People Before Profit blog

He got the ball rolling

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:10:00 +0000

In some ways last night's State of the Union address by President Obama was a virtuoso performance. There were stirring moments, memorable turns of phrase, humor, a defense of activist government, and proposals that will be welcomed, and surely help, millions of people in need.

With the scent of Massachusetts still in the air, the president reasserted his reform agenda and took the fight to the party of obstruction. In polite, nuanced but forceful terms, he chastised the Republican Party.

In powerful oratory, he challenged some of the main ideological talking points of right-wing extremism, reminded everyone that he inherited record deficits and an unprecedented economic mess, and defended the stimulus bill and other recovery measures, including, and unfortunately the unconditional bank bailouts.

One of the high points of the evening was when the president called out the right-wing (and maybe worse) dominated Supreme Court whose members were sitting directly in front of him for their recent decision saying it's OK for corporations to throw money into the election process.

One of the low points was his defense of the escalation of troops in Afghanistan and his threatening tone toward Iran and other "adversaries."

Overall, I'd say that if the leaders of the "Party of No" came into the legislative chamber last night with wind in their sails, they left with their sails trimmed and a dour look on their faces. The evening for them turned out to be a "bummer."

They had hoped to hear President Obama repeat what President Clinton said in his State of the Union address in 1994: "The era of big government is over." But the president disappointed them.

While the broad people's coalition that elected him will not, I'm sure, be entirely happy with the president's speech, all signs are that his fighting tone ("I will not quit"), his focus on the economy, his defense of democratic rights (civil, labor, women, immigrant, gay and lesbian), his insistence on financial reform, and his policy initiatives outlined in the speech, including a health care bill, will reenergize this coalition, which, as of late, has been understandably dismayed by the pace and depth of change.

But this new energy will quickly dissipate if the White House and congressional Democrats go back to ignoring the rumbling from below and bending over backwards to satisfy Republicans and conservatives in their own party.

Working people expect them to draw a line in the sand, show more partisanship, push the legislative process, and tenaciously fight for the American people. If the Republicans obstruct and filibuster so be it. At least everybody will know who is blocking legislative measures that would ease the economic crisis when they go to the polls this fall.

But as good as many parts of Obama's speech were, it didn't fully rise in substantive terms to the challenges of our times and this era. The president could have knocked the ball out of the ballpark, but he settled for less. He had a chance to make the case for deep-going political, economic and social reform, including radical reform, but he came up short of that.

His speech didn't have the programmatic depth that is objectively necessary at this moment. It took us an important step closer to solving the awful economic mess and relieving the human toll that comes with it, but only a step.

Politics is an art as well as a science. And part of that art includes knowing when to advance and when to retreat. Last night President Obama didn't retreat, but he didn't advance the people's agenda to the degree that was possible and necessary. He roused the nation, but he didn't hit the high note.

We would probably have to go back to Franklin Roosevelt to find a president who has the trust of our nation's multi-racial, multi-national, male-female, young and old working class as President Obama does.

But the people's trust has to be constantly renewed - and on the basis of practical performance, on the basis of systematically fighting for the crying needs of the American people. This president can be a transformative leader (he has that potential in my view), but only if he embraces and fights for a transformative agenda.

That agenda in a full-blown sense has yet to be articulated by him. If President Obama and the Democrats want to hail the private sector as the engine of growth, I wouldn't quibble too much as long as they recognize that the private sector at this moment (big or small business) isn't generating jobs and probably won't for a long time. In these circumstances, only direct and indirect government intervention in the form of a massive public works jobs program, infrastructure repair and renewal, aid for state and local governments, and special measures for the hardest hit communities, and especially communities of racial minorities and immigrants, stands a chance of lowering unemployment in any kind of meaningful way.

In other words, the economy still has to be re-inflated and restructured along democratic, sustainable, nonmilitary, and worker-friendly lines, but the likelihood of the private sector doing that is zero. To a degree, the president is moving in this direction, but the pace and nature of the economic reforms that he prescribes is far too limited for the scope and depth of this crisis.

One of the serious missteps that he made last night was his call for a freeze on domestic discretionary spending, beginning in 2011. Hopefully the freeze is only a political calculation to ward off the Republican wolves who accuse him of being a "spend and tax" liberal. But in any case, it comes with a price insofar as it entrenches in the public mind that deficit spending is inherently bad and that our budgetary woes are caused by "handouts" to the poor and vulnerable, especially people of color and immigrants - not to mention aid to developing countries.

This is an unmitigated falsehood that ruptures our sense of social solidarity, of connectedness to every other human being. The truth of the matter is that the current budget deficit, as the president said, began during the Bush years as a result of two wars of aggression, mammoth tax breaks to the top income tier, and a bulging military budget.

Fiscal discipline and balanced budgeting are not an article of faith that has to be adhered to no matter what the circumstances. If that were the case, the U.S. and world economy could easily have tumbled into a full-blown depression last year. Capitalism isn't a self-correcting system. Market failure and crisis are as much a reality as sustained economic growth. Vicious and reinforcing contractions of the economy can easily leave an economy stagnating at a far from optimum level or in complete ruin unless they are counteracted by aggressive government action and spending measures. The stimulus and anti-crisis measures of the Obama administration acted as a tourniquet; it stopped the hemorrhaging.

But it didn't heal the wound.

If the president looks to the Depression years he will see more than one Roosevelt. There was the Roosevelt of 1934-1936 and the Roosevelt of 1937. The 1934-1936 Roosevelt had hit a wall as far as his reform efforts were concerned and he was faced with a moment of decision as to how to proceed - should he stay the course, retreat, or enlarge his vision. He chose the latter and thus the New Deal.

Or Obama could look to the 1937 incarnation of Roosevelt who, when seeing a surge of economic activity, decided to cut back on spending and balance the budget, which, as it turned out, was exactly the wrong medicine for an economy in its early stages of recovery.

From President Obama's speech it seems like he hasn't definitively decided which Roosevelt he will emulate, although I believe he leans toward the 1934-1936 Roosevelt. Which is what we need. Admittedly a bold anti-right, anti-corporate course of action won't be easy. The opponents are many and powerful. Resist they will.

Thus to level and tilt the playing field in a progressive/radical direction, the president has to be joined, prodded, and where necessary differed with by the labor-led coalition that elected him. So far it hasn't carried its share of the load; it is not even strong and united enough to enact even the program that the president outlined last night - let alone win more fundamental reforms. Too many of us have been content to watch, offer opinions, criticize, express our frustrations, and feel disappointed in the president.

But aren't we part of the problem too, indeed a big part? An era of reform - and especially radical reforms - combines popular, sustained, and united action from below with new political openings from above. Both are necessary.

Last night the president got the ball rolling, but he didn't roll it far enough or always in the right direction. So now it's our turn to get a lot more players involved, roll the ball further and roll in the direction of economic security, equality, democracy and peace.

Setting the record straight for Emmett Till

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:53:00 +0000

"Simeon's Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till"

By Simeon Wright with Herb Boyd

Lawrence Hill Books, 2010, 137 pp (Hardcover, $19.95)

You are 12 years old. It's the summer. You are happy because your cousin is visiting. But one "dark, dark night, four hours before sun up," you wake up and your father is standing in your bedroom with two men. Your mother is screaming and crying. The men have come for your cousin. He walks out of the bedroom with these strangers. You hear the car drive off but you never hear it come back again.

Your mother, terrified, leaves home. You find out your cousin is dead. Your dad and you are in danger because you are witnesses to a crime.

This is Simeon Wright's story. His cousin was Emmett Till - a Black teenager from Chicago who was kidnapped and lynched in 1955 while visiting family in the segregated South. Wright has just written a book, appropriately called "Simeon's Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till."

Despite eyewitnesses, Till's killers were never convicted. As Wright retells it, "There was no justice for a black man in Mississippi if the case had anything to do with a white person.

The murder of Till and the subsequent decision of his mother, Mamie, to have an open casket funeral, was the spark that lit the fire of the Civil Rights Movement. The sight of Till's disfigured face published in Black newspapers across the country galvanized the community. Just months after his lynching, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white person on a Montgomery, Ala., bus. Parks said she had Emmett Till on her mind.

In "Simeon's Story" Wright brings us back to August 1955 in a town called Money, Miss. He recounts the hard work of life on a farm, including the back-breaking job of picking cotton. He recalls the racist terror: "The Ku Klux Klan and night riders were part of our daily lives. We had separate schools, water fountains, churches and restaurants. The cemeteries were even segregated."

He dedicates the book to his father, Moses Wright, who courageously testified in court against the two white men charged with Till's murder, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant. "It was the first time in the history of the state," Wright reports, "that a black man accused a white man of anything ... I felt extremely proud."

One of the inaccuracies plaguing the Till story that disturbs him most is how his father's court testimony was reported: "According to the story, Dad pointed out J.W. Milam while on the witness stand, he said, 'Thar he' in broken English. Dad's English was not broken; in fact, he was very careful about his pronunciation and his use of language. As a preacher, he was used to speaking in public, so for anyone to suggest that he spoke so poorly is crazy."

Wright relates a revealing episode in the Till tragedy. He was with Till, whose nickname was Bobo, and four other boys at the Bryant grocery store.

Wright's brother was concerned about Till not knowing "Mississippi rules" and sent Simeon into the store with him so he wouldn't be alone. Earlier, Till had bought firecrackers at another store and set them off in town.

After the youths left theBryant store together, Till made a dangerous mistake, Wright says. As Mrs. Bryant left the store to go to her car, Till whistled at her. "I think he wanted to get a laugh out of us or something. He was always joking around, and it was hard to tell when he was serious. It was a loud wolf whistle, a big-city 'whee wheeee!' and it caught us all by surprise. We all looked at each other, realizing that Bobo had violated a longstanding unwritten law, a social taboo..."

The teenagers panicked. "Like a group of boys who had thrown a rock through somebody's window, we ran to the car. Bobo, with a slight limp from the polio he'd contracted as a child, ran along with us, but not as panic-stricken as we were. After seeing our fright, it did slowly dawn on him that he had done something wrong."

Wright says Till begged the boys not to tell on him. He was afraid of being sent back to Chicago, thereby ending the fun they were having up to that point. "We didn't want that to happen so we promised to keep quiet for Bobo's sake. It never occurred to me that Bobo would be killed for whistling at a white woman."

Wright's life has been plagued by "what if." "If I had told Dad, he would have done one of two things: either he would have taken Bobo back to the store and made him apologize to Mrs. Bryant or he would have sent Bobo home as soon as possible. Either way, perhaps Bobo would be alive today."

In a Jan. 18 telephone interview, Wright said he remembers feeling all alone after the trial: "We got the feeling no one was there to help us."

The brutal kidnapping and murder of Till, and the ensuing terror had a lifelong impact on Wright. He thinks of his cousin every day: "Certain sounds that I hear. Every car I heard approaching from the west, or the smell of honeysuckle triggers memories."

Perhaps the most emotional scar came from his mother's flight out of Mississippi. "You never get over that," Wright said. "But she was so terrified. It was a crucial point of my life. I can still hear the crying and talking."

Wright participated in Sojourn to the Past, a living black history class of high school juniors and seniors. Wright said he was inspired to write this book by the students who were interested in the Till case. He said he wants the book to inspire young and old alike to stand up to all types of "bullies."

"If you see a bully, deal with it," he said. "You have to help the little guy. There are more Emmett Tills in the world. You have to fight for the little man."

Wright also credits his wife and filmmaker Keith Beauchamp for recording his eyewitness account of this horrific event in his family's lives and our nation's history. Beauchamp investigated Till's murder, 50 years later, and found many inaccuracies in the story. He also found that a number of eyewitnesses to the events were not interviewed. Beauchamp's research led him to make a documentary, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till." The documentary and the work of Till's mother and the Emmett Till Justice Campaign won wide support to reopen the case. In 2004, the U.S. Justice Department announced it would begin to reinvestigate. Despite the exhumation of Till's body, confessions and witnesses, there were no new indictments. The case remains "unsolved" today.

In 2008, Wright helped lobby for the passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which was signed into law Oct. 7, 2008. Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, was blocking its passage with a procedural maneuver. But Wright got a call on Sept. 24 from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid informing him the Till Bill had finally passed.

In a statement Reid said, "The bill has always had broad bipartisan support; it is nothing short of shameful that it languished for more than a year because of one Republican Senator. But today we can be proud that the U.S. Senate has at long last acted to resolve unthinkable, unsolved Civil Rights-era murders like Emmett Till's." The bill allocates $10 million a year toward the Justice Department's cold case investigations. There are numerous unsolved civil rights crimes.

Wright also credits unions and especially African American union leaders, like Rayfield Mooty of the United Steelworkers, for their work on the Till case and other important equality issues. Mooty, a relative of Mamie Till, helped mobilize Chicago unionists to support the family and their call for justice. Mooty also helped Wright get his first job at Reynolds Aluminum Company. Eventually, Wright became a pipefitter and a member of the Pipefitters union, Local 597.

"Take the unions out of it and we're done for," he said.

While Wright has seen some improvements on racism over the years, including the election of Barack Obama, he said for African Americans, "it's much bleaker now than then. Because of the job situation. Our standard of living has fallen." He recalled that in 1974 when nearby Electric Motors started there were "13,000 workers, now there are a few cars over there."

He said unless something is done to create jobs, there will be "dancing in the streets again."

"That's what I call marching," he added.

Wright is an extraordinary man with a harrowing story to tell. Through it all, he finds forgiveness and resiliency. His story should be read by all.

For more reading on this subject, "From Emmett Till to Harold Washington, meet Arlene Brigham, foot soldier for equality."

James and Esther Jackson and the long civil rights revolution

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:26:00 +0000

With African American History Month about to start, I had the occasion to attend a very moving event at the Tamiment Library (New York University) on Tuesday. It was a celebration/book party recognizing the tremendous contribution of James and Esther Jackson in the struggle for African American freedom, and welcoming the publication of a new book entitled "Red Activists and Black Freedom."

The book, which is based on the Jacksons' papers, deals with the forgotten history of the civil rights movement during the 1930s and '40s. That was when the Communist Party USA played an outstanding role in the fight against Jim Crow in the South - an effort that set the stage for the upsurge in the 1960s.

Michael Nash, director of the Tamiment Library and one of the editors of the book, described the Jackson archives as "nationally important" because they show the relationship between the struggle in the South during the '30s and '40s for black freedom and the Communist Party.

The party played a leading role in organizations like the Southern Negro Youth Congress, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the Sharecroppers Union and in the organization of the tobacco industry in Virginia and steel in Birmingham, Alabama. The role of the party is well known in defense of the Scottsboro Youths but it was involved in many other struggles too - to register voters, organize unions, defend civil liberties, stop lynching, etc. People like Esther and Jim Jackson, Edward and Augusta Strong and Louis and Dorothy Burnham were in the forefront of the party's work in the South.

The book "Red Activists and Black Freedom" is a series of essays by a number of scholars and activists based on a symposium titled, "James and Esther Jackson, the American Left and the Origins of the Modern Civil Rights Movement," held at the Tamiment on Oct. 28, 2006. With the success of that event it was decided to publish the presentations in book form. The book was edited by historian David Levering Lewis with Michael Nash and Daniel Leab.

Participating in Tuesday's event, which drew a packed house, were a number of panelists including the book's editors and some of its contributing authors - Tim Johnson, Maurice Jackson, Sara E. Rzeszutek and Michael Anderson - who each briefly discussed their essays on the Jacksons.

The event was topped off by moving speech by Esther Jackson. She spoke about how supportive both their parents were. She recounted how her mother supported her decision to go to Birmingham to work with Ed Strong after she finished her Master's degree at Fisk University.

She told the story of how Jim decided not become a pharmacist after he graduated from pharmacy school but instead decided to join Chris Alston and help organize tobacco workers in Virginia. When Jim was cleaning out his father's drug store in Richmond, Va., to prepare it to be sold, he found dozens of IOUs from striking tobacco workers in the basement, which meant that all along his father had been helping the strike by giving free medicines to the striking workers.

Esther also spoke movingly of her own experience with the strength of the black family. Something, she said, "we don't hear much about."

She told the beautiful story of the thousands of pages of love letters that she and Jim had written to each other when Jim was in Burma during the Second World War. They are part of the archives at the Tamiment.

The book reveals the tremendous work of the party which set the stage for the great upsurge of the 1950s and '60s. Esther Jackson noted that without the efforts of David Levering Lewis "the book would not have been possible." In his remarks, Lewis made the point that the civil rights movement had a long history, it didn't start with Martin Luther King and it continues on today. "We are not in any post-racial period," he said.

One of the essays in the book was written by Angela Davis whose mother Sallye was also a member of the Southern Negro Youth Conference and played a leading role in the defense of her daughter during her trial.

The history of the Communist Party in the South during the '30s and 40s was almost expunged from the historic record during the McCarthy Era, one of the speakers remarked. We saw a bit of this period portrayed in the writings of Richard Wright and recently in the movie "The Great Debaters," but to get a real picture as we celebrate and recommit during Black History Month, "Red Activists and Black Freedom" is a must-read.

Health care: Keep the pressure on

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:01:00 +0000

Editorial

Bravo to the health care activists who are cranking out the phone calls and participating in rallies across the country to say "finish reform right," despite stalled negotiations on Capitol Hill.

Supporters in Congress say they need continued constituent messages as they try to break the logjam and open the way for the 40 million with no coverage and as many with inadequate coverage to get the care they need.

Health care legislation bogged down when Republicans voted no as a bloc and enough Democrats plus Independent Joe Lieberman joined with them in threatening to filibuster and deny the necessary 60 votes in the Senate.

With the election of Republican Scott Brown to the seat held by Ted Kennedy, the undemocratic nature of the "filibuster" is even more plain to see.

In exit polls, most of those who voted for Obama in 2008 but voted for Brown this year favor a stronger health care bill with a public option. They were angry and frightened that their existing health care benefits might be taxed. Their top concern was lack of jobs. Their protest was to stay home or vote for the opposition.

The Republican spin being given, which claims that people do not want health care reform, distorts the real picture. Even worse, it diverts attention from where the immediate focus needs to be - organizing on the ground like the labor organizing that took place last summer in response to the "tea bag" disruption of town hall meetings.

Health Care for America Now correctly says, "stop the corporate interests.... We need health care we can afford in and out of work, the choice of a public option, and reform that doesn't tax our benefits. Tell the president and Congress to choose wisely and finish reform right, for us."

Health care is a basic human right, not a political football. Too many lives are at stake. Join their campaign and sign a letter here. Call your members of Congress and let them know that now is the time to put our nation on the path to quality, affordable health care we can all count on.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamgn/ / CC BY 2.0

The freeze and the fire

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:48:00 +0000

President Obama has been rumored for weeks to be considering appeasements to the budget deficit critics. So he proposes to freeze discretionary spending everywhere but defense and so-called entitlement spending.

Never mind that mass unemployment has not receded, that lending is not expanding, that signs in the fall of upticks in growth have already been revised downward. Never mind that without health care reform, without a serious draw-down in unemployment, or without cuts in military spending, real deficit reduction is a joke. Never mind that all evidence demonstrates that concessions to Republicans yield zero benefits, politically. Paul Krugman quotes Jonathan Zasloff, who wrote that "Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon." (Mellon was Herbert Hoover's Treasury secretary, who according to Hoover told him to "liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness.")

It's hard to imagine a more serious error in addressing economic recovery challenges arising out of the Great Recession. It's hard to imagine a worse conclusion to draw from the recent Massachusetts election. And it's hard to imagine a more telling lesson in crisis politics for working people: we are our own protection!!

Nothing, not even a sympathetic president, can replace the role of the multitudes in motion when the government has been demonstrably captured by corporate interests. And capture is the right word. If the recent Supreme Court decision wiping out all restrictions on corporate control of election campaigns were not enough, this political collapse by the president on the most burning question - government intervention to spur job creation - should be clear warning: the salvation of American democracy rests on the ability and willingness of the people to take to the streets.

Both the court decision on elections and Obama's retreat, if not reversed, will not be the end. In fact, such a blatant, undisguised assertion of corporate power has not happened since before the last great crisis in 1929 when closet Nazi-sympathizers like Andrew Mellon were spewing their venom openly.

I doubt this step was taken lightly. This kind of capture of state cannot be sustained without further aggressive suppressions of popular access to democratic institutions and processes.

Some may say it's a matter of presidential character - perhaps Roosevelt was a stronger president. I reject that. Any strength Roosevelt, in retrospect, displayed over Obama was only possible because the strength of the people's mobilizations overcame corporate arrogance. The same will be true now.

So far, on practically every initiative the president has taken (except Afghanistan) I have found myself joining his campaigns, phone banks, etc.

This time - I will be calling and organizing to defeat the freeze, and turn up the fire.

Democratize the Federal Reserve Bank

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:48:00 +0000

What seemed a foregone conclusion - the reappointment of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for another four-year term - has turned into a matter of contention. For this we have to thank Massachusetts voters. Their rebellion that took the unfortunate form of electing a right-wing Republican to fill the Senate seat of the late Edward Kennedy has recalibrated nearly everything in politics, including and not least, the reappointment of Bernanke. No one was expecting his coronation, but nearly no one expected anything but token resistance to his reappointment by President Obama.

Until now the most vocal critic of Bernanke has been Vermont senator and socialist Bernie Sanders. But now Sanders has some new allies in the Senate. Whether it is enough to derail the president's appointment is doubtful at this point, but it is a fight worth making. Two good reasons come to my mind.

For one thing, Bernanke - and before him the so-called oracle at the Fed, Alan Greenspan - were two of the main engineers of our protracted economic slump. When some economists were issuing warnings about the speculative bubble in the housing market and the grave consequences if it burst in the years prior to the meltdown in 2008, Fed czar Bernanke was making speeches about the "Great Moderation." According to him, sudden and sharp contractions of the economy were a thing of past. Hello! Talk about being asleep at the switch!

For another thing, since the bubble burst Bernanke has shown little if any desire to use monetary tools to address the long-term unemployment crisis. His actions suggest that he is content with how the economy is performing, even though many economists argue that jobless rates are going to remain high for a long time unless special measures are taken.

Paul Krugman, the Noble prize winner in economics and New York Times columnist, writes in a recent column, "Mr. Bernanke has offered no hint that he feels the need to adopt polices that might bring unemployment down."

Still, Krugman gives his former colleague and economics department chair at Princeton "a less than ringing endorsement" (his words) for reappointment, although in "damning Bernanke with faint praise," (my words) he provides the rest of us with ammunition to block Bernanke's reappointment.

It is said the administration feels that "another defeat (in the wake of the Massachusetts elections and the limbo status of health care) would be worse than association with Bernanke" (as Robert Kuttner put it), but is sticking with Bernanke a gamble worth making since he is a symbol of Wall Street-Washington collusion that tens of millions of people deeply resent?

There are a whole stable of economists who are technically qualified, ready to enforce tough regulations on Wall Street and its speculative excesses, and sympathetic to working people. Nominating one of these individuals, if well explained, could show the American people that the president has "their back."

Which leads me to a larger question that the past decade and a half of Fed mismanagement of the economy raises: should the Federal Reserve be democratized? Should its policy committee that sets interest rates and credit conditions include people's representatives? Who's going to regulate the regulators?

Currently, the Fed and its governing bodies conduct their business without any public oversight. Decisions that impact on the lives of hundreds of millions are reached behind closed doors. And its members are appointed from a narrow pool of bankers for the most part (the independence of the Fed is laughable as far as finance capital is concerned; it has enjoyed a long marriage to the financial moneybags and banksters.)

I suppose these present arrangements could be justified if the performance of Bernanke and his Board of Governors were exemplary. But, as I indicated above, that isn't the case. The Fed as currently constituted and managed is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

A democratically constituted and transparent Fed won't solve the economic crisis by itself, but it could be an important tool to reinflate and restructure the economy to the advantage of working people - employed and unemployed. It could also signify a new departure on the part of the White House to forcefully address the anger and desperation that people are feeling.

Until then, let's send Bernanke, along with his soulmates in the White House, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, on a well-deserved vacation.

Is this a socialist moment?

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:51:00 +0000

Is this a socialist moment? I hear this question when I travel. So here is the answer I usually give when asked at public meetings.

It depends on how we understand a "socialist moment." If it means that the American people in their majority are insisting on a socialism transformation of society, there is little evidence for it.

People are angry and frustrated; they want change; they are ready to struggle for jobs and relief, health care, public education, housing assistance and so on. But are they demanding a system change, a socialist society? Not yet. To say otherwise seems like a stretch to me.

If, however, what is meant is that many more people are ready to give socialism a hearing, not reject it out of hand, then I would say, "Yes, this is a ‘socialist moment'." This is no small thing. It wasn't that long ago that socialism didn't have much currency among broad sections of the American people. It was considered a failed model, undemocratic and worse, a bankrupt idea - something best consigned to history.

In fact, the ideologues of capitalism thought they had buried the socialist idea once and for all, but to their chagrin the genie is once again out of the bottle, thanks in large measure to the conditions buffeting the domestic and world economy. It is not economic determinism to say that force of economic circumstance and the crisis of everyday living for tens of millions is shaping and reshaping mass thinking, although in contradictory ways.

Communists and socialists should welcome the rebirth of this dialogue on socialism and eagerly participate in it.

Like everything else our vision of socialism needs to adjust to new conditions (economic crisis) and challenges (economic and environmental sustainability, nuclear disarmament, world poverty and inequality) as well as examine the experience of socialism in the 20th century.

After all, there are no universal models into which every country fits. The cloth of socialist experience is a beautiful weave of many colors and threads, not a drab monotonous gray. Each country fashions a socialism that bears a deep imprint of its own history, politics, economics and culture.

The experience of successful and unsuccessful socialist revolutions and societies has to be filtered carefully into our national context. In no case can those experiences be uncritically and simplistically imported.

As Gus Hall, the former leader of the Communist Party USA, said on many occasions, "We are for Bill of Rights Socialism," referring to our nation's Bill of Rights, which in his view would be preserved and expanded upon in a socialist society in the United States.

Re-envisioning public schooling

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:23:00 +0000

McKINLEYVILLE, Calif. - A short while back I had a talk with a young man, the son of a dear friend. Our talk centered on his new schooling agenda, called "Independent Studies." Earlier, he'd found difficulty and indifference in attending "regular high school," becoming detached and then formally suspended from the campus.

After a brief period of time, he re-entered into his schooling under the "IS" program. It was interesting to learn that this endeavor allowed him to pursue home study, partnered with some campus classes and community work.

When my two boys, Rob and Jake, had their differences with the drudgery and boredom of high school, both opted out. They were later placated, only to attend a ramshackle old school on the outskirts of town that served as a "continuation" high school for containment of "screw-ups" and "drop-outs."

Somehow they made it through. Rob is now a University of California at Davis-trained master horticulturist and landscaper. Jake is a computer master wizard. I only wish that, all those years ago, they could have had the option my friend's son now enjoys.

Because of the hard times we are facing - the economy and the lack of transportation, affordable housing and livable wage employment opportunities - many young (and old) students and their families are having extreme difficulty in securing adequate education.

I believe the universal public funding model for schooling must continue and flourish, but its structured design, its delivery and scope should be modified so as to include all people, establishing a lifetime educational availability. What I call "open (public) schooling" could utilize a myriad of different public buildings to provide people with access around the clock. Its curriculum would include not only the academic, vocational, recreational and sports aspects but further introduce comprehensive "life studies" courses.

Most of our young people and adults have traveled through their school years and graduated without ever being taught how to manage and cope with the stress and requirements of life, to survive and thrive in the everyday world. I believe starting early in school and continuing forward, a course in "life studies" should be given. Under its broad heading subjects such as personal home economics, health and safety, record-keeping and storage, social and interpersonal relationships and communication, basic residential and land care, urban and rural survival skills along with basic repair and maintenance of real and personal properties would be highly advantageous.

Finally, on our road to socialism, we must never neglect our people's public school system. We must listen diligently to our students' criticisms and constantly work to improve public education's quality and consistency.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenfernandez/ / CC BY 2.0

Controversy rises over plans for Haiti

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:55:00 +0000

The nightmare just doesn't stop. On Wednesday, two new aftershocks struck Haiti, whose cities and towns were destroyed by a major earthquake last week. In spite of outside aid and the efforts of its own intrepid citizens, Haiti is very far from seeing an end to its tribulation.

The Haitian government says it has already counted 72,000 dead, with more than 200,000 a possible total fatality count in a country of 9 million people. Compare this to the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, where 125,000 died in a country of 230 million: One Haitian out of every 45 may have died, compared to one person in 1,840 in Indonesia. And there is now danger that many, many people not killed outright in the quake will die of disease, hunger and exposure.

There is both cooperation and conflict in the rescue effort. Many nations have been sending in supplies and rescue teams, including Cuba, Spain, South Africa, Venezuela, Brazil, France, Mexico and the United States to name just a few. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thanked the Cuban government for allowing U.S. aircraft to pass through Cuba's airspace en route to Haiti, and former Cuban president Fidel Castro suggested that even two countries that have butted heads as often as Cuba and the USA can cooperate in such humanitarian crises. But there is a question about whether, for example, any U.S. materials and supplies could be channeled to the more than 400 Cuban medical personnel working in Haiti (with more on the way) because of the U.S. blockade against Cuba.

Some within Haiti and regionally worry about the military slant of the U.S. effort. While the overwhelmed Haitian government of President Rene Preval has welcomed the U.S. action, and there is broad recognition that the U.S. military is uniquely able to provide certain kinds of large-scale help (helicopters, field hospitals, earth moving equipment), others wonder why so many "boots on the ground", in fact over 10,000 in addition to thousands more United Nations peacekeeping forces, are needed. Leaders of Bolivia and Venezuela worry aloud about this. Spanish news media have complained that the U.S. military has expelled them from the airport, and several countries, plus the medical relief organization Doctors Without Borders, have complained that the U.S. military authorities that are now running the airport are delaying efforts to send in supplies and rescue personnel by air, while the distribution of food, water and medical materials seems to be very slow.

The troops are said to be needed to provide security for aid teams and for the Haitian people. Some violent incidents, resulting either from the desperation of starving people or from the activities of criminals escaped from collapsed prisons, have been reported but these incidents have been few, and some such reports may just be rumors. Cuban and other medical and rescue personnel have continued to work without being molested and without any armed protection.

Haiti is a nation of descendents of slaves who fought to the death for their freedom. The last time the Marines were there, from 1915 to 1934, they were sent to control "disturbances" and ended up implementing forced labor with brutal racist violence. The U.S. occupation authorities showed their "spirit of international cooperation" by helping to collect the blood money that France had demanded Haiti pay as punishment for defeating the French military in 1804. More recently, in 2004 U.S. troops spirited the legally elected president of Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide, out of the country against his will.

To some in the United States, the tradition of asking former presidents to be symbolic heads of relief efforts may seem inoffensive. But seing President Obama flanked by former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, announcing on television that these two gentlemen would be heading up the Haiti relief effort, may have seemed ominous to many Haitians. Can we expect Haitians to forget that Bush ordered the deposing and kidnapping of Aristide in 2004, and that Clinton helped to restore him in 1994 but in exchange forced Haiti to accept some of the neoliberal policies of "free" trade, privatization etc. that have enriched foreign investors but left Haiti an economic wreck?

On Friday, the Obama administration finally granted Temporary Protected Status to undocumented Haitian immigrants in the United States, which will allow them to stay and work for 18 months. But the government hastened to say that new Haitian immigrants without papers will immediately be returned to their destroyed country. There will be a speedup in processing the movement of Haitian orphans to prospective adoptive parents in the U.S. but it is clear that there is no possibility that the U.S. will take substantial numbers of Haitian refugees. And in Haiti, the government of President Preval sent out the message that nobody should take to boats to try to get to U.S. shores, because they will be stopped and returned to Haiti if they do. The large presence of U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships off Haiti's coasts gives backing to this warning.

Yet the small African nation of Senegal, in solidarity, has invited Haitians to move to its shores and offered them land. The per capita gross domestic product of Senegal is $1,600 in a population of 14 million, while that of the United States is $46,000 in a population of 307 million. Yet the fear of Haitian immigration to the United States has some suggesting that displaced Haitians be sent to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as happened during the administration of George Bush the First.

There are some very positive developments. The AFL-CIO reports on its blog about thousands of unionized U.S. nurses and others who are offering to go to Haiti en masse to help. U.S. unions and other organizations have set up phone-banking all over the country to raise money for Haitian relief. Teams of firefighters and search and rescue personnel have gone to Haiti from cities and villages all over the United States. There is a massive response from the African American and immigrant communities. These efforts should be applauded, expanded and supported by all.

The biggest test of all will be what happens after the rescue operations end and the focus changes to reconstruction. Will Haiti be forced by its extreme need to accept even more aid and trade plans that sacrifice the interests of its people for those of multinational corporations and powerful, developed capitalist states? Will the IMF back off demands, already being advanced before half the bodies have been retrieved from the ruins, that Haiti freeze government employees' pay in exchange for vitally needed aid?

Musicians’ victory is good for all workers

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:44:00 +0000

CLEVELAND - Musicians in the Cleveland Orchestra celebrated Tuesday after a 30-hour strike forced management to drop demands for a wage cut and increase in health premiums.

The new three-year contract between Local 4 of the American Federation of Musicians and the Musical Arts Association freezes wages for two years followed by two increases in 2012 totaling 5 percent.

In return, the players agreed to do some additional charity and educational concerts without pay.

The strike brought out serious problems facing the Cleveland orchestra in an area wracked by unemployment, and it stirred controversy because even base pay for the musicians is in the six figures.

The world-renowned orchestra has been hit with declining ticket sales and charitable contributions as well as a sharp drop in the value of its endowment.

Some commentators, including Connie Schultz, a liberal columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, criticized the musicians for not showing more humility and appreciation for having highly paid jobs at a time of massive economic crisis.

"They argued that it was unfair to cut their pay," Schultz wrote, "but failed to acknowledge the millions of Americans who have seen their wages and benefits slashed in the last year." Furthermore, even with a pay cut, "their standard of living would still bear little resemblance to the lives of most Americans in these troubled times," she wrote.

This is pandering to anti-labor prejudice and phony populism.

A win for one group of workers is a win for all and it's better than a loss. It shows that workers even in the most difficult of times can hold the line. There's no reason for shame or apologies.

In fact, the union had already made concessions in recent years, including giving up their defined-benefit pensions for 401k stock accounts. They made it clear they would not continue down that road and degrade the ability of the orchestra to attract talent.

The union's firmness sets an example that is good for the entire labor movement.

"The union stood its ground and won a victory for everyone," said Harriet Applegate, executive secretary of the North Shore AFL-CIO. "This is one of the few union stories that has a happy ending. We should all celebrate this victory."

Schultz took issue with those who compare a musician's job to that of a "highly skilled factory worker," saying that "an orchestra member's hardest day will never rival the regular grind of a factory worker's life."

But what purpose does that claim serve? Professional musicians are indeed extremely highly skilled and their skills are acquired after years of excruciating training and maintained with a lifetime of hard work. No one should downgrade the difficult labor of any worker, whether in a factory or in an orchestra.

In fact, the skills of these musicians are so great that it was virtually inconceivable that scabs could be hired to break the strike. The orchestra management was over a barrel and promptly settled.

The music produced by the Cleveland Orchestra is highly prized and generates enormous revenues in ticket sales and royalties, as well as contributing to the prestige and cultural enrichment of Cleveland and the country. Even if the orchestra is currently operating in the red, why take it out on labor? A tiny fraction of the trillions wasted on Wall Street, war and tax cuts for the rich would provide for national programs, such as were enacted during the Great Depression, to support the arts.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mitosettembremusica/ / CC BY 2.0

Racism and counter-revolution: Cuba and Haiti

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:08:00 +0000

"John Brown was born just as the shudder of Haiti was running through all the Americas," wrote his biographer W. E. B. Dubois. Indeed, "The prospect of Cuban independence raised the specter of another black republic in the Caribbean," said historian Louis A. Perez Jr. That worried Winston Churchill, in Cuba reporting on Cuba's second War for Independence in 1895: "A grave danger represents itself. Two fifths of the insurgents in the field are Negros. [They would] demand the predominant share in the government."

"Those people are no more fit for self government than gunpowder is for hell," said U.S. General William R. Shafter from Cuba a few years later. "The insurgents are a lot of degenerates," offered General Samuel Young of the U.S. occupation forces. Major Alexander Oswald Brodie said, "The Cubans are utterly irresponsible, partly savage."

Beginning in 1868, Cuba's African-descended General Antonio Maceo fought to end slavery and win Cuban independence. After 1895, he and his ragtag army were instrumental in ending Spanish colonialism. Like former Haitian slave Toussaint L'Ouverture a century earlier, he led black soldiers to victory over a European power.

A government backed by U.S. military incursions kept the Cuban economy in U.S. hands. Not until 1959 would Cuban revolutionaries gain a second national independence. The use of racism as a tool of oppression would end.

For Monroe Doctrine enforcers in Washington, Haitian independence in 1804 and the victory of the Cuban Revolution represented big fish that got away. They took preventative steps, such as invading the Dominican Republic in 1965 with 42,000 troops and, from the beginning, punishing Haiti.

The U.S. government joined a multinational trade embargo against Haiti in the early 19th century and withheld diplomatic recognition for almost 60 years. In 1825 France forced Haiti to pay billions in gold francs for property losses, i.e. slaves. Payouts, including interest, lasted until 1947, inflicting a chronic open wound upon the Haitian people.

U.S. Marines invaded in 1915 to settle other debts. They stayed until 1934 and ran the government. Haitian former military officer Charlemagne Perault led a guerrilla insurgency requiring U.S. troop reinforcements. Display of his dead body roped to a door represented psychological warfare at its crudest. U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, attempting to justify U.S. occupation, argued that black people have an inherent propensity for the savage life and a physical incapacity for civilization.

Subsequently, U.S. backing of the Duvalier dictatorship, father and son, and use of economic tools to undo food sovereignty reinforced Haitian dependency. Rural people moved into cities, and topsoil disappeared. For President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the price of popularity and his message of social justice was U.S.-backed coups and exile.

A week after the January 12 earthquake, U.S. media reports cast survivors as potentially violent. Like Afro-Cuban rebels before them, they were scorned. A New York Times columnist attributed Haiti's misfortunes to a flawed "culture," given over to Voodoo. "Responsibility is often not internalized," he suggested. A U.S. radio preacher said that Haitian independence came at the cost of a curse, presumably never to be lifted.

Haitians have long been portrayed as a dependent people, beyond hope. Racist denigration is, of course, commonly used to ward off solidarity for "malcontents." People seen as lesser human beings require special rules.

In post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, for example, military power became the U.S. response to violent tendencies latent, supposedly, in starving, thirsty, wounded, bereft and grief-stricken people. Doctors, disaster relief specialists and humanitarian aid shipments from dozens of nations were on hold, waiting for guns, tanks, naval ships, and 12,000 U.S. troops to be deployed,

Interviewed on Democracy Now, Dr. Evan Lyon of U.S.-based Partners in Health said, "There are no security issues ... and there's also no violence." "Racism has slowed the recovery efforts of this hospital," he concluded.

"Most Haitians here have seen little humanitarian aid so far. What they have seen is guns, and lots of them," reported Al Jazeera's Sebastian Walker. Community people were reported to be forming cooperative recovery projects.

For racist oppressors, black people's yearnings for equality may be dangerous, and so too is organizing for social justice. Marco Rascon, writing for the Mexican La Jornada newspaper, suggests the U. S. government in Haiti is looking at Cuba. "Before the Haitian disaster, powerful Cuban social organizing had begun to extend its networks, medical and educational institutions," he states. "The force of solidarity goes beyond delivering supplies. It can generate what is feared more: social organization, where the spirit moving the people will be the people."

Photo: http://www.defense.gov/dodcmsshare/newsphoto/1999-02/981215-M-3661W-001.jpg

Stock market gets giddy over Massachusetts

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:08:00 +0000

It's tempting to go into a long rant about the results of the Massachusetts elections. But I'm basically of the "let the dust settle a bit" school of punditry. For now I fall into the "It takes a fight to win" camp. Having said that, something that really got me going before the polls closed on Tuesday was Wall Street and the stock market.

Business reporters and Fox Noise analysts were ecstatic. All the U.S. markets rose steadily all day long. "The markets are betting that the Democrats will lose Kennedy's seat in the Senate," they thrilled, "and this will not only kill health care reform, but all the rest of the Obama agenda." Most mentioned banking reform and labor rights, like Employee Free Choice. Then they also mentioned that pharmaceutical and insurance stocks seemed to be leading the way higher.

Most of us have heard economists tell us that the stock market is not much of an indicator of the health of the economy. Sure, when it goes all to hell, it does tend to state the obvious: things are bad. But remember how it was rising out of sight just before the crash? Not a clue. Of course the stock market's value as gauge of the economy has gotten even worse as banking capital has gotten "too big to fail," and edged out manufacturing capital that might be some small measure of productive wealth creation. Now it's more of a "heads they win, tails we lose" kind of indicator. "They" are Wall Street and "we" are most of the rest of us who work for a living on Main Street. Another example - next time a giant corporation announces a huge layoff, watch the ticker. Cost cutting (jobs, automation and speedup) seems to raise stock prices.

Anyway, back to the elections. The stock market might not be a useful economic indicator, but at times it just might be an indicator of the class struggle. The investment houses, the banks, the derivative traders, ("coupon clippers," Woody Guthrie used to call them) got giddy at the thought of defeating even the modest reform agenda of the Obama administration. Even though none of the modest reforms being proposed would be more than a mosquito bite on Wall Street profits.

The next day the stocks took a tumble that wiped out more than the gains of Election Day. Traders were worried about profits because the dollar got stronger, the price of oil dropped and China's banks are tightening lending. What irony. The financiers who took billions in bailout money are worried that China's banks might tighten money and "hurt the economic recovery." Isn't it still a problem that the U.S. banks are not lending much even with all the government handouts that were supposed to loosen their lending? Well one thing for sure - reading the tea leaves of the stock market won't tell us much about how working people will respond to Tuesday's election in Massachusetts. Anyone know where I can buy some "fight for a second stimulus and public works jobs" futures?

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thewalkingirony/ / CC BY 2.0

Evolution: ‘Theory’ is fact

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:03:00 +0000

Book review:

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
By Richard Dawkins
Free Press, N.Y., 2009

In recent years, especially since the publication of his seminal "The God Delusion," Richard Dawkins has become known, somewhat unfairly, as an anti-Christian, hate-mongering atheist. Of course, he is one of the leading polemicists of the so-called "New Atheists" movement, but "polemicist" does not equate necessarily with "hate monger" or "intolerant thug." Anyone who's seen his slate of Channel 4 shows will know that Dawkins, even when confronted with the most outrageous or offensive ideas, will say little more than, "Yes, I must admit that I am a bit frustrated."

The point that all the New Atheists make is this: There is disagreement over religion, and between religions, so there should be discussion, and everyone should respect each other, and themselves, enough to be up for good debate. In doing so, they've given atheism a better name (now it is the fastest growing demographic in the U.S. Census). But they've also helped Christians and other religious groups, who are often insultingly portrayed as closed-minded or ignorant (something none these authors would say). Dawkins and the others have given religious people the opportunity to debate their ideas in public. Even some of the most fundamentalist religious organizations have taken up the chance for a debate, and have shown themselves to be far more thoughtful and intelligent than is the stereotype.

Much hay has been made (including by sales-happy publishers) about Dawkins comparing creationists to Holocaust-deniers. While this sounds inflammatory, anyone who reads the actual passage can see that Dawkins is not making any sort of moral judgment, but a point about the nature of truth and fact. We know that the Holocaust occurred; there is no question about it. It is appallingly stupid, offensive and, more to the point, irrational to deny the fact. In the same fashion, it is just as irrational to deny evolution. Perhaps a bold statement, but not as grave an insult to creationists as one would assume at first glance.

Such is the context for Dawkins's latest work, "The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution."

Extreme right-wing Christians have said this book is simply another example of the author's supposed intolerance. Even the New York Times review accused Dawkins of getting "his knickers in a twist" for insisting that evolution is indeed a fact. When Dawkins argued, in an interview with Bill O'Reilly, that "intelligent design" should not be taught in classrooms, O'Reilly accused an incredulous Dawkins of "fascism."

All of this is exactly the reason that Dawkins felt the need to write this book, a fun and entertaining, not to mention iron-clad, argument that evolution is fact. According to Dawkins, such a fight is necessary because "intelligent design" proponents "control school boards, they home-school their children to deprive them of access to proper science teachers, and they include many members of the United States Congress ..."

Imagine, he suggests, that you are a teacher of Roman and Greek history. But instead of being able to take your time talking about the contributions of those two empires, and their influence on modern states, you have to take up limited classroom time defending the notion that the ancient Romans and Greeks even existed, that Latin wasn't invented at some point during the Victorian period. This, Dawkins says, is the situation in which many biology teachers find themselves today.

Though known now as an outspoken atheist, Dawkins makes clear that, in this book, his argument is not with religion. In fact, he makes the point that the archbishop of Canterbury (the prelate of England's state-sponsored religion), the pope, most mainstream Christian organizations, as well as Jews and Muslims, all accept the fact of evolution. In the book, he calls upon the leaders of all these groups to use their power to help advance real, scientific education. It's part of a basic, democratic education. Perhaps some Catholics may disagree with Dawkins as to why evolution occurred - maybe God directed it, maybe there was no guidance given - but surely there can be unity around the fact that it did occur, and it occurred the way Darwin described more than a century ago. Evolution is a fact. And that scientific fact, the information that we know, is what should be taught in science classrooms. Leave the rest to philosophy and theology classes.

Dawkins spends a good deal of time discussing the meaning of the word "theory," and how preposterous it is to say evolution is "just a theory." If you're prepared to say that evolution is "just a theory," then you'd better be prepared to say the same about gravity. There are two definitions of theory: one is roughly equivalent to "hypothesis;" the other is "a proven hypothesis, a system of ideas ... a statement of what are held to be general laws, principles or causes of something known or observed." Obviously, evolution falls into the latter definition.

Dawkins takes the reader along for a fun ride as he shows the preposterousness of the idea of some "missing link," or why, out of all the fossils that have been found, the discovery of one single fossil in the wrong place-his example is that of a rabbit fossil in Precambrian rock-would completely disprove evolution.

Dawkins' wry, tongue-in-cheek, but also entirely serious, description of certain absurdities in the development of mammals as an argument against "design" leave the reader laughing as well as enlightened.

Anyone with a thirst for good writing would do well to read "Greatest Show." Dawkins himself, in a footnote description of another writer, sums it up the best: "It is the kind of writing that makes me want to rush out into the street to share with somebody-anybody - because it is too good to keep to oneself."

Photo: Richard Dawkins (picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/CaNfTfbvYz3rwnxGM9a-hQ Creative Commons license)

The Obama challenge to the banks

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:29:00 +0000

Lonesome Hobo Economics

... Kind ladies and kind gentlemen ...
Once I was very prosperous
There was nothing I did lack
I had fourteen carat gold, in my mouth,
and silver on my back

But I did not trust my brother
I carried him to blame
Which led me to my fatal doom
To wander off in shame.

- Bob Dylan, "Lonesome Hobo," 1967

The banks: First he proposes to tax them - they are going to the Supreme Court to stop him if they can. Then he demands they pay back all that they owe - after the public watched the bailed-out banks handing out big bonuses as they, the people, are standing in unemployment lines. The president has taken a decidedly more combative, populist tone, moving to re-mobilize and rekindle commitment from the broad-based forces that elected him.

It's time. As the election in Massachusetts, I think, shows: those forces are hunkered down, frustrated, and increasingly angry at immense inequities alongside a persistent official 10 percent unemployment figure. They are facing down loss of retirement for themselves, or their parents or grandparents, foreclosed or underwater homes, inability to use credit (which many are compelled to start using for food and rent!), and increasing violence (there are upticks since the recession has deepened).

The Obama health care legislative battle has been much harder, more complex, longer and more exhausting than expected. After the election of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to succeed Ted Kennedy, dark clouds are forming over the prospects of any heath care bill passing soon. Voters' frustration appears driven mostly by the bad economy - but they are clearly, in larger numbers than previously thought, confused by the health care debate.

Decisive moves on expanding the stimulus also appear blocked as fear of deficits expands - also largely the result of Republican propaganda, but also fueled by the bank bailouts that may have forestalled collapse, but have not really restarted credit visible to the consumer. The re-commitment to two of Bush's wars, neither of which seem headed toward sustainable conclusions, has also sounded warnings for many Americans stunned by the costs, and by the damage to their fellow citizen-veterans and the shape they are in coming back from the Mid-east, Afghani and Pakistani war zones.

While the Republicans have also made noises over "bailouts for bankers," it's clear they are just cats' paws for the banking industry themselves. They completely stonewalled - would not even meet to discuss - Sen. Dick Durbin's attempt to pass a mortgage reform that would have actually protected many homeowners from losing their homes. His measure would have safeguarded homeowners unless they were unable to make payments on the REAL secured value of their house, rather than inflated rates of the bubble. That was the only real financial reform that could have put some significant money and help in working people's pockets. Republican concern for the victims of the financial crisis is clearly bogus - but that has to be demonstrated and exposed.

So it's a good, in fact necessary, step that Obama is calling the right-wing' bluff on financial reform, and that he is planning on taking needed funds for a second stimulus directly from the banks. I hope that he is serious. It addresses the deficit issue, unemployment and the populist anger at the bailouts - all at once. The populist outpouring against Wall Street must not end up serving Republican ends, or it can wreck his presidency, and all of us at the same time.

The bottom-line consequence of the financial crisis is that finance capital, and national investment policy in general, needs a substantial restructuring that the banks are going to have to accept, but that no amount of talk will ever persuade them to accept. They must be forced. There is no other alternative. To start - they must pay a fair piece of the price of getting people back to work. Tying financial reform to jobs is the only way to pull the center back into the "forward progress" coalition. And more than ever, it's clear that time is of the essence and that this must mean government directly hiring the unemployed. Stimulus contracts will not get the job done in time to prevent a Democratic setback. Direct employment will make an immediate, and visible difference.

Finally, on the policy of bipartisanship that Obama has tried to encourage, but which has yielded such meager results:

It's been clear to many for a long time that the Reaganite tendency in the Republican Party, a tendency made even more reactionary by Bush and the right-wing media and religious movements, has long prepared to block the progress of social democracy in the United States by any means necessary, on every front, and no matter the consequence for the country's ultimate progress or prosperity.

Bipartisanship makes sense if there is universal good will about the national interest at some level. But it makes sense to expose those who claim the national interest but cannot put it in front of even the most extreme anti-democratic sentiments. This faction has seized de facto control over the Republican Party apparatus, and through the filibuster has veto power over the entire agenda voted in last year. One way or another, these forces, and their real financial backers, must be brought completely into the light and marginalized! If not, the pundits criticizing Haiti for its so-called "failed state" mentality, will be having their lines read back to them.

Thousands gather to commemorate a legend

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:10:00 +0000

FORT WORTH, Texas - Thousands from all corners of North Texas gathered at the downtown Convention Center here on Jan. 18 to remember a man who lifted a nation into the fight for equality.

At 11 a.m. the floats began to make their way down the street. People on all sides were waving and carrying posters or signs with pictures and quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. One that really caught my eye said, "An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity." It really portrays the need for us to change from viewing society as individuals and work together to achieve unity.

Such unity was seen during this parade, for thousands of people worked together to display a magnificent tribute to Dr. King. It also showed how far we have come as a society. During King's time the nation was more divided by race, and now here at the parade were people of all backgrounds in unity.

The rising unemployment numbers seemed to have had a great impact on the parade, for there were labor union workers holding "Jobs now" signs. Jobs with Justice activists were gathering worker support by collecting signatures and handing out leaflets about the job crisis. Unsurprisingly, many people were willing to show their support as we are all feeling the pressure of this recession.

There were many kids on the floats as well as in the crowd. I guess it shows that the memory of Dr. King's legacy will not die any time soon, and the coming generations will know of the sacrifice and struggle their forefathers had to endure to better the future.

When the march ended, a high school band played in the downtown Water Gardens, and a speaker followed.

Surprisingly, I don't recall seeing any mainstream press, or any press at all for that matter. I was expecting to see the white vans the camera crews always drive. The parade was not just to commemorate a man who revolutionized the nation, but living proof that what Dr. King and so many others fought and died for was not in vain. All kinds of people can come together with unity.

Photo: Forth Worth, Jan. 18. (PW/Brandon Berrios)

Setting the record straight

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:30:00 +0000

It is said by some on the left that the Communist Party USA has no differences with President Obama. Just to set the record straight: we do and we express them. For example, we opposed the nearly unconditional Wall Street bailouts and deployment of more troops to Afghanistan. We argued for a bigger stimulus package. And we said the president should push the envelope more; otherwise he runs the danger of the extreme right turning the popular discontent over the economic crisis against him, the Democratic Party, and the people's movement that supports his agenda. Isn't this what we saw in Tuesday's election in Massachusetts, where a right-winger was elected to the Senate?

But in expressing our differences with the president, communists go to great lengths to state them in a constructive and unifying way. We don't do it to score points or demonstrate our "militancy." We don't lose sight of the class nature of this struggle.

The main organizations of the working class and people are not always in sync with the president on every issue either. But they don't turn their differences into an unbridgeable divide between them and him. In fact, they consider him a friend and are mindful of the unrelenting attack, steeped in racism and other forms of division, coming from right-wing extremists, against our nation's first African American president - something that was so evident in the Senate election in Massachusetts.

The left has something to learn from the approach of these people's organizations. We are too comfortable in our role as an exceedingly small, but "principled and militant" grouping in U.S. politics. Such a posture, which could easily gain greater currency in the aftermath of Tuesday's election, may feel satisfying, but it won't help us evolve into a political player that exercises a major influence on U.S. politics nor get us a flea hop closer to socialism.

In my view, the president has made mistakes, particularly his handling of the financial, jobs and health care crises, but he isn't the main obstacle to social change; he is not the "enemy," or even an "enemy." President Obama is a reformer, not a socialist reformer, not a radical reformer, and not even a consistent anti-corporate reformer, but a reformer nonetheless whose agenda creates space for the broader people's movement to deepen and extend the reform process in a non-revolutionary period.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson were Democratic Party regulars, but, with the help of a popular and sustained insurgency, both of them stepped outside of their comfort zone and morphed into change-makers, thus opening up space for substantive reform - Roosevelt with the New Deal and Johnson with civil and voting rights, Medicare, federal aid for education and the "War on Poverty." Unfortunately, Johnson's mistaken decision to escalate the war in Vietnam stained, perhaps irreparably, his presidency and historical legacy.

Barack Obama in my opinion has the same potential to "grow on the job" and enact reforms that measurably improve the lives of the American people and reframe our nation's place in the world. Right-wing extremists and powerful sections of capital feel much the same. Hence, the formidable opposition striving to sabotage, block or contain even the tiniest reforms by any means necessary. To make matters much more difficult, the broad coalition supporting reform is not yet of sufficient size, strength and understanding to consistently elect people's candidates as well as guarantee passage of the president's reform agenda - let alone radical reforms such as sustainable and just economic development, a national "profit-free" health service, a massive full employment program with affirmative action and living wage guarantees, fully funded, integrated, quality public education from child care to college, and a new foreign policy that accents peace, cooperation, equitable relations and a commitment to end global poverty.

Until that movement is at such a level, it is premature to say what the political limits of this president are, or, to put it differently, smugly dismiss him as simply another Clintonian Democrat. When our movement reaches the level of the popular upsurges of the 1930s and '60s, we will be in a better position to say where he fits on the political spectrum and whether his views are elastic enough to accommodate more deep-going changes.

Don't think we will succeed if the Obama presidency fails. If it fails, we will once again be fighting an uphill, defensive struggle as we were in the Bush and Reagan years, or worse. Witness the election of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate.

There will inevitably be differences and tensions with this White House as we go forward. In most instances, the differences will pivot around the pace and depth of reform; in some instances, such as the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, the differences are more fundamental.

The role of the left is to help navigate these differences, while at the same time infusing energy and clarity and sustaining the strategic unity of the people's movement against the main enemy - right-wing extremism and powerful sections of big capital. This admittedly is a difficult needle to thread, but, as we know from the experience of the 1930s and '60s, it was done then. And there is no reason to think that it can't be done now. In doing so, the left of our time will move into the center of U.S politics.

Families endure health care ‘crucible of pain’

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:27:00 +0000

My 88-year-old mom, who fell and broke her arm some eight weeks ago, had to endure a two-pronged battle - with herself and with the health care system.

I suspect that her story, while not tragic, is more commonplace than generally recognized. But, as with other common experiences, it carried the potential for tragedy.

After less than a week in the hospital, she was sent home with her arm in a sling. No need for surgery. It was a clean break, the arm would heal on its own.

In her bed at my sister's home, where she's lived since her stroke more than four years ago, things went from bad to worse, and not just for my mom.

It was a nightmarish week for my sister, who had to get up three or four times in the middle of the night to help our mother: give her the pain medication at the prescribed intervals, get her out of bed, escort her to the bathroom, and then back to bed, readjust the pillows, and so on, and on...

I relieved my sister a couple of nights and rapidly joined her and the legions of other family members throughout the land turning into basket cases while caring for loved ones 24/7. Regular work attendance, family and social life - much less moments of reflection about the beauty in life - quickly go out the window.

On the seventh day, I heard my sister's frantic voice through my sleep. stumbled out of bed and into the room next door. There I found my sister on her knees beside our mother, both of them on the floor by the bed. Mom was breathing, snoring soundly, slouched over her good arm. "Should we put her back in bed? What if she's injured something else? Her head, maybe? Should we call 911? Yes ... no ... yes."

We opted for 911. In the ER later it was determined she had not injured any other part of her body. We surmised she must have rolled off the bed in her sleep, unconscious of what was transpiring. "Phew! That was a close one."

There was a silver lining in all this. It took a second fall, soon after the first, to convince the insurance company that our mother needed extended professional care until the arm healed. No amount of logic or medical correctness had persuaded the insurer to approve extended care in a medical facility after the first fall.

After several days in the hospital, we lost the fight to place our mom in the acute rehab center where she had made satisfactory progress four years earlier after her stroke and after a subsequent hip replacement. This, after the professional personnel at the rehab facility had determined she was a prime candidate for their intensive program. We discovered later that the cost of care there was too high for the insurance carrier.

But we did take solace when we defeated efforts by the insurer to rush our mother instead into a dingy skilled nursing facility. We played low and dirty with the poor overworked social worker: "How would you like for your own mother to be placed in a dump?" After that and no small amount of persistent prodding at various levels of the health care bureaucracy, our mom was admitted into a decent skilled nursing facility.

A few days into her stay at the skilled nursing facility, my sister and I noticed our mother had intervals when what she said made little sense. We worried that she was beginning to lose it. We arranged to have the resident psychologist see mom during her weekly visits.

It wasn't until several days later that it dawned on us to inquire about the pain medication. It turns out they were giving her a pill that contained morphine.

Morphine, commonly administered to patients in acute pain, sends my mother into a tizzy, including bouts of grouchiness and hallucination. So, the first thing out of our mouths any time our mom is transferred to a new health care facility is "Please, no morphine." We are assured by the discharging facility that her chart so states.

After four weeks at the skilled nursing facility, her arm was X-rayed. Things were healing nicely. Practically every day, my sister and her daughter, who has been a big help all along, pressed for an orthopedic doctor to examine our mom in order to determine whether she could start putting weight on her arm. The physical and occupational therapists were also pressing so they could start more aggressive treatment - the sooner that's done, the quicker the recuperation.

It wasn't until three weeks later - a day after our mom was discharged from the skilled nursing facility - that she was seen by an orthopedic doctor and certified capable of putting weight on the arm.

While at the skilled nursing facility, she regained her ability to walk on her own using a cane, for which we're thankful. But save for some limited non-weight-bearing exercises, she received no therapy on the arm for which she was placed in the facility in the first place.

Neither protestations at the facility and with the insurance company nor the subsequent appeal to a supposedly impartial arbitrator changed the original decision to send my mom home on the day set by the insurer.

In the course of this experience, we've learned that under public Medicare it is the health care professional who has the final say on the best remedy, including how long it is necessary for a patient to remain in a medical facility. It is not a clerk or even a health care professional on the payroll of a for-profit outfit whose job depends on how well he/she satisfies the company's profit line. Our family had initially opted for the private plan because it had a better prescription drug plan.

For folks our mother's age, it is bad enough to have to endure the pain - physical and emotional - that comes with a serious injury. Not to mention the prolonged confinement in the health care facility. Judging from the comments of several patients our mother befriended, their ordeal felt more like incarceration. More than once staff members rushed out the facility's front door to catch one patient who kept "escaping," as the other patients would say, half jokingly.

Under the present for-private-profit-dominated health care system, inferior treatment and often life-threatening ordeals are heaped on patients who must already bear the crucible of their personal pain and fears.

I shudder to think what becomes of patients who don't have family or friends to advocate for them.

Our mother is now recuperating at my niece's home where there are no stairs to climb. It is with admiration that I watch the tender, patient and yet firm hand with which my niece cares for her grandma. My wife and daughter had taken shifts at the health care facility. In the process of fighting for our loved one's welfare, the family has gotten closer and is more united than ever. As a result of this recent experience, our resolve to fight for health care reform has never been greater.

Deep inside, my heart cries out to do away now with this whole for-corporate-profit health care system and replace it with a democratically-run public system. But my better senses bring me back to reality. Let's take care to pass the best health care plan present conditions will allow and, like Social Security and other social programs, improve on them with continued struggle.

Health care and a democratically-run system of public social benefits are on the horizon. Let's keep our eyes on the prize.

Mass. confusion

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:57:00 +0000

Editorial

Whether or not Martha Coakley wins the Senate seat today in Massachusetts, the battle for the interpretation of what it all means is already underway.

From our point of view, the spin from right-wingers of both red and blue persuasion will go something like this. "Republican Scott Brown rode a populist uprising. People are unhappy about health reform. They are unhappy about the Obama agenda. They are angry about the economy. So Democrats have to back off their agenda of decent health reform, Employee Free Choice Act, climate change bill and immigration reform. The White House will even have to back off its diplomacy -first foreign policy."

"To win in 2010 means to go slow. Don't do so much. Be cautious," they will opine.

That will be a terrible misinterpretation of events.

Yes, there is anger at the mind-boggling job loss and economic insecurity. And there is disappointment among the most active of the Democratic base on the health care compromises.

Some in the Democratic Party think, "So what if the base is angry? They have no where else to go." Well, yes, they do. They can stay home.

And that is exactly what was happening in Massachusetts before the president got there on Sunday to breathe life into the campaign. Democrats, who have a 3 to 1 registration rate over Republicans, were sitting on the sidelines for numerous reasons - including the confusing and compromised health care struggle, lack of a stronger focus on shifting the wealth of the banks and Wall Street to Main Street, a poorly run Coakley campaign and a clever push by the Republican Brown who has kept his distance from Palin, McCain and the rest of the Republican ultra-right crowd.

Brown walked right through the opening left for him by timid Democrats who weren't stepping up to the plate and successfully painted himself as a working-class champion while painting Coakley and the Democrats as out-of- touch elites. AFL-CIO leader Richard Trumka hit it dead-on when he said workers and their families won't be taken for granted.

All of this is not meant to minimize the impact of racism, coded or not, that emanates from the GOP, Tea Partiers and their ilk continued in Massachusetts with their messages of "tax-and-spend Democrats" out for only the minorities and immigrants, and all of the rest of their garbage.

While a number of grassroots-oriented organizations raised the alarm on the situation in Massachusetts a few weeks ago, among them women's groups, it wasn't until President Obama went to the state and fired off a speech that talked about taking on the banks, creating jobs, getting health reform done and finishing the "change" agenda that things started to get fired up.

It's that kind of leadership that the country needs to take on the corporate and political forces. While such leadership is needed, however, the voters that elected this country's first Black president cannot sit on the sidelines and take things for granted.

It might sound cliché, but democracy, in fact, is not a spectator sport. What was said during the campaign, "It's not about me, it's about your ability to make change," needs to be said again, understood and acted upon.

The White House and the Democrats will have to stick to their guns on health care but make a major shift in the direction of a massive jobs program, radical curbs on big finance and shifting wealth from Wall Street to Main Street if they expect to come out ahead in 2010. If they make those shifts and if the peoples' movements line up behind those issues, real change is not just possible but much more likely.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/newzgirl/ / CC BY 2.0

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! That’s what we need!

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:28:00 +0000

What thrilling opening words, in California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's State of the State speech on Jan. 6. But 48 hours later, on Jan. 8, we get the real deal in store for California jobs, via the governor's 2010-11 budget proposals.

For example, the jobs of 380,000 home care providers will end, if In-Home Supportive Services is eliminated, as the governor threatens if federal funds don't come through. IHSS, the safety net for some 450,000 poor and ill seniors and the disabled, allows them to live safely in their own homes. Institutional care would cost four to five times as much.

Many other human services cuts are threatened. Among them: elimination of the CalWORKS welfare to work program and the Healthy Families children's health care program, and cuts to Medi-Cal (California's Medicaid program) - all of which would result in lost jobs. And state employees face a proposed 5 percent reduction in their pay. Though in his State of the State speech the governor promised no more cuts to education, two days later he proposed $2 billion in cuts to K-12 spending.

"Many of our poor, elderly and most vulnerable people will not survive this budget," said state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco. State Senate president pro tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, exclaimed, "You've got to be kidding!" Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, characterized the governor's proposals as "a pile of denial."

Democrats generally rejected the program; Republicans supported it.

How can the continuing tragedy of California's financial crisis be avoided? How could it have been avoided in the first place? With a $19.9 billion deficit facing us, where do we find the money? The California Tax Reform Association has a few proposals in its "Revenues for the Budget Crisis." Let's take a look:

* Enact an oil severance tax. California is the only oil-producing location in the world that does not tax oil extraction - $1.2 billion.

* Eliminate existing corporate tax loopholes - $1 billion. In addition, recent budget agreements secretly slipped in additional tax loopholes for the state's biggest corporations, slated to take effect in 2011. Eliminating these before they take effect would save another $2.5 billion.

* Broaden the sales tax to include services such as entertainment, professional sports, hotels, golf, skiing etc. - $2 billion. Add a sales tax on telecommunications, cable and satellite - $2 billion or more. (Taxing online and mail-order purchases would bring in further billions; the exact amount has not been estimated.)

* Reinstate the state's top income tax bracket of 11 percent - $4 billion growing to $6 billion. (And if that sounds like too much for the wealthy to bear, remember the top 1 percent of California income recipients take 25 percent of the income.)

* Close property tax loopholes such as failing to reassess the market value of property following an ownership change - $2 billion.

* Increase the alcohol and tobacco tax - $2.4 billion.

* Maintain the vehicle license fee at 1 percent - $1.3 billion.

* Improve tax collection - $2 billion.

Others have proposed adding "green taxes." A carbon permit fee could bring in $2.5 billion, and pollution fees on a variety of air and water emissions, $1.4 billion.

So, what becomes obvious is the complete insanity of the diehard conservatives - mostly Republicans - who are willing to let the elderly, the disabled and the children die, while they themselves do nothing but scream, "No new taxes!"

Photo: PW/Marilyn Bechtel

Three schools of thought on financial reform

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:48:00 +0000

In my view, the three prevailing schools of thought on financial reform are as follows, with many economists sharing one or more features of the three:

1. Make the banks that engage in higher risks -- mainly investment banks -- smaller. A smaller investment banking sector is the most reliable path to smaller risk, this school says. Do this by restoring some or all of the 1933 Glass Steagall Act, which put firmer separation between investment banking use of commercial and community bank depositors' money. It also restricted selling of public shares (in other words, speculation or bets with other people's savings) by investment banks which were predominantly partnerships and whose own incomes rose or fell with the fortunes of their clients. An additional argument in favor of the "make them smaller" school: maybe this will lessen their bargaining power over national industrial and infrastructure policy through their extremely powerful lobbies.

2. Don't focus on making banking smaller. There may be big political consequences if financing of national debt moves more and more offshore due to scaling down U.S. finance, this school warns. Plus some argue that there is no sure path to risk reduction through breaking up Goldman, JPMorgan, Bank of America, or AIG. This group favors national tax, insurance and regulatory policy to control the amount of leverage in the system. This group seems to me to underestimate the essential "fox guarding the chicken coop" behavior and bias (resulting from the flow of professionals in finance between public and private sectors) of the bureaucratic institutions designed to supervise giant, private financial institutions.

3. The unintended side effects of any government intervention are just too awful to contemplate. Do nothing and in the "long run" (when, as John Maynard Keynes says, "we are all dead!"), markets will reach a "new equilibrium." Only the alleged "invisible hand" of the marketplace knows what wages or living or social conditions such "new equilibrium" may bring - perhaps the Pinochet solution! So what! So says the third group, mainly Republicans and those heavily tainted with policies that encouraged the Wall Street bubble mania in mortgage-backed securities.

While I tend to favor #1, and certainly oppose #3 as completely useless, there is going to be a real problem moving big numbers of ordinary people into action on any financial reform that does not a) restore their lost 401k pensions, or b) give them back their foreclosed home.

The closest thing to that was the cram-down bill by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. - that would have saved millions of homes at mostly financial sector expense - which got killed early on. That alone speaks volumes about what AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka characterized as our servitude to Wall Street in so many aspects of economic life. No reform under contemplation by Congress at this time, whether from the "make them smaller" or "let them be big but legislate some way to de-leverage them" factions, will bring back lost retirement funds and homes.

But if we think about financial reform in a more fundamental sense as a struggle to implement a collective, social reallocation of investment capital from less productive to the most productive, most strategic applications, then the fight for jobs - which is of such overriding immediate AND long-range urgency, and affects the overwhelming majority of working families (one of every two families has a member without work) - must inevitably exert the biggest pressure for a stronger national industrial (investment) policy, and thus a large public share of investment dollars, and thus a relatively smaller private financial sector.

In a way, perhaps the jobs fight is our best path to impacting financial reform. The jobs fight DEMANDS that government compel the employment of the unemployed AND a net RISING standard of living for all workers.

The level and degree of innovation coming out of the private and corporate sector is constrained in many cases by the stalled demands for more powerful, more broad-based and more efficient infrastructures in many sectors (transportation, housing, Internet connectivity, etc). The excessive diversion into "financial infrastructure innovation" for its own sake was a truly parasitic development, and appears to have done some serious damage to the private sector's current capacity to innovate, according to innovation expert Michael Mandel. Rapid job creation from that sector may not be able to contend with the still very high levels of risk (and shortage of credit) still plaguing the system.

Perhaps the most important decision of all is where, exactly, to place our collective "bets" on the mix of investments that will promise the best and soundest basis for the future? One must consider many little-knowns and not a few complete unknowns:

* How much should be invested in primarily scientific and technical research?

* How much in overall education? Broad-based education reform is, and must be, simultaneously a) rising standards, values, knowledge and skills; and b) a direct battle against poverty and political or economic inequities by race, nationality and gender.

* How much of GDP for health care?

* How will the variables of globalization, and all its economic and security entanglements, including war and peace, impact available resources?

* How to mobilize the people as they adapt to the social changes all the big "bets" will entail. What is the broadest, sustainable, level of democracy possible in making decisions of such magnitude and consequence? The people, collectively, I believe, make wiser decisions than merely the most powerful faction at a given time. Accurate economic information is important in assessing risks, but life experience is what determines the range of uncertainty that can be tolerated.

As long as jobs and the public investment demands of a renewed national industrial and employment strategy are satisfied - perhaps, exactly HOW private financial capital is reorganized and re-regulated are best decided through Darwin's "natural selection" algorithm.