Health care is 15% of the U.S. gross domestic product. Health care costs have been rising rapidly for several years. U.S. health care expenditures surpassed $2.4 trillion in 2007, more than three times the $714 billion spent in 1990. The cost of health care is projected to reach $4.4 trillion by 2018. There is a lot of room for corporate profiteering in the increasing cost of health care. So, the millions the health care industry has invested in Baucus and the Senate Finance Committee could turn out to be a very profitable one.

It is evident that any bill that comes out of the Senate Finance Committee will be a pro-industry bill that will ensure trillions in profits for the health insurance industry, HMO’s and pharmaceutical industry.

Baucus has held two hearings so far and has refused to allow advocates for the most popular reform – a single payer national health policy – to even testify. Single payer, improved Medicare for all, is favored by more than 60% of Americans as well as majorities of doctors, nurses and economists. It is the most cost-effective and efficient way to provide health care to all Americans from cradle to grave.

Why aren’t single payer advocates allowed to testify before Baucus’ committee? Follow the money. Campaign donations explain why and demonstrate that the Senate Finance Committee should not be in charge of health care. Senator Reid should remove the health care reform bill from Baucus and start all over before the Health Committee in the senate.

Here’s why Baucus is not doing the peoples business:

According to OpenSecrets.org over his career he has taken donations from:

The Insurance Industry: $1,170,313
Health Professionals: $1,016,276
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products Industry: $734,605
Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $541,891
Health Services/HMOs: $439,700

That is a grand total of $3,902,785. Can we trust Baucus to put aside the profits of the industries that have kept him in the senate? Will he put the people’s necessities ahead of the profits of his contributors? Baucus has shown his bias and should be removed from leading the health care reform effort by the Democratic Party leadership.

In 2008 Baucus had virtually no challenger in Montana. A little-known Republican was on the ballot, Baucus won with 73% of the vote. But, Baucus sought big donations from big business anyway. He used his connections to corporations with business before his committee to raise an immense campaign fund of more than $11 million. In 2008, 91% of his donations come from individuals living outside of Montana, which is why he is more the “Senator for K Street” then the Senator for Montana. Corporate health profiteers who invested in Baucus will now benefit from his stewardship over health care reform. His 2008 donations from health care profiteers included:

Insurance: $592,185
Health Professionals: $537,141
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products: $524,813
Health Services/HMOs: $364,500
Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $332,826

That is $1,826,652 Baucus took from industries who he can now make wealthier by deforming health care reform.

The health care profiteers knew that Baucus would determine their fate and ponied up. Now the only thing standing between them and their payback is a single payer national health care plan. Single payer, which would end private insurance and control the cost of pharmaceutical drugs, is not being considered – not even allowed to participate in the conversation before Baucus.

And, it is not just the chairman of the committee who has received massive donations, the full Finance Committee is a gluttonous embarrassment of campaign pay-offs. In 2008 the full committee received a total of $13,263,986 from industries affected by health care reform. Can we trust this committee to put the interests of the people before their donors? The donations to the Finance Committee in 2008 included:

Insurance: $5,103,900
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products: $3,308,831
Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $2,809,353
Health Services/HMO: $2,041,902

These industries expect to be rewarded with billions, even trillions, in profits and hundreds of millions in corporate welfare. Senator Baucus’s behavior shows they have made a good investment and bought a senator who should be called Chairman Blagojevich. He is doing his best to make sure the single payer message is not heard because he knows it is the fairest, most efficient and cost-effective way to ensure health care access for all Americans but it would put some of his donors out of business and control the profits of others.

It is time to remove Baucus from the leadership of health care reform. It is time to move the critically important priority of reforming America’s health care system from the Finance Committee and put it before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. At least their mission is health care not money.

The People (well, maybe a small fraction of one percent of them) have spoken, however confused and inchoate the message.

And so, in response, I have a simple proposal: let’s make all tax payments voluntary.

Grover Norquist of “Americans for Tax Reform” proclaims that he wants to “drown government in the bathtub,” by which he must mean abolish government services. What gives government the right, we are often asked, to seize our property through taxation? “It’s your money!” Bob Dole shouted. And George Bush repeatedly asked, “who is better qualified to spend your money? You, or the government?” To the libertarian-right, tax payments for any purpose other then the protection of individual rights to life, liberty and property, is theft. (More on the “qualification” of the government to “spend your money” here).

No one likes to pay taxes. But for that matter, no one likes to pay the mortgage on one’s house, utility bills, or car payments. However, we all understand that if we do not make these payments, we will be evicted from our homes, or the electricity will be shut off, or our cars will be repossessed – and justly so.

So here is my proposal: make all tax payments voluntary. If all those April 15 “tea party” tax protesters find tax-paying so onerous, then they should be excused from paying taxes.

The only provision is that if they do so, they are no longer entitled to the services that are supported by taxes.

To wit:

• They may no longer use the public highways.
• In case of fire, they can not call the fire department to save their homes.
• In case of home invasion, armed robbery or other criminal threats, they can not call the police for help.
• They can not sue for damages in court. (Judges, bailiffs, court reporters, etc. are on the public payroll).
• They can not hire workers that were educated in public schools or universities.
• They can not use computers (micro-circuitry developed by NASA) or the internet (originated in DARPA, a federal agency).
• They can no longer purchase prescription drugs (certified safe and effective by the FDA).
• They can no longer purchase meat and dairy products that have been inspected by the Dept. Of Agriculture.
• They can not visit the National Parks or National Forests.
• They can not purchase airline tickets, (since that industry is regulated by the FAA) or use public airports.
• Their bank accounts may not be protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
• For that matter, they cannot use United States currency, since it is guaranteed by the Federal Government. Instead, they will have to conduct all transactions by barter.

And that’s just the beginning of a long list.

Any takers?

Of course, it will be impossible to deprive the tax protesters of all government services – in some cases they will, of necessity, be “free riders.” For example, the air they breathe will be cleaner due to the enforcement of clean air standards, paid for by other citizens. Similarly, they will be safer from foreign invasion thanks to a military paid for by others.

All free-loading tax protesters who are caught using the above listed services, will be assessed charges. In other words, they will be required to pay their taxes.

Which kinda leaves things pretty much where they were to begin with, doesn’t it?

Politicians like Bob Dole and George Bush, and the FAUX News screech-merchants keep telling us that taxes are “your money!” – in other words, that we are entitled to keep it. Activists such as Grover Norquist and his “American for Tax Reform” demand that taxes be cut, and cut, and cut again, until, as Norquist puts it, government is reduced to the size where we can “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” which I take to mean, eliminate government. All this, notwithstanding the obvious and manifest public benefits that are “purchased” by tax revenues.

And yet, somehow, this subversive nonsense strikes a responsive chord among our fellow citizens. Why is this?

To be sure, many citizens are not opposed to paying their taxes, per se. Their complaint is that so much of their tax assessment is lost to waste, fraud and abuse. But this complaint is legitimately voiced by all citizens, regardless of political persuasion – right, left, and center. Everyone, that is, except those scoundrels who benefit from that waste, fraud and abuse. The solution, however, is not to abolish taxes — not, that is, if the above listed services are to be supported. The answer is improved law enforcement and harsh penalties. Put bluntly, where there is waste, fraud and abuse, we should root it out and then nail the bastards – including Dick Cheney’s pals at Halliburton and other “contractors” who seem to have “lost”a few billions of “our” money in Iraq.

The more outrageous injustice in our tax system is the unfair distribution of the tax burden: a tax structure that allows the mega-billionaire to pay a smaller percentage of his income than his secretary or his house keeper. The traditional principle of tax assessment is that it be based upon the ability to pay. It is self-evidently true that the value of a constant sum of money, say a thousand dollars, is far greater to a poor person than to a wealthy person. If a Wal Mart clerk loses a grand, she and her children will go without food for several days. If Bill Gates loses that amount, it is of no consequence whatever to him. Hence the graduated income tax rates, and the inherent injustice of Steve Forbes’ “flat tax.” Similarly, the wealthy individual’s income from investments should not be taxed less than the poor workers’ salaried income. And yet, more and more, the tax burden is shifting away from the wealthy to the poor and middle class. This is legitimate reason for complaint and reform. But meanwhile, those aforementioned public services must be paid for.

Even so, there is in this country a tradition of the clever and resourceful tax evader as some sort of a hero. Ronald Reagan said as much in 1985 as he all but advocated rebellion against the very government over which he presided:

The members who spoke in this capital [Williamsburg, Virginia] said ‘no’ to taxes because they loved freedom. They argued, “why should the fruits of our labors go to the crown across the sea.” Well, in the same sense we ask today, “why should the fruits of our labors go to that capital across the [Potomac] river?” . . . . We, like the patriots of yesterday, are struggling to increase the measure of liberty enjoyed by our fellow citizens. We’re struggling, like them, for self-government — self-government for the family, self-government for the individual and the small business, and the corporation… What people earn is their money. Seventy-two years after its inception, what is our Federal tax system? It is a system that yields great amounts of revenue, even greater amounts of disorder, discontent and disobedience. [Tax cheating] is not considered bad behavior. After all, goes this thinking, what’s wrong with cheating a system that is itself a cheat? That isn’t a sin, it’s a duty! (Transcribed from a tape of Reagan’s speech, NPR, May 30, 1985)

This was a message that was repeated throughout the realm in the astroturf “tea parties” on Wednesday.

And so, by hiring a coterie of skillful accountants and lawyers to seek out loopholes, or by setting up phony off-shore corporations, the enterprising tax evader is admired by many for striking a blow against the despised and unworthy “big government.” In fact, he is transferring his tax burden to the rest of us, the honest taxpayers. Somehow, too many of us seem to forget as he evades his tax responsibility, legally or otherwise, he continues to take advantages of the services paid for by the rest of us: the roads and bridges, the protection of his property and person by the police and fire departments, the knowledge and skill of his workers, most of whom were educated at public expense. Some hero!

Pause for a moment and reflect upon what you are paying for with the federal income tax that your filed before Wednesday, along with the property and sales taxes that you pay to your state and community: the roads, schools, public safety, safe food and drugs, secure investments, parks and museums, clean air and water, and so much more. And if you are annoyed by your tax burden, direct your anger, not at the government which provides these services, but at the tax cheats and the politicians who write the tax laws that benefit their “sponsors”– their campaign contributors.

“Government” is not the culprit – “the problem,” as Ronald Reagan put it. The authentic villains are the free-loaders who “purchase” the tax loopholes and the sweetheart government contracts through their political “contributions,” and who thus leave it to the rest us to pay for the vital public services of which all of us, honest and dishonest alike, are the beneficiaries. Included among the villains are demagogues of the right-wing media who incite masses of gullible “sheeple” to protest against their own self-interest, and against their democratically elected leaders.

Are you “mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore”? Then don’t simply act angry. In addition, act smart. Don’t blindly demand the abolition of taxes. Public services, supported by taxes, are both desirable and, in many cases, indispensable. Instead, demand tax justice, and insist that public officials either get with the reform program or step aside and be replaced by those who will.

There’s a woman in Chicago… She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.

– President Ronald Wilson Reagan (1976)

… This legislation provides an historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and family.

– President William Jefferson Clinton (August, 22, 1996)

All I’m trying to do is restore some balance to our economy so that middle class families who are working hard – they’re not on welfare, they’re going to their jobs every day, they’re doing the right things by their kids –they should be able to save, buy a home, go on a vacation once in a while.

– President Barack Hussein Obama II (March 18, 2009)

It’s unclear what possessed President Obama’s intimation at welfare recipients as lazy, selfish, uncaring bums, but the suggestion that they are not “working hard,” or “doing the right things by their kids,” is a cruel and mean one. The characterization of poor single-mothers, who coincidentally live a life dependent on food stamps and other government subsidies, as irresponsible narcissists is surely no new phenomenon. One need only look to Ronald Reagan, two decades ago, and find ample relief in his infamous description of financially-disempowered Black and Brown females as, Welfare Queens. Obama’s high-fiving of the ‘Great Communicator’ is, sadly, unsurprising, for one who has praised Reagan at every step possible.

In the heat of the ’08 presidential campaign, last year, Obama couldn’t contain his admiration for the man whose economic policies successfully demolished the dignity and dreams of a whole generation of people: “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” Obama went further in his praise of Reagan, for eliminating “the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s.” A couple of days back, on St. Patrick’s Day, Obama again drew inspiration from the man many—and they are certainly in no short supply—have compared to the devil, on numerous occasions.

Whether Obama understands this or not, the demonization of welfare recipients has to STOP! As long as the narrative of laziness remains affixed to the character of this group, the right-wing’s war on poverty (the war to perpetuate it) would have foot soldier in the White House—an ally in the most powerful man in the world. Another notion, as it relates to Welfare, that deserves death by a thousand execution squads, is the premise that Black and Brown single mothers are the major recipients, and thus, welfare is but another Affirmative Action-esque ‘handout,’ which must be eliminated, to enforce personal responsibility on these communities. Every legitimate study shows that White women are, in fact, the overwhelming beneficiaries of welfare programs. This detail is not meant to bash economically handicapped White women, but rather, to put to bed, once and for all, the lies concocted by the right-wing, in attempts to abolish the safety net which has held many families intact, for the last few decades.

In 2000, when Obama enacted a run for Congressman Bobby Rush’s Congressional seat, the then-relatively unknown State Senator sought to convince inner-city Chicago constituents, which Rush represented, that he was not the Ivy League, Harvard educated, Hyde Park snub Rush’s campaign had depicted him as. Unfortunately, the charge stuck to him, like a lapel pin, and many Black and Brown residents had a hard time seeing the faces of their struggle in Obama’s eyes and promises. Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther, won handsomely, and without breaking a drop of sweat.

Obama might not have to worry about those claims lingering any longer, but, as every politically-astute observer knows, old ghosts come haunting back—chickens come home to roost. If Obama keeps up his antics of lambasting poor Black mothers for feeding their kids Popeyes Chicken remnants for breakfast, and asserting that a “good economic development plan for [the Black community] would be if we make sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars,” it wouldn’t be such a tough sell, next election cycle, for his opponents to argue that, perhaps, the populist President isn’t so populist after all! It might not be so hard to propose that Obama, himself the child of a food-stamps recipient, has forgotten were he came from.

Obama’s remarks, though intensely troubling, might be just the wake-up call progressives could have only dreamed of. In the mid-‘90s, when Bill Clinton fulfilled his solemn vow to “end welfare as we know it,” many Clinton supporters were unable to reconcile the actions of the then-popular president, to the promises—of equality for all—he had made on the campaign trail. In his reflective book, Death Blossoms, political prisoner and prophetic leader, Mumia Abu Jamal described Clinton’s “legislative obscenity” as a “chilling” plot, drafted to dash “the hopes of millions of the poor, all in order to protect his political ass.” Brother Jamal, as always, was right on target, and the question now looming larger than ever, is if Obama might be considering a relative “legislative obscenity,” which might come in handy, in the event of a need to “protect his political ass.” The prospect might look improbable, but history informs us of the moral obligation to remain combat-ready at all times.

Freddy was a diminutive 70 year old who maintained that he was 59 until Amelia and I presented him with mathematical contradictions stemming from the age of his oldest child. He denied that the triumph of the Cuban rooster was indicative of broader regional trends—despite the recent triumph of a constitutional amendment authorizing Venezuelan officials to run for indefinite reelection—and surmised that the Cuban rooster simply controlled the media.

As for social programs involving Cuban doctors, Freddy claimed that Hugo Chávez’ Misión Barrio Adentro was an attempt at foreign infiltration of Venezuela under humanitarian guise, as well as a means of perpetuating the cycle of discrimination against the non-poor. Amelia and I pointed out that:

   1. the Barrio Adentro staff in Belén was convinced that our request for free ultrasounds of various parts of our bodies was a maneuver concocted by the CIA.
   2. this did not prevent them from attending to us, thus perpetuating a cycle of discrimination in which medical supplies were denied to Cuba by the US such that they could be used on Amelia and me by Cuban doctors in Venezuela.

Posada Don Manuel, Belén’s sole option for accommodations, consisted of approximately a dozen rooms and a parking lot, all contained within a high wall with a white sliding gate. Over vodka and insects in the parking lot on our first night in town, Freddy lamented the number of rooms that were still only half-finished after a decade of work, and attributed the delay to the fact that construction of the posada had overlapped with construction of the Bolivarian state. I had heard similar complaints from my father’s relatives in Cuba, who claimed to have been attempting to repaint their bathroom for the past 50 years; lack of access to paint did not seem to be an issue at the posada in Belén, where the inside of the surrounding wall had been divided into colorful panels devoted to a variety of subjects.

Two of the panels featured Simón Bolívar looking off into the distance with accompanying quotes. Others advertised the town’s claims to fame (handmade cheese and cockfighting), its official religion (Catholic), and its primary tourist attractions (Posada Don Manuel). The specification of religious orientations was justified by Freddy:

FREDDY: Chávez no es cristiano.

The cockfighting panel, meanwhile, was substantiated by the arrival to the posada of a gallero whose T-shirt, hat, belt buckle, and keychain depicted roosters in various poses. He was toting a live rooster in a carrying case that also depicted a rooster, and informed us that there would be a cockfight the following day, 1 March, at a nearby arena. Freddy attempted to resume his position at the center of the conversation by announcing once again that he was 59.

When Amelia and I arrived to the arena the next morning, we were immediately ushered through a crowd of beer drinkers into a corner where two men were attaching artificial spurs to a rooster’s legs with adhesive tape. A single poster of Chávez holding a Palm Sunday cross hung on the wall, and most of the red baseball caps present featured cockfighting slogans rather than slogans of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela.

Once the rooster had been prepared for the fight, Amelia and I were ushered back through the beer drinkers to the fighting ring and advised to refrain from placing bets based on which rooster we thought was prettier. We were otherwise incorporated into the action when Amelia got to draw a numbered beer cap out of a sack in order to determine the order of battle, and when we had a bloodied rooster thrust in front of our faces so that we could observe how one of his artificial spurs had fallen off.

The man doing the thrusting explained that a lost spur eliminated the possibility of victory. Amelia and I asked if the rooster from Tampa had also lost a spur during his confrontation with the Cuban rooster; the man was unsure of the details, but did know that Chávez had lost a spur during his confrontation with the global financial crisis. We recalled other applications of animal terminology to the president of Venezuela by segments of the opposition, and suggested adopting the classification of him as a black monkey as a possible jumping off point for negotiations with Barack Obama, who might sympathize with fellow victims of primate jokes.

Amelia and I lasted for 2.5 fights out of a scheduled 16 and returned to Posada Don Manuel to find Freddy sitting in a chair in front of the wall panel featuring the painting of Posada Don Manuel. When we informed him we had just been at the cockfighting arena, Freddy announced that the poster of the Palm Sunday cross was further evidence of Chávez masquerading as a man of religion—as was the fact that he had read a passage from the Bible during the 20th-anniversary commemoration of the Caracazo uprising on 27 February.

The Caracazo had come about in reaction to policies of President Carlos Andrés Pérez, who had confronted his own economic crisis by donating his spurs to the IMF, and had resulted in the killing and disappearing of untold numbers of citizens by the national armed forces. During his commemoration of the event, Chávez confirmed that the Venezuelan administration at the time had not been based at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas but rather at the White House.

Freddy contended that the current Venezuelan administration was based not at the Miraflores presidential palace but rather in a sickbed in Havana, and that governing regimes founded on national diets of rice and beans were destructive to the human body. The dangers of the new pecking order were reinforced a few days later, when Chávez announced from Miraflores the expropriation of a rice plant belonging to a Minnesota-based multinational that had been evading price controls on unmodified food items by modifying them.

Last month, Nawal al-Samarrai, Iraq’s State Minister for Women’s Affairs, quit her job to protest a lack of resources and government support. She faced the daunting task of helping women with a budget that had been slashed from $7,500 to $1,500 per month.

“I think it is wrong to stay as a minister without doing anything for my people, especially in this time and in this situation of Iraqi women — we have an army of widows, violated women, detainees, illiteracy and unemployment — many, many problems. I had to resign,” she said in an interview with National Public Radio.

Al-Samarrai says there are more than three million widows in Iraq, most of them with children and without a social safety net or steady source of income. Because so many men have been killed by consecutive wars, some estimates put the rate of women to men at 65/35.

As the six-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq approaches, the voices of the women who are dealing with growing unemployment, violence, and seclusion are still missing from the conversation about the continued occupation and President Obama’s decision to keep 50,000 troops in their country.

A new book attempts to give those women a voice and examine why military intervention and occupation have failed to “liberate” them. In What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq, authors Nadje Al-Ali, Reader in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Nicola Pratt, Lecturer in Comparative Politics and International Relations at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, write, “Official rhetoric puts women at center stage, but we show that in reality women’s rights and women’s lives have been exploited in the name of competing political agendas.”

The authors also challenge the widespread held belief in the Western media and among many U.S. politicians that something inherent in Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Iraqi culture is responsible for the ongoing violence, sectarianism, and systematic erosion of women’s rights in Iraq. “We argue that it is not Islam or ‘culture’ that has pushed Iraqi women back into their homes. Instead we blame specific and rapidly changing political, economic, and social conditions as well as a wide range of national, regional, and international actors,” they write.

When the Western media does highlight the plight of Iraqi women, they almost always fail to note that Iraqi women activists have been organizing since the 1920 revolution against British occupation. The Women’s Awakening Club, the first women’s organization in Iraq, was founded in 1923. The Iraqi Women’s Union, a feminist organization founded in 1945, tackled previously taboo issues such as prostitution, divorce, workplace issues, child custody, and property rights.

“Iraqi women were once at the forefront of the region with regard to women’s education, labor force participation, and political activism,” write Al-Ali and Pratt.

They argue that it is essential for antiwar movements to address the issue of women’s rights and resist U.S. imperialism simultaneously. “Any analysis of what went wrong in Iraq must put gender firmly on the agenda.”

AlterNet caught up with Nadje Al-Ali on a recent visit to San Francisco. Al-Ali is founding member of Act Together: Women’s Action for Iraq, a UK-based group formed in 2000 to campaign against the economic sanctions on Iraq and since late 2001, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. On August 1, 2007, Al-Ali’s uncle and 16-year-old cousin were killed in their home in Baghdad by unmasked gunmen.

Rose Aguilar: March 20 marks the six-year anniversary of the invasion. When you look back at this occupation, what comes to mind?

Nadje Al-Ali: The death toll. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. You have hundreds of thousands of widows. Iraq has become a nation of widows. Sixty-five percent of the population is women. You have some areas of Iraq where about 70 percent are female-headed households and there is no functioning state, so women are forced to beg. Some are forced into prostitution. Some get $100 a month to survive.

RA: What else is new about today’s situation?

NA: We’ve never seen a situation where women were told to stay at home or forced to follow a dress code or told not to drive, which is happening in certain parts of Iraq. This is a totally new phenomenon. Last year in Basra, 133 women were killed by various Islamist groups for allegedly not being Islamic enough. This is not to say that things were wonderful under the previous regime, but one of the things that has been disturbing for me is the fact that some of the women and men I’ve talked to who suffered under the previous regime and under sanctions and wars, say it was better then than it is now.

Also, what I think is forgotten is the humanitarian crisis. Six years afterwards, people still don’t have electricity. They need generators if they want electricity. Seventy percent of Iraqis don’t have access to clean water. Eighty percent don’t have access to sewage. The hospitals are in very bad shape. We haven’t seen any reconstruction, really.

RA: What about the political situation?

NA: We had one Saddam Hussein. We had a dictator. Now Iraqis tell me, ‘We have 90 Saddam Husseins. We have many dictators.’ I’m in contact with scholars and university students. Everything is controlled by political parties. We had one radio station before; one TV station; one newspaper. Now we have many, but each one is pulling one specific line. That is not democracy.

I think it is wonderful that women went out to vote and in principle; it’s wonderful that women ran; but what people don’t realize is that many women who ran for election were not asked if they wanted to run. They were told to run. There’s a 25 percent women’s quota and lots of women ended up being told by their brothers, fathers, or other male politicians that you need to run because we have to fill the quota.

RA: What about security?

NA: Things are better than they were last year. In 2006 and 2007, it was really bad. Almost 90 people a day died. Things are better now, but why are they better? How is it sustainable? If you look at a city like Baghdad, mixed neighborhoods hardly exist anymore, so you have a Sunni neighborhood and you have a Shia neighborhood.

RA: Are neighborhoods still divided by walls?

NA: I’ve heard that some of the walls are being taken down, but there are still walls controlled by local militias. I hope that the country is going into a more stable phase, but I don’t trust the situation yet because in the first years after the invasion, the U.S. supported the Shia militia and armed them. The last few years, they have been arming Sunni groups. So now you have the Shia militias that are armed and the Sunni militias that are armed, both by Americans. What is going to happen? I don’t know.

Many people are fed up with sectarian political parties, but I don’t think this is the beginning of democracy. Fifty percent of the population voted. There had to be extremely high security at the polling station. Yes, Maliki is not an extremist Islamist, but he’s part of the Shia Islamist political party. It’s not a secular regime. What we have now is an establishment that is based on corruption. Everything is corrupt in Iraq.

RA: In this country, when we have conversations about Iraq, we tend to focus on the military and technical aspects, which are important, but it’s so rare to see the human side of the occupation. You said Iraq is not a functioning state. Talk about that.

NA: What does a state do? It provides security. It protects the borders. The state is also involved in providing services related to education and healthcare. That is still not happening. What you have are different political parties controlling different aspects of the state. If you want anything in Iraq, you need to pay for it. You need to prove that you are part of a political party, so that party can pull strings for you to get something done. For instance, if you want to enter university or get a scholarship, you have to go to a political party’s office. You pay your way through the system.

The billions of dollars that were supposed to go into reconstruction went into the pockets of American companies like Halliburton, but they also went into the pockets of corrupt Iraqi politicians. It’s on all levels from your local thug to the ministry.

RA: According to reports, the U.S. is still spending $12 billion a month in Iraq.

NA: I find it very strange that in the context of this worldwide crisis and the credit crunch, these connections are not being made. In terms of getting people to think about Iraq, if they don’t care about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died, think about your own lives. There is a connection between the money that is spent there and the money that could have been invested in your healthcare system, education system, and so on.

RA: You interviewed 120 women for your book. Tell me about the women’s rights activist you interviewed. How are they doing their work under such horrible circumstances?

NA: In 2004 and 2005, there was a mushrooming of women’s organizations in Iraq. It’s important to mention that the first people to deal with the mess after the invasion and looting were women. They tried to clean up the local hospitals and schools on a very practical level. They’re not passive bystanders.

RA: That’s how they’re often portrayed in the media.

NA: Yes, they’re either victims or they’re the heroines of the new Iraq. Iraqi women realized that despite the rhetoric of women’s liberation, women’s rights were not going to be handed to them on a golden platter. They had to fight for it, so they started to mobilize politically.

RA: In your book, you say it’s important to remember that Laura Bush and Condoleeza Rice constantly talked about women’s rights in Iraq.

NA: Yes, they started to think about women’s rights in Iraq a few months before the invasion. For years, many of us have been trying to point out how economic sanctions affected women’s rights. No one wanted to listen, certainly not the Bush administration. All of a sudden, there’s this interest in women’s rights.

Many Iraqi women inside Iraq decided to take things into their own hands. They said, ‘We had to keep the country together during these difficult times, during wars, during dictatorships, during sanctions. We want to be part of this new Iraq.’ But they knew they had to fight for it. So they started to mobilize. There was a mushrooming of women’s organizations that worked on humanitarian and political issues. In 2005, you saw women demonstrating on the streets. There were even sit-ins. People started income generating projects. There was a lot of activity. But in mid-2005, there was an outbreak in violence and women were targeted. Women’s rights activists received death threats. Many had to leave the country. Many stopped working. Despite the difficulties, many organizations continue. You still have over 100 women’s organizations throughout the country involved in providing basic services and lobbying politically. I don’t feel very hopefully about the political struggle. The first thing that is compromised is women’s rights.

In the current constitution, one of the outstanding issues is Article 41. It relates to the personal status code, which is a set of laws that govern marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. Very few people know this, but in 1959, there was a new constitution. Iraq had one of the most progressive personal status codes. For instance, a man was not allowed to say, ‘I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you.’ He had to go through court. A man could not just marry a second wife or third wife. He had to get the permission of the wife. It was a codified set of laws that applied to all Iraqis, whether you’re Sunni or Shia, which allowed for mixed marriages. Now in the current constitution, Article 41 states that all Iraqis follow their specific set of laws depending on their ethnic and religious background. There is no law that is actually spelled out. It just says it’s up to interpretation. It’s not that Islamic law is inherently bad. If you had an egalitarian person interpreting Islamic law, you can come up with relatively egalitarian laws. But when I see the people who are controlling the streets of Iraq, I’m not very hopeful.

RA: What are you hearing from the Iraqi women’s rights activists about the occupation?

NA: Their views have changed quite drastically over the years. They had very divergent views in the beginning. Some women were pro-invasion. Many were not keen on the invasion. One woman said, ‘It happened. We’re hopeful.’ Some were vehemently against it, so there was quite a range of opinion when I started out. In 2005, there was a shift. Women who were optimistic in the beginning started to rethink their position and became much more critical of the occupation. Until 2007, some Iraqi women’s rights activists would tell me, ‘We don’t like the occupation. We want them to go. But they cannot go quite yet because we are more worried about the militias linked to the government and the Islamist insurgents. As long as they are targeting women, we need the Americans to protect us.’ Even they have changed their opinion. They are very disillusioned.

For a long time, they were still hoping that the Americans would somehow help them in their struggle for women’s rights, which in the beginning they [the Americans] were at least paying lip service to it. Now they’re not even saying that anymore. They’re not even pretending to be interested in women’s rights and there’s a great sense of disillusionment and disappointment among the women, who until a little while ago, were willing to go to the Green Zone and try to get support. But even they have realized that the American occupation is not helping in terms of security. If anything, they have worsened sectarian tensions and have been arming militias and insurgents. And they are not being serious about women’s rights and not even pretending to be.

RA: There were massive demonstrations in this country in the lead up to the invasion, but they’ve died down. There will be a big march in DC on March 21. As you speak in this country, what goes through your mind?

NA: When I entered the San Francisco airport, the immigration officer asked me, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m here for a book launch for What Kind of Liberation.’ He said, ‘So women’s lives are really good now in Iraq?’ I told him, ‘No, actually they’re not.’ And he was really surprised. It’s not that I like to be the conveyer of bad news, but I think people need to get a reality check.

This idea that because there was an election and women participated, Iraq becomes a model. Even when the violence stops, the implications for women’s rights and women’s roles are long term. They are the biggest losers in all of this because they are being used by everyone, whether it’s the Iraqi government using women to show they are different from the previous regime, or the resistance who see women as resistance to imperialism and therefore women should wear certain clothes and behave in a certain way. Women are caught between all these different forces. The irony of the situation is the louder we fight for women’s rights while the occupation is going on, the greater the backlash against women’s rights inside Iraq.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

– Mark Twain, (1835-1910)

The Cost of Living [has been] replaced by the Cost of Survival. The old system told you how much you had to increase your income in order to keep buying steak. The new system promised you hamburger, and then dog food, perhaps, after that.

– John Williams, private economist

The consumer price index is being understated by at least 1 percent per year.

– Bill Gross, professional investor

… The development of credit derivatives has contributed to the stability of the banking system by allowing banks, especially the largest, systemically important banks, to measure and manage their credit risks more effectively. In particular, the largest banks have found single-name credit default swaps a highly attractive mechanism for reducing exposure concentrations in their loan books….

– Alan Greenspan, Fed Chairman, May 5, 2005

Last February 20th, the U.S. Department Of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that, on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U. S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased by 0.3 percent during the month of January. Some independent economists, however, think that the real inflation rate is much higher, possibly as high as 7.52 percent. Why is that so?

The CPI is a measure of how much the price level of a basket of representative consumer goods and services, adjusted for predictable seasonal shifts, is supposed to have varied during a month or a year. Such a measure has been provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics since 1919, covering the period between 1913 and today.

For many people, the CPI is less a measure of inflation than an imperfect measure for adjusting cost of living allowances. It is a technique that plays a central role in computing increases in the Cost Of Living Allowances (COLAs) of various money disbursements, incomes and wages. Some incomes, for example, such as Social Security payments and other entitlements, are statutarily adjusted upwards when the CPI goes up, and such adjustments have a direct influence on one’s standard of living.

Economists have long debated the best methods of measuring inflation, especially as it affects the cost of living of various categories of consumers. This is a complex issue that involves statistical methods in calculating price indices, economic principles and notions of social justice. Moreover, not everyone is impacted equally by a rise in the overall level of consumer prices, depending on one’s economic and financial situation. For example, for people living in a city and who are renters, a rise in the price of cars or of houses would not have the same predictable effect on them as it would on folks living in a rural area and who own their own homes. And it is not everyone who can deflect the negative impact of a rise in the price of consumer goods on their standard of living by substituting less costly items.

For the period between 1913 and 1982, the formula for measuring consumer inflation in the U. S. was pretty much straightforward. Government statisticians would periodically collect prices in certain identified areas with which the Bureau of Labor Statistics would then construct price indexes. Over time, surveys of consumer expenditures were conducted and the weight of different goods in the index would be adjusted accordingly to reflect people’s new buying habits.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration feared that the standard CPI index overstated the impact of overall inflation on the cost of living of many recipients of government payments, the most important ones being Social Security outlays. The decision was then made to move away from the objective of having a general consumer price index measuring overall consumer inflation and adopt instead the policy of constructing a cost-of-living index that more closely reflected the true impact of inflation on different categories of consumers. That is why, since 1982, the CPI measurements that the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes relates more to the cost of living, as defined and periodically revised, than to providing accurate information about the level of general inflation. [As a matter of fact, another government agency, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), has the responsibility to calculate a price deflator for consumption expenditures and other expenditures as part of the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA).]

Indeed, in the mid-1990s, substantial changes were made to the CPI index which had the net result of lowering the official measure of consumer inflation. First, increases in asset prices, such as in housing, were only indirectly taken into account. For example, the 2002-2006 real estate bubble hardly registered at all in the CPI because only ‘imputed’ home rents for home owners were used in the index. At that time, rents were virtually stagnant in many cities due to overbuilding. Secondly, arbitrary downward adjustments were made in the prices of certain goods to reflect their enhanced quality. It is true that cars, TV sets or cellular phones are more performing today than their alternatives in the past, and this raises people’s standard of living. However, such goods cost more, and the higher prices are not fully recorded in the CPI. Thirdly, and maybe more debatably, in order to concentrate on the impact of price increases on the true cost of living, it was assumed that consumers adjust to higher prices of certain items by substituting relatively less costly goods when relative prices change. For instance, buyers would be assumed to switch from steaks to hamburgers or from beef to chicken when the price of steaks or beef increases. Similarly, people would tend to switch from high-priced stores to discount stores when their incomes do not follow inflation. It can also be assumed that such forced substitutions are not without inconveniences or hardships for the consumers, and thus could indicate a lowering in their standard of living. Nevertheless, these modifications that lowered the official measure of the CPI were incorporated into new statistics from 1982 on.

Consequently, it has become somewhat risky to rely on official CPI figures to obtain a true assessment of inflation. Because of all the changes made in the CPI index since 1982, the CPI has become less and less a true measure of consumer inflation, even though it may or may not more closely reflect the true impact of inflation on people’s cost of living. For the overall economy, it is fair to assume that the true inflation rate is substantially higher than what is reflected in official CPI announcements, and this has a compounding effect overtime.

For its part, since February 17, 2000, the Fed uses a “core” chain-type price index for personal consumption expenditures (CTPIPCE), i.e. a price measure for all items less price increases in food and energy. What is at stake here is the danger that government officials may begin to believe their own official inflation figures which are understated, maybe for good reasons as far as cost of living issues are concerned, but nevertheless severely understated as far as the true inflation rate is concerned. This has the potential for disastrous consequences, not only for the public in correctly judging inflation pressures for investment purposes, but also for public officials in framing policy, especially monetary policy.

The most recent example is provided by the pronouncements that Fed officials made during the crucial 2003-2005 period, when a dangerous housing bubble was building up speed and when financial firms were embarking upon riskier and riskier financial schemes. To a man, Fed officials denied there was any risk of inflation and, contrary to what everybody could see, declared that there was no housing bubble going on.

For instance, on March 1, 2003, the No. 2 man at the Federal Reserve, Fed Gov. Donald Kohn insisted that the extremely low short-term interest rates that the Fed was keeping down had not created a speculative bubble in real estate.

In 2004 and in 2005, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan echoed Mr. Kohn and repeated many times that there was no inflation and that he was in no hurry to raise short-term interest rates from their 46-year low level of 1 percent. In April 2004, for example, in remarks on the economic outlook to the Joint Economic Committee, Greenspan remained unconcerned about inflation, declaring that “as yet, the protracted period of monetary accommodation has not fostered an environment in which broad-based inflation pressures appear to be building”, just at a time when the housing bubble was but one year from its final top.

At that time, the old pre-1982 CPI formula, as calculated by private economists, indicated that U.S. consumer inflation was above 8 percent and that a housing bubble and a concomitant stock market bubble were in full swing. Future Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, then a Fed Board member, echoed his mentor in late 2005 by saying that there was no housing bubble to go bust and that the fact that U.S. house prices were rising four times faster than the economy was “largely [a reflection of] strong economic fundamentals.”

But, it is now generally agreed that from 2002 to 2004, the American central bank pursued a monetary policy that was too expansionary and that—plus the lack of government regulation of the derivative market—contributed greatly to create the conditions for a major financial crisis. Let us keep in mind that in 2004, the Fed Chairman was publicly recommending that people buy adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), especially interest-only adjustable-rate mortgages, and other subprime loans instead of safer fixed rate loans.

As a matter of fact, most economists agree that interest rates should have been raised as early as 2002. But Mr. Greenspan implied later that he was forced to play politics with his monetary policy, when he declared on September 17, 2007, in an interview with the Financial Times, that “raising interest rates sooner and faster would not have been acceptable to the political establishment given the very low [official] rate of inflation”.

There you have it. What is suggested here is that the push to reelect President George W. Bush, in the fall of 2004, may have played an important role in letting the housing bubble become bigger, thus paving the way for a housing bubble burst in 2005-2006. This is, by the way, on top of the confession that Mr. Greenspan made in his Memoirs (The Age of Turbulence) that he had personally lobbied the Bush-Cheney administration in favor of the unprovoked 2003 U.S. war against Iraq, and that consequently, he was personally tied to the overall political agenda of the Bush-Cheney administration.

When the history of this financial and economic crisis is written, it shall be recorded that the Fed and other government agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), did little or nothing to prevent the debt pyramid from reaching the dangerous levels it attained and which is now crashing down, dragging down with it the entire U.S economy and most of the world economies.

Obamamania is rampant among Obama voters. By this I mean a continuing almost-religious faith that President Obama will give us what we need despite all of the accumulating factual evidence to the contrary. I know of no “mania” that has ever served mankind well, and there is a special danger inherent in Obamamania. To get at this phenomenon, I choose to explore some back ground.

When people say: “I just can’t believe that President Obama would betray us,” I shudder. There are several critical current factual exposures of the falsity of Conventional Wisdom about which many people respond, “I just can’t believe that …” With that statement and the mind-set behind it, we are defending the status quo. This mind-set constitutes the powerful controlling special interests’ defense against the exposure of the real factual weaknesses and lies of the status quo. Obamamania serves the same purpose. Among the most important of these uningested factual exposures of Conventional Wisdom are these:

• Our private banking system at the Wall Street level has substantial systemic defects that public regulation can not control.
• Israel practices apartheid and secretly undermines all efforts for peaceful settlement with Palestine.
• The $180 Million Dollars that Wall Street contributed to elected officials in the last election cycle in fact controls their votes and policy solutions. We are in fact governed by a ruling class oligarchy.
• President Obama is continuing or enlarging every single act and policy that Wall Street demands, just as ex-President Bush did. The latest example is Obama’s position in court that detainees have no rights under law.
• 9/11 was intentionally caused or enabled by persons high in our government, specifically including former Vice President Cheney.

I have long believed that speaking writing and publishing the truth among citizen-voters could ultimately overcome Wall Street, the Wall Street Banks, the military industrial complex, and even the fact that our elected officials are bought and paid for by very wealthy and powerful financial interests. I have always believed that truth speaking citizens could overcome the contention of Karl Marx that the ideas and ideology of the ruling class inevitably become the ideas and the ideology of citizens everywhere. I had not realized how addictive and how hypnotic the ideas, the ideology, and the brainwashing of the Wall Street Banks, the military industrial complex and the main stream media are. These powerful special interests in fact constitute our ruling class. The exposure of these implanted defensive ideas that many have ingested may help.l I hope that the exposure and communication of this truth will thaw our immobilization and enable us to act politically together.

There have been several recent factual expose’s that expose the falsehood of ruling class mind-sets. For example:

• Two recent Bill Moyers programs exposing Wall Street’s control of the government and the power of big money on our elected officials.
• The surprising 2 hour documentary by CNBC “House of Cards” that exposed the acts and the greedy motives of every actor including the Fed and the Wall Street banks that resulted in our current “depression that threatens to turn out to be worse than the Great Depression.”
• The recent book by Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, the serious academic study by Professors John Mearschiemer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, and the many articles by Professor Norman G. Finkelstein exposing that the acts of Israel are often in conflict with the best interests of the United States, and in conflict with Israel’s PR about its stated acts and objectives.

About each of these exposes, many people, including mainstream politicians, academics, economists, advisors and citizens say: “I simply cannot believe that…” For example, many state: “I cannot believe that Israel does evil things,” and claim that Carter, Walt, Mearscheimer, and Finkelstein are anti-Semitic, or self-hating Jews and simply ignore the facts. Some will say, “I cannot believe that our government is that bad or that corrupt” and dismiss the facts with one or more of the status quo defenses that I outline below.

From his actions, appointments, and policy proposals as President, it appears that Obama himself is a victim of this addictive brainwashing.

Our brainwashed state appears to be founded in large part on the fact that we all, rich and poor, Phi Beta Kappa bright, and not so bright, employed and unemployed, male and female, NGO employees and government employees, union members and non-union members, are dependent for our survival on the existing status quo. It is very difficult if not near impossible for us to believe that the source of our survival is somehow corrupt, non-functional or untruthful. We are something like 6 year old children who are terrified at the thought of the death of our mothers. Moreover, we are fairly well off now. We do not want to jeopardize what we already have. The trouble with this is that we may wait too long until things really get bad, and then it will be too late to save civilized democracy. In fear many will turn then to a strong man, perhaps a General who promises to “save” us, as the Germans did in 1933. So let’s wise up now.

In our addicted brainwashed state, when we are called to act, the following are our varying reactions and responses when presented with the true facts, all based on our inner fear that is usually not known or acknowledged.

* Refusal to listen or read. I will not waste my time with that crap.
* Claimed lack of time. I am too busy earning a living to keep what I have. I am doing ok right now.
* Claimed lack of intelligence. I do not have enough brains or facts to act. Those in control know far more than I do.
* Denial. Things are not really what the facts show. Our situation is not nearly as dire as you say.
* Moral Relativism. What you say is “dire” is just a matter of opinion and there are a lot of contrary opinions.
* Groundless Optimism. Things will work out alright. They always have in the past.
* Self Destruction. If it really is that bad, I will kill myself.
* Alcohol. Have a drink, fella. Relax and it will all go away and you will feel better like I do.
* God will save us. All we have to do is pray.
* Conspiracy Nut. You are a just a proponent of some crazy conspiracy theory.
* Retreat into Inner Life. Meditation, serious prayer, being in the “now,” “our survival depends only on our own inner growth,” I am saving us all by doing my inner work.
* Science will save us. I have confidence in our human ability through science to survive.
* Claim of impotence. There is nothing that I can do that will really help.
* Communism. What you propose is communistic or socialistic
* More Big Government. We need to get the government off our backs so that we can enjoy our freedom and take care of ourselves.
* Ad Hominem attack. You are a crazy grandiose zealot. What gives you the right to proclaim the truth? I too keep up with the current news. I know just as much about the truth of what s going on as you do. You are a control freak. Your proposed actions are unloving. All change must be based on love.
* That is class war. We have no classes in America. We all have the same common interests. We are all Americans, like Obama says.
* There is no alternative. For example, many will say Israel has no alternative. About the private Wall Street banks, defective that they may be, most people say they are better than any possible alternative
* Obamamania. President Obama will save us. This is probably the most dangerous of the ruling class myths of all because it immobilizes the civic impulse in thousands and thousands of bright knowledgeable citizen-voters from acting to support Obama. Obama himself does not want this mania and wants us to help him now, between elections, as he begs in his many web sites. The civic impulse is limited in most people. The most we can expect is that they will vote. We are in bad trouble indeed unless some Obama voters can be mobilized to take other political action besides voting. Obamamania is a form of what theologian Walter Wink calls the “Myth of Redemptive Violence” cast in the form of a very bright orator, constitutional lawyer, and democratic politician. (Some argue that Wall Street selected and financed Obama for the very purpose of immobilizing us, our civic impulses, and our normal tendencies to act on our outrage.) This Myth of Redemptive Violence is pervasive in our society. We ingest it from early childhood on. In the case of Obamamania, built on his seductive vague promise of hope and change, his strength and his “violence,” are that he will use his oratory, his constitutional law brilliance and his political brilliance to save us by himself without effort on our part. This is my short summary of how Wink describes this Myth:

Our childhood TV shows, our comic books, many of our movies and our foreign policy are all founded on the false myth of redemptive violence. It promises to redeem, to restore order, law, peace and democracy, but it never does. This myth appears in The Lone Ranger, Batman, Superman, Cowboy Westerns, James Bond movies, TV games, modern adult movies and popular TV shows, and in our foreign policy and CIA. No cooperation, community effort on our part or democracy is required to remove the evil. The Myth is the essence of totalitarianism. The myth is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, and irrational depiction of evil trouble the world has ever known. The good guys always win. We are devoted to this Myth because it seems so real. It survives in our religious institutions. This myth, and not Christianity, is the real religion of America. No preacher in church once a week can match its power, its excitement, its addiction and its fascination. It is the foundation of holy wars and “just” wars. The distinctive feature of this Myth is the victory of order over chaos by means of “violence” of some kind by one person, albeit a “super” person. “One super man’s might (“or hope and promise of change”} makes right.” There is an underlying theology that the brilliant strong man has the powers of God. The strong man is thus a king with the power of God. Obamamania means that President Obama has become a God for many Obama voters.

All of us, radical, conservative, libertarian, Phi Beta Kappa brilliant or of meager intelligence, in elective office, or citizen, will be damaged and our democratic civilization will fall unless we can act together to meet the threat, and act together to mobilize and act on our outrage. Given the “gung ho” tendency toward “happy talk” as far as our economy is concerned on the part of the ruling class who say the economy can be restarted by relatively conventional means by the same persons and ideas that created the crisis, we must deal with the possibility that things could get much worse than anybody has so far dared to say. Before we can mobilize ourselves and others to act, we must ourselves transcend the addictive brainwashing, the hypnotic trance, and the mythical falsehoods that support and defend the status quo. We all must surpass our differences to deal with our common paramount peril whatever its dimensions may turn out to be.

Here is how it can all play out:

Some of us clear ourselves of our trance, face the facts, and inform those around of us of our new mind-set and our recognition that civic action on our part is urgently required.

We join existing organizations like Democracy for America, Progressive Democrats, Code Pink, and MoveOn.org. I have found that my local chapter of Democracy for America is tentatively supportive of Obama, but wary, and free of Obamamania. I believe Code Pink is also.

We help these groups to mobilize million person marches, focusing their action on two strategic objectives, both locally and at the national level:

* We focus on elimination of the Senate filibuster. We will never get any of our objectives so long as an unconstitutional supermajority of 60 Senators is required to pass legislation or good appointments. So long as it is in place, we would have to elect 2 good Senators in all 50 states to get what we need. Given Blue Dog Democrats and other problems, this is impossible. A simple majority of a quorum of Senators can change the rule if they want to. We must organize, hound the Senators, the Vice President, and the President in DC and in their local offices until they do so. We must bang our pots and pans with a focus.

* We focus on securing public democratic control of our money, to be accomplished by causing the Secretary of Treasury to be the sole creator of money, the incorporation of the Fed into the Secretary of Treasury, and the prohibition of fractional reserve banking, largely as proposed in the American Monetary Act. This is the strategic time to do so. The banks are bankrupt and on the ropes. By doing this, we cut off their source of Ponzi-like money, and hence their immense political power. Then and only then will we be able to push for things like Single Payer Health Coverage. Since Wall Street private bank money is the “mother’s milk of politics,” we will cut off the source.

These focused actions, when accomplished, will not adversely affect us at all. Local banks and local businesses will still function as usual. These actions will insure economic and political stability and sustainability. They are the least radical changes that can deal effectively with the radically profound economic and political problem now confronting us.

On February 10, Bloomberg.com reported that Treasury Secretary Geithner “pledged government financing for as much as $2 trillion…to spur new lending and address banks’ toxic assets, seeking to end the credit crunch hobbling the economy.” Hudson calls it “Stage One of a two-stage plan,” so far unannounced, to transfer trillions more to corrupt bankers who caused the problem in the first place, yet taxpayers will get little more back than the bill.

On February 11, the New York Times reported that “House and Senate leaders…struck a deal on a $789 billion economic stimulus bill after little more than 24 hours of rapid-fire negotiations…clearing the way for final Congressional action later this week (so) Obama (can) sign the bill on” February 16 in a prime time TV spectacular.

In America today, they’re called bailouts, but throughout history they were handouts. Some quite generous (though nothing like today’s) and always for the privileged. Never for the public interest or greater good.

Last October, Howard Zinn wrote about them in his Nation magazine article titled “Bailout — A Great Opportunity”:

Let’s face a historical truth: we have never had a “free market,” we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. These titans of wealth hypocritically warned against “big government” but only when (it) threatened to regulate their activities, or when it contemplated passing some of the nation’s wealth on to the neediest people.

“They had no quarrel with ‘big government’ when it served their needs, (and it) started way back” in 1787 when the Constitution was drafted. The year before farmers from Western Massachusetts and elsewhere rebelled to protect their properties from being seized for nonpayment of taxes. The Founders took note and “created ‘big government’ powerful enough” to deter them in future incidents. To return runaway slaves to their owners, and to massacre Indians to make way for new settlers.

They established the idea of handouts as well. The first one to pay full value for near-worthless bonds held by speculators — an earlier version of buying today’s toxic assets.

It was bad enough, then compounded by taxing the public to pay for them each time, and having a standing army ready in case of resistance. What precisely happened in 1794 when Pennsylvania farmers stood up against unfair tax laws.

“In the first sessions of the first Congress,” markets were manipulated with tariffs “to subsidize manufacturers.” Government also partnered with private banks to establish a national one. These practices were commonplace from that time to now. Only the amounts get bigger. The more concentrated business gets, the greater its appetite and more power it has to satisfy it. It’s now insatiable enough to demand trillions more in handouts before the current crisis ends, looted from the Treasury with taxpayers getting the bill.

Zinn notes how in the 19th century government subsidized canals, the merchant marine, and before and during the Civil War gave about 100 million free acres of land to the railroad barons “along with considerable loans to keep” them in business. It was the largest ever giveaway until Paulson’s-engineered Wall Street one, and as stated above, lots more is coming, and much of it still ahead.

Democrats back it more than Republicans. Another long-standing tradition from the republic’s beginning, as Zinn again noted. He cited Democrat Grover Cleveland vetoing “a bill to give (a mere) $100,000 to Texas farmers to help them buy seed grain during a drought, saying (dismissively): “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” However, in the same year he gave wealthy bondholders $5 million by pricing them $28 above market value. “Rugged individualism” he called it to make it on our own with a little government intervention for assistance. Only for business. Never the public.

After WW II, military Keynesianism became dogma. Aircraft and other defense industries had to be saved and another Depression avoided. The oil industry got its depletion allowance. Chrysler was resurrected from the dead. Continental Illinois Bank was taken over until sold to Bank of America. Business was shored up overall by the 1971 Emergency Loan Guarantee Act. Post-9/11, the Air Transportation Safety and Stabilization Act was for the airlines. Today it’s rescuing Wall Street and major banks, Fannie, Freddie, AIG, the auto giants, and any other “too big to fail” company. Generous government handouts to revive America’s business, or at least that’s the hope behind them.

Historian Charles Beard’s Documented History of Handouts

In December 1931, noted historian Charles Beard wrote about them for Harper’s Monthly in an article titled: “The Myth of Rugged American Individualism.” He documented 15 examples of government handouts/subsidies to business when the country was sinking into Depression.

(1) Government Regulation of Railways from 1887

Beard asked: “How did the Government get into this business?” At the “insistence of business men, shippers, who were harassed and sometimes ruined by railway tactics.” Through rebates, pools, stock watering, bankruptcy-juggling, savage rate slashing, merciless competition, and much more by some of the most cutthroad of all robber barons. They caused disastrous railway bankruptcies involving bloodshed and arson during the Panic of 1873, the result of financier Jim Fisk and railroad baron Jay Gould trying to corner the gold market. Ulysses S. Grant deterred them. A panic ensued and depression followed — two years after the great Chicago fire destroyed four square miles of the city, including close to where this writer lives.

(2) Waterways

Since the nation’s founding, the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding the development of rivers, harbors, canals, and other infrastructure, and continues to do it for business. “Who (was) back of all this,” Beard asked? “Business men and farmers who want lower freight rates. There is not a chamber of commerce on any Buck Creek in America that will not cheer until tonsils are cracked for any proposal to make the said creek navigable.” Dredging companies also backed it and companies making their machinery.

Beyond Beard’s timeline, the Eisenhower administration began building the Interstate Highway System at the behest of the auto industry, but its origin way pre-dated him with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938. Then another Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944. Still another in 1952 and under Eisenhower one more plus the Highway Revenue Act of 1956 that created the Highway Trust Fund to pay for the proposed 41,000 miles of roads (up to almost 47,000 by 2004).

(3) The United States Barge Corporation

Again Beard asked: “Who got the Government into the job of running barges on some of its improved waterways?” Not socialists. Good Republicans and Democrats representing the country’s business interests.

(4) The Shipping Business

WW I was the proximate cause. For over half a century government stayed out of subsidizing ship builders and allied industries. “Under the cover of war necessities,” it went into the business with much joy from the industry. It backed huge merchant marine expenditures in the form of cheap or subsidized funding, and did it by spending money “like water educating politicians.” What today we call lobbying.

Beard asked: “Who wants navy officers on half pay to serve on privately owned ships? Business men. Who wants the Government to keep on operating ships on ‘pioneer’ lines that do not pay? Business men. And when the United States Senate gets around to investigating this branch of business, it will find more entertainment than the Trade Commission has found in the utility inquest.” In other words, if Congress ever has second thoughts, it’ll be too late. Business will have pocketed their money and used it.

(5) Aviation

Government was already in this business by providing costly airway services free of charge and by subsidizing air mail. Once again, private enterprise was behind the whole scheme, or as Beard put it: “Gentlemen engaged in aviation and the manufacture of planes and dirigibles.” Government merely helped out by buying planes “for national defense” or whatever other reason it chose.

(6) Canals

Consider the Panama Canal, for example. East and West coast shippers backed it because of costly railroad rates. Others with a financial interest in the Cape Cod Canal found that one unprofitable. “They rejoiced to see (that) burden placed on the broad back of our dear Uncle Sam” to bail them out.

(7) Highway Building

Even in Beard’s day, “business men engaged in the manufacture and sale of automobiles and trucks” wanted the government to spend hundreds of millions on roads and tax railroads to help pay for them. With a touch of humor, Beard asked: “Who proposes to cut off every cent of that outlay? Echoes do not answer.”

(8) The Department of Commerce

Its very name defines its purpose. To promote what Calvin Coolidge called “the business of America.” A process Beard described going on in its “magnificent mansion near the Treasury Department, and its army of hustlers scouting for business at the uttermost ends of the earth. Who is responsible for loading on the Government the job of big drummer at large for business? Why shouldn’t these rugged individualists do their own drumming instead of asking taxpayers to do it for them?” Herbert Hoover headed the department at the time and outdid all his predecessors in dispensing public money. The same president Herbert Hoover we blame for his public stinginess after the country headed into Depression on his watch.

(9) The Big Pork Barrel

It’s been around for ages and entered into the vocabulary after the Civil War. It was named after a container to store pig meat in brine, and in 1801 a farmer’s almanac urged readers to “mind our pork and cider barrels.” Its need went out with refrigeration but got new life in reference to political bills bringing home the bacon for constituents. For all sorts of things like post offices, rivers, harbors, buildings, and a whole array of boondoggle projects and giveaways. Beard cited public buildings, navy yards and army posts with business interests every time the beneficiaries.

(10) The Bureau of Standards (NBS)

It’s now called the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), and was originally established in 1901 as a measurement standards lab under the Department of Commerce to promote US innovation and industrial competitiveness. Given its purpose was to help business, Beard asked: “Why shouldn’t they do their own (promoting) at their own expense, instead of turning to the Government?”

(11) The Federal Trade Commission

In 1914, it was established as an independent US government agency. While claiming its principle mission is to promote “consumer protection,” it exists solely for business and in Beard’s day for “business men who do not like to be outwitted or cheated by their competitors.” Why so for “rugged individualists,” he asked? Why not let them all do as they please “without invoking government intervention at public expense” and no public benefit.

(12) The Anti-trust Acts

Beard refers to the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act – trustbusting legislation of their day to defuse anti-competititive practices. Today they’re mere artifacts at a time business oligopolies and de facto monopolies dominate all major industry groups and are practically omnipotent. It’s why Chomsky calls them “private tryannies.”

Earlier, businesses complained that these laws constrained them and their ability to do large-scale planning without risking prosecution. Yet farmers and small business wanted them. The former for lower prices. The latter so as not to be undersold, “beaten by clever tricks, or crushed to the wall by competitors with immense capital.”

Individualism inspired both acts, what Woodrow Wilson called “The New Freedom. Break up the trusts,” he said, “and let each tub stand on its own bottom.” That’s how small businessmen felt. Lawyers representing them put it differently: “The natural person’s personal liberty should not be destroyed by artificial persons known as corporations created under the auspices of the State.”

(13) The Tariff

They go back to the 18th century and were the government’s largest source of revenue from the 1790s until WW I. Once income taxes became law in 1913, that changed although taxing income was used during the Civil War and again in the 1890s.

Beard referred to tariffs as the kind of “interference” business men demanded to protect their interests while at the same time wanting “the right of capital to find its most lucrative course, industry and intelligence their natural reward, and commodities their fair price.” The idea of “free trade” then was about the way it is now. One way with government protecting business against foreign competition, heavily by tariffs back then. More today by the WTO, NAFTA and the like. Beard’s response: “If competition is good, why not stand up and take it?”

(14) The Federal Farm Board

It was created in 1929 so was quite new when Beard wrote about it. He called it a “collectivist institution” and a product of “agrarian agitation on the part of our most stalwart individualists, the free and independent farmers.” Hoover sponsored it and signed it into law, but under him its measures were modest at best. It primarily and fundamentally stabilized prices and production through cooperative methods. It financed associations to limit production. The alternative was to let farmers produce what they wish, as much as they could, and sell it at whatever the market would bear. It’s slogan was “Grow Less — Get More,” cooperate under government leadership or hang separately.

(15) The Moratorium and Frozen Assets

It was a Herbert Hoover plan for a one-year moratorium on payments due the US from foreign powers at a time of growing economic duress as well as a “proposal to give public support to ‘frozen assets.’ ” Its “inspiration” was the jam American investment bankers were in. They made easy money in the 1920s, were now in trouble, and wanted government bailout help.

In 1927, a distinguished German economist told Beard that “the great game in his country, as in other parts of Europe, was to borrow billions from private bankers in the US, so that it would ultimately be impossible to pay reparations, the debts due the Federal Government, and then the debts owed to private parties.” As a result, they believed bankers would force their government to forego its claims for the benefit of private operators. It worked, and according to Beard: “American taxpayers (were) to be soaked and American bankers (were) to collect — perhaps.”

What then is a “frozen asset?” A piece of paper representing a transaction expecting to yield a larger return than possible on a prudent investment. For example, a 7% Western farm mortgage at the time was frozen tight and its holder with it. But why should government have to intervene to save them from “their folly and greed? No reason, except that (investors) want the Government to bring home their cake so they can eat it.”

Beard stressed that “the Federal government does not operate in a vacuum, but under impulsion from without.” From “rugged individualists – business men or farmers or both…The Government operates continually in the midst of the most powerful assembly of lobbyists the world has ever seen.” Representing every business interest “above the level of a corner grocery. For forty years or more there has not been a President, Republican or Democrat, who has not talked against government interference and then supported measures adding more interference to the huge collection already accumulated.”

Woodrow Wilson, for example. He based his 1912 campaign on individualism. A new freedom against corporate wealth controlling government. As a Jeffersonianism heir, “he decried paternalism of every kind.” But look at the laws enacted under him:

• the Federal Reserve Act subverting the Constitution by giving a private banking cartel the right to print money, control its supply and price, and charge government interest on what it would not have to pay if it printed its own;
• the Federal income tax to service the federal debt owed to bankers;
• the trainmen’s law virtually fixing wages on interstate railways for certain classes of employees;
• the shipping board law that put the government in the shipping business and let it regulate rates;
• the Farm Loan Act that established 12 regional Farm Loan Banks to serve members of Farm Loan Associations;
• federal aid for highway construction;
• the Alaskan railway;
• the Water Power Act that created a Federal Power Commission with extensive authority over waterways and the construction and use of water power projects; and
• various other acts belying the notion of “the less government the better” so increasingly more of it for business became the law of the land.

Republicans regained power in the early 1920s on a slogan of returning to normalcy and getting government out of business. In fact, they repealed none of Wilson’s laws. They and their ideological forebears “came honestly by subsidies, bounties, internal improvements, tariffs, and other aids to business.” It was their kind of normalcy. Individualism, with no interference, lots of handouts, and nothing changed under Republican and Democrat administrations through today.

Handouts to Business: the American Way of Life

American business is defined by Socialized costs and privatized profits — more than ever today with trillions in handouts plus all sorts of other generous benefits:

• subsidies and other direct grants;
• tax breaks, reductions, deductions, exclusions, write-offs, exemptions, credits, loopholes, shelters, and rebates even for profitable companies; the bigger they are, the more they get;
• letting corporations be headquartered off-shore and pay no federal income taxes; allowed to repatriate foreign earnings on the same basis; export jobs and erode the nation’s industrial base; financialize the economy; make it a casino, and loot the Treasury to cover their bad bets;
• large government contracts of every imaginable kind; some on a cost-plus basis with every incentive to cheat and get more;
• discounted user fees or subsidized use of public resources;
• free government-funded R & D;
• various other government direct payments; every cabinet department as a conduit for government funding to private business; every program from the Department of Commerce, Agriculture and others underwrites it; the FDA for Big Pharma; the FCC for media and telecommunications firms; the FAA for the airlines, the Treasury and Fed for Wall Street, and so forth; the most active “peoples” agency is the IRS;
• other subsidies like accelerated depreciation; the cost of advertising; direct aid for companies that advertise abroad; and much more with Democrats as pro-business as Republicans while at the same time curtailing essential social benefits;
• individual tax breaks for the rich; winking and nodding about billions offshored to tax havens; letting corporate fraud and abuse become the national pastime;
• privatizing more of what government should do and/or does best — schools, highways, bridges, airports, prisons, public lands, utilities, the running of elections, foreign policy, parts of the military, war through the use of mercenaries, outer space, and thus far a failed attempt to take away the most important poverty reduction program for seniors and the disabled — Social Security;
• privatizing wealth and socializing debt;
• abolishing welfare and other social benefits; rendering organized labor impotent in a “Walmartized” society; ruling by the doctrine of rewarding the privileged at the expense of beneficial social change; the greater good; government for the people; human need; and the democratic ideal that government should serve all its people, not just its preferential few.

Beard’s “rugged individualism” is pure myth for them. But, rugged or otherwise, it’s the consigned fate for the rest of us — sink or swim at a time a lot of us are submerging.

Pundits compare him to Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), whose New Deal is credited with bringing the U.S. out of the Depression. It was the most devastating global crash in history, bringing the U.S. 25 percent unemployment, Hoover ville homeless camps, bread lines — and militant working-class revolt.

Even before he was elected, the London Times asked, “Could Obama be the new Roosevelt? … We need an exceptional Amer i can president.”

Be warned: “Great Man” politics, the irrational hope that a larger-than-life hero will single-handedly usher in a new day, is a dangerous myth for working people. It serves ruling-class interests by implying that people should passively wait for deliverance. The “Great Man” theory of history discounts the material conditions and class struggles that actually shape events.

The New Deal’s main feats were unemployment benefits, public works, and Social Security — which gave people money to buy the products capitalism must sell.

The nearly hidden historical fact is that these gains were not delivered by a munificent benefactor. Workers fought for the advances in an epic struggle the like of which the U.S. has not seen before or since. Roosevelt responded to this tsunami of revolt, not because he was a friend of labor, but to save the system. His choices about how to do so were dictated by forces no one person can control.

FDR had to shore up profits and protect the system from itself with regulation, and he had to deflect working-class revolt.

Accepting that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, let’s evaluate the New Deal and the struggles that brought it about. In the light of that history, how does Obama’s “New Deal” stack up?

Roosevelt — defender of capitalism

In FDR’s first 100 days, Congress passed 15 major pieces of legislation, including regulation of banks, corporations, and agriculture, relief and public works programs, and the creation of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority.

The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) is considered the defining legislation of the New Deal in countering the depression. It suspended anti-trust laws to allow price fixing. Industries were called on to set minimum wages and maximum hours, but not required to negotiate with workers. A vague endorsement of the right to organize was included to pacify labor but did not distinguish between real and company unions.

Two years later, when the worst of the crisis was past, the NIRA was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court for violating anti-trust laws.

FDR only made necessary concessions to labor. According to Art Preis in Twenty Years of the CIO: Labor’s Giant Step, public works projects never gave jobs to more than a quarter of the unemployed, and hiring always peaked before elections, which were followed by large layoffs.

Roosevelt, like Obama, promoted the mystique of friendship to both business and labor to mobilize the sup port of all classes. But since the interests of the elite are directly opposed to those of working people, the image of the champion of “all Americans” is a con. The Great Man romance ignores the part working people always play in winning social gains. And their role is decisive.

Mass action dynamo

A major strike wave began in 1933 and built for five years. It involved a million to two million workers a year and kept a fire lit under the president and Congress. Workers gained Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations and Fair Labor Standards Acts, and the Bonneville Power Administration.

Communists and radicals played a central role in these gains. One of their innovations was the unemployed leagues, whose support for many strikes was crucial to victory. In 1934, the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, the Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and the West Coast dock strike (which included the San Francisco general strike) were enormous struggles involving thousands of workers who stood up to brutal state violence. Trotskyites, other socialists, and anarchists were leaders in all of them.

The victories of these epic battles helped ignite the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which unionized hundreds of thousands. U.S. workers invented the sit-down strike in 1936 and used it powerfully to organize the auto and other mass production industries.

If this struggle had kept its momentum, who knows what the outcome would have been? Instead, conservative union officials acted as FDR’s “labor lieutenants” to tame workers and tie them politically to the Democrats.

Philip Murray of the United Mine Workers called off the bitterly fought 1933 coal strike on Roosevelt’s command.

John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman of the CIO set up the Labor’s Non-Partisan League to support Roosevelt and forestall a mounting drive for an independent labor party. This was the forerunner to today’s political action committees (PACs), which spend millions on Democrats and indoctrinate unionists to support the “good” capitalists — like Obama.

Will a New Deal work today?

Obama is marketing him self with Roosevelt’s very words, “we need action and action now,” to propose a $775 billion “economic stimulus” package. But despite the Rooseveltian rhetoric, this “bipartisan” plan bears little resemblance to the New Deal.

Fifty percent is supposed to fund the huge areas of infrastructure rebuilding and alternative energy development. But instead of a WPA-style public program, 80 percent of the jobs are to be in the private sector. Most of the billions will go to businesses which will fritter away money on cost overruns and the usual federal contractor skulduggery.

Only 10 percent is to go directly to extended unemployment insurance and health care. Forty percent is scheduled for tax cuts to businesses, supposedly for job creation, and the “middle class” (read: workers). Aid to state and local governments, which could help to stave off massive budget cuts, may be sacrificed to accommodate Republicans.

The tax breaks for workers will, like last year’s rebates, go to paying off debts, not to consumer buying. Jobs are created by the demand for products. Without demand, tax breaks to businesses will disappear without creating employment.

It is also questionable whether an all-out New Deal could heal this depression. World capitalism today has progressed much farther into a process of progressive, terminal decay. Corporate globalization and “free trade” have dramatically cut workers’ wages and buying power. Neither astronomical deficit spending on two wars nor a financial bailout have done much to help the economy.

The bright spots in the situation are labor fights like the recent Republic Windows and Doors sit-down strike in Chicago and the hard-fought victory in unionizing the Smithfield meatpacking plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. With so much outrage over corporate bailouts, other labor battles can’t be far behind.

Fact is, the rulers can give up more of their wealth. But they won’t unless workers put the fear of revolution in them. And if we can do that, we might as well go all the way to socialist revolution, making the wealth everyone creates public property, controlled by the workers. Sound utopian? Actually, it’s crisis times like this when people do remake society, because there is simply no reasonable alternative.

Obama has already shown that, like the “Great Man” FDR, he will only do what is necessary to save capitalism. His loyalty is to the system, not to working women and men. It falls to the labor and social change movements to win an even break for the bulk of humanity and the fundamental change we desperately need.

Doctor Gupta has a history of siding with the status quo. That is the opposite of what is needed. We need access to health care for everyone — pure and simple. Nothing less will do. This is not nuclear physics or brain surgery. It is politics.

Many of the 18,000 who die from lack of health care are children. On September 28, 2007 BBC reported:

… In February, there was an outcry over the case of Deamonte Driver, a 12-year-old boy who died because his family could not afford private dental treatment. “The thing about Deamonte was his smile, he was always smiling,” says Gina James, principal of The Foundation School in Maryland, where Deamonte was a popular and promising student.

It was while he was at school one Thursday in February that Deamonte complained of toothache. On the Saturday he had emergency surgery. An abscess had spread to his brain. A few weeks later he died.

“Everyone here was shocked,” says Ms James. “They couldn’t understand how he could have toothache and then die. We sometimes give the little kids candy as a reward; well, for a while they stopped taking it because they would say ‘if I get a cavity, will I die?’”

Deamonte’s mother, Alyce, could not afford private health insurance and in the US there is no state health service. For the poorest there is some free treatment, called Medicaid. But not all dentists or doctors accept Medicaid patients, and Alyce Driver could not afford to pay to have Deamonte’s tooth extracted. Some 45 million Americans are without health insurance, nine million of them children.

Many say it is America’s national scandal. …

The new Surgeon General should be someone who understands why the USA is the only developed nation in the industrialized world to have no health care for many citizens. Understanding the problem should be the number one qualification. Not only doctors, but also nurses, dentists, teachers, blue collar workers and those in many other professions qualify. The point is this — it is not necessary for the SG to be a medical doctor. Having an M.D. behind the name should neither qualify nor disqualify anyone. Lack of compassion and a lack of understanding of the real problem should be the disqualifying factors.

How about a Surgeon General nominee who needs a root canal but has no money? Extreme pain can sometimes fill a person with empathy. Dental care, eye care, prescription drug coverage, long term care (in and out of the home) should be included in a new Single Payer System.

Michael Moore made a major contribution with Sicko — one of the best documentaries of our generation. Mike Moore is a controversial guy, but that is irrelevant. The facts are the facts and Moore did a great job in presenting the facts in Sicko. He ‘gets’ it. He understands the suffering of those who face the calamity of a health crisis. He understands that the leading cause of bankruptcy has been major illness. He understands that it is the collusion between the Congress and the insurance companies that is responsible for the needless deaths — 18,000 every year. That is like having a 9/11 every sixty days — but worse. We are doing this to ourselves by continuing to allow the insurance companies to profiteer and deny care to those who have insurance. Those without insurance don’t stand a chance.

The powers that be, are tweaking around the ragged edges of health care. There is a movement to convert all paper medical records to an electronic form. Follow the money on that one. It will be a boondoggle for some companies. Will it compromise the privacy of patient records? Will it improve the quality of care or increase the number of people who have access to care? Unfortunately it will be a distraction from the real problem — lack of access to the care, not the records.

The bottom line is this. We can have insurance companies or we can have universal health care, but we can’t have both. Only a Single Payer System will work. Any plan that allows the insurance companies to continue to profiteer will fail to provide the care. Children, such as Deamonte Driver, will continue to die.

Good candidates for Surgeon General are Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, and many other lesser knowns. Ralph Nader is over-qualified for the job, but maybe that is exactly what is needed — someone with a long history as an advocate for the common man.

Now is the wrong time for a media star who does not understand what it feels like to have a loved one in need of health care that is not accessible. We need someone with compassion and the courage to go up against the power of the insurance companies — a fighter for the people.

This abstract ideology is having a practical impact across California and the nation. In the face of a budget crisis, Governor Schwarzenegger ordered massive layoffs and unpaid furloughs of state workers. Over 238,000 employees are being forced to take off two unpaid days a month, beginning in February. Over 10,000 were fired this year and thousands more could lose their jobs.

The city of Watsonville closed its offices until January 5 in an effort to save $561,000. Many city services, such as the public library, will simply lock their doors, while so-called essential services-police, water and garbage-will continue to operate.

California suspended $4 billion in highway, school and other infrastructure construction projects. Nationwide over 5,000 transportation projects are being put on hold. These cuts only worsen national and state unemployment. California’s joblessness jumped to 8.2 percent, the third highest in the U.S., and reached 9.5 percent in L.A., threatening a long and deep recession.

The California Republican minority adamantly opposes raising taxes to provide state services and urges deep cuts in education and social programs, such as mental health and children’s funds. They advocated cutting legislative pay 5 percent but welfare payments 10 percent. GOP minority leader Mike Villines of Clovis, denounced efforts to begin what he calls “an illegal tax increase package that is a blatant attempt to silence California voters.”

Such thinking is typical. A recent letter to the New York Times calls government schools, roads, hospitals, research, loans and housing “excesses.” The writer denounces, “a gigantic, bloated government,” and calls for a return to “America’s founding principles: individual rights, property rights and the pursuit of happiness, with government only in the form of military, police and courts.”
The GOP’s 2008 Platform declares, “government should tax only to raise money for its essential functions” and not “as a tool for social engineering.” Their goals include making permanent Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, passed in 2001 and 2003, and ending federal income taxes. Social services and charities are left to “the vital role of religious organizations,” which are also chartered to promote “patriotism.”

Facing the worst financial crisis-which many economists blame on the Bush Administration-since the Great Depression, Congress and the incoming president are calling for a massive financial stimulus. Even Bush demanded the hasty signing of a $700 billion bailout for over-leveraged banks. The basic problem of balancing budgets stretches across 44 states and the federal government and, while presidents and their parties are not always in agreement, GOP party stalwarts appear to be on a path to destroy all government.

Eliminating social services for the most needy and monies for California schools, which already rank near the bottom nationally for funding per pupil, is not only shortsighted, it’s cruel and inhumane. Elected in reaction to high budgets of the Davis Administration, Schwarzenegger failed to control the GOP legislature and primarily cut funding to balance the budget.

This scenario is playing out across the country, although Republicans, stymied in cutting necessary social services, are inventing a new way to finance government–selling off or leasing state assets. Across the country, states are selling or leasing the public domain so politically friendly private businesses can profit. Minnesota is contemplating selling the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and the state lottery, to bring in $3 billion. Massachusetts may put the Massachusetts Turnpike up for sale, and New York is considering putting the Tappan Zee Bridge, the lottery, toll roads, and public golf courses, parks and beaches up for sale.

Where will this trend end? Indiana leased its toll road to an Australian-Spanish partnership for 75 years. Chicago wants to lease the Midway Airport and the Chicago Skyway toll road, parking ramps and parking meters to private business. Pennsylvania leased its turnpike and Texas is proposing a private toll road system. Water, sewers, libraries, schools, unused properties and other public assets are also being considered for privatization. By selling off or leasing assets, states will allow private companies to cut employees, raise prices and increase profits, providing the states with one-time revenue while raising the costs for citizens.

Similar to the bank bailout plan, privatizing public property socializes risk and privatizes profit. Decisions about expansion, hours of operation, staffing and maintenance will be left to for-profit businesses–the very opposite of publicly owned, controlled and operated facilities. Business argues that they can operate more efficiently but anyone who subscribes to cable TV knows the power of a business monopoly.

The only way to stop the destruction of government appears to be to defeat Republicans who march in lockstep as solidly as the Nazi or Communist parties in America’s former enemy states. The old mantra of “no taxes, small government” is frayed, out-of-date and cavalier when applied to public services. This is a time to rededicate America’s future to cooperation, problem solving and controlling private greed for the benefit of the public.

I was forty miles from the mainland. We had disembarked on a company-sponsored, 3-day fishing trip on an 85-foot boat out of Bilouxi, Mississipi. Once the main vessel dropped anchor, we were provided smaller skiffs to fish out of. On the morning of October 23rd, I wound up on a skiff by myself and got caught out in weather. High waves and rain fouled the skiff’s engine and then started to fill the craft with water. I tried bailing but was unsuccessful. I tried to get the motor to fire back up, but it wouldn’t engage. Next thing I knew, I was flailing in the Gulf.

It was windy and cold. The sky was gray and rainy. I clung to the hull of the skiff as best I could. The white-capping 3-5 foot swells battered me constantly, and every time I attempted to set myself in an upright position to survey my surroundings, I was swept away by waves and had to swim back to the hull.

After five hours adrift, my situation worsened considerably. I had resigned myself to a long haul, maybe clinging to the precarious hull overnight or a couple of days at most. But accidental seawater ingestion began to take its toll. I experienced diarrhea and vomiting. I started to dehydrate. The cold wind and water got worse and I became hypothermic. I kept thinking I’d see land or drift into a shipping lane, but there was nothing but waves.

I had two moments of profound discovery.

The first was my realization of the ocean’s indifference. There I was, off the grid, nary a technological umbilical for miles. For the first time in many years, I was definitively expelled from the seemingly constant comfort zone that most of rely on to exist. I was alone and practically helpless, and the ocean didn’t care. I was mundane flotsam, pointless and probably temporary. Nature was oblivious.

I was too cold and desperate to get very philosophical but, suffice it to say, I subsequently realized that I’d forgotten a few things about life while I was toiling and compromising to make a living.

The second profound moment I had was a Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman) revelation. As I lay sprawled across the hull, clinging as best I could, it occurred to me that I was worth more dead than alive. If I let go and just drifted off, abandoned my breath, and embraced the cold Gulf, my family stood to collect more insurance money than I could possibly earn or save even if I worked for the rest of my life. And this was before our economic recession or hints of a depression.

One high seas nap and my children’s college education would be covered. Our cars and house could be paid off. By leaving myself behind, my wife and kids could get ahead.

For better or worse, dumb brute instinct kicked in and I survived. About eight hours into the ordeal, an HH-65C Dolphin rescue helicopter from the Coast Guard in New Orleans fished me out of the drink. The Coasties swaddled me in blankets and told me that in another hour or so and I might have drifted into the Louisiana marshes where I could have walked out of the Gulf—if I could avoid the alligators.

At the hospital, between intravenous hydration and warming cloaks, a doctor told me that if my core temperature had dropped another degree or two, my whole body would have seized up.

Now that I’m back home, everybody reminds me how lucky I was and I guess they’re right. But as I go over the resultant $7,000.00 hospital bill and $1,200.00 ambulance invoice and prepare to do battle with my insurance company, Willy’s idea still doesn’t seem so bad. The grass is always greener, even in a graveyard.

There was a time in this country when, if you worked hard, you could probably get ahead and afford things, and be secure. Healthcare wasn’t a bankruptcy, and dying wasn’t a viable option.

It seems a shame and a disgrace that if you have health insurance, it probably doesn’t cover much. And if you can afford life insurance, the best way to come out ahead on the investment is to die prematurely.

It’s almost funny. While you’re alive the insurance companies want you treated as little as possible until you’re dying. Then they want you to live long enough to no longer afford your life insurance.

It’s been two months since I was brought back ashore and I still second-guess my survival. I’m still adrift and swimming. We all are. And there doesn’t seem to be any land in sight.

Meanwhile, the search for signs that the job market will improve soon is a grim task. On that note, California’s unemployment insurance system is struggling to meet the expanding ranks of the jobless through a program that gets its funds from an employer-paid tax.

According to Loree Levy, spokesperson for the state Employment Development Department, filings for unemployment insurance rose 78 percent between 2007’s third quarter and third quarter 2008.

As California’s home bubble and in turn set off a wave of job losses, the unemployment fund declined by 55 percent during the past year. EDD forecasts a $2 billion-plus deficit next year, and double that figure by 2010.

Based on past income, eligible California workers can receive unemployment insurance ranging from $40 to $450 every week for 26 weeks. If this period ends and workers are still jobless and eligible, they can file for federal extensions for up to 33 weeks in “high unemployment states” such as California.

As more people in the state lose their jobs, less people actually qualify for benefits. According to Levy, 45 percent of the 1.1 million Californians out of work in the third quarter of 2002 received unemployment insurance. In the third quarter of 2008, 35 percent of the 1.4 million unemployed received benefits.

The decline of jobless workers who receive unemployment insurance in California mirrors a national trend, said Joel Blau, an author and professor of social welfare at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. In 1975, 75 percent of unemployed American workers received unemployment insurance, according to him.

There is more than one reason for this trend. Let us consider two of them.

According to the California EDD, “Self-employment does not usually qualify for unemployment insurance benefits coverage.” It is worth noting that the self-employed are part of the federal government’s monthly jobs survey of households, one of two measures the state uses to determine its rate of unemployment.

Then there is the job category of independent contractors. Employers are not required to cover the costs of the payroll tax for unemployment insurance for independent contractors, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations.

Looking to President-elect Obama, it is unclear what policy measures he will implement to address the fiscal crisis of the states, of which unemployment insurance is one piece. Recently, about 400 respected economists, including Nobel Laureate George Akerlof at UC Berkeley and Michael Perelman at CSU Chico, signed a letter urging Congress to stimulate state budgets by “extending unemployment insurance and increasing benefits for low and moderate income households who are likely to spend quickly”.

In the meantime, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed increasing the employer-paid tax for unemployment insurance. The employers who remain in business during the current downturn are sure to resist that policy through the state and local chapters of the chambers of commerce and the like.

The governor, who recently described the state’s growing budget deficit as a “financial Armageddon,” also seeks to decrease unemployment benefits from their present amount. Jobless workers, less politically organized than businesses generally, will be hard-pressed to resist that proposal, though such an effort is possible.

The call is now going out to begin exerting post-election pressure. The operating belief among Obama progressives is that the leftist position is now stronger because all of these empowered voters will demand specific policies.

Nowhere will this strategy be put to a greater test than in the battle to reform the nation’s healthcare system, sure to be one of the foremost initiatives in Obama’s first hundred days. That is because nowhere will the centrist paradigm of getting elected come into greater conflict with the desires of progressives to have effective reform.

The middle way on healthcare reform, which Obama used to parry and parrot Hillary Clinton’s plan in the Democratic primaries, is premised on the idea that the power of the health insurance lobby is too strong to be assailed head on. Therefore the most expeditious approach to providing healthcare for all is to give the insurance companies what they want: continued control of the system and access to more business, paid for out of the Federal Treasury. These concessions will then open the door for fairness provisions: requirement to insure preexisting conditions, tax credits to pay for insurance, expanded Medicaid and S-CHIP, pooling mechanisms and a limited public plan.

Powerful forces within the Democratic Party and the liberal media are already marshaling to push this initiative early. Senator Max Baucus of Montana is introducing the legislation. The lavishly funded HCAN organization is ubiquitous. Hillary Clinton is expected to weigh in forcefully. The internal conflict among Democrats is already being framed as — will buying insurance be mandatory or voluntary.

But the real story on healthcare reform is less apparent and much more alarming. The newly empowered centrist faction of the Democratic Party may well be pushing a plan that is destined to fail, and in so doing they may sabotage reform for a generation.

Passing legislation and having it signed by the president may be the least of their problems. Much more central to the discussion is, will the middle way prescription realistically work? Here’s what the Obama plan won’t do: save the country any money. The modus operandi of all politicians, whether Democratic or Republican, is to defer to the powerful and rely on the largesse of the Federal Treasury.

The last thing that the Democratic leadership wants to admit is that their acquiescence on the $850 billion Wall Street bailout has seriously crippled their ability to expand spending on social programs, especially ones that represent burgeoning outlays into the future.

The working model of the Obama/Baucus plan of mixed private and public coverage is the Massachusetts universal care program. Passed under Republican Mitt Romney and implemented by Democrat Deval Patrick, its effect on public spending is unequivocal. The Boston Globe reports:

The subsidized insurance program at the heart of the state’s healthcare initiative is expected to roughly double in size and expense over the next three years — an unexpected level of growth that could cost state taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars or force the state to scale back its ambitions.

Massachusetts is now turning to the federal government for help in making up the difference. They will be joining the queue behind AIG, Lockheed-Martin and Kellog, Brown and Root.

If reducing the cost of healthcare was easy it would already have been taken care of by now. But the aforementioned political realities have kept key considerations off the table. Namely that roughly 30% of every healthcare dollar goes to maintaining the for-profit insurance infrastructure — administrative costs, advertising, promotions, lobbying, CEO salaries and profits. This is potential savings that the Democratic conciliatory approach is not attempting to reach.

Instead the cost-containment mechanisms in the Obama/Baucus plan are so generic that they are nearly identical to those in John McCain’s plan and are likely to be implemented by the industry irregardless of government action. These include improvements in information technology and a greater emphasis on maintaining good health.

Another aspect of rising healthcare costs that gets little attention is the reliance of Wall Street on private healthcare companies as a growth industry. Certainly a legitimate part of a capitalist economy it none the less creates perverse incentives within the fee-for-service structure to provide the kind of care that keeps the stock prices for these companies rising, i.e. late stage treatment over prevention and countless unnecessary tests, treatments and hospitalizations. In both of these components of the private system, for significant savings to ever be realized, someone is going to have to cut off the cash cow to these corporations.

That makes the centrist impulse of leaving the private structure intact almost the same as no action at all. If the level of public debt that we are now facing proves to be unsustainable then even liberal initiatives like H-CHIP and Medicaid may be threatened let alone the new spending this plan entails. If the economy continues on its current trajectory the Obama plan, like the Massachusetts model will be headed for the dust heap of history.

The activist community needs to come to terms with how formidable their task is. In healthcare, as in scores of other issues, no change will take place until there is an actual confrontation with entrenched power. The reallocation of public resources to the needs of the people will never happen unless those resources are wrested from the clutches of the military/industrial complex and the corporate welfare state.

The private insurance industry is not fearful of Obama’s plan, rather they welcome it. Their stock values have plateau-ed and they are anticipating a huge influx of cash as the uninsured are added to their roles, paid for with taxpayer dollars. They have given substantial contributions to both Obama and the Democrats, outstripping their support to their former allies in the Republican Party.

The mainstream of the Democratic Party, the corporate dominated media and centrist lobbying groups like Health Care for America Now are creating an impenetrable wall on the issue of reform. What is blocked out by this wall of hoopla is the third option on healthcare, the one that actually represents a possible solution to our current morass.

If one were to look at the examples of other industrialized countries that offer universal, quality healthcare at about half the cost of the United States then it becomes manifest that our best option lies with a single payer system. This shouldn’t be confused with “socialized” medicine where the government takes over the entire healthcare industry. Rather it means Medicare for all, where the government replaces the private insurance industry with a single risk pool and keeps healthcare delivery in the hands of doctors and hospitals.

With the investment industry nearing a dysfunctional state; with governments — state, local and soon federal — struggling to finance basic services; with the auto industry on life support largely because of their healthcare obligations, circumstances are propitious for confronting the inefficiencies of the current structure and building a viable, less expensive system that will see us through the hard times ahead. But the efforts of the centrists to rush Obama’s plan through the first hundred days of the new administration are having the effect of confusing the American people and protecting the insurance industry. If the aim of HCAN is to build grassroots support for change, wouldn’t it be just as easy to promote change that serves the interests of the grass roots?

Obama progressives who believe that they are in a position to influence his policies need to be cognizant of this situation. They are up against not only the Republicans and the Health Insurance Association of America but also the centrist Democratic leadership and the president that they just endorsed. It is a moment and an issue where only a progressive solution will do and the left needs to clearly differentiate itself from the center.

A unified Democratic push for single payer would be a difficult enough battle. A divided Democratic party doesn’t bode well. But a Democratic initiative that is inadequate and does not fix the problem will be the worst outcome of all, for it will discredit the left and the idea of healthcare reform for years to come.

As the income and living standards of the poor, the working class and a significant sector of the middle class in America have declined, a quite small portion of the population known as the upper class has become wealthier and more powerful than ever. One would have to revisit the Gilded Age of the late 1800s or the Roaring Twenties just before the 1929 Great Depression to locate comparable contradictions between the rich and the rest of the American people.

There are many distressing statistics that demonstrate the extent of economic inequality in the United States. The following is a telling illustration:

The top 20% of wealthy families in the U.S. now possess 84.7% of all assets and wealth. The top 5% alone control 58.9%, and the richest 1% command 34.3%. The “bottom” 80% possess of 15.3% of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 40% within this total have accumulated 0.2%. That’s two-tenths of one percent owned by 120 million Americans, while 34.3% is possessed by 3 million.

According to progressive economist William K. Tabb, writing in Monthly Review (July-August 2006), the Bush Administration’s economic policies “carry echoes which have been heard down through our nation’s history and have taken on resonance analogous to the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, other periods when conservative ideology and politics held sway and rapid increases in inequalities were produced by deregulation and variants of laissez faire policy and Social Darwinist thinking. But in all periods, we have had a government of the rich that has acted in the interests of the rich.”

Columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman, writing in the N.Y. Times on April 27, 2007, argued that “Income inequality… is now fully back to Gilded Age levels… Last year… a hedge fund manager took home $1.7 billion, more than 38,000 times the average income. Two other hedge fund managers also made more than $1 billion, and the top 25 combined made $14 billion… The hedge fund billionaires are simply extreme examples of a much bigger phenomenon: every available measure of income concentration shows that we’ve gone back to levels of inequality not seen since the 1920s.”

There is a clear cause and effect when the “upper” classes get richer and the “lower” classes get poorer. It often derives from the ability of those with power and wealth to manipulate government policy regarding taxes, regulations, and programs to further benefit themselves at the expense of those lacking power and wealth.

This is hardly unique in American history, but more prevalent at certain periods, such as the present moment when economic inequality and poverty are at high levels. We will focus upon three comparable periods in the past that generated a progressive response ultimately resulting in major social and economic reforms.

The United States advertises itself as the world’s outstanding example of democracy. But how can a democracy function properly and fully in conditions of gross economic disequilibrium, especially when class inequality is compounded by racial and gender inequities as well?

President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized this contradiction when he declared in 1944 that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

Economist Lester Thurow, in his 1999 book about the income gap titled Shifting Fortunes asked: “How does one put together a democracy based on the concept of equality while running an economy with ever greater degrees of economic inequality.”

American progressives of an earlier era understood this as well. Historian Richard C. Wade, writing about the reform struggle of the early 1900s, noted: “Progressives agreed that the central question of their times was how to control the power of concentrated wealth in a democracy.”

No wonder increasing comparisons are made between America in the early 2000s and the Gilded Age — a period of enormous wealth and opulence for the few and exploitation and oppression for the many.

An important difference between this earlier period and now is that in the late 1800s/early 1900s, there was a substantial fight back against the machinations of wealth and power, while in comparison today’s response has largely been confined to the wringing of hands.

Progressive movements arose in opposition in several past situations of extreme inequality and flaunted wealth. There were people’s organizations out in the streets; unions were marching; there were sizable left groups organizing and leading struggles. At times, popular pressure obliged the ruling parties to put some restraints on the corporations, investors, financiers, and their hangers-on, and even to pass legislation favorable to working people.

But now, after a quarter-century of stagnating wages, with a recession looming over the country as prices are rising and incomes are falling, as workers are losing their jobs and homes, Washington is spending trillions on aggressive wars and a relative pittance on new programs to help the masses of people.

There’s a class war going on, initiated and led by wealth and power. Various administrations in Washington in recent decades offer a perfect example of our government’s penchant for coddling the rich and ignoring the needs of working families. But aside from small left organizations and reform groups, some unions and a few politicians, what forces in our society are truly fighting for the poor, the working class and lower middle class majority of the American people? It is certainly not the two ruling parties.

There’s an election going and neither Democrat Barack Obama nor Republican John McCain has put forward a worthwhile immediate program to counter high prices for food and fuel, increasing unemployment, and depressed incomes. Neither offers a strategic program to greatly reduce poverty and inequality in America, to create good new jobs and affordable housing. Neither will contemplate big cuts in the military budget nor sharply increasing taxes for the rich to pay for these programs.

For over 200 years in America, virtually every decisively important government program or law that benefited the masses of people was the product of persistent, hard-fought struggle led by progressive and left social or political or labor movements, or all in combination. This was true at various points in history in the attainment of an eight-hour day, vacations, and a minimum wage; the right of women to vote and to work in jobs previously held by men only; the granting of Social Security pensions, Medicare and Medicaid; the end to lynch laws, the poll tax and formal racial segregation — and just about every other advance that has taken place in our society.

None of it was a gift. All of it was a struggle. And it’s the only way poverty and inequality — and all comparable abuses — can be reduced significantly.

The last period of relatively progressive governance in America lasted a few years and ended four decades ago when President Lyndon B. Johnson left office. LBJ is accurately remembered as the president who led the U.S. into the quagmire of the imperialist Vietnam War. But his extensive and fruitful “Great Society” domestic program was the final attempt to continue New Deal-type reforms initiated by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression when masses of people were demanding relief and reform.

The great obstacle to progressive social change in America today is that we have been living in conservative political times for decades. The nation is just emerging from eight years of George W. Bush’s hard core ribald neoconservatism and preemptive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; preceded by eight years of Bill Clinton’s centrist compromise with the rightists, killer sanctions against Iraq and the unjust war in Yugoslavia; four years of George H. W. Bush’s conservatism and the first war against Iraq; and eight years of Ronald Reagan’s reactionary Cold War policies, subversion throughout Central America, and right wing economic programs.

The 2008 election offers the U.S. people a choice between centrism and neoconservatism — all in the name of an ambiguous mantra of undefined “change.” This means that the right and center — the political tendencies least willing and able to end gross economic inequality and banish poverty in the U.S. — will dictate national policy through the next four years as they have in the past.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There were periods in American history when conservative times did transform into progressive times. When this happened it was almost invariably a consequence of popular mass struggle for affirmative political reform.

Today, the U.S. left — from left-liberalism and progressivism to social democracy, socialism and communism — is weak and without meaningful influence. And our critically important union movement is weak as well, with a leadership that remains wedded to the “lesser evil” centrism of the Democratic Party in return for token political compensation.

When the American left revives, as it certainly will, and popular mass struggle resumes, the conditions will exist to bring about a new period of substantive social, economic, and political reform.

Lately there have been some reports of an incipient progressive upsurge within the Democratic Party that might seriously address matters of poverty and economic inequality, among others.

Undoubtedly there are many left-liberal and progressive Democrats who are justly disappointed by the cautious performance of their party’s majority in Congress and by the refusal of the leadership to venture even a trifle to the left of center. Groups such as Democrats.com and MoveOn.org, among others, are cited as evidence of a progressive resurgence and even a possible harbinger of an effort to seize party leadership “from the bottom up.”

Our country would benefit if the center/center-right Democratic Party moved to the center-left in the next few years on the basis of agitation within its ranks. But it is far-fetched to think it will do so after the party leadership’s diligent and successful efforts over the decades to bury liberalism and completely reject the hint of social democracy implicit in the first few years of FDR’s New Deal.

At some point there will be another period of progressive advance, such as several earlier times in America’s history. When that happens it probably will be generated from outside the Democratic Party and consist of mass movements with progressive and left leadership around such key issues as economic reform, peace, inequality, poverty, jobs, housing, militarism, imperialism, union rights, and so on.

Such circumstances might influence the Democrats to take some action. Or it could lead to another Progressive Party, as it has done thrice before on the national level (1912, 1924, and 1948) and four times on the state level, not to mention many other left third parties.

Let’s briefly look back to some earlier periods of progressive reform in our history. While there were active reform movements in the years before the Civil War (abolition and women’s rights), a broad major reform struggle began in the 1870s and lasted with varying levels of intensity about 40 years. It took place during two historic periods: the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

The name Gilded Age was taken from a 1873 book of that title penned by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Their use of “gilded” derived from Shakespeare’s King John: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily… is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”

The Gilded Age officially began with the end of Reconstruction in 1877. It was weakened by the decimating depression of 1893-97 and declined at century’s end, though many of its conditions continued into the Progressive Era, which lasted between 1900 and World War I.

During the later 1800s America changed from a rural agrarian society into a mixture with urban industrial development that greatly accelerated the Industrial Revolution and created fabulous fortunes for the wealthy, and extreme exploitation for working class men, women and children. Long hours, low pay, and miserable living conditions painfully afflicted multimillions of American workers as unrestrained capitalism ran amuck.

Simultaneously, as the U.S. was adjusting to a post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction period of booms and busts (there were three depressions in the Gilded Age), the great majority of former slaves were forced into a new type of oppression under Jim Crow segregation laws (the model for pre-liberation South Africa’s apartheid system.) It took 90 years, the civil rights movement, and the 1960s reform period to end formal racial segregation, though racist inequality still exists in America.

The Gilded Age, according to author Steve Fraser in an article for TomDispatch.com April 28, was characterized by “crony capitalism, inequality, extravagance, Social Darwinian self-justification, blame-the-victim callousness, [and] free-market hypocrisy.”

In response, he wrote, “Irate farmers mobilized in cooperative alliances and in the Populist Party. Farmer-labor parties in states and cities from coast to coast challenged the dominion of the two-party system. Rolling waves of strikes, captained by warriors from the Knights of Labor, enveloped whole communities as new allegiances extended across previously unbridgeable barriers of craft, ethnicity, even race and gender.”

The strikes were militant and massive, and included the Great Railroad Strike of 1877; the 1886 railroad strike; the 1892 Homestead Strike; the Great Uprising of 1886 composed of nationwide strikes and demonstrations for an eight-hour work day, which led to the legal lynching of four anarchists on trumped up changes after the Haymarket Riots; and the 1894 Pullman Strike conducted by the American Railroad Union and led by socialist Eugene Debs.

The new labor movements were the only protection most American workers had against unbridled capitalist greed. The Knights of Labor, one of America’s first great unions, was formed in 1869 and played an important role in the working class fight back during the Gilded Age. It faded in the late 1880s. The more restrained American Federation of Labor was formed in 1889. The militant Western Federation of Miners was organized in 1893, and the revolutionary International Workers of the World, the Wobblies, came about in 1905.

The Populist (Peoples) Party was founded in 1890 to put forward demands ignored by the two ruling parties. It received over a million votes in the 1892 presidential elections on a platform calling for direct election of U.S. Senators, a secret ballot, referendums, recall of elected officials, direct primary balloting and opposition to the gold standard. A number of its candidates became governors and members of Congress.

By the next presidential election in 1896, the Democratic Party had adopted a number of the populist demands which it had earlier opposed. The Populist Party then supported Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, who lost to Republican William McKinley. That was the beginning of the end for the populists. Their party quickly declined and dissolved in 1908.

The excesses of capitalism were mainly addressed by reforms during the Progressive Era, but some took place in the 1890s, such as the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), which outlawed business monopolies; The Interstate Commerce Act (1887), which protected small shippers against powerful railroads; and the Civil Service Act (1883), aimed at ending corruption, which substituted the merit system for the spoils system in filling government jobs.

The Progressive Era was a period of great reform in response to the extreme exploitation of working families that accompanied swift industrialization and the growth of cities at a time when millions of poor immigrants were pouring into our country. The working people benefited from these reforms, but so did capitalism, of course, the regulation of which was essential to rationalize and strengthen the system, not replace it.

According to a superb college textbook on American history, Who Built America? (vol. 2): “Scholars [of the Progressive Era] have been unable to agree on exactly what Progressivism was. In fact, Progressivism encompassed many distinct, overlapping and sometimes contradictory movements: it was working people battling for better pay and control over their working lives; it was women campaigning for more equality and the right to vote at the same time as African Americans were being disfranchised in the South. It was corporations and their allies pushing to make city governments more businesslike; it was middle class reformers closing saloons and prohibiting the sale of alcohol; it was politicians and presidents extending the power of government to ‘bust trusts’ and regulate corporate activity.

“Sometimes these various reform forces worked together, sometimes they fought each other. Each responded in some way to the profound economic and social changes of the Gilded Age, but they differed in their interpretation of problems and solutions. As coalitions shifted, these diverse campaigns laid the foundation for modern American politics.”

The progressive movement had a number of concerns: the terrible conditions of working class life, from child labor to poor housing and ill health; the abuses of robber barons and business owners; the lack of government regulation of the marketplace; women’s suffrage; prohibition; race oppression; direct elections (to the Senate); electoral reform; and anti-monopoly reform.

There was another concern as well, according to the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers: “Fear of the expansion of socialism and Marxism provoked many in the upper class to support more moderate reform efforts as a means to ease the growing tensions between rich and poor and head off more extreme threats to their privileged role in society.”

President Theodore Roosevelt, who as vice president entered the White House in 1901 after President McKinley was assassinated, was the foremost reform politician during the Progressive Era. Although a man of wealth, an open imperialist, and staunch advocate of capitalism, he opposed the excesses of the Gilded Age as counter-productive to the interests of the United States and to his own vision of America as a burgeoning world power. TR, as he was known, believed that “the man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”

Republican Roosevelt left office in 1908 after presiding over the passage of a number of reforms demanded by the progressive movement and the expansion of federal authority. He was succeeded by his own vice president, William H. Taft. Out of office but still riding the progressive wave in 1910, TR outraged his own class be declaring: “I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and… a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes.”

Convinced that Taft and the Republican Party had turned against progressivism, Roosevelt unsuccessfully sought to obtain the party’s nomination in the 1912 presidential election. He then bolted the Republican Party and, with support from the progressive movement, formed the Progressive Party (known also as the Bull Moose Party) with an extensive reform agenda, the purpose being “to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics.” With the GOP split, the Democratic Party’s Woodrow Wilson won the election. Roosevelt was second and Taft last. Union leader Debs, running at the candidate of the Socialist Party, came in fourth with 6% of the vote. The Progressive Party collapsed in 1916.

Among the federal reforms of the Progressive Era were the following:

The Newlands Reclamation Act (1902) a conservationist measure; the Elkins Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906 and 1911), making sure that companies label ingredients; the Meat Inspection Act (thanks to writer Upton Sinclair’s exposé in his novel The Jungle); the Federal Reserve Act; the Clayton Antitrust Act, opposing monopolies and ruling that labor unions did not fall under antitrust laws; and the Federal Trade Act that established the Federal Trade Commission that is supposed to investigate “unfair business practices.”

In addition, laws were passed regulating the drug industry, establishing federal controls over the banking industry, and improving working conditions. Further, two progressive constitutional amendments — the power to tax income and the direct election of Senators were approved in 1913. Another progressive cause, women’s suffrage, was passed in 1919.

The Roaring Twenties were hardly progressive. It was a period of extreme Republican laissez faire economics, until the stock market crashed in 1929, plunging America and the world into the Great Depression.

There were radical moments in the 1920s, however, including the resurrection of the Progressive Party, which fielded Wisconsin progressive Republican Sen. Robert M. LaFollette Sr. as its 1924 presidential nominee against conservative candidates from both the Democratic and Republican Parties. LaFollette, whose program included nationalization of large industries including railroads, higher taxes for the rich and lower taxes for working people, and collective bargaining for workers, was supported by labor, socialists and liberals. With nearly five million votes — 16.6% — La Follette came in third. The Progressive Party dissolved in 1946, long after it ceased activity on the national level. During these years in its Wisconsin stronghold the party elected a governor and six members of the House of Representatives.

By the second half of the conservative 1920s the rich-poor gap was reaching Gilded Age proportions. Herbert Hoover, who defeated liberal Democrat Al Smith in the 1928 election, was the third Republican elected to the presidency during the decade. In accepting nomination, Hoover declared: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. We shall soon… be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”

Hoover assumed office in March 1929. The Great Depression began seven months later, catapulting most of the working class and middle class into exceptionally hard times. Consistent with his conservative ideology of waiting for the “market” to cure itself, Hoover did practically nothing as the economy crumbled in the three years until the 1932 election, which gave rise to the greatest period of progressive reform in U.S. history.

The Democrats nominated New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a fifth cousin to Theodore Roosevelt. He declared in his acceptance speech, “I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people,” and his program became known as the New Deal. FDR, as he was universally known, captured 57.4% of the vote against 39.7 for Hoover, and remained in office to four terms. He delivered the famous line, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” in his first inaugural address in 1933.

Roosevelt was under extreme pressure when he entered the White House. Unemployment reached its peak that year — 25.2% — meaning one in four workers was jobless and many others were working for reduced pay and waiting for their jobs to disappear. Millions of families were suffering great distress and relief from Washington barely existed.

From the day he entered the White House, Roosevelt understood that his principal task was to preserve capitalism in America at a time when private enterprise systems around the world were experiencing economic disasters. There were two threats. One was that the downward economic spiral in the U.S. might lead to a total collapse. The other was the fear that the working class might seek to replace capitalism with socialist or revolutionary communist alternatives. At the time, these were quite rational speculations.

The political left had been organizing since the day the stock market crashed. For instance, according to Who Built America?, just weeks after the market crash “the Communist Party organized the first of what was soon a nationwide network of ‘Unemployed Councils.’ These Communist-led neighborhood groups worked to aid the unemployed with immediate problems of rent and food, to apply pressure for improved relief programs, and finally to recruit new members to join the party. On March 6, 1930, the communists held a series of rallies on what it dubbed International Unemployment Day,’ demanding government action. In city after city, the turnout far exceeded expectations.”

The Communist Party was active throughout the 1930s, in all the major cities, in the unions, in the South among poor black sharecroppers, in Harlem stopping evictions and fighting for unemployed workers. Near the end of the 1930s CP membership rose to its highest number ever, 100,000. Many other progressive and left groups, including populist farmers, were organizing as well, but the communists were the most energetic.

Unions were active but did not come into their own until late 1935 with the formation of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). In little more than a year union membership in the U.S. rose from four million to seven million. Confrontations between labor and management sharply increased as companies resisted collective bargaining, often engaging in redbaiting in the process. Many in the wealthy class and their minions in corporate management viewed unionization as a red plot.

Company brutality, exercised through local police and private security thugs, increased as labor became stronger. Police shot and killed 10 striking workers outside a Chicago steel factory in May 1937. In the same month, a Ford company guard viciously beat leaders of the CIO’s United Automobile Workers union.

The less activist American Federation of Labor (AFL) was founded 46 years earlier as a craft union, organizing each craft — such as plumbers, sheet metal workers or carpenters — into separate unions. The CIO organized workers around entire industries — auto, steel, coal, and so on, conveying to each member a sense of mass and solidarity.

The CIO was known for its militancy and spectacular sit-down strikes. Many leftists including communists were CIO organizers and union militants at the time — often the most dedicated and hardest fighters for the union — even as a number of union leaders expressed anticommunist views in response to criticism from the owners. (The CIO purged most of its left militants in the late 1940s when it took a right turn in response to the Washington’s anticommunist campaign accompanying the start of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. It subsequently merged with the AFL and has generally supported some of the worst aspects of U.S. foreign policy ever since.)

The new president understood that the desperation afflicting American workers and their families, combined with the determination of the political, social, and union organizations demanding that Washington alleviate their plight, obligated him to proceed swiftly, decisively, and in tune with the progressive assumptions of the day.

Roosevelt was not a leftist by any means, but his program of relief and reform was vast, with social democratic implications never before introduced in America. “The test of our progress,” he once said, “is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s wife, was to his political left, and she encouraged him with words and observations from her many fact-finding trips throughout the country to follow a progressive line. It didn’t always work, but she never relented.

The right wing and many capitalist ideologues hated Roosevelt for his “socialist” programs. The left was generally supportive but critical when he fell short. The masses appreciated his helping hand. In the end his actions contributed to the preservation of capitalism but it took beginning of World War II to fully end the Great Depression in the United States.

FDR proceeded in two stages, known as the First and Second New Deal, mainly in the six years between 1933-38. The initial New Deal took place in the first two years of Roosevelt’s Administration. Hundreds of programs, some quite innovative and most of them welcomed by a grateful nation, took place during the first hundred days. Many of these programs were of an emergency nature to keep the system and its people afloat. The second New Deal, from 1935-38, tended to be more to the left and supportive of workers and their unions.

The Roosevelt Administration’s list of programs and legislation implemented during this period was extraordinary, even though some were phased out over the years. Following is a short list of some of the Roosevelt team’s key accomplishments, compiled from Wikipedia:

• United States bank holiday, 1933: closed all banks until they became certified by federal reviewers.

• Abandonment of gold standard, 1933: gold reserves no longer backed currency; still exists.

• Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 1933: employed young men to perform unskilled work in rural areas; under United States Army supervision; separate program for Native Americans.

• Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 1933: effort to modernize very poor region (most of Tennessee), centered on dams that generated electricity on the Tennessee River; still exists.

• Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), 1933: raised farm prices by cutting total farm output of major crops and livestock.

• National Recovery Act (NRA), 1933: industries set up codes to reduce unfair competition, raise wages and prices.

• Public Works Administration (PWA), 1933: built large public works projects; used private contractors (did not directly hire unemployed).

• Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) / Glass-Steagall Act: insures deposits in banks in order to restore public confidence in banks; still exists.

• Securities Act of 1933, created the SEC, 1933: codified standards for sale and purchase of stock, required risk of investments to be accurately disclosed; still exists.

• Civil Works Administration (CWA), 1933-34: provided temporary jobs to millions of unemployed.

• Indian Reorganization Act, 1934: moved away from assimilation.

• Social Security Act (SSA), 1935: provided financial assistance to: elderly, handicapped, paid for by employee and employer payroll contributions; required years of contributions, so first payouts were in 1942; still exists.

• Works Progress Administration (WPA), 1935: a national labor program for more than 2 million unemployed; created useful construction work for unskilled men; also sewing projects for women and arts projects for unemployed artists, musicians and writers.

• National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) / Wagner Act, 1935: set up National Labor Relations Board to supervise labor-management relations; In the 1930s, it strongly favored labor unions. Modified by the Taft-Hartley Act (1947); still exists.

• Judicial Reorganization Bill, 1937: gave the President power to appoint a new Supreme Court judge for every judge 70 years or older; failed to pass Congress.

• Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter 8), 1938: established a maximum normal work week of 40 hours and a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and outlawed most forms of child labor; still exists

From 1941 through 1945 the Roosevelt Administration was totally absorbed with winning the war in Europe and Asia, and many new progressive domestic programs were backlogged until peace returned.

Vice President Harry S. Truman, a former Senator from Missouri, became president when Roosevelt died in April 1945, three weeks before Germany surrendered. Japan surrendered four months later, days after Truman ordered the destruction of two Japanese cities with nuclear bombs. (It subsequently was determined that Japan would have given up relatively quickly without the annihilation of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

Six months after Roosevelt’s death, Truman loyally put forward FDR’s progressive peacetime program — a 21-point legislative proposal calling for an Economic Bill of Rights. The program advocated universal healthcare, full “living-wage” employment, adequate unemployment benefits, affordable housing, public works funding for the construction of airports and highways, an increase in the minimum wage, and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee on a permanent basis — all “regardless of station, race, or creed.”

By now, however, the political tide was rapidly turning and progressives soon became isolated. Conservatism was making a big comeback in Washington. The government was launching a Cold War against its former Soviet ally that went on to preoccupy the United States for 45 years. The right wing, supported by big business, most liberals, and the leaders of the AFL and CIO, began a noisy, bullying red-hunting crusade against “domestic communism” that lasted deep into the 1950s, continued at a lower level throughout the Cold War, and in certain ways still goes on today. One of the many casualties of this turn to the right was Roosevelt’s economic program. Some its progressive provisions, including universal healthcare, remain unfulfilled 60 years later.

Given the growth of postwar conservatism, the Progressive Party idea was revived again in time for the 1948 elections. Its candidate was Henry Wallace, who had been Roosevelt’s vice president since 1941-44, but was not renominated at the 1944 Democratic convention. Anticipating that FDR might not live throughout his fourth term, four key urban Democratic party leaders, backed by the party’s Southern racist politicians, conspired to dump Wallace because they considered him too progressive, friendly to the Soviet Union, and an avowed opponent of racial segregation.

The four leaders decided on Truman after their first two choices declined. They then convinced Roosevelt, who personally selected Wallace in the 1940 election, to remain neutral and allow the convention to select the next nominee for vice president. The plan almost backfired when Wallace received great support from the delegates after his 1944 convention speech. The party leaders managed to delay the voting to the next day. Throughout the night they set about informing the delegations that Roosevelt was neutral and that leftist Wallace as president would be a disaster for the party.

Truman was elected. Roosevelt named Wallace Secretary of Commerce as compensation. Truman fired him in 1946. Wallace then decided to run as the Progressive Party nominee. It is interesting to contemplate how history may have changed had Wallace, not Truman, succeeded FDR in the spring of 1945.

Most of the left backed Wallace, largely to halt the developing Cold War and to continue the progressive aspects of the New Deal. The Communist Party also supported Wallace’s candidacy. The CP did not control either Wallace or the Progressive Party, though it had some influence within the organization. But most Democrats, Northern liberals and Southern segregationists alike, relentlessly redbaited the third-party campaign, charging it was a communist front. Wallace was neither a socialist nor communist, though accused of being both.

Wallace’s program was quite progressive. He campaigned strenuously for an end to Jim Crow segregation and for full equality for African Americans at a time when open racism permeated America. He also called for a continuation of the wartime alliance between the U.S. and USSR, which made him a “subversive” by the standards of 1948, in addition to being a “race mixer.”

On Election Day, Truman defeated Republican New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey with almost 50% of the vote. Wallace received 1,157,057 votes, 2.38%. He broke with the Progressive Party two years later when the party leadership did not join him in condemning North Korea for the Korean War. The party dissolved in 1955, and Wallace died 10 years later.

The conservative 1950s gave way to the “Sixties,” a decade in which a substantial and diverse sector of Americans rose up against racism, war, stultifying conformity and outdated conventions, taking to the streets and demanding change — not today’s quaint “change you can believe in” but a concrete reordering of society.

The Civil Rights movement, with Martin Luther King at the forefront, led the struggle against racism starting in the mid-1950s, then exploding in the early 1960s into dramatic sit-ins, mass marches and demonstrations to end segregation NOW! The movement was also influenced by the important political example of Malcolm X, and by such organizational exponents of black power as the Black Panther Party.

As this historic uprising was unfolding, a huge peace movement developed in opposition to Washington’s unjust war against Vietnam. At the same time the left and various communist groups revived and expanded, a radical student movement quickly spread throughout the country, the women’s movement erupted in protest, and the gay rights movement was launched.

Today, when the media look back to the 1960s it’s often with an emphasis upon the hippies, the music of the time, pot-smoking, long hair, unusual modes of dress, and “dropping out,” as though all this was the principal aspect of the decade. Actually, the counter-cultural movement was a relevant expression of dissent against bourgeois conventions, but it was the historic, progressive protest movements and their intense political struggles for change that continued into the 1970s that characterized the era known as the Sixties.

This political uprising created the progressive context for another round of reforms, which brings us to President Lyndon Baines Johnson. His administration was the last in which the Democratic Party really embraced liberalism and thought of itself as an extension of the New Deal.

Johnson was a New Dealer as a young Texas politician in the 1930s/40s and one of the most effective majority leaders in Senate history when he became John F. Kennedy’s vice president in the 1960 election. He assumed the presidency when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and won reelection on his own in 1964. Mass opposition to his escalation of the unjust and brutal war against Vietnam deflected him from seeking reelection in 1968.

LBJ’s social reforms were part of his “Great Society” program. His most important achievement was in civil rights, the legislative reflection of the movement’s sharp struggle against racial segregation. With his way paved by this mass nonviolent rebellion, Johnson used his formidable political skills to bring into law the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, ‘65, and ‘68 that in total ended job discrimination and segregation in public accommodations; that safeguarded minority voting against unfair qualification tests; that ended poll taxes; appointed government voting examiners; banned housing discrimination; halted national quotas in immigration; and provided legal protection for Native Americans living on reservations.

Johnson also waged a War on Poverty to end hunger and deprivation. Progress was made, though in the end the “war” was lost. Its main element was embodied in the Economic Opportunity Act (1964), creating the Office of Economic Opportunity. The OEO coordinated a network of local antipoverty programs. The campaign also brought about Food Stamps, Head Start, VISTA, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the Job Corps, and Model Cities program.

Healthcare was helped immeasurably by the administration’s championing of Medicare (1965) and Medicaid (1966).

In terms of education, the Johnson Administration was responsible for the Higher Education Act and the Secondary Education Act, both in 1965, and the Bilingual Education Act in ‘68.

In consumer protection, Johnson brought to fruition the Cigarette Labeling Act of 1965, the Child Safety Act and Vehicle Safety Act, both of 1966, the Flammable Fabrics Act and Wholesome Meat Act, both 1967.

The environment was a big winner as well: The Clean air, Water Quality and Clear Water Restoration Acts, Wilderness Act, Endangered Species Preservation Act, National Trails System Act, Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, Land and Water conservation Act, Solid Waste disposal Act, Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act., National Historic Preservation Act, Aircraft Noise Abatement Act and National Environmental Policy Act.

Johnson left office in January 1969. Since that time nearly 40 years ago very little else of a progressive nature has taken place in American national politics. It’s been a long essentially conservative era to this day.

(As an editor of the leftist Guardian newsweekly during the 1960s, this writer — along with much of the left — was so preoccupied with opposing Johnson’s imperialist war that his domestic accomplishments were virtually drowned out amid the shouts of “LBJ, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” In compiling the facts for this article, after almost four politically dreary decades of the Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations, it was impossible not to be quite impressed by Johnson’s progressive legislative achievements.)

Some Democrats point to certain initiatives emanating from the eight years Bill Clinton occupied the White House (1993-2001) to suggest he was a liberal, but the record shows an administration that was virtually indifferent to strengthening or generating social service programs for the people. Clinton’s few accomplishments over two terms do not amount to much more than the Family Medical Leave Act (1993), providing unpaid leave to take care of a newborn infant or sick family member; the AmeriCorps public service program (1993); an increase in the minimum wage in 1996; and his support for the Republican welfare “reform” legislation in 1996, which ended the federal welfare system that was put in place when the Democratic Party was liberal. The party has now moved so deeply into the center it considers “ending welfare as we know it” to be a major accomplishment of the Clinton presidency.

After this excursion into America’s progressive past, we repeat the question at the beginning of this article: “How can poverty and grave economic inequality be reduced significantly in the United States? Under what conditions might it be possible to bring about a period of significant progressive reform that would address our country’s major social problems?”

There are short term and long term responses to this question. We will deal only with the short term foreseeable future and leave matters of social revolution and the complete restructuring of society for another forum.

It seems to us, from the past history of social reform in American, that it’s going to take a lot more to greatly reduce poverty and inequality than crossing one’s fingers and voting for a centrist politician to lead the country, backed by a largely centrist and rightist Congress. The U.S. has experienced alternating centrist and rightist governments for decades, and they have been the cause of increasing poverty and the widening rich-poor gap,.

We have talked to a number of progressives who are investing hopes for a better America in their ability to work internally to transform the Democratic Party into a replica of its liberal periods of 40 and 70 years ago.

We have mentioned to them that to accomplish this would require the near takeover of a party that is now held in the iron grip of a centrist leadership. This leadership is supported by a solid majority of its elected politicians, the Democratic Leadership Council, the Blue Dogs, the party apparatus, the fundraisers, and the big donors. Then there’s the powerful beneficiaries of great corporate, financial and inherited riches — the 5% who control 58.9% of the nation’s wealth and assets — who have a huge stake in keeping the two-party system in what their self-interest dictates is the correct political alignment. And they are surely content with today’s center-right political parameters. To put it mildly, they have considerable influence.

We respect the left Democrats who are trying to transform the Party from within, but do not think they will succeed.

In our opinion, to provide a serious antidote to the plague of poverty and inequality — among other grave shortcomings in our society — requires a resurgence of both the political left in America and the emergence of progressive mass movements of people demanding real social change.

Can such a combination of circumstances move the Democrats sufficiently to the left to achieve the objective of implementing high quality social programs? Maybe. It did in the 1930s and ’60s. But today’s Democratic Party seems quite comfortable occupying the political center, functioning as a barrier to the left in national politics, and prospering as the only “lesser evil” in town, effortlessly capturing millions of progressive votes from people who feel they have no other choice.

A resurgent left could offer other choices, not only in the social movements for change but party politics as well.

Suppose there was to be a revival of the Progressive Party idea — not as a quickly organized national alternative that makes a small dent and fades away. Many advanced capitalist societies have a few mass political parties (not just two) and several smaller but viable parties as well, and at least one of the big parties to one degree or another seeks to represent the interests of the working people. This is why such countries, all within the capitalist orbit, have done a better job than ours in serving their people — from longer vacations to lower infant mortality, from universal healthcare to adequate welfare programs. And in many ways they are more democratic, too, and far less warlike and hegemonic.

Building such a new mass party would take a long time, but if the progressive sector of the labor movement got behind the idea it wouldn’t take as long, especially if it was joined by movements for peace and justice, for racial, gender and economic equality, for environmental survival, for cutting the war budget and eliminating nuclear weapons, for immigrant and gay rights, and for ending militarism and imperialism.

There are already a number of small left third parties, some of which might benefit by association with an up and coming, all-embracing Progressive Party (of whatever name) that was seeking to become a viable mainstream party.

Given the awesome complexity of attempting to convince the fractious U.S. left to get behind a major progressive third party will make the expression about “the devil in the details” sound like the understatement of the century.

But the existence of a viable left third party, coupled with progressive social movements in motion, would create a national political environment conducive to the growth of all sectors of the left and their respective parties, clearing the way for further progress.

Liberal economist Paul Krugman, whom we quoted earlier, also speculated in the same article that “it’s much too soon to declare the march toward a New Gilded Age over,” meaning things will get worse before they get better, but he concluded: “If history is any guide, one of these days we’ll see the emergence of a New Progressive Era, maybe even a new New Deal. But it may be a long wait.”

Or maybe not so long, depending mainly on the future status of America’s left and progressive forces, the revival of mass activist movements, and objective economic and social conditions within the U.S., plus on the final disposition of the Democratic Party and on what the progressives within that party will do when they cannot move it toward a new progressive era.

As US hegemony in Latin America becomes less profound and pervasive, Latin America’s local brand of neo-liberalism expands and goes global. The onset of the US recession and financial crisis has little or no effect in slowing Latin America’s export boom, demonstrating the growing de-coupling of the two regions’ economies, rendering obsolete the long-standing cliché: “When the US sneezes, Latin America catches pneumonia.”

The Class Dynamics of the Resurgent Right

One of the key factors driving the resurgence of the right, the weakening of the self-styled ‘center-left’ regimes and the isolation and decline of the radical social movements in the first decade of the new millennium, is the ‘primarization’ of the economies. The primary economic sector, namely agriculture and mining, is dominated by big national and foreign agro-mineral corporations who also lead ‘peak’ business and financial institutions and exercise hegemony over local and regional governments and their employees. Favorable world prices and the opening of new dynamic overseas markets as well as large inflows of foreign investments into the primary sectors have vastly increased the role of agro-mineral elites in the economy and increased their demands for greater influence over national economic policy. The growing centrality of agro-mineral sectors and its ‘satellite’ industries (finance, commerce, farm machines, infrastructure and construction) has shifted the axes of political power from center-left alliances of urban middle class-working class and rural/urban poor to agro-mineral led mass power-bloc embracing urban small business, professional organizations, rural middle and even small farmers, disaffected urban consumers and fixed salaried employees suffering the ravages of high inflation.

The right wing-led primary sector elites are the foremost exponents of ‘free market’ policies, independently of the decline of influence of the IMF and World Bank, as their basic strategic goal is unrestrained access to overseas markets and importation of capital and consumer goods at the lowest competitive prices. Domestically the agro-mineral elites and their collaborators among the financial, commercial sectors demand the end of government regulation, lowering or elimination of export tariffs, an end of revenue sharing with the national government and the reinvestment of trade surplus in infrastructure projects facilitating exports and earnings.

The shift in power from the radical left to the center left to the right follows closely the fortunes of capital. The radical-left dominated the street and exercised a virtual veto on economic policy and influenced ‘regime change’ at the height of the economic and political crises and breakdown of neo-liberalism at the turn of the 20th century. The Center-Left emerged from the stalemate between the social movements and the ruling class during the crises: The radical left was able to block capital rule but unable or unwilling to replace it and the ruling class occupied the strategic positions in the economy but was unable to rule. The Center-Left was essentially a ‘transitional regime’ born in the aftermath of the crises and breakdown but only able to survive if and when it was able to adapt to the demands of agro-mineral elites emerging out of the economic boom of the post-crisis period. The ‘center-left’ regimes’ pursuit of policy adjustments and structural continuities created its ‘grave-diggers’ on the right. Secure in their support from the privatized strategic financial, agro-mineral and industrial sectors, the Center-Left implemented a series of fiscal, monetary and labor policies which ‘force-fed’ the re-launching of capitalist growth. Favorable world market conditions biases the center-left regimes to adopt the primary sector’s growth strategy, independent of the fact that their electoral base was opposed to the leading elites in the primary sector. The Center-Left operated with a static view of the post-crisis balance of power between the mobilized poor and resurgent bourgeoisie: They envisioned a ‘productive alliance’ where they could harness wealth and revenues generated by a ‘free market’ primary sector to social welfare payments pacifying their mass base. The strategy fell apart from the moment the primary sector boom took off and the resurgent agro-mineral elites flexed their political muscles based on record high profits. The right-wing primary sector elites refused to play along with the ‘productive’ alliance and ‘share the wealth’ policies of the center-left regime. Unable to put the genie back in the bottle, the Center-Left became a political captive to the resurgent right, back tracking on promises to its mass base and unwilling and unable to protect its supporters, let along mobilize them against the institutional and street violence of the primary sector’s right-wing shock troops.

The Resurgence of Free-Market ‘Neo-Liberalism’ and the Decline of Social Movements

The ascendancy of the kingpins of the primary sector-driven economy has had important repercussions over the macro-economic and political map.

First and foremost, the right has captured political power in the dynamic agro-mineral regions, and with the windfall profits and local tax revenues, have been able to fund local welfare projects, which mobilize the great majority of the local population in support of their ‘regionalist’ agenda. In so doing the Right has been able, to a great extent, to turn class conflict into sectoral/regional conflict.

Secondly, regional leverage and the increasingly strategic role of the rightist-dominated regions in the national economy has resulted in greater political influence on national politics. In particular, important economic elites in the capital cities, particularly in the finance and commercial (export-import activities) sectors have joined forces to undermine the center-left regimes. The result has been the increasing ‘bending’ of the vulnerable center-left regimes to the more radical deregulatory demands of the agro-mineral sector. The problem facing the center-left regimes is that the resurgence of the Right takes place at a time when inflationary pressures are forcing organized labor to demand greater salary increases, especially in light of the past 5 years of rapid growth and growing inequality. The result is a three-cornered conflict in which the center-left regimes face opposition from its former popular base, and have been abandoned by the provincial and capital city middle class.

The regulatory measures, which the Center-Left introduced in the face of the crisis earlier in the decade, are now being eroded. Their weak efforts to ameliorate extreme poverty and to finance urban employment are being undermined by a self-confident and assertive agro-mineral right, which correctly sees itself as the dynamic center of the Center-Left export-led development strategy. The dependence of the Center-Left on the primary sector and its failure to introduce structural changes in land tenure, mineral and energy control were crucial to the powerful resurgence of the Right. The Center-Left’s refusal to re-nationalize the strategic economic sectors privatized during the previous decade and its strategy of political demobilization of the popular movements have dramatically shifted the balance of political power to the right.

The Demise of the Peasant and Indian Movement

By the turn of the millennium peasant and indigenous movements were playing a major role in some countries in Latin America. In Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Central America and Paraguay, peasant and Indian movements played a major role in either overthrowing neo-liberal regimes, building powerful regionally-based movements with an impact on national policy, helping elect center-left presidents and, in a few case, providing mass support for guerrilla movements. Most of these social movements were effective ‘veto groups’ in the making of a national political agenda. As important political actors, these movements were much sought after allies by self-declared center-left electoral politicians and parties to counter-act the patronage politics of right-wing agro-mineral elites. The moment of triumph of the movements, their recognition as central actors in national politics, as potential makers and breakers of the electoral fortunes of urban-led political parties and leaders, was also the beginning of the end of their role as representative agents of the mass base.

Peasant and Indian leaders succumbed to blandishments or political favors, government jobs, EU/North American-funded NGOs and micro-loans administered by international overseas banks. Movements and leaders witnessed their center-left political allies turn to the right, embracing the agro-mineral export strategy and abandoning promises of land reform, food security and funding for cooperative agriculture. The result was the visible loss of political initiative, internal divisions and mass defections and, in some cases, the transformation of the movements into transmission belts of official policies leading to partial demobilization and the loss of ‘street power’. Above all, the turn and emphasis on ‘autonomy’ and ethnic politics, promoted by the NGOs and their EU and North American funding agencies caused the Indian movements to move away from class politics in favor of regionalist/separatist politics. This shift to identity politics isolated them from the trade unions, miners and urban working class and provided the powerful regional agro-mineral elites with a pretext to seize control over the most productive and rich regions of the country, containing the most fertile soil and concentrations of minerals and major gas and oil fields.

Despite the advanced state of decay and disarray of the peasant and especially Indian movements and their increasingly isolated and marginal role in national politics, an army of leftist and progressive journalists, NGOers, academics, and writers continued to prattle on about ‘Latin America’s powerful social movements’, a ‘pink tide’, the ‘advance of the Left’ and so on. As the agro-mineral Right in Bolivia passed separatist referendums in provinces which they dominated, and peasants and Indian supporters of the central government were savagely beaten by neo-fascist thugs backed by the provincial separatist regimes, the Morales-Linares regime abandoned any pretext of defending the physical security of its followers while making every effort to placate the agro-mineral elite. In Ecuador, subsequent to the Indian movement CONAIE’s disastrous (2003) electoral alliance with pseudo-populist-turned rightist President Lucio Gutierrez, the movement declined, divided and demoralized its mass base, reaching its nadir in the 2007 vote for the constituent assembly where it secured 2% of the vote for its candidates. The Zapatista Indian movement self-marginalized itself by refusing to support the multi-million person protest movement against the presidential fraud of 2006, and by giving minimum token support to the mass urban-rural uprising in the Mexican state of Oaxaca which lasted 6 months under severe state repression.

Social Movement Retreat from National to Local Actors

In the latter third of the present decade, in the face of the ebbing of the left movements and the demise of the center-left regimes and the resurgence of the hard right agro-mineral elite, the rural social movements have retreated toward local, sectoral struggles, the urban trade unions and movements toward economic-salary struggles and the Indian movements to defensive survival struggle against the dynamic expansion of soya plantations, timber exporters, and mineral and oil multinational corporations. The leading rural movements, like the MST in Brazil, have experienced as many government evictions of land squatters as land occupations. The CONAIE in Ecuador, and the Indians of Chiapas have seen many more of their supporters abandon their ancestral lands, their farms and even the country than have joined the movements. The peasant and Indian federations of Bolivia have witnessed the vast expansion and enrichment of the agro-business export elites, while poverty levels persist at over 65%, forcing massive outward migration overseas.

The dual reality today is the retreat of the Indian and peasant movement and the resurgence of the agro-mineral ruling elites, both reflecting the enormous impetus given to this economic polarity by the Center-Left’s promotion of primarization of the economy.

Latin American Paradoxes: Leftist Electoral Victories and Rightwing Power

Contemporary Latin America can best be understood by examining its most salient paradoxes and identifying the basic contrast between the proclaimed appearances and the empirical realities. Over the past three years the most powerful and organized civil society movements are organized by right-wing urban big business, agro-business elites backed by substantial numbers of the private sector middle class, small farmers, retailers, civic associations, transport owners and professional organizations. In contrast, the rural and urban social movements of the poor organized by the Left are in retreat, immobilized or in a ‘defensive mode’. The resurgence of the Right takes place in the context of left-center regimes whose policies have demobilized the movements via co-option, stimulated an economic recovery which has in turn raised expectations and demand from the right for greater ‘autonomy’, regional power, more lucrative concessions and lower taxes.

A brief survey of Latin American in 2008 of all the major countries confirms the new paradigm of a resurgent right.

Bolivia: By the end of June 2008, the right-wing fully controlled the governments in 5 provinces, ran and won referendums in 4 provinces, dominated the ‘streets’ and plazas through aggressive ‘civic organizations’, periodically engaged in violent attacks on assemblies of Indians and trade unions, and it had the power to call effective general strikes and lockouts closing down the economy. Led by the agro-business oligarchy of Santa Cruz, they set up a parallel government to negotiate tax collection, foreign economic policy and to force the national army and police to abide with its policies. The result is that the rightist regions now control over 85% of the gas and oil exports and reserves, 80% of agro-exports and most of the financial and commercial institutions. Popular left organizations have been manipulated and divided by the Morales-Garcia Linera regime, undermining their capacity to counter the rightist resurgence. In June, the mining federation — or at least a majority of its delegates — voted for a general strike to be held in July against the resurgent Right and the impotent Morales regime.

Argentina: Throughout the first half of 2008, the leading agro-business enterprises with strong support from the provincial bourgeoisie, small and medium farmers organized massive and sustained lockouts, a multitudinous demonstration of 200,000 in Rosario and forced the Cristina Kirchner government to renegotiate a tariff tax on the windfall profits of grain and soya exports. The right-wing leaders of the boycott succeeded in weakening the popularity of the ‘center-left’ regime, calling into question its authority and ability to govern, while building political alliances with the urban financial and commercial sectors. Equally important, the scarcity of food (meat and grains) led to price rises, fueling inflation and provoking widespread discontent among the urban poor. There was little backing from the popular urban movements either in support of the ‘center-left’ regime or opposition to the rightist road blockages and boycott, except among sectors of the truckers unions. Clearly the rightwing agro-export-led hegemonized rural movement has replaced the unemployed workers movements as the dynamic sector of extra-parliamentary politics. As a consequence of the weakening of the Center-Left, the right-wing orthodox neo-liberals are likely to become the electoral beneficiaries.

Brazil: During the first six years of the Lula Da Silva presidency, right-wing business and banking leaders and advisers have dominated all the strategic economic positions in the government. The major ‘movements’ in the country-side have been totally dominated by the soya, timber, sugar-ethanol elite who have dispossessed small farmers, Indians and subsistence peasant in expanding their production of bio-fuel crops and other agricultural exports. The Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST) has seen its social actions criminalized, tens of thousands of their organized land squatters evicted, their makeshift shacks burned and crops uprooted by military, municipal and state police, and private armies of agro-exporters. One of the driving forces of the agro-export boom has been large-scale, long-term foreign investment in millions of acres of fertile lands, food processing plants, ethanol refineries and storage and shipping facilities. Under Lula Da Silva, millions of acres of the Amazon region have been stripped of the tree cover and thousands of indigenous people and poor land settlers have been evicted. At best the MST has been engaged in defensive struggles, declining land occupations and symbolic protests against biotech agriculture and ecological destruction. In contrast to the dynamic expansion of the capitalist-led land takeover movement receiving powerful financial and police support from the Lula regime, the popular movements are in retreat, under vigilance and subject to ‘heavy’ repression, incarceration and assassination if and when they engage in ‘direct action’. The Lula regime, which came to office with the powerful backing of the trade unions, the MST, public sector unions and popular social movements, has become the leader of the resurgent, elite-led agro-export movement. Lula has eliminated the MST and trade unions’ political options and opened the way for the reaffirmation of ruling class hegemony.

Venezuela: After the Venezuelan Right suffered a series of severe setbacks, namely the defeat of the military coup of April 2002, the bosses’ lockout of December 2002-February 2003, the referendum of 2004, and the presidential elections of 2006, they returned to the streets in 2007 and secured the defeat of the Chavez referendum in December 2007 by the narrowest of margins (less than 1%). The right-wing in Venezuela has, over the past decade, retained a mass extra-parliamentary presence and a well-funded network of NGO’s which train and engage in wide ranging street demonstrations, aided by US overseas agencies. The Venezuelan Right has combined electoral and extra-parliamentary action, violent terrorist and non-violent mass protest, alternating according to circumstances and opportunities. Taking advantage of concessions from the government, including regime amnesty of the coup participants, rising inflation and opposition-induced shortages, the Right is aiming to win local and state elections scheduled for November 2008, where they hope to win a significant minority of state and municipal elections. Coming off from their leadership in the elite-dominated public and private university student movements and their solid business-agro elite base, the Right hopes to repeat their first electoral success in the 2007 referendum. The government and its new mass party, PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), faces a rejuvenated Right, strengthened by the Colombia-US sponsored infiltrators and agitators in the poor neighborhoods capable of violent disturbances and promoting separatist movements, especially in the oil-rich state of Zulia.

Ecuador: The popular uprising of 2005 ousting right-wing President Lucio Gutierrez, the subsequent election of Rafael Correa and the twin victories in the referendum for a new constitution and the constitutional convention delegates (October 2007) all but eliminated the traditional right-wing parties. Having decisively lost their electoral bastions in the legislature and Presidency, the political right launched a large-scale regionalist-separatist ‘autonomy’ movement based in Guayaquil, led by its major. In early 2008, they mobilized 200,000 rightist loyalists in an effort to pressure the constitutional assembly. Even more seriously, the military and its intelligence agencies, working closely with the CIA and the Colombian military, withheld information from President Correa regarding Colombian President Uribe’s violent intervention and bombing of Ecuador’s frontier region in pursuit of FARC guerrillas. In response, Correa fired his Defense Minister and the head of military intelligence as well as replacing the head of the armed forces. The key to the resurgence of the Right in Ecuador is the fact that the powerful coastal banks, industrial and financial groups have remained intact, as well as the major foreign-owned petroleum multi-nationals, which control 56% of oil production. The major private mass media allied with the Right dominate the airwaves in the absence of any major government media outlet. While Correa correctly eliminated the most egregious pro-imperialist military officials, the civil and military institutions of the state continue to be honeycombed with appointees from the previous right-wing regimes. If Correa currently dominates the executive and legislature, the Right has demonstrated its capacity to launch a powerful regional-based civil society movement and retain ties to key military sectors. The growth of the Right in civil society occurs at a time when the principal left civil society movements (the Indian movement CONAIE and the petroleum workers trade unions) have been weakened and neglected or marginalized by the Correa regime, making it vulnerable to extra-parliamentary attack.

Colombia: Colombia is a country where the extreme Right has made its greatest gains both within the government, civil society, the class struggle, and in relation to its neighbors. With the election of Alvaro Uribe, Colombia witnesses the systematic extension of death squad activity linked to a mass urban middle class movement and the forcible recruitment of tens of thousands of rural informers under threat of torture and death. Backed by over $6 billion dollars in US military aid, thousands of North American advisers, and the latest in electronic detection technology from the US and Israel, the regime has driven over 2 million peasants out of the countryside into urban slums or over the border. The re-election of Uribe was accompanied by an increase in the armed forces to 250,000. The center-left mayors and congress-people of the Polo Democratico are totally impotent to prevent weekly massacres and are unable to block the enactment of a proposed bilateral free trade agreement with the US. The regime has militarized most of the countryside, isolating and destroying peasant and trade union organizations.

By 2005 the Colombian right was infiltrating paramilitary forces into Venezuela to destabilize the Chavez regime. They organized the kidnapping of a FARC spokesperson in downtown Caracas. The culmination of Colombia’s projection of regional power was the bombing of a FARC encampment in Ecuador, identified by the US and Colombia in the course of international negotiations over hostages and prisoners brokered by Chavez. As a result, Chavez bent to Uribe’s pressure and publicly attacked the FARC calling on it to disarm and unconditionally submit to the terms dictated by the Colombian government. Today Uribe mobilizes 1.5 million supporters while the Center-Left can count on 200,000, while the left popular movements are in retreat.

Far from a period of left advance, Latin America is in the midst of a resurgent right, in civil society and in the electoral arena, in large part thanks to the economic boom, which (together with the consolidation and promotion of their economic backers in agro-business, finance and mining) now threatens to displace the center-left regimes. The growing ‘white-tide’ has laid the groundwork for a new form of joint imperial-oligarchic hegemony if and when the US recovers from its recession, financial crisis and the military quagmire in the Middle East.

The Paradox of Autonomy

The second paradox is located in the leftist or center-left proposal for ‘autonomy’, which has strengthened the Right and the regional economic elite and weakened the central government and national popular movements. What started as a leftist-indigenous demand for a pluri-ethnic state based on ‘regional autonomy’ has evolved into the platform of the rejuvenated Right — demanding regional autonomy in order to exclusively control and exploit agro-mineral rich regions. The slogan for ‘autonomy’ raised originally by Indian-led movements and backed by US and European-funded NGO’s envisioned local ethnic self-government free of central government tutelage. The problem is that the most prosperous, revenue and resource rich areas are precisely the regions where the Indian communities do not dominate and in which wage labor and commercial relations have largely dissolved traditional indigenous ‘reciprocal relations’. With the ascendancy of Left-center government the issue was capturing additional revenue from the resource-rich, white oligarch-controlled regions in order to finance the development of the poorer regions where Indians predominate and to resettle poor and landless Indians on to fertile lands and to provide them employment in productive industries and mines. Instead, regional autonomy has essentially confined the Indians to their infertile and remote mountain regions to administer their own misery and receive little state aid generated by the enormous profits from mining and agro-exports. In contrast, once having lost influence or direct control over the central government, the rich regions dominated by the agro-mineral and financial elites have seized upon the Indian rhetoric of ‘autonomy’ to move toward de fact secession and monopolize locally generated wealth and revenues against any federal revenue sharing.

The vagueness of the entire ‘autonomy’ and ‘local government’ rhetoric failed to analyze the classes, which would benefit from the devolution of power and resources. Moreover the uneven development of regions and unequal distribution of wealth precluded any possibility of an equitable policy favoring the least developed and low-income regions. Regional autonomy, which first appeared (or was discussed) by the NGO community as a way of redressing historical injustices among the Indians, had the opposite effect of denying a majority the fruits of its achievement of national power. The divorce of poverty-stricken Indians from regions of high growth and fertile lands and rich mines was a result of their historical dispossession by big landowners and mine owners; and even earlier the flight from colonial predators in search of indigenous people for forced labor. The progressive demand is not to ‘empower’ the poor in their impoverished regions but to demand the devolution of lands via an agrarian reform and the expropriation of mines as real mechanisms to create class empowerment. The center-left regimes refuse to expropriate, resettle and empower the poor; instead their policy of ‘autonomy’ preserves existing elites and property historically cleansed of indigenous peoples and encloses the Indians in their unproductive mountain enclaves and slums. Worst of all, regime autonomy rhetoric played to the hand of the Right, allowing them to seize political control over their prosperous regions at the expense of the federal government.

The Paradox of Popular Electoral Support of the Rightist Resurgence

There is no doubt about the leftist appeals of the center-left politicians and regimes. Studies of the electoral results demonstrate conclusively that their main base of support came from the rural and urban poor, the lower middle class and the organized social movements and trade unions. The driving force of political regime change from the neo-liberal Right to the Center-Left was the deep economic crises precipitated by the unregulated market, wild financial speculation and great concentrations of wealth in the midst of a systemic crisis. Yet it is precisely the popular electoral base of the center-left regimes, which have benefited least from the economic recovery, the commodities boom, and the relatively high growth rate. It is the formerly discredited economic elite, which has recovered its high rates of profits and managed to consolidate its possession of dubiously privatized assets. The center-left regimes have ‘closed the cycle’, which began with the end of the 90’s crises of neo-liberalism, leading to the discrediting of the rightist regimes and the decline of profits. This led to the emergence of powerful social movements, serving as the trampoline for the ascendancy of the Center-Left to power, the recovery, growth and now resurgence of the Right in both its economic and political expressions. All of this has taken place in less than a decade and far from the accounts of the myopic leftist commentators who still claim the ‘end of US hegemony’.

Paradox of Profits

The highest rates of private profits, growth rates, foreign exchange reserves and fiscal austerity have occurred under popularly elected center-left regimes of the 2000’s, not the neo-liberal rightist regimes of the 1990’s. In part this is because of the high world prices of agro-mineral exports, but it is also because of the political stability, economic incentives and fiscal policies of the center-left regimes. The Center-Left’s demobilization of the popular insurgency and the channeling of politics into established institutional channels has been viewed positively by both foreign and domestic investors, leading to the repatriation of capital. The regimes imposition of moderate wage increases at a time of expanding capital gains has increased profits and income inequalities. Equally important, the center-left regimes have reduced large-scale, long-term pillage of the economy and massive corruption, forcing capital to invest for profit rather than to rob the treasury. Corruption of politicians is now largely a means of greasing the wheels of investment. The greater growth of capitalism under the putative ‘center-left’ rather than under the neo-liberal right is partly the result of the turn form plundering existing resources to investing in ‘normal’ capitalism. In that sense the difference between neo-liberal Right and the Center-Left is not over capitalism or ‘free markets’; it is between capitalism that engaged in income from state ‘rents’ and a capitalism that grows via market transactions.

The Paradox of Center-Left Prioritizing Debt Obligations over Social Programs

The hard Right prioritized its relations with the international lending agencies, depending in large part on debt financing for many of its investments in unproductive financial sector growth. The right-wing’s pillage of banks and destruction of savers’ confidence led to constant resort to the IMF and World Bank for bailouts, in the process subjecting the economy to onerous conditions limiting growth especially in the real economy. Rhetorically, the Center-Left waged ideological warfare against the IMF and especially its conditionality and onerous debt payments, which it argued impoverished the working class. Once in power, the Center-Left moved quickly and decisively to pay down the official debt (in fact paying down the debt to the IMF and World Bank), claiming it was limiting their influence. In fact the center-left regimes increased their total private internal and external debt, loyally followed IMF-WB tight fiscal policies and programs on budget surpluses and retained ‘central bank’ links to the financial sector — calling this arrangement ‘autonomy’.

None of the center-left banks placed any restriction on debt payments — none gave priority to the ‘social debt’ over paying bondholders or creditors. The Center-Left were as prompt and punctual in meeting debt payments as the Right had been — once payments were agreed. Argentina, which initially agreed to reduce the debt payments following the financial crises, followed up by agreeing to add or increase payment in accordance with its growth rate. In the subsequent 5 years of 8% growth, its foreign and domestic debt holders more than recovered what was initially deducted. Growth in debt payments and increases in foreign reserves far exceeded incremental increases in the minimum wage in all center-left regimes, making them attractive markets for overseas investors in their stock markets.

The Paradox of Declining Labor Militancy and Greater Dispossession Under Center-Left

There has been a decline in labor militancy and an increase in displacement of urban and rural workers under the Center-Left regimes. The Center-Left with its influence over and co-option of trade unions and peasant leaders oversaw the decline of general strikes and robust politically motivated mobilizations for structural change, which characterized the earlier period of rightist rule. Factory occupations by unemployed workers came to an end in Argentina. Unemployed workers organizations ceased to block major highways. Employers filed claims to repossess occupied plants, and in many cases won judgments in their favor. Capitalist property was protected and functioned with fewer strikes and work stoppages. Land occupations by peasants were replaced by land dispossession by land speculators and agro-business investors. The commodity boom was accompanied by a real estate boom, leading to ‘urban development’ via the displacement of the urban poor from the shantytowns and the building of upscale high security apartments, shopping malls and business complexes. Under the slogans of ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ and easy credit, the Center-Left converted class-consciousness into consumer-consciousness especially for the organized better-paid unionized sectors of labor.

Paradox of Popular Classes Winning Elections and Losing Social Power

The election of center-left personalities led to the substitution of traditional politicians for grass roots social movement leaders and in some cases the social movement leaders were converted into establishment politicians. In either case, in political office the center-left politicians became apostles of the dogma of ‘representing all classes’ diluting their commitment to their original constituency and substituting Presidential decrees for popular consultations and downgrading the relevance of social power in the streets. The more sweeping the victory of the Center-Left, the less dependent on social movements, the further it drifted from the programmatic demands of the social movements. The popular organizations were badly compromised, having harnessed their followers to the Center-Left, were left with a disillusioned constituency with no alternative on the horizon, confined to extracting minor concessions.

Paradoxes of Economy: As Markets Grow — US Influence Declines

Latin American capitalism has become more ‘free trade’, more deeply integrated into the global market and exhibited higher growth rates at a time when US capitalism enters into recession and experiences stagflation. The old cliché: ‘When the US catches a cold, Latin America suffers pneumonia’, no longer holds. Latin America is increasingly ‘decoupling’ from the US economy in three directions: Increasing market ties with Asian and the European Union; expanding regional trade and deepening its domestic market. Given the commodity boom, ‘going global’ means higher profits, better market access and fewer restraints on achieving higher negotiated prices. As a consequence, the declining centrality of the US market and political leverage means Latin American exporters can avoid non-reciprocal trade agreements with the US in which US quotas, tariffs and subsidies limit North-South free trade.

As the Influence of the IMF and World Bank Decline — Free Markets Grow

The huge trade surpluses accruing to Latin American agro-mineral exporters grow, the need to finance via the IMF and World Bank declines. Given the harsh conditions imposed by the IFI, Latin American governments can seek commercial financing or draw on local public and private self-financing. The greater domestic and international liquidity had facilitated increased financing of investment in the agro-mineral export sector, which in turn has stimulated more free trade agreements within Latin America and between the region and rub-region and the EU and Asia. The fact that trade barriers are falling as IMF-WB influence wanes, demonstrates that the ‘free market’ policies are endogenously designed and not ‘imposed’ from outside institutions. The ascendancy of the agro-mineral and financial ruling classes in Latin America and the higher profits accruing from wider unrestrained access to overseas markets are necessary and sufficient reasons for their embracing the free market policies, even as the IMF-WB experiences a decline in macro-economic influence.

Anti-Neo-Liberalism as Prelude to Virulent Growth of Neo-Liberalism

Practically all the regimes ruling Latin America from the Center-Left onward have attacked ‘neo-liberalism’ as the source of ‘mis-development’ in the run-up to elections. Once in power and confronted with the growth of world demand for export commodities and windfall profits, the ‘post-neo-liberals’ have embraced with greater fervor the turn to primary goods exports, the pursuit of reciprocal free trade agreements and the massive importation of finished goods — the typical pattern of the neo-liberal model.

Anti-neo-liberalism became a ritualized demonic icon as a past associated with discredited politicians and corrupted parties. Its invocation however serves to mystify the ‘faithful’ to the fact that the current regimes have taken the neo-liberal prescription further along the non-regulatory path. While castigating ‘old style’ neo-liberalism, the current regimes gain the political capital to promote the new dynamic contemporary version.

The Paradox of Growth and Hunger

The greater the agricultural growth , the greater the export earnings, the worse the inflation, the greater decline in food consumption, the greater the generalized discontent. The enormous increase in demand from the dynamic newly industrializing and mineral rich countries as well as the demand for ethanol from the imperialist West, the greater the growth in agricultural exports. The massive inflows of revenue and the decline of domestic food production as land is converted to soya, sugar and grass for foreign markets, the greater the disequilibrium between local food demand and supply, resulting in inflationary pressures. Inflation outruns wage increases, leading to greater social malaise, food riots, strikes and road blockages. Inflation polarized civil society in multiple directions pitting agro-exporters, transport, consumers, fixed economy pensioners, wage and salaried workers, weakening the leverage of the central government over the economy and eroding its popular and ruling class support.

The Greater the Call for Regional Integration, the Greater the Integration into the World Market

While there are numerous calls for ‘regional integration’, especially Venezuela’s projected ALBA, the principal direction of Latin American trade is toward the dynamic centers of world trade. Increasingly major economic enclaves in specific dynamic economic sectors and regions of Latin America have linked up with fast-growing Asian, European and Middle Eastern regions — far surpassing the rate of growth in intra-regional trade. The US proposed regional trade agreement, ALCA, never got off the ground; the Andean union is in tatters as Colombia and Peru seek bilateral agreements with the US; Venezuela’s proposed ALBA includes only the marginal economies of Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominica and Bolivia, and most of the flows are from Venezuela to its weaker associates, and its principle trading parties still include the US and now Asia, the Middle East and Russia. Ecuador, ostensibly a potential member of ALBA, prefers to maintain its ties with the US, a major buyer of its petroleum exports.

Social Paradoxes

The principal sites of Indian slave labor on haciendas in Latin America are identified to be Bolivia and Brazil: one country led by an ‘Indian’ president and the other, the former leader of a major trade union confederation. The most flagrant abuse of indigenous citizens protesting economic contamination and elite abuse is in the three ‘center-left’ regimes of Ecuador (mining centers), Bolivia (especially Santa Cruz) and Chile (scores of Mapuches in the South have been jailed by the ‘Socialist’ President). The more successful the economic recovery of the center-left regimes, the less support they receive from the middle class, the stronger the elite demands for greater concentration of wealth and the weaker the counter-response of the popular social movements. The center-left regimes have presided over dynamic growth and greater social polarities, which have dramatically shifted the balance of power to the hard right and hastened the demise of center-left political hegemony.

Hypothesis to Explain the Paradoxes

The contrast between the hopes and illusions and dismay resulting from left and right projection of Latin America’s ‘left turn’ break will neo-liberalism and dynamic growth of popular social movements requires severe interpolation and raises important questions:

1. What accounts for capitalist recovery and expansion, booming exports, political demobilization of popular Indian, peasant and unemployed workers movements and political stability?
2. What accounts for large-scale flows of private investment and global integration at the expense of labor’s share of income and regional integration?
3. What accounts for decline of US influence and the demise of ALCA even as neo-liberalism deepens and free market policies increase the contribution in foreign trade to CNP?
4. What accounts for the abrupt changes, in less than a decade (1998-2008), from what appeared the terminal crises of neo-liberalism, massive popular upheavals, center-left stabilization, economic recovery and dynamic growth under the aegis of free trade policies and the resurgence of rightist power? What accounts for the shifts in the axis of growth within the ruling class from finance and industry to primary sector exports as the driving force of the economy and the marginalization of urban-led social movements and middle class reformers?
5. What has class struggle politics declined in the face of the resurgence of patronage politics, backed and supported by many of the same formerly militant social movement leaders?
6. Why have vertical elite-led coalitions replaced horizontal intra-class alliances, in which co-option has undermined dissent?
7. Why has easy credit and high rates of consumerism blunted class conflict and emerged unchallenged from traditional trade union leaders?

Tentative Answers to Contemporary Latin American Paradoxes
Schematic form

Social — How formal-symbolic power (institutional) leas to loss of substance/informal power for social movements (‘recognition’ but not substantive benefits or power to set government agenda or make legislation.

Why the ‘crisis’ of neo-liberalism in the late 1990’s and early 2000 did not lead to a decline, let alone demise, of the ruling elite — difference between policy or regime failures and continuation of structural underpinnings.

‘Crisis’ political outcomes led to regime changes which adapted new ‘anti-neo-liberal’ rhetoric to policy adjustments within the structural paradigms and institutional setting established by previous neo-liberal regimes.

Post-crisis regimes combined (some carry-over) neo-liberals in crucial economic, financial ministries and central bank with new faces in social ministries administering policies targeting politically active social movements, their leaders and destitute mass constituencies.

The socio-economic result of this ‘post-crisis’ new policy configuration and political division of labor were favored by high world market prices and expanding markets and the relative weak bargaining power of newly incorporated workers to the largely contingent work force.

Strong prices and world demand for exports, the absorption of under-utilized capacity and the weak bargaining position of labor led to substantial economic growth, and the perpetuation and even increase in social inequalities.

Growth was financed by the capital-intensive agro-mineral export sector and the fuller utilization of existing productive capacity and partial re-investment of profits — not by any large-scale new private or public investment.

New horizontal and especially vertical divisions emerged as a result of the growth-inequality gap and the uneven growth of agro-mineral-urban service and industrial geo-economic sectors.

The right growth-social clientele model, high profit-stagnant wages model, led to increased socio-economic conflicts with organized labor over wages and mass popular consumer protests over inflation, high food and other basic prices.

The economic recovery and growth model powered by the agro-mineral export elite increased their economic weight in the economy and led to demands for greater political power in setting the terms for the distribution of profits between the agro-mineral sectors and the urban service/industrial financial sector.

The centrality of the agro-mineral sector in the post-crisis period found expression in ‘regionalist’ and in some cases ‘separatist’ or ‘autonomist’ movements, in order to monopolize high export earnings. A small percentage of the new windfall profits and the general income gains accrued to small and medium mine owners and farmers, facilitating the hegemony of the big agro-mineral corporate leaders and their political leaders in regional civic organizations and government.

The vertical divisions between rival center-city service-based elites and the agro-mineral rural elites, found expression outside of the constitutional, institutional and electoral framework.

The post-crisis regimes having overcome ‘systemic’ challenges from below, now face severe challenges from within the system over the distribution of wealth and power from regional-based power.

The richest and economically dynamic agro-mineral elites lead a ‘rebellion’ to gain hegemony over the urban-service partners in ruling over the entire country.

Struggles over decentralization and regional/sectoral conflicts are transitional steps toward reconfiguration and concentration of national power in the hands of the rich agro-mineral elites.

The Impact on Communities Coalition, the Pivot Legal Society and the Carnegie Community Action Project, with the help of Professor Michael Byers and student Mike Powar, are arguing that the specific articles of the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights have been violated by Canada and its obligations to provide the human right to adequate housing.

In essence, neo-liberal policy-making, without effective public policy intervention, directly violates human rights—in this case, the right to adequate housing.

Early on during the Olympic bidding process, games organizers and government partners made promises that evictions would not occur in the inner-city neighbourhoods. Concerns were raised as early as August of 2001 that evictions similar to Expo 86 would occur when a thousand people were evicted during the World’s Fair.

A plebiscite on the Olympics passed with 64% support in 2003 largely due to assurances that Vancouver would host the first socially sustainable Olympic Games.

A vaguely worded Inner-City Inclusive Commitment Statement was signed but did not include specific numbers despite the protestations of community groups at the time.

After the Bid Corporation morphed into VANOC after Vancouver won the bid in 2003, no civil society representatives were appointed to its Board. After several years of piecemeal attempts at consultation, VANOC’s own housing table recommended building 3,200 units of social housing and closing tenancy loopholes which were allowing long-term low-income tenants in Single Resident Occupancy hotel housing to be evicted easily.

As the rapid pace of gentrification resulted in dilapidated property quadrupling and quintupling in value in a few short years, it placed low-income inner city residents at risk. City Hall and the provincial government turned down requests to place a moratorium on SRO conversions.

Since the Olympic bid process began, over 1,000 units of affordable SRO housing units have either been converted to other uses or shut down permanently. This imperfect housing stock often times represents the housing of last resort for low-income people. Furthermore, the increase in property values has now led owners to move to double-bunking in some 10 foot by 10 foot rooms, often infested with bedbugs. Though this is not illegal, it raises serious public health concerns in a neighbourhood with third world health indicators.

In an October 2007 visit by UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, Miloon Kothari stated, “You have in government a legacy of misguided policy decisions which have led to this massive crisis in housing and homelessness. We didn’t hear this in other places—the decrepit nature of SROs, the conditions of the buildings that people are living in, the very poor health. As has been the case throughout our visit, I was repeatedly struck by the contrasts in such a beautiful city. Because there has been so much investment, it is striking that a few blocks from million dollar condominiums there is such immense poverty.”

In a January 2008 visit to Vancouver by Dr Kris Olds, a member of the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions Advisory Committee on hallmark events, said, “These events magnify existing development paths, they are implicated, but they are not the only factor. They are a key acceleratory mechanism to spurring on change, particularly since the 1970s. There is clear evidence that they have played a role in generating evictions from place to place. Is it the only force? No, but an event of this magnitude does play a role, it is implicated, absolutely.”

Despite forwarding the recommendations from COHRE’s June 2007 report on hallmark events, no level of government has taken initiative or leadership in a way that is changing the facts on the ground. Despite the province’s purchase of 17 SRO hotels, their inability to close tenancy eviction loopholes leave open the reality of economic displacement in the housing of last resort. It is this housing stock that is the essence of the human rights complaint.

The idea that the poorest, most elderly and most vulnerable people are being thrown out into the street as a result of property speculation, aided by the hype of the pre-Olympic environment, is an embarrassing footnote to the first “socially sustainable Olympic Games.”

The Toronto-based Wellesley Institute released a report card in early February which raised the issue of growing housing inaffordability—a leading cause of evictions and homelessness. Renting costs outpaced renter incomes in six of the 10 provinces. There are estimated to be between 200,000 to 300,000 homeless people in Canada.

Nations such as Canada that sign on to optional treaty protocols such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights often invoke the term “progressive realisation” to justify the time lag between domestic policies meeting international standards. Scott Leckie of the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions has written that progressive realisation is used as “an escape clause from the obligations generated under the Covenant.”

Canada, along with other G-8 countries, has openly worked within the international system to deny a complaint mechanism on optional human rights protocols related to economic, social and cultural rights.

The Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights contend that, “As in the case of civil and political rights, States enjoy a margin of discretion in selecting the means for implementing their respective obligations … the burden is on the state to demonstrate that it is making measurable progress toward the full realization of rights in question. The State cannot use the ‘progressive realisation’ provisions in Article 2 of the Covenant as a pretext for non-compliance.”

Canadian law professor Craig Scott has written, “Canadian governments have long invoked averages and medians as adequate accounts of the state of human rights enjoyment in Canada, thereby showing how little understanding (or sincere attempt to understand) there is of the very nature of human rights. … That Canadians on average are not homeless, on average have adequate nutrition, on average go to adequate schools, or on average raise their children in a dignified way says nothing at all about whose human rights are being respected and whose are being violated.”

The federal government has been cutting housing policies since the early nineties. In 1993, the government cancelled funding for new co-ops and non-profit housing and capped its expenditures at two billion dollars annually, according to the Wellesley Institute.

As IOC head Jacques Rogge rolled in to Vancouver a few months earlier in 2008, he effusively praised VANOC for its socially sustainable legacy. Despite little or no opportunity for civil society organizations to be at the table, despite the obvious gentrification and displacement being exacerbated by the Olympic project, the head of the IOC had the audacity to praise’ VANOC.

Public relations and marketing have trumped reality in pre-Olympic Vancouver.

VANOC turned down requests for a $1 homelessness levy to be charged on Olympic tickets and merchandising that would be matched by the provincial and federal governments. VANOC and government partners turned down their own housing table’s recommendations of building 3,200 units. They have pointed fingers at one another as people get evicted from the inner-city virtually every month. It takes a lot of people working in unison to produce the sheer inertia of this unprecedented incompetence.

Added to that, an uncritical pre-Olympic media environment has distorted Vancouver’s public sphere in a way that has delegitimized critical discussion of the issues and forced many mainstream civil society organizations from publicly expressing their criticism for fear of losing their funding.

Rather than invite civil society organizations to the table, VANOC has shown an arrogant, fortress-like approach to community engagement.

There are 200,000-300,000 people expected to come to Vancouver in 2010 where there are only 27,000 hotel rooms. Even with homestays and cruise ships, that will still leave thousands of spaces still unaccounted for and will place pressure on the existing rental market. Without government intervention, a few thousand people will likely be evicted.

There is not one person at VANOC or any level of government that has addressed this question in a public way. Even calls for temporary legislation to protect tenants have been spurned.

The UN complaint is a strong and damning indictment of Vancouver’s pre-Olympic housing environment and the use of the term “social sustainability” as a marketing and public relations term by VANOC.

Across the globe, malnutrition and lack of medical care cause more than three million babies to die at birth every year. Every year, more than half a million women die in pregnancy or childbirth, and millions more are crippled.

Poverty and inequality cause most maternal deaths. In 2000, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 women was 2 in Sweden, 17 in the United States, 330 in Asia, and 920 in Sub-Saharan Africa. If any nation can lower the maternal death rate to 2 per 100,000 women, then that should be the expected standard everywhere.

In the United States, mothers get little or no support. The arrival of a child turns life upside down. Frequent night feedings exhaust parents who are expected to work the next day. Despite talk about “family values,” Americans are not entitled to paid parental leave.

Financial uncertainty adds to physical and emotional stress. Family expenses rise at the same time that the mother’s pay check is reduced or discontinued. How long can a new mom afford to stay off work? Will she lose her job? Will she find another one? Will there be affordable childcare? Americans are not entitled to childcare support.

Lack of social support causes more women to be hospitalized for psychiatric problems around the time of childbirth than at any other time in their lives.

About 85 percent of new mothers experience “baby blues,” the fatigue, sadness and irritability that commonly follow childbirth or adoption. From 10 to 17 percent of new moms suffer clinical depression due to changing hormones, sleep deprivation, social isolation, financial stress, a difficult or traumatic birth, difficulties breast feeding, low social support, financial problems, inadequate housing and relationship problems.

Approximately one in 800 new mothers develops full-blown psychosis. In Texas, Andrea Yates suffered from hallucinations that compelled her to murder her five children. In Toronto, a family doctor jumped in front of a train, killing herself and her infant son.

Society demands that mothers manage without support. When they cannot cope, they are presumed to be inadequate. Postpartum depression and psychosis are under-recognized and under-treated because most women feel too ashamed to seek help.

Every child is a gift to humanity. Yet, lack of social support makes the child-raising years the most stressful for men and women. Parents of both sexes suffer more depression than non-parents.

This is the heartless reality behind celebrations of Mother’s Day. Talk is cheap. Parents and children have a right to real social support. Cards and flowers are not enough.

We know what ideas our “leaders” have lying around. They’ve been drumming them into our heads for years. What shape might the coming crisis take?

Crisis needn’t be a hurricane or tsunami; it can be a financial disaster as well — even a phony one. As long as people are scared and confused and will do what you want them to — that’s all that matters.

Crisis might look like the perfect storm of mortgage meltdown, recession, declining industries and wages, rising deficits, all coming to a head as the boomers retire — and that unfortunate file cabinet full of IOUs, with — so sorry — “no money” to redeem them.

Combine that with a full-court press of pundits, preachers and politicians, all well-manicured and well-fed, none in any danger of going without in their old age, though they insist you must. All of them nattering away at you, on the TV, in the papers, on the radio, relentless as the zombies in The Night of the Living Dead:

“There’s no-o-o-o money! No-o-o-o money! If you don’t do what we say the country’s going to go broke and you’re all going to die!”

It might be that the 1983 debut of both Greenspan’s “reform” and the Cato paper wasn’t coincidental. It might be, indeed, that Greenspan created the debt to the Trust Fund with an inkling that it could eventually be hyped as a “crisis” to take down Social Security for good.

That’s how the IMF did it, Klein says. Get the rubes in debt, then pressure them to take your “shock treatment,” your austerity program. As in Chile, as in Russia, where poverty rates doubled and tripled after the treatment¹; so here. We too must take our medicine.

Bugger that.

There’s no Social Security crisis. There never has been. If you’re not convinced yet, how about this: the projection used to hype the phony crisis assumes a growth rate of 1.8% over the next 75 years.² That’s lower than the 1.9% average growth rate of the Great Depression, 1929-1940.³

But there are actually three projections; an optimistic one, an intermediate one, and a pessimistic one. In the “optimistic” scenario, long-term growth averages 2.6%, the Trust Fund never runs out, and there’s a 17-trillion dollar surplus in 2080.⁴ So far, reality has always turned out closer to the optimistic projection than the other two. Since 1980, growth has averaged 3.1%.⁵ Whee! Feel better?

Not that a projection 75 years into the future has any bankable accuracy anyway.

The projection, like “crisis” it predicts, is a fraud, a cynical Big Lie, a con. They want your money. That’s all they’ve ever wanted, and they’ll keep pushing until they get it, unless they know you understand the con.

The Republicans won’t save you, and the Democrats won’t save you either. They’re the ones up on the tube, debating oh-so-seriously about the “crisis” when they know it’s phony, pretending to disagree, all the better to con you. They’re the good cop and the bad cop, the inside and the outside man in the three-card game.⁶

They know that some of you’ll want to identify with the nice, caring Democrats, who’ll save Social Security by raising taxes — just a hair, just a smidge. And others will want to identify with the tough, fiscally responsible Republicans, who’ll institute sensible private accounts.

And while you’re watching the game, taking one side or the other, getting all riled up about the stupidity of the other side — they’re moving in, like the partners in crime they really are, for the coup de grace.

Here’s the straight story.

“The economy” isn’t the casino, isn’t the game, isn’t even the chits of paper we use to trade and keep score with. The economy is the real world of producing real goods and services. So long as American workers are producing real goods and real knowledge for decent wages, there will be enough surplus for their elders’ Social Security.

If, on the other hand, our “leaders” follow the road they’ve been on the last 30 years: off-shoring production, outsourcing democratic government to unaccountable private power, stripping resources faster than they’re renewed, allowing infrastructure and human skills to decay, and substituting a casino economy for a real one, we’ll all go broke, and private accounts won’t change that likelihood one bit.

Social Security’s not in crisis. Our leadership is. Our democracy is.

No tax hikes, no benefit cuts, no private accounts. Hands off, ya lying crooks.

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

1. See discussion of the effect of “shock therapy” and privatization on Chile and Russia in Melanie Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 2007.
2. Social Security Administration, 2004 Trustees Report, Table V.B.2, intermediate projection 2015-2080 = 1.8% GDP growth
3. Growth % calculated from “Real GDP 1929-1940,” Louis D. Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson, “The Annual Real and Nominal GDP for the United States, 1790 – Present.” Economic History Services, 10/05.
4. Social Security Administration, 2005 Trustees Report, Table VI.F7.
5. Growth % calculated from “Real GDP 1941-2006,” Louis D. Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson, “The Annual Real and Nominal GDP for the United States, 1790-Present.” Economic History Services, 10/05.
6. Three-card monte is a confidence game where the “mark” is tricked into betting he can find the money card among three face-down playing cards, a classic short con in which the outside man pretends to conspire with the mark to cheat the inside man, while in fact conspiring with the inside man to cheat the mark. (*definition from wikipedia)

Within certain circles of power, the Social Security “crisis” has been lying around for a very long time. In his 1936 campaign against FDR, Alf Landon called the new program a “fraud on the workingman,” and continued:

“Every month they bring 6 per cent of their wages…so that he may act as trustee and invest their savings for their old age….the day comes…What do they find? Roll after roll of neatly executed IOU’s.”²

Those damned IOUs again.

FDR won that election. It was the Great Depression, the poorhouses were full, and for some the threat of starvation hit all too close to home.³

During the war and after, booming profits kept the rich folks busy for awhile, but by the end of the 50’s things had started to slow down and Social Security crisis was back on the agenda.

St. Reagan, in his nominating speech at the 1964 Republican convention, suggested privatization.⁴ Goldwater, the nominee, echoed the call.

He lost. Too many folks still remembered the Depression and the poorhouses. Social Security had put those institutions out of business, but in their day, the overwhelming majority of their residents were over sixty.⁵⁶

Today Social Security is a bulwark against penury for the elderly. It provides 50% or more of retirement support for 2/3 of beneficiaries, and 100% of support for 1/3.⁷

In 1978, a young Congressional candidate picked up the theme of crisis. Stumping at the Midland Texas Country Club, George W. Bush said:

“[Social Security] will be bust in 10 years unless there are some changes…The ideal solution would be…[for people] to invest the money the way they feel.”⁸

Like the WMDs, the 1988 Social Security bust never manifested. You’d think Bush would be embarrassed, but 20 years after the crisis-that-wasn’t, he’s still banging the privatization gong.

There’s plenty more scary talk where that came from, a steady stream of policy papers and opinion pieces, dutifully parroted by the media. The think tanks that produce them are funded, not by any grass-roots demanding Social Security reform, but by a handful of big private fortunes, some well-known: Mellon-Scaife⁹, DuPont¹⁰, Coors.¹¹

Other funders are less famous, but their fortunes are equally large. The Koch brothers, inheritors of one of the world’s largest private oil fortunes, fund what’s probably the most important source of privatization propaganda: the Cato Institute.¹² Incidentally, George Bush’s sister Doro Bush Koch, is reportedly married to a Koch cousin.¹³

In 1983, in the wake of another failed attempt to gather public support for privatization, Cato published an influential paper titled “Achieving a Leninist Strategy.”¹⁴

The authors start by acknowledging that Social Security is a popular program, so head-on approaches to dismantling it are

unlikely to be successful. Instead, they recommend the “Leninist Strategy” of the title. Strange to find libertarian free-marketeers so enthusiastic about a reviled communist, but politics does make strange bedfellows.

Lenin was a political strategist known for super-pragmatism, a proponent of stealth tactics, alliances of convenience, and sleeper cells. He advised a secretive vanguard to help create the conditions for revolution, while lying in wait for the “revolutionary moment” when power could by seized by virtue of the same vanguard’s superior organization and discipline.

This is exactly what the Cato authors recommend in the way of a long-term strategy to take Social Security private. To help create revolutionary conditions, they suggest:

1) Mobilizing a coalition of folks who’d benefit from privatization (banks, investment houses, and other financial institutions).

2) Continuing public “education” aimed at discrediting Social Security and talking up privatization.

3) Creation and promotion of financial savings alternatives (e.g. 401Ks, IRAs) to get people accustomed to using them.

4) Splitting potential coalition supporters of Social Security, such as current and future recipients: “…the strategy must be to propose moving to a private…system in such a way as “to…neutralize…the coalition that supports the existing system.” Thus, older folks would be told their benefits wouldn’t be cut, making them less likely to mobilize to help protect benefits for the young.

All this has happened in the years since.

At the end of the paper, the authors say: “The next Social Security crisis may be further away than many people believe…it could be many years before the conditions are such that a radical reform of Social Security is possible. But then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform.”

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

1. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 1962.
2. Alf Landon, “I Will Not Promise the Moon,” Speech of 1936.
3. Ronald Edsforth, The New Deal: America’s Response to the Great Depression, Starvation deaths, pp. 84-87.
4. Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing,” Speech of 1964.
5. Michael B. Katz, The Shadow of the Poorhouse, Social Security as “the end of the poorhouse,” p. 132.
6. Abraham Epstein, Facing Old Age: A Study of Old Age Dependency in the United States and Old Age Pensions, majority of residents elderly, pp 28-29.
7. Economic Policy Institute, “Economic Snapshots, Social Security and Income, Figure 1, Importance of Social Security Benefits to Those Aged 65 and Older.”
8. “For Bush, A Long Embrace of Social Security Plan,” New York Times 2/27/05.
9. Mellon-Scaife helps fund Cato, Heritage and other anti-Social Security initiatives through Scaife foundations.
10. The Dupont think tank is the National Center for Policy Analysis.
11. The Coors family helps fund Cato, Heritage and other anti-Social Security, initiatives.
12. Media Transparency, Koch Family Foundations; Cato Institute Project on Social Security Choice.
13. “Kicked in the Koch,” American Politics Journal 8/4/00.
14. Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, “Achieving a Leninist Strategy.”