing its own citizens and security forces.15

Conclusion

As the Obama regime and its European allies publically embrace extremism, including state terror, targeted assassinations and the car bombings in crowded urban neighborhoods, the respectable press has joined in. Extremism takes many forms — from the refusal to report honestly about the use of mercenary force and violence to overthrow another anti-colonial regime to the blatant cover-up of the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians and the dispossession of millions of peasants and farmers. The ‘educated classes’, the respectable affluent reading public are being continuously indoctrinated by the respectable Western media to believe that the smiling and pragmatic President Santos in Colombia and elected President Lobos in Honduras have succeeded in establishing peace, market-based prosperity, mutually beneficial free trade agreements, and military base concessions with the US — even as these two regimes currently lead the world in the murder of trade unionists and journalists. On May 15, 2012 the US Hispanic Congressional caucus awarded Lobos a leadership in democracy award – the same day the Honduran press reported the murder of the news director of radio station, HMT, Alfredo Villatoro, the 25th critical journalist killed between January 27, 2010 and May 15, 2012.16

The respectable press’ embrace of extremism and its use of demonological and vitriolic language to describe critical regimes opposed to imperialism are matched by its euphoric and effusive praise of state and pro-western mercenary brutality. The systematic cover-up of crimes by extremist journalism goes far beyond the cases of Colombia and Honduras. Financial Times reporter Michael Peel ‘covered’ the assault on the Libyan government of Gaddaffi without mentioning the NATO-led bombing campaign that destroyed Africa’s most advanced welfare state. Peel presented the rise of armed gangs of fanatical tribal and Islamic terrorists as a victory for democracy over a “brutal dictatorship.”17 Peel’s mendacity and cant is evident in his outrageous claims that the destruction of the Libyan economy and the mass torture and racially motivated murders, which followed NATO’s war, was a victory for the Libyan people.

The totalitarian twist in the respectable press is a direct consequence of its long-term toadying to the extremist policies pursued by the western regimes. Since extremist measures, like the use of force, violence, assassination and torture, have become routine by the incumbent presidents and prime ministers, the reporters have no choice but to fabricate lies to render ‘respectable’ such crimes, to spit out a constant flow of highly charged adjectives in order to convert victims into executioners and executioners into victims. Extremism in defense of pro-US regimes has led to the most grotesque accounts imaginable: Colombia and Mexico’s Presidents are the leaders of the most thoroughly narcotized economies in the hemisphere yet they are praised for their war on drugs, while Venezuela, the most marginal producer of any drug, is stigmatized as a major narco- pipeline.18

Articles with no factual basis, which are worthless as sources of objective information, direct us to seek an underlying rationale: Colombia has signed a free trade agreement, which will benefit US exports over Colombian by over a two to one ratio.19 Mexico’s free trade policy has benefited US agro-business and giant retailers by a similar ratio.

All forms of extremism permeate Western regimes and find justification and rationalization through the respectable media whose job is to indoctrinate civil society and turn citizens into uncritical accomplices to extremism. By endlessly prefacing ‘reports’ on Russia’s President Putin as an authoritarian Soviet-era tyrant, the respectable media avoid any discussion of the doubling of the Russian standard of living and Putin’s over 60% electoral triumph. By magnifying an authoritarian past, the murdered Libyan President Gaddafi’s vast public works, social welfare programs and generous immigration and foreign aid programs to sub-Sahara Africa can be relegated to the oblivion. The respectable press’s praise of death squad Presidents Santos and Lobos is part of a large-scale, long-term systematic shift from the hypocritical pretence of pursuing the virtues of a democratic republic to the open embrace of a virulent, murderous empire. The new journalists’ code reads ‘extremism in defense of empire is no vice.’

  1. There’s a general consensus that the respectable print media include the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
  2. Financial Times (FT) 5/8/12; See also FT (5/4/12) “Colombia looks to consolidate gainsin country of complexities.”
  3. FT 5/8/12 (p. 1).
  4. BBC News, May 5, 2012.
  5. Renan Vega Cantor, Sindicalicidio! (Un cuento poco imaginativo) de Terrorismo Laboral Bogotá, Feb. 25, 2012.
  6. Inforrme CODHES Novembre 2010.
  7. FT, 5/8/12 p. 4.
  8. See the Annual Reports of CODHES, Reiniciar and Human Rights Watch.
  9. Claroscuro Informe Aual 2011; Programa Somos Defensores Bogota 2012; Corporacion Colectivo de Abogados. Jan-March 2012.
  10. Fiscalia General, Informe 2012.
  11. Falsos Positivos Blogspot.
  12. Thom Shanker, “Lessons of Iraq Help US Fight a Drug War in Honduras,” New York Times, May 6, 2012.
  13. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2012.
  14. Honduran Human Rights, May 12m, 2012.
  15. The notorious cover-up of the car bombing is the handiwork of the FT’s star middle east journalists. See Michael Peel and Abigail Fielding-Smith, “At Least 55 Die in two Damascus Explosions: Responsibility for Blasts Disputed,” FT, 5/11/12.
  16. Honduras Human Rights, April 24, 2012.
  17. Michael Peel, “The Colonels Last Stand,” FT, 5/12-13/12.
  18. One of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary narco traffickers described the close financial and political ties between the Colombian United Self Defense terrorists and the Uribe-Santos regime. See La Jornada, 5/12/12.
  19. BBC News, 5/15/12. According to the US International Trade Commission estimates the value of US exports to Colombia could rise by $1.1 billion while Colombia’s exports could grow by $487 million.
]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/when-the-respectable-become-extremists/feed/ 0 The Elections Won’t Bring Progressive Change, So What Can? http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-elections-wont-bring-progressive-change-so-what-can/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-elections-wont-bring-progressive-change-so-what-can/#comments Fri, 25 May 2012 15:00:14 +0000 Jack A. Smith http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44622 Less than six months before the November presidential elections in an exceptionally distressed United States the narrow, unpleasant parameters of political possibility are emerging. Two alternatives confront the American people, both to the right of center.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-elections-wont-bring-progressive-change-so-what-can/feed/ 0 On the Front Lines of the Wage War: Stopping the Wal-Martization of Mind and Matter http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/on-the-front-lines-of-the-wage-war-stopping-the-wal-martization-of-mind-and-matter/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/on-the-front-lines-of-the-wage-war-stopping-the-wal-martization-of-mind-and-matter/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 15:00:33 +0000 Paul Haeder http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44609

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

— John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden

I’ve been thinking about those angels/devils after contemplating the death of Carlos Fuentes. I spent time with him in El Paso, Juarez and Las Cruces. I’ve been thinking about my years in Latin America; thinking about those international bridge blockades against wars in Central America, against NAFTA, against the first Iraq oil war. What Fuentes said above and all that he has been oft-quoted tying to some of the same political things Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Pablo Neruda and others have said over time about the United States: What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.

That’s what I am thinking now – how my fellow Seattlites have spent countless billions knowing themselves as giant wind bags of consumption and self-actualization and highly self-regarded as masters of their digital universe.

I’m also thinking about this high-tech town, the new provisos at the federal level to allow the cops here to deploy unmanned drones, the obsession with Facebook going public, the constant silly treadmill of the next generation iPad, the next new digital thing that ramps up the paranoia complex that is tied to almost anything around digital commerce, digital thinking, digital systems and digital organization.

People in Seattle have contorted nature and used nano-technology to insert silicon skin cells and digitized eyes into their offspring.

I can think of other things apropos now, things that Fuentes said a long time ago; in an 1998 interview, Fuentes may have been lambasting Ronald Reagan, but the caricature  still fits so many white politicians and military men:

While Fuentes toured Nicaragua, President Reagan asked Congress to approve increased  military aid to his freedom fighters. “There is an obsessive old man in Washington, dreaming of  movie scripts which never happened actually, looking for lost lines, consumed by his personal  fears,” Fuentes fumed when we finally caught up with him for an interview. “I hope that when he leaves, his fears and obsessions and paranoia will leave with him, too.”1

It’s a town of Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon, unending biotechnology innovations (sic) and “knowledge” services tied to surveillance, micro-processing, and academia. It’s white and full of guys and gals with graduate degrees and PhD’s; one of  the highest college-educated cities in the nation, per capita. People in gated communities in Bellevue seemingly “know themselves” (as Fuentes said of all Americans) but know very few others in the 3.3 million Puget Sound area.

People running the tax-dodging Boeing and running the military servicing contracts know nothing about the places that pay for those bombs and tools of repression with the death of citizens and cultures.

People on the West side of the Cascades don’t even know their fellow Washingtonians on the East Side of the state, deferring to the epithets “rural bumpkins” and “red side of the state voters” (we’re not talking commies).

This Fuentes observation has become a truism for the US in general – we love those iPads, but never mind the suicide prevention nets around those Chinese factories. We love instantaneous Google searches producing a million hits on how to breed Peruvian hairless dogs, but screw the environmental impact of all those servers. It’s the delusion of our times – disconnecting commerce, oil, food, consumption, capitalism to anything other than “externalities, necessary means of doing business, collateral damage, unintended negative consequences … etc.”

Slow Food, Fast Money, Sloppy Thinking

Consumerism is king in Seattle; it’s just packaged differently. Shop at REI, that’s cool. End up at a Wal-Mart in one of those outlier suburbs, that’s wrong. Hand-crafted chocolate from Theo’s, that’s great; KFC, that’s for Somalis. The height of reverse snobbery are those $4.50 PBRs in chic pubs where you can bring your German-command-trained Belgium shepherds for burgers and fries (and maybe a Pabst Blue Ribbon, too).

Slow food, lots of non-profits looking for walkable and bike-able communities, even some dealing with poverty and public education — that’s another Seattle. Endless discussion about marriage equality. Obama’s many trips to the Emerald City (he’s here all the time, pocketing millions each trip). Seattle is all those “We Love Obama . . . Yes We Can” signs lining the streets when Secret Service and Homeland Security close the links to Capitol Hill when Obama and Michelle hang with Bill and Melinda.

It’s the city that called the young Frances Farmer a “heathen” when she won a high school award for her essay, “God Dies.” Four years later, at U of Washington, Farmer won a trip to the Soviet Union by out-selling everyone hawking a leftist newspaper.

During that time time, 1931, many Seattle  churches held special meetings to confront “rampant atheism” in the public schools. “If the young people of this city are going to hell,” one Baptist minister reportedly told his congregation, “Frances Farmer is surely leading them there.”

Like the tens of thousands of techies [knowledge workers, AKA “creative class” (sic)] who come from mostly states where land-grant schools provided them with those opportunities to start and finish degrees in economics, engineering, IT management, Farmer stayed for a while, and then left.

She had a storied career, but at the peak of her film career, Farmer told tabloids that the Seattle reaction to her high school essay became a major turning point in her life. “It was pretty sad,” she said, “because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.”

The Insipid Space Needle and the Half Century Party Recognizing the World’s Fair, 1962

Luckily, Seattle’s small black community also gained the same sort of “turning points” the Hollywood start got from the Emerald City’s oppression.

That was forty-four years ago when Judge James Dore sentenced Aaron Dixon, Larry Gossett, and Carl Miller to six months in jail for unlawful assembly during a March 29, 1968 sit-in at Franklin High School. The newspapers call what followed, “… riots in Seattle’s Central Area.” But, hundreds of young African Americans gathered at Garfield High School for a protest rally. Rock throwing in Seattle is more than just protest – like this 2012 May Day, when the airwaves were full of bubble brain TV reporters  (sic) screaming about three or six Black Bloc anarchists smashing in a few bank windows and another few vehicle windows. The city goes crazy. The planned march for Trayvon Martin was charged with hundreds of cops with their grizzly-bear pepper spray canisters strapped to their Volcano mountain bikes. Helicopters, paddy wagons, huge military police presence. For a few windows busted.

The mayor – Sierra Club liberal – says the cops have the power on May Day 2012 to arrest anyone they deem carrying anything that might be used for a weapon. That new Canon Rebel my fiance just got for her birthday? My motorcycle “murse?” Heavy anatomy and physiology college books? Weapons … right! Private protection agencies – Seattle Police Department – guarding Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Gucci.

Seattle Police gave their orders to disperse then arrested six people during five hours of protest July 1, 1968. But now, every day, the airwaves are abuzz about how Seattle brought the world into the 21st Century during the 1962 World’s Fair. The entire city is washing that event in a glow of nostalgia rarely seen in this moody city.

We’re a city that will tear down a viaduct that moves hundreds of thousands of cars a week to be replaced by a tunnel, the $4.3 billion deep bore project, whereby the prime property near Pike Place and Pioneer Square will be open again for those multimillion dollar views of the Sound and Olympics. Yet school lunch programs and child care services are being axed.

This a city where the very rich have 20,000 square foot bungalows spreading out to their private boat docks where multimillion dollar yachts shine in that every-rare afternoon glint. A city where ancient Chinese grannies shuttle in the International District wearing black pajamas and conical hats while hoisting shoulder poles (biǎndans) chok full of tin cans.

Six thousand dollar bicycles and a continuous parade of chugging vehicles gridlocked on Seattle’s freeways. The new toll bridge that goes into Bellevue (think Microsoft and Gates-people) is an excuse to keep poor, riff-raff out of that city where big homes and big yachts grow like cancer along the edge of Lake Washington.

This is a city that has so many poor people living paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet. Garbage collection runs around $150 a month. Electricity bills run $150 in the winter. Natural gas costs for small old rentals go as high as $500 a month.

It’s a city of schizophrenia, in a state that is in the Paul Ryan “cut, cut, cut and fire, fire, fire teachers and public workers mode.”

Homelessness in One of USA’s Most Expensive Cities

There’s also the old issue of Nickelsville – An encampment of pink tents created during Mayor Greg Nickels mayoralship in 2008;  it’s been forced to move more than 15 times, forced by city “fathers” and the cops. It’s right back to where it started out, though. Hundreds live there. Thousands of homeless  battle that Amazon.com smile ethos – lots of $120 K a year jobs right out of graduate school, and $9 an hour barrista jobs pulling shots. There have been several weddings held at Nickelsville.

How is it 103 million Americans are living double below the federal poverty wage of $36,000 a year for a family of four? Or that the medium wealth of Hispanics and blacks dropped 66 percent and 53 percent respectively over the past decade? Yet, in Seattle, people talk about their weekly trips to Silver Mountain ski resort and hitting the beaches of Hawaii once a month?

We Are Being Told that Poverty is Our Fault, That We Spend too Much on Junk, On Homes, on Education Loans to Buy Big Screen TVs and Brand New Ford Mustangs

Maybe the other pithy thing Steinbeck said – man is the only varmint that sets his own trap, baits it and steps right on it – is more apropos in Seattle since we never learn from history; corporations are disempowering us all with the junk it carts out each year and the political power it purchases through trillions in bribes; and how basically humanity has evolved from “apes with sticks and termites” into “apes with nuclear warheads, dildos and high fructose corn syrup.”

You know, much of the crap on-line retailer Amazon.com sells at Christmas time is that sex toy stuff, not just electronics, books, and personal savior exercise equipment.

My intersection with Amazon.com happened in 1994 when the company came about. I never bought into monopolies then or now, and I already had down pat “the planning and economic development thing/angle” of supporting mom and pops and small businesses.  Never bought anything from Amazon, and I never will.

But, I have that one stock – purchased with union organizing money – so I can bang on the stockholders’ meeting Thursday, May 24. The past year, I’ve been in contact with unions and organizers who are protesting the company. I know that pie cutter they sell at Amazon – one big radial cutter with all those even piece pieces – is symbolic of the lack of evenness in Bezos’ business plan, all those  millions spent on fighting fair sales taxation in states where bricks and mortar shops pay for each commercial-retail exchange while Amazon skirts its duty to pay its fair share. I know that a company that pays 2.5 percent in taxes is on the same level as those other 265 corporations bilking the taxpayer and US safety nets.

I have friends of friends who have been to my house who think Amazon.com is the model of the century, who think corporations have already won, that revolution will never happen, and who call the Occupy Movement “a bunch of flea-baggers.”

These Amazon-techies are wielding their electrical engineering and MBA certificates from state schools, many back east and in the south, and point blank they defend Bezos for taking over retail, taking over publishing and for having warehouses with wage slaves in them. They believe the world has always been feudal, and that Bezos is not evil, just a good businessman.

They think youth with education loans averaging $25,000 are chumps, and they can’t wait for Humanities teachers (and the like) to shrivel up and die.

These kids, or twenty-somethings, rather,  laugh that some fifty-something is an out of work humanities-English teacher with all those writing clips and stories of adventure in Latin America. They actually think the job market is theirs to manipulate, and that fifty- and sixty-somethings without a chance for a living wage is part of the deal.

It makes sense to them that the few haves have a lot and the haves not are the new majority.

They actually think writers and authors groups are dead wrong about publishing’s demise and the affects that Amazon has on the publishing world. They are arrogant because they got out of rust belt Pennsylvania or Bubba-land Alabama and have that oh-so hip Seattle townhouse and the endless junk and the stock options that define success, minimal power and the straight and narrow way toward early retirement.

Funny thing is, even those $120 TO $200 K a year wunderkinds burn out after 10 years, 15 years,  end up buying some hobby farm in the area raising fungi and blueberries.

Alas, they are the products of the schools I taught at, and they are contemptuous of liberals, humanities teachers, anything to do with ethics or social justice, and they have all the information at their Google fingertips, so they are the ones “in” on the real climate change story, the real “financial disaster” story, the real story on Bradley Manning, Wiki-leaks and how the world runs, will run and will never run.

Arrogance isn’t a Strong Enough Word to Characterize Them when Schlepping for a Job

I know why Scott Turow and other writers are mad as hell at Amazon for what it’s doing to the publishing-writing worlds.  Just listen to the best-selling author and President of the Authors Guild:

Salon.com:  So what’s the problem?

Scott Turow:  The concern is that they are getting so large and they compete so ruthlessly that there’s a lot of fear for what the world with Amazon in charge is going to look like.

The Guild’s beefs with Amazon became pronounced over the issue of the resale of new titles some years ago. This was something that Amazon pioneered. They would sell you a [just-released] book on Day One, buy it back from you on Day Two, and then resell it to another customer on Day Three. This was legal, but certainly not what anybody ever intended.

Traditionally, in hardcover, that’s been basically a split of the proceeds between the author and publisher. (An aside: That’s something we’re fighting with publishers about in the digital world.) So Amazon decides to go into competition with the publishers by reselling the book they just bought. The publisher gets paid nothing, and neither does the author. It’s a pure profit for Amazon.

Now, the reason you don’t see used bookstores within new bookstores is that the used books compete with the new books and the publishers supplying the new books would object. Either you’re doing business with me or you’re competing with me. I’m not going to sell you books so you can take some percentage of sales.

The problem, of course, was the Amazon had gotten so big that publishers were afraid to resist that. It’s not the mere fact that they’re competing [with their own suppliers]. I can certainly understand that it’s good for consumers to be able to buy a book two days later at a lower price. It’s the fact that the publishers were afraid to dismiss Amazon.

So, where is this going, this ode to joy about American-Seattle values and lack thereof?

The job market? Partly. I started off writing this essay with these questions in mind:

• What do you do when you feel like the world is dumping on you at age 55 while humping it on the job market in a town like Seattle, where happy couples spend a thousand a month on cooking lessons teaching them how to cure Berkshire heritage pig meat and then dump $5000 for a week in Paris to learn the art of truffles?

• Faced with temporary work hell – adjunct faculty countrywide teach 70 percent of all higher education classes, with a whopping 535,000 as PT and another 235,000 as non-vetted, non-tenure track full time wage slaves working one, two and three year contracts with no guarantees of returning –  the job search becomes surreal so should I give up?

• After applying to dozens of places, many non-profits, some education-centered jobs — places looking for what I would have thought would be a gifted teacher, one with outdoor education and teaching, a writer, journalist, planner, someone with curriculum development, world travel, event planning, multi-project facilitation, coaching, four college degrees, and a lot of independent journalism, both for print venues like dailies and slick magazines and radio – is there some Seattle curse put upon blokes like me?

• I’ve got letters of recommendation from executive directors of environmental groups who tout my organizing skills on environmental issues, yet, why do Seattle non-profits never bother to even acknowledge applications?

• When the unions start stringing me along for a job, is it time for Plan B, Plan C (more on these later)?

Those bullet points are entirely whole other essays in the works. Again, though, I keep telling myself that all of those laments are really not the stuff of real legitimate whining when I’ve already had the chance to go at it in higher education, had my $10 dollar a day in Europe fun, and all those travels in Latin America and abroad to Vietnam.

Stop complaining, I hear that Steinbeck voice inside. Give it a rest, I hear from the ghosts of Jack Nicholson playing Frances Phelan in Ironweed. I hear the last words of a former student and friend – that 26-year-old who went into 36 firefights in Fallujah, Iraq, at age 18; who later had to recover three KIA-ed buddies on Thanksgiving Day. You think he’s got it good now that he’s serving four months in lock up (out in August) for four DUI’s and resisting arrest?

The voices, doubts and real world examples just keep me awake at night, knowing they got it rough and I am going through a rough stretch. I run 8 miles a day, write daily, do what I can to carry forth with whatever it is the man doesn’t expect of me.

But that Amazon smile wears on us.

You put in 10 years in Spokane – develop a sustainability initiative at the community college; bring famous thinkers to campuses and the city like David Suzuki, Winona LaDuke, James Howard Kunstler, Sonia Shah; do major planning of earth day celebrations for the city; develop and write a column on sustainability for the middle of the road weekly; create and host a weekly hour FM Radio show on climate change and social justice with such folk like Bill McKibben, Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill, Naomi Wolf and others; help the city get Beaming Bioneers in town several years in a row; write for the daily newspaper with his own sustainability column and create a special two-year project covering the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster; get a master’s in urban planning and work on major planning issues within the city, including the mayor’s task force on sustainability; and, oh yeah, teach several thousand students how to think for themselves and think outside the box.

You get the ten-year pin for working the temporary teaching gig, and then, the last straw – your teaching is outside the political, philosophical, prudent lines of a conservative college in a conservative town. You are told that there are no more classes.

The tsunami of budget cuts (sic) and cuts to classes, firing adjunct teachers, ending programs and killing student aid and wiping student services hit Washington State hard. Several billion in cuts for all state supported schools came down from our legislature in just three years, while politicians glad-hand the tax evaders and all those tax loophole whores that make Washington State one of the most backward, regressive taxation-wise states in the US of A.

Should you whine? Lash out? Act out? What is it, this idea of putting decades in as a radical worker while temping or part-timing in quasi “normal” places like academia (mostly making FT living as adjunct) and in journalism (corporate and outside that box), somehow slave-like compared to Foxconn workers or sulfur harvesters slogging in the crater of the Kawah Ijen volcano in East Java, Indonesia?2

What is Seattle without Amazon.com? Some get it, others never will …

Here I am, in Seattle less than a year, and I see what we should be whining about – taxi drivers from India and the African continent who have to lease their cabs and push 12, 14, and 16 hour days to make ends meet (read – break even). What about Somali women working as day care and personal care workers for $8 an hour while spouses sling baggage at Sea-Tac for $10 an hour, urine breaks not included? Alaska Airlines boasting profits and on-time customer service, yet these workers – African Americans, Latino/a and from all parts east and west of Turtle Island – are hired by contractors, agencies that offer zero benefits, and worse, complete anti-worker rules and regs that make a grown grandpa cry. (No, I am not a grandpa, and, no, I don’t cry.)

But get this: These immigrants and Seattle working class blacks, Asians, Latinos, the lower economic  rung whites are getting it, so to speak. What’s it they are getting in happy, sappy, moldy, Techie, Obama-y Seattle?

That Amazon smile ain’t for them. That fancy “community engagement” rhetoric from developers and so-called Sierra Club liberals is the same old empty song. They see that the Seattle Police Department under investigation for abuse of authority, and for criminal assault, battery and homicide is not the police force for, by and with the people.

This is a town where a 1906 run-down house goes for $350,000. Where 700 square foot townhouses rent for $3000 a month, with just the right view and gentrification. Sea planes fly overhead on sunny days, yachts pull into slips where waiting SUVs are all new and shiny; Tesla sports cars zoom through downtown against the roar of 1800-cc custom bikes; affordable matching Smart cars in those special driveways up near where Bill and Melinda “slum it” in their 25,000 square foot symbol of Gandhi’s seven sins of man.

Meanwhile, suburban ghettoization – Everett, Kent, Auburn, Rainer Beach, Whites Center – runs rampant as people of color-poverty-immigration status find fix-it-up ranchers and sprawling multiple-story single family homes and hunker down, sometimes with two or three families throwing in.

It’s a city that threatens to cut curbside garbage pick-up to twice a month. A city where the rats get bigger each six months. It’s a city where transit is under constant attack in the media by tea party armchair quarterbacks. Bus routes are dropped and bus tickets go up.

Does anyone outside the Puget Sound remember the stories of an 84-year-old retired nurse pepper sprayed – all four-foot-eight of her – for marching last November in Occupy Seattle? Do any readers remember a woodcarver – John Williams –  a mainstay of the Pike Place Market, being plugged several times until his last gasp of air probably mouthed why a fully decked out Seattle Police officer would be screaming “put the knife down” when he was deaf and the knife was his work’s tool.

The Demands of the King of Knowledge Workers

Just being here for almost a year has sparked my confidence that working class people are getting it, up against the constant drone of delusional liberals and basically “rednecks in Subarus and Beamers.” That great army of knowledge workers and IT wunderkinds has a collective zero interest in ethnic neighborhoods or people of color-poverty. Pad Thai and Naan and Sopapillas are about as close as these almost-millionaires will ever get close to that great dripping pot that Seattle should be (it’s still the whitest city in America for it’s size).

Yet, just a few weeks ago, Filipino women, Ethiopian students, African-American activists, day care workers, Port of Seattle drivers and young and old unionists and supporters and organizers were out there at the Amazon campus, staring dozens of cops and private security types in the eyes while delivering Jeff Bezos our demands:

• get out of ALEC – you know, voter repression, school privatizing, stand your ground laws by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a, what, 501(c) 3 non-profit (sic);

• stop the sweatshops in Pennsylvania, Nevada and elsewhere, so-called Fulfillment Centers, where $12 an hour is supreme, and working conditions are embarrassing for the richest country in the world, under the stewardship of a guy worth $19.3 billion;

• pay taxes – the corporate tax rate should be 37 percent, no loopholes, but Amazon got off with 5.6 percent two years ago, 2.6 percent this past tax cycle;

• give to your community, Seattle – Amazon is notorious for not having some charitable presence in Seattle; and,

• stop killing independent bookstores, book publishers and authors’ opportunities – 30 percent of all books sold anywhere, e-books, used books, etc. Think monopoly, think underselling e-books to keep other competitors out of the business , think anti-trust.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its offshoot, Working Washington, and others flew out two former Amazon warehouse workers from Pennsylvania to speak to the crowd at noon while those techies ate lunch in the quasi public stage-table seating area and while video taping us from the cantilevered windows above enveloping us.

I counted 75, including Paul Loeb, author of several books, including, Soul of a Citizen who spoke at the noontime event, framed by the TechFlash Seattle Technology News Source as “more Amazon.com employees waiting in line at nearby food trucks Thursday than there were noon-time protesters outside Amazon’s headquarters in South Lake Union.”

Cute and vapid, and typical of the tongue in cheek sarcasm of some in the Seattle techie/knowledge worker scene where everything to do with cyberspace, on-line technology and “computing for a better you” is A-okay by them, as long as their fancy food trucks aren’t blocked off or anything.

Loeb reiterated how bullet number five above links directly to him as a writer and how books are sold – those by lesser known writers, up-and-coming authors, and outside the box thinkers.

“Amazon wants to create a dominance of ideas … it’s not just selling shoes,” Loeb told me. “From a writer’s standpoint, it harder for writer to write books because Amazon puts a bottom line on what publishers have to sell books for. This company is not benevolent. They aren’t the writer’s friend. This idea of getting people to use phones to get it cheaper, that’s part of the Amazon growth model. Amazon is dragging us to the bottom because they are not promoting middle class jobs.”

He called it blackmail, saying how Amazon forces his own books to be sold for $9.99, or else. His voice seems lost in the valley of the working class, but at least he understands the larger issues around why Trayvon Martin’s death is on the hands of all ALEC supporters, including Jeff Bezos and Amazon sending ALEC bucks for political shenanigans, or worse, unethical leveraging.

Two of those at the rally were hard-pressed to look kindly upon the techies coming out in the sun to eat their power bars and handmade kettle potato chips. Jim Herbold, who worked in an Amazon warehouse for five months when he was 61 years old , said the Amazon way is the temporary and you are out way: “Very few people work there past three months,” he said.

Karen Salasky, who also worked in the Pennsylvania warehouse for nine months, also came out to Seattle, and she experienced the dreaded six-point system and the 115 degree warehouse conditions while being forced outside in 20 degree weather for three hours sometimes while the Amazon warehouse honchos checked the fingers of every employee after a fire alarm was pulled.

Purple fingers isn’t about voting, but they symbolize theft of Amazon’s time, so everyone is suspected.

Creeps recruited from the ranks of the US military manage (sic) those warehouses, and the result is that you’ve got a temporary worker assembly line; point demerits against you if you encounter a foot of snow coming to work; forced evacuations from 115 degree warehouses into 20 degree Pennsylvania chill for three hours.

Workers slogging away putting down 8 to 12 miles a day in warehouses that literally rip the knee joints from old timers. The stories go on and on, and DV readers got a taste of them here – with former Lehigh FC employee Nichole Gracely submitting to interviews and her own essay.3

So, here we are, in Seattle, around 75 of us, and then the other 75 or so Amazon employees rubber necking or actually sticking it out and listening. I wander around with camera, notepad and that confident look of reporter who takes no prisoners.

I overhear two techie metro-sexual types eating something I do not recognize from some boutique lunch shop located around the headquarters “campus” (sic). It’s the clear delineation I’ve had all through my life, before college in 1975 and through all those years teaching, traveling, writing, reporting, and in the bustle of activism.

“Dog eat dog America, ya gotta love it or leave it.” These two fellows munching on probably arugula chips dipped in the juices from bacon made on an island in the Straights of Juan de Fuca sort of went dark: “I guess they should have just gone to college and got the hell out of that hell hole. What do they expect? The same pay we get? Right.”

I didn’t get their names as they palmed their Amazon badges on my approach. You have to imagine these fellows and gals running around Seattle with caffeine buzzes, inside Whole Foods and Starbucks and everywhere with their company-mandated ID swipe cards dangling and company-provided backpacks.

But I ask them:

Look, you both went to college, maybe somewhere other than here, right? So, those schools need groundskeepers, building engineers, cooks, all those clerical people, the works, including faculty. Some of those jobs are harder, to be sure, but you are not expecting that some of the profits and profit sharing and benefits scheduling and some sort of safety nets – let’s see, you all get moving expenses, health and dental, stocks, retirement plans, travel and per deim and time off, paternity – so, what’s the problem with others in society, within your own corporate structure and mission, getting something more than this? You really think these very two people – a younger woman from another country and a white older American guy – deserved the harsh conditions you just heard them describe?

The two just smirk and wander off.

Hell, I don’t need to ask questions anymore because I’ve been asking questions since I was age 12 and living in Europe while my old man prepared to jump into the Vietnam War in his Army cryptography specialty. I’ve been asking city officials, cops, honchos, everyone questions as a journalist since 1975. I’ve been asking questions of students since 1977 (as a dive master instructor) and since 1983 (as an English-Literature-Writing professor) to help students, sources, anyone them find their voices, their intellectual strides.

  1. 1998 Mother  Jones interview.
  2. See more on the Apple/Steve Jobs/Jeff Bezos/Amazon paradigm.
  3. Where Santa’s Helpers Work 247-365 Days a Year; Jeff Bezos Free-shipping and Forty-percent of online Retail Sales; Inside a Dot.com Warehouse.
]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/on-the-front-lines-of-the-wage-war-stopping-the-wal-martization-of-mind-and-matter/feed/ 0 A World Without Capitalists Is Necessary http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/a-world-without-capitalists-is-necessary/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/a-world-without-capitalists-is-necessary/#comments Mon, 21 May 2012 15:00:33 +0000 Frank Scott http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44573

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

– World Federation of Labor

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

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

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

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

What kind of system is this? This kind:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/a-world-without-capitalists-is-necessary/feed/ 0 Where Santa’s Helpers Work 24/7, 365 Days a Year http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/where-santas-helpers-work-247-365-days-a-year/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/where-santas-helpers-work-247-365-days-a-year/#comments Mon, 21 May 2012 15:00:25 +0000 Nichole Gracely http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44566 Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley (LV) is a distribution hub, and many fellow Amazon associates and Integrity Staffing Solutions temps had previously worked in other local warehouses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brrr!

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

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

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

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

Happy holidays.

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/where-santas-helpers-work-247-365-days-a-year/feed/ 0 Inside a Dot.com Sweat shop http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/inside-a-dot-com-warehouse/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/inside-a-dot-com-warehouse/#comments Sat, 19 May 2012 15:01:53 +0000 Paul Haeder http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44567 Nichole Gracely has the inside scoop on demerits, humiliation, and the work ethic Amazon warehouses demand (think: Columbus’ marauders taking their pound of flesh from the Taino).

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

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

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

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

July 23, 2011 by Spencer Soper, The Morning Call

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

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

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

The following is my anonymous contribution to the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NG: They are remarkably accurate.

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

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

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

Bio

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

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/inside-a-dot-com-warehouse/feed/ 0 Mother Jones Deserves Her Own Stamp http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/mother-jones-deserves-her-own-stamp/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/mother-jones-deserves-her-own-stamp/#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 15:00:28 +0000 David Macaray http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44505 A fiction writer would be hard pressed to invent a character whose life was more tragic and sorrowful, yet more inspiring and socially relevant than that of Mary Harris Jones, better known as “Mother Jones.”

Born in 1837, in Cork, Ireland, the teenage Mary Harris and her family emigrated first to Toronto, Canada, then to the U.S., with stops in Monroe, Michigan and Chicago, before settling in Memphis, Tennessee, where Mary met and married George E. Jones, an ironworker and organizer for the National Union of Iron Moulders.

Mary opened a dressmaking shop in Memphis, in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, fulfilling her dream of becoming a wife, mother and businesswoman.  Then tragedy struck.  Mary’s husband and four children (all of whom were under the age of five) died during a virulent yellow fever epidemic that swept through Memphis, leaving her a childless widow.

Following their deaths, and looking for a fresh start in a friendly environment, Mary returned to Chicago, where she set up another dressmaking business.  Then, incredibly, four years later, disaster struck again.  Mary’s dress shop, her home and her personal possessions were all lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

It was in the wake of these personal tragedies that Mary Harris Jones became heavily involved in the labor movement, initially as an organizer for the Knights of Labor, and then, with the Knights of Labor’s dissolution, as an organizer and spokeswoman for the United Mine Workers (UMW).  In truth, she was considerably more than a UMW organizer; she became the coal miners’ patron saint.

By all accounts Mary was a brilliant, charismatic speaker, and a fearless, dedicated champion of social justice.  The authorities (politicians, mine owners, business groups) were terrified of her.  In 1897, at the age of 60, she began using the name “Mother Jones,” and in 1902, a West Virginia District Attorney with the improbable name of Reese Blizzard, famously referred to her as “the most dangerous woman in America,” sealing her reputation.

One of Mary’s chief concerns was child welfare.  Not only was she an early and outspoken opponent of child labor, she took the maternal view that men’s wages should be generous enough to allow their wives to stay home and raise their children.  A brave and independent thinker—and unquestionably affected by the deaths of her four young ones—Mary shied away from many of the feminist issues of the day, including women’s suffrage, believing that a mother raising her children trumped everything else.

Although the word “iconic” tends to be overused these days, the term certainly applied to Mother Jones.  For roughly 60 years, she was the working man’s spiritual leader and benefactor—part Madonna, part mediator, part rabble-rouser—a labor icon in every sense of the word.  This brief summary of her career doesn’t do her justice.  Suffice to say that in an era of colorful, larger-than-life male figures, Mother Jones more than held her own.  She died in 1930, at the age of ninety-three.

A couple of labor activists and historians, Steve Fesenmaier (in West Virginia) and Sanford Berman (in Minnesota), have spearheaded a drive to have Mother Jones honored by a commemorative stamp.  I’ve spoken with both men by telephone and was impressed not only with their staggering knowledge of labor history, but with their perseverance.  They’ve been committed to this project for seven years.

What does it take for the USPS (United States Postal Service) to put you on a commemorative stamp?  Several things, actually.  You don’t have to be an American, and you don’t have to be an intellectual or moralist (Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, and Elvis have been on stamps), but you do have to be dead for a minimum of five years (although exceptions can be made for ex-presidents).

Commemorative stamps have been around since 1893.  Interestingly, you can’t  get on a stamp if you’re a religious figure.  The USPS has a policy of not issuing stamps for people who were known primarily for their religious beliefs, which means Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson are not eligible.

When atheists protested Mother Teresa getting her stamp, in 2010, the USPS was able to sidestep that potentially incendiary issue by claiming that the second-most famous Roman Catholic in the world (behind the Pope) was being honored for humanitarian rather than religious reasons.

The point that Messrs. Fesenmaier and Berman wish to emphasize is that the public can influence these selections.  There’s a group called the Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee, composed of approximately 15 people, that makes recommendations to the USPS.  People can write to this committee and suggest candidates.  If Duke Wayne and Elvis can get stamps, why not labor’s legendary benefactor, Mother Jones?

The mailing address is:

Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee:  Stamp Development
U.S. Postal Service
1735 North Lynn Street (Room 5013)
Arlington, VA 22209-6432

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/mother-jones-deserves-her-own-stamp/feed/ 0 A Drop in the Progressivist Bucket http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/a-drop-in-the-progressivist-bucket/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/a-drop-in-the-progressivist-bucket/#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 15:02:58 +0000 Kim Petersen http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44502 Whoop dee doo! Barack Obama has acknowledged that gay people should have the right — as other human beings do — to marry. It is long overdue step in supporting every human’s right to form a love partnership regardless of sexual orientation. Obama wasn’t even a leader in his decision; it came after his vice president Joseph Biden had announced he was in favor.

To be sure, progressivism demands that LGBTQ share the same rights as every other person, and the United States president’s affirmation of that right is important, but it should be a given — not a sudden, monumental revelation. Yet, even though Obama has tepidly espoused a tenet of progressivism, endorsement of one or two progressivist principles does not make one a progressive.

Obama’s evilism (it’s definitely not lesser) lost (or it should have lost) a while back the support of progressives. When a presidential candidate promises change (and gullible people start to envision an end to warring, an end to torture, an end to incarceration without habeas corpus, and an end to unfair distribution of wealth, and other progressive moves) and carries on with the extremist status quo of warring and neoliberalism, what reaction should one expect from progressives?

Obama does not acknowledge, by deeds, the right of workers to form unions unencumbered — which is vital to ensuring workplace safety, protecting worker rights, and attaining a fair wage for their labor.

Obama does not acknowledge, by deeds, the rights of all humans to have a job — especially a decent paying job that upholds the integrity of labor.

Obama does not acknowledge, by deeds, the right of all citizens to universal, easy access to healthcare whether poor or well off.

Obama does not acknowledge, by deeds, the rights of Afghanis, Iraqis, Iranians, Pakistanis, Syrians, Yemenis, Libyans, and Palestinians to live free from the fear of drone attack and US or US-backed military assault.

Back in the homeland, the president does not acknowledge, by deeds, the rights of citizens to escape the clutches of financial robber barons. His administration has been surveilling the Occupation movement. Whose side is Obama on? He bails out the 1% and he spies on the 99%.

Wealth at any given moment is finite. Imagine if one divides the economic pizza in a crowd of 100 people, and 100 slices are cut. That is one slice for everyone, and everyone should be satisfied, no? However, what if one person grabs 67 slices of pizza and leaves 33 slices for the rest of the people? How will the 99% feel then? It seems very clear to see what would happen. There is a reason why the Occupation movement arose.

While average citizens were being foreclosed and jobs were disappearing, Obama bailed out the 1% with cash — much of it created by the blood, sweat, and tears of working people, and yet he says nothing meaningful about the right of the 99% to have their slice of the economic pie.

Workers cannot even retire secure in the knowledge that they will be provided for in their retirement years under Obama.

Why can Cuba provide free education right through university, universal healthcare, and high employment with poverty constrained? What does the Cuban Revolution know about progressivism and an egalitarian society that stymies Obama and the others who follow the Washington Consensus through its economic collapses, bailouts, and to whichever economic precipice looms next on the dark capitalist horizon?

Anyway, at least gays can now sleep well knowing that the president has drummed up the gumption to say it is okay for them to marry.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/a-drop-in-the-progressivist-bucket/feed/ 0 Mission Impossible: Finding a Minivan Made in America by Union Workers http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/mission-impossible-finding-a-minivan-made-in-america-by-union-workers/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/mission-impossible-finding-a-minivan-made-in-america-by-union-workers/#comments Sat, 12 May 2012 15:00:05 +0000 Walter Brasch http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44458 Last year, not one of the 491,687 new minivans sold in the United States was made in America by unionized workers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/mission-impossible-finding-a-minivan-made-in-america-by-union-workers/feed/ 0 Social Security Garnished for Student Debts http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/indentured-servitude-for-seniors-social-security-garnished-for-student-debts/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/indentured-servitude-for-seniors-social-security-garnished-for-student-debts/#comments Sat, 12 May 2012 14:59:26 +0000 Ellen Hodgson Brown http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44476

The Social Security program…represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.

— President Jimmy Carter, December 20, 1977

[This law] assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half century ago…[The Social Security Amendments of 1983 are] a monument to the spirit of compassion and commitment that unites us as a people.

— President Ronald Reagan, April 20, 1983

So said Presidents Carter and Reagan, but that was before 1996, when Congress voted to allow federal agencies to offset portions of Social Security payments to collect debts owed to those agencies. (31 U.S.C. §3716).  Now we read of horror stories like this:

I’m a 68 year old grandma of 2 young grandchildren. I went to college to upgrade my employment status in 1998 or 1999. I finished in 2000 and at that time had a student loan balance of about 3500.00.

Could not find a job and had to request forbearance to carry me. Over the years I forgot about the loan, dealt with poor health, had brain surgery in 2006 and the collection agents decided to collect for the loan in 2008.

At no time during the 6-7 year gap did anyone remind me or let me know that I could make a minimum payment on the loan. Now that I am on Social Security (have been since I was 62), they have decided to garnishee my SS check to the tune of 15%.

I have not been employed since 2004 and have the two dependents ….  I don’t dispute that I owed them the $3500.00 but am wondering why they let it build up to somewhere around $17,000/20,000 before they attempted to collect.

Her debt went from $3500 to over $17,000 in 10 years?!  How could that be?

It seems that Congress has removed nearly every consumer protection from student loans, including not only standard bankruptcy protections, statutes of limitations, and truth in lending requirements, but protection from usury (excessive interest).  Lenders can vary the interest rates, and some borrowers are reporting rates as high as 18-20%.  At 20%, debt doubles in just 3-1/2 years; and in 7 years, it quadruples.  Congress has also given lenders draconian collection powers to extort not just the original principal and interest on student loans but huge sums in penalties, fees, and collection costs.

The majority of these debts are being imposed on young people, who have a potential 40 years of gainful employment ahead of them to pay the debt off.  But a sizeable chunk of U.S. student loan debt is held by senior citizens, many of whom are not only unemployed but unemployable.  According to the New York Federal Reserve, two million U.S. seniors age 60 and over have student loan debt, on which they owe a collective $36.5 billion; and 11.2 percent of this debt is in default.  Almost a third of all student loan debt is held by people aged 40 and over, and 4.2% is held by people over the age of 60.  The total student debt is now over $1 trillion, more even than credit card debt.  The sum is unsustainable and threatens to be the next debt tsunami.

Some of this debt is for loans taken out years earlier on their own schooling, and some is from co-signing student loans for children or grandchildren.  But much of it has been incurred by middle-aged people going back to school in the hope of finding employment in a bad job market.  What they have wound up with is something much worse: no job, an exponentially mounting debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and the prospect of old age without a social security check adequate to survive on.

Gone is the promise of earlier presidents of a “commitment to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.”  The plight of the indebted elderly is reminiscent of the Irish immigrants who came to America after a potato famine in the 19th century, who were looked upon in some places as actually lower than slaves. Plantation owners kept their slaves fed, clothed and cared for, because they were valuable property.  The Irish were expendable, and they were on their own.

It is obviously not a good time to raise interest rates on student debt, but they are set to double on July 1, 2012, to 6.8%.  Many lawmakers in both parties agree that the current 3.4% rates should be extended for another year, but they can’t agree on how to find the $6 billion that this would cost. Republicans want to take the money from a health care fund that promotes preventive care; Democrats want to eliminate some tax benefits for small business owners.

Congress cannot agree on $6 billion to save the students, yet they managed to agree in a matter of days in September 2008 to come up with $700 billion to save the banks; and the Federal Reserve found many trillions more.  Estimates are that tuition could be provided free to students for a mere $30 billion annually.  The government has the power to find $30 billion — or $300 billion or $3 trillion — in the same place the Federal Reserve found it: it can simply issue the money.

Congress is empowered by the Constitution to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof,” and no limit is set on the face amount of the coins it creates. It could issue a few one-billion dollar coins, deposit them in an account, and start writing checks.

But wouldn’t that be inflationary?  No.  The Fed’s own figures show that the money supply (M3) has shrunk by $3 trillion since 2008. That sum could be added back into the economy without inflating prices.  Gas and food are going up today, but the whole range of prices must be considered in order to determine whether price inflation is occurring.  Housing and wages are significantly larger components of the price structure than commodities, and they remain severely depressed.

There is another way the government could find needed funds without raising taxes, slashing services, or going further into debt: Congress could re-finance the federal debt through the Federal Reserve, interest-free.  Canada did this from 1939 to 1974, keeping its national debt low and sustainable while funding massive programs including seaways, roadways, pensions, and national health care.  The national debt shot up only when the government switched from borrowing from its own central bank to borrowing from private lenders at interest.  The rationale was that borrowing bank-created money from the government’s own central bank inflated the money supply, while borrowing existing funds from private banks did not.  But even the Federal Reserve acknowledges that private banks create the money they lend on their books, just as central banks do.

U.S. taxpayers now pay nearly half a trillion dollars annually to finance our federal debt.  The cumulative figure comes to $8.2 trillion paid in interest just in the last 24 years.  By financing the debt itself rather than paying interest to private parties, the government could divert what it would have paid in interest into tuition, jobs, infrastructure and social services, allowing us to keep the social contract while at the same time stimulating the economy.

For students, at the very least the bankruptcy option needs to be reinstated, usury laws restored, predatory practices eliminated, and the cost of education brought back down to earth.  One possibility for relieving the burden on students would be to give them interest-free loans.  The government of New  Zealand now offers 0% loans to New Zealand students, with repayment to be made from their income after they graduate.  For the past twenty years, the Australian government has also successfully funded students by giving out what are in effect interest-free loans.  The loans in the Australian Higher Education Loan Programme (or HELP) do not bear interest, but the government gets back more than it lends, because the principal is indexed to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which goes up every year.

Predatory lenders are keeping us in debt peonage through misguided economics and bank-captured legislators.  We have people who desperately want to work, to the point of going back to school to try to improve their chances; and we have mountains of work that needs to be done.  The only thing keeping them apart is that artificial constraint called “money”, which we have allowed to be created by banks and let out at interest when it could have been created by public institutions for public purposes, either by direct issuance or through publicly-owned banks.  We just need to recognize our oppressors and throw off their yoke, and the good times can roll again.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/indentured-servitude-for-seniors-social-security-garnished-for-student-debts/feed/ 0 The Language of Occupation: The Greek Collapse http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-language-of-occupation-the-greek-collapse/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-language-of-occupation-the-greek-collapse/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 15:00:42 +0000 Binoy Kampmark http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44469

I take to the streets and go to rallies but maybe I should go to parliament to blow my brains out.

– Dimitris Christoulas to a friend, Business Insider, Apr 5, 2012

The cornered tend to be desperate. The insecure can lose their bearings. The Greek financial crisis is producing an assortment of warring metaphors, some more plausible than others. The common target in this whole business is Germany, implying that more than just the eurozone may be under threat. It suggests, in fact, that financial instability will, in time, lead to a nationalist critique of the European idea.

As with broader conflicts, the national is explained through the local. Global events can be seen through individual lenses, the stories of citizens who have suffered, even if those stories can unduly simplify the complex. In Greece, Dimitris Christoulas has offered the premise for the Greek protest movement. The 77-year-old retired pharmacist shot himself on Syntagma Square in Athens early last month leaving behind a poignant and powerful note. In that note, he claimed that he would ‘rather die than scavenge in rubbish bins for his food’ (Guardian, Apr 5).

Christoulas’s suicide has been labelled as the first ‘act of resistance’ akin to the revolutionary actions of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit and veg vendor whose act of self-conflagration in December 2010 set the Arab Spring in motion. But what was he resisting against? Unemployment levels in Greece stand at 21 percent and GDP has shrunk. The country is now in its fifth straight year of economic contraction. Soup kitchens in Athens are full with one in every eleven residents making regular trips. A bartering economy is starting to thrive.

The country’s suicide rate has climbed dramatically. From being one of Europe’s lowest, it has officially doubled. An elderly woman, wanting to alleviate the burden on her children, set herself on fire. Such cases make the political ground rich for disaffection, an all too prominent feature in the electoral rhetoric prior to last week’s ballot. Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza party has made gains on the platform of attacking those ‘loan sharks’ who have appropriated Greek sovereignty, promising an annulment of the bailout package. Those loan sharks are, of course, German, giving outsiders the sense that Teutonic bank managers will don their jackboots and march through Athens. The German role behind the bailout has even been deemed to be an imposition of an ‘economic Fourth Reich’ by the nationalist party, the Independent Greeks.

The suicide note by Christoulas also drew on history as a weapon. The government of Lucas Papademos, he suggested, was effectively collaborating with external forces the way Georgios Tsolakoglou did with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Even if Christoulas was drawing a very long bow, the problem of sovereignty is certainly critical. The leaders of the New Resistance movement led by Mikos Theodorakis have been enthusiastic and exaggerating in their praise of the Syriza leader. ‘I support with all my strength Alexis Tsipras in his efforts to form a government that will terminate the memorandum and will seek to recover the sovereignty of our country.’

Many would prefer a state of unchanged, moneyed comforts – pensions that are unreduced in perpetuity; a retirement age in the late 40s that enables a good deal of the rest of life to be enjoyed. But the tragedy of the money economy is that the hard means of supporting such lifestyles requires a base, preferably not on quicksand. When that base is crumbling, the rest will follow suit. Bad governance produces discontented, even revolutionary citizens. Internal disaffection encourages an often fruitless search for external excuses.

In a sense, there is a true ‘occupation’ – an economic one ruled by a cadre of technocrats. The banksters are in indirect command, dictating the programs of several countries in Europe where the finances have been shown to be poor. Sovereignty has become subservient to repayment, conditional on financial assistance. A vicious cycle has come into play: the banks have been responsible for lending to those who cannot pay. The books have been cooked; the credentials of those receiving borrowing exaggerated. The result is pure, inconsolable misery. The blame, as ever, is easily levelled against states whose better finances are seen as a means of bullying rather than an issue of praise. German Chancellor Angela Merkel becomes less a sound economic manager than a cruel stifler of independence.

As with any complex, undermining event, several factors feature. Either the political forces are deemed complicit with external forces (notably the Germans), and are accused of collaborators as a shorthand reference; or they are complicit in accepting the entire list of expectations dictated to by Brussels. The true impoverishment that has taken place in Greece is its political promise. The people, as they always have done, will survive in spite of their efforts.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-language-of-occupation-the-greek-collapse/feed/ 0 The Greek Elections and Political Prospects in Greece http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-greek-elections-and-political-prospects-in-greece/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-greek-elections-and-political-prospects-in-greece/#comments Thu, 10 May 2012 15:48:03 +0000 Christos Kefalis http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44455 The Greek elections of May 6th have produced a shocking, sensational result which definitely opens a new chapter in the political history of Greece and will have important repercussions on the European situation as well. The result shows a clear polarization between left and right and a breakup of the hitherto ruling political forces PASOK and New Democracy, the so called “two party system” which dominated Greek political life since 1974.

The two traditional parties, pillars of the neoliberal policies, lost more than half of their previous vote. Combined together, they make now just a 32% of the electorate, in comparison to 77% they had scored in the 2009 elections. New Democracy has dropped from 33% in 2009 to 19%, while PASOK has sunk even more dramatically from 44% to 13%, losing more than 2.000.000 votes. This was the punishment for their reactionary “Memorandum” policies, which they followed in cooperation with the European Union and the IMF. These policies led to a vast impoverishment of the majority of the people and a mass unemployment officially already at 23%, resulting even to a plethora of suicides by desperate men and women.

The vote of the broad left rose from a modest 12% in 2009 to an impressive 35.5% (17% for SYRIZA, 8.5% for KKE, 1.2% for the anticapitalist left party ANTARSYA and some 6.1% for the Democratic Left and 2.9% for the Greens). However the prospect of a left government is made problematic since the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) is an ultra-Stalinist party, denying beforehand any cooperation with “opportunists”, which it considers to be all other left parties except from itself. Moreover, the Democratic Left and the Greens are moderate center-left parties, which do not differ radically from PASOK and have supported until lately a rather conservative agenda. Even so, the collective result of the three radical left parties, SYRIZA, KKE and ANTARSYA, an impressive 26.5%, makes it possible to have some real hope for the future.

The other significant feature of the elections is the abrupt rise of the ultra-right, jumping together to an astonishing 20.5%. Formerly represented by just one party, LAOS, which had scored a modest 6% 3 years ago, the ultra-right now was able to present three major parties, Independent Greeks, LAOS, and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which took respectively 10.6%, 2.9% and 7%. LAOS paid for its support of the Papadimos government, holding office during the last months in Greece to implement the austerity programs of the Troika, falling just short from the required 3% to enter the parliament.

However, the shocking 7% achieved by Golden Dawn, an openly neo-Nazi and racist anti-immigrant party, marks perhaps more than anything else the result of the Greek elections. It is the first time such a party not only enters the parliament but gains mass support, which the Nazis lacked during the whole political history of Greece, famous for its resistance movement in 1941-45.

This result had been anticipated by left activists and publicists, between others by our group in Marxist Thought, which devoted its whole last issue to the problem of fascism, neo-fascism, and the new ultra-right. There was a mass mobilization by left organizations during the last three weeks calling the attention of the people to the danger of the neo-Nazi gangs. However, all this proved largely ineffective, as they have gained hold during the last years in degraded neighborhoods and within the unemployed youth. The stance of the Stalinist KKE, which not only is doing absolutely nothing to fight the ultra-right but gives shelter to nationalists like the notorious journalist Liana Kanelli, and even went so far as to welcome the Golden Dawn representatives at the Halyvourgiki strike through the local workers’ union it controls, added largely to the problem.

It is true that the ultra-right gathered together “only” 20.5%, in comparison to the radical left’s 26.5%. However, it is also true that it more than tripled its forces, while the radical left “just” doubled them.

The ensuing situation has been utilized by conservative commentators of the media and the Press, to interpret the result as an illogical expression of anger, pushing to extremes, against the demands of logic and caution. According to this reading, people were carried away by the false promises of demagogues, which are impossible to fulfill. The correct way would have been to foster the reactionary “reforms” that would eventually lead to an overcoming of the crisis through development and higher productivity and an improvement of democracy. Dora Bakogianni, the leader of the ultra neo-liberal (and falsely called so) Democratic Alliance, which failed to enter the Parliament by a narrow margin, has many times argued so in the most clear cut way.

This type of argument has in fact a double purpose. On the one hand, it attempts to equate in a tricky way the ultra-right menace and the prospect of left change as two complementary facets of the problem facing Greece, thus presenting the left as a danger too and denying beforehand there can be any radical positive solution. And on the other hand it seeks to embellish the corrupted Greek parliamentary system and make the parties of the establishment look like a guarantee for stability and improvement, while they are in fact the cause of the problem and of the ultra-right menace too. In Greece, corruption of leading politicians and public officials has been extremely widespread, taking enormous proportions with practically no one of them being ever punished. This decay has been one of the main causes that facilitated the rise of ultra-right and neo-Nazism. Yet, we are urged now to believe that these very forces that produced this situation have the magic clue to lead the country out of the crisis, and this by following the recipes that made it so deep. In fact, when reactionary politicians like Bakogianni are talking about “improving productivity” they only mean more layoffs and a new lowering of wages in the public and private sectors, thus making the existing bad situation even more desperate.

SYRIZA has countered these stereotypes in a successful way, by proposing the formation of a government of the left, which attracted much support from the people. The charismatic personality of its president, Alexis Tsipras, played a part in this too. Other radical left parties like KKE and ANTARSYA failed to make an equivalent impression. The KKE insisted on an ultra-sectarian policy, calling for the establishment of a front for the direct overthrow of the system by a “popular power”, connecting every fight for a bettering of the sad lot of the people with this prospect and denying harshly that anything could be done before establishing the “popular power.” This in fact meant condemning itself to passivity and a bureaucratic break with reality under the deceptive guise of fighting for the revolution, as has so often been the case with Stalinism. ANTARSYA had a much better approach and has played a vital role in the fight against the Golden Dawn neo-Nazis during the last years. Yet it paid for its lack of strong bonds with the people and its inability to cooperate with other left forces. This it failed to do not only with SYRIZA, with which it has a number of programmatic differences, but even with the FSO (Front of Solidarity and Overthrow), a small radical left formation led by Alekos Alavanos, a former eminent SYRIZA leader who broke with SYRIZA and kept largely aside in these elections.

The KKE has been accusing SYRIZA for being opportunistic and spreading illusions to the people by proposing a government of the left, since such a government would be no better than the existing ones. Aleka Papariga, the dogmatist General Secretary of the KKE, has even gone so far as to suggest that taking part in such a government would mean to betray the people for some ministerial “chairs” and state that the KKE would give no vote of confidence to it, should it appear before the Greek Parliament. Their political estimate after the elections was that the rise of support for SYRIZA signifies an attempt by the system to thwart the radicalization of the people and channel it to roads acceptable to the ruling classes. Moreover, Papariga has plainly refused even to meet A. Tsipras who took yesterday the mandate to form a government, after A. Samaras, the New Democracy leader, failed to do so and resigned his mandate.

All this however and the assertion of the KKE leadership that no change at all can be achieved in a parliamentary way is highly sectarian dogmatism. Of course socialism cannot be finally established in a parliamentary way, to achieve that a revolution by the people is needed. Yet the experience of Chavez in Venezuela shows that with the support of a mass movement big radical changes can be initiated using the parliament as a lever, and there is no real reason that this should be in principle impossible for Greece.

Real problems, however, start from this point on. To enforce such a radical change with the help of a left government based on a parliamentary majority, a mass front is needed, which will lend support to the whole project. This is all the more essential in Greece, to be able to withstand the strong pressure by foreign lenders and the European governments and imperialist institutions. However, neither such a majority, nor a front exists presently. And while numbers might make the government of the left abstractly possible at a later stage, it is not at all certain that it will materialize.

The KKE stance is the main problem to that. This party has the support of a significant part of the industrial working class, the fighting elements of which would strengthen and cement the proposed front. However, the KKE, after a break in 1991, has followed for two decades an increasingly Stalinist course. This has gone to the length of not only rehabilitating recently Nikos Zahariadis, the authoritarian and cynical Stalinist General Secretary of the KKE in 1931-56, but also presenting Stalin as one of the greatest of all Marxists, accepting the validity of the Moscow trials and adopting the accusations that Trotsky, Bukharin, and the other Bolshevik leaders were agents of the Gestapo. A number of hard Stalinist pseudo-theorists like politburo members Makis Mailis and Stefanos Loukas have formed a circle directing the party’s inner political and ideological life, thus lowering the level of its members and making it vulnerable to all kinds of careerists and opportunists.

The KKE has repudiated the revolutions of the Arab Spring and the great movements of the “indignados” in Greece and Europe as being suspect and perhaps even guided by organs of the imperialistic secret services, refusing to take part in them. Instead of that it calls the people to unite in party fabricated “fronts” that are directed from above and have little connection with the people. Recently it has gone so far as to ignore the dramatic suicide of Dimitris Christoulas, a 77 year old man who shot himself at Syntagma and left a moving message to the younger generation, urging it to fight against the corrupt rulers. Christoulas was a member of the “indignados” movement and so “Rizospastis,” the official organ of the KKE, in the few lines it devoted to the incident did not even mention his name (calling him “the 77 year old man”) and shamelessly censored his message, reaching even the point off hurling accusations at him that his action was in the interests of the ruling classes, who want the people to commit suicide. Alekos Halvatzis, the son of Spyros Halvatzis, the KKE spokesman in the parliament, left the KKE one or two years ago, accusing the Papariga leadership of having filled the party with “stowaways.”

The SYRIZA is on the other hand a coalition of various groups including Marxists, Trotskyites, Maoists, left and moderate reformists, greens, and a number of other tendencies. The party has a genuinely democratic character and this variety of views lends it liveliness, as a center of discussion and production of ideas. However, in the grave situation facing Greece it could also prove a problem, by preventing at a critical moment a unified stance on crucial questions on which the various components hold different views. For the moment, of course, the electoral success strengthens the unity of the party, but this cannot be sure to hold indefinitely in the future.

The KKE, with its usual fanaticism, seems likely to “bet” on the possibility that a balancing of views will not be possible in SYRIZA and after a probable failure of the attempt to set up a left government or pursue it properly in case it is established, in the not very remote future the Greek people might turn to them. Such a hope can be sustained by the fact that SYRIZA does not have strong bonds with the masses that came over to it in the present elections, and its foothold is not in the working class but mainly in civil servants and the youth. It is a vain hope though in the sense that if SYRIZA fails to cope with the difficulties, chaos will be made universal, and in such a situation the ultra-right and not the KKE will be the one most likely to benefit.

The SYRIZA victory has coincided with the victory of Francois Hollande in France. Yet, it should be made clear, these are two events of an entirely different character. Hollande’s success, even if he has gained the support of many left voters, signifies just a shift of policy within the ruling classes and its parties. It may lead to some partial changes and adjustments, a somewhat different tone and orientation, but it will leave the general foundations of European policies untouched. The turn to SYRIZA in Greece however has a potential to challenge the very foundations of the austerity policies and the domination of the markets. It may serve as an example, especially if it is successful, for other countries facing similar problems, like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, and instigate a general and real European movement to the left.

The ruling European elites, as represented by Merkel, Schäuble, Barroso, etc, are fully conscious of this and have reacted nervously, either by intervening shamelessly before the elections to dictate the result, or by simply stating that the country’s obligations, signed by the previous government, must be fulfilled. Their fears are certainly justified, especially in the case that a broader movement to the radical left takes place in Europe. However the really urgent question is: how will SYRIZA cope with their intensified pressure during the following months and what it will strive and be able to achieve at a moment the reactionary forces still remain stronger in Europe as a whole?

SYRIZA’s program aims at a denouncement of the “Memorandum” and a re-negotiation of debt, which will include cancelling a large part of it as odious. It also claims a 3-year period of suspension of debt obligations, which would be an important relief step, if achieved. SYRIZA aims at nationalizing a number of banks, heavier taxation of the rich and improving the situation of the people, to a restoration of their former living standards. After having received the mandate, Tsipras proposed a 5-point program which is a concretization of this.

Other left forces like ANTARSYA argue, however, that this is not enough and that a unilateral repudiation of debt will be needed, which will mean that the country will have to leave the Euro zone and return to its national currency. This position is largely held also by the Left Current, a significant component of SYRIZA headed by its parliamentary spokesman Panagiotis Lafazanis, while a number of influential Greek economists, like Kostas Lapavitsas, have also argued this way. Significantly, the KKE connects the cancelation of debt too with the “popular power” slogan, considering it to be impossible under parliamentary conditions. This, of course, is an absurdity since the repudiation of debt is a reform that concerns the system of distribution leaving untouched the capitalist system of production as such. Thus it is perfectly conceivable under capitalism, as a number of examples show (Ecuador, Russia, etc.).

The difficulty with the unilateral repudiation of debt is that, although being in the long run most beneficial to the people, it will cause in its initial stages significant problems and disorganization. To minimize this and avoid an experience like that of Argentina in 2001, it is essential that the majority of the people are convinced for its necessity and it is pursued in an ordered way by a left government that is determined and conscious of its aims. This means that while the European left is still on the defensive, the attempt to implement the “compromising” program of SYRIZA and reach an agreement with the EU should be made. If, as it is quite possible, the neoliberal EU elites refuse to make any real and significant concessions, then this could convince the Greek people for the necessity of more radical steps. Prospectively, it will be ideal if this course coincides will a general revival of mass movements in Europe, especially in Europe’s south, leading to a “European Spring,” like the Arab one.

This prospect is not so remote as it may seem. The ruling classes in Greece and Europe are taking it seriously and making preparations to face the challenge it will pose to their system. The recent rise of the ultra-right in Greece, openly supported by a part of the media, capitalist circles, and the state security machine, is a part of this.

The breakup of the Greek political system has been compared in this respect with the downfall of the Weimar Republic and it is true that there is a number of striking analogies. Under a similar situation of deep economic crisis, mass unemployment, and poverty, we attend the bankruptcy not only of the formerly leading political parties but of the parliamentary system as well. The Papadimos government was important in this regard, as it signified a first step away from normal democratic government, towards technocratic-bureaucratic administration, reminiscent in many ways of the Brüning government in Weimar. The program of the newly created Independent Greeks party, headed by Panos Kammenos (a former New Democracy minister), contains a number of even more dangerous reactionary points, combining an ultra-privatization plan with proposals of appointing the chiefs of police and the army ministers of security and national defense respectively. This is clearly a Bonapartist plan, which would open up a threat to the very foundations of bourgeois democracy and of the labor movement. For the time being, such measures are supported only by the Kammenos party and those even more to the right (LAOS, Golden Dawn). It is not to be excluded that as the crisis intensifies, the more traditional parties, PASOK and New Democracy, or at least certain groups within them, might turn to similar directions.

The May 6th elections had the important consequence of producing a stalemate, not allowing the formation of any viable government. PASOK and New Democracy together have 149 seats, which do not give the needed parliamentary majority of 151. But even if they possessed this, forming a government would be out of question since it would be weak and without authority. This excludes also the possibility of a government being formed by these two parties together the Democratic Left, which would indeed possess a majority of 168 seats. Democratic Left has wisely excluded this possibility, as it would mean to identify itself with the two formerly big parties which were condemned by the people. The broad left on the other hand cannot form a majority, even if we count together all its disunited components. The possibility of forming a “national government” supported by a broad spectrum of forces except the ultra right, as proposed by PASOK and New Democracy leaders, is also excluded since it would simply mean to involve the left in the memorandum policies.

Greece is heading therefore almost inevitably to new elections, which will take place somewhere in the middle of June. These new elections have the potential to provoke a further impressive restructuring of the political scene.

SYRIZA’s tactics will be to unite around it the other left forces, which failed to enter the parliament (KKE of course has declared it is against unity under all conditions). That includes not only the Greens and ANTARSYA, but possibly some other groups that broke from PASOK like the small (and farily conservative) “Social Agreement” party. SYRIZA may also draw votes from KKE and improve its performance in the agrarian areas, which voted more conservative than the big cities (SYRIZA got more than 20% of the vote in Athens but much less in the countryside). If all this materializes, SYRIZA will almost certainly come first and take advantage of the 50 seats bonus the illogical electoral law grants the first party. This could augment its parliamentary force from 52 seats now to some 120, facilitating greatly the formation of a left government.

However, the ruling class parties have some prospects of countering this. The New Democracy party might be able to unite with the two small ultra-neoliberal parties, Bakogianni’s Democratic Alliance and Action of Stefanos Manos (a Greek big capitalist), which gathered together a respectable 5% of the electorate. Should such a regrouping be achieved, then first place in the coming elections will be a very open issue. However, A. Samaras, the New Democracy leader, is not in good terms with the leaders of the other two parties, so it will be rather difficult to happen (although the New Democracy leader has already made the proposal). Alternatively, it is quite possible that the two ultra-neoliberal parties will make a joint appearance, but this, while ensuring their representation in the new parliament, would not stop SYRIZA from coming first.

There is also a possibility of mass desertions of New Democracy and PASOK voters towards the “Independent Greeks” party, which poses as a patriotic and popular right, defending the interests of the people. This might take big proportions if certain sections of the ruling classes and media, who still supported the traditional parties, decide to move towards Kammenos as their only viable representative. However, there is a 7% difference in favor of SYRIZA now, so this movement would have to be very pronounced to enable the Independent Greeks to take the lead. A convergence between the Independent Greeks and Golden Dawn is not very likely since the Independent Greeks leadership takes pains to dissociate itself from Nazism. It will be very interesting though to see what will be the result of Golden Dawn in these new elections.

One thing is certain. After the next elections, the hour of truth will come for Greece. It will also be the hour of truth for the Greek radical left. Developments will show if it is able to unite, withstand the enormous pressures the EU authorities will apply and open up a new progressive way for Greece and a window of hope for the rest of Europe.

Update

Developments are running fast here in Greece, so that the situation changes abruptly and forecasts may prove wrong or inexact in just a few hours.

After E. Venizelos, the PASOK leader, took the mandate from President Papoulias this day, he had a meeting with Fotis Kouvelis, the leader of the Democratic Left. In it, there was a proposal by Kouvelis of forming an “Ecumenical government” of so-called limited purpose, which will supposedly renegotiate the Memorandum and hold office until the 2014 European parliament elections. Venizelos reacted positively to that, saying that it practically coincides with PASOK’s proposal for a government of “National salvation.”
So it seems that for the first time there is a real prospect of a government being formed after the stalemate of the last days.

This government will in fact be the New Democracy-PASOK-Democratic Left government, which Kouvelis himself had excluded just a few days ago. SYRIZA almost certainly will not take part in it, as will also be the case with the other parties represented in the Greek parliament. However, for obvious reasons of legitimization, the three parties will try to make it appear as something different, perhaps by appointing Kouvelis as Prime Minister and limiting or even wholly avoiding the participation of PASOK and New Democracy.
If this prospect materializes, it will be a flagrant violation of the will of the people, as expressed in the elections. Its real aim will be to continue the Memorandum policies, albeit in a slightly different manner, by extracting a few rather insignificant concessions from the European Union and make it appear as a great achievement. It will also signify a further step towards political anomaly, as it will be based mainly in the two formerly ruling parties condemned for their policies and will represent just 37% of the total vote.

Alexis Tsipras has justly called this plan an attempt by PASOK and New Democracy to find a “left Karatzaferis” – comparing thus Kouvelis with Giorgos Karatzaferis, the leader of the ultra-right LAOS, who had supported, with PASOK and New Democracy, the former Papadimos government, his party failing to enter the new parliament for that reason. The plan to establish such a government shows how horrified the ruling circles are from the prospect of a new election which might give a clear victory to SYRIZA and the left (some polls having already shown an increase of the support for SYRIZA after the election to the level of 25%). It is also a sign of how much the European Union governments and institutions are worried from the prospect of a left government in Greece and strongly press behind the scene for this kind of solution.

It remains to be seen if during the meeting of the Political Leaders with President Papoulias, which the constitution provides for as an attempt to form a government when the circle of mandates ends, it will become possible to reach this solution. The meeting will take place at most after 3 days, if Venizelos exhausts the duration of his mandate. Even if it is established, however, such a government will be patently weak and will not have any real prospect of solving the grave problems of Greece. It is doubtful therefore – although not impossible – if the three parties will take the risk of appointing it and coming to a total failure which will be blamed upon them after a few months.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-greek-elections-and-political-prospects-in-greece/feed/ 0 The Privatization of Creativity http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-privatization-of-creativity/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-privatization-of-creativity/#comments Wed, 09 May 2012 15:01:16 +0000 Max Haiven http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44442 1. The new hype about creativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The creation of creativity

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

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

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

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

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

3. The creativity commodity

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

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

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

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

4. The rise of “creative capitalism”

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

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

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

5. The passion of the creative class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Creating a different world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Struggles for and against creativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-privatization-of-creativity/feed/ 0 The Last of the Rickshaw Pullers http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-last-of-the-rickshaw-pullers/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-last-of-the-rickshaw-pullers/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 15:02:55 +0000 Kim Petersen http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44379

When the Communists came to power in China, one of their first acts was to abolish the hand-pulled rickshaw. What an irony that in the second decade of the 21st century, the Communist leaders in West Bengal wait for the remaining rickshaw-pullers to die!

– A.J. Philip1

The Esplanade district is a large commercial area in the heart of Kolkata, India. On a warm February day while heading toward the markets on Lindsay Street, I observed a pair of rickshaw pullers hauling their human cargo along at a brisk trot.

One block over on Sudder Road, where most of the backpackers hang out, sat a wiry bare-foot man wearing a lungi (skirt) and a gumcha (cloth) wrapped around his head. His name is Mohammad Salim. He is a 62-year-old husband and father of six children from Bihar, in the north of India, and he is one of the last rickshaw pullers.

Kolkata is the last place in the world where people earn a living at as what some describe as “human beasts of burden.”

Salim was eager to be interviewed about his job, and his colleague, Mohammad Raju, 35, married with four children, joined in.

During this time of year (February when the interview took place), they said they earned about 100 to 200 Rupees a day ($1C=50 Rupees); on a really good day, they earned 300 Rupees. It cost about 100 Rupees a day to eat, and one can imagine that these men burn many calories a day transporting people and their goods hither and thither.

Rickshaw pulling is a male-only occupation. The pullers laughed when I asked whether a woman might do such work. “It is too dangerous,” they said, not mentioning any physical limitations.

They said their customers are both Indians and tourists. Depending on the trip, they usually charged the Indians about 20 Rupees and the tourists 30-40 Rupees. The price was per trip and not per number of passengers.

It was not uncommon to see two corpulent passengers with many bags of goods being trotted home by the lean rickshaw pullers — like scenes straight out of Aravind Adiga’s, The White Tiger: “thin stick men, leaning forward … bearing a pyramid of middle-class flesh – some fat man with his fat wife and all their shopping bags and groceries.”2

The rickshaw has two large wheels and between there is a simple seat with low backing, about a meter above the ground, where the customers seat themselves with their bags. The rickshaw puller lifts the vehicle by means of two parallel poles an arm’s width apart. Most of the pullers rent their rickshaws. Sadar Ali, 44, from Bargona, Sundarban, is the father of three boys and one girl. He said he rents his rickshaw for 25 Rupees a day from the Salvation Army.

More rickshaw pullers joined our group. They were very forthcoming about the details of their livelihood.

One newcomer, Mohammad Edad, the 58-year-old father of four, told of his longest trips being about 10 kilometers, for which he received about 100-150 Rupees.

Sixty-year-old Firoj from Lashmikantpor said sometimes the bags of passengers would be 20 kilograms.

Because these rickshaw pullers were Muslim, they worked Saturday to Thursday, taking Fridays off. They said the rickshaw pullers were about half Muslim, half Hindus, adding that they all got along well.

Generally, they said other traffic was respectful to the rickshaw pullers, and they plied their trade in the narrow lanes where vehicles have more difficulty maneuvering. The main competition was from the Ambassador taxis.

They said that they would stop pulling a rickshaw if another kind of job was available, but that they were content.

Salim said, “Money makes happy. The only business is money. [I] do it for the money.”

Raju is from Kolkata, where he lives with his family. Salim stays in Kolkata for 4 to 5 months, and then he heads back north to his family in Bihar during the low season.

The best season for working, they all agreed, was monsoon season. Then, the streets are flooded; it is difficult to walk, and cars cannot drive. They indicated by sweeping their hand with palm in-turned that the water level was up to their hips. During this season, they said they made 1000 Rupees a day.

The push is to eliminate rickshaw pulling from the last place on the planet. Without them, however, other jobs will need to be provided for Salim, Raju, and their colleagues, and during monsoon season, people will have to find another way to get to where they are going.

On Bertram Street Mohammad Salim Mohammad Edad Sadar Ali and Firoj Mohammad Salim and Mohammad Raju All photos by kim, February 2012
  1. “West Bengal’s rickshaw era,” Herald of India.
  2. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (Noida, India: Harper-Collins, 2009): 27.
]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-last-of-the-rickshaw-pullers/feed/ 0 There Is a Plague Loose Upon the Land http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/there-is-a-plague-loose-upon-the-land/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/there-is-a-plague-loose-upon-the-land/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 15:00:25 +0000 David Macaray http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44391 Most states in the union have laws against “gouging.”  Broadly speaking, gouging is defined as the practice of arbitrarily raising prices on necessary goods, such as milk, bottled water, baby food, baby formula, bread, etc., in response to civil emergencies (riots, martial law) or natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, tornadoes).

For example, an anti-gouging law would prohibit the owner of a neighborhood convenience store, in the wake of a massive earthquake, from tripling or quadrupling the price of drinking water.  This consumer-protection device is one more instance of a benevolent government’s vital role in regulating the so-called “free market.”  What could be fairer?

However, there are market fanatics out there who abhor these anti-gouging laws.  One of their arguments is the reliable, time-honored appeal to the “slippery-slope.” This argument maintains that if we allow the government to interfere with the sacrosanct Law of Supply and Demand, if we give it the power to approve or disapprove of a sticker price, the next step will be rigid restrictions on how much profit we’re entitled to make, and the next step after that will be transforming us from the Land of Opportunity into a communist state.

Another argument is that, even in a grave emergency—say, in the aftermath of a major earthquake, with roads buckled, buildings collapsed, gas lines and water mains broken—the free market, in its genius, can be counted upon to automatically make the necessary “corrections,” because competing stores will adjust their prices accordingly, in order to attract customers (as if “comparison shopping” will continue unimpeded).

But this gouging issue transcends retail commerce.  The case can be made that what’s been happening in the collective bargaining process over the last couple of decades (actually going all the way back to the Reagan administration) is a form of gouging—not in the statutory sense, of course, where laws are being broken, but in the sense of businesses taking unfair advantage of a customer’s distress (with the “customer” in this case being the American worker).

Management’s embrace of the aggressive, take-it-or-leave-it approach to contract negotiations is tantamount to a neighborhood store ripping us off by quadrupling the price of baby food following an earthquake.  To the objections of an outraged consumer, the greedy store owner replies, “If you don’t want the baby food, don’t buy it.”  To the objections of the labor union representing the employees, the greedy company replies, “If you don’t like working here—if you’re unhappy here—quit.”

A perfect example of this scorched-earth policy can be seen at the Caterpillar plant in Joliet, Illinois, where, just a few days ago, on May 1, more than 700 Caterpillar employees (members of the International Association of Machinists) went on strike to protest a substandard contract being forced down their throats.

Why would a healthy company do that?  Why would a healthy company choose to grind a loyal, efficient workforce into the ground?  For the same reason a store owner, in the absence of anti-gouging legislation, charges $5.00 for a bottle of water that, only a day earlier, had sold for $1.25.  Because they can.

It’s certainly not a question of being able to “afford” a decent contract.  Caterpillar is the world’s largest maker of mining and construction equipment, diesel engines, and industrial gas turbines. They are enjoying record profits.  In 2011, the company generated more than $60 billion in revenue, and in the first quarter of 2012 has already made $1.5 billion in profits.  So successful are they, CEO Doug Oberhelman was granted a 60-percent compensation increase in 2011, putting him a shade under $17 million.

Again, why is this highly profitable company squeezing their workers?  Why are they playing hardball?  Short answer:  Because they can.  Because—with jobs scarce, with the economy fragile, with fear still in the air—they believe they have the workers on the run.  And it’s happening all across the country as more and more corporations are waking up to the realization that now is the opportune time to gouge the worker.

Those Joliet IAM members have the right idea, and they deserve our admiration.  The only way to induce a stubborn company to bargain in good faith is by denying them the opportunity to earn that money and make those profits, and the only way to do that is by employees withholding their labor.  Shut ‘em all down.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/there-is-a-plague-loose-upon-the-land/feed/ 0 Extractive Capitalism and the Divisions in the Latin American Progressive Camp http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/extractive-capitalism-and-the-divisions-in-the-latin-american-progressive-camp/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/extractive-capitalism-and-the-divisions-in-the-latin-american-progressive-camp/#comments Thu, 03 May 2012 15:00:01 +0000 James Petras http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44377 The leading agro-mineral exporting countries, including those engaged with the world’s leading mining and energy multi-national corporations(MNC) are also those characterized as having the most independent and progressive foreign policies. Apparently the primacy of “extractive capitalism” and commodity-export based economies are no longer correlated with ‘neo-colonial’ regimes.

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

The Progressive Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuities and Similarities between Past Neoliberal and Contemporary Progressive Regimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Divisions between the Progressive Regimes and the Social Movements

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

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

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

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

Case Studies of Extractive Capitalism and the Progressive Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/extractive-capitalism-and-the-divisions-in-the-latin-american-progressive-camp/feed/ 0 Obama’s Election and the Union Movement http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/obamas-election-and-the-union-movement-2/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/obamas-election-and-the-union-movement-2/#comments Wed, 02 May 2012 15:00:48 +0000 Jack A. Smith http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44353 In an open letter to Trumka in late March, independent consumer advocate Ralph Nader said he was aware of “your group’s public stands in favor of” progressive legislation, “but as you well know, there is a very marked difference between being on-the-record, as the AFL-CIO is, and being on-the-daily ramparts pushing these issues, as your organization is not.”

Nader was right in terms of the AFL-CIO endorsement of the president, which simply didn’t accord with its own known disposition, but efforts are being made by some unions to mount the “ramparts” of public witness in recent times and they are not just intended to collect more votes for Obama in November.

This is an important point. There are two aspects to the question of the large labor-liberal coalition that lately has bedecked itself in the slogans of the Occupy movement. According to the Global Justice Ecology Project April 24:

Over the past several weeks, a broad coalition of progressive organizations — including National People’s Action, Color Of Change, the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), MoveOn.org, the New Bottom Line, environmental groups like Greenpeace and 350.org, and major unions such as SEIU and the United Auto Workers — has undertaken a far-reaching effort to train tens of thousands of people in nonviolent direct action. They have called the campaign the 99% Spring.

This effort is not an Occupy project, and a number of Occupy supporters (such as the key magazine Adbusters) and some activist groups are suggesting that the coalition is merely an effort to co-opt the anti-1% forces to support Obama, but that’s only partly correct.

It’s true that Obama is using the 99% slogan to draw a sharper distinction between himself and shape-shifting Romney, who is expected to occasionally gravitate to the center right during the remaining campaign while not completely disavowing his opportunist waving of the Don’t-Tread-On-Me Tea Party banner during the primaries. It’s also true that some groups in 99% Spring are in it strictly to support the Democrats and are, in fact, front groups.

But some unions, which certainly want a Democratic win, also seeks to promote labor’s agenda independently among the masses of people, not least by associating itself with movements demanding a better deal for the 99%.

Union leaders know this isn’t the latter 1930s or the first three decades after World War 2, when the Democrats often went to bat for the working class/lower middle class. This is 2012, after several decades when productivity jumped 70%, wages stagnated at 10% increase and the rich more than doubled their income. Today the Democrats are no longer center/center left. Wall Street has both parties in its pocket.

Actually, many of the Occupy slogans are quite similar to what labor has been fighting about for years, such as denouncing Wall St., the corporations, CEO pay, the end of the “American Dream,” and particularly the rampant growth of economic inequality and the rich-poor gap.

The AFL-CIO organized several marches to Wall St. in New York in the years leading up to last October’s Occupy march and occupation of Zuccotti Park near the financial center. Labor hardly received any publicity because the commercial mass media is anti-union. The media, however, thrives on new social disruptions that include matters of permanent encampment, forced removal, several incidents of serious police brutality, and the fact that millions of people are adopting relatively radical slogans throughout the country.

Some big labor organizations, such as the giant Service Employees International Union, the Transport Workers Union and others supported Occupy Wall Street protesters from the beginning and joined in their big demonstrations because of a similarity of grievances. Finally, as a perhaps belated response to the economic crisis, a lot of labor’s old slogans have now percolated into social movement discourse.

The unions didn’t invent the 99% watchword, but it was an easy fit for a major people’s movement representing millions of workers that’s being aced out of the political system by the power elite. The AFL-CIO  now refers to the labor movement as “America’s original working class social network.”

Not all unions by a long shot are yet involved with social movements, and all too frequently social movements seem indifferent to union problems or view organized labor as just one more  “interest group.” Some unions, indeed, have become antagonistic to certain causes such as the environmental movement. The Laborers International Union, for example, was highly critical of the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline because it “takes away jobs.” The actual number of jobs involved is not that large, but it’s important to a union with high percentage of unemployed workers.

This is not a new problem and a possible step toward resolution is fairly obvious. Social change movements must make genuine efforts to demonstrate concrete solidarity with the trade unions. The job issue is real in terms of the environment and other labor issues. What’s needed is a united campaign by the social/political movements and the trade unions to oblige the power structure to take forceful steps to put people to work, including the creation of “green” jobs and infrastructure repair. Social change movements should also provide active support for labor’s campaign to eliminate barriers to organizing workers.

Frankly – though this is a long shot – at some point labor should consider taking a portion of the multi-millions its spends on financing Democratic candidates and lobbying Congress and use part of it to build a mass coalition of unions and various social change organizations willing to fight the power. It’s obvious the unions aren’t getting an adequate return for their monumental investments in the system. It would take several million bucks and a few years, but a huge nationwide activist movement making radical economic and social demands on the government and political system could pay off  in a big way.

This is an unusual election year. As all peace and justice organizers know, presidential election years are virtually a washout for all activism except that of an electoral nature. The enormous anti-Iraq war movement was totally sidelined in 2004 as its Democratic base focused on supporting pro-war John Kerry. It happened in 2008 as well, and the peace movement nearly collapsed when Obama took power. Now there are numerous dissident actions taking place around the country in an election year. Occupy still gets considerable attention but other types of activism are in the streets and meeting halls as well.

Today’s activism is a far cry from the dramatic growth of the political left and the union movement during the Great Depression — particularly in the formidable strike activity that characterized the period — but at least it has started after a relatively quiet couple of years following the onset of the Great Recession.

The May Day action and other manifestations are signs that economic and other activism will continue to grow. Another reason is that the government acknowledges that 14.6% of workers remain unemployed, partially employed or “discouraged and not working (a probable underestimate) — and this situation is expected to last for several years.

The American labor movement is under the gun and beginning to move in a good direction, too slowly for some, too fast for others. The big union federation only broke with decades of top leadership “business unionism” in 1995 that kept the movement distant and suspicious of progressive social forces. This is changing, though many unions are still foot-dragging.

Real solidarity between the movements and the unions will enhance positive change. The more the unions involve themselves in social struggles for equality, people’s rights and labor rights, in the face of a political system in thrall to the 1%, there’s a good chance it can become stronger. And a bigger and more viable union movement can lead the way to substantial progressive social change. Time will tell.

  • Read Part 1.
    • ]]>     http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/obamas-election-and-the-union-movement-2/feed/ 0     Life, Labor, and Liberty: May Day Then and Now http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/life-labor-and-liberty-may-day-then-and-now/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/life-labor-and-liberty-may-day-then-and-now/#comments Tue, 01 May 2012 15:00:31 +0000 Greg Moses http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44338 Counting in reverse through the great Theses on Feuerbach, we pass by the iconic eleventh, which demands that we quit describing the world and start changing it, in order to re-visit the lesser-known tenth.

    “The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society;” says the Smith-Cuckson translation of the tenth thesis, “the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity.”  In plain English we recognize the warning already sounded in 1845 that normalized uses of “civil society” bring with them bureaucratic retinues, orders of articulation, credentials, and border-sweeping technologies of lethal effect.

    In the author’s German original, the term for the old society is not “civil” but “burgerliche,” which is usually translated into “English” as bourgeoise.  Therefore on this May Day 2012 we ask how far from a bourgeoise society have we traveled and what are the prospects of ever realizing our “social humanity” (oder die gesellschaftliche Menschheit)?

    This May Day question is born from the robust and passionate vision expressed by the twenty-something German author when he dashed off the tenth thesis as a prelude to his life’s work.  It reminds me of a slightly older Thoreau, who wrote in his great “Civil Disobedience” of 1849 that “when men (sic) are prepared for it” they will be governed by no government at all.  Together these authors sing lyrical sentiments worthy of May Day, a calendar occasion for marking human celebrations of life, labor, and liberty.

    As Rosa Luxembourg tells the modern history of May Day, it was born in Australia by workers — the stonemasons of Melbourne University, says Wikipedia — who in 1856 won their struggle for an 8-hour work-day.  In the radical Republican aftermath of the US Civil War, the 8-hour day was adopted for federal employees and proclaimed as a presidential principle by Ulysses S. Grant.  Deploying the 8-hour policy into “private” employment became a bloody struggle for several decades more, validating the sorts of things that Marx liked to write about revolution, and solidifying the modern association between May Day and labor struggle.

    And still, the story of May Day goes back into archaic traditions of human responses to springtime.  Dancing around maypoles, people enact a sense of participation in the joys of natural renewal and growth won back from winter’s death.  Even in the “Official Eight Hour Song,” we hear a human demand to experience the things of spring.  “We want to feel the sunshine, and we want to smell the flowers, for surely God has willed it and we mean to have it ours.”  In the accumulated history of factory work, the cruelty of long hours would become ever more unbearable in proportion to April’s lengthening light.

    “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” asked Emerson, anonymously, in his essay “Nature” of 1836. “Our hands and hearts are weary and our homes are heavy with dole,” rejoined the singers of the 8-hour song, “if our lives are filled with drudgery, what need of a human soul?”  In some parts of Texas especially this year spring has gushed from the soil like a trillion geysers of greening promises.  Landscapes that last year groaned under dehydrations the color of burnt toast this year have sprung into unbelievable thickness of life.  Just add water, and up from underground it comes dressed for dancing in the sun.

    “All social life is practical,” declares thesis number eight, as our countdown continues.  “All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”  May Day 2012 promises to revive the greening energies of general strike, when people declare for themselves a day to stand apart from everything they do in the name of “civil society” and posit the experience of a more social humanity.

    The global occupy movement inspired by Tahrir Square is this spring beginning to make-over vacant lots and abandoned bookstores into gardens and museums.  People are seeking new ways to practice their social humanity.  Dead spaces, dehydrated by a “capital strike” are being renewed through social labor, which is the only source that capital can come from in the first place.  People are exploring human practices and comprehending possibilities in the best ways they know how.

    “There is no doubt,” wrote the wise Jane Addams, “that the great difficulty we experience in reducing to action our imperfect code of social ethics arises from the fact that we have not yet learned to act together, and find it far from easy even to fuse our principles and aims into a satisfactory statement.”  There is no royal road to the new, but that has never stopped life from moving forward.  We don’t have to live out other people’s gridlock as our own.

    So when I hear that San Francisco activists have ploughed under idle land the better to grow their own food, or that people in East Lansing have transformed an abandoned book store into a museum, I think of Henry George scanning his beloved bay area and recognizing the absurd contradiction of a system that would enforce monopoly over idle property even as it grinds out longer lines of joblessness and poverty.  Throw property open to anyone weary of idle hands, and you practically eliminate idleness altogether.  “It is not the relations of capital and labor,” said George, “not the pressure of population against subsistence, that explains the unequal development of society.”  No.  “The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land.”

    We don’t know if Henry George was right.  In the end it will be a practical question answered in practice, not theory alone.  But we do have some acquaintance with the practical absurdity of “civil society” reacting with brutality to the social, human occupations of idle spaces.  Pardon us, please, if we are well reminded of Hawthorne’s immortal account of what happened to Thomas Morton.  A general strike would at least emphasize an insight that unifies both ancient and modern histories of May Day.  It is through our sheer participation in life itself that we find any shred of value whatsoever.  By dedicating a day each year to the dancing practices of our social humanity and their comprehensions, we remind ourselves of a proper standard for evaluating everything in between.

    ]]>     http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/life-labor-and-liberty-may-day-then-and-now/feed/ 0     Obama’s Election and the Union Movement http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/obamas-election-and-the-union-movement/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/obamas-election-and-the-union-movement/#comments Tue, 01 May 2012 15:00:11 +0000 Jack A. Smith http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44352 Mitt Romney is the Republican Party’s strongest contender, but President Barack Obama still has a good chance for reelection in November.

    This is largely because the ultra-right and its antics are alienating a sector of voters who otherwise may have tilted toward the Republicans and will bring to the polls those 2008 Obama supporters who may have stayed home because of disenchantment with the White House record.

    Recognizing the conservatives and their Tea Party vanguard have gone too far in openly subverting the needs and security of the American people, Obama has decided to veil his center right political record with progressive populist rhetoric for the remainder of the campaign. He even articulates some Occupy themes — a smart if not entirely convincing stance.

    Perhaps the main ingredient in any possible Democratic presidential victory is the labor movement. Without it, Obama’s chances plummet. AFL-CIO, Change to Win and a few independent unions are supplying Democratic candidates with over $400 million this year. Of equal importance, organized labor wants to field an estimated 400,000 campaign workers as well.

    For the first time, union members can now ring doorbells in non-union households, which will allow volunteers to reach unprecedented numbers of people. This is one of the only positive aspects of the conservative Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions.

    The corporations and Wall Street will provide the Democrats with more money, but they simply cannot field a fraction of labor’s campaign supporters in the streets and on the phones. At the same time, as we shall discuss in Part 2, the unions not only seek Obama’s reelection but several of them have an equal interest in reaching out independently and joining with social movements in the fight against the 1%. Many of the issues brought up by the Occupy forces and others are long time union issues as well, and the labor movement needs allies.

    Of course, all the Democratic constituencies will have to turn out in full force at the polls as well. In addition to union members, this includes African Americans and Latinos, women, younger voters, college graduates, and a not insignificant sector of the 1% campaign funders.

    It’s ironic that during Obama’s first term, with Democrats controlling the House and Senate for two years and then the Senate during the last two, the White House has done little for its main supporters, except those of the power elite. The black community, Obama’s most loyal supporters, was completely neglected despite its desperate economic circumstances and high unemployment. Considerable numbers of younger voters, and others as well, of course, were disillusioned by the contradiction between the president’s strong election promises of “change” and  his weak performance in office.

    Many union leaders and members are extremely disappointed by the candidate they worked so hard to elect in 2008. Labor was not only ignored since then; aside from occasional tokens of Democratic support it was actually set back several times during the Obama years.

    But when the AFL-CIO General Board voted unanimously to endorse President Obama for re-election March 13, its only reference to the casting aside of workers’ interests was one paragraph in a declaration of over-the-top support for the Democrats. It read:

    Although the labor movement has sometimes differed with the president and often pushed his administration to do more — and do it faster — we have never doubted his commitment to a strong future for working families. With our endorsement today, we affirm our faith in the president. We pledge to work with him through the election and his second term to restore fairness, security and shared prosperity.

    What followed was a series of statements and documents virtually lauding every decision the president made since taking office in January 2009, singling out three for special mention:

    • He took America from the brink of a second Great Depression by pressing Congress to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which saved or created 3.6 million jobs.

    • He championed comprehensive health insurance reform, which — while far from perfect —set the nation on a path toward the health security that had eluded our country for nearly 100 years.

    • He insisted upon Wall Street reform — passed over the objection of almost every Republican. Now, we can finally begin to reverse decades of financial deregulation that put our entire economy at risk.

    Many labor leaders saw through this, of course. but they are uniting behind Obama to keep the Republicans out of the White House and perhaps make inroads in the right wing-dominated House as well. The destruction of the union movement, after all, is a main objective of the Republican Party.

    The unions are much weaker than in past decades. Membership today is down to 11.8%, compared to 35% in 1954. But they remain a huge organization and votes Democratic. The NewYork Times pointed out recently that in 2008 “white blue-collar men voted for John McCain over Mr. Obama by an 18-point margin, but, in large part because of unions’ politicking, white blue-collar men in unions backed Mr. Obama by a 23-point margin.”

    Despite the enthusiastic statement of support, the labor movement has been complaining for well over a year, often in public. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka repeatedly suggested last year that labor wasn’t getting its due and that the unions should seriously consider taking a more independent stance toward the Democrats.

    It was expected the key union leaders would silence dissent during the election year, but they have been unable to mask their irritation as the Obama Administration has taken one anti-union step after another in recent weeks and months.

    For example, the JOBS bill, passed in mid-April by Congress and signed with enthusiasm by President Obama, doesn’t create jobs. The acronym stands for “Jumpstart Our Business Start- Ups Act,” and it’s a gift to one constituency — the wealthy contributors of Silicon Valley’s tech industry — at the expense of another, the labor movement. The legislation was the creature of  Obama’s corporate-controlled Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.  The bill will greatly benefit big business and Wall St.

    Trumka, one of the two labor members of the 24-person blue ribbon 1% panel, thundered:

    We are disappointed — and angry — that despite warnings from current and former financial markets regulators, law professors, institutional investors and consumer advocates, 73 senators voted for the cynically named ‘JOBS Act’…. This is a vote against investors in the real economy and for Wall Street speculators. When the next bubble bursts, Americans will know who to blame.

    And then there’s the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which was engineered in April by President Obama in Colombia and will go into effect May 15. Obama characterized what has been called a “little NAFTA” as a “win-win” for both countries and an expression of support for the besieged Colombian labor movement.  More union organizers have been murdered in Colombia than anywhere else in the world. Two dozen were killed last year alone.

    United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard denounced the agreement, charging that it allows the Colombian government to continue “its shameful distinction as the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist.” He suggested Obama’s guarantee about enhanced safety for Colombian union organizers was mistaken. Trumka called the compact “deeply disappointing and troubling.”

    Leaders of the Colombian labor movement joined Trumka in this statement:

    The underlying trade agreement perpetuates a destructive economic model that expands the rights and privileges of big business and multinational corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment. The agreement uses a model that has historically benefited a small minority of business interests, while leaving workers, families, and communities behind.

    This is just the latest. In February Congress and Obama approved a bill funding the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) over union objections. The legislation also weakened bargaining rights for workers in the aviation and rail industries by increasing from 35% to 50% the number of worker signatures required to allow an election for union recognition. It wasn’t even necessary to pass the measure at all. FAA re-authorization has been extended for the last four years by temporary funding, and could have been continued until the labor restrictions were excised.  Labor howled again, to no avail as usual.

    In fact, Obama has reneged on nearly all his 2008 campaign promises to the unions, such as his pledge to fight for the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would have removed onerous limitations on labor organizing going back many decades. Trade unions have been fighting unsuccessfully for relief the whole time.

    The White House also didn’t act on labor’s call for the administration to create 25 million full-time jobs. Obama ignored a promise to hike the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011. He didn’t, as he vowed, renegotiate NAFTA. He strengthened the Patriot Act after insisting in 2008 that he would get rid of it. He didn’t fight for safety and health standards for workers. The White House supports cutbacks in postal services that are strongly opposed by labor.

    The list of Democratic dismissals of labor’s priorities — to placate the right wing and satisfy Wall St., corporate and wealthy backers — contains many more examples. And as far as the AFL-CIO’s three favorite Obama moves are concerned — jobs, health insurance and Wall St. reform — they stand as their own refutation. Each of these “victories” was worked out and compromised beforehand in negotiations with insurance companies, corporations and the financial industry.

    This is only part of the story. Several key unions are beginning to engage independently with various movements for social change, mainly on economic issues. Labor is hardly united on this matter, but it’s a development worth watching.

    ]]>     http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/obamas-election-and-the-union-movement/feed/ 0     Labor Not Loyalty on May 1 http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/labor-not-loyalty-on-may-1/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/labor-not-loyalty-on-may-1/#comments Tue, 01 May 2012 15:00:10 +0000 David Swanson http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=44357 Two key steps have helped to ruin May Day in the United States.  First, Labor Day was created at a completely different time of year — labor day without the struggle, labor day without the history, labor day without the labor movement.  Second, Loyalty Day was created on May 1st.

    Loyalty Day is a monstrosity for a few reasons.  We already have Veterans Day (created by ruining Armistice Day), Memorial Day, Yellow Ribbon Day, Patriots Day, Independence Day, Flag Day, Pearl Harbor Day, an Iraq-Afghanistan Wars Day (created, believe it or not, by Congress in 2011), and of course the xenophobic blood-curdling celebration of every September 11th.  That should be enough.  We already have a dangerous excess of loyalty.  According to the International Social Survey Programme, the United States is number 1 among nations in the percentage of its people who say that everyone should obey the law even when the law is unjust, and also number one in the percentage of people who say everyone should support this country even when it is wrong.  Conscious intentional harm.  Institutionalized stupidity.  How low can we go?  A 13-year-old girl in Pennsylvania was just punished for refusing to stand and robotically chant a fascistic Pledge of Allegiance.

    This May Day is nine years since Bush declared Mission Accomplished in Iraq, and the hell of the war on Iraq really began.  It’s seven years since the Downing Street Memo was made public and the lies about Iraq really fell apart.  It’s six years since Nancy Pelosi publicly committed to not impeaching Bush or Cheney no matter what they did — and the hell that was to be whatever followed Bush and Cheney effectively began.  Loyalty Day has been a day for major public violations of the oath our public servants take to protect the Constitution.  Treason Day would be more accurate.

    The alternative to loyalty that we need to develop is not treason or barbarism.  It’s participation in government of, by, and for — rather that upon, against, and onto — the people.  For that we need to be rid of Loyalty Day, and we need to replace it with what May 1st was always supposed to be: May Day.

    Two key steps are helping to restore May Day to us.  First, recent immigrants from the rest of the world — which has continued to celebrate May Day even as we who began it have forgotten it — have brought it back as a day to demand rights for immigrants.  Second, the Occupy movement is building a broad movement combining demands for civil rights, economic rights, and peace.  And as part of that process, we are studying people’s history instead of the sort of history approved by the Texas School Board and other big buyers of lousy text books.

    May Day in year 126 since May Day began is showing signs of out-shining the May Days we’ve seen for many years.  May Day is the commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre and the struggle for an 8-hour day in Chicago.

    May Day had a long history in Europe as a seasonal celebration of rebirth and hope. It was also the first of a month, an ideal time for strikes in industrialized nineteenth-century America where workers tended to be paid at the end of the month. At its 1884 convention the American Federation of Labor adopted a resolution that all labor would strike on May 1, 1886, to demand an eight-hour day. The media, which in this country has always been completely fair and balanced, predicted a violent Communist insurrection. The Chicago Tribune reported oh so responsibly: “Every lamp-post in Chicago will be decorated with a communistic carcass if necessary to prevent wholesale incendiarism or prevent any attempt at it.”

    There were 62,000 workers in Chicago who committed to strike on May 1st.  Another 25,000 demanded an eight-hour day without threatening to strike.  And 20,000 were given the eight-hour day before May 1st. Meanwhile, the Armours, Swifts, Medills, Fields, and McCormicks (Chicago’s royalty, people who would have adored Loyalty Day) mobilized the National Guard, the Pinkertons, and specially deputized police.  Rahm Emanuel would have been proud.

    Workers marched down Michigan Avenue in Chicago instead of working on May 1, 1886, and 340,000 did the same nationwide.

    Leading activists Albert Parsons and August Spies spoke at the rally in Chicago, which ended peacefully. The Communist insurrection proved as real as Saddam Hussein’s long-range missiles.

    But two days later, Chicago police shot striking workers outside McCormick Harvester Works, and labor leaders organized a protest in Haymarket Square for the next day. In the meantime, thousands of workers all over the country were winning the eight-hour day and returning to work.  If you have an 8-hour day today, you have them to thank for it.  Freedom is not free, as the saying goes.  It’s not created by wars.  It’s created by productive struggle.  And if you’ve lost the 8-hour day, you have our collective failure to keep up the struggle to blame.

    As the relatively small and peaceful meeting at Haymarket Square was wrapping up, 180 policemen marched on the crowd, and a bomb went off — which many believe was thrown by an agent provocateur. The Chicago Tribune demanded that Parsons, Spies, and two others, Michael Schwab and Samuel Fielden, be hanged for murder.

    The police began smashing up labor offices and beating up innocent people. “Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards,” said Julius Grinnell, Chicago’s State’s Attorney.

    The four men named above were indicted for murder, along with George Engel, Adolph Fisher, and Louis Lingg. Parsons, who had escaped, became a modern Socrates and turned himself in to face certain death. Testimony from “witnesses” who had been threatened with torture and others who had been paid turned out so contradictory that the prosecution shifted to a focus on the defendants’ thoughts and politics. Fielden and Schwab ended up with life sentences; Lingg died in his cell; the others were hung. Parsons left behind a note to his children that included this:

    We show our love by living for our loved ones. We also prove our love by dying, when necessary, for them.

    In 1888 the AFL set May 1, 1890, as the next major day of action. Workers all over Europe joined in, and a holiday worthy of the name was born.

    This May Day, do what you can for Albert Parsons, for those you love, and for those who will come after us.  Do not work. Do not be loyal.  Do not be silent.  Be the change you want to see in the world.

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