People Before Profit blog

GOP Convention brews lies and hate

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 16:03:00 +0000

I can't recall another Republican Convention more full of lies, demagogy, sexism and racism as the one just concluded in Tampa.

This noxious cloud enveloping the convention hall was meant to obscure a glaring fact - the GOP knows its policy of enriching the 1% and austerity for the working class is not a winning platform.

The GOP knows billionaire Mitt Romney, who spent all of 2 minutes of his acceptance speech explaining his program for the country, cannot overcome his sky-high negative ratings.

Working people sense his disdain as exemplified in his stewardship of Bain Capital, the equity firm obsessed with attaining maximum profits through job destruction and outsourcing and the countless offshore bank accounts hiding his true massive wealth.

The GOP is also aware the entire Republican platform, perhaps the most right wing in history, is out of step with the majority of Americans. The platform among other things:

calls for a national "right to work for less" law,

guts public sector unions,

outlaws abortion without exception,

calls for self-deportation of 12 million undocumented immigrants,

makes English the official language,

outlaws same sex marriage and

reinstates "Don't Ask Don't Tell" in the military.

And without shame, Mitt Romney, Karl Rove and the ultra-right Republicans are brazenly committed to use racist hatred to slash and burn their way to the White House and a Republican Congressional majority.

The GOP is pinning its hopes on dividing the electorate, winning a decisive share of white voters and suppressing the vote of African Americans, Latinos, youth and students and seniors in a close election.

It's hardly surprising given the GOP history. You could count on both hands the number of African American, Latino and Asian delegates in the convention hall, half of whom were speakers cynically promoted to obscure what was obvious to all.

Predictably, speakers subtly and not so subtly whipped the racist and sexist atmosphere, giving rise to numerous ugly incidents.

Speaker after speaker tried to outdo each other with vilification of President Obama, blaming him for every conceivable ill, accusing him of undermining freedom and liberty, hurling every disdainful, sneering jibe and invective his way while offering no alternative.

Horrified colleagues watched as Patricia Carroll, an African American CNN camerawoman, was pelted with peanuts by delegates.

Carroll said, "You come to places like this, you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don't think I should do."

Again stunned onlookers watched as Ron Paul supporters shouted down Zoraida Fonalledas from Puerto Rico, the chairwoman of the Committee on Permanent Organization, with the chant, "USA, USA, USA," as they protested the decision not to seat members of the Maine delegation.

Rick Santorum continued sowing the racist seeds he scattered during the primaries. As Joe Walsh noted in Salon.com, "In case any was in danger of missing the racial subtext (of Obama supposedly gutting the work requirement for welfare), Santorum linked Obama's supposed waiving the work requirement (which he did not in fact do) to "his refusal to enforce the immigration law." Welfare recipients and illegal immigrant, oh my! Santorum made sure to scare white workers with the depredation of those non-white "slackers and moochers."

Meanwhile strategists for the Romney campaign, desperate to cut into President Obama's support, openly admit they will double down on racism to win votes from white workers. This proves Romney's "birther" comment at a Michigan campaign rally was calculated.

The Romney campaign gleefully boasts it will continue running their patently false TV ad charging President Obama has gutted work rules for welfare recipients simply because they say it is having the intended effect of shifting some white voters.

The ad dredges up coded racist images to appeal to resentments among white workers reeling from the economic crisis. It follows the racist "food stamp president" characterizations of the GOP primary, regurgitated at the convention by former Arkansas governor and current right-wing hate talk show host Mike Huckabee.

Republican strategists pledge to continue running a blatantly false ad claiming Obama robbed $716 billion from Medicare in order to pay for the Affordable Care Act, supposedly undermining the program to funnel money to the poor, mainly African Americans and Latinos.

As the New York Times reported August 25, the Romney campaign doesn't give a hoot about the truth but will "blow the dog whistle of racism" to erode Obama's persistent support among white working class men and women - even all women.

"The strategic shift in the campaign message that has been unfolding in recent weeks reflects a conclusion among Mr. Romney's advisers that disappointment with Mr. Obama's economic stewardship is not sufficient to propel Mr. Romney to victory on its own," says the Times.

Such an appeal to racism has a two edged sword. The country has come a long way reflected in the historic election of President Obama. Millions of whites, including crucial independent voters, are abhorred and turned off by blatantly racist appeals. However as long as it is still effective in blinding a section of white workers to their own best interests, the struggle against it is far from over.

The only way to counter the dangerous extremism emanating from Tampa is to expose racism, sexism and homophobia as morally repugnant, show the true common interests of our multiracial working class and people, spread the truth and fight for maximum unity and turnout on November 6!

Photo: Demonstrators walk with a Mitt Romney puppet during a protest march, Aug. 28, in Tampa, Fla. Thousands of protestors gathered in Tampa to march in demonstrations against the Republican National Convention. Dave Martin/AP

A book for Labor Day: "Playing Bigger Than You Are - A Life In Organizing"

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:48:00 +0000

The U.S. national holiday, Labor Day, started out as a safe alternative to the militant labor traditions of May Day. But things change. Labor has changed in the fight against the vicious attacks on it over the last 30 years. Labor Day is more and more a day of struggle for worker rights. At the same time, May Day is being reclaimed as the workers' fight back holiday.

This Labor Day workers will be marching and highlighting union and election struggles around the country. But, after the marches, it might be a good time to kick back and read a good book by a lifelong activist and leader in those fights.

"Playing Bigger Than You Are" is a great book to read in the heat of struggle. Author Stewart Acuff has a lot to say about how we organize and build people power to win. (Read John Case's interview of Stewart Acuff here.)

Many of us in the labor movement first heard of Stewart after he was elected president of the Atlanta AFL-CIO in 1991. In 1995, he led a broad coalition of labor and community activists in militant action to occupy the Atlanta office of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich. They were giving voice to millions of working class people's disgusted with Gingrich's "Contract for [on] America.

What a spark! Labor and community groups around the country responded in protest against Gingrich's plan. As Stewart points out in the book Gingrich quickly became the "controversial Speaker Gingrich."

The "Contract" was very similar to the Republican talking points of today, though not as extreme as the current Republican platform.

For some who know Stewart, the reach and breadth of his organizing experience in this book will reveal a whole new side of him. Community organizing in Dallas, Texas and Memphis, Tenn., for ACORN, Stewart helped lead battles from getting stop signs at dangerous intersections, to fighting for more equitable distribution of Housing and Urban Development funds.

It's ironic that while GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney touts his dubious role in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, Stewart really did play a critical leadership role fighting for union rights in the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. After his 1991 election, Stewart hit the ground working to guarantee that the 1996 Olympics were union-made. He worked hard to help build a broad labor-community coalition that included key sectors of the civil rights movements.

And they won.

I would especially recommend this book to young organizer and activists who are in motion and just getting started. "Playing Bigger Than You Are" highlights many important lessons about organizing. But perhaps even more important, the book really underlines an approach to organizing that focuses on learning everyday from your experiences.

"It's not about concepts and techniques as important as those are. We organize to give people a voice. We organize people no one will listen too and give them a voice that everyone will hear," Stewart writes.

And always remember, "You cannot build a union or community organization for others, they have to do it themselves," he wisely counsels.

Book review

"Playing Bigger Than You Are -- A Life in Organizing"

By Stewart Acuff, forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders

2011, Levins Publishing, 129 pp., $24.95, paperback $14.99

Photo: John Bacthell

Paul Ryan's Pell Grant cuts are unjust, misguided

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:49:00 +0000

Paul Ryan and those Republican budget cutters are at it again. This time they're going right for the jugular vein of the higher education financial aid system: Pell Grants. Paul Ryan 's budget would cut $170 billion from the already underfunded and high-demand program.

Pell Grants are a vital aid source for low-income college students, helping them pay college tuition. The Education Trust and others in higher education estimate that over 1 million students would lose out on a Pell Grant over 10 years if this becomes a reality. In a time where tuition and books costs are strangling many low-income and working class students, why are we cutting when we should be funding this vital program? Oh I forgot, education is a privilege according to the 1%.

Wrong. Education is a human right. It is the basis on which knowledge, and with that empowerment, is founded. Everyone should have that chance to have some of that knowledge and empowerment, regardless of income.

I see it every day at my school. Even at a public community college like mine where tuition is deeply discounted for all county residents, students are still struggling to pay the bill. Even after all the state and federal grants, and the high-interest private loans, they're still weighed down with test, activity, and textbook fees on top of tuition.

And now Republicans want to cut Pell Grants? Throw away the chance for 1 million students to better themselves? I don't think so. Pell Grants are a critical program which must be funded at all costs.

I have long called in previous education articles for higher education reforms. These reforms in the interim would include a temporary massive increase in funding for Pell Grants to cover more students. Other goals would include passage of the Student Loan Forgiveness Act, and the eventual abolition of student loans themselves which are unjust, and crippling.

Both Pell Grants and loans would be replaced by permanent guaranteed federal scholarships available to all students who opt for attendance at a public college, university, or vocational/technical school. These scholarships would be funded through a strong central progressive taxation scheme with the burden being on the top incomes.

Education should never be a tool of the privileged few. If we cut Pell Grants and fail to reform higher education we are looking at education becoming a private sector business with no public support. Millions of students ,many of them low-income, minority, and working class, would be left without a means of empowerment. That to me is unjust and misguided. Education is the right and lifeblood of the 99%.

Photo: Even with a computer and a calculator most college students are struggling to find ways to pay for their education. Jay LaPrete/AP

Caterpillar capitalism triumphs

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:09:00 +0000

The almost 800 striking Machinists at Caterpillar in Joliet, Ill., voted last week to accept the company's contract offer, which included almost the same give backs on wages, health care and pensions as the one they rejected some four months ago. The local leadership urged a "no" vote on the offer negotiated by the union's district leadership. Reports say the vote was close, but the strike-weary workers relented to the company's demands: wage and pension freeze, double the health care costs, replacing current pension plan with 401-K and seniority rights curbed.

Caterpillar threw in a few crumbs it didn't have before, namely, new hires will get a 3% raise over the course of the six-year contract, a higher ratification bonus and time limits on management's ability to override seniority on jobs and overtime.

What makes this concessionary contract significant is Caterpillar is rolling in record profits to the tune of $5 billion last year. Caterpillar is seen as a workforce trendsetter in manufacturing. The highly profitable trendsetter demanded and won concessions from its union employees, achieving its goal of so called market wages. That means bringing its employees down the wage ladder to equal the area's going rate - about $13 bucks an hour. Caterpillar begins it, who's next, a profitable John Deere? Other highly profitable companies?

The workers said they expected Caterpillar to be able to pay for what the workers had before this new contract. They didn't want to go backwards and expected in a time of record profits of "sharing" the wealth, instead of giving millions to the CEO, top execs and, of course, the sacred shareholders.

That's what The New York Times called Caterpillar capitalism.

Earlier this year Caterpillar broke the Canadian UAW local at its London, Ontario operation when it locked out the 465 workers. The company then transferred the work to a nonunion plant in Indiana, which recently became a "right to work for less" state.

Pitting union workers against nonunion workers or American against foreign to compete for jobs at ever spiraling down wages is an old capitalist tactic called whipsawing or better yet, race to the bottom.
With the current economic climate - huge wealth gap between the global haves and the 99% have nots, productivity up, job creation down, unemployment up, wages down - corporations are in the drivers seat. People think a job at $13 an hour is better than nothing.

Is there a solution? Not easy ones but it starts with building a united labor and people's movement globally and locally, one that has an approach to political and legislative action along with strikes and protests. The first steps that can help such a movement to grow are the ones Americans will take to the voting booths in November. A possible Romney administration with a Republican Congress and ultra-conservative Supreme Court will put the movement on the defensive while giving a bright green light to corporate America and turning over the levers of government to them.

Photo: Caterpillar strike picket line, August 1, 2012. PW

Why we need a massive jobs program

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 11:50:00 +0000

Recently I visited Bridgeport, a neighborhood in Chicago's near South Side; I was attending a Communist Party school. It was the second time I had the opportunity to visit the Windy City. The first time, in 2005, I didn't have a lot of time to get around but being downtown and on the North side gave me the impression of a city that was doing fairly well.

Seven years later, the downtown and North Side sections still had pockets of the upwardly mobile, but the hustle and bustle had definitely diminished. Even so, in comparing it to the Bridgeport section, there was a stark difference; I was really taken aback at what I saw.

This is, as many a writer has coined; the "Great Recession." As I strolled South Halsted Street (a main avenue that connects the South Side to the North), many stores were closed and shuttered. For a brief time, due to my excitement of attending the school and just being in this great city, I had forgotten the hard times we are in.

I always enjoy talking to people, especially when I'm visiting a place I've never been. While washing some clothes in a nearby laundry place, I took the opportunity to talk with two women who live in the area. I had heard that there was an attempt at gentrification in the area but when I suggested this to one of the women she looked puzzled and told me that if in fact that was true, it had ended abruptly with the meltdown of the U.S. economy.

She explained that she moved into the area several years before the recession and now the house she bought was "under water" for $125 thousand. I then asked if she had a job and she replied, "For now, but I'm not sure for how long." Her friend had a job in a local real estate office and she laughed when describing how the manager of the office told perspective buyers about the great shopping and transportation. She looked around at the closed stores and then looked at me with a quizzical sort of smile.

That's the first part of my kick in the pants. Hey! Is Congress listening? We are in deep trouble in the U.S.A.

Shortly after returning from Chicago, my partner and I took my granddaughters camping in the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania) at Hi Point National Park. We camped in the town of Montague, which is on the Jersey side. Port Jervis is on the New York side. I've always had this vision of Port Jervis as a solid working-class town, an idyllic place; a town that I would have loved to have grown up in.

We drove into Port Jervis to buy a few sundries and take in what I expected to be a pleasant experience. Wow! What a shocking experience. A picture is worth a thousand words, but I was so taken aback at what I saw that I didn't think to take any.

One store after another was closed. One side of a street we walked down was entirely shuttered with the exception of one or two stores. The only businesses that seemed to be surviving were the antique stores. Apparently the town is a favorite stop for folks looking for such things.

We stopped at a local bakery for a little dessert - my granddaughters weren't as interested as I or my partner in the experience - and rest. Before leaving, I asked the server how long she lived in the town; she replied "thirteen or fourteen years"; then I asked her how things were going. She said, "Many people are on section eight and public assistance... there are no jobs."

Is Congress listening to the American people? Does the budget-cutting right wing in Congress care that the American working class is bleeding? Obviously not.

It is so, so very clear to me that the only way the working families in America will be able to raise their families and live a decent life in the future is for the government to intervene - as it should - and put a massive infrastructure jobs program in place. For example, The American Jobs Act, sponsored by Representative John Conyers of Michigan.

HR 4277, a revised version of HR 870, was introduced by Rep. Conyers in March of this year. This federal legislation would create a national public service jobs program to complement job creation efforts in the private and nonprofit sectors. There is no other way. This is the first step towards any kind of meaningful recovery.

At the party school, a chart was used to explain why we need a massive jobs program and government intervention. Pure and simple it explains how productivity has gotten us to this point in our history. Here is a sampling: 2 percent of the U.S. population is engaged in agriculture today; in 1940, 18 percent were engaged. Manufacturing: 9 percent today, while in 1940, 37 percent were in production of goods. In this era of globalization and enormous productivity there is no logical reason not to challenge the existing order of things.

The first thing that must happen to get any one of the jobs programs passed is to re-elect President Obama. This administration has done much for the betterment of the American people in spite of the rabid pushback by the right wing, which is in the majority of the House at this time.

I would be greatly remiss if I didn't include the imperialist wars that the military corporations have engaged us in that are draining our treasury.

And, I'll end here with the words of the recently deceased Gore Vidal (American social commentator, author and critic of American foreign affairs policy): "America can not prosper without peace." To be in agreement is an understatement.

Boston’s U.S.-Cuba games show beauty of sports

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Too often, sports is considered to be yet another venue that exacerbates divisiveness, exhorts nationalism and further inflames existing tensions. However, there are beautiful moments where sport transcends national, racial and geopolitical divisions and unites athletes in the beauty of the game.

Such an event is the U.S.-Cuba Friendship Games and related activities taking place Aug. 23-30 in Boston and neighboring communities.

American softball teams from the EMASS League and Bay State Association have been afforded fantastic opportunities to travel to Cuba. While there, they not only played against Cuban softball teams in a tournament but were treated to entertaining parties and wonderful treatment by their Cuban hosts. This series of games in Boston is allowing the Americans to return the favor.

Events like the Friendship Games and the U.S. sending college players to compete against the Cuban national baseball team in July are showing that sports can be a common bond used to strengthen humanity despite the lengthy political disputes between the U.S. and Cuba.

Sometimes, it is more than just the play on the field that is a beautiful thing to watch.

Photo: Friendship Games

Romney part of Global Tax Dodging, Inc.

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:03:00 +0000

Mitt Romney is a tax dodger. That's according to the 950 pages of confidential financial documents about his offshore Cayman Island investments, posted by Gawker last week.

It looks like Romney avoids paying taxes as much as Prince Harry avoids wearing clothes.

Romney isn't alone. He's got about 10 million buddies worldwide, including oil barons, drug kingpins and technology tycoons, who do the same thing. They hide their wealth in offshore tax shelters and create elaborate schemes to get out of paying taxes.

It comes with the territory of being the global 1%. You accumulate untold wealth - not by the sweat of your brow but on the backs of others - and then you employ lawyers, accountants, banks to - as they say - minimize your tax liability; you hire lobbyists and politicians to write favorable tax codes; and you endow think tanks to come up with reasons to justify the cheating of the public coffers.

This global 1% stash anywhere from $21 trillion to $32 trillion (yes that's right TRILLION) in these havens, according to a groundbreaking report by Tax Justice Network.

Twenty-one trillion dollars is the size of the U.S. and Japan's economy put together.

If that's not bad enough, the report estimates an unprecedented concentration of that wealth - $10 trillion - is controlled by only 91,000 individuals. Talk about the global .001%!

The numbers are "conservative," the report's author says. They only measured financial wealth - no real estate, no yachts or private jets.

Romney is part of the global stash-the-cash-offshore crowd, one that calls for austerity - severe government cuts - while they sit on a Mt. Everest of untaxed cash.

The report says if this incredible wealth were taxed it would generate revenues of between $190-$280 billion, enough to turn current debtor countries into creditors.

Imagine what the taxes could do here. Maybe all of America's children could get world-class education and health care, instead of the economic and racial inequality that has run rampant these last 30 years, since Reagan and the Republican Revolution.

As Romney was hiding his assets in the Caymans, the rest of the top 1% in the United States was doing the same thing. They doubled their income from 1980 to 2010.

During that same period, incomes of the bottom 90% in the U.S. dropped almost 5%, according to a study by two economic professors from the Paris School of Economics and the University of California Berkeley, the report noted.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow put the crisis of economic and racial inequality in perspective in his recent column, "Starving the future." Blow cites data from a recent report that "half of U.S. children get no early childhood education, and we have no national strategy to increase enrollment."

Plus:
• More than a quarter of U.S. children have a chronic health condition, such as obesity or asthma, threatening their capacity to learn.

More than 22 percent of U.S. children lived in poverty in 2010, up from about 17 percent in 2007.
More than half of U.S. college students drop out without receiving a degree.

This is while China and other countries are expanding education and health care for their young people, he says.

There's more. In a survey, K-8 teachers report hunger rising among their students.

Blow cites "a teacher in the Midwest as saying, 'The saddest are the children who cry when we get out early for a snow day because they won't get lunch.'"

In America. Outrageous.

What is the GOP, Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan's response? Cut food assistance programs.

Anything but raising taxes, they say. "That's socialistic!"

Instead the 1% take their ill-gotten gains and try to buy elections to install a president and Congress that will continue the pattern of aiding and abetting the "plutonomy."

This is what is at stake in the November elections.

You don't believe me? How about Citigroup?

In his article "Oligarchy in the U.S.A.," Northwestern University political science associate professor Jeffrey Winters quotes a 2005 Citigroup report, which gave some straight talk to its super-wealthy clients.

Calling its clients leaders of a "plutonomy," Citigroup said the heart of a plutonomy is income inequality facilitated by governments willing to give these capitalists favorable tax rates.

But Citigroup warned that such tax regimes are not forever. "[P]ersonal taxation rates could rise - dividends, capital gains and inheritance taxes would hurt the plutonomy."

Winters argues the oligarchy employ every means necessary to keep its treasure from being taxed.

President Barack Obama's minimal attempt to "curtail offshore tax havens in 2009," Winters writes, was met with "outright hostility" from Republicans, "who argued that they would cripple American corporations' ability to compete globally."

It's clear what a Romney administration would do. It would increase the obscene wealth gap, bring more misery to Americans, wreck the economy and threaten democracy.

Anyone who thinks they can sit this election out because "nothing ever changes" is not only irresponsible, but in for a rude awakening.

With Romney, change will happen. But it won't be good.

The Mali war - the wages of sin

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:15:00 +0000

The reports filtering out of Northern Mali are appalling: a young couple stoned to death, iconic ancient shrines dismantled, and some 365,000 refugees fleeing beatings and whippings for the slightest violations of Sharia law. But the bad dream unfolding in this West African country is less the product of a radical version of Islam than a consequence of the West's scramble for resources on this vast continent, and the wages of sin from the recent Libyan war.

The current crisis gripping northern Mali-an area about the size of France- has its origins in the early years of the Bush Administration, when the U.S. declared the Sahara desert a hotbed of "terrorism" and poured arms and Special Forces into the area as part of the Trans-Sahal Counter Terrorism Initiative. But, according to anthropologist Jeremy Keenan, who has done extensive fieldwork in Mali and the surrounding area, the "terrorism" label had no basis in fact, but was simply designed to "justify the militarization of Africa."

The U.S. military claimed that when the Taliban fell in Afghanistan, terrorists moved west into the Horn of Africa, the Sudan and the Sahara. But Keenan says, "There was absolutely no evidence for that...really a figment of imagination." The real target of enlarging the U.S.'s military footprint was "oil resources" and "the gradually increasing threat of China on the continent."

The U.S. currently receives about 18 percent of its energy supplies from Africa, a figure that is slated to rise to 25 percent by 2015. Africa also provides about one-third of China's energy needs, plus copper, platinum, timber and iron ore. According to the Financial Times, new gas fields were recently discovered on the Algeria-Mali border

There have been terrorist acts in Africa. In 1998, hotels were bombed in Kenya and, in 2002, a synagogue in Tunisia. The 2004 Madrid train bombers were associated with the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, an organization that set off bombs in Casablanca in 2003.

But these groups had no affiliation with international terror groups like al-Qaeda, and the only one that could be said to be Sahara-based was the Algerian Salafist Group for Fighting and Preaching. That group later renamed itself "Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb" (AQIM).

In 2006, the International Crisis Group also concluded that the Sahara "was not a hotbed of terrorism" and that most North African governments saw the Trans Sahal Initiative as a way to tap into high end arms technology, like attack helicopters, night vision equipment, and sophisticated communications networks.

When the U.S. African Command (AFRICOM) was formed in 2008, it took over the Initiative and began working directly with countries in the region, including Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Chad, Niger, Mauretania, and Senegal. Indeed, the only country in the region that did not have a tie to AFRICOM was Libya.

The US also has basing agreements with Uganda, Ghana, Namibia, Ghana, Gabon, and Zambia. Some 1500 U.S. Marines are currently deployed at Lemonier, a French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti on the horn of Africa.

The "terrorism" label has always been a slippery one. For instance, the US supported the 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia that overthrew the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) government. Washington said the UIC was associated with al-Qaeda, but never produced any evidence of that. The UIC was a moderate Islamic movement that drove out the U.S.-supported warlords and brought peace to Somalia for the first time since 1991. It included such radical Islamic groups as the Shabab, but those organizations did not dominate the government.

The Ethiopian invasion changed all that. For Somalians, Ethiopia is a traditional enemy, and the Shabab succeeded in uniting a large section of the population against the occupation. Thus, a small group that was marginal in the UIC became the backbone of the resistance. "The end result of the US-backed invasion was driving Somalia into the al-Qaeda fold," says Somalia's former foreign minister, Ismaciil Buubaa.

The crisis in Mali has a long history, rooted in the country's deep poverty, on one hand, anda on the other, a push by the Tuaregs-a nomadic Berber people that have long controlled trans-Sahara trade-for greater autonomy and a bigger piece of the development pie. The Tuaregs have staged unsuccessful revolts four times since Mali won its independence from France in 1960, but the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya gave them a golden opportunity.

Gaddfi had long supported the Tuaregs in their war for independence, and many Tuaregs served as pro-government mercenaries in Libya. When Gaddafi fell, a cornucopia of arms opened for the Tuaregs, who quickly put their newly acquired firepower to use against the largely ineffective Malian army.

The so-called "terrorist" groups, like Ansar al-Din, al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad and AQIM, only moved in after the Tuareg Movement for the National Liberation of Azawed had expelled the Malian army from the north and declared a separate country. It is these groups that are stoning people to death, tearing down Sufi shrines, and enforcing rigid Sharia law. The Tuaregs have largely been pushed to the side, and many of them have returned to the desert, abandoning cities like Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal to the Islamic groups.

Besides the original protagonists in northern Mali, there is growing tension between the Islamists and the Songhai, Mali's largest ethnic group. There are rumors that Songhai villages are organizing militia, adding yet another dimension of potential trouble.

None of this had to happen.

When the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973 on Mar. 17 last year, it was to "protect civilians" in Libya. At the time, the 53-member African Union (AU) was attempting to negotiate a political solution to the crisis, but two days after the UN resolution was approved, NATO launched Operation Odyssey that smashed up Gaddafi's air force and armor.

On Mar. 20, the AU met in Mauritania in an effort to stop the fighting. "Our desire," read a joint AU statement "is that Libya's unity and territorial integrity be respected as well as the rejection of any kind of foreign intervention." The AU was acutely aware that Africa's delicate post-colonial borders have enormous potential for creating instability, and that Libya might end up being a falling domino.

"Whatever the motivation of the principle NATO belligerents [in ousting Gadaffi], the law of unintended consequences is exacting a heavy toll on Mali today," former UN regional envoy Robert Fowler told the Guardian (UK) "and will continue to do so throughout the Sahel as the vast store of Libyan weapons spreads across this, one of the most unstable regions of the world."

A decade of growing US military involvement on the continent has not only failed to curb instability and the growth of so-called "terrorist" groups, the US's actions in Somalia and Libya have directly fed the formation of such organizations. And "training" has hardly stabilized things. Indeed, the Mali army captain, Amadou Sanogo, who overthrew the civilian government-the act that led to the Tuareg's successful offensive-was trained by the U.S. military. Sanogo attended the Defense Language Institute in 2005 and 2007, a US Army intelligence program in 2008, and an officer-training course in 2010.

"Terrorism" in Africa is fueled by local conditions, not by an international jihadist agenda. Boko Harum in Nigeria reflects the tension between the poverty of the country's largely Islamic north and its more prosperous Christian south. Similar fault lines run through Niger, Ivory Coast and Cameroon. Terrorism in Algeria and Morocco mirror economies that are unable to provide jobs for a huge swath of their populations, coupled with authoritarian political structures that stifle any attempt to do something about it. Somalia was first a pawn in the Cold War, and then the very definition of chaos. When an Islamic government began taming that chaos, the U.S. overthrew it, unleashing the Shabab.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid is being directed at fighting terrorism on the continent, and the US military is training the armed forces of dozens of African nations. A Malian army captain used that aid and training to pull off a coup that now threatens to turn into a regional war.

Will Morocco use U.S. aid to fight terrorism or tighten its grip over the mineral rich Western Sahara and re-ignite its war with the Polisario Front? Will Niger fight "terrorists" or crush Tuareg resistance to French uranium mining in the Sahara? Will Algeria go after the AQIM or its own outlawed Islamist organizations? Will aid to fight terrorism in Nigeria be diverted to smash resistance by local people to oil production in the Niger Delta?

Bayonets won't defeat the source of terrorism and instability in Africa. Indeed, military solutions tend to act as recruiting sergeants for groups like AQIM. Africa doesn't need more weapons, but rather aid, development, and programs that lift a significant section of the continent's population out of poverty.

This article originally appeared in Dispatches from the Edge. Photo: U.S. Army Capt. Laura Porter with children during a medical capabilities exercise Sept. 3, 2007, in Senkoro, Mali, as part of Flintlock 2007. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeromy K. Cross)

Ryan and Akin serve notice of imminent threat to democracy

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 12:57:00 +0000

The pick of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's vice presidential running mate and the outrageous remarks of Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin serve notice on the American people that the threat to our nation's future is imminent and profound.

Every inch of social progress secured in the course of struggle over the past several decades is subject to reversal in the event of a government takeover by the Republican Party in November.

This danger takes center stage in the midst of a deep, protracted, and structural economic crisis that is roiling the entire country - the multiracial working class in the first place. It occurs on the cusp of long-term demographic changes that create new democratic possibilities as we scan forward in time. And it comes at the close of the first term of an African American president whose re-election is viscerally dreaded by right-wing extremism, due to the president's skin color and politics.

Each of these factors give right-wing extremism - in its newest form (it goes back to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and subsequent iterations up to the present) - a particularly venomous and reactionary character.

Indeed, in the worldview of the present-day right-wing extremists there is too much equality, too much democracy, too much "redistribution," too much regulation, too much secularism, too much science, too much diplomacy, and too much government.

In their view, the rights revolution that began in the '30s, took a leap forward in the '60s, and continues to this day, needs to be reversed and unceremoniously crushed.

I'm not suggesting that fascism is around the corner. But the ascendancy of the Republican Party in November could well set the stage for an authoritarian government not bound by the democratic desires of the vast majority of Americans, or by constitutional limits.

It is fair to ask: How could a party that presents such extreme dangers to the democratic values and fabric of our country possess any chance of winning in November?

There is no simple answer to this question. But some explanations come to mind.

The extreme right cleverly conceals its overarching aim to do the bidding of the top layers of the capitalist class at the expense of everyone else. It appeals to racist, misogynist, xenophobic, and homophobic feelings and beliefs. It resorts to demagogy, lies, and twisting facts. It invokes the fairy tale of an unrelenting government intruding into every aspect of the economy and people's lives. It conjures up a rampaging secularism that is supposedly at war with religious practices and values. It exploits legitimate (and illegitimate) discontent, economic and otherwise, with the Obama administration. It raises the specter of "freeloaders" (re: people of color, welfare recipients, and low-income people) living off the labor and taxes of hard working Americans. And, not least, it systemically tries to suppress the vote.

At the core of this political coalition of the Right are the most reactionary sections of monopoly capital on Wall Street and elsewhere, willing and able to spend billions of dollars in this campaign.

But gathered around them are disparate social groupings set adrift by larger socioeconomic changes in our society and convinced that the world as they knew it is collapsing before their eyes.

While this is a formidable coalition, it is neither of one mind nor invincible. Indeed, because of its diverse character, it contains contradictions - contradictions that the people's movement, with an eye to peeling away some of its social base, should take advantage of.

The main task however is to mobilize every American who is worried about this gathering danger to register their opposition at the polls on election day.

From rural to urban America, from schoolyard to college campus, from neighborhood to workplace, from small town and to big city, from ghettos and barrios to suburbs and exurbs - no voter who is concerned about the democratic character of the country should stay home.

It is a big challenge for the labor and people's movement, but there is no other road forward to a better future for the American people.

Photo: Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, along with Todd Akin (on right). The country is in danger if their party takes over in November. Scott Applewhite/AP

Raising taxes on the rich works for everyone

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 12:24:00 +0000

Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have emerged over recent years as the world's most respected authorities on income concentration. No one has generated better historical data on the incomes of America's super-rich.

But Piketty and Saez haven't done much work, for the general public, on the impact of top-heavy income distribution on our daily economic lives. That just changed. The Paris-based Piketty and Saez, a University of California at Berkeley scholar, joined with MIT's Stefanie Stantcheva on a brief article that helps explain why raising taxes on a nation's rich creates economies that work for everyone, not just the wealthy.

Piketty and his colleagues begin "How Much Should The Rich Pay In Taxes?" in the most recent edition of the Tax Justice Focus quarterly by noting a simple and amply documented reality: In nations that have significantly lowered tax rates on high incomes, the rich have significantly increased their share of national income.

Since the 1970s in the U.S., the tax rate on income over $400,000 has dropped from 70 percent to 35 percent. Over that same span, households in the U.S. top one percent have more than doubled their national income share, to 20 percent.

In Europe and Japan, by contrast, tax rates on the rich have dropped much more slowly and top one percent income shares have increased "only modestly," they report.

Conservatives have an explanation for these numbers. High tax rates on high incomes, they claim, discourage entrepreneurs. Lowering high rates, the claim adds, encourages them. Entrepreneurs who can keep more of their income go on to invest in their economy, create jobs, and make everybody happier.

In the bigger economy lightly taxed entrepreneurs build for us, conservatives freely admit, the rich will make plenty of money and even increase their income share. But the rest of us shouldn't mind any of this at all. Thanks to the rich, they argue, we get to live in larger, more buoyant economies, the conservatives claim.

In their new Tax Justice Focus paper, Piketty, Saez, and Stantcheva put these claims to the test. If the conservative argument reflected reality, they note, nations that cut tax rates on the rich substantially should show much higher economic growth rates than nations that still levy stiff taxes on their richest.

In fact, the three economists point out, reality tells no such story.

Nations that have "made large cuts in top tax rates such as the United Kingdom or the United States, have not grown significantly faster than countries that did not, such as Germany or Denmark," their research shows. So what's going on in countries where the rich all of sudden face substantially smaller tax bills?

In these countries, such as the U.S., Piketty and his colleagues submit, top executives don't suddenly - and magically - become more "productive." They instead find themselves with a huge incentive to game the system, to squeeze out of the companies they run all the personal profit their power enables them to squeeze.

The more these executives can squeeze, in countries that sheared tax rates on the rich, the more they can keep. The result? The top one percent - in nations that go easy on the wealthy at tax time -proceed, as the authors put it, to "grab at the expense of the remaining 99 percent."

The three authors don't go into chapter and verse on this money-grabbing in their new paper; they don't need to. Millions of Americans already know this grabbing behavior first-hand. They've seen corporate execs routinely outsource and downsize, slash wages and attack pensions, cheat consumers and fix prices.

How can we start discouraging these sorts of corporate executive behaviors? Piketty, Saez, and Stantcheva have a straightforward suggestion: Raise taxes on America's highest-income bracket; raise them as high as 83 percent.

This suggestion, the three acknowledge, may now seem politically "unthinkable." But back between the 1940s and the 1970s, they point out, the notion that we ought to raise taxes on the rich to reduce the incentive for outrageous behavior rated as the conventional wisdom in the United States.

In those years, "policy makers and public opinion" felt strongly that pay increases at the nation's economic summit "reflected mostly greed or other socially wasteful activities rather than productive work."

Is this perception about pay at the top now about to make a comeback? Piketty and his fellow researchers certainly think so, and they see in the Occupy movement signs of a shifting public perspective on the wealth of the wealthy.

Economists ought to be speeding this shift "with compelling theoretical and empirical analysis," add Piketty, Saez, and Stantcheva in a hopeful final note. These three authors, their new paper demonstrates, practice what they preach. All the rest of us should be grateful.

Veteran labor journalist Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much Online, a newsletter about wealth and income sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies' Program on Inequality and the Common Good. E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org.

Under Ryan budget, a living hell awaits the unborn

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 13:34:00 +0000

It's curious how those Republicans who preach "right to life" for the unborn are willing to make life a living hell for the newly born.

It's bad enough that a child is born into poverty every 29 seconds in our country - not exactly a ringing endorsement of capitalism in the world's richest nation.

But imagine what it would be like for our children if after a November election sweep, Republicans were to enact next year the budget bill they passed in the House this year (which fortunately failed in the Democrat-led Senate).

The bill authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., - the presumptive Republican vice-presidential candidate - called for slashing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the bedrock program aimed at stemming childhood and adult hunger.

His budget would cut $133.5 billion over 10 years, precisely when it's most needed as the Great Recession shows little sign of abating.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) estimates such cuts would force America's poorest families to forgo as many as 8.2 billion meals a year. That's the number of meals consumed by 7.5 million people over a year - approximately the combined population of Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas.

Nearly one in seven Americans relies on SNAP to help cover the cost of their meals.

"We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people ... into complacency and dependence," Rep. Ryan - whose net worth is about $8 million - charges with pious indignation.

But it's not for lack of trying that millions of workers cannot find a job today.

Furthermore, nearly half the households receiving supplemental nutrition assistance include children with at least one employed parent.

For children of color cutting SNAP would result in a triple whammy.

Out of 16.4 million poor children in 2010 in our country, 12.4 percent were white, but 39.1 percent were black and 35 percent were Latino, according to the recently released "The State of America's Children 2012 Handbook," a project of the Children's Defense Fund.

Although the handbook failed to cite figures for other ethnic groupings, anecdotal evidence tells us poverty levels among Native Americans and some Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders would likely be comparable to those cited for blacks and Latinos.

The disproportionate impact cutting nutrition assistance would have on people of color, and Ryan's choice of code words and imagery, can only lead one to characterize such policies as racist.

And what's Rep. Ryan's plan to get us out of our complacency, dependence and economic doldrums?

He proposes "as one of our hallmark issues to get to economic growth and job creation, to reform the tax system."

The Republican House budget cuts taxes for the wealthiest Americans in part by slashing domestic programs like SNAP.

But when the economic crisis first hit with full force, during former President George W. Bush's tenure, corporations and the rich already enjoyed the lowest tax rates in history.

Cutting SNAP would mean poor families having less money to spend on food, reducing grocery sales and killing jobs.

Ryan's budget would kill 184,000 jobs, CAP said, basing its conclusions on its report "The Economic Consequences of Cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program."

So much for the claims of Republican politicians, and the corporations they represent, that they are job creators.

"I'm as pro-life as a person gets," Ryan brags. Among bills he co-sponsored, two are particularly noteworthy.

One would ban abortion care in almost all cases, including rape or incest.
The other would refuse to provide emergency abortion to save the woman's life.

Under different circumstances this would make a person an accessory to premeditated murder. Apparently, a woman's life means nothing to Ryan.

But then, Ryan says he does care about the "right to life" of the fetus in the mother's womb.

So let's take a closer look.

Ryan's budget would cut $1.4 trillion from Medicaid, the government health insurance program primarily serving low-income people, most of whom are children and their mothers.

The cuts would reduce vital prenatal care to low-income pregnant women and make it hard to provide basic checkups for all children in low-income families.

Some 14 million children, women, seniors and others in need would be dropped from the program, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Another 11 million people would be dropped from Medicaid under the Romney-Ryan plan to repeal health care reform.

This is clear evidence that Ryan and his running mate Romney do not have the best interests of children and women in mind.

If a measure of a society's worth is how it treats its children, then capitalism in America is failing our children miserably.

The drive for maximum private corporate profit is behind this. But that's the subject of a different opinion piece.

For now, we must conclude that voters must defeat the Romney-Ryan presidential ticket and keep Republicans from gaining majorities in both houses of Congress.

Any hope to shift political momentum in favor of our nation's children and those yet to be born lies in a resounding defeat for Republicans in November.

Nothing less will do.

Photo: Creative Commons 3.0

Wildfires - and Republican climate change cluelessness - continue

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:14:00 +0000

Eight months into 2012, 39 large wildfires continue to burn across the western U.S., having destroyed nearly 7 million acres of land - more than any year since records were first kept. As the blazes continue to consume forests and destroy homes, the climate change that spawned them is continuously being denied or ignored by Republicans.

The summer drought, the worst since the Dust Bowl, is fueling the flames, said Ken Frederick, a public affairs specialist with the Bureau of Land Management at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. With little relief expected over the next two months, the fires, which have left eight firefighters dead and charred a total area the size of Maryland, show no signs of slowing.

Meanwhile, right-wing climate change deniers continue to add insult to injury by rejecting science and painting activists as unbalanced conspiracy theorists. Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., on the other hand, has painted himself as a shining example of just how clueless Republicans are about the environment.

In addition to insulting women everywhere by making a number of ignorant, controversial remarks about "legitimate rape," the GOP Senate candidate proved he was just as backward on the subject of climate change, when he stated in 2009 that global warming struck him as, "if it weren't so serious, as being a comedy, you know. I mean, we just went from winter to spring. In Missouri, when we go from winter to spring, that's good climate change. I don't want to stop that. Who in the world would put politicians in charge of the weather, anyway? What a dumb idea."

By claiming that in the case of "legitimate rape," the female body can "shut that whole thing down," Rep. Akin has already demonstrated that his knowledge of science is virtually non-existent. But just as with his misogynistic views, Akin's cluelessness on climate change seems to be, by and large, a reflection of Republicans on the whole.

Grist.org writer David Roberts explained, "The most significant force behind climate change denial is not any ineffable psychological mystery, but simply the increasing intensity and radicalization of the American conservative movement. The [r]ight is rejecting reality, and adopting a stance of ideological opposition to anything the non-[r]ight" supports.

On Akin's official website, he insisted, "The question of predicting future climate trends, as well as man's ability to definitely influence them, is still an active field of scientific research. Scientists state that the planet has gone through many natural heating and cooling cycles over the years."

Actually, that's not at all true, unless by "over the years," Akin is referring to "millions."

Over in the western U.S., the effects of climate change are anything but "good" - the ongoing brushfires present a very real threat to people, property, and wildlife.

The most recent example came in the form of a 21,500-acre northern California wildfire, which yesterday destroyed 50 buildings and forced the evacuation of 3,000 people from their homes. More than 200 buildings still remain under threat as firefighters struggle to battle the blaze.

Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer noted, "What we're really seeing here is a window into what global climate change looks like. It looks like heat; it looks like fires; it looks like this kind of environmental disaster."

Photo: Tumblr

What does it take to “Rebuild the Dream”?

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 12:23:00 +0000

In September 2009, Van Jones stepped down as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality under a barrage of right-wing criticism of his youthful flirtation with leftist politics. While Jones briefly recounts the events surrounding his resignation in the introduction to his new book, Rebuild the Dream, its main purpose is to present Jones' take on the last 12 years of American politics as well as some suggestions on what activists can do to address some of our most pressing economic and political problems.

Jones' analysis of Obama's 2008 election victory is straightforward: Various grassroots groups - particularly the anti-war movement - that developed during George W. Bush's two terms in office found a welcoming and tech savvy ally in the Obama campaign. However, after the election, the liberal grassroots fell into disarray: some activists took Obama's election to be the sole object of their hard work (ignoring the new challenge of holding Obama to his campaign promises), while others became disillusioned by the actions of Obama the President and gave up altogether.

But he points out that the lessons of the 2008 election weren't lost on the conservative activists who went on to form the tea party movement. In fact, the tea partiers were so successful that they managed to force Democrats to defend spending on safety-net programs like Medicaid and Social Security in the middle of a recession.

In his view, the only counter-force to the influence of the tea party has been the equally spontaneous - and successful - Occupy Wall Street. Though Jones clearly sympathizes with the Occupy movements, he believes that the only way they can solidify their rhetorical victories is to get as comfortable within the corridors of power as they are without.

Anyone to the left of the liberal catchall category of "progressive" will find Jones' analysis wanting. In Rebuild the Dream, Jones joins other contemporary political figures in seeking an ideology-free politics powerful enough to unite people of all walks of life in the mission to achieve some moderately liberal objectives. But the call for a post-political politics is usually a sign that the caller is in ideological agreement with neoliberal economic and social policy.

For example, Jones sees the recession as the result of a few bad apple capitalists ("the worst of the 1%") who gamed the system and believes that kinder, gentler capitalism - with its worst impulses constrained by regulation - will pull the U.S. out of the economic crisis and into prosperity.

He also believes the Occupy movement's anti-capitalist rhetoric "falls short in a lot of ways" and argues that "a movement that defines itself as the 99% against the 1% cannot succeed in America. But a movement that defines itself as the 99% for the 100% cannot fail."

But even those readers who agree with Jones' viewpoint may find Rebuild the Dream wanting in substance. Stylistically, the text suffers from its use of buzzwords interspersed with generalizations which feign profound insight - like a TED speech or Malcolm Gladwell article. Furthermore, Jones simply tries to cover too many ideas in too short a time to delve into any one of them deeply.

In the end, Rebuild the Dream is more a survey of Jones' opinions than a useful analysis of American politics.

Rebuild the Dream
By Van Jones
2012, Nation Books
Hardcover, 320 pages, also in Kindle edition.

Judy Gallo, longtime activist, dies at 70

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 11:19:00 +0000

CLEVELAND - About 100 friends and activists in labor and progressive groups gathered at a memorial here Aug. 18 to pay tribute to Judy Gallo, who died recently at age 70 of progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare, incurable disease.

Gallo had been a leader in the peace movement and active in labor and social justice campaigns and in the Communist Party in the Cleveland area since the mid-1970s.

Gallo came from a conservative working-class family in northeastern Pennsylvania. After graduating from college in 1963, she joined the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), working in the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Atlanta, Georgia.

She was arrested four times and saw first-hand the violence and brutality of the Jim Crow South as well as the courage of those fighting to end it. The experience had a transforming and radicalizing impact that changed her life.

After leaving the South, Gallo was hired as an organizer for the United Electrical Workers, working out of the New York office. Later, working for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union, she met Communists and joined the party, working in its labor commission.

She married John Gallo in 1974 and moved to Cleveland to be with his family. She soon became active in the effort to peacefully desegregate the city's schools. She went to nursing school and got a job as an RN at MetroHealth, the county hospital, where she discovered nurses were forced to work overtime without pay. She led an effort that made the hospital compensate the nurses and later led a union organizing drive that was unsuccessful.

Gallo became active in the peace movement and held leadership positions in Peace Action and the local chapter of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
After retiring from MetroHealth, she worked at the United Labor Agency providing services and training to union members, served on the AFL-CIO Executive Board and its AFL-CIO Retirees Council as well as with Cleveland Jobs With Justice.

From 2003 to 2007 she served as coordinator of the Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, which led voter registration efforts in the African American and Latino communities. In a six-page autobiography distributed at the memorial, she wrote of her experiences in the 2000 elections, "I became convinced that if people voted they would vote the right way for Gore and the Democrats."

Gallo did interviews and headed up the Women's History Project, which recently published a booklet with biographies of 16 local activists.

About 20 people spoke at the memorial. They included her surviving husband and their two sons, Jesse and Nick. Others were labor and community leaders including Harriet Applegate, executive secretary of the Cleveland AFL-CIO, representatives of Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Betty Sutton, State Rep. Nickie Antonio and East Cleveland Councilwoman Barbara Thomas, the former president of AFSCME Local 3360 at MetroHealth.

Akin, Ryan, rape and Republican hypocrisy

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:38:00 +0000

Republican hand wringing over the crude remarks about "legitimate rape" made by GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin in Missouri is perhaps the starkest of many recent examples of that party's hypocrisy.

The Romney-Ryan ticket is distancing itself from Rep. Akin, not because they disagree with his ignorant views about rape victims not having the right to abortions, but because they fear Akin will expose what they and their party are all about.

Fierce opposition to women's reproductive rights, including the right to decide whether or not to bear a child, has been the agenda of the Republican Party for quite some time now.

The GOP platform adopted when George W. Bush was selected as the nominee for president included a no-abortion, no-exception, plank that would force rape victims to carry pregnancies to term.

When Sarah Palin was the party's vice presidential candidate in 2008 she campaigned openly in favor of the position enunciated by Akin the other day.

In 2010 almost all the GOP candidates for the U.S. Senate and House embraced the Akin position.

Now we see Romney, Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell and a slew of other Republican leaders calling upon Akin to pull out of the Senate race.

Why the big freak-out from GOP leaders?

Is there any demand for Rep. Paul Ryan to step down as the candidate for vice president? As co-sponsor with Akin of every single one of Akin's radical anti-women's-rights bills, Ryan and Akin are birds of a feather.

Paul Ryan also has the distinction of cosponsoring with Akin HR 3, the third bill passed when Republicans took over the House in 2010. That bill attempts to redefine rape, distinguishing between "forcible" and supposed other kinds of rape!

In 2011 a "personhood" amendment that re-defined an egg at the moment of conception as a "person" was too radically right to pass even in Mississippi. Yet a only a year later Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum - the major GOP presidential candidates - supported it.

Ryan co-sponsored with Akin a national version of that personhood amendment in the U.S. Congress.

Romney passed up the Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell as a choice for his vice presidential nominee because McDonnell, due to his backing for forced invasive procedures for women who seek abortions, had become known as Gov. Ultrasound.

Yet Romney picked Paul Ryan, who had introduced a federal version of the same ultrasound bill into the U.S. Congress.

The concern by Republicans over the Akin remarks has nothing to do with disagreeing with what he said. The concern is that when the voters hear what Akin said they may realize that Akin's positions, which are repulsive to the majority of Americans, are the positions of the Republican Party itself.

Photo: Brian Ray/AP

The meaning of Romney’s Ryan choice

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:13:00 +0000

When I heard that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had picked Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate, I cheered. Finally - a Republican shamelessly on record calling for abolishing Medicaid, cutting Medicare, privatizing Social Security, giving the finger to the uninsured, the unemployed, unions, the middle class, minorities, immigrants, women - you name it. A man declaring he wants to follow in the austerity footsteps of European bankers who have brought their entire continent (minus the more socialist and social-democratic of nations) to recession in the midst of the still-ongoing global depression!

No one may be able to figure out if there is anything stronger than vapor behind the words of Romney, since he has flip-flopped so many times. There can't be more than 20 people outside of Romney's family who have the slightest idea what he stands for. All of his support is simply anti-Obama constituencies: the rich (who are pretty sure Romney's not going to raise their taxes), the racist and nativist anti-immigrant groupings who are not sure Romney won't "betray them," neo-fascist groupings masquerading as religious organizations, and a large number of men who appear to be blaming all the wrong people for their declining incomes and bad luck in these times.

Choosing Ryan for VP clears up matters for a lot of folks who weren't sure if Romney was a "severe" conservative. Romney is a tool of the banking and financial services industry first of all. The joke that Ryan is a "serious intellectual" instead of a fraud has been promoted by 'Faux News' ever since he became the de facto spokesman for "lets-cure-the-depression-by-laying-off-more-people" policies.

Paul Krugman has exposed this promotion in detail in the New York Times on several occasions -- the latest just this week. The loss in federal revenues from Ryan's budget proposals will be greater than the savings in expenditures. That does not even take into account the pain and suffering endured by millions of Americans unable to find health care, unable to retire, unable to live, under the draconian cuts in services he advocates.

But what about the Obama program? The President is resisting all the cuts Ryan and the Republicans advocate. So, the choice of who to vote for in the presidential election is perfectly clear. There is not much worse that can happen in the next three months besides a Romney/Ryan victory in November.

But political gridlock, and, I would argue, the declining clout of the labor and people's movements within the Democratic Party leadership, is taking a toll on the willingness of the Obama administration to take the steps truly needed to get out of this depression. In four years official unemployment is only two points off its 10 percent peak in 2009. The drag in public employment, in particular, driven by Republican austerity filibusters, is threatening to pull the rate even higher. The official rate disguises many kinds of unemployment.

The more reliable indicator is the workforce participation rate, which is still in decline, and now sits at 63.7 percent of the working age population (age 16 and over). This is the lowest level since the 2000 tech bubble recession.

Obama has numerous jobs proposals, but all focus on tax or other concessions to corporations - not direct federal, state, or local government hiring. Contracting out (the focus of much of the 2009 stimulus) is notoriously more costly and inefficient in addressing unemployment than direct hiring. Relying on tax incentives to corporations works fine once the economy is growing again - but is nearly worthless while still in a depression.

The strategy and tactics of this time means defeating Romney/Ryan and re-electing Obama/Biden. The alternative is moving further in negative territory. But it will not be near enough to fix the depression, reduce inequality and restore the promise of a rising standard of living to working people. For that, the people will have to do some heavy lifting themselves.

I predict it will all soon become much clearer. "Critical junctures," as economist Daron Acemoglu's research has shown, turn the phony arguments of elites about austerity for everyone else to dust.

In 1941, had not the critical juncture of World War II arrived, Roosevelt would have left office with 16 percent official unemployment, mired in growing congressional gridlock over "too much debt." The attack on Pearl Harbor blew all those debates away in a single day. So it will be. We don't know what the "externality" or the "juncture" will be. A super-hurricane, hostile Martians landing in Key West, a return of the Black Death from the latter Middle Ages in Europe, whatever...

But it's coming!

Photo: Flickr

More than a few rotten apples on Wall Street

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:36:00 +0000

NEW YORK - The movers and shakers of scandal-ridden Wall Street are busy scapegoating a "few rotten apples" - and hoping the rest of us don't notice they're still holding billions in ill-gotten gains.

Remember Ina Drew? This past spring Drew had her 15 minutes of fame as the JPMorgan Chase exec in charge of the reckless derivatives trading that may end up costing the Wall Street banking giant as much as $7.5 billion.

Drew will apparently pay a price for her role. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced the bank will "claw back" approximately two years worth of the pay Drew has already collected. Which two years? Dimon didn't say. Drew collected about $14 million last year and $15.9 million the year before.

Drew resigned from JPMorgan in May after 30 years of faithful service. In all those years - a span of time that included one financial industry scandal after another - no other bank executive as high-ranking as Drew has had to suffer the indignity of having take-home clawed back.

Bankers, in other words, appreciate the public relations value of shouting out willingness to claw back "ill-gotten gains." But they seldom ever do any clawing.

Clawbacks, on the other hand, do raise some difficult practical questions. Where, for instance, do you draw the clawback line?

Consider Dimon, for example. In 2011, Dimon pocketed an 11 percent raise to $23.1 million. Doesn't Dimon, and not just Ina Drew and the power suits she so poorly managed, bear some responsibility for the JPMorgan trading mess? It occurred, after all, on his watch.

But let's be fair. On Wall Street, Dimon hardly stands alone. Sky-high rewards for financial industry executives that we've seen over recent years rest, across the board, on a recklessness that almost crashed the nation's entire banking sector - and would have, if taxpayers hadn't come to the rescue in 2008.

In July, the now-retired CEO who helped swing open the door to that recklessness, Sandy Weill of Citigroup, went public with an apology of sorts.

In the late 1990s, Weill pressured Congress late to gut the federal law that for years prevented banks from gambling with federally insured bank deposits. A GOP-run Congress eventually passed, and Democratic President Bill Clinton signed, legislation that did just what Weill demanded. Now Weill's calling for a regulatory do-over, a restoration of the old rules that kept apart commercial and investment banking.

Giant banks, proclaims Weill, should never again be able to place taxpayers and depositors "at risk."

The banking colossus Weill created, Citigroup, made him a billionaire, and Weill spent most of the first decade of the 21st century on the Forbes list of America's 400 richest. Should a chunk of his huge fortune now be clawed back?

Former CEOs at two other financial industry giants, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, also now acknowledge the disaster that our reign of big banks created. Should they be clawed back, too?

We as a nation actually answered questions just like these generations ago. In 1916, we enacted a federal estate tax - a national levy on the grand fortunes that affluent people leave behind at death. Back then, most Americans agreed that the richest among us had either ripped the rest of us off to build up their grand fortunes or benefited much too royally from an infrastructure the rest of us, through our tax dollars, had fashioned.

Either way, our forebears concluded, the wealthy had a responsibility to give back to the society that had made them fabulously rich. They saw the estate tax, in effect, as the ultimate clawback. In future years, the estate tax would do some serious clawing. Between 1941 and 1976, the estates of the rich faced a tax rate of 77 percent on wealth over $10 million. In 1980, the top estate tax stood at 70 percent on wealth over $5 million.

Estate tax levies have been falling ever since. In 2010, thanks to the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001, we had no estate tax at all. Since then, thanks to a late 2010 deal between the White House and GOP leaders in Congress, we've had an exceedingly weak estate tax. Couples have had all wealth under $10 million totally exempt from any estate tax, and no estate with a value over $10 million has faced a tax rate higher than 35 percent.

If the current Congress does nothing on the estate tax over the rest of this year, the pre-Bush estate tax of 2000 - with a 55 percent top rate - would go back into effect as of Jan. 1, 2013. Lobbyists for America's most comfortable are, predictably, working hard to prevent that eventuality.

To help in that effort, Republican lawmakers are seeking to make the 2010 estate tax deal permanent. Top Democrats in Congress and the White House want to revert back to 2009's 45 percent top rate. But the Democratic congressional leadership hasn't been able to round up enough Democratic votes to move forward on even this mildest of stabs at significant estate taxation.

How mild? In real life, a 45 percent top estate tax rate translates, after exemptions and deductions, into not much of a burden on the super rich.

In 2007, for instance, the top estate tax ran 45 percent. In that year, 1,192 wealthy Americans died and left behind estates worth at least $20 million. These estates held a combined $75 billion. But after exemptions and deductions, only $10.2 billion of that $75 billion, 14 percent, went to federal estate tax.

Two years ago, three U.S. senators introduced legislation that would, if enacted, subject net estate wealth over $50 million to a 55 percent top tax rate, with a surtax of an additional 10 percentage points on wealth over $500 million.

Estate tax rates at that level might do some serious clawing. And claw we must.

"The man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the state," the great Republican estate tax champion Teddy Roosevelt noted a century ago, "because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government."

Wealthy Americans today aren't meeting that obligation - not even coming close.

Veteran labor journalist Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much Online, a newsletter about wealth and income sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies' Program on Inequality and the Common Good.

Photo: Jason Fedarow, MO SEIU State Council/PW

Progressive cinema: “The Story of Film: An Odyssey”

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:15:00 +0000

This is the fifth and last in a series about the 2012 Traverse City Film Festival. See parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

"The Story of Film: An Odyssey" is one of the most astounding artistic achievements in the history of cinema. The fifteen-hour extravaganza by Mark Cousins, shown at the 2012 Traverse City Film Festival (and last year at the Toronto International Film Festival) is not just another chronological TV documentary - it's poetry. It's an artistic film about the art of cinema.

Cousins shares his joy and excitement over cinema through a lilting Irish brogue. Although he's a professor with multiple degrees in art and philosophy, his respectful narration never condescends. Cousins says, "In the whole fifteen hours, I never used technical jargon. I tried to speak in a way that would be accessible. I believe you can express complex ideas with relatively simple language without dumbing down or cheapening the ideas. Cinema is a more democratic art form and it would be wrong to make it hard to access."

Cousins, who was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but now lives in Scotland, is the ultimate passionate film lover. He watches at least two movies a day when possible and always sits in the front row of the theater. And he's done this since he was a child when he first sneaked into movie theaters to escape the harsh realities of his warring country ... and discovered the world.

The Story of Film consists of 15 episodes that do not have to be seen in sequence. Each segment is a joyous work of art unto itself covering films from all corners of the globe. In Traverse City they showed the first two hours one day and the last two hours another day. Then, on the weekend, they showed the first eight episodes, followed the next day by the remaining seven sections. Everyone was pretty much awestruck at the immensity and power of the project.

Cousins claims there have been at least 500,000 films made, and he used clips from 1,000 films in the entire project. One committed fan actually listed all the titles with links to each film on Wikipedia.

Cousins hosted a TV series for years about film and interviewed many noted filmmakers, which he carried over into this project. He also wrote a book on the same subject, but obviously talking about film clips and showing the actual clips is quite a different effect. There is not a single still in the entire series, and no clips were altered from the original.

What makes Cousins' approach unique is his focus on innovation; films that revolutionized the industry, from around the world - de-emphasizing Hollywood. He explains that the series "was made out of anger and love. I was furious that African cinema was sequestered or marginalized. That Middle Eastern cinema was underrepresented, and women filmmakers were ignored."

Cousins is a brilliant scholar with allegiance to working people, who are represented with respect throughout the entire series. He also believes images and ideas drive movies, not money, and his focus is always on content and artistry, rather than box office numbers.

His exuberance overflows with innumerable superlatives: "the best film from the '80s, the greatest film from India, the most amazing image in cinema." He defends this mannerism: "I've never been afraid of saying 'I think this is as good as it gets.' I know there's a danger of being overstated but I'd rather do that and put some heat into the discourse rather than being too cool and professorial and trying to get academic about it. I'd rather err on that side than on the other."

Cousins' charm, passion, and knowledge of film was in high demand at the Traverse City Festival, as a panelist discussing the future of cinema, digital vs. film, as the emcee for Wim Wenders screenings (Wenders is one of the many directors interviewed in The Story of Film), and he was constantly called upon to spread his infectious optimism,

"I'm hopeful," he says. "I think there is something so innately splendid in cinema. I ended The Story of Film in Mauritania, Africa, to show where cinema is so important and just beginning, partly because of literacy levels in the country." He goes on to proclaim cinema is essentially a social experience, recalling his lifelong joy of sharing feelings and emotions with fellow filmgoers, and suggests ways to develop communal screening areas in neighborhoods and collective dwellings.

Michael Moore introduced Cousins at the festival as a person who "understands this incredible art form, that isn't really that old. This man has made a love poem to cinema, and it's fifteen hours long. He spent six years of his life putting this together (plus two more for editing), to, through his eyes, show us cinema in a way that's just profound, moving, and thought-provoking. He has made one of the best documentaries of all time."

The Story of Film won the special Founders Kubrick Prize at the festival. The film will be available on DVD in November for as low a price as possible, according to Cousins.

As I complete my coverage of the 2012 Traverse City Film Festival, You've Been Trumped, a David and Goliath film about Donald Trump's attempt to build a giant golf complex in pristine Irish countryside, is premiering in New York City. This brilliant film was featured and awarded at the 2011 Traverse City Film Festival. It took about a full year for this timely, provocative tale to get to public theaters. Another good reason to check out your local film festival.

For more information about the 2012 Traverse City Film Festival go to www.traversecityfilmfest.org

Photo: Traverse City Film Festival

Being president takes more than a businessman

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:38:00 +0000

Thomas Paine was a man of the enlightenment who saw "virtue" as the cornerstone of a new vision to "begin the world over again." By virtue, he meant rising above your own self-interests to do public good. He also said "the greatest offense of all to the great Father is when we seek to torment and render each other miserable." Not, by the way, the words of an atheist. So should not our presidents be men and women who seek to be virtuous, who, to quote the Statue of Liberty, seek to turn the misery and torment of "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" into happiness?

Vision, determination, leadership, and hard work...all potentially good qualities in both an American businessman and an American president. But there is another, deeper, level of characteristics in many successful businessmen in a capitalist society, characteristics not, perhaps, so attractive when considered as qualities to lead and inspire a nation.

The fundamental principle of running a business in America is to make money, preferably for yourself and secondly for shareholders, but NOT to do public good. A fast food chain aims to sell you the cheapest food at the highest possible price, not to concern itself with your health - unless, of course, it sees a profit in the idea of doing so.

To quote Abba Ramos, a veteran organizer in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union:

"If they can get a trained monkey to unload that boxcar tomorrow morning, rest assured, they'll have them over there and they'll have some bananas for lunch, and you'll be out on the street looking for work. Simple as that. You've got to remember, they follow only one rule of economic law, and that's that maximum production-minimum cost yields the greatest amount of profit. They don't deviate from that."

And another set of characteristics potentially begin to emerge - ruthlessness, greed, self-aggrandizement, lust for power, beliefs of superiority, lack of morality, lack of caring for anyone else, and an intense instinct for self survival and success. These are not good qualities for the job of being responsible for the people of a nation.

And so, as we roll, or descend, into another presidential campaign, we have once again an opportunity to think about the qualities that we look for in our leader.

Obama, after Harvard, became a community organizer on the streets of Chicago, no doubt mixing with some shady characters and no doubt living on a tight budget, but certainly working to improve some peoples' lives and living conditions. He then went on to make more than $5 million for writing his autobiographies.

Romney, after Harvard, helped to found Bain Capital. Now it gets interesting. Bain Capital's job was to go into struggling companies and implement a strategy that would either save them, close them down or, perhaps, move them overseas. The only consideration was the possibility of profit. Peoples' jobs, the welfare of the community, and a sense of compassion were not part of the transaction. And Romney made more than $200 million through this work, saving companies or closing them down or moving them out of the country. The prime motivation for this work was not "virtue" in any sense of the word but, rather, making a lot of money.

Thomas Paine wrote:

"When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not repressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of happiness; when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and its government."

We have a way to go. Who might best help us along the way? That is the question.

This article was sent out by the author to the AFL-CIO Blog and a variety of other labor publications. Ruskin is the director of the Harry Bridges Project and the author of "The Life of Thomas Paine."

Photo: The ability to inspire, which Obama demonstrated when he spoke in Berlin, Germany four years ago, is lacking in many business leaders. Jae C. Hong/AP

Left on the bookshelf: "Vision and Communism"

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 13:48:00 +0000

In 2011, a unique program called "The Soviet Arts Experience" took up temporary residence in concert halls, art galleries, and theater stages around the greater Chicago area. One of the byproducts and lasting artifacts of this enterprise is the book "Vision and Communism."

Soviet posters featuring avant-garde photo-montage images produced by Bolshevik artists still flushed with revolutionary victory are rather well documented. Even today, images from such designs are frequently reproduced in slightly less proletarian backdrops such as in television commercials for the Turner Classic Movies cable television station.

This experimentation of pushing the boundaries of the medium of poster art did not end in the 1930s however. The Soviets continued to use the poster as a medium of mass communication both to extol the virtues of socialism to their own population and to inspire those beyond their borders, often to dazzling effect, right up until 1991.

Soviet artist Viktor Kortesky said, "The poster always works on the leading edge, in the thick of events, and precisely for this reason its representational form must be developed and kept new." "Vision and Communism" focuses on his prolific and provocative career as a purveyor of proletarian ideas via the poster.

Koretsky's work is not just a collection of memorable images and strident slogans meant to awaken and inform. Some of his work rises to the level of high art. Such is the case with the poster entitled "Capitalism is War, The Peoples Suffering, And Tears." This poster was in fact presented in its original maquette form at an installation at Chicago's Smart Museum that ran until January 2012. Its stark beauty summaries the agony felt by those ground up and cast aside by a system characterized by exploitation, fear, and suffering.

The book traces in detail the unique history, design, and usage of posters in Soviet society. Posters did not always convey political ideas or proclaim revolutionary slogans. Some were used for such mundane pursuits as instruction in how to sort potatoes and where to obtain inoculations. No less than the fiery Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky himself realized the utilitarian need for posters, calling them "telegraphic bulletins."

Small black and white images of Kortesky's artistry are reproduced throughout the book, and thankfully, there are also eight color plates that capture the full drama of his works. A slim and heavily footnoted volume at only176 pages, the book still gives a full picture of the growth and shaping of the Communist images, artwork and communication, citing everything from the films of Aleksandr Medvedkin to Vladimir Shukhov's Comintern radio tower, which is one of the enduring Moscow landmarks of constructivist art, architecture, and inspiration.

The book does lose its way somewhat in a short detour discussing the films of Chris Marker but makes up for it in a detailed accounting of the resistance to apartheid in South Africa, which was a reoccurring theme in Kortesky's work.

Students of art and anthropology, as well as Soviet history, would find this book to be a valuable addition to their personal library.

"Vision and Communism: Viktor Koretsky and Dissident Public Visual Culture"
Robert Bird et al., editors
2011, New Press
176 pages, paperback, $24.95

Photo: Better World Books