The Good

The longer a rotten system lasts, the more any change to it is perceived to be a giant leap forward. In this light, the House health bill contains some positive changes. Insurers will now be prevented from refusing enrollment based on a pre-existing condition or dropping subscribers who become ill. Such policies have allowed private insurers to maintain profit margins and, consequently, are contributing factors to the swelling ranks of the uninsured. Their elimination is certainly a positive reform.

Another provision in the bill removes the anti-trust exemption for private health insurers. Since 1945, insurers have been exempt from Federal anti-trust law but subject to whatever state-by-state provisions existed. Insurers argued that this allowed them to share essential information about pools of subscribers in order to determine risk. In practice, much more than information was shared. The American Medical Association reports that large insurers now control 94% of health care business in most regional markets. A few large-scale private insurers lord over each segment of the country. House Democrats view anti-trust law enforcement as a means to combat this concentration, but it presents a more ominous prospect when viewed inside of the rest of the reform proposal.

Transforming the mass number of uninsured, at last count around 48 million, into potential customers will favor those companies capable of operating economies of scale. In other words, the larger the corporation, the easier it will be to price your way into the new market. For a time, prices may drop, but only at the cost of further monopolization, this time on the national instead of regional scale. Anti-trust law is a notoriously weak weapon to break up monopolies, since enforcement is contingent on the political appetite of whatever administration directs politics in Washington. Removing the exemption is positive, yet creating the conditions to expand the problem of monopolization seems to neutralize the benefits.

The Bad

Many emotional pleas and an equally large number of words have been delivered for and against the public option. Right-wingers point to it as the crux of the secret socialist plan, while honest liberals made it a litmus test for the utility of the bill. What emerged from the debate is a watered-down version of a public plan sabotaged by concessions made to a vocal right-wing and paid for by campaign contributions to Democrats from the private insurance lobby.

Key to the watering-down was de-linking reimbursement rates from the Medicare schedule. Medicare operates as a price-fixed program where rates are negotiated into annual budgets through the legislature. These are, generally, significantly below rates in the private sector. The House bill version of the public plan will operate with rates determined by the marketplace. This means that the private sector will play a primary role in determining the cost structure in which the public plan will operate. This will end the deflationary effect a Medicare-compensation structure would have and may also mean, as the Congressional Budget Office has argued, that a public plan will be forced to offer more expensive plans than private insurers.

The weak public plan will have negative ripple effects inside the overall reform. The uninsured who can prove financial need, can now apply for “insurance credits” to purchase coverage. However, since the public plan may prove to be more expensive than private plans, it is likely that a significant amount of public subsidies will be funneled into the coffers of private health insurers. This fits with a larger pattern being developed by the Obama administration of funneling good public money into bad private sector businesses that have failed to meet the needs of the American people. The double problems of price inflation inside the plan and the issuance of insurance credits to private companies threaten to drive the already inflated price tag for the reform well past the estimated $1.2 trillion.

The Ugly

In another act of right-wing slight-of-hand, House Democrats shifted the mandate burden from the business community onto individuals. Republican pressure forced the ceiling on businesses mandated to provide insurance to their employees up to $500,000 in payroll. This will allow a significant swath of the businesses to be relieved of the burden of purchasing insurance.

Conversely, individuals will be forced by the government to carry some sort of health insurance. The penalty for not doing so will be a fine of 2.5% of your income. Continued non-payment and remaining uninsured will result in further fines and a possible jail term. This is a bonanza for private insurers, as millions will be forced into a new market for low-cost health insurance. Such plans are sure to skimp on coverage and run high on costs.

The site of the herding will be the new health insurance exchanges. This idea, championed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, will insure that market-based ideology frames the new health care system. Rates will be determined here, insurance offerings will be made and terms of care will be formulated here. All this with the continued logic of the marketplace where profits are a central concern and people’s health an afterthought.

Still Single-Payer

None of the changes outlined above amount to socialism. Nor do they even signal the opening of a road which could lead to a socialist health care plan. The hope for genuine reform rests in the same place as it did before the bill was passed – in the certainty that the private sector will make such a mess of health care that the American people will be outraged enough to move towards socializing health care. A single-payer plan would cut across the good, the bad and ugly of this round of health care reform. Our health would cease to be a commodity and be guaranteed as a human right. Plenty of organizing is needed to win single-payer and, in the immediate term, we have plenty of myths to dispel about the wonders of small reforms.

But they’d had a second child recently, so I visited their tiny apartment to offer congratulations. It was the polite thing to do. (That, and Mom threatened to cut me from the will if I didn’t.)

Dolton sat on a rent-a-sofa in his cramped front room, cradling his newborn daughter.

“I’m so happy for you two,” I lied. Dolton toiled at three part-time jobs; none provided benefits. My sister is disabled and can’t work. They’ve had everything from appliances to vehicles repossessed. Sooo… what to do?

Have another kid! Sigh.

“Dolton, Jr., just loves his new baby sister,” my brother-in-law said, gesturing to his ten-year-old nearby. “Don’t you, little Dolt?”

My nephew winced. The kid was no dummy. Someday I’d have to ask Apolitica who the real father was.

“So,” I ventured, “what’s the new one’s name?”

“Dimina.”

“You mean,” I said, gasping, “she’s going to be… a little Dim?”

“You got it!” Dolt said, beaming.

And some people never will, I thought, glancing towards Apolitica. She dashed into the kitchen. Coward.

From the rent-a-tube in the corner, Bill O’Liely railed against healthcare reform.

“Obama and his damn socialism!” Dolton fumed. “He and that commie Congress’ll bleed America dry.”

It took me a moment to roll my tongue back into my mouth. Finally, I managed: “It’s especially tragic given how well our economy had, thus far, survived two needless wars, tax cuts for the mega-rich and trillions shoveled to criminals who sabotaged the economy.”

“Spew actual facts if you want,” Dolt growled, “but if Obamacare passes, mark my word: soon there’ll be a hammer-and-pickle on every flag.”

The only pickle I could visualize was the one my sister and her husband were in. They’d just received the bill from the county hospital for Dimina’s birth and, without healthcare, bankruptcy was imminent.

“Dolt,” I said, “you slave away and yet you’re still destitute, and now your medical bills will break you. How could you possibly be against affordable healthcare for you, your family and 47 million other uncovered Americans?”

“Because,” he spat, “socialized medicine is un-American!”

Dimina wailed. I could relate.

“Don’t buy the lie,” I pleaded. “Polls show a huge majority of Americans want healthcare for all, and most also know that single-payer is the only real solution. Which, incidentally, is not socialized medicine, but socialized insurance.”

“I’m against socializing. Period.”

Well, so was I — at least with my brother-in-law. Inexplicably, I pressed forward. Why did lemmings come to mind?

“Don’t get hung up on pejoratives,” I urged, thinking of all the ways the extreme right has sullied once-perfectly respectable terms in recent years.

“Then how’re we supposed to buy food that doesn’t rot?”

“Excuse me?”

“Without pejoratives, food spoils. Everybody knows that,” Dolton declared triumphantly.

“I believe,” I said slowly as I wondered what I’d ever had against disinheritance, “you may be thinking of preservatives, which is what they’ll be dipping my brain in in a few hours after I donate my body to science immediately after leaving your place.”

“Ha!” he snorted. “There won’t be any donating needed once you liberals get your death panels in place.”

“They already exist.”

“Huh?”

“Death panels. They already exist. Except they’re usually called ‘insurance companies.’”

“Whaddya mean?” Dolt asked, seemingly genuinely perplexed. (Well, OK, so he always seemed genuinely perplexed.)

“C’mon, Dolt,” I said, “surely even you can see those vultures spare no effort denying as many claims as possible which, once they’re done inventing exclusions and ‘pre-exiting conditions,’ translates into untold real suffering and, not infrequently, death.”

“Hnh,” Dolt snorted. “Why do you lefties hate the free market so much?”

“You mean the ‘free market’ that the insurance companies rig with millions of dollars in bribes, sorry, campaign contributions, and industry-written legislation that best serve, hmm, let’s see, the insurance companies?”

“There you go again with your precious details,” Dolt sneered. “Listen, Mark, government-run healthcare will put an industry out of business, and that’s about as hippo-pinkie as it gets.”

“Then you should love the bogus Baucus bill. Mandatory insurance for everyone, and fines for non-conformers? How delightful — for the insurance companies.”

My brother-in-law was silent. He’d either died, or was thinking. (Barring precedent, it had to be the former.) Cautiously, I continued:

“Dolt, let me ask you something: Are you more interested in the well-being of insurance companies, or tens of millions of your fellow citizens? Because here’s the deal: the sole function of the former is to further line the pockets of shareholders and CEOs by skimming up to thirty percent of a money pool that, were it to populate a single-payer system, could nearly all be applied toward providing excellent health coverage for every American.”

“I don’t want the government choosing my doctor!” he cried.

I wondered how I could’ve missed the moment I crossed into the parallel universe.

“Dolton,” I said quietly, “you don’t have a doctor.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

I simply had to find out where the next Masochists Anonymous meeting was. Solidly cementing my qualifications for membership, I ventured on:

“Listen, Dolt, under single-payer, government simply handles the billing. Period. Current private investors are bought out, then hospitals become non-profit and receive annual payments for expansion and operational expenses. The government owns nothing, thereby debunking that ‘socialized medicine’ hooey. And, you choose your own physician.”

“I’m sure,” Dolton snarled, “doctors and nurses will love working for peanuts, which is all that’ll be left once the government starts handling all the dough in your fallopian world.”

Being in a fallopian world sounded pretty utopian at the moment.

“Hardly. Having the paperwork done by just one not-for-profit entity with low overhead — Medicare only spends about three percent on administration — instead of by numerous profit-sucking, bottom line corporations, not only frees up enough money to provide affordable, quality universal healthcare but also ensures doctors and nurses are well-compensated. It’s a no-brainer [thus making it right up your alley, I didn’t say].”

Dimina squalled. My sister came in swiftly and whisked her up. “She’s been running a fever,” Apolitica explained worriedly as she hurried to the bathroom.

“Yeah, she’s been feeling pretty crummy lately,” Dolt said, looking a little far off. (I mean, more than usual.) He was obviously concerned. I had to admit: for all his faults, Dolton was a loving father.

From the TV, xenophobia burbled: beware medical services-stealing immigrants, warned Glen Blecch.

“Handouts to illegals goes a long way toward making this country sick!” Dolt parroted.

I had to admit this, too: my brother-in-law was a bonehead.

“No,” I sighed, “what really makes this country sick is its sickness, in every way. We Americans pay by far the most for healthcare, yet rank miserably down the list in every major healthiness indicator. And as far as the expediency of denying medical services to undocumented aliens, you might want to think twice about that the next time you read about a tuberculosis outbreak in a farm labor camp or a meat-packing plant.”

“I don’t read.”

Imagine my shock.

“I don’t need the liberal media telling me how lucky we are to have a Marxist president making America more communist everyday,” he ranted. “What happened to good old American self-sufficiency? Why do people think the government owes them handouts? How come — ”

“Dolt!” It was Apolitica, entering from the hallway, carrying her bawling daughter. “Dimina’s temperature has shot up to 106. I told you we should have taken her in yesterday. We have to go the emergency room NOW!”

“But…baby — we can’t even pay the other bill we have.”

“NOW!” Apolitica repeated, already out the door with her ailing infant.

Dolton snatched his keys from the rent-a-table. “How did this happen?” he moaned.

Was there a rent-a-mirror around?

Michael Yates: Corporate America began to wage what turned out to be a one-sided war against working people in the mid-to late-1970s, when it became apparent that the post-World War Two “Golden Age” of U.S. capitalism was over. As profit rates fell, businesses began to develop a strategy for restoring them. This strategy had many prongs, and one of them was ideological, that is, a struggle for “hearts and minds,” to use a military term now being applied to Afghanistan. The presumed failure of Keynesian economics, marked by the simultaneous existence of escalating inflation and unemployment, gave the ideological struggle its foundation. Maybe there had been too many restrictions placed on the market, and these restrictions (minimum wages, health and safety regulations, laws facilitating union organizing in labor markets; public assistance in the form of money grants, housing subsidies, and the like; restrictions on the flow of money internationally) had led to results opposite those that liberal Keynesians had thought most likely. If these complex arguments could be tied to simple cliches, like “get the government off our backs,” “the unions have gotten too powerful” (with always a hint that they are too radical thrown into the argument), and “welfare queens” (with that always popular whiff of racism), they could provide ideological cover for what was really a matter of corporate economics, namely the making of money.

This ideological attack bore fruit quickly. President Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and Volcker, under the guise of fighting inflation, immediately began to snuff the life out of working class communities by forcing interest rates up to nearly 20 percent. Today, Volcker is treated like a hero by Democrats and above reproach (though ignored by President Obama’s more right-wing economic advisors), which shows just how far to the right economic discourse has moved. What Carter began, Reagan completed, firing the Air Traffic Controllers and putting the nail in labor’s coffin. Behind the scenes in all of this and growing in strength for the next twenty years (funded by wealthy business leaders) or so were the right-wing think tanks you mention. Just as retired generals go to work for military contractors and defeated politicians become lobbyists, government economic advisors get jobs at Heritage or the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Institute. The staffs of these ideological centers churn out endless position papers and studies, which find their way into our newspapers and the offices of our congresspersons. A gigantic network of professors, journalists, politicians, lobbyists, and, today, a television network (Fox) bombard us with right-wing propaganda. That all of this has been successful is seen by the fact that the shibboleths of neoliberalism—such as the needs for privatization of public entities, the free reign of markets, the obviousness of the success of welfare reform, the evils of raising the minimum wage—are all commonplaces today.

While the public now knows that something is rotten, I am not sure that neoliberal ideas are so under attack that they will lose their sway. I think that the tenacity of these ideas owes something to the lack of an ideological alternative, which, in turn, is due to the abject failure of organized labor to provide one. For example, we need universal health care. Labor, however, has not consistently argued in favor of this or supported it at all. Now Congress is poised to enact healthcare legislation that might well be worse than the profit-driven system we have all come to hate. Labor should refuse to support this legislation, but I doubt it will. Then, when the new healthcare plans fail to deliver the goods, the right-wing will be lying in wait, ready to pounce and say, “See, we told you so. The government always makes things worse.” In other words, until there is a radical ideology to replace right-wing thinking, the latter is unlikely to lose its drawing power.

Fred Magdoff: Although these institutions were very successful, along with a number of other forces, in shaping public attitudes toward the economy, the reality of the current severe economic conditions are causing many, including some economists, to rethink their views of how “efficiently” markets function in the real world (as opposed to their ideological make-believe world) and that some different approaches may be needed. People seem to understand that the “big players” played a major role in the crisis, but most of the anger has been placed on the outrageous salaries of the top echelon. Of course, this is just “chump change” compared to the massive amounts at that are transferred to the wealthy through the speculative casino that our economy has become.

　
MW: Socialism has a huge public relations problem. Wouldn’t you agree that socialism has been effectively discredited in the U.S. media and that, even now–with unemployment soaring at 10 percent and more than 300,000 foreclosures per month–the average American worker still believes in the virtues of capitalism? How do you explain this phenomenon?

Michael Yates: Part of my answer here can be seen in my response to your first question. Socialism has, indeed, been discredited here, partly due to its rejection by its natural supporter, namely the labor movement. The CIO expelled in the late 1940s and early 1950s the left-wing forces who built the great industrial unions. When it did this, it abandoned the worker-centered ideology that might have laid the basis for support here for at least the kind of social democracy we find in the Scandinavian nations. This left the ideological field to the enemies of social democracy and socialism. Of course, we cannot ignore the long and inglorious history of police-state repression of those persons and organizations that championed socialism. Our government has never hesitated to arrest, imprison, and even kill the enemies of capitalism. So it has been dangerous to be a radical here, though not so much today when radical ideas aren’t taken seriously and there are no powerful radical organizations left. Suppose that after the Second World War, the left in the labor movement had grown, and the left-led unions had continued to successfully organize workers and win good collective bargaining agreements. Suppose that they had built upon their impressive worker education programs, made inroads in the South, and fought hard against U.S. imperialism and the Cold War. We might have a much different political terrain on which to fight today.

Two other factors that must be considered in the attachment of the working class to capitalism are racism and imperialism. In the past, employers routinely pitted white workers against black, and one weapon they used was to associate black workers (and the civil rights movement) with communism (It was interesting to note in this connection the attempts to make Obama out to be a radical socialist). The claim that black union supporters were reds helped to solidify white support for capitalism. By the same token, anti-imperialist struggles in the poor nations of the world (often former colonies of the rich countries) were typically led by political radicals. These could be made out to be anti-American, and then those in the United States who allied themselves with these struggles could also be labeled anti-American, despite the fact that they might also be supportive of policies that would benefit working people. The schools and the media could be counted out not to try to set anyone straight on any of this.

Now, having said this, I must also say that to the extent that left forces in the United States identified themselves uncritically with the former Soviet Union and its extremely undemocratic political system, they sometimes played into the hands of those opposed to socialism. And I must also admit that socialist forces were, at their strongest, never powerful enough here to force their best ideals permanently into the consciousness of the working class majority. Finally, in the past, the success of capitalism in the United States allowed for some sharing of the wealth with workers, and this, too, made people less willing to entertain radical ideas.

Old and deeply ingrained ideas die hard, and unless there are forces at work to develop new ones and unless there is at least widespread experimentation with new ways to organize production and distribution, little is likely to change, even in the face of economic catastrophe, such as so may working men and women are facing right now. Quite the contrary, workers might be persuaded that actions detrimental to their long-term self-interest need to be taken, such as, for example, draconian measures against immigrants.

Fred Magdoff: There is no question that the term socialism has a public relations problem. But while it’s true that most people don’t fully understand the basic workings of the capitalist system nor what socialism is, there are indications that many people are ready to talk about alternatives—and that includes socialism. The positive public response to Michael Moore’s movie, Capitalism, is one indication. But a Rasmussen poll last spring found that only 58% of American’s say that capitalism is better than socialism. For adults under 30, 37% preferred capitalism and 33% preferred socialism. It’s not clear what the poll results really mean. But it does indicate that people are willing to hear about and talk about alternatives to capitalism.
　
MW: In a chapter titled “Neoliberlism” you focus on the disparity of wealth in the US today. Here’s an excerpt:

By 2006 the top 1 percent of households received close to a quarter of all income and the top 10 percent got 50 percent of the income pie. In 2006, the 400 richest Americans had a collective net wealth of $1.6 trillion, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million people. This degree of income and wealth inequality was last seen just before the beginning of the Great Depression. (pg 50)

Let’s ignore the moral issue for now, and focus on the supply/demand question. Is it possible for an economy to produce sufficient demand when more and more of the wealth and income goes to the upper 5 or 10 percent of the population? (isn’t this proof that capitalism is inherently crisis-prone?)

Michael Yates: If a certain amount of output is produced, an equal amount of income is generated. So, conceptually, there could be enough demand to buy the output, no matter that the incomes generated are getting more unequally distributed. It certainly has been the case that the rich people now getting such a large share of the pie spend gobs of money. And rich foreigners spend a great deal of money in the United States as well. However, the rich also save a lot of money (the more they get, the more they save), and this money does not enter immediately into the spending flow. Working people, on the other hand, can be counted on, by virtue of the limited income that they command, to spend all of their income. Therefore, the more income the rich have, the more savings there will be, and, unless some way is found to convert all this saving into spending on newly-produced goods and services, the more likely it is that there will be a crisis caused by not enough spending (and its corollaries of unsold goods and services and unemployed labor). If we understand that growing inequality is the normal trajectory of capitalist economies, a trajectory only mitigated by the power of organized working people to win a bigger share of the pie for themselves and to compel the government to intervene in the marketplace on their behalf, then it is correct to say that capitalist economies are crisis-prone for this reason alone.

Growing inequality also creates other potential problems for the system. Sometimes it can generate a political crisis, a crisis of legitimacy so to speak. The rich exert tremendous political power, and this power grows as those at the top command a larger and larger share of a society’s income. To the rest of us, the game looks increasingly rigged, with us having little chance to improve our circumstances through individual efforts. More inequality also has harmful social and economic consequences that we don’t normally think of. Recent research has shown that if we compare two entities (two states in the United States, for example) with equal average incomes but different degrees of inequality, then the place with more unequal incomes will also have higher rates of infant mortality, arrest and imprisonment, school dropouts, low infant birth weights, and many other measures of social well-being. Growing inequality actually kills some of us, makes some of us sicker, and puts some of us in jail.

I want to add an important point. To say that capitalist economies are crisis-prone, because of a tendency toward income inequality or whatever other reason, is not the same as saying that these economies are on their deathbeds, no matter how severe a crisis may be. It is possible for an economy to exist in a crisis or a prolonged period of slow growth (stagnation) without it being ready to collapse. In the end, it is political struggle, that is, class struggle, that truly destabilizes an economy and generates conditions in which it is possible to imagine the birth of a new system.

Fred Magdoff: It is one of the many contradictions of the system. If ordinary folk are paid well they can buy a lot of stuff and help keep the system going. So from the point of view of the system as a whole, higher paid workers would help the economy. However, there is only one driving force for individual capitalists–and that’s to make as much money as possible. What might be better for the overall economy can be of no concern to the individual trying to maximize profits. For an analogy, let’s take a look at ocean fishing. Almost every fish species is being fished to the point at which the population crashes. It would make sense for all of the companies operating the large trawlers to cooperate and fish less in order to preserve the resource on which they depend. So what’s good for their long-term future is sacrificed as each individually tries to maximize their catch and therefore profits.

MW: Here’s another excerpt from the book: “In 2006, the financial sector employed about 6 percent of the workers but ‘produced’ 40 percent of the profits of all domestic firms.”(pg 56) A few paragraphs later you add that, “Making money without actually making something turned out to be the largest growth sector of the U.S. economy from the early 1980s to the present crisis.”

This seems to imply that as manufacturing and other parts of the “real” economy have become less lucrative, the trading of paper assets has become Wall Street’s new profit-center, the Golden Goose. What impact has the “financialization” of the economy had on ordinary working people?

Michael Yates: I think that an answer here has two parts. First, it was the neoliberal “revolution” begun in the 1970s that did immense harm to working people. For example, unionization rates began to fall dramatically in the 1980s, as Reagan began his “magic of the marketplace” assault on the working class. Real wages (the purchasing power of our paychecks) began to stagnate in the 1970s and are not much higher today than then. Relatively high-wage public employment began to endure a long period of privatization, which also damaged working class living standards. The move toward “free trade” did workers here no good, as manufacturing began to flee our shores for low-wage havens abroad. None of these things had to do with financialization per se.

Second, however, once the neoliberal attack on working class living standards took hold and incomes began to flow upward, those with a great deal more money began to look for ways to put this money to work. The corporations that they owned also had higher profits, and they did the same. The United States has always had a robust financial sector, though in the past, it was not the tail that wagged the dog as far as our system of production and distribution was concerned. Neoliberalism brought with it a deregulation of international movements of money and goods and services. [It is important to note that we see neoliberalism as a political response to capital’s quest for restored profits beginning in the mid-1970s when the post-Second World War two economic boom ended and the slow growth (stagnation) common to mature capitalist economies reasserted itself.] These, in turn, required a certain amount of financial innovation, to reduce, for example, the risks of fluctuations in currency exchange rates and sharp changes in political conditions that could threaten investments. From these innovations came still more, until finance began to take on a life of its own. And while neoliberalism and direct corporate actions inside workplaces did reduce costs and raise profits, they did not create nearly enough capital spending opportunities (investment) to absorb the growing individual savings and business profits. Finance of one kind or another then began to be seen as a place to dispose of surplus and make still more money. Leveraged buyouts, stock market speculations, real estate “investments,” all took off from the 1980s on, absorbing money that could not find enough opportunities in the real economy of production. As these things happened, financial “innovation” exploded, with all of the alphabet soup of financial instruments we describe in our book.

This explosion of finance proved detrimental to working people in a number of ways. Leveraged buyouts inevitably resulted in the hollowing out of what were often perfectly viable businesses. Companies were saddled with debt, assets were stripped and sold, and workers were furloughed by the tens of thousands. The inflation of asset values gave rise to the notion that it was the job of managers to increase the share price of their businesses—in any way possible. Businesses came to be thought of as mere collections of assets rather than entities that produced things. Asset inflation gave rise to asset speculation and the development of ever more complex financial instruments, all leading sooner or later to financial bubbles and the inevitable bursting of the bubbles. As we have seen, the bursting of financial bubbles has had tremendously negative impacts on working people: shuttered workplaces and unemployment to name but the primary ones. The last bubble, in real estate markets, was harmful to workers not only after it burst but also as it was developing. In the aftermath of the dot.com bubble, Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Fed Board of Governors, directed Fed policy to pressure interest rates down to very low levels. This helped to push loose money into real estate. As house prices began to rise, banks and brokers started to encourage working people to do two things: borrow money against the appreciated value of their homes and buy homes, either as first-time buyers or as purchasers of more expensive homes (after selling old ones). Working people were eager to do both because they saw houses as sources of cash to compensate for stagnating household incomes and as a form of wealth that could help secure them against the hazards of ill health, lost pensions, or college-age children needing money for school. Working class households began to take on large amounts of debt, making themselves more vulnerable, even as they thought they were making wise financial decisions. Ironically, those who saw their incomes rise so high because of neoliberalism were now, in effect, loaning money to those who didn’t fare so well. As banks accumulated mortgages, farsighted Wall Street swindlers saw golden opportunities to develop a slew of new financial instruments based upon the packaging and repackaging of mortgages into new and exotic instruments. Greenspan played their shill, arguing that they had uncovered the secret of hedging infallibly against risk. From here it was but a short step to the criminal schemes of Countrywide and a host of other financial institutions. The billions of dollars made were used not only to finance a new gilded age of revoltingly lavish consumption but to corral the most tractable politicians money could buy.

Fred Magdoff: Financialization of the economy created the possibilities for people to take on more and more debt—credit cards, new cars, 2nd mortgages, etc. It was the selling of a lifestyle way beyond people’s ability to pay for it plus the easy access of loans that created the bind that many people find themselves in today. In essence, it allowed people to live beyond their means. They were encouraged to take on debt as their house values seemed headed up forever, and the great rise in foreclosures and bankruptcies is the unfortunate result of the financialization of the economy. Also, those people who had retirement money in individual accounts or with pension systems and thought that they had become very wealthy, now found themselves with much less to rely upon.

MW: In the last couple of decades, consumer debt has skyrocketed, as you note, “doubling from 1975 to 2005, to 127 percent of disposable income.” (pg 60) Have we gone as far as we can without deleveraging and paying down debts? What happens to a credit-dependent economy when the consumer can no longer increase his/her debt-load? Is this just the beginning of a decades-long down-cycle?

Michael Yates: Certainly no entity—not a person, a family, a business, even a government— can take on rising levels of debt (relative to income) indefinitely. Sooner or later, the piper has to be paid. Working-class consumers took on large amounts of debt, to compensate in part for stagnating wages and incomes, and, it is important to note, to pay for health problems and other household traumas. This meant that the burden of the debt rose, since income wasn’t rising as fast as the debt, and also because the interest rates charged on credit cards and subprime mortgages were so high. We at Monthly Review have been decrying the rise of consumer debt for many years, and we said that the debt chickens would come home to roost sooner of later. I must say that I was surprised that debt could be broadened and deepened for so long. The ingenuity of creditors in extending loan periods and devising so many new forms of debt has to be admired for its audacity. Then, the ways in which these debts were packaged and sold so that more debt could be extended was truly breathtaking. Unfortunately, consumers ultimately couldn’t pay and all hell broke loose. Now, with so much unemployment, workers are truly strapped. They will not be borrowing so much or spending so much anytime soon. [One interesting recent development is that, as some households have defaulted on debts or simply stopped making payments, consumer spending has showed a bit of an upward tick!] So the question arises: what spending will fuel a sustained recovery? It won’t likely be consumer spending. Capital spending was stagnating to begin with and was the root cause of the crisis. There are no new “epoch-making” innovations on the horizon that would generate the amounts of investment that were brought forth by the automobile. U.S. exports seem a very unlikely demand support. That leaves the government. In a capitalist economy, especially one like the United States with its lack of a history of generally accepted public spending, it seems very unlikely that public spending will make up for shortfalls in aggregate demand. Already, there are widespread entreaties (and not just from the far right) urging the federal government to wind down in spending programs—well before, I might add, the economy has recovered. As we see it, the United States is, indeed, in for a long period of stagnation, a “down cycle” as you put it.

Fred Magdoff: This is one of the major constraints on the system. The economy is in a process that economists call “deleveraging,” which is just another way of referring to somehow getting rid of debt. Some are able to pay off what they owe, a few are able to renegotiate down some of their debt, many are losing their homes, and some are going bankrupt. Until this works its way out, and a lot of debt is shed one way or another, there will be a drag on the “consumer” portion of the purchases. This is particularly significant to the U.S. economy because it is so dependent on consumer purchases—in 2007, these absorbed approximately 70% of the goods and services produced.

MW: The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know is as lucid and compelling summary of the financial crisis as any I have read. In the closing chapter you state that capitalism is undergoing a “crisis of legitimacy” and that “the system can never deliver what is needed for us to realize our capacities and enjoy our lives… That “instead of private gain” the purpose of society and the economy is “to serve the needs of people, by providing the necessities of life for all, without promoting excessive consumption (consumerism) while protecting earth’s life support systems.”

All of the things that which kept capitalism in check–progressive taxation, crucial regulations, and the power of unions–have either been reversed, repealed or greatly eroded. More and more people are beginning to see the greed which governs the system, and it scares them. But is the country really ready for structural change or will the vision of an economy which “serves the needs of its people” be dismissed as “pie-in-the-sky” Utopianism?

Michael Yates: Well, first thank you Mike for the kind words. They are much appreciated. Typically, the best we have been able to hope for from the public in the United States has been an amorphous populism; people are willing to say that the system is corrupt and that it is biased in favor of the rich. But proposals for change, much less a radical transformation of the economic system, are rare commodities. I think things would be different, however, if we had a real labor movement, one that was rooted in communities, broad in its composition, and not afraid to have principles and stand by them come hell or high water. This should be the lesson that progressives learned from the right-wing. The talking heads of Fox may seem insane to us, but they and their intellectual gurus almost never deviate from the set of reactionary principles with which they began to transform the “common sense” of the nation. We suggest at the end of our book that we ought to ask ourselves if a return to the pre-economic crisis status quo is what we want. In the best of times, there is plenty of unutilized labor, a degraded environment, poverty, dead-end jobs, and much more that is not so desirable. So we chose a number of alternative outcomes to what we have now that we think have mass appeal, from universal healthcare to basic food guarantees. However, as you say, these might well, and I think will cause people to react with a pie-in-the-sky indifference. What might make working men and women stand up and take notice would be for these goals to have a mass-based advocate, one that would make these goals matters of rigid principle and begin to fight for them through mass actions. We might think that the right-wing ideologues we see on television are insane. Yet, come hell or high water, they stick to their guns. Their political and economic adherents have wielded tremendous power for a long period of time, and even today when they seem to be losing their grip on the national “common sense,” they can still mobilize the faithful. The left needs to take a lesson from this. More particularly, the labor movement must take a firm and rigid stand on issues like national health care, food security, environmental degradation, full employment, good and cheap housing, U.S. war-making and imperialis, racism, and a host of others. Then it must educate members rigorously and constantly about such principles. Most importantly, it must begin to actively fight to achieve them, activating its millions of members and allies, wherever it can find them. It is through action, bold and unafraid, that people’s minds will get changed and a new “common sense” developed.

Having said this, I think it is clear that the labor movement, as currently constituted, is not up to the tasks at hand. Too many unions are moribund, stuck in the failed labor-management cooperation mind set of the past and run by people too old and infirm to do much of anything. So, not only will we have to have a worker-led opposition to the status quo, fighting to change it radically, but this opposition will have to be built on a new basis. There are some hopeful signs, such as the development of community-based worker centers, mainly in immigrant communities. These may be models for the labor movement of the future.

Fred Magdoff: Just getting what should be the most reasonable reforms through Congress is a major effort, which usually fails or is corrupted in the process. Look what’s happening with health care “reform.” Even if a “public option” is finally part of the bill, it will be a bill that helps some people, but is primarily a boon to the health care industry, which will get a lot of new revenue. It’s not a bill designed with the single purpose in mind: how can we supply medical care for everyone at reasonable cost. Rather it’s a bill designed with significant input from the for-profit sector that will end up supplying them with extra profits. It is clear that government-run systems (and there are a variety of ways to do this) are far cheaper and more efficient and can actually cover everyone. SO, it seems as though piecemeal reform is a) very difficult to obtain and b) can be reversed as the power of the wealthy increases. A system is needed that can break the power of the wealthy and create a real political and economic democracy in order to be able to meet the basic needs for all the people.

It appears as though the savior may be riding in on a pale horse.

According to a September 5 New York Times article, banks like Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs are exploring new investment schemes that involve buying up life insurance policies from sick and elderly people, bundling them into huge securities, and selling shares in the securities to investors.

Buying shares is essentially a bet–that the people whose insurance policies on which the securities are based will die “on time” or earlier than expected. According to the Times, “The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return–though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.”

Just when it seemed impossible for Wall Street–still counting the trillions in taxpayer dollars it received in a government bailout to save it from collapse–to sink any lower, greed came to the rescue with the development of a grim new market.

As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

Now, the financial crisis has driven capitalists to the nursing and retirement homes, and to the bedsides of the sick and dying.

The credit rating agency DBRS–whose Senior Vice President Kathleen Tillwitz informed the Times that “our phones have been ringing off the hook with inquiries”–is studying how to rate pools of life insurance policies. The main challenge is figuring out how to pool people together. As the Times wrote:

The solution? A bond made up of life settlements would ideally have policies from people with a range of diseases–leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s. That is because if too many people with leukemia are in the securitization portfolio, and a cure is developed, the value of the bond would plummet.

If the sub-prime mortgage market boom is any indication, an increased demand for existing life insurance policies spurred by increased securitization would lead to widespread abuse and fraud–with policy originators faced with the same incentives that encouraged mortgage brokers to deceive borrowers with “teaser” interest rates that ballooned several years into repayment.

In this case, the victims would be the elderly, the sick, and those who depend on life insurance benefit payouts in the case of the death of a loved one.

A further element of instability would be added if life insurance-backed securities take off–the likely proliferation of illegal “stranger-owned life insurance” or “STOLI” policies.

A STOLI is a policy created when a broker or investor convinces someone, usually a senior citizen, to take out a life insurance policy, with the promise to sell it quickly for a one-time payment. According to Reuters, “The death benefits are immediately transferred to investors, usually hedge funds.”

The securitization of life insurance policies would likely lead to an increase in the number of illegal STOLIs, once the banks exhaust the possibilities of buying up existing, legitimate policies to package into securities. In turn, insurance companies would have an incentive to crack down on this practice to avoid paying death benefits to the investors, leaving the market prone to crisis.

Other challenges for a credit rating agency like DBRS include figuring out what “would happen if health reform passed, for example, and better care for a large number of Americans meant that people generally started living longer? Or if a magic-bullet cure for all types of cancer was developed?” These eventualities, while prolonging and improving the lives of millions, would be bad for investors’ bottom line.

The “potential risk for investors,” the Times continued, is that “some people could live far longer than expected. It is not just a hypothetical risk. That is what happened in the 1980s, when new treatments prolonged the life of AIDS patients. Investors who bought their policies on the expectation that the most victims would die within two years ended up losing money.”

According to an ABC News story:

The industry for selling life insurance [policies to investors] first sprang up during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s. “Companies loved AIDS because it was a predictable death sentence,” says Gloria Wolk, a life-settlement expert who learned about the practice while volunteering at AIDS services clinics. “The shorter and more certain the life expectancy, the higher the returns promised to investors and the greater the lump sum offered to patients. It was a grim mix of free-market capitalism and human mortality.”

Wolk nevertheless said she “saw the industry make a huge difference in the lives of terminally ill patients and their families”–by providing victims with funds to pay for the exorbitant health care and other costs associated with dying from AIDS, while it was ignored by a government run by Ronald Reagan.

The only conceivable defense of the practice of bundling life insurance policies into securities and selling them to investors to profit from the deaths of policyholders is that it enables those who sell their policies to get more than they would if they simply sold policies back to the insurance company.

But this option is only attractive because health care costs in the U.S. place quality care out of reach–for the nearly 50 million people without health insurance, and for tens of millions more who are insured, but can’t afford the co-pays and deductibles that pile up when they get sick or injured.

Similarly, for the elderly whose retirement savings have been eroded by the current crisis, the inadequacy of Social Security, and by the long-term shift from defined-benefit pension plans to 401(k)s based on the stock market, the main reason most would be tempted to sell their life insurance policies is that our government neglects to provide a decent standard of living for elderly workers who have outlived their usefulness to the exploiting class.

In other words, the market for securities backed by life insurance policies depends on the absence of universal single-payer health care for all and the lack of a sufficient social safety net for senior citizens.

Almost as disturbing as first-tier financial institutions betting on death is the matter-of-fact reporting of the New York Times.

The Times article, titled “Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance,” ignores completely the question of the morality of human beings gambling on the lives of others, indexing the sick based on the nature of their affliction and when it is likely to kill them, and crossing their fingers that no cure for cancer is discovered. This is a brilliant illustration of Marx’s assertion that capitalism “has left no other bond between [people] than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.”"

It says a lot about capitalist society’s brutality and indifference to human life that the newspaper of record could cover this story without pause, going no deeper than the pros and cons from the perspective of investors–while “Ads by Google” accompany the story, inviting readers to “sell your life insurance policy” and “find low cost life insurance.”

Nor does the Times question the logic of devoting massive wealth to a market that creates no new value in the form of goods or services, and is of no use to anyone but the few who will profit from it.

According to the Times article, there are $26 trillion in life insurance policies in the U.S, and “some in the industry predict the market [for life-insurance-backed securities] could reach $500 billion.” That sum is nearly three times the total of all the budget shortfalls of every state government for fiscal year 2010.

A just society based on human need would use that $500 billion to preserve and expand essential services that are on the chopping block as states balance their budgets.

A just society based on human need would devote those resources not to betting on death, but providing top quality care to the sick, researching new cures and treatments (and making them available to all), and ensuring that the elderly live the last years of their lives in dignity and security.

According to the economic “experts,” the U.S. economy is beginning to “recover.” But the very nature of the recovery–a return to big bonuses and salaries for Wall Street executives alongside deepening and sustained unemployment, cuts in social services and health care “reform” that amounts to a massive government handout to the health insurance industry–demolishes any idea that the U.S. is not a class society.

It is time to build the socialist alternative. Our lives and dignity depend on it.

“O.K., my little Veggies,” he asked, “what important lesson have we learned from this cautionary tale?”

Peter Parsnip was the first to germinate a reply, “That animals can talk!” he shouted with flatulent enthusiasm.

“Fair enough,” responded farmer Midland, barely concealing his highbrow contempt. “What else?”

“That pigs like to wear clothes and get drunk,” offered Spudwell Potato Head, one of the simpler complex carbohydrates on this or any corporate farm. Midland’s eyes rolled involuntarily as he grimaced ever so slightly. Frankly, he was beginning to question the wisdom of reading allegorical literature to life forms as congenitally unsophisticated as vegetables. Just at that moment, however, he was pleasantly surprised by a bright green head of lettuce.

“We learned that socialism is evil,” said Mr. Green the Head Lettuce thoughtfully.

The ebullient farmer unleashed a toothy grin that spanned from ear to ear. “Exactly!” he exclaimed.

Unfortunately, the profundity of Head Lettuce’s revelation was clearly lost on the rest of the audience, which remained in what can best be described as a persistent vegetative state. Undaunted, Farmer Midland sought to capitalize on what he at least viewed as a teachable moment.

“In fact,” he began, “the animals in this story represent the unbridled lust for power of an out-of-control government bureaucracy.”

“But Mr. Midland, sir, wasn’t it the animals who were suffering at the beginning of the book?” inquired a somewhat naive bale of new mown hay. “I mean, obviously horses and cows are evil, but I actually felt sorry for the cats and dogs on that farm. Wasn’t Mr. Jones kinda mean to them, too?”

At this point, the sycophantic Mr. Green intervened to buttress his corporate master’s argument. “Admittedly, this particular farmer may not always have acted in the interest of his livestock, but we should be careful not to extrapolate generalities from any one individual case…” As Head Lettuce searchingly scanned the crowd of crudités and locked eyes with of a bunch of carrots, he could see they were thickly glazed.

Meanwhile, Farmer Midland lost no time in resuming the rhetorical offensive. “Look, whatever you think of Mr. Jones’s actions in the story, you must admit they indicate he was under a lot of stress due to unwarranted government interference in his business. Government regulators not only unfairly penalized Jones for storing raw pork in an unrefrigerated warehouse warm enough to incubate flies, they further hampered his profit-making ability by restricting the sale of meat from diseased animals too sick to lift themselves off the ground.”

“There’s one thing I still don’t understand, though,” interjected Rudy Rutabaga. “Are you saying that when the animals in the story chased the farmer away, that was kind of like the government taking over the farm?”

“That’s right, rootboy,” chimed in Mr. Green, running out to patience. “Remember, all you need to know is this:

“1) Animals make up the government;

“2) Animals eat plants (i.e., us); therefore,

“3) The government will eat us if we let them.”

The medley of mixed vegetables wilted in horror. “Then who can we turn to to protect us from the government?”

“That’s where we farmers come in,” declared Mr. Midland proudly. “We represent the free market garden established to serve your unhybridized ancestors, the cause for which so many of them were willing to be sliced, diced, mashed, and pureed. So don’t let their sacrifice be in vain. Take my advice: gather up your fiber, lock tendrils together, go march into those livestock pens while you still can, and show those government farm animals who’s boss!”

After some initial debate, the intrepid vegetables finally agreed with Mr. Midland and Mr. Green, and resolved that they’d better act quickly if they were going to save themselves. So they formed up in ranks, raised up a mighty battle cry, and charged off into the holding pens where they were immediately trampled and eaten by the grateful livestock.

“Now all we have to do is drag these government animals into the bathtub and drown them,” said Farmer Midland with a wry smile. “Then we can enjoy a proper feast.”

Mr. Green laughed nervously. “How do I know you won’t try to eat me?” he asked.

Mr. Midland was quick with his answer. “That’s simple. You remind me too much of money, and only a fool devours the thing he loves.”

Upon hearing this, the head of lettuce breathed a miasmic sigh of relief.

“Besides,” the farmer added, almost as an afterthought, “salad sucks.”

This type of ideology may have had some traction back when Russia and China first acquired nuclear weapons. After all we thought god was on our side and had thus bequeathed nuclear weaponry solely upon the United States. What a surprise it must have been to wake up one day and find out that godless Russkies and Chinese had attained the same power the U.S. had, which is to say owning a weapon that could literally destroy the entire planet. How could a good and gracious god allow such a thing to happen? In the case of the Russians getting the bomb, we “discovered” that the Rosenbergs had passed the plans on to them for money.¹ This version proved to be nice, clean and played into sound stereotypes of the period. We even sent them to the chair in an attempt to assuage our collective consciousness that we are the good guys and as such the only ones who should be allowed to possess something that could turn the planet into a dust heap with the push of a button.

Considering that now some dozen or more nations have the bomb, slogans like being better dead than Red appear to be trite. Pakistan isn’t communist and they have the bomb. Israel isn’t a communist nation and they have the bomb, somehow “better dead than kosher” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. It also smacks of abject racism, something many conservatives are, but are loath to admit.

Slogans and stereotypes are better employed where simple minds can easily sum up their non-comprehension of a complex issue with a snappy slogan. Hence we now have loads of right-wing folk parading around with images of President Obama sporting a Hitler moustache and a hammer and sickle tattoo on his forehead. The conservatives claim Obama is turning America into a socialist country. First off while Hitler was the head of the National Socialist Party, this group of wacky characters was anything but. The hammer and sickle was the logo Lenin and his Russian cohorts adopted. Accept for the very brief life of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, also known as the Nazi/Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Hitler hated the socialists in general and the Russians in particular. Generally it’s a good idea to get your facts straight when you want to protest publicly, but in the case of extreme conservatives when have facts ever impeded them? It’s so much easier to conjure up images of Nazi Germany and claim that the President wants to turn America into a communist country. Just chalk it up to another honest mistake for these plan and simple folks. Communism is a form of government. Socialism is an economic system, but hey who’s counting when setting up a right-wing agenda?

This game plan for employing the Red Boogieman with the Obama Administration’s National Health Care Initiative is right out of the 1950’s red-baiting McCarthy era. Anyone with any sense of history should be able to understand this and see its fallacies. Unfortunately this hasn’t been the case when you look at the rest of America beyond the New York and Los Angeles skylines.

Both of these cities do have a distinct advantage over most other Americans when it comes to understanding the methods being employed by the right. The healthcare initiative is not the first time conservatives have used slogans and Red baiting to destroy something that was for the public good. Conservatives played this same card effectively nearly six decades ago to ensure that the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field for the sun soaked stadium that would arise out of the fields of Elysian Park Heights, or better known to Angelinos, Chavez Ravine.²

Faced with an extreme housing shortage in the post-war years Los Angeles claimed eminent domain for all of the properties in the three neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine, a sleepy Hispanic enclave just west of downtown. The real estate became the property of the City Housing Authority. CHA had noted architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander design a community that would provide low income housing, schools, parks and shops.

As with any government program it takes time to get off the planning stages. Such was the case with the Elysian Park Heights Development Project. By 1952 the thinking had changed. Only Communist countries supplied government funded housing. In America you paid for what you had and if you didn’t have anything that was your own tough luck. State Senator John B. Tenney, chair of the California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities and the leading Red-hunter in the state began an investigation of alleged Communist infiltration into the CHA. The Los Angeles city council immediately sought to backtrack on its support for the CHA, voting that year to cancel its contract with the agency. The CHA appealed all the way up to the State Supreme Court when in April 1952 the Court took the conservatives’ side and decided not to hear the case thus reaffirming city’s right to cancel their contract. Not satisfied with the State Supreme Court’s decision, the Los Angeles City Council placed a referendum on the June ballot. Proposition B prevailed upholding the city’s decision to cancel the CHA contract. This literally changed the city’s mayoral leadership when the three-term incumbent, Fletcher Bowron lost to Norris Poulson primarily over the housing issue of Chavez Ravine.

With the defeat of the public housing and planned community project Los Angeles was now able to use real estate claimed through eminent domain in anyway they saw fit. What better way to say we care about our citizens than denying them quality lost cost housing and literally giving the property to a private business owner? Walter O’Malley had long been considering a move from Ebbets Field. When approached by leading Angelinos such as City Councilwoman Rosalind Wyman and the Chandlers, owners of the Los Angeles Times, O’Malley traded a hunk of downtown real estate less than half the size of the Chavez Ravine property, tax free for 60 years.

All of this sounds very familiar when you know the history. Unfortunately most Americans couldn’t tell you our second President’s name let alone remember something like Walter O’Malley’s business chicanery with the Los Angeles oligarchy. This is undoubtedly why the conservatives have chosen to dig up the Red boogieman imagery when President Obama started mentioning something like government sponsored healthcare.

Currently there are four lobbyists working for the pharmaceutical, insurance companies, medical associations etc. to every Congressperson and Senator on Capitol Hill. Their goal is simple, the defeat of the President’s heath care plan, or at the very least its evisceration. Oddly enough the very same folks that complain about our government embracing socialism are the first to cry “Foul,” and look for a government handout when their bank, auto company or military contract goes belly-up. Somehow it isn’t socialism when the government decides to give taxpayers’ dollars to Merrill Lynch, GMC or Blackwater. That’s just good old fashioned American business and the Red boogieman isn’t even in sight. Knowledge of the issue and looking beyond slogans is the only way to combat such thinking and allowing conservatives to destroy the public good for the interests of private business. A good slogan can certainly come in handy though. Just think of what the Democrats might have accomplished if they would have called the healthcare initiative Medicare for Everyone instead of “public option” which sounds more like a bathroom facility at a park.

1. One of the reasons I italicized “discovered,” while Julius was probably guilty, it is highly doubtful his wife was. They both played into the Jewish stereotype of the day which also made it easier to get a death sentence and carry it out swiftly. This probably wouldn’t have worked with WASP Alger Hiss. He looked too much like “us.” The Rosenbergs were definitely ethnic in appearance which no doubt worked against them in the media.
2. Golden Dreams – California in an age of abundance. Kevin Starr pp. 146-153.

Within the past year, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina has called Obama “the world’s best salesman of socialism.” Conservative economist Donald J. Boudreaux of George Mason University has acknowledged that Obama isn’t really a socialist, but warns that the “socialism lite” of such politicians “is as specious as is classic socialism.”

Silly as all this may be, it does provide an opportunity to continue talking about the promise and the limits of socialism in a moment when the economic and ecological crises are so serious. So, let’s start with the basics.

As with any complex political idea, socialism means different things to different people. But there are core concepts in socialist politics that are easy to identify, including (1) worker control over the nature and conditions of their work; (2) collective ownership of the major capital assets of the society, the means of production; and (3) an egalitarian distribution of the wealth of a society.

Obama has never argued for such principles, and in fact consistently argues against them, as do virtually all politicians who are visible in mainstream U.S. politics. This is hardly surprising, given the degree to which our society is dominated by corporations, the primary institution through which capitalism operates.

Obama is not only not a socialist, he’s not even a particularly progressive capitalist. He is part of the neo-liberal camp that has undermined the limited social-democratic character of the New Deal consensus, which dominated in the United States up until the so-called “Reagan revolution.” While Obama’s stimulus plan was Keynesian in nature, there is nothing in administration policy to suggest he is planning to move to the left in any significant way. The crisis in the financial system provided such an opportunity, but Obama didn’t take it and instead continued the transfer of wealth to banks and other financial institutions begun by Bush. Looking at his economic advisers, this is hardly surprising. Naming neo-liberal Wall Street boys such as Timothy Geithner as secretary of the treasury and Lawrence Summers as director of the National Economic Council was a clear signal to corporate America that the Democrats would support the existing distribution of power and wealth. And that’s where his loyalty has remained.

In short: Obama and some Democrats have argued for a slight expansion of the social safety net, which is generally a good thing in a society with such dramatic wealth inequality and such a depraved disregard for vulnerable people. But that’s not socialism. It’s not even socialism lite. It’s capitalism — heavy, full throttle, and heading for the cliff.

In reaction to the issues of the day, a socialist would fight to nationalize the banks, create a national health system, and end imperialist occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That the right wing can accuse Obama of being a socialist when he does none of those things is one indication of how impoverished and dramatically skewed to the right our politics has become. In most of the civilized world, discussions of policies based in socialist principles are part of the political discourse, while here they are bracketed out of any serious debate. In a recent conversation with an Indonesian journalist, I did my best to explain all this, but she remained perplexed. How can people take seriously the claim that he’s socialist, and why does applying that label to a policy brand it irrelevant? I shrugged. “Welcome to the United States,” I said, “a country that doesn’t know much about the world or its own history.”

Let’s take a moment to remember. Socialist and other radical critiques of capitalism are very much a part of U.S. history. In the last half of the 19th century, workers in this country organized against expanding corporate power and argued for worker control of factories. These ideas were not planted by “outside agitators”; immigrants at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries contributed to radical thought and organizing, but U.S. movements grew organically in U.S. soil.

Business leaders saw this as a threat and responded with private and state violence. The Red Scare of the 19-teens and ‘20s tried to wipe out these movements, with considerable success. But radical movements rose again during the Great Depression, eventually winning the right to organize. In the boom times after WWII, management was willing to buy off labor (for a short time, it turned out) with a larger slice of the pie in a rapidly expanding economy, and in the midst of Cold War hysteria the radical elements of the mainstream labor movement were purged. But radical ideas remain, nurtured by small groups and individuals around the country.

One of the reasons that “socialist” can be used as a slur in the United States is because that history is rarely taught. If people never hear about socialist traditions in our history, it’s easy to believe that somehow socialism is incompatible with the U.S. political and social system. Add to this the classic tactic of presenting “false alternatives” — if the Soviet Union was the epitome of a socialist state and the only other option is capitalism, then capitalism is preferable to the totalitarianism of socialism — and it is easy to see how people might wonder if Obama is a Red to be Scared of.

This long-running campaign to eliminate critiques and/or critics of capitalism — using occasional violence and relentless propaganda — has always been a threat to basic human values and democracy. The promotion of greed and crass self-interest as the defining characteristics of human life deforms all of us and our society. The concentration of wealth in capitalism undermines the democratic features of the society. Socialist principles provide a starting place to craft a different world, based on solidarity and an egalitarian distribution of wealth.

But capitalism is not only inhuman and anti-democratic; it’s also unsustainable, and if we don’t come to terms with that one, not much else matters. Capitalism is an economic system based on the concept of unlimited growth, yet we live on a finite planet. Capitalism is, quite literally, crazy.

But on this question it’s not fair to focus only on capitalism. Industrial systems — whether operating within capitalism, fascism, or communism — are unsustainable. The problem is not just the particular organization of an economy but any economic model based on high-energy technology, endless extraction, and the generation of massive amounts of toxic waste. Extractive economies ignore the health of the underlying ecosystem, and a socialist industrial system would pose the same threat. The possibility of a decent future, of any future at all, requires that we renounce that model.

This reminds us that one of capitalism’s few legitimate claims — that it is the most productive economic system in human history in terms of output — is hardly a positive. The levels of production in capitalism, especially in the contemporary mass consumption era, are especially unsustainable. We are caught in a death spiral, in which growth is needed to pull out of a recession/depression, but such growth only brings us closer to the edge of the cliff, or sinks the ship faster, or speeds the unraveling of the fabric of life. Pick your metaphor, but the trajectory is clear. The only question is the timing and the nature of the collapse. No amount of propaganda can erase this logic: Unsustainable systems can’t be sustained.

To demand that we continue on this path is to embrace a kind of collective death wish. So, while I endorse socialist principles, I don’t call myself a socialist, to mark a break with the politics associated with industrial model that shapes our world. I am a radical feminist anti-capitalist who opposes white supremacy and imperialism, with a central commitment to creating a sustainable human presence on the planet. I don’t know any single term to describe those of us with such politics.

I do know that the Republican Party is not interested in this kind of politics, and neither is the Democratic Party. Both are part of a dying politics in a dying culture that, if not radically changed, will result in a dead planet, at least in terms of a human presence.

So, socialism alone isn’t the answer. In addition to telling the truth about the failures of capitalism we have to recognize the failures of the industrial model underlying traditional notions of socialism. We have to take seriously the deep patriarchal roots of all this and the tenacity of white supremacy. We have to condemn imperialism, whether the older colonial style or the contemporary American version, as immoral and criminal. We have to face the chilling facts about the degree to which humans have degraded the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain our own lives.

I’m not waiting for Obama or any other politician to speak about these things. I am, instead, working in local groups — connected in national and international networks — to create alternatives. There is no guarantee of success, but it is the work that I believe matters most. And it is joyful work when done in collaboration with others who share this spirit. But to get there, we have to find the strength to break from the dominant culture, which is difficult. On that question, I’d like to conclude by quoting Scripture. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said:

“Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” [Matt. 7:12-14]

I end with Scripture not because I think everyone should look to my particular brand of radical, non-orthodox Christianity for inspiration, but because I think the task before us demands more than new policies. To face this moment in history requires a courage that, for me, is bolstered by tapping into the deepest wisdom in our collective history, including that found in various religious traditions. We have to ask ourselves what it means to be human in this moment, a question that is deeply political and at the same time beyond politics.

At the core of these traditions is the call for humility about the limits of human knowledge and a passionate commitment to justice, both central to finding within ourselves the strength to pass through that narrow gate.

My advice to any of you who want to be part of a decent future: Find that strength wherever you find it, and step up to the narrow gate.

[This is an expanded version of a talk given to the University Democrats student group at the University of Texas at Austin, September 23, 2009.]

Needless to say, if our current “Pretender in Chief” and his socialist allies in Congress succeed in forcing through a government takeover of the military in this country, there is bound to come a day in the not-too-distant future when our grandchildren ask us in a plaintive voice, “Grampa, what was it like when you were young and legal questions were settled through manly tests of mortal combat unencumbered by meddlesome government interference?” I, for one, will not have the heart to answer that question. What about you?

And what about the so-called “public military option”? According to the independent research group ITTTTI (In The Tank Think Tank Inc), this is nothing less than the first step toward driving honest contractors like Xe/Blackwater and Wackenhut right out of business. And this at a time when an overwhelming majority of Iraqis and Afghanis say they are satisfied with the occupation forces they currently have and don’t wish to add another layer of wasteful and expensive armed bureaucrats on top of it.

But it’s not just the army that President Obama wants to nationalize. He also has plans to create a government-run navy. That’s right folks, he wants to undo three centuries of Profitable Privateering on the High Seas by innovative small business entrepreneurs like venture capitalist Henry Morgan of J.P. Morgan Chase and currency trader William Kidd of the investment firm Kidd “R” Us , in favor of a centralized fleet on the British model. And just in case you think that’s a good idea, I refer you to Sean Hannity’s exclusive on-air phone interview with a caller who identified himself only as 245-year-old mutineer Fletcher Christian of Pitcairn Island. He has precious little good to say about the Royal Navy, I can tell you.

Now we can take all this lying down, of course, or we can all rise up together and be miscounted! Join us in Boston at noon on September 31, 2009 for the Million Man Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, followed by the Million Man Boston Massacre. All you have to do is download any of the prefabricated slogans from our FOX News website, customize the spelling till your heart’s content, and paint it on your T-shirt with a ketchup-dipped freedom fry while standing in front of a mirror so you’re sure to get it right. Then drive to Boston with your car windows down yelling, “The Red States are coming! The Red States are coming!”

The other 1.7 million of us will be waiting for you inside the Old North Church.

And remember, the folks back home is a’ counting on ya…

If there’s anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was “highly objectionable”. His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were “outrageous and disgusting”. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “angry and repulsed”, while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images “deeply upsetting.” Miliband warned: “How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya’s reentry into the civilized community of nations.”¹

Ah yes, “the civilized community of nations”, that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward.² No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an “accident”. Why then give awards to those responsible?

Today’s oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi’s innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he’s innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi’s trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case.³ The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror.

The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non — loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport — for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act.

And the court admitted it: “The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta to Frankfurt] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.”⁴

The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany — guaranteed, sworn to, scout’s honor, case closed — until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya — the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq — that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington.

The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on Nov. 14, 1991. Within the next 20 days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite.⁵

In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr. Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. “If he goes back to Libya,” Swire says, “it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case. … I’ve lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive.”⁶

And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost 20 years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years.

The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: “American intelligence documents [of 1989, from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)] blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.” Added the Times: “The DIA briefing discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was ‘no current credible intelligence’ implicating her.”⁷

If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it’s highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect.

One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya’s guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take “responsibility” for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing.

Humankind shall never fly

All those angry people. Yelling at the president and members of Congress about how the proposed government health plan, and Obama himself, are “socialist”. (See the poster of Obama as the Joker character from Batman with “Socialism” in large letters, as the only word.⁸ ) These good folks wanna get their health care through good ol’ capitalism; better no health care at all than godless-atheist commie health care; better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government. But these screaming, heckling Americans — like most of their countrymen — might be rather surprised to discover that they don’t really believe what they think they believe. I wrote an essay several years ago, which is still perfectly applicable today, entitled “The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?”

A common refrain, explicit or implicit, amongst the recent health-care hecklers is that the government can’t do anything better or cheaper than private corporations. Studies, however, have clearly indicated otherwise. In 2003, US federal agencies examined 17,595 federal jobs and found civil servants to be superior to contractors 89 percent of the time. The following year, a study to determine whether 12,573 federal jobs could be done more efficiently by private contractors found in-house workers winning 91 percent of the time, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. And in 2005, a study of tens of thousands of government positions concluded that federal workers had won the job competitions more than 80 percent of the time. All these studies, it should be kept in mind, took place under the administration of George W. Bush, who, upon taking office in 2001, declared it his top management priority that federal workers should compete with contractors for as many as 850,000 government jobs.⁹ Thus, any pressure to influence the outcome of these studies would have been in the opposite direction — putting the outside contractors in the best light.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.

The continual selling of the Afghanistan war

“But we must never forget,” said President Obama recently, “this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”¹⁰

Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the ultra-nationalist group whose members would not question such sentiments. Neither would most Americans, including many of those who express opposition to the war when polled. It’s simple — We’re fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. We’re fighting the same people who attacked New York and Washington. Never mind that out of the tens of thousands the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001. Never mind that the “plot to kill Americans” in 2001 was hatched in Germany and the United States at least as much as in Afghanistan. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

As to “plotting to do so again” … there’s no reason to assume that the United States has any concrete information of this, anymore than did Bush or Cheney who tried to scare us in the same way for more than seven years to enable them to carry out their agenda.

There are many people in Afghanistan who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on houses, wedding parties, and funerals. One doesn’t have to be a member of al Qaeda to feel this way. There doesn’t even have to be such a thing as a “member of al Qaeda”. It tells us nothing that some of them can be called “al Qaeda”. Almost every individual or group in that part of the world not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wishes to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American aggression while being a member of al Qaeda and people retaliating against American aggression while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit in your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

In any event, as in Iraq, the American “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists. This is scarcely in dispute even at the Pentagon.

The only “necessity” that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire?

But the war against the Taliban can’t be won. Except by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to do, and then get out.

The revolution was televised

   You will not be able to stay home, brother.
   You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out.
   You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials.
   Because the revolution will not be televised. …

   There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news
   The revolution will not be right back after a message
   The revolution will not go better with Coke
   The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath
   The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised

These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron’s song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as ‘60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called “revolution”.

Fast Forward to 2009 … Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post:

WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution?

GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution.¹¹

Oh? So that’s it? That’s what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward.

Yugoslavia

During 1998-1999, the United States used the Kosovo conflict to reaffirm its hegemonic role in Europe. US officials deliberately undercut a potential diplomatic solution to the Kosovo war; instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, the United States sought a military solution in which NATO power could once again be demonstrated. The resulting air war, in 1999, succeeded in fully establishing the continued relevance of NATO, thus affirming US hegemony in Europe and undercutting European proclivities for foreign policy independence.

– David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

There’s no issue of the recent past that has caused more friction internationally amongst those on the left than the question of what really took place in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Gibbs’ new book explores many of the myths surrounding this very complicated and controversial slice of history, particularly those dealing with the supposed humanitarian motivation behind the Western powers intervention and the many alleged Serbian atrocities.

1. Washington Post, August 22 and August 26, 2009.
2. Newsweek magazine, July 13, 1992.
3. Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17, 2009.
4. ”Opinion of the Court”, Par. 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001.
5. Read many further details about the case.
6. The Independent (London daily), April 26, 2009.
7. Sunday Times (London), August 16, 2009.
8. Washington Post, August 6, 2009, p.C2.
9. Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006 for this citation plus the three studies mentioned.
10. Talk given at VFW convention in Phoenix, Arizona, August 17, 2009.
11. Washington Post, August 26, 2009.

Two years ago, at Socialism 2007 in Chicago, I spoke about an “invisible government,” a term used by Edward Bernays, one of the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays who, in the 1920s, invented “public relations” as a euphemism for propaganda. Deploying the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation; he called cigarettes “torches of freedom.”

The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together the power of all media — PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising. It was the power of form: of branding and image-making over substance and truth — and I would like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement: the rise of Barack Obama and the silencing of the left.

First, I would like to go back some 40 years to a sultry day in Vietnam.

I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a company of US Marines who had been sent to this village to win hearts and minds.

“My orders”, said the Marine sergeant, “are to sell the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86.” Page 86 was headed WHAM: Winning Hearts and Minds. The marine unit was a Combined Action Company which, explained the sergeant, “means that we attack these folks on Mondays and win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays”. He was joking, though not quite.

The sergeant, who didn’t speak Vietnamese, had arrived in the village, stood up in a jeep and said through a bullhorn: “Come on out everybody, we got rice and candy and toothbrushes to give you!…”

There was silence.

“Now listen, either you gooks come on out, or we’re going to come right in there and get you!”

The people of Tuylon finally came out, and stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben’s Miracle Rice, Hershey bars, party balloons and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery-operated, yellow flush lavatories were held back for the arrival of the colonel.

And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned, and the yellow flush lavatories were unveiled. The colonel cleared his throat and produced a handwritten speech.

“Mr. District Chief and all you nice people,” he said, “what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts. They carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no place on earth like America. It’s the land where miracles happen. It’s a guiding light for me, and for you. In America, you see, we count ourselves as real lucky having the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and we want you nice people to share in our good fortune.”

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” got a mention. All that was missing was the Star Spangled Banner playing in the background.

Of course, the villagers had no idea what the colonel was talking about. When the Marines clapped, they clapped. When the colonel waved, the children waved. As he departed, the colonel shook the sergeant’s hand and said: “You’ve got plenty of hearts and minds here. Carry on, Sergeant?”

“Yessir.”

In Vietnam, I witnessed many spectacles like that. I had grown up in faraway Australia on a steady cinematic diet of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Walt Disney, the Three Stooges and Ronald Reagan. The American Way of Liberty they portrayed might well have been lifted from the WHAM handbook.

I learned that the United States had won World War Two on its own and now led the “free world” as the “chosen” society. It was only much later when I read Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion that I understood something of the power of emotions attached to false ideas and bad history.

Historians call this “exceptionalism” — the notion that the United States has a divine right to bring what it calls liberty to the rest of humanity. Of course, this is a very old refrain; the French and British created and celebrated their own “civilizing mission” while imposing colonial regimes that denied basic civil liberties.

However, the power of the American message is different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to rule Nicaragua, American textbooks referred to an “age of innocence.” American motives were well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said. There was no ideology, they said; and this is still the received wisdom. Indeed, Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main element is its denial that it is an ideology. It is both conservative and liberal, both right and left. All else is heresy.

Barack Obama is the embodiment of this “ism”. Since Obama was elected, leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as a “nation of moral ideals” — the words of Paul Krugman in the New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that, “spiritually advanced people regard the new president as ‘a Lightworker’ . . . who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama’s bombs, or a Pakistani child whose family are among the 700 civilians killed by Obama’s drones. Or Tell it to a child in the carnage of Gaza caused by American smart weapons which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were resupplied to Israel for use in the slaughter “only after the Obama team let it be known it would not object.” The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.

Obama’s is the myth that is America’s last taboo. His most consistent theme was never change; it was power. The United States, he said, “leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good . . . We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And there is this remarkable statement: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that a we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders.” At the National Archives on May 21, he said: “From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.”

Since 1945, “by deed and by example,” the United States has overthrown fifty governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements, and supported tyrannies and set up torture chambers from Egypt to Guatemala. Countless men, women and children have been bombed to death. Bombing is apple pie. And yet, here is the 44th President of the United States, having stacked his government with warmongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, teasing us while promising more of the same.

Here is the House of Representatives, controlled by Obama’s Democrats, voting to approve $16 billion for three wars and a coming presidential military budget which, in 2009, will exceed any year since the end of World War Two, including the spending peaks of the Korean and Vietnam wars. And here is a peace movement, not all of it but much of it, prepared to look the other way and believe or hope that Obama will restore, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, the “nation of moral ideals.”

Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History in the celebrated Smithsonian Institute in Washington. One of the most popular exhibitions was called The Price of Freedom: Americans at War. It was holiday time and lines of happy people, including many children, shuffled through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest, where messages about their nation’s “great mission” were lit up. These included tributes to the quote “exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives” in Vietnam where they were quote “determined to stop communist expansion.” In Iraq, other brave Americans quote “employed air strikes of unprecedented precision.”

What was shocking was not so much the revisionism of two of the epic crimes of modern times but the sheer routine scale of omission.

Like all US presidents, Bush and Obama have much in common. The wars of both presidents, and the wars of Clinton and Reagan, Carter and Ford, Nixon and Kennedy, are justified by the enduring myth of exceptional America — a myth the late Harold Pinter described as “a brilliant, witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is so extraordinary to see an African-American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race — together with gender and even class — can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what matters, above race and gender, is the class one serves.

George Bush’s inner circle — from the State Department to the Supreme Court — was perhaps the most multi racial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary.

To many, Obama’s very presence in the White House reaffirms the moral nation. He is a marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein or Benetton, he is a brand that promises something special — something exciting, almost risqué, as if he might be a radical, as if he might enact change. He makes people feel good. He’s postmodern man with no political baggage.

In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama refers to the job he took after he graduated from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as “a consulting house to multinational corporations.” For some reason, he does not say who his employer was or what he did there. The employer was Business International Corporation, which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action, and infiltrating unions and the left. I know this because it was especially active in my own country, Australia.

Obama does not say what he did at Business International; and there may be nothing sinister, but it seems worthy of enquiry, and debate, surely, as a clue to whom the man is.

During his brief period in the Senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single-payer health care. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate, he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority and has not. Instead, he has excused the perpetrators of torture, reinstated the infamous military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact and opposed habeus corpus.

Daniel Ellsberg was right when he said that, under Bush, a military coup had taken place in the United States, giving the Pentagon unprecedented powers. These powers have been reinforced by the presence of Robert Gates, a Bush family crony and George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, and by all the Bush Pentagon officials and generals who have kept their jobs under Obama.

In Colombia, Obama is planning to spend $46 million on a new military base that will support a regime backed by death squads and further the tragic history of Washington’s intervention in Latin America.

In a pseudo event staged in Prague, Obama promised a world without nuclear weapons to a global audience mostly unaware that America is building new tactical nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Like George Bush, he used the absurdity of Europe threatened by Iran to justify building a missile system aimed at Russia and China.

In a pseudo event at the Annapolis Naval Academy, decked with flags and uniforms, Obama lied that the troops were coming home. The head of the army, General George Casey, says America will be in Iraq for up to a decade; other generals say fifteen years. Units will be relabeled as trainers; mercenaries will take their place. That is how the Vietnam War endured past the American “withdrawal”.

Chris Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion puts it well. “President Obama,” he wrote, “does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel.” And so you are kept in “a perpetual state of childishness.” He calls this “junk politics.”

The tragedy is that Brand Obama appears to have crippled or absorbed the antiwar movement, the peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress, thirty are willing to stand against Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s war party. On June 16, they voted for $106 billion for more war.

In Washington, the Out of Iraq Caucus is out of action. Its members can’t even come up with a form of words of why they are silent. On March 21, a demonstration at the Pentagon by the once mighty United for Peace and Justice drew only a few thousand. The outgoing president of UPJ, Leslie Cagan, says her people aren’t turning up because, “it’s enough for many of them that Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right direction.” And where is the mighty MoveOn these days? Where is its campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what exactly was said when, in February, MoveOn’s executive director, Jason Ruben, met President Obama?

Yes, a lot of good people mobilized for Obama. But what did they demand of him — apart from the amorphous “change”? That isn’t activism.

Activism doesn’t give up. Activism is not about identity politics. Activism doesn’t wait to be told. Activism doesn’t rely on the opiate of hope. Woody Allen once said, “I felt a lot better when I gave up hope.” Real activism has little time for identity politics, a distraction that confuses and suckers good people everywhere.

I write for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, or rather I used to write for it. In February, I sent the foreign editor an article that raised questions about Obama as a progressive force. The article was rejected. Why? I asked. “For the moment,” wrote the editor, “we prefer to maintain a more ‘positive’ approach to the novelty presented by Obama . . . we will take on specific issues . . . but we would not like to say that he will make no difference.”

In other words, an American president drafted to promote the most rapacious system in history is ordained and depoliticized by the left. What is remarkable about this state of affairs is that the so-called radical left has never been more aware, more conscious, of the iniquities of power. The Green Movement, for example, has raised the consciousness of millions of people, so that almost every child knows something about global warming; and yet there is a resistance within the green movement to the notion of power as a military project. Similar observations can be made of the gay and feminist movements; as for the labor movement, is it still breathing?

One of my favorite quotations is from Milan Kundera: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” We should never forget that the primary goal of great power is to distract and limit our natural desire for social justice and equity and real democracy. Long ago, Bernays’s invisible government of propaganda elevated big business from its unpopular status as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic driving force. The American Way of Life began as an advertising slogan. The modern image of Santa Claus was an invention of Coca Cola.

Today, we are presented with an extraordinary opportunity, thanks to the crash of Wall Street and the revelation, for ordinary people, that the free market has nothing to do with freedom. The opportunity is to recognize a stirring in America that is unfamiliar to many on the left, but is related to a great popular movement growing all over the world.

In Latin America, less than 20 years ago, there was the usual despair, the usual divisions of poverty and freedom, the usual thugs in uniforms running unspeakable regimes. There is now a people’s movement based on the revival of indigenous cultures and languages, and a history of popular and revolutionary struggle less affected by ideological distortions than anywhere else.

The recent, amazing achievements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay represent a struggle for community and political rights that is truly historic, with implications for all of us. These successes are expressed perversely in the overthrow of the government of Honduras, for the smaller the country the greater the threat that the contagion of emancipation will follow.

Across the world, social movements and grassroots organizations have emerged to fight free market dogma. They have educated governments in the south that food for export is a problem rather than a solution to global poverty. They have politicized ordinary people to stand up for their rights, as in the Philippines and South Africa. An authentic globalization is growing as never before, and this is exciting.

Consider the remarkable boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign — BDS for short — aimed at Israel, that is sweeping the world. Israeli ships have been turned away from South Africa and western Australia. A French company has been forced to abandon plans to built a railway connecting Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli sporting bodies find themselves isolated. Universities have begun to sever ties with Israel, and students are active for the first time in a generation. Thanks to them, Israel’s South Africa moment is approaching, for this is, partly, how apartheid was defeated.

In the 1950s, we never expected the great wind of the 1960s to blow. Feel the breeze today. In the last eight months millions of angry emails, sent by ordinary Americans, have flooded Washington. This has not happened before. People are outraged as their lives are attacked; they bear no resemblance to the massive mass presented by the media.

Look at the polls that are seldom reported. More than two thirds of Americans say the government should care for those who cannot care for themselves; 64 percent would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone; 59 percent are favorable towards unions; 70 percent want nuclear disarmament; 72 percent want the US completely out of Iraq; and so on.

For too long, ordinary Americans have been cast in stereotypes that are contemptuous. That is why the progressive attitudes of ordinary people are seldom reported in the media. They are not ignorant. They are subversive. They are informed. And they are “anti-American”.

I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian Martha Gellhorn, to explain “anti-American” to me. “I’ll tell you what ‘anti-American’ is,” she said. “It’s what governments and their vested interested call those who honor America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the south with the Civil Rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.”

A certain populism is once again growing in America and which has a proud, if forgotten past. In the nineteenth century, an authentic grassroots Americanism was expressed in populism’s achievements: women’s suffrage, the campaign for an eight-hour day, graduated income tax and public ownership of railways and communications, and breaking the power of corporate lobbyists.

The American populists were far from perfect; at times they would keep bad company, but they spoke from the ground up, not from the top down. They were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. Does that sound familiar?

What Obama and the bankers and the generals, and the IMF and the CIA and CNN fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It is a fear as old as democracy: a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action and are guided by the truth. “At a time of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth a revolutionary act.”

* Watch a video of Pilger’s address.

“I just hope each and every one of my loyal helpers manages to land on his or her financial feet,” offered the distraught and visibly shaken elder Claus, CEO and – until recently – managing stockholder of the firm. “I know this was as much a shock to them as it was to me.” Some three hundred elves are expected to lose their jobs as a result of the acquisition, which could send the unemployment rate in the sparsely-populated North Pole region soaring as high as 93%.

According to company executives, the future of CII’s charitable wing – The Claus Foundation – remains uncertain. When contacted by reporters following Tuesday’s announcement, X. Claus declined to specify what plans, if any, he had for the philanthropic enterprise. He was, however, willing to share a few tantalizing details in an exclusive interview granted to the Wall Street Journal’s Pamela Pabulum:

WSJ: Mr. Claus, thank you for agreeing to talk to us.

X. Claus: My pleasure.

WSJ: First of all, I’m sure our readers would love to hear your expert assessment regarding any fatal flaws in your uncle’s business model which may have led to the kind of long term stock devaluation the company has undergone in recent centuries. What can you tell us about that?

X. Claus: Well, it’s not really a mystery, is it? I mean, you run a giveaway program that rewards every kid in the world for simply being “good”, and what do you expect? I don’t even know how to quantify “good”, do you? It’s too vague a term to be of any use in business, and it’s certainly no basis for a corporate strategy. In my opinion it’s SOCIALISM writ large, pure and simple, and it has no place in a free country like ours.

WSJ: So it’s safe to say you’re not planning to continue producing toys?

X. Claus: Look, here’s the bottom line. We’ve issued urgent instructions to all middle management at Claus Industries to redirect the company’s resources away from the non-profit manufacture of toys and into the highly lucrative and growth-oriented health insurance and pharmaceutical sector of the economy. Accordingly, we’ve changed our name to “ClausCare Inc.”

WSJ: Sounds ambitious.

X. Claus: Pamela, we’re all about the future here at ClausCare.

WSJ: So I guess the children of the world won’t be getting any free goodies in their stockings this year.

X. Claus: Regrettably, no. But I am proud to announce that as an introductory promotion this coming Holiday Season, our marketing department plans to provide enough free lumps of coal to fill every child’s stocking up to the brim. Clean Coal. From the Cheney Family Strip mines in Hell Hole, Wyoming.

WSJ: I’m sure the children will be thrilled.

X. Claus: I hope so. We’re all really tickled about it here at ClausCare, I can tell you. And since it looks like Congress is going to pass a Health Care Reform Bill that requires some 40 million new customers to buy health insurance from private industry without recourse to some blood-thirsty totalitarian government plan involving Nazi “Death Canneries” that grind up old people and turn them into dog food, you can be sure we’ll be coming around to every house on Christmas Eve to sign up all 40 million of you new customers to vastly improved health care contracts. And don’t worry; You’ll be entitled to the sort of comprehensive coverage and up-to-date medical care envisioned by Our Founding Fathers back in 1776. That means free mercury-oxide for all, and no deductibles on leeches.

WSJ: Sounds great. By the way, what does the initial “X” in your name stand for?

X. Claus: It’s a nom de guerre, really. A nickname I picked up at Harvard Business School. It’s short for “Exclusionary.” You see, the guys in my fraternity just started calling me “Exclusionary Claus”, since my major in business school was insurance underwriting, and it just sort of stuck. In fact, my grad school professors got together and presented me with a special award for “Most Creative Writer of Exclusionary Clauses.”

WSJ: Can you give us some examples of your work in that department?

X. Claus: Sure. I was the driving creative force behind several industry favorites, including “Whereas the party of the first part, having failed to disclose his or her previously unforeseen medical condition…” And then of course there’s “In the event the insured fails to meet any of the extrinsic financial obligations imposed after the fact by the insurer in a timely manner…” And my personal favorite, “Under no circumstances shall a condition or complaint resulting from, or perceived as having resulted from, a nuclear conflict not directly attributable to the actions of the insurer result in…etc., etc.” That last one got me an honorable mention at the Health Care Expo in Las Vegas last year.

WSJ: Your Uncle Santa traditionally used helpers in his work, by which of course I mean his elves. I gather they’ll be considered redundant at ClausCare?

X. Claus: Unfortunately, yes.

WSJ: Will you be retraining any of those elves to perform jobs at ClausCare?

X. Claus: Well, there’s a bit of a problem there. You see, because Uncle Santa insisted on paying his employees a living wage for the past 1700 years or so, he had the luxury of skimming off the top of the elf gene pool. But because we here at ClausCare believe strongly that Freedom means “working for free”, we put a lot of advertising dollars into convincing working-class people to undermine their own best interests without expecting any compensation in return. This philosophy requires us, for obvious reasons, to dredge the bottom of that same gene pool as it were, to get at the deep sedimentary layer often referred to as “the salt of the earth.” What we recover by this process is a different class of helper: less mercurial and more leaden of mind; less cerebral, more visceral in nature. But suffice it to say these workers serve our purpose quite well. Because of their near total absence of annoying brain wave interference, the predigested talking points we provide them to recite at public meetings are retained in their pristine state, you know, right off the printed page, as it were…

WSJ: Are these creatures even elves?

X. Claus: Well, genetically speaking, we’re not exactly sure. We refer to them as “Oaves.”

WSJ: If I’m not mistaken, the Urban Dictionary defines “oaves” as the plural of “oaf.”

X. Claus: Hmmm…Interesting. That may be true, but for us it’s a useful acronym. It stands for “obtuse, agitated, vituperative, and educationally stunted.” But for all that, these oaves are worth their considerable weight in gold, and frankly, we couldn’t operate without them!

WSJ: Yeah, I’ve seen them on TV; they can suck the intellectual oxygen right out of a room.

X. Claus: Damn straight.

WSJ: So, everybody knows Santa used a magic sleigh pulled by flying reindeer to make his appointed rounds. How do you get your “oaves” from town hall to town hall?

X. Claus: Well, Pamela, now that, thankfully, we’re out of the toy business, we decided to scrap that old wreck of a sleigh and replace it with a fleet of brand new, state-of-the-art coal-burning buses.

WSJ: Your buses are powered by coal?

X. Claus: Not powered by coal, heated by coal. They’re actually pulled by invisible unicorns.

WSJ: Forgive me, but aren’t unicorns imaginary?

X. Claus: Of course, but our oaves don’t know that! One should never underestimate the power of credulity to change the world, let alone pull buses. Actually, we’ve told the oaves they can help the invisible unicorns by pushing with their feet, and we’ve cut holes in the floorboards to facilitate this. It’s sort of …ponderous I suppose, but trust me, if the buses moved any faster, the oaves would be confused by all the blurred scenery. This way they can all stick their heads out of the window, relax, and enjoy the ride.

WSJ: One last question, Mr. Claus. Will ClausCare’s corporate headquarters remain at their current location at the North Pole?

X. Claus: Well, the North Pole is, in some respects, an admirable location. It’s extremely remote and inaccessible by phone or even internet, which makes it ideal from the standpoint of avoiding inconvenient medical claims by our customers. But I’m afraid my doctor (and by my doctor I mean, of course, the entire Health Insurance Lobby) has expressed some concerns about the climate. He points out that the average daily high temperature there is a relatively balmy minus 30 degrees F. and growing warmer (not due to any man-made climate change, I should point out). His recommendation is that in order to avoid fatal cardiac thaw, I should move to the South Pole, where it is a full 20 degrees cooler on average.

And as retired Texas congressman Dick Armey likes to say, “The only heart-warming stories we in the insurance business enjoy telling involve hungry cannibals around a campfire.”

WSJ: Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Claus.

X. Claus: Not at all.

CDC scientists isolated and developed the seed strain of swine flu. Working furiously to manufacture the vaccine are five major drug companies, which received about $1.8 billion in federal funding to produce the anti-virus. Leading the testing, analyses, and education campaigns about the swine flu, in addition to the CDC, are the U.S. Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Federal Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in addition to the Department of Health and Human Services, which developed the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza protection.

Testing of the vaccines on human subjects is being done at eight major U.S. universities and hospitals, which received federal funding. The federal government is also providing about $260 million in grants to state health departments to give the vaccine at no charge to people who do not have insurance or whose insurance does not cover vaccinations.

In several European countries, which are producing about 70 percent of all vaccines for a worldwide population, most research and production is being funded and carried out by government agencies.

But if you listen to the multi-millionaire conservative bloviators of talk radio and Fox News, or the shrill screeching of a minority of tea-baggers and conservatives at dozens of town hall meetings, you hear one theme. These right-wing loonies say they don’t want the government involved in health care. No government. Get government out of their lives. Government is evil! The well-orchestrated campaign against health care reform focuses upon shouting over any attempt by members of Congress to present the truth about health care bills. Apparently, they believe the health care crisis is a sports game; whoever shouts the loudest to drown out everyone else gets the most points.

If these harpies of the right are all-so-determined to stop universal health care, if they don’t want the government in health care, then I have a couple of suggestions.

First, because the baggers scream “socialist” at anything they don’t approve, they should refuse to accept Social Security or Medicare when eligible. If they’re veterans, they should refuse any VA medical programs, and reject any disability income.

Next, when the swine flu vaccines are ready for distribution in Fall, the opponents of health care reform should refuse to be vaccinated. That’s right. They need to stand by their principles, and not get the vaccines. After all, by their bastardized strain of logic, anything with a government stamp on health care must be suspect. They may even believe the massive public education campaign by the federal government is just a scare tactic, that the vaccines—primarily researched, tested, and funded by the federal government—may even be part of a secret conspiracy by the federal government to control Americans’ minds and make everyone Communists.

Nevertheless, whatever their beliefs, when the Swine Flu vaccine is ready, the opponents of the “intrusion” of the federal government into health care just need to say “NO”! but don’t say “no” for the rest of us.

Missing from this debate are the millions of us who support a single-payer system. The cost effective and truly humane plan proposed in House Resolution 676 for a National Health Insurance Program, now faces the possibility of being reduced to a footnote in the history of the early twenty-first century healthcare debate. So, what is to be done? My recent trip to a health care themed “town hall” meeting attended by about 250 people in New York State’s 20th district, represented by Scott Murphy (D), provide some answers to this question.

Most of us have by now seen media coverage of these “town hall” meetings: Elected officials make a case for Obamacare, right-wing protestors carry signs denouncing Obama as a socialist and make wild claims about the dictatorial hell “government healthcare” will usher in. Those in support of the president’s as yet unclear plan shout back and carry their own signs. Blows are occasionally exchanged. Single-payer advocates are rarely heard from.

At the town hall meeting I attended, I was surprised to see that the media’s coverage of these events was fairly accurate. One protestor’s sign alluded to the 1973 movie Soylent Green by suggesting that a government run plan might create a dystopian nightmare where patients stand in front of “Obama’s death panel” (as former governor Sarah Palin recently described it) waiting to be judged worthy of scarce, rationed health care. When the town hall was opened to Q&A, right supporters offered an ample serving of this fear-mongering and misinformation.

When I had my chance to speak, I thanked the members of the military, firefighters, and police officers who had spoken (pause, wild applause from the right) – for being living testaments to the success of public services and government-run institutions (laughter and applause from the left and confused silence from the right). I then told my own story — of both of my parents passing away in the past four years, of being told their insurance had run out even after decades of working for the state, that they were denied needed care because of an inability to pay, and that this amounted to rationing health care — rationed based on those who can and cannot afford it. The feared nightmare, I said, is already here.

I asked Congressman Murphy why, despite the support of tens of millions of Americans, a single-payer option was not being discussed as a real alternative to the present system. Several members of the crowd applauded, expressing their agreement, but most were silent. In Congressman Murphy’s reply, he claimed that he had not heard much support from within his district for a single-payer system and had a responsibility to reflect the wishes of his constituents.

The near silence from a crowd of approximately 250 people when I mentioned single-payer left me a bit confused. This crowd had been extremely vocal for over an hour, interrupting Congressman Murphy and nearly every speaker to interject their opinions either for or against the Obama plan. Why were there so few cries in support of single-payer and, even more strangely, why was the right-wing eerily silent when I suggested a plan that would bring us even closer to real socialism? Second, I think Congressman Murphy might have been correct: single-payer advocates have not been vocal enough in making their position known. This is not helped by others on the left who have abandoned hope for single-payer and instead support Obama’s plan because they see single-payer as an impossibility in corporate dominated America. The “lesser of two evils” mentality has apparently migrated from the ballot box to the health care debate.

After asking my questions, I moved around the crowd a bit, striking up conversations with the handful of single-payer advocates as well as Obamacare supporters. It turned out that few of the Obamacare advocates I spoke with had even heard of HR 676, but were very interested to learn more. It became apparent that the near silence I experienced after asking Congressman Murphy about single-payer was attributable to the fact that few there had even heard of HR 676. Most, it seems, had no idea what I was talking about. Congressman Murphy’s claim that few in his district had brought up single-payer started to become more believable. So, where does that leave us?

Fueled by half-truths and outright lies thousands of right wing meet-up groups are springing up around the country, inspired by Glenn Beck and other so called “patriot” pundits. These are the people at the town hall meetings parroting the slogans of fear and divisiveness. Their strategy is working, their numbers are growing, and partly because of their influence the debate over healthcare is not moving beyond the two options mentioned at the beginning of this article.

If we advocates of single-payer have any chance at winning real change, or at least having our voices heard in this debate, we need to act quickly, act firmly, and act collectively to educate the public and make our voices heard. Some basic ideas came to mind as a result of my trip to a town hall meeting.

We should not assume that most people understand what single-payer means, or know that it even exists as an option. Always be willing and able to explain the benefits of HR 676, in comparison to the false options of the other proposals. Flyers with basic information on single-payer can be placed at local establishments such as coffee shops, bars or wherever people gather. We should use the media exposure to our advantage.

Let’s start seriously putting the screws to elected representatives. We should contact them to present single-payer as a viable option. If they reject this, we can escalate the pressure. Either way, the time to act is now!

Of course, we cannot go it alone in this struggle. Consider getting involved with organizations that advocate for single-payer, like the Socialist Party-USA or Healthcare-NOW. History shows that there is power in numbers.

We must always remain in motion. Get active and organize locally to protest, petition, and gain support.

Time is running out. We must act quickly and decisively if our voice is to be heard.

Mother Earth Circling Grandmothers: Women’s relationship roles, revolving around motherhood, are the key to understanding Indigenius Socialism. Photo: Stewart Steinhauer

Ready?

By the the beginning of the 21st century—after the imagined end of history, and much to Euro-origin intellectuals’ surprise—a call for socialism in the 21st century arose in Latin America, first among Mayan Zapatistas and then spreading southwards across the remainder of Turtle Island.

Socialism for the 21st century became Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s electoral battle cry, where, in spite of the complete and absolute opposition of the privately owned public media, he won election after election on the promise to redistribute oil revenues to the 60 per cent of the Venezuelan population that was desperately poor. Following Chavez’s program of Catholic liberation theology mixed with a smattering of Marx and topped off with hefty doses of pragmatic state capitalism, nation states across the southern continent tilted Left, with the notable exception of Colombia—after Israel, the largest recipient of US military aid in the world.

Like Evo Morales and the Bolivian Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), Indigenous-led social movements throughout Latin America are openly anti-capitalist, because capitalism as a system of political economy means ongoing genocide for Indigenous Peoples and perpetual ecocide for the non-human portion of the Mother Earth Super-Being, of which humans are a part. (See CIBC and Me, Part IV for details.) Coming from a deep history of harmonious relations with Mother Earth, and having already spent millennia in systems of political economy based on simple egalitarian sharing, Indigenous Peoples have something to say about what a potential future steady state global system of political economy could look like.

The first thing I have to point to is the European model of industrial development. It doesn’t work for a multiplicity of reasons, and negates Marx’s theoretical explanation of how capitalism would automatically create a human society filled with workers who will, some day, transform capitalism into a socialist society. From an Indigenous perspective, the Euro-origin industrial model arises from a psychological pitting of human against nature, manufacturing an ideological division that does not exist in Indigenous reality. Further, it posits that something called “scarcity” exists, and that technological development is necessary to better this supposedly natural state of scarcity. Within this imagined dichotomy, nature is wild and humans are civilized; humans living in a state of nature are wild, and therefore not real humans. The real humans live in a state of technologically ameliorated scarcity, assembling vehicles for Ford, GM and Chrysler, with two mortgages and four credit cards. So much for Marx.

From the Indigenous-to-Turtle Island point of view, there is no dichotomy between wild and civilized. There is no such thing as wilderness. When Europeans arrived on Turtle Island they saw wilderness, while Indigenous Peoples saw the space as fully inhabited by culturally developed humans who were living in an active relationship with Mother Earth. Land that was fully, ethically, sustainably inhabited by Indigenous Peoples was seen by Europeans as undeveloped. John Locke’s labour theory of value claims that an Indian’s land is not worth one-thousandth of what the same acre of land would be worth were it located in England. Several hundred years after Locke’s writings, agricultural researchers are suggesting that, if all factors from the global industrial base are included, free-ranging a 60,000,000-head herd of buffalo is most likely the best agricultural use of the High Plains region of North America—exactly the use it was being put to prior to the introduction of Europe’s industrial development model.

From an Indigenous point of view, a logical recommendation for socialism for the 21st century is a complete redesign of humanity’s global industrial base. The redesigned industrial base has to abandon both the myth of scarcity and the myth of wilderness, while embracing the reality that humans actually are an integral part of an enormous Super-Being, whom Indigenous folks have long known as Mother Earth.

A quick dash back to reality for a moment: we humans aren’t going to voluntarily undertake a task of that magnitude while we are in our current antisocial state of mind. It’s easy to point to the global problems facing humanity and say that our self-induced trauma has shaped us to be the species we are now. The challenging part is imagining the way forward from here.

This brings my imagination to the crucial place: the crux of the matter; the originating point. The human vagina. Not being personally endowed with one, and certainly subject to the same forces noted by psychological studies concluding that a man’s imagination goes there at least once every 10 seconds, I realize I’m fair game for criticism.

However, as a once-popular song might have said had it been penned by an Indigenous lyricist, the vagina bone is connected to the stomach bone, and the stomach bone is connected to the heart bone. In an odd way, that just about sums up gender relationships while being anatomically correct, energetically speaking. Indigenous socialism arises from the relationship between mother and child, the first social relationship we humans experience. Looking into the structure of the social institution of Indigenous motherhood, prior to the cataclysmic assault staged by Christian missionaries hell-bent on their civilizing mission, I see some noteworthy features.

Connecting the heart bone to the head bone, I see the common thread of Indigenius Socialism expressed through a particular aspect of human sexuality. Modern medical researchers call it oxytocin, but you don’t have to name it to know it. Human females experience an inter-human bonding, or a primary socialism, during sexual arousal, sexual activity, sexual orgasm(s!), child birth, breast feeding, communal food preparation, communal feasting, and communal socializing in general, when the mood is non-violent. From the very specific Indigenous point of view found on the High Plains, where all those buffalos were roaming among the playful deer and antelope, pre-Christianized human societies practised a non-hierarchical matrifocal social form, where women’s relationships established the social norms. Men had roles, too, and I’ll get to that in time, but women’s relationship roles, revolving around motherhood, are the key to understanding Indigenius Socialism and the foundation of what I am proposing here as Syncretic Indigenius Socialismo.

In the human brain, there is a formation medical researchers call the limbic node; it is croissant-shaped, with one end arching around to almost touch the other. Almost, but not quite. Electricity-based human nerve impulses can jump the gap; stimulation on either end causes excitation on the other end. Oral receptors are at one end of the limbic node and genital receptors are at the other end of the limbic node.

Those crazy medical researchers! Their studies show that in societies with higher emphasis on general brain development, there is a corresponding higher level of oral-genital sexual activity. French and Cree societies both fit into the higher-brain development category and I’ll gamble a wager on the origin of the Metis Nation from the shared preference for oral sex. Is the Metis infinity symbol really just a clever play on a sideways 69?

The head bone is connected to the vagina bone, as many intelligent people know, and you don’t have to be able to articulate the mechanics of it all to get it. In pre-Christian Cree society, adventures in sexuality were separated from pregnancy by well understood and widely practised plant-based and practice-based birth control. You could have your cake and eat it, too. Women were free to choose when, where, and with whom they would conceive a child. Women chose to have children spaced about four years apart—two or three at most—in a lifetime and had children in age cohorts within their own circle of age cohort sister-cousins. Children grew up with an age cohort of cousins, without the burden of having immediate older or younger siblings and with the benefit of being born into a circle of similarly aged playmate relatives.

Women often chose to have a first child around the age of 16, when their mothers were about 32, their grandmothers were about 48, their great-grandmothers were about 64, and their great-great grandmothers were about 80. It was not uncommon for women to live to 100 years, so up to six generations of mothers could be present in an extended family, with the newborn infant representing the seventh generation. This meant that every new mother was surrounded by a depth of experience in the fine arts of Indigenous Socialism. She was certainly never on her own, without support, trying to care for several, or even a dozen or more children, all her own, often on her own, as was the European standard at that same time in history.

Out of this foundational matrix arose the basic form of Indigenous Socialism. By choosing fathers from across the bio-region, extended family villages were cross-linked with many other extended family villages, in an intricate web that formed the regional and national governance systems. It was literally all in the family. The genius of Indigenous Socialism was that it did not extend from an avant-garde of intellectuals as a theory imposed imperfectly, top down, on a mass population, but instead was an organic product of a matrifocal society. When Fredrick Engels travelled to upper New York State to see for himself Haudenosaunee society in action, he marvelled at how a territorially large and heavily populated region could self-manage without elected officials, judges, police or prisons.

Like technological development, the organization of daily affairs in human society was founded on a completely different paradigm. Men did have roles, but women’s expectations of men were adjusted to account for men’s inherent weaknesses, most notably a propensity towards violence and a severe shortage of oxytocin. The poor dears could only get a blast of the primal socialist juice during orgasm; all the more reason to assist them in attaining as many as possible during a lifetime. Along with frequent orgasms, ceremonial activities also played an important part in reducing the potential stressor on a socialist system caused by an overabundance of testosterone—for instance, the sweatlodge. This wasn’t just an Indigenous introduction; Scandanavian societies, too, recognized the social benefits of immersing men in energy-sapping hot steamy environments for prolonged periods of time.

The Indigenius twist was an emphasis on the latent altruistic nature possibly underlying male humans’ obvious violent nature, as a remedy to the anti-social behaviours otherwise all too dominant. Protocol rituals in a simple sweatlodge ceremony remind and reinforce the necessary immersion of humans in the natural world; many times I’ve heard Elders leading sweatlodge ceremonies ritually comment on how we humans must humble ourselves and crawl on our hands and knees into the lodge, re-entering the womb of Mother Earth. During normal sweatlodge proceedings, water, earth, wind and fire are acknowledged with gratitude, from the perspective of the human family, while reminding us of our survival-based obligations to the circle of natural forces we have emerged from. The combination of intense heat, complete darkness and an extraordinary soundscape often moves participants out of day-to-day mundane realities and into the immediacy of relationship with Mother Earth. Everyone simultaneously has a unique experience and a deeply bonding common experience. Real socialism.

The genius of Indigenous ceremony is that it intentionally creates a psychological space where Indigenius Socialism can come to life, rewarding co-operation, voluntary sharing and spontaneous acts of kindness, while penalizing greed, selfishness and violence. These actions are easy for women, but hard for men—that damn testosterone! Within the ceremonial space, Indigenous women have figured out a method, over millennia, for engaging men, by using the same tactics used with young children. Useful roles are identified and social prestige is offered, while steady, firm Elder female hands quietly steer the ceremonial proceedings from a discreet position in the background.

I realize that we seem to be a long way away from the way of life that Rosa Luxemburg called primitive communism; she was just looking at what Marxists call the mode of production and she didn’t mean the mode of reproduction of the reserve army of labour. A syncretic Indigenius Socialism for the 21st century has to account, in practice, for both the mode of production and the mode of reproduction and does so by putting the mode of reproduction where it belongs: first. You can’t build a socialist future among antisocial human beings; the 20th century is a fine illustration of that point.

Becoming pregnant, being pregnant, giving birth, nurturing a new life: here’s where we can see the transcendence of the notions of wilderness and scarcity. Mother Earth is not wild, nor is She short on essential items for Her existence. The same is potentially true for every human mother; the keys are sharing and co-operation. Exactly what a global human society would look like following those two simple concepts is not for me to say, but I can predict something.

Indigenius Socialism will be built by women, for humanity, utilizing everything now in existence, to rise above the barbarism of the present moment. We men can choose to be women’s assistants in this project; it could be an ecstatic experience. Imagine global human population plummeting in a women-led movement, while orgasms per lifetime are skyrocketing. Perhaps the Metis Nation is a signpost to the future: Indigenous Peoples will be Peoples indigenous to Mother Earth—one race, diverse, living locally while thinking globally, wickedly intelligent, one more species among many worth saving from extinction. There is a window of opportunity now, but, if we humans don’t take it, we will just create another one soon. We will eventually choose socialism over barbarism; our Mother told us to.

Internal and External Correlation of Forces

The correlation of forces between capitalists and workers in the energy sector in Latin America varies greatly: In Venezuela, the Chavez government, with the backing of the oil workers union, has extended public ownership and distributed oil revenues to the popular classes through food subsidies, universal health and public education programs. At the other extreme in Colombia under President Uribe, private foreign oil companies are increasingly in control, profits are repatriated to the imperial countries or taken out of the country by the domestic elite, government revenues subsidize the oligarchy and government-backed death squads and the military to assassinate and threaten trade union and community leaders.

Between these two poles of the nationalist left and the neo-fascist right, several other variants exist: Social democrat, social liberal and neo-liberal.

Bolivia and Ecuador, under Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, represent the social democratic approach, proposing ‘partnerships’ between ‘state’ and foreign capitalist oil companies, which share the profits from exploitation of crude petroleum. The foreign companies still control most or all of the refining and trading and the social democratic government have yet to establish their own ‘marketing systems.’

The ‘social liberal’ policies are found in Brazil and Argentina where the major oil companies are ‘state’ only in name only, as they are traded on the stock markets in Latin America and Wall Street. State revenue is distributed in an unequal proportion, the bulk used to subsidize the agro-mineral sector and minority share to fund social programs – including basic anti-poverty programs.

The neo-liberal policies are found in Mexico and Peru where former publicly owned oil companies and energy resources have been handed over to foreign oil and energy companies. In Mexico only the militancy of the electrical workers union(SME) has prevented the government from privatizing this strategic industry. Under the neo-liberal regimes the oil and energy revenues have been distributed almost exclusively among the foreign and domestic ruling class and only a minimum’ trickles down’ to the workers, peasants and Indian communities in the form of subsistence “poverty programs.” Neo-liberal regimes disinvest and plunder the public enterprises, decreasing their share of production and leaving them with debts, obsolete technology and declining capacity to fulfill overseas obligations.

The Impact of the Economic Boom and Global Recession (2003-2009)

The performance and ownership of the energy sector is influenced by the internal class struggle, the condition of the world economy and the rise and decline of US imperialism. The crisis of neo-liberalism and the popular rebellions between 1999-2005 ended the principal phase of large-scale privatization in many countries of Latin America. The overthrow of the governments of de la Rua in Argentina, Sanchez de Losado in Bolivia and Noboa and Gutierrez in Ecuador, the defeat of the golpistas in Venezuela (April 2002) and the bosses lockout (December 2002-February 2003) led the radical mass movements to set a new agenda: The re-nationalization of the energy sector: petroleum, the electrical sector, mining and other strategic sectors.

The popular rebellions however, with the exception of Venezuela, did not lead to worker-peasant governments. Instead, center-left middle class-led alliances with the popular classes led to some partial reforms. In Bolivia, Evo Morales increased the role of the state in partnership with 42 foreign-owned oil and gas companies. Kirchner set up a state company but refused to re-nationalize YPF/Repsol in Argentina. In Ecuador, Correa increased taxes on petroleum companies, but the foreign multinational companies still produce 57% of the oil. In Brazil, Lula refused to re-nationalize the privatized enterprises – and the majority of shares in Petrobras have remained in the hands of private investors.

The major struggle against the energy and mining companies’ exploitation in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Chile were led by the Indian movements and in some cases were supported by petroleum workers and peasant organizations. The reason is clear: The energy companies were not merely exploiting labor, they were destroying their economies and living conditions through massive contamination of the environmentand seizure of their traditional.

In Brazil, Lula’s large-scale, long-term promotion of huge multi-national sugar plantations and refineries producing ethanol displaced thousands of small farmers and Indian communities and intensified the exploitation of the rural workers. The rural landless workers’ movement (MST) and other rural social movements, allied with Lula, engaged in defensive struggles. However, without urban allies, they were unable to defeat the combination of Lula and agro-business.

Urban Workers and Trade Unions

The major driving force in the popular rebellions against neo-liberalism varies in different countries and at different times.

In Ecuador, the oil, mining and factory workers joined the mass peasant movements to overthrow Noboa at the beginning of the decade. In Argentina, the unemployed workers and the middle class led the struggle to overthrow De la Rua. In Venezuela, the petroleum workers split with a minority supporting the bosses’ lockout and the majority took control and operated the wells in support of President Chavez. Throughout the decade, however, the energy sector workers have been organized and militant in defense of their economic sector, opposing privatization and protecting their living standards through mass struggle. But their presence in the popular rebellions has been scarce. In many cases the leadership of the energy trade unions has supported the center-left regimes in order to secure wage concessions and job protection. In the best of cases, the energy trade unions have engaged in solidarity demonstrations with the mass struggle of the peasants, Indians and unemployed.

Paradoxically, the strong and militant organization of the energy unions has led to economic gains and sectoral reforms, which have led to highly segregated islands of affluence among a mass of urban and rural poor. The past decade has witnessed the decline of the energy workers as a vanguard in the popular rebellions: Other classes have taken their place. This has created a strategic danger because in the course of large-scale privatizations of the energy sector, the workers will fail to secure the support of the rest of the working class and peasants.

While oil exploitation in the Amazon creates ‘jobs for oil workers,’ it destroys the livelihood of the Indigenous communities and sets off a deadly conflict between the oil companies and their workers against the mass of artisans, small farmers and Indigenous communities dependent on farming, fishing, and handicrafts in proximity to the petroleum and mining operations.

The World Recession and the Energy Sector

The world crisis cannot be resolved by strikes and protests alone. Even re-nationalization cannot, in itself, create the basis for a national recovery. The only alternative facing the energy sector workers is an internal ‘cultural-political revolution’ in which they rethink their basic strategy and move beyond sectoral struggles.

The current prolonged deep recession can only be confronted at the national-political level – by a turn to forming a broad-mass political alliance with the popular classes with a strategy for taking state power. In the face of the collapse of capitalism, the trade union struggle is no longer effective. The trade unions can only succeed by taking a decisive turn toward anti-capitalist movements – a turn toward an explicit embrace of socialism.

Today the entire capitalist class has seized control of the state, specifically the state treasury, to finance their survival and recovery at the expense of the workers, peasants, Indians and the urban poor. As the crisis deepens, mass urban and rural rebellion will once again break the bonds of bourgeois hegemony. The question will arise: Will the energy workers be part of a socialist solution or part of the capitalist problem? Will the energy workers return to become part of the vanguard or remain part of the rearguard? What is absolutely clear is that the energy workers occupy a strategic position in the world capitalist system – without petroleum nothing moves, without electricity the bankers cannot count their profits and the investors cannot read their dividend payments.

Never has the capitalist system in its entirety demonstrated today in real life that it is a failed system – neither producing goods and services, nor providing credit and finance, nor employing labor.

Karl Marx’s famous phrase comes to mind: “A specter is haunting the capitalist class: The coming of the socialist revolution.”

Panic ensued. The one hallway leading out of their attic apartment was engulfed in flames. Charles, Annie and James’ 19-year-old son, made a daring leap through the wall of fire and escaped, but the rest of the family was trapped. The only way out of the inferno was through the window; there were no fire escapes. Annie made it down to the second floor windowsill with the help of another son, Willis. The crowd below placed a pile of blankets on the ground to cushion her fall and told Annie, dangling for her life, to let go. She hit the pile and survived. Willis also jumped and survived. The fire, described by one Chicago firefighter as a “holocaust,” killed four of the Hickman children. They were found underneath the bed with Leslie (14), shielding the bodies of his younger siblings Elvena (9), Sylvester (7), and Velvena (3).

Hickman returned home the following morning to find his building gutted and his family gone. He recounted later that a neighbor approached him and broke the tragic news. “He said, ‘Mr. Hickman, I hate to tell you this, four of your children is burnt to death.’ And I weakened to the ground.” Even though he was distraught and wracked with pain, Hickman remembered a threat made by his landlord to burn out the tenants out of his building if they didn’t move out.

Hickman found his family, buried his children, moved into a new apartment, and returned to work. But justice eluded him. “Paper was made to burn, coal and rags. Not people. People wasn’t made to burn, ” he told his son. The police didn’t seriously investigate the case. Coleman, his landlord, was a free man. Over the next six months, Hickman became increasingly depressed and frustrated. His family worried about his mental stability. On July 16, he picked up his .32 caliber pistol and went to confront Coleman at his home on the Southside of Chicago. He found Coleman sitting in car outside his house and accused him of setting the fire. Hickman later claimed that Coleman admitted it. Hickman, a deeply religious man, raised his pistol, looked Coleman straight in the eye and said, “God is my secret judge,” and shot him four times. Coleman died three days later.

Police arrested James Hickman at his home and charged him with murder. State prosecutors sought the death penalty. The Hickman family saga could have ended with another tragedy with James facing life in prison or execution by the State of Illinois. But a small group of revolutionary socialists in Chicago, members of the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP), took the lead in putting together a vibrant community based campaign that ultimately resulted in James Hickman going free. How did they accomplish this?

Jim Crow Chicago Style

James Hickman, like many African Americans during and immediately following the Second World War, came to Chicago to escape the grinding poverty of life in the rural Deep South. Hickman was born on February 19, 1907 near Louisville, Mississippi. His parents were sharecroppers and at ten years old he went to work in the fields. When James was sixteen years old he married Annie, who was to be his wife for the rest of his life. They had nine children together. His first goal after arriving in Chicago was to find a decent paying job to support his large family. He eventually found one at International Harvester’s Wisconsin Steel plant near the Indiana border. But finding decent housing for his family was another story.

Hickman searched for housing in Chicago when the overwhelmingly bulk of the city’s growing African-American population was still confined to a narrow sliver of land on the Southside of the city starting at what was then called 22nd Street (now called Cermak) and stretching to 62nd Street between Wentworth and Cottage Grove Avenues. More than 60,000 black workers came to Chicago from 1940 to 1944 seeking employment in war-related industries. This migration to Chicago continued after the war. “Between 1940 and 1950 Chicago’s black population swelled by 214, 534,” according to Chicago housing historian Arnold Hirsch, bringing it up to a total of 492, 265. The boundaries of the ghetto were walled off by restrictive “covenants”—deals between white homeowners and larger institutions, which stipulated that that only whites could buy homes in certain defined areas.

In 1927, the Chicago Real Estate Board began promoting racially restrictive covenants to YMCAs, churches, women’s clubs, the many chambers of commerce and property owners’ associations as a way of “protecting” the value of their property from incoming black families. This racist housing policy was backed by the city and by the policies of the federal government. It is believed that by the mid-1940s as much as 80 percent of Chicago’s residential housing was covered by restrictive covenants of one kind or another. The Supreme Court in 1948 ruled that restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, the year following the Hickman case, though little would change for many years.

The available housing for Blacks in Chicago was confined almost entirely to the South Side ghetto, leading to massive overcrowding. A small enclave of Blacks was beginning to grow on the West Side of the city, but it was plagued by the same problems that residents struggled with in the South Side ghetto. In many cases, black landlords were as guilty as white landlords of making money hand-over-fist by cutting up apartments into smaller and smaller units called “kitchenettes.” The cute sounding word really meant a dilapidated one-room apartment. According to Hirsch, “The Chicago Community Inventory estimated that there were at least 80,000 such ‘conversions’ between 1940 and 1950.” Nicholas Lemann, in history of the black migration to Chicago, The Promised Land, vividly describes the kitchenettes as “rickety three-story tenemen…with heating, plumbing, and insulation that were rudimentary at best and often completely non-functional.” Yet, there was little to no options for black families seeking shelter. The housing crunch for blacks was made worse by returning veterans. Blacks faced white violence when they tried to move into predominately white communities. This is how Jim Crow worked in Chicago. This is also how James Hickman met David Coleman.

A dangerous man

David Coleman was also from the South and came to Chicago in 1943 with ambitions to be a businessman. Coleman met a woman in July 1946 with a building to sell at 1733 West Washburne, on the West Side of Chicago; he leased it from her shortly thereafter. In effect, he had day-to-day control of the property and he collected the rents.

In the middle of August 1946, Hickman heard that an apartment was available at Coleman’s building, which was subdivided into Kitchenettes. Coleman first showed him the basement apartment for $50 a month. Hickman later told journalist John Bartlow Martin, “The water was half a leg deep in the basement…no windows, no lights, no nothing in there.” Hickman declined the basement “apartment” but Coleman quickly offered him an attic apartment for $6 a week until the space on the second floor became free. “We walked up the stairs, it so dark,” Hickman later testified, “we almost had to feel our way…I am walking around looking at it, I don’t like this. She [Annie] said, I don’t nether but surely we can stay here because we ain’t got no place.” It was a small attic that adults could barely stand-up in, and there was no electricity, no gas, and only one window. But they needed shelter for their seven children. So, despite their reservations the Hickman’s told Coleman that they would take the attic “apartment” with the expectation that the second floor apartment would be theirs soon. They gave Coleman one hundred dollars as a down payment.

Days turned to weeks and still there was no word from Coleman on the promised apartment. Finally, Hickman confronted Coleman in mid-September 1946 and demanded back his $100 deposit so he could look for another place. Coleman refused. “I won’t pay you until I get ready,” Coleman barked at Hickman. In return Hickman said he would take him to court. Hickman recalled that Coleman threatened to burn him out. “He said he had a man on the East Side ready to burn the place up if…I had him arrested.” The Hickmans swore out a warrant for Coleman’s arrest but the police didn’t arrest him.

This wasn’t the first time that Coleman threatened to burn his building. The previous fall, tenants in Coleman’s building stopped contractors (who showed up with no notice) from further cutting up their apartments into smaller units. Coleman appeared at the scene and tenants told him that he would have to go to court to evict them. He declared, “I am the owner, I don’t have to go to Court to do that, I will get everybody out of here when I want if it takes fire.”

Coleman was clearly a dangerous man, but the city authorities did nothing. In fact, the coroner’s jury that heard testimony concerning the death of the Hickman children could not decide if the fire was accidental or deliberate, and recommended that the State’s Attorney initiate an investigation into it. No serious investigation was done. In the end, Coleman was fined by the city authorities for a series of safety and health violations—totaling $450—the equivalent of $112.50 a piece for each of the dead Hickman children.

“We got there first”

Soon after Hickman shot and mortally wounded Coleman, he returned home and waited for the police to arrest him. He offered no resistance and confessed to what would soon be the murder of David Coleman. While in jail Hickman was interviewed by a two of the most important newspapers in Chicago, the Chicago Daily Defender, the leading Black newspaper in Chicago, and the Chicago Daily Tribune. But by far the best piece of journalism on Hickman was written by Robert Birchman for The Militant, the weekly newspaper of the Socialist Worker’s Party, who laid out the case. “The story of Hickman is the story of negligence and callous disregard of housing and health conditions. It is the story of the horrible slums in which the Negro people are forced to live in dilapidated, disease-ridden firetraps,” declared Birchman. “It is the most tragic of many calamities in which 22 persons have lost their lives, many others suffered injuries and hundreds made homeless as a result of fires in Chicago’s Negro ghettos since the first of the year.” Shortly after Birchman’s interview with Hickman, M.J. Myer, a Chicago labor attorney and co-counsel in the (historically important but largely forgotten) Minneapolis sedition trial of American Trotskyists in 1941, became lead counsel for Hickman. Myer released a statement shortly after the coroner’s inquest into Coleman’s death, that read in part, “In Hickman’s mind all evidence pointed to Coleman’s responsibility for the burning to death of his four children This idea has obsessed him until it reached a point where he no longer could control himself.” Myer also announced that a defense committee was being formed on Hickman’s behalf. Two other attorneys joined Myer; Leon Despres, then a counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and soon to be a famous Chicago alderman, and William H. Temple, an African-American criminal defense attorney and a member of the Chicago NAACP executive board, giving Hickman an effective legal team. They all agreed to represent him without compensation.

How did the SWP get involved in the case so rapidly? They had 150 members in the greater Chicago area, whereas the Stalinist Communist party, by far the dominant group on the U.S. Left, had easily ten times that number, if not more. “We got there first, not the Communist Party, because our members were involved in the neighborhood in tenant rights,” longtime socialist Frank Fried, told me in a telephone interview. “They were members of the Westside Tenant’s Union.” Fried had just left the navy and was active in the liberal American Veterans Committee; he would become a leader of the SWP-initiated Hickman Defense Committee.

Immediately following the fire, the tenants in Coleman’s building organized themselves into the Chicago Area Tenants Union, which members of the SWP were actively involved in. The driving force behind the tenants’ union was the Chicago SWP organizer, Milt Zaslow (who went by the public name of Mike Bartell) and his partner Edith. “The tenants’ rights organization that began in the building where Milt, Edith and their son lived,” wrote Karin Baker and Patrick Quinn in 1997 obituary of Zaslow/Bartell. “The group pushed for improved living conditions, among other demands. At one time a renters’ strike developed that involved thousands in the city of Chicago. The campaign got so big that people in distant neighborhoods were calling them, wanting to get involved.”

The SWP also benefited from the revival of civil rights activism following the end of the war. The Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), which was founded in 1941 at the University of Chicago and pioneered many of the tactics that became mainstays of the civil rights movement of 1950s and 60s, took the lead in the fight against Jim Crow in Chicago. “Chicago CORE, after a year of inactivity, was revived in the autumn of 1945 under the chairmanship of the black schoolteacher and NAACP leader, Gerald Bullock.
Finding few members interested in action, he dropped the chapter’s rigid selection procedures and made a broad appeals for new members to which the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) responded,” according to historians Meier and Rudwick. Gerald Bullock would later play an important part in the Hickman defense campaign. An SWP member became the editor of the local Chicago CORE-News. One of the most successful campaigns of CORE, involving SWP members, was the campaign to desegregate the aptly named White City Skating Rink in 1946. “Although it was located in the predominantly African-American part of the city, only whites were allowed in certain areas of the park, such as the roller rink. The SWP under Milt’s leadership was central in implementing a broad-based campaign that broke the color barrier at White City.” Frank Fried recalls, “Mike was an organizer’s organizer. He got up everyday and read the four daily newspapers, and look for things to get involved in.” The Hickman case was one of them. Leon DesPres deeply believed that, “but for Mike, James Hickman would have been convicted.”

“Will you help us?”

Working quickly, SWP activists put together a Hickman Defense Committee on August 8, 1947. The focus of it’s work was, according to Fried, was “to make it politically impossible in the eyes of the people of Chicago for the prosecutors to convict Hickman, to put as much pressure that could be mobilized on the city, and take the case national to pressure the state and the city.” The committee received support from the Chicago Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Industrial Union Council, the American Federation of Labor Building services employees union, the American Veterans Committee, and the Baptist Ministers Conference of Chicago. A public appeal for Hickman was signed by Willoughby Abner, first vice-president of the Chicago CIO Council and chair of the Hickman defense committee; Charles Chiakulous, president of the UAW-CIO Local 477; and Bernis Johnson, chair of the Westside NAACP Youth Council.

Abner was important to the defense campaign because of his stature as a leading black trade unionist in the UAW in the Chicago area. According to historian Nelson Lichtenstein, Abner “organized thousands during the war in several South Side foundries and small manufacturing facilities.” Sidney Lens, a local trade union official, who later become a nationally known historian and antiwar leader during the Vietnam War), also played a central role in Hickman’s defense campaign. “We put a collection can for donations, a petition and leaflets about Hickman in every store, bar or restaurant we could in the black neighborhoods in Chicago,” says Fried. “People gave generously. Everybody knew about Hickman. I think the prosecution was screwed from the beginning.”

Why was the Hickman cause so popular? The reasons were explained in an article written on the case for the journal Fourth International some time before Hickman’s trial. “Every so often a previously unknown individual suddenly attracts wide attention. There is usually a social reason for this. The story connected with the particular case epitomizes the plight of voiceless millions, focusing on the needs of one group and the crimes of another, bringing into the light of day the festering rottenness of class society…. Hickman’s story is the story of Jim Crow as it is practiced north of the Mason-Dixon line.” The tragedy of James Hickman personified the plight of Chicago’s black community.

Seeking to organize a large public display of support for James Hickman and his family, the defense campaign organized rallies at several churches across Chicago. The largest rally was held on September 28, 1947 at the Metropolitan Community Church on Chicago’s South Side. To build the rally, the campaign put up “hundreds of posters announcing the event,” canvassed the area with “two sound trucks,” and handed out “40,000 leaflets.” Over 1,200 people attended with the overwhelmingly African-American audience unanimously passing a resolution calling for Hickman’s release. The featured speaker at the rally was actress Tallulah Bankhead, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and was a member of a powerful Democratic Party family from Alabama. Her father had been speaker of the House of Representatives in the late 1930s, but she broke with her family over the conservatism of the Southern Democrats, particularly their virulent racism. Her involvement in the Hickman campaign was something of a “coup” for Sidney Lens. He recalled three decades later:

I was leaving my office on Dearborn Street one evening when I noticed her name on the marquis half a block away. She was starring in a new play. On the spur of the moment I went to the stage door and asked for her. To my surprise she knew about Hickman and was immensely sympathetic. When I asked her, however, to speak at the rally we planned at the Metropolitan Community Church, she shuddered as if I hit her with a blast of artic air. “Why, Mr. Lens, how can I make a speech?” It took a while to figure out that what she meant was that while she was capable of reciting other people’s lines, she was incapable of constructing a speech on her own. I agreed therefore to write a speech for her, and a couple of days later she advised that “I read it to my secretary and made her cry. I’ll be happy to deliver it.”

Bankhead, according to Lens, “drew tears from the whole audience, a couple of thousand people” with a riveting speech:

It seems to me a shameful condemnation of our society that 2000 years after Christ, people are still herded together into Black ghettoes merely because of their skins have different pigmentations than other people. No one condones murder or any act of violence. I hope the day shall come soon when humanity can resolve not only its racial problems but all problems coolly and rationally; when emotional acts of violence—be they individual or national—can be eliminated. So long, however, as there exists anywhere on earth one minority that is treated with contempt, that is herded into Black slum areas, that is abused and insulted, so long will we have violence, hate, brutality, savagery. So long as there exists a Jewish problem, or a Mexican problem—or a problem of any minority—so long will one form of violence beget another. I am proud to be one of the humble gladiators in this struggle against narrow prejudice and stupidity. I am glad to lend my efforts so that there shall be no more James Hickman tragedies.

Other speakers that night included the best-selling African-American author Willard Motely, and Chicago packinghouse union official Philip Weightman. Hickman’s attorney M.J. Myer roared to the crowd, “It is not Hickman who should be on trial, but the inhuman landlords and real estate interests who sacrifice human lives for profit, for they are the real criminals. They are the people who should be put behind bars and kept there.” The Communist Party, which could have contributed significant resources to the Hickman campaign, refused to participate and stood outside the Hickman defense rally handing out a pamphlet, The Great Conspiracy by Alfred Kahn, attacking the SWP and repeating old slanders that Trotskyism and fascism were in league against the Soviet Union.

Motley, author of the 1947 best-selling novel Knock on Any Door, which was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart in 1949, played an incredibly important part in the Hickman defense campaign. He had a huge reputation at the time of the case. His book sold 47,000 copies during its first three weeks in print and a total of 350,000 during the next two years. His involvement opened many doors for supporters of Hickman. However, the one door that Motley could not open was to the Chicago Sun (soon to be the Sun-Times). The Chicago based author met Hickman in prison and wrote an eloquent appeal that the defense committee attempted to publish in the Chicago Sun, one of the largest circulating newspapers in the mid-west. The Sun’s owner Marshall Field, heir to the Field family fortune and a publicly identified liberal, refused to printed Motley’s appeal even after the defense committee was prepared to pay for the space. Motley publicly attacked Field for his hypocrisy. He is one of those “rich liberals…who talk out of both sides of their mouths.” The defense committee had Motley’s appeal circulated to many of the largest Black newspapers in the country including the Chicago Daily Defender. Motley didn’t hold back his feelings about the Hickman case:

You have seen many pictures of men who have killed. You have seen the photographs of the returned soldier. Perhaps next door lives a boy who killed some other boy during the war. In the war millions of men killed other millions of men because they believed they were a threat to their homes, their wives, their children. This threat was thousands of miles from home. These were strangers killed, with whom there had been no personal contact. James Hickman killed the man who had threatened his wife and children with a death more horrible than the Nazi gas chambers. And carried it out. This is what I was thinking of as I sat talking to Hickman today. Hickman needs help. There are three children left who need him. A wife who needs him. Will you help us help him?

“This man has paid enough”

The defense campaign scored a major victory when the State’s Attorney office announced on the eve of the trial that it was dropping its demand for the death penalty. This changed the whole atmosphere surrounding the trial. Leon Despres, co-counsel for Hickman, said that it made the trial “less edgy.” It was also a backhanded admission that the pressure of the defense campaign was working. James Hickman went on trial for the murder of David Coleman on November 5 before a white judge and an all-white jury in the Cook County Criminal Court building. The presiding judge was Rudolph Desort, the prosecutor was Assistant State’s Attorney Samuel Friedman, and M.J. Myer was the lead counsel for the defense. The prosecution presented a total of eight witnesses that included four policemen and Coleman’s half-brother, Percy Brown, who under cross-examination gave testimony that reportedly contradicted statements he had made earlier to the police.

M.J. Myer in his opening statements argued that Hickman was not guilty because he was “temporarily insane” at the time of the shooting of David Coleman. Myer placed the blame for the shooting of Coleman on the terrible living conditions in Coleman’s building and the death of the Hickman’s four children. Myer called witnesses that testified to Coleman’s previous threats to burn the tenants out of the building and James’ anguished state of mind following the fire and deaths. Two psychiatrists testified for the defense. Dr. Boris M. Ury interviewed Hickman, while he was incarcerated at Cook County Jail. Hickman spoke about the divinely inspired “mission” of his dead children’s lives. “I see the future in these four was destroyed. They would have been great people had they lived. I had a vision, but their lives was cut-off.” Dr. Ury’s report went on: “Client continued to discuss the grandiose ‘mission’ of his children: ‘The Lord had work for them to do. He had picked them out…’ Examiner [Ury] inquired whether this godly mission would be confined to work among the colored people but he was assured by his client that the mission would be applicable to all people.” Dr. Ury concluded his report by saying that Hickman shot Coleman “in a schizoid, disassociated state, feeling he was accomplishing the Lord’s will.”

Leon Despres considered James Hickman’s testimony in court “magnificent” and, at times, “poetic.” Hickman sat solemnly in the witness chair and wore a modest gray suit with a white flower in lapel, according to Chicago Daily News reporter John Culhane, who pieced together the courtroom scene from interviews with Leon Despres and access to his Despres’ case files for an article he wrote in the mid-1960s.

“This was God fixed this,” Hickman testified.

I had raised these children up and God knowed that vow I made to him…that these children was a generation to be raised up. God wasn’t pleased what happened to them….

I had two sons and two daughters who would some day be great men and women, some day they would have married, some day they would have been fathers and mothers of children. These children would have children and these children would children and another generation of Hickmans could raise up and enjoy peace.

The trial lasted nine days. On November 15, after nineteen hours of deliberation, the jury informed the judge that they couldn’t reach a decision. It was a classic “hung jury”—seven to five for acquittal. The State’s Attorney’s office initially declared that it would retry James Hickman the following January. But it soon reversed itself and announced that it was dropping the murder charge and recommending to the judge that Hickman be sentenced to two years probation if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He agreed and walked out of court a free man on December 16, 1947. Hickman had served a total of five months in jail. Samuel Friedman, the prosecuting attorney, said that one of the major reasons that his office didn’t want a retrial was the public support for Hickman from across the country as he held up letters of support for Hickman. “They are too numerous to read all of them here,” Freedman declared holding up a fistful of letters, resolutions and telegrams, “but the general opinion is to the effect that mercy ought to be shown to an individual who, under the stress of the loss of four children, has been punished to such an extent that society can be magnanimous and afford him a chance to return to his remaining children and his wife, and spend the rest of his lifetime in peace.” Though he admitted “some quarters” would disagree with his recommendation, Freedman concluded, “The state feels this man has paid enough with the loss of his children.”

“A chain of personal memories”

The Hickman family returned to the private lives after the trial. But within a year the case received it’s widest publicity (outside of Chicago) when Harper’s magazine commissioned renowned journalist John Bartlow Martin to write a story on the Hickman case. Martin’s writings would today be called “true crime,” but that would be a great disservice to them. They were neither lurid nor exploitative, as many true crime works are. Martin’s writing style combined the best techniques of a novelist and a journalist with the motivation of a socially conscious liberal. In his autobiography, written many decades after the Hickman case, he recounts how he approached writing the The Hickman Story:

In preparing to do the piece, I read Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and other books, but only for my own background information—I wrote the piece almost entirely from interviews, especially interviews with Hickman and his wife and with the landlord’s relatives, I simply told the story of Hickman’s and the landlord’s lives and their world—the world below.

The “world below” was one of racism and poverty that greeted Black refugees from the Deep South. “I wanted to do not an article, crammed with demographers’ statistics, but, rather, a story about a man. James Hickman had been a sharecropper in Mississippi. He was deeply religious and deeply devoted to his children.” Martin’s article is great writing and deserves to be read by everyone today committed to social justice.

But what lift’s the story from the page is the illustrations of the Hickman case by the great American artist, Ben Shahn. Shahn’s name is not one that many Americans would recognize, but millions have seen his work, particularly his drawings of the martyred Sacco & Vanzetti, and the three murdered civil rights activists, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. Shahn’s drawings of the Hickman case that hung on the east wall of Leon Despres’ old law office caught the eye of reporter John Culhane, prompting him to write one of the few profiles of the case to appear in the decades that followed the trial. Shahn later wrote of his own struggle to capture the enormity of the Hickman family tragedy:

I was asked to make drawings for the story and, after several discussions with the writer, felt that I had gained enough of the feel of the situation to proceed. I examined a great deal of the factual visual material, and then I discarded all of it. It seemed to me the implications of this event transcended the immediate story; there was universality about man’s dread of fire, and his sufferings from fire. There was a universality in the pity which such a disaster invokes, had its overtones. And the relentless poverty which had pursued this man, and which dominated the story, had its own kind of universality.

Sometimes, if one is particularly satisfied with a piece of work which he has completed, he may say to himself, ‘well done,’ and go on to something else. Not in this instance, however. I found that I could not dismiss the event about which I had made drawings—the so-called “Hickman Story.”… I had some curious sense of responsibility about it, a sort of personal involvement.

The Hickman tragedy “aroused in me,” Shahn recalled, “a chain of personal memories.”

There were two great fires in my own childhood, one only colorful, the other disastrous and unforgettable. Of the first, I remember only that the Russian village in which my grandfather lived burned, and I was there. I remember the excitement, the flames breaking out everywhere…The other fire left its mark upon me and all my family, and left scars on my father’s hand and face, for he had clambered up a drainpipe and taken each of my brothers and sisters and me over the house one by one, burning himself painfully in the process. Meanwhile our house and all belongings were consumed, and my parents stricken beyond their power to recover.

The most powerful of all of Shahn’s Hickman drawings is the four huddled, deceased children. His “personal involvement” led him to use his own siblings as the basis for the drawing. “They resemble much more closely my own brothers and sisters.” John Bartlow Martin’s story and Ben Shahn’s drawings remain the most powerful documents from that era of the Hickman case. Unfortunately, the Hickman trial transcript disappeared many decades ago along with much of the paperwork related to Hickman’s legal defense. The Sidney Lens Papers at the Chicago Historical Society has some of the Hickman defense campaign literature, flyers and brochure—just enough to give you a feel for the campaign.

“Dismiss it in a sentence or two”

Despite all of this, one has to ask, how can such a powerful story disappear from the public memory? This is an amazing story, not only of rapacious greed and racism that led to an excruciatingly painful family tragedy, but also the triumph of justice over very long odds. It didn’t take place in some remote part of the country, but played itself out in Chicago, who’s crime-obsessed, tabloid press salivated over stories of much less interest. I think there were several things working against the Hickman case getting the recognition that it deserved. The case took place in 1947; over the next few years the death-grip of the Cold War would tighten around U.S. society. A virulent level of repression would drive socialist, communists and radicals of various allegiances to the very margins of American society. In many ways, the campaign to save James Hickman was one of the last echoes of the great radicalization of the American working class of the 1930s and 1940s. A successful political campaign to free an African-American man who shot and killed his landlord led by revolutionary socialists is not the type of story to be embraced during the height of the American Century. The Hickman case was simply steamrolled over by a decade and half of political repression and cultural conformity. This, however, is only a part of the answer.

The other part lies, I believe, in who writes the history of the American Left. By-and-large they were historians that were members of the Communist Party and the New Left of the 1960s, few of who have shown any interest or political sympathy for the revolutionary tradition of Marxism and the Russian Revolution in the form Trotskyism in this country in the 1930s and 1940s. “Trotskyism has been written out of the history of the American left,” notes veteran revolutionary socialist Joel Geier. There are notable exceptions, such as Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals or Bryan Palmer’s James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, but too often the most popular left-wing histories of the 1930s and 1940s simply dismiss, denigrate or out-rightly censure the role of Trotskyism in the radical movement.

One of the worst examples of this is Labor Untold Story by Boyer and Morais, published by the UE, one of the unions of the CIO era that was led by the CP. It strait-forwardly ignores the Trotskyist-led great Minneapolis Teamster strikes of 1934. It was the strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco that directly led to the formation of the CIO. This type of censorship may be extreme but not uncommon. This includes the 1941 trial of the Trotskyists of the SWP for “subversion” under the reactionary Smith Act that became the model for the trials that destroyed the CP after WWII. Yet, as Ellen Schrecker in her Many Are The Crimes: McCarthyism in America notes, “There is little scholarship on the Trotskyist Smith Act case. While recognizing it implications for the later Smith Act cases, most writers tend to dismiss it in a sentence or two.” Instead of “dismissing it in a sentence or two,” it’s time that Trotskyism gets the proper recognition it deserves in American radical history.

There are many stories such as the Hickman case that need to be recovered from oblivion and retold. Last year Clint Eastwood’s film Changeling was released. Set in 1928 Los Angeles, it told the real-life story of Christine Collins and her search for the truth behind the kidnapping of her son and the mind-boggling public relations stunt by the LAPD, who sent her the wrong child and then attempted to shut her up when she refused to play along. It led to an explosion of public protest. The story disappeared from public memory for eight decades until screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, a former journalist, was contacted by an old source at Los Angeles City Hall, who told him that the city was planning to destroy some of its archives and that there was “something [Straczynski] should see.” This turned out to be a transcript of a city council hearing of Collins’ case. There are thousands of stories of injustice and struggle hidden away in the archives of city halls around the country. Hopefully, younger historians can bring to light the many of these stories before they are lost to history.

I want to extend a special thank you to two people, Frank Fried and Leon Despres. Frank first told me about the Hickman case at Joel Geier’s 70th birthday party, and Leon Despres (who passed away on May 7, 2009 at 101 years old) for allowing me to discuss the case with him at his Hyde Park residence. Patrick Quinn has been extremely helpful in tracking down important sources of information on the case and commenting on the first draft of this article. I also want to thank the Chicago Historical Society for allowing me access to the Sidney Lens papers, and the Library of Congress for access to the Hickman files in John Bartlow Martin’s papers. The librarians in charge of the Willard Motley papers at the Northeastern Illinois University were very helpful but I ended up referencing different material on Motley’s role in the Hickman case.

This would be unremarkable, except that almost his entire lecture was spent urging those activists present to reformulate their strategies in light of the Black Panthers’ experience. If you watch the meeting in full, it almost seems that two different languages are being spoken, with Hilliard’s message – restated over and over – unacknowledged by almost every speaker from the audience. Hilliard stresses the relevance today of the Panthers’ ten-point programme (08:09 = time into video), argues that the most important aspect of the group’s activity was its “survival programmes” (10:24), suggests one of the most pressing issues for left-wing activists in London is knife crime and gang violence (13:27), and proposes practical solutions to black people being harassed via police stop-and-search powers (48:34). Here are a few selections from his speech:

As we grew we saw the need to really begin to address the very basic desires and needs of people in the community because if we were not doing that we were going to be isolated. (05:53)

You should look at our Black Panther Party as a model for how you meet today’s challenges. (10:24)

I think that if there is any lesson that you can draw from the history of our Black Panther Party that is that it is possible for you to usher in change as we did. You just have to be willing to get involved in issues in your community. (15:33)

Apart from the ovations, the largest rounds of applause are when Hilliard condemns the Iraq war. What is surprising is that the central elements of his message are picked up by virtually none of the speakers from the audience, despite him listing the key elements of the Panthers’ “survival programme” (05:53) which he says are the most important lessons to be learned from the party’s work. The achievements of the group included:

• Running the free breakfasts for children programme
• A bus programme for senior citizens “because they were being mugged and were afraid to come of their house”
• Giving free prescriptions and medical care to the elderly
• Testing 500,000 African-Americans for sickle cell anaemia over the course of five years
• Clothing and shoe programmes
• Buses to prison programme

These aspects of the Panthers’ activity were at the heart of their political orientation. They recognised this was both a moral necessity – to directly intervene to improve the quality of life of members of their community – and a strategic imperative. It was this belief in addressing the immediate interests of working class black Americans, in fact their “mastery of mass organizing techniques”¹ that built them a support base in cities across America. As an author in The Journal of Negro History notes:

One thing that was fundamental in the attraction of members to the Black Panther Party and their numerous supporters was its policy of ‘serving the people.’ This was a policy of going to the masses, living among them, sharing their burdens, and organising them to implement their own solutions to the day to day problems that were of great concern to them. The BPP organised and implemented community programmes ranging from, as previously mentioned; free breakfast for children programs, and free health clinics to free clothing drives. They also led rent strikes resulting in tenant ownership of their buildings, and led campaigns for the community control of schools, and the police, and to stoppage of drugs, crime, and police murder and brutality.¹

So what can the Left today learn from the Panthers? Well, Hilliard makes the point clear in his talk, suggesting activists begin engaging in community work and addressing the core concerns of working-class people. The practical examples he cites are knife crime and gang violence, along with more community control of police. This makes sense given that crime consistently ranks as one of the major concerns of ordinary people, as it clearly did in the context in which the Panthers were operating. It also makes sense, if we’re serious about building movements that in the long-term can bring about fundamental social change, to address a community’s core economic and social concerns, and establish institutions independent of the state that build a political culture and improve people’s lives.

However, Hilliard doesn’t mention the central point, at least for the audience he is addressing. That is, the Left is consistently failing to heed any of the lessons to which he draws our attention. As Left Luggage has previously highlighted, crime is not taken seriously as an issue to be addressed in the here and now, but is deferred until capitalism’s overthrow. Likewise, very little energy is expended on community organising around the immediate needs of the working class. Instead, the Left tends to focus its activity on international issues and movements, such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, anti-capitalist mobilisations, the war on terror, and US imperialism more generally.

Paradoxically, the very enthusiasm demonstrated for the Black Panthers at Hilliard’s talk is a manifestation of the Left’s unbalanced political focus. That’s not to say Hilliard and the Panthers don’t deserve a couple of standing ovations. Of course they do, for the reasons already outlined. However, the fact that Hilliard demonstrably failed to impress his message upon the audience is a symptom of a peculiar approach to foreign political movements, especially those that achieve a degree of success. That is, we romanticise their struggle while ignoring its lessons.

This can be seen in numerous cases. For instance, many left-wing activists are involved in Palestine solidarity work and identify closely with the Palestinian cause; the example of the 1987-1993 Intifada – of a people rising up to attempt to shake off their oppressors – remains an inspiration to many.

However, the Intifada did not emerge from nowhere. As well as being a product of political, social and economic change throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it was crucially the product of organising that took place among the population over the previous two decades. Central to this development were a range of popular organisations that aimed “to provide basic services to a population living under military occupation as an alternative to the occupation.”² These organisations, in other words,

“served economic and social as well as political functions. They filled a void in the provision of services not available to resident Palestinians under the occupation […] they also provided a training ground for collective action and the development of leadership and organisational skills among Palestinians, and incorporated a political agenda aimed at raising national consciousness.”³

Once the Intifada got underway, “popular committees” were established to “coordinate the provision of education, health care, agricultural production, security and defence, and other services”³ to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. They also performed “underground social work” to offer support to families with members arrested, injured or killed by the Israelis.⁴

The methods of these organisations, during and especially after the end of the first Intifada, were taken up enthusiastically by Hamas, which similarly set up schools, charities, clinics, and teaching circles to mobilise popular support behind the Islamist movement. It is not an exaggeration to say this is the modus operandi of the majority of political Islamist groups in the Middle East and while clearly we don’t want to borrow from their ideology, we can still learn from the strategy of these mass political organisations.

Another case is the Zapatista movement, which first came to prominence in 1994 when it established an autonomous zone in Chiapas, Mexico, and attracted much interest from the Left internationally, particularly from libertarian socialists and anarchists due to its use of participatory democratic forms of organisation. Solidarity groups were established by left-wing activists around the world to support the movement.

The Zapatistas consisted of a guerrilla movement without a civilian arm but symbiotically linked to the peasant communities of the region through ten years of clandestine organisation.

“The movement was built by political education and direct action which resolved the immediate problems of the communities […] the small victories built the larger movement – infusing the members of the community with the idea that they were capable of winning in struggle and changing society.”⁵

A significant problem for the peasant communities of Chiapas was access to cultivable land, so the Zapatistas set about reclaiming land from large owners through occupation. They also had a range of other social programmes in their “communities in resistance,” including providing health clinics, schools, supplying electricity, and establishing a communal culture. They also tackled directly the problems of alcohol and drug addiction such that “there is a total absence of consumption or sale of drugs, which are also not permitted in the autonomous communities.”⁶

These varied movements – from the south of Chicago, through the Gaza Strip, and the Chiapas mountains – are linked together in their basic strategic approach. In each case, they were effective because they aimed to meet the immediate needs of their populations while building networks of solidarity and establishing a political culture. Of course, the situation in contemporary Britain seems quite different, but as David Hilliard says, working class people here are facing similar structural problems as those addressed by the Black Panthers.

How many activists who have read about the Zapatistas, attended meetings on Chiapas, or engaged in solidarity actions, have thoughtfully considered the implications of their strategy? Likewise, how many of us have seriously set about building the kind of “survival programmes” Hilliard talks about? Or the “popular organisations” that were able to meet the everyday needs of Palestinians while also building a culture of resistance?

It is not enough simply to engage in activism around foreign struggles without considering how those movements were built and attempting to apply the lessons here; to do that is simply a form of romanticism, a radicalism by proxy. We should support international progressive movements where we can, but our primary and pressing goal must be to establish “communities in resistance” at home.

1. Harris, Jessica Christina. ‘Revolutionary Black Nationalism: The Black Panther Party’. In The Journal of Negro History, 85, 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 170-171.
2. Hilterman, Joost R. ‘Mass Mobilization and the Uprising: the Labor Movement’. In Michael C. Hudson, ed. The Palestinians: New Directions. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. 1990. p. 47.
3. Alin, Erika G. ‘Dynamics of the Palestinian Uprising’. In Comparative Politics, 26, 4 (July 1994), p. 485.
4. Muslih, Mohammad. ‘Palestinian Civil Society’. In Middle East Journal, 47, 2 (Spring 1993), p. 267.
5. Petras, James, and Steve Vieux. ‘Myths and Realities of the Chiapas Uprising’. In Economic and Political Weekly, 31, 47 (November 23, 1996), p. 3055.
6. ‘Zapatistas Eradicate Alcoholism and Drug Addiction’ by Hermann Bellinghausen, in La Jornada (Mexican daily newspaper), March 6, 2009.

The impetus for this interview (Sobre poder atómico, cambio climático, energías limpias y formas de organanización ciudadanas) was the publication of a Spanish translation of Garcia’s CounterPunch article “To Power A Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?”

Salvador López Arnal: Let us start with a few basic notions. When we talk about nuclear fusion, what do we really mean?

Manuel García, Jr.: Nuclear fusion is the application of energy to a pair of atomic nuclei so as to force them into each other despite the electric and nuclear forces of repulsion that normally keep nuclei separate and distinct, so that some of the combined nuclear mass is transformed into energy by Einstein’s formula E = m c-squared, and is emitted as nuclear radiation; and the remaining combined mass is reformed into an new single nucleus of a different chemical element.

SLA: This new source of energy is sometimes associated with a defeat of climatic change. Why? Do you think this is a fantasy of self-interest by governments, military powers and large corporations?

MG,Jr.: The consensus of modern science is that the carbon dioxide (CO2) gas emitted by the many, many sources of combustion of hydrocarbons (petroleum and many forms of natural and processed organic matter) inherent in human activity has made the Earth’s atmosphere warmer and more insulating (it traps more infrared radiation, which is heat) than it was before the industrial exploitation of petroleum. So, human activity in combination with natural cycles of climate are producing an effect that is called global warming (”Climate and Carbon, Consensus and Contention“).

By comparing the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere today with conditions and climates of the distant past, so far as science can detect them; and by running computer simulations of Earth’s climate into the far future, scientists can arrive at a wide variety of possibilities of what our climate might evolve to during this century. Many of these predictions are unpleasant, some generally, and others for particular regions and portions of humanity. For example, some island nations may disappear because of the rise of the ocean level due to the melting of the ice caps.

The difficulty faced by modern society is that the great work-saving technologies, comforts and advances much of the developed world enjoys are possible because of abundant energy, which we generate by the combustion of coal (for electricity and industrial process heat) and petroleum (for transportation technology and military mobility), and this combustion is the source of the CO2 that might trigger a major change in Earth’s climate to much less hospitable conditions. Do we forsake today’s comforts and conveniences for decades, even longer, solely based on fears arising out of computer simulations, and which may not come to pass? Or, do we proceed emitting enormous quantities of waste heat (CO2 and entropy) to continue our capitalist mode of industrialized resource exploitation, and wealth accumulation for a select few, even if it triggers a catastrophic shift in climate and a drastic reduction of food production?

How to respond to the uncertainties and challenges of global warming, by finding the right balance between our old technologies of energy production, new ones that emit less CO2 but may need development and investment before achieving their full potential, and imposing stricter measures of energy conservation and accepting greater inconveniences (like the reuse and recycling of current items) is a subject of major contention today. Nobody wants to give up their particular way of making a profit just because it may contribute to global warming, and also many would like to find profitable business ventures that exploit the concerns over global warming. So what begins as a discussion of geophysics and its impact on society degenerates into many arguments about making money, and politics: who is going to “win” and who is going to “lose?”

Clearly, if we can find new ways of generating abundant energy without also emitting CO2, then the comforts of the First World can be continued, and the necessary improvements for the Third World can be made without causing a change of the world’s climate. So, many suggest that their favorite technology or hoped-for future profit-making scheme will provide energy without CO2 emission. Some of these claims have more merit than others, and many groups that make such claims are seeking government subsidies (research money or tax breaks).

The nuclear power industry is advertising itself as a “green” technology, one that does not emit CO2. This is blatantly false as all the mining, fuel processing, transportation, construction and waste disposal activities associated with nuclear power create CO2 emissions. Wind and solar energy are the most efficient as regards energy produced per mass of CO2 emitted. The deficiencies of wind and solar in terms of their convenience are that they are energy sources of low concentration (they may require a large area for collection) and low power (low to moderate temperature or limited electrical power from any single generator). Conservation is the most cost-effective “green” technology today, it simply means reducing the waste associated with whatever energy generation methods are already in use.

SLA: So, at this point fusion is promoted as the solution?

MG,Jr.: One dream that grew out of nuclear physics is the vision of devising fusion reactors to power society. We are familiar with the enormous output of energy from nuclear fission (the splitting apart of a nucleus) whether slowly in nuclear reactors or suddenly as in explosions of nuclear bombs. But, there is a much larger yield of energy from nuclear fusion; and an essentially unlimited supply of fusion fuel. The fusion of deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen, powers our Sun (the Sun’s own gravity from its huge mass squeezing the nuclei together at its core). Here on Earth, deuterium and tritium occur naturally in trace quantities in the oceans; and they are readily made from ordinary water irradiated with neutrons in nuclear reactors. The fusion dream is to use deuterium and tritium to make power reactors of much greater yield than nuclear fission reactors, and which do not use radioactive metals for fuel, nor generate the same quantities of radioactive waste.

The leading idea in the quest for technological fusion energy has been the magnetic compression of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) plasma (a highly electrified gaseous form of matter) in devices called tokamaks (magnetic fusion energy has nearly 60 years of research). A more recent idea (over 35 years) is laser-fusion (called inertial confinement fusion). The NIF facility I discussed in my recent article is a laser-fusion facility (”¿Bombas nucleares o luz solar?“).

Fusion works marvelously in stars because they are so massive. Their huge gravity forces nuclei into fusion at the star’s core, and the huge bulk of the star is of sufficient depth and density to easily capture and contain the nuclear energy released by fusion reactions. Fusion is a process of energy generation that is mismatched to the much smaller scale of our Earth. The Sun extends 109 times further from its center than the Earth, and it is 333,000 times more massive. Science has yet to devise an artificial star, a steady fusion reactor; but it has devised impulsive ones, which are nuclear (hydrogen) bombs. My article described how NIF (National Ignition Facility) and facilities like it assist in the design of nuclear weapons.

SLA: What are your criticisms of nuclear energy, generally?

MG,Jr.: My criticism of nuclear power in all the forms described, for the purpose of providing a steady supply of electricity to a nation, is twofold:

1, the technology is not well matched to the end-use, there are many complexities, dangers, and inefficiencies between the fuel source and the electrical output, the entire cycle from fuel production to waste management is excessively costly (per kWh of electricity produced) fiscally, environmentally and politically;

2, the nature of the technology makes for highly centralized generator sites (which must also be high security zones, and are very expensive), requiring an extensive distribution network (which will have transmission losses).

Highly centralized power generation serves the needs of highly centralized economics: exclusive capital accumulation at extensive social cost. Distributed power generation serves the needs of a distributed population: communal technical networks provide local control and personal economic independence.

Solar and wind technologies can generate electricity locally and practically over much of the Earth’s surface, whether land or sea. There are far fewer conversions of energy forms from the sources to the electrical output, so there are fewer types of inefficiencies; and there are never the types of hazards associated with radioactive materials and nuclear technology. Because the energy generation processes are natural to the Earth’s environment (solar-electric, solar-thermal, wind-torque-electrical, hydro-torque-electrical), the entire process cycle: from source to generation to recycling of used equipment and material, is much simpler and cheaper (by fiscal measures that are socially complete in that they account for environmental and political liabilities). Solar, wind and hydro technologies are “natural’ to the Earth, and well-matched to the end-use of residential electricity, and many industrial applications.

The dispersed nature of “the source” of solar energy (wind and hydro too, but they are more localized) means that generators and users are closer to each other (even coincident), so distribution networks will be smaller and more efficient. This means proximate local networks can have overlap, providing redundancy and thus a greater degree of overall reliability over regional and national scales. It also means the local “owners” of the generators are much more likely to be among the users of the electrical output, so the entire economics of the system becomes as distributed and decentralized as the energy source. Micro-networked solar energy is intrinsically communal. An energy system that offers a family the possibility of gaining its energy independence by harvesting the sunlight that falls, and catching the wind that whisks through the space they occupy to live, would be a wonderful thing.

However, if you are part of a group — we could call them capitalists, or industrialists, or pirates, it’s all the same — who wish to control a large source of energy, which they meter out to many individuals at a distance for a profit, then you would prefer a highly centralized energy generation technology. This is why I wrote that nuclear power is prized by the mentality that sees the taxi meter and the cash register as the purpose of organizing society. The hazards, complexities and inefficiencies that make it necessary to isolate and make large nuclear power generation sites, also fits them to the needs of monopoly control, and leaves the nation vulnerable to societal blackmail through the energy dependency of its people.

SLA: In a recent article published in CounterPunch — “To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?” — you mention that Hugh Gusterson wrote, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, that the recently inaugurated National Ignition Facility (NIF), near San Francisco, was in its entirety a program of nuclear weapons development. Do you agree with that opinion? How does NIF support nuclear weapons development?

MG,Jr.: My article covered that point. NIF is funded to provide data on fusion phenomena that are created on a microscopic scale, with extremely intense pulses of laser light bombarding micro-balloons filled with deuterium and tritium. NIF will also be used to provide data on the properties of uranium and plutonium when they experience extreme pressure; microscopic samples will be compressed by laser bombardment, and fission reactions initiated. This data from experiments is then used to refine and correct computer codes that simulate the intricate physics. These codes can then be used to help design full-scale nuclear bombs. NIF is intended to fill the gap left by the cessation of full-scale nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site. There has never been any secret about any of this, but Thomas Friedman did not mention it in his paen to NIF as a prototype fusion energy system, published recently in the New York Times. That was Gusterson’s point.

SLA: As you say, NIF belongs to the mentality that “sees the taxi meter and the cash register… as the purpose of social organization.” But, you add, “this flow of energy in unlikely to be as safe, reliable, freely available, poverty alleviating and socially uplifting as could very easily be the case today.” What sense does it make then to choose a road of so limited value? What is hidden behind that decision?

MG,Jr.: This is because public resources are being invested for the benefit of a profiteering capitalist elite, and all risks and liabilities are being socialized. Don’t ever think that socialism is disliked in the United States. On the contrary, it is highly prized by the apex class of our economic pyramid as the best way of eliminating its wastes, expenses and responsibilities. Centralized energy technology is preferred by monopolists, and their sole focus is exclusive capital accumulation. Decentralized power generation puts more control into the hands of local communities and individuals. This method of powering the nation is clearly of superior social value (and an essential necessity in the rural Third World, with solar electricity generators of the simplest type), but it is not championed by the US government for the same reason national health care is not championed by the US government: it has been bought off by corporate money. The key political point here is that the US government does not work primarily in the interests of the public, it is an agent of corporate interests, protecting them FROM popular democratic action. By far the most devastating deficit in the U.S. today is the democratic deficit; the fiscal ones are trifles in comparison, they only entail money.

SLA: You also mention that nuclear weapons only have a functional value if their design is proved by tests and that this requirement was the reason for the many nuclear tests carried out by many countries since 1945. How many tests have been carried out to date by all nuclear nations, including Pakistan and Israel? Where are they carried out?

MG,Jr.: Since 1945 over 2000 nuclear tests have been carried out, about half were conducted by the U.S. (1054); Russia did 715, France 210, the U.K. 45, China 45, India 6 and Pakistan 6 (this total is 2081). Not all tests have been acknowledged or verified, so there are some uncertainties as to the exact number. South Africa, under the apartheid regime, and Israel may have conducted a joint test in the South Atlantic, but South Africa claims never to have tested and has since dismantled its stockpile; Israel says nothing and is not known to have conducted a nuclear test. Tests have been carried out in many places. Most US tests were in the Pacific southeast of Hawaii, and at the Nevada Test Site. Both Russia and China conducted their tests at remote sites within their territories. France conducted tests in the South Pacific, and the U.K. conducted nearly half its tests in Australia or territory controlled by it, and the rest at the Nevada Test Site. India and Pakistan used remote and desert locations for their underground tests. The test by North Korea in 2006 was of such low yield that many believe it was really a failure.

SLA: What are the difficulties and risks of working with large quantities of materials with high levels of radioactivity?

MG,Jr.: The risks are of (1) radiation exposure to people, causing illness or disability or death; (2) the possibility of grouping too much radioactive material together and initiating a chain reaction (a critical mass that proceeds to “melt down”); (3) theft of nuclear material, and its malicious misuse; (4) accidental release into the environment, introducing a pollutant with heavy metal toxicity as well as radioactivity; (5) producing a large amount of radioactive waste: the machines, materials and containers used to shield workers from radioactivity, which must be stored and kept secure for a long time; (6) incurring large and continuing expenses to pay for all the activities required by the possession of a nuclear materials industry and its legacy.

SLA: Is there any link between the use of nuclear energy and the possession of nuclear weapons?

MG,Jr.: Yes. The material for bombs is usually produced in reactors built for that purpose, but it can also be harvested from the fuel rods of civilian power reactors. All uranium nuclear reactors produce a build-up of plutonium. This is why the U.S., Russia and the major atomic powers wish to control the fuel cycle of reactors in client states that have “peaceful’ atomic power, like South Korea. The fuel cycle is the production of fuel rods for civilian reactors, and their eventual removal and “reprocessing” to remove the plutonium build-up, and recycle the remaining uranium-235, or package the rod for “disposal.” The situation of Iran’s nuclear program illustrates the intrinsic connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons (”Iran’s Uranium“).

SLA: What do you think of the pressures by the US and Israel to prevent Iran’s development of nuclear energy?

MG,Jr.: Both Israel and the U.S. want to prevent the rise of any competitive regional power in the Middle East and Central Asia. This is because the U.S. seeks to control the sources and economics of petroleum, and Israel seeks to undercut the source of economic sustenance to the resistance movements in the territories it invades and occupies (and its vision is large in this regard). I have elaborated on these themes elsewhere (”Iran’s Uranium“).

SLA: Please give us five reasons against the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

MG,Jr.: Nuclear power is:

(1) inefficient: it is likely that more energy will have been used to build, maintain and secure nuclear power sites, and to manage the waste legacy of the nuclear power industry than it will ever supply as electricity;

(2) insecure: nuclear reactors require massive amounts of cooling water, those located along rivers have had to be shut down in times of drought (in recent years in Europe) creating shortages of supply; because nuclear power is so centralized, any reactor site that is incapacitated for any reason will cause a deficit in its network, and this will require purchasing fossil-fuel energy on short notice, or doing without;

(3) slow: it takes so long to build a nuclear power station that this technology cannot really be mounted, nor easily disassembled as the case might be, to respond to changes in the volume and geographical distribution of energy demand;

(4) dangerous: it uses the most physically hazardous substances we know of, though I suppose they do kill germs, and this extreme hazard creates monumental problems of risk management and security; also, the possibility of nuclear weapons proliferation is all too real;

(5) expensive: the features noted each add to the expense of the technology, and this cost is considerable in each of the fiscal, political and environmental dimensions; expense is always a relative measure, and my view is that if solar (and related generation and storage) and micro-networks were given the same quantity of government subsidy, and not even for as many decades as nuclear power has enjoyed, we would have a much better system of national electrical power by every criterion imaginable, except that of monopoly control of a societal dependency.

SLA: You mentioned that NIF is presented as the positive answer, in the U.S., to the question many nuclear weapons states are now asking: “can we keep a nuclear weapons arsenal at reduced cost and also bypass the ‘danger’ and ‘political’ disincentives of having them, by eliminating most of the weapons testing infrastructure and workforce, and instead relying on the virtual reality of computer simulations.” Why do you think that those simulations will never be able to replace tests of real life-sized weapons?

MG,Jr.: By definition a simulation is incomplete, it relies on projections and approximations to some of the details that make up a real item and a real phenomenon. The details of the dynamics of ultra-rapid (billions of a second) compression and nuclear fusion of millimeter-scale capsules will have unavoidable differences to the much slower (microseconds) implosion of full-scale nuclear devices. The characteristic length scale of the phenomenon plays a role in determining how the dynamics of the imploding fluid mass will evolve.

Let me give an analogy. The distance over which molecules of air interact by collision (at sea level) is about 60 billionths of a meter, call it lambda. The air friction resisting the motion of an object through the atmosphere is the accumulated effect of molecular collisions: air pushed away by the object in turn collides into surrounding air molecules, and some of these rebound back into the object. The net effect is “drag” caused by the viscosity of air. The effect of this viscosity is most pronounced against the surface of the object, but soon fades away with distance from it (say within thousands of lambdas). In the case of a typical airplane wing, the fluid disturbed by viscous interaction with the wing surface is confined to a relatively thin layer called a boundary layer (which might build up to a few percent of the wing thickness). For many calculations of aeronautical engineering, a slight increase to the thickness of the wing is used to account for the boundary layer of fluid that tends to move with, or ’stick,’ to the wing, and then the overall lift of the wing is calculated as if this modified shape were moving through a frictionless atmosphere. This method is quite good when the length scale that characterizes the size of the wing is large in comparison to the thickness of the boundary layer. This is easily the case with large wings at high speed, as with our airplanes. However, this method fails when trying to understand the workings of the wings of small insects. Gnats that may be of millimeter scale will be swimming in a viscous soup of an atmosphere, since their wings and bodies are easily within the length over which air viscosity acts.

Because not every force and physical interaction changes its characteristic length scale as the length scale of the object in question is changed, there are inevitable differences in the dynamics of fluid motion, between situations of different size. Another example is the dynamics of planetary atmospheres, like our weather, which is highly influenced by gravity because of the size and mass of the Earth. Yet, gravity has essentially no influence on the dynamics of gnat flight; gnats are nearly suspended in weightlessness, paddling through a three dimensional syrup of atmosphere.

So, micro experiments in fusion will certainly help to refine codes simulating intricate physics, which can be used to help design full-scale nuclear bombs, but neither these experiments nor the codes will ever fully account for all the details of the full-scale dynamics. Of course, all that is needed, for the purposes of engineering warheads, is that they be good enough, and that is ultimately determined by the complexity of the warhead designs and the accumulated experience of the weapons designers.

SLA:You mentioned that, in any case, the crucial point is that nuclear weapons are unnecessary for a reasonable national defense. How do you justify that statement? Because of the monstrous effects of their actual use?

MG,Jr.: Let me point you to an article (”Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence“). My basic points: (1) the globalization of world economies makes any nuclear war a permanent loss of wealth to the investor population of world capitalism, so nuclear weapons have lost their strategic value, and (2) the improvements in shooting and bombing accuracy given by the integration of computer, electronics and GPS space technologies makes it unnecessary for advanced military powers to use the massively powerful blasts from nuclear explosions in order to achieve tactical objectives in their colonial wars or wars for dominance against rivals.

SLA: You ask yourself: “Is the investment in NIF as an ICF (Inertial Confinement Fusion) system prototype a wise public policy, regardless of NIF’s role for nuclear weapons?” You answer by saying that “it depends on the type of society you want to power and when you expect to start doing so.” Why? How do you justify that relation?

MG,Jr.: I can only repeat what I said in the article (”To Power A Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?“). Highly concentrated power generation systems serve the needs of narrowly focused capital accumulation at great social expense. Fusion energy systems fit that type, but they will take a very long time and a lot of money to develop.

SLA: You also mention that you prefer to organize society “in a socialist or classless manner, or at least more egalitarian and certainly not corporate-controlled,” and that you would prefer a decentralized national energy supply system, where “the generation, control of, storage and use of energy were all local.” What type of systems would these be? What sources of energy are you thinking about?

MG,Jr.: A solar collector unit, perhaps the size of a large refrigerator, that can generate enough heat to power a small Stirling engine that then cranks a generator, and produces as much electricity as a typical wall outlet (115 VAC, 15 A) during four hours a day, and which could be built locally with generic components, could transform the lives of people in Third World villages and rural areas. Imagine having the energy to pump water, refrigerate essential food stores, recharge batteries that provide lighting for nighttime study, run power tools, provide electric heat for cooking, boil and purify water. Such simple and small systems of “gridless green energy” could have a major impact on the conditions of most of humanity, including the people at the bottom of the economic ladders in our First World nations. Fancier versions of such systems (e.g., using the batteries of electric vehicles as storage units of household electricity generated by a solar-photovoltaic system), and micro-networks of generation and storage as mentioned several times, could maintain the level of comfort we have grown accustomed to in the First World, and do so with much less danger and in a much more egalitarian and economically liberating way. There are no physical laws barring such a vision, only the small-mindedness of our greed as institutionalized in our politics.

SLA: You state that we already have all the technical means to implement such a system, a national network of micro-networks or local networks. “Solar energy focused as heat onto pipes carrying oil along the focal axes of parabolic trough collectors, and the oil transferring its heat through a heat exchanger to water, generating steam, which in turn drives a turbine that turns an electric generator, can produce electricity from sunlight with from 1% to 5% efficiency, steadily during the day.” Are you thinking basically of the U.S.? Would it really be posible in other tecnologically less developed societies? Wouldn’t it be necessary to have technological or even geographical conditions that are within reach of very few states?

MG,Jr.: Clearly, the more elaborate and technically refined the nature of solar, wind or hydro systems and the networks connecting generators with storage units and users, the less likely they will be first used in the Third World. But, the general type of thinking behind such systems can be used to build simple examples that are within the reach of less developed societies.

Face it, there isn’t a corner of this globe that is so remote that it hasn’t been reached by the gun trade. Well, why not the solar energy movement? We can assume that there is enough of a population of artisans anywhere, with sufficient hand tools and knowledge that they could fabricate the simplest of solar collectors, ovens and windmills, Stirling motors and even electric generators if they have access to basic materials, and clearly drawn plans or sample units. Anywhere such a local system of energy-from-the-sun is built will become a focal point of new construction of newer and better systems, and these will spread to other sites and other groups of people. Yes, I admit this is a step up from giving a completely helpless and ignorant person in the wilderness a shovel and a cow; but it is not that big of a larger step. And, like the shovel and cow, giving such a person both the knowledge and the essential materials to produce a system that provides a greater quantity of clean energy right at his location is an investment in humanity that can only grow to everyone’s benefit. Read the reports on the energy needs of the Third World written by the United Nations Development Programme (my article on the subject can be read here).

As to geography, most of the Third World is in equatorial latitudes, sunshine may be one of the few things they have in abundance.

SLA: Wind-power, you say, “is the most abundant source of non-fossil non-nuclear energy today.” Do you see any inconvenience in the widespread use of this type of energy?

MG,Jr.: Large wind power arrays are best isolated to sites with little nearby population and frequent winds. An obvious location is away from the shore, for example instead of oil derricks at sea. Small wind-energy modules are already being built, which can be mounted on rooftops and add to the household electrical supply. “Inconveniences” are really just problems of design and engineering, and ultimately a source of satisfaction to the innovators of the technology, who overcome them.

A national system of electrical energy supply will be the integration of solar, wind and hydro generators of micro or residential scale, which are coupled with storage units and use sites by a micro-network, and the micro-networks are then coupled by the types of regional networks we are accustomed to now, which also connect to industrial-scale generator sites (e.g., “solar farms,” “wind farms,” large hydroelectric facilities), in order to create a quilt of overlapping local networks which in total is then a robust, reliable and multiply redundant system of national electrical energy supply.

SLA: From your point of view, the hurdles for change are only political. Is it so? What political hurdles are you thinking about?

MG,Jr.: The hurdles are: (1) public awareness of what is truly physically possible — this is the target of my writing, (2) the fear of change and loss of continuity of service (continuity of mindless comfort, as long as one can afford to pay for it), (3) the opposition of powerful capitalist “energy industry” interests, who do not want any change in their profitable modus operandi, and (4) the democratic deficit of the U.S. government (and others), which is held hostage by corporate money and is unresponsive to the public will.

SLA: Please let me ask two final questions. Why do you think Einstein supported the research on atomic energy during the Manhattan Project?

MG,Jr.: He was influenced by people he knew and trusted (Leo Szilard, like Einstein, a Jew), and were afraid the world might indeed succumb to the domination of Hitler and the Nazis. One has to remember how formidable the Third Reich was at its peak in 1939. Europe had essentially capitulated to it: France would fall in 1940, England would be isolated and on the defensive, and Stalinist Russia was formally in compliance with its non-aggression treaty with the Third Reich. The very idea of democracy and free society seem threatened. The thought of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Militarist Japan (in China since 1937) dominating and having their types of mass oppression spread over the globe was inducement enough for Einstein to urge the one major power left, the United States, to invest in the physics that could turn the tide of the world war: the atom bomb. Great fears give rise to great weapons.

SLA: Could you imagine a world without nuclear weapons? What realistic steps could be undertaken to bring us nearer to that ideal?

MG,Jr.: Yes, I can imagine a world free of nuclear weapons. The more people become self-confident in their own lives, and free themselves from their personal fears, the less likely they will be fooled by fear-inducing propaganda, which is the main tool of social control. People who have liberated their minds in this way are best able to become aware of the realities of their national societies, and to become advocates for the egalitarian betterment of their societies. Part of this betterment will include alterations to personal lifestyle, undertaken freely so as to remove oneself (as well as one can) from the support of imperialism and anti-environmental and exploitative capitalism. One then is able to drop prejudices and broaden one’s sympathy to include all who suffer in the world. At this point, your actions in the cause of creating a just and authentically peaceful world are a matter of taking advantage of whatever opportunities the accidents of birth and the vagaries of fate make available to you. Others will be influenced by your example, and in this way the effectiveness of the cause spreads.

A political movement to bring a nation to implement nuclear disarmament, and to then urge other nations to do likewise, must be populated by individuals who have gone some way along the process I described, above. The generosity of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, they being replaced by compassion and respect as the basis of international relations, can only arise from a political movement that reflects these ideals as the general sense of the personal values of its people. A people obsessed with their own gain and their entertainment, and living in fantasy worlds of parallel isolation enveloping them from their laptop screens, is a mass of atomized disengagement, a sea in which the managers of the corporatocracy wash away their cares and sink their wreckage.

I could recommend the philosophy of Epicurus, or Zen. Most basically, I would ask anyone to realize that we are living in a world that would be paradise if we cooperatively chose to make it so. Learn what you fear, and overcome it; then be grateful for life and express it. The rest will come naturally.

Today we are caught in a global economic crash and depression, a calamity affecting every nation connected to the global economy, especially poor nations lacking economic reserves. But this crisis also puts into play new possibilities for a democratic surge, perhaps toward economic democracy.

From the perspective of Economics 101, every bubble mania is basically alike, but from the beginning, this one has been harder to swallow, because it started with people who were just trying to buy a house of their own, who usually had no concept of predatory lending, and who had no say in the securitization boondoggle that spliced up various components of risk to trade them separately. It seemed a blessing to get a low-rate mortgage. It was a mystery how the banks did it, but this was their business; we trusted they knew what they were doing. Our banks resold the mortgages to aggregators who bunched them up with thousands of other subprime mortgages, chopped the package into pieces and sold them as corporate bonds to parties looking for extra yield. Our mortgage payments paid for the interest on the bonds.

For twenty years securitizations and derivatives were great at concocting extra yield and allowing the banks to hide their debt. Broadly speaking, a derivative is any contract that derives its value from another underlying asset. More narrowly and pertinently, it’s an instrument that allows investors to speculate on the future price of something without having to buy it. The words that are used for this business-securitization, insurance, diversifying risk-sound reassuring, but they mask that the business is pure high-leveraged speculation and gambling. Credit-default swaps are private contracts in a completely unregulated market that allow investors to bet on whether a borrower will default. Ten years ago that market was $150 billion; today it’s $62 trillion, and it’s at the heart of the meltdown. Credit default sellers are not required to set aside reserves to pay off claims, and in 2000 Congress exempted them from state gaming laws. AIG’s derivatives unit was a huge casino, selling phantom insurance with hardly any backing, for which we now have to pay. The tally for the past six months: four bailouts, $160 billion, some very hard-to-take bonus payments, and no bottom in sight for a sinkhole of toxic debt exceeding $1 trillion.

Derivatives created dangerous incentives for false accounting and made it extremely difficult to ascertain a firm’s true exposure. They generated huge amounts of leverage and were developed with virtually no consideration of their broad economic consequences.

So many plugged-in players rode this financial lunacy for all it was worth, caught in the terribly real pressure of the market to produce constant short-term gains. Speculators gamed the system and regulators looked the other way. Mortgage brokers sold bad mortgages; bond bundlers packaged the loans into securities; rating agencies gave inflated bond ratings to the loans; corporate executives put the bonds on their balance sheets; and all made fortunes off toxic products they had no business creating or passing off. The chief rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, were supposed to expose financial risk. Instead, paid by the very issuers of the bonds they rated, they hung triple-A ratings on rubbish. There was so much money to be made that firms couldn’t bear to leave it aside for competitors to grab. The banks got leveraged up to 50-to-1 (that’s where Bear Stearns was at the end) and kept piling on debt. The mania for extra yield fed on itself, blowing away business ethics and common sense.

Today we are staring into an economic abyss, a global deflationary spiral. Deflation, once started, has a terrible tendency to feed on itself. Income falls in a recession, which makes debt harder to bear, which discourages investment, which depresses the economy further, which leads to more deflation. To have any chance of breaking the deflationary spiral, the Obama administration has to solve the bank problem and dispose of the toxic debt.

One option is Henry Paulson’s original plan, “cash for trash,” this time with more public accountability. Another is to ramp up the insurance approach, “ring-fencing” bad assets by providing federal guarantees against losses. But these are more-of-the-same options that coddle the banks and don’t solve the valuation problem-that no one trusts anyone else’s balance sheet. The banks are holding at least $2 trillion of toxic debt. For the past six months, the banking system has been paralyzed because the big private equity firms and hedge funds are refusing to pay more than thirty cents on the dollar for the mortgage bundles and the banks can’t stay in business if they book such huge losses on their holdings. In the meantime the banks are holding out for at least sixty cents and pleading for more relief.

The Latest Bailout Fad: Creating Bad Banks

The third option, the “bad bank” model, creates transitional banks to soak up bad debt. Here the risk of getting prices wrong is even greater, assuming that assets are valued immediately. If the government overpays for toxic securities, taxpayers are cheated; if it doesn’t overpay and the banks take mark-to-market prices, many are sure to fail. Some advocates of the bad bank strategy say the government could stall on the price issue, waiting until values rise, but FDIC chair Sheila Bair says no, banking is not alchemy: assets can’t be floated into the ether.

Bair and Timothy Geithner have settled on an aggregator bank model that blends the original Paulson plan with some elements of the bad bank topped off with an auction scheme to find private buyers for the toxic debt. Geithner wants the government to create a $2 trillion public-private investment fund that subsidizes up to 95 percent of deals partnered with hedge funds and private equity firms to buy up the bad assets of the zombie banks. The private funds will end up owning the assets; the FDIC will do most of the partnering work; and the Treasury will hire four or five investment management firms.

Since this is apparently what we’re going to do, I certainly hope it works. But this plan is by far the most cumbersome and least transparent strategy of all. It coddles the banks. It is based on the dubious hope of finding enough private buyers for rotten goods. It assumes that private fund managers have been wrong thus far about the real value of the mortgage bundles. It offers a taxpayer guarantee to investors to ensure they won’t lose money if they get in. And it depends on convincing taxpayers to pony up another $2 trillion for that purpose. Essentially, this is a scheme to pay fantastic bribes to private investors to buy the bad assets for more than they’re worth.

Here’s A Better Idea: Let’s Create Good Banks!

I am for biting the bullet now. It’s obscene to keep paying off the very people who created this disaster. It’s better to take control of the situation now than to dither for another nine or ten months while we lose 600,000 jobs per month. At some point moral fairness and accountability have to enter this picture. We should nationalize the zombie banks, transfer the bad assets to a reincarnation of the 1980s Resolution Trust Corporation, and sell off the sellable parts to new owners.

Nationalization is cleaner and more transparent than the alternatives. It takes hold of the valuation problem by finding the bottom. It cuts off the gusher of taxpayer gifts to managers and shareholders. It offers taxpayers a way of getting some of their money back. It puts an end to mergers between zombie banks, which create more zombie banks that are too big to fail.

Most importantly to me, an aggressive nationalization strategy would put into play the possibility of something more creative and constructive: establishing publicly funded venture capital banks. If we can seriously talk about creating bad banks or aggregator banks, we ought to be able to talk about creating publicly owned good banks to do good things. Public banks could finance start-ups in green technology that are currently languishing and provide financing for cooperatives spurned by traditional banks. The public banks could be financed by an economic stimulus package, or by claiming the good assets of banks seized by the government, or both.

We must push Obama for him to create anything like that, as he is surrounded by centrist corporate establishment types eager to placate Wall Street and averse to wiping out shareholders. We must also push him to stick to a social investment strategy throughout his presidency, instead of backing off from it as Franklin Roosevelt did.

A public bank that supports green technology and cooperatives would be a major breakthrough for economic democracy in this country. Economic democracy is about democratizing power and creating environmentally sustainable economies. In its full-orbed version, it features mixed forms of worker, community, and mutual fund or public bank enterprises. I am not suggesting that factors of production trump everything else. Any social justice politics worthy of the name requires a feminist, interracial, multicultural, ecological, and anti-imperial consciousness that privileges liberationist and environmental issues.

But no serious challenge to existing relations of power can ignore the factors of production. Economic justice is never dispensable. Those who control the terms, amounts, and direction of credit play a huge role in determining the kind of society that everybody else lives in. We’re getting a dramatic demonstration of that today. The question of who controls the process of investment is enormously important. Gains toward social and economic democracy are needed today for the same reason that political democracy is necessary: to restrain the abuse of unequal power.

Pros and Cons of Economic Democracy

Economic democracy, like political democracy, is messy and time-consuming. Democratically controlled capital is less mobile than corporate capital, and the return to democratically controlled capital tends to be lower than in corporations, because worker-controlled enterprises are more committed to keeping low-return firms in operation. Producer cooperatives are often too slow, small, and humane to compete with corporations, and they require cooperative habits and values that cut against the grain of American individualism. In the United States, any strategy to break down concentrated economic power by expanding the cooperative sector confronts difficult trade-offs, political opposition, and cultural barriers.

But economic democracy also has pragmatic considerations in its favor. Economic losses caused by worker participation can be offset by gains in productivity made possible by it. People often work harder and more efficiently when they have a stake in the company. Worker ownership is a key option for communities threatened by runaway plants and deindustrialization. Experiments with various kinds of worker ownership increased dramatically in the 1990s, aided by a growing network of policy experts, and some unions began to bargain for worker ownership, worker control over pension funds, and worker management rights. These developments have the potential to become the building blocks of a serious movement for economic democracy.

Today there are approximately 12,000 worker-owned firms in the United States, including large enterprises such as Republic Engineered Steels, Publix Supermarkets, and Northwestern Steel and Wire. Most employee ownership plans offer shares without voting rights; most assure that employees will be kept in a minority ownership position; few provide educational opportunities to help worker/owners develop management skills; and virtually none offer programs to build solidarity or help worker/owners forge links with other cooperative enterprises or raise awareness of economic democracy issues. Worker ownership without democratic control is a nominal version of economic democracy, thwarting the real thing, and American unions have a generally dismal record in this area, reinforcing the shortcomings.

With all its limitations, however, worker ownership is a viable option, and a necessary one. The Mondragon network in Spain is spectacularly successful; in the United States, several thousand firms have converted to employee ownership, thousands of others have been launched with worker-ownership plans, and approximately 1,000 companies in the United States are fully worker-controlled.

It Begins by Building the Cooperative Sector

Full-orbed economic democracy is obviously far off. On the way to something like it, economic democracy is about building up institutions that do not belong wholly to the capitalist market or the state. It begins by expanding the cooperative sector. Producer cooperatives take labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from the stock market and maintaining local worker ownership. Community land trusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic controls to serve the social needs of communities. Community finance corporations take democratic control over capital to finance cooperative firms, make investments in areas of social need, and fight the redlining policies of banks. These strategies widen the base of social and economic power by mixing together cooperative banks, employee stock ownership plans, producer cooperatives, community land trusts, and planning agencies that guide investments into locally defined areas of need such as housing, soft-energy hardware, infrastructure maintenance, and mass transit.

But merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough. Cooperatives usually prohibit non-working shareholders, so they attract less outside financing than capitalist firms. They are committed to keeping low-return firms in operation, so they tend to stay in business even when they can’t afford to pay competitive wages. They are committed to particular communities, so they are less mobile than corporate capital and labor. They smack of anti-capitalist bias, so they have trouble getting financing and advice from capitalist banks. They tend to maximize net income per worker rather than profits, so they tend to favor capital-intensive investments over job creation. And because cooperative owners often have their savings invested in a single enterprise, they tend to avoid risky innovations.

These problems can be mitigated with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations. Cooperative economics and ecological sustainability are naturally linked by the necessity of creating structural alternatives to the capitalist fantasy of unlimited growth. The kind of economic development that favors the needs of poor and disenfranchised communities and does not harm the earth’s environment requires a dramatically expanded cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms rooted in communities, committed to survival, and prepared to accept lower returns.

But worker ownership does not do enough for equality, especially in the highest-yielding cooperatives, which nearly always have high entry fees. Rather than allow members to sell out to the highest bidder and take their capital gains, most cooperatives require members to sell out to the company. This policy guards against reverting to traditional capitalist ownership, but in cooperatives with high share prices, one has to be rather well off or very determined to apply. One might address the equality problem by universalizing cooperation, but that would ruin a mostly good thing. If everyone had to belong to a cooperative, the entry fees would be waved and many enterprises would fail.

Better Social Ownership Models

We need forms of social ownership that facilitate democratic capital formation, have a greater capacity for scaling up, and are more entrepreneurial. Specifically, we need forms of economic democracy featuring public banks and mutual funded holding companies. This approach can take a variety of forms, but the essential idea is to establish competing banks or holding companies in which ownership of productive capital is vested. The companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwise control the process of investment, including decision-making power to initiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable firms. Equity shareholders, the state, and/or other cooperatives own the holding companies or public banks.

Unfortunately there is a lot more theory on this subject than concrete examples of it. The theorists include Peter Abell, Raymond Plant, Alec Nove, Saul Estrin, David Miller, John Roemer, Robert Dahl, Joanne Barkan, Gar Alperovitz, Radoslav Selucky, Otto Sik, Thomas Weisskopf, and David Winter. The biggest experiment thus far was the Meidner Plan in Sweden, named after German economist Rudolf Meidner, which was enacted in 1982 by the Social Democratic government. It called for an annual 20 percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the form of stock to eight regional mutual funds. Worker, consumer, and government representatives controlled the funds, and as their proportion of stock ownership grew, these groups were collectively entitled to representation on company boards. If fully carried out, this experiment would have rendered effective control over profitable firms in Sweden to the worker and public organizations. But the Social Democrats made little effort to educate the public about it or win popular support for it. For eight years Sweden’s corporate class railed against it constantly. The Meidner Plan’s term expired in 1990, and especially after the Swedish banking crisis of 1992, the Social Democrats lost their enthusiasm for it. That made political sense for them at the outset of second-wave globalization. It may prove to be the death knell for large-scale experiments in full-orbed economic democracy.

But less ambitious forms of economic democracy have succeeded in many places, and the scale question rests on politics and culture more than economic viability. Public bank theory takes seriously the failures of state socialism, the limitations of worker ownership, and the necessity of building up highly capitalized forms of economic democracy. The distinct advantage of this approach is that it diversifies forms of risk sharing and promotes greater efficiency by forcing firms to be financially accountable to a broad range of investors. Essentially, it is a solution to the entrepreneurial deficiencies of worker ownership, addressing conflicts of interest between cooperative owners and profitability that cause cooperatives to miss market signals.

There Can Be No Socialist Blueprint or Magic Wand

This approach does not rest on idealistic notions about human nature and it should not be the next progressive blueprint. Economic democracy is a brake on human greed and domination; the whole point of it is to fight the universal propensity of dominant groups to hoard social goods and abuse disenfranchised people. Neither should progressives absolutize any particular model of economic democracy, for the blueprint mentality is inherently problematic. Socialists were wrong to equate socialization with nationalization. They were wrong to reject production for profit, wrong to think that state planners could replicate the complex pricing decisions of markets, and wrong in trying to organize an economy not linked by markets. Not all Socialist traditions made these mistakes, but the blueprint mentality was deeply ingrained in virtually all of them.

From a democratic perspective, the key problem with the mutual fund model is that it weakens workers’ power at the firm level. To the extent that the holding companies are granted supervisory control over their client enterprises, worker control is diminished. To the extent that the holding companies are kept in a weak position, the advantages of the mutual fund model are traded off as the enterprises essentially become cooperatives.

I have a theory about how to deal with that problem–it’s a circular scheme modeled on Mondragon’s “second degree” cooperatives that upholds the authority of the holding companies–but more important than any particular theory or model is the willingness to expand the social market in different ways and find out which models work best in particular circumstances. The tradition of Christian social ethics and progressive theology to which I belong has an ample history on this subject. The father of the social gospel, Washington Gladden, believed that profit-sharing industrial partnerships would put an end to the class struggle, until he lived long enough to see otherwise. The founder of social ethics, Francis G. Peabody, shared the conviction of most social gospelers that cooperatives were obviously the progressive Christian solution. The greatest social gospeler, Walter Rauschenbusch, believed that a combination of state and cooperative ownership would create a good society. Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple developed a type of guild socialism featuring a Meidner-like plan for worker-controlled collective capital funds. Reinhold Niebuhr stood for radical state Socialism before opting for the welfare state. Many liberationists and social ethicists have promoted “socialism” without describing what it is.

Most of this tradition wrongly operated with unitary ideas of capitalism and socialism, as though each were only one thing, culminating in the liberationist tendency to condemn “capitalism” categorically while employing “socialism” as a magic wand. The latter approach is too vague, monolithic, and evasive, but neither should social justice movements embrace any particular model as the next sign of the divine commonwealth.

The Better Way: Organic, Pluralistic, Pragmatic, Voluntary

Economic democracy must be a project built from the ground up, piece by piece, opening new choices, creating more democracy, building an economic order that allows for social contracts, common goods, and ecological flourishing. Economic democracy nurtures and sustains social trust: social capital that no healthy society can do without. It is a project that breaks from the universalizing logic of state socialism and takes seriously that there are different kinds of capitalism. Social theorist Roberto M. Unger calls for “alternative pluralisms,” step-by-step constructions of alternative political and economic institutions. Abstract concepts of a monolithic “capitalism” or “market” obscure the variety of possibilities within existing capitalism and markets. So-called “capitalism” is always the product of particular historical configurations, contingencies, and struggles.

The tests of any experiment in economic democracy are pragmatic. To impose something like the Mondragon network on a capitalist society would require coercion over workers who don’t want to belong to cooperatives. The U.S. Pacific Northwest has a network of longstanding, highly successful plywood cooperatives. Some plywood workers choose to work in conventional firms instead of the cooperatives. No political economy worth building would force them into a different choice.

The issue of choice, however, is the key to a better alternative. A politics that expanded the cooperative and social ownership sectors would give workers important new choices. The central conceit of neoclassical economics could be turned into a reality if meaningful choices were created. The neoclassical conceit is that capitalism doesn’t exploit anyone, because labor employs capital as much as capital employs labor. But in the real world the owners of capital nearly always organize the factors of production. To expand the cooperative and other social market sectors would give choices to workers that neoclassical theory promises, but does not deliver. It would show that there is an alternative to a system that stokes and celebrates greed and consumption to the point of self-destruction.

The earth’s ecosystem cannot sustain a U.S.-level lifestyle for more than one-sixth of the world’s population. The economy is physical. There are limits to economic growth. Global warming is melting the Arctic ice cap at a shocking pace. It is melting large areas of permafrost in Alaska, Canada, and Siberia, and destroying wetlands and forests around the world. The manic logic of corporate capitalism pays little heed to communities and the environment, and none to equality. Corporate giants like ExxonMobil succeed as businesses and investments while treating the destructive aspects of their behavior as someone else’s problem.

For thirty years one had to be a stubborn type to sail against the religion of the market. Now one only needs to be awake. If the stubborn types can seize this terrible moment as an opportunity to build a better social order, we may actually do it.

One of the greatest weaknesses of the mainstream environmental movement has been its failure or refusal to identify capitalism as the root problem. Indeed, many of the world’s Green Parties, including the one in Canada where I live, openly describe themselves as eco-capitalist, committed to maintaining the profit system.

Of course this puts them in a contradictory position when they face the reality of capitalist ecocide.

In Canada, as you may know, oil companies are engaged in what the British newspaper The Independent accurately called “The Biggest Environmental Crime in History,” mining the Alberta Tar Sands. If it continues, it will ultimately destroy an area that is nearly twice as big as New South Wales, in order to produce oil by a process that generates three times as much greenhouse gas as normal oil production.

It is also destroying ecosystems, killing animals, fish and birds, and poisoning the drinking water used by Indigenous peoples in that area,

It’s obvious that anyone who is serious about protecting the environment and stopping emissions should demand that the Tar Sands be shut down. But when I raised that in a talk not long ago in Vancouver, a Green Party candidate in the audience objected that would be irresponsible, because it would violate the oil companies’ contract rights.

Evidently, for these ecocapitalists, “capitalism” takes precedence over “eco.”

But as capitalist destruction accelerates, and as capitalist politicians continue to stall, or to introduce measures that only benefit the fossil fuel companies, we can expect that many of the most sincere and dedicated greens will begin to question the system itself, not just its worst results.

Greens moving left: Gus Speth

An important case in point, and, I hope, a harbinger of what’s to come in green circles – is James Gustave Speth, who is now dean of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Gus Speth has spent most of his life trying to save the environment by working inside the system. He was a senior environmental advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, and later to Bill Clinton. In the 1990s he was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and Chair of the United Nations Development Group. Time magazine called him “the ultimate insider.”

Last year, after 40 years working inside the system, Speth published a book called The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Stability. In it, he argues that working inside the system has failed because the system itself is the cause of environmental destruction.

My conclusion, after much searching and considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today …

Inherent in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn profits, invest them, innovate, and thus grow the economy, typically at exponential rates …

That’s exactly correct, no Marxist could have said it better. Nor could we improve on Speth’s summary of the factors that combine to make contemporary capitalism the enemy of ecology.

An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic growth at almost any cost; enormous investment in technologies designed with little regard for the environment; powerful corporate interests whose overriding objective is to grow by generating profit, including profit from avoiding the environmental costs they create; markets that systematically fail to recognize environmental costs unless corrected by government; government that is subservient to corporate interests and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism spurred by a worshipping of novelty and by sophisticated advertising; economic activity so large in scale that its impacts alter the fundamental biophysical operations of the planet; all combine to deliver an ever-growing world economy that is undermining the planet’s ability to sustain life.

Speth is not a Marxist. He still hopes that governments can reform and control capitalism, eliminating pollution. He’s wrong about that, but his analysis of the problem is dead-on, and the fact that it comes from someone who has worked for so long inside the system makes his argument against capitalism credible and powerful.

The socialist movement should welcome and publicize this development, even though Speth and others like him, don’t yet take their ideas to the necessary socialist conclusions.

Greens moving left: James Hansen

Similarly, we should be very encouraged that NASA’s James Hansen, one of the world’s most respected climate scientists, joined in the March 20 demonstration against a planned coal-fired electricity plant in Coventry, England. Hansen is another environmentalist who has worked inside the system for years.

He told the UK Guardian that people should first use the “democratic process” by which he means elections. He went on:

What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I’m not surprised that people are getting frustrated.

I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we’re running out of time.

In the same interview, Hansen expressed concern about the approach of the Obama administration:

“It’s not clear what their intentions are yet, but if they are going to support cap and trade then unfortunately I think that will be another case of greenwash. It’s going to take stronger action than that.”

Like Speth, Hansen is not a socialist. But he condemns the most widely-promoted market-based “solution,” and he calls for demonstrations and protests, so ecosocialists can and must view him as an ally.

Why ECOsocialism?

Which brings me to a question I’ve been asked many times, including during this visit to Australia. “Why ecosocialism?”

Why not just say ’socialism’? Marx and Engels were deeply concerned about humanity’s relationship to nature, and what we would today call ecological ideas are deeply embedded in their writings. In the 1920s, there was a very influential ecology movement in the Soviet Union. So why do we need a new word?

All that is true. But it is also true that during the 20th century socialists forgot or ignored that tradition, supporting (and in some cases implementing) approaches to economic growth and development that were grossly harmful to the environment.

Socialist Voice recently published an interview in which Oswaldo Martinez, the president of the Economic Affairs Commission of Cuba’s National Assembly addressed just that question. He said:

The socialism practiced by the countries of the Socialist Camp replicated the development model of capitalism, in the sense that socialism was conceived as a quantitative result of growth in productive forces. It thus established a purely quantitative competition with capitalism, and development consisted in achieving this without taking into account that the capitalist model of development is the structuring of a consumer society that is inconceivable for humanity as a whole.

The planet would not survive. It is impossible to replicate the model of one car for each family, the model of the idyllic North American society, Hollywood etc. – absolutely impossible, and this cannot be the reality for the 250 million inhabitants of the United States, with a huge rearguard of poverty in the rest of the world.

It is therefore necessary to come up with another model of development that is compatible with the environment and has a much more collective way of functioning.

In my view, one good reason for using the word ‘ecosocialism’ is to signal a clear break with the practices that Martinez describes, practices were called socialist for seventy years. It is a way of saying that we aim not to create a society based on having more things, but on living better — not quantitative growth, but qualitative change.

Another reason, just as important, is to signal loud and clear that we view ecology and climate change not as just as another stick to bash capitalism with, but as one of the principal problems facing humanity in this century.

Evo Morales: Save the planet from capitalism

Although he has never used the word, so far as I know, one of the strongest defenders of ecosocialist ideas in the world today is Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, the first indigenous head of state in Latin America.

In a short essay published last November, Evo brilliantly defined the problem, named the villain, and posed the alternative.

Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism, Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world. It generates luxury, ostentation and waste for a few, while millions in the world die from hunger in the world.

In the hands of capitalism everything becomes a commodity: the water, the soil, the human genome, the ancestral cultures, justice, ethics, death … and life itself. Everything, absolutely everything, can be bought and sold and under capitalism. And even “climate change” itself has become a business.

“Climate change” has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.

You know, last year I spent months working with other members of the Ecosocialist International Network, composing a statement to be distributed at the World Social Forum. It was finally published as the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration.

Now I wonder why we didn’t just publish this statement by comrade Evo Morales. He set out the case for ecosocialism, including a program of 20 demands, more concisely, more clearly, and vastly more eloquently than we did. I urge you to read it and to distribute it as widely as possible.

Slamming on the brakes

Writing in the 1930s when Nazi barbarism was in the rise, the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin said:

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.

That’s a powerful and profound metaphor. Capitalism has been so destructive, and taken us so far down the road to catastrophe, that one of the first tasks facing a socialist government will be to slam on the brakes.

The only choice, the only way forward, is ecosocialism, which I suggest can be defined simply as a socialism that will give top priority to the restoration of ecosystems that capitalism has destroyed, to the reestablishment of agriculture and industry on ecologically sound principles, and to mending what Marx called the metabolic rift, the destructive divide that capitalism has created between humanity and nature.

The fate of the ecological struggle is closely tied to the fortunes of the class struggle as a whole. The long neo-liberal drive to weaken the movements of working people also undermined ecological resistance, isolating it, pushing its leaders and organizations to the right.

But today neo-liberalism is discredited. Its financial and economic structures are in shambles. There is growing recognition that profound economic change is needed.

This is an historic opportunity for ecological activists to join hands with workers, with indigenous activists, with anti-imperialist movements here and around the world, to make ecological transformation a central feature of the economic change that is so clearly needed.

Together we can build a society of Good Ancestors, and cooperatively create a better world for future generations.

It won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick, but together we can make it happen.