Socially speaking

So here we are, attempting to keep the nation from slipping under the surface of Bush’s bathtub … trying to level the playing field for workers, save the livelihood of millions, shore up our crumbling infrastructure, slap an e-brake on a free-fall economy and save ourselves from oblivion — and the Pub’s are likening Obama to Chavez.

The smoke and mirrors that prompted the nation to run like bobbleheaded sheep in the last eight years was Pub delusion … now, although I’m loathe to name the energy and carve it in stone, we’re squinting through a fine mist of stupidity that’s squirting out of media nozzles everywhere. Go over to MediaMatters if you want to track this; it’s getting thick.

Stupid is as stupid does — that’s a Forrest’ism. But stupid isn’t like ignorant: uninformed. It’s a deliberate choice. And it’s pretty apparent, given the rambling discourse we’re hearing; like the Old Boys, here in the Patch, that gather around the innards of an ailing truck, or kick back at the greasy spoon, the media seems to be talking just to hear itself blow hard. It’s all I can stand to go out for social occasions these days, surrounded by people who can’t think their way out of a paper bag. Ditto on watching cable news.

SanJay Gupta has turned down his bid for Surgeon General, apparently not impressed with the pay scale. Media reports it thus: His decision is yet another blow to Obama’s effort to expand health coverage this year.

Pardon me? Obama needed a flashy, corporate hack in order to further the health care conversation?

The Bonehead [House leader John Boehner] is reported as saying, “The era of big government is back, and Democrats are asking you to pay for it.” Wolf Blitzer on CNN evidently agrees, affirming that Obama is going to raise taxes on MILLIONS of people … not you, of course, unless you brunch with Bill Gates or are a fixture at the country club. Probably gonna raise taxes on him, sure enough, and many of his contemporaries. But not me — not you. At least not today.

So yes, O will raise taxes on those who will barely notice the dip in their balance — lower taxes on the other 95% of us. If all we hear is the word raise … like the squeal of a circling hawk that startles the herd and makes us bolt like Dittoheads, shot from Limbaugh’s cannon … then we deserve our fate: to lay still, quivering, as the Pub parasites draw the last of the nutrients from America’s flailing corpus.

But of course, my opinion doesn’t count for much; yours either. Unless we organize, unionize. In this supposed Socialist give-away we’re the undeserving poor; and the Over Class don’t see why they should pay for our mortgage; discounting the part where this will eventually come to visit their self-indulged households and lay them low, whereupon they will have their hand out quick as lightning and whine that it was “done unto them.” But us — no, we did it to ourselves.

You smarty-pants liberals probably didn’t know that Obama is responsible for the DOW plunging. And he’s declared war on the wealthy, too. Far-Lefty zealot Krugman sez … so nationalize, already. Stalinist, for sure.

Here’s some first class stupid for ya:

“Here’s where we began talking about another possibility: that Team Obama was deliberately targeting the U.S. economy, deliberately impoverishing millions of Americans, deliberately angering our closest allies while coddling dictators like Putin and his puppet Medvedev and funneling millions to terrorist organizations like Hamas. Maybe that young person the financial journalist Jim Cramer spoke to was right and “We’ve elected elected a Leninist” whose “agenda is destroying the life savings of millions of Americans”? … What we need now is some clever legal talent to show how deliberately sabotaging the United States economy counts as Treason, a high Crime, or at least a Misdemeanor. Any takers?”
- Roger Kimball

Here’s Sullivan’s comment — he gets intelligence points in the Righty crowd:

Obama’s predecessor secretly invoked the power to suspend the First and Fourth Amendments for seven years, authorized the seizure and torture of American citizens, launched two decade-long wars of attrition, doubled the national debt, presided over the worst financial bubble since the 1930s, provided the weakest level of economic growth in decades, and left the US in the grip of the steepest depression since the 1930s. But after five weeks, it’s Obama who should be impeached? Ooookaaaay.

My own state — the Show Me state — is trying to add an amendment to its constitution to redefine what birth certificates must prove for candidates [prolonging the tinfoil hat Birther dialogues. They probably haven't heard how tired judges already are with this ridiculous conversation.] We’ve also hauled in some of those toxic FEMA trailers and slapped them in a mobile home park; I’d suppose some poor folk will jump at cheap rent, and prove, yet again, that we’re really the Show Me How Stupid I Can Be state. We’re seriously behind the curve in paying attention, here.

Can stupid get more arrogant? Oh, sure.

Rush has challenged Obama to a debate — AS IF! Open here to read the egregious thing Jabba the Bozo said today; but if you’re thinking he’s just a two-bit carnival barker, you should know that this whole Rush fiasco is the Democrats fault, anyhow!

I know, I know — stupid is a throw-away word; too broad, too simplistic. Lazy.

But oh so appropriate; and becoming more obvious by the moment. The Right can’t possibly believe most of the stuff they say because it defies basic intelligence; but they know their audience, infected with a terminal case of stupid — somebody call SanJay, although I think Big Pharma has already diminished their soft, toxic brains and rendered them permanently paranoid.

Still, I’ll give the Rightys credit for knowing that a slip Left is not only here, but unstoppable. The more the economy tanks, the more I see the ultimate demise of the Fed looming large.

So here’s my ‘inner ponder’ of the day — if Bernie Sanders is the only person who makes consistent sense to me … am I a Socialist?

Well. It could be worse — I could be stupid.

Three reads — have a great weekend.

Jude

Rage is Good
Tom Hayden, The Nation via CommonDreams
Friday, March 6, 2009

Hopefully, the demonstrations planned on Wall Street April 4 will contribute to the global uprising. Our president and Congress need the pressure.

The world has turned against American hegemony before: against the Vietnam war, against the World Trade Organization and against the invasion of Iraq. On all three occasions, the world was right and Washington was wrong.

On this occasion, the global economy is being devastated by the Wall Street crash. Hundreds of millions are are hurtling into extreme poverty, export industries are collapsing, currencies being destabilized.

As the conservative French president Nicolas Sarkozy says, “Laissez-faire, ces’t fini.” (Laissez-faire is finished.)

As nations blame Wall Street and move to protect their people, the protests need not be anti-American nor anti-Obama. Sarkozy cannot be accused of being anti-US. Neither are Iceland nor Ukraine. The global opposition might just may be what we need, an organized populist counterforce to the business and banking lobbies entrenched in Washington.

Obama’s stimulus package and proposed budget are not the problem. They represent the most progressive government initiatives in a half-century. But as Franch Rich noted in the New York Times March 1, Obama “was fuzzy when it came to what he wanted to do about” more bailouts. The Obama administration is in trouble on the question of what to do about the financial system andthe credit crisis. But Rich is wrong for once in suggesting that it’s “bad news” for Obama that “the genuine populist rage in the country…cannot be ignored or finessed.”

The “bad news” is really an opportunity for progressives, unions and Democrats to build a bottom-up populist alternative to the “greed is good” politics of Wall Street, which has infested both parties. Obama should privately welcome “populist rage” as a stimulus to reform. If he does not, he may see right-wing populism making a comeback as soon as 2010.

Some progressives, including even Warren Beatty, think it’s time to introduce a discussion of socialism, if only to point out that our present course is one of socialism for the banks and corporations. Obama himself says good things about Sweden’s nationalization of banks, but quickly demurs that Americans are not “culturally” ready for such an option. At the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson, a democratic socialist in the tradition of Michael Harrington, prefers re-regulation to either nationalization or socialism at this point: “to avoid socialism (to whatever extent throwing public money at banks is socialism) you need liberalism (that is, the willingness to restrain capitalism from its periodic self-destruction.)

My sense is that we are moving too rapidly towards economic hell for a socialist ideology to catch up. While efforts to dust off and legitimize the term will go on, Meyerson is right that the battlefield just ahead is over reregulation, which may evolve into a contentious, awkward, bureaucratic nationalization out of necessity. That is why the sturdier, and heavily regulated Canadian and Swedish banking systems already are being closely examined.

But Obama is not only post-Sixties, he is post-Thirties too. Coming of age in the Reagan era, he was convinced that a healthy dose of President Clinton’s Rubinomics was the alternative to Reaganomics. It was the Clinton administration who crusaded for the deregulation of Wall Street at home and for neo-liberal privatizations in Latin America, Africa and Asia. A whole generation of “new Democrats” came to believe in market fundamentalism and magic bubbles. They privately dismissed those Canadians and Swedes as girlie-bankers. Now they are busted.

Clinton deregulated the derivatives market and hedge funds, so called because they are investment instruments designed to “hedge” against risk, where the supposed values are “derived” from underlying assets (for example, when shaky home loans were bundled into securities and sold to third parties as if they were AAA-rated.) Under Bush, between 2002 and 2008, the derivative market rose in estimated value from $106 trillion to $531 trillion, 35 percent to 40 percent of all corporate profits with no oversight, according to Obama Economic Advisory Chair Paul Volcker. That was because, under Clinton and his treasury secretaries Rubin and Alan Greenspan, there was deliberate elimination of oversight when it was proposed by Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She was fired for her efforts.

The Clinton era, with its modest increase in most family incomes while the rich became the super-rich, apparently had a deep effect on Obama and most certainly on his generation of Democrats. Last year Obama raised nearly $7 million from Wall Street investment firms. Wall Street became a cash cow for Democrats who looked the other way. As a centrist, Obama toyed with notions of “nudging” the Wall Street firms into better behavior by designing a better “choice architecture” in place of traditional regulation (the term is that of his close University of Chicago friend Cass Sunstein.)

Obama has filled his most senior economic positions with people directly responsible for the deregulation policies that contributed to the unfolding catastrophe. They include:

• Top economic adviser Larry Summers, who as treasury secretary in 2002 championed the law de-regulating derivatives which, according to the New York Times, “spread the financial losses from reckless lending around the world;”

• Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who worked for two Republican administrations and Henry Kissinger’s private consulting firm, then orchestrated the recent bailouts of Rubin’s Citigroup and American International Group, the insurance giant;

• Budget Director Peter Orszag, another Rubin protégé;

• Michael Froman, another Rubin student, was Obama’s transition team point person on the economy (The transition team also included Rubin’s son, James Rubin);

• Securities and Exchange Commission Director Mary Schapiro has made a reputation for self-regulation. An appointee of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, she ran the industry-dominated Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) which oversees Wall Street self-regulation–and missed the Bernard Madoff scandal;

• Gary Gensler, the new director of Obama’s CFTC, drafted the 1992 law exempting derivatives from oversight by the agency he now heads.

These are only brief snapshots of the tangled conflicts of interest that make a profound re-regulation of Wall Street unlikely at this point. If a street gang member in Los Angeles had conspired to rob an investment banker of a few thousand dollars, he would receive a multi-year prison term with added time for being a gang “associate.” But some of the people responsible for the greatest financial scandal in many decades are flying high in high government offices, their friends colleagues rewarded with million dollar bonuses or mega-billion dollar bailouts, while some complain, incredibly, that a cap of $500,000 on executive compensation is not only unfair but will cause a talent drain from Wall Street.

The logical question is why Obama has appointed such people to key decision-making positions in the first place. No one can know the answer to such a question. Franklin Roosevelt, when asked why he appointed Joseph Kennedy to a leading regulatory position, is said to have replied, “It takes a crook to catch a crook.” (A defective gene pool from long years of Ivy League inbreeding comes to mind, but that would be unkind.)

In this crisis, Obama seems to be at the progressive end of the political spectrum in Washington, not his preferred position in the center. Where is the movement to push him? Congressional liberals seem uncomfortable criticizing the new president’s appointees. This reluctance runs deeper than partisan politics, involving what Rep. Barney Frank describes as an overwhelming desire to preserve the financial institutions. For one example, without naming names, when asked how he could have voted for Henry Paulson’s massive bailout package, a leading liberal Congressman said “when the experts look you in the eye and tell you the whole system is going to collapse, it’s hard to be a no vote.”

The blogosphere usually can be counted on to raise hell, but its middle class whiteness and affinity for Obama make them unlikely leaders of a populist economic revolt. Organized labor has the capacity to fill the streets and generate heat in Congressional districts, but it is delighted with the president’s stimulus and budget packages and the appointment of Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary, so are likely to hold its fire for a time.

It’s not clear what has happened to the anti-globalization movement of the past decade, but the opportunity now exists to argue for a system of global financial regulations, including capital controls, and a global living wage. Otherwise, financial capital will flow towards banking havens which are the least regulated, and threatened governments will move towards protecting their constituencies from unregulated global capitalism.

That is why the potential threat of worldwide anger in the streets, including the streets of American financial districts, is so important as the only strategic pressure point that that might cause Obama to ride herd on his recovering deregulators while a progressive populism comes alive in American politics.

Rage is good. ++

Who You Calling Socialist?
It’s Renovation, Not Socialism
Harold Meyerson, WaPo
Wednesday, March 4, 2009

“We are all socialists now,” proclaims Newsweek. We are creating
“socialist republics” in the United States, says Mike Huckabee, adding, on reflection, that “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.” We are witnessing the Obama-era phenomenon of “European socialism transplanted to Washington,” says Newt Gingrich.

Well! Even as we all turn red, I’ve still encountered just two avowed democratic socialists in my daily rounds through the nation’s capital: Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders . . . and the guy I see in the mirror when I shave. Bernie is quite capable of speaking for himself, so what follows is a report on the state of actual existing socialism from the other half of the D.C. Senators and Columnists Soviet.

First, as we survey the political landscape, what’s striking is the absence of advocates of socialism, at least as the term was understood by those who carried that banner during the capitalist crisis of the 1930s. Then, socialists and communists both spoke of nationalizing all major industries and abolishing private markets and the wage system. Today, it’s impossible to find a left-leaning party anywhere that has such demands or entertains such fantasies. (Not even Hugo Chávez — more an authoritarian populist than any kind of socialist — says such things.)

Within the confines of socialist history, this means that the perspective of Eduard Bernstein — the fin de siecle German socialist who argued that the immediate struggle to humanize capitalism through the instruments of democratic government was everything, and that the goal of supplanting capitalism altogether was meaningless — has definitively prevailed. Within the confines of American history, this means that when New York’s garment unions left the Socialist Party to endorse Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, they were charting the paradigmatic course for American socialists: into the Democratic Party to support not the abolition of capitalism but its regulation and democratization, and the creation of some areas of public life where the market does not rule.

But in the United States, conservatives have never bashed socialism because its specter was actually stalking America. Rather, they’ve wielded the cudgel against such progressive reforms as free universal education, the minimum wage or tighter financial regulations. Their signal success is to have kept the United States free from the taint of universal health care. The result: We have the world’s highest health-care costs, borne by businesses and employees that cannot afford them; nearly 50 million Americans have no coverage; infant mortality rates are higher than those in 41 nations — but at least (phew!) we don’t have socialized medicine.

Give conservatives credit for their consistency: They attacked Roosevelt as a socialist as they are now attacking Obama, when in fact Obama, like Roosevelt before him, is engaged not in creating socialism but in rebooting a crashed capitalist system. The spending in Obama’s stimulus plan isn’t a socialist takeover.

It’s the only way to inject money into a system in which private-sector investment, consumption and exports — the other three possible engines of growth — are locked down. Investing more tax dollars in education and research and development is a way to use public funds to create a more competitive private sector. Keeping our banks from speculating madly with our money is a way to keep banking alive.

If Obama realizes his agenda, what emerges will be a more social, sustainable, competitive capitalism. His more intellectually honest and sentient conservative critics don’t accuse him of Leninism but of making our form of capitalism more like Europe’s. In fact, over the past quarter-century, Europe’s capitalism became less regulated and more like ours, one reason Europe is tanking along with everyone else.

Take it from a democratic socialist: Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism. And the reason isn’t that the woods are full of secret socialists who are only now outing themselves.

Judging by the failures of the great Wall Street investment houses and the worldwide crisis of commercial banks; the collapse of East Asian, German and American exports; the death rattle of the U.S. auto industry; the plunge of stock markets everywhere; the sickening rise in global joblessness; and the growing shakiness of governments in fledgling democracies that opened themselves to the world market — judging by all these, a more social capitalism is on the horizon because the deregulated capitalism of the past 30 years has blown itself up, taking much of the known world with it.

So, for conservatives searching for the culprits behind this transformation of capitalism: Despite our best efforts, it wasn’t Bernie and it wasn’t me. It was your own damn system. ++

If We Are in the Death Spiral of Capitalism, Can We Start Using the “S” Word?
The electroshock paddles of “stimulus” keep being applied, but the capitalist patient isn’t waking up. Is it now safe to talk about socialism?
Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher, Jr., The Nation via AlterNet
March 6, 2009

If you haven’t heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of capitalism, it isn’t just because there aren’t enough of us to make an audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say, 2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism–its ability to regroup and find fresh avenues for growth, as it did after the depressions of 1877, 1893 and the 1930s. In fact, The Communist Manifesto can be read not only as an indictment of capitalism but as a breathless paean to its dynamism. And we all know the joke about the Marxist economist who successfully predicted eleven out of the last three recessions.

But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how many times the electroshock paddles of “stimulus” are applied. We seem to have entered the death spiral where rising unemployment leads to reduced consumption and hence to greater unemployment. Any schadenfreude we might be tempted to feel as executives lose their corporate jets and the erstwhile Masters of the Universe wipe egg from their faces is quickly dashed by the ever more vivid suffering around us. Food pantries and shelters can no longer keep up with the demand; millions face old age without pensions and with their savings gutted; we personally are consumed with anxiety about the future that awaits our children and grandchildren.

Besides, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. There was supposed to be a revolution, remember? The socialist idea, prediction, faith or whatever was that capitalism would fall when people got tired of trying to live on the crumbs that fall from the chins of the rich and rose up in some fashion–preferably inclusively, democratically and nonviolently–and seized the wealth for themselves. Such a seizure would have looked nothing like “nationalization” as currently discussed, in which public wealth flows into the private sector with little or no change in the elites that control it or in the way the control is exercised. Our expectation as socialists was that the huge amount of organizing required for revolutionary change would create an infrastructure for governance, built out of–among other puzzle pieces–unions, community organizations, advocacy groups and new organizations of the unemployed and nouveau poor.

It was also supposed to be a simple matter for the masses to take over or “seize” the physical infrastructure of industrial capitalism–the “means of production”–and start putting it to work for the common good. But much of the means of production has fled overseas–to China, for example, that bastion of authoritarian capitalism. When we look around our increasingly shuttered landscape and survey the ruins of finance capitalism, we see bank upon bank, realty and mortgage companies, title companies, insurance companies, credit-rating agencies and call centers, but not enough enterprises making anything we could actually use, like food or pharmaceuticals. In recent years, capitalism has become increasingly and almost mystically abstract. Outside manufacturing and the service sector, fewer and fewer people could explain to their children what they did for a living. The brightest students went into finance, not physics. The biggest urban buildings housed cubicles and computer screens, not assembly lines, laboratories, studios or classrooms. Even our flagship industry, manufacturing autos, would require major retooling to make something we could use–not more cars, let alone more SUVs, but more windmills, buses and trains.

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism–with some help from industrial communism–has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don’t have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what’s next on the agenda.

In this situation, with both long-term biological and day-to-day economic survival in doubt, the only relevant question is: do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favorite adjectives) future?

Let’s just put it right out on the table: we don’t. At least we don’t have some blueprint on how to organize society ready to whip out of our pockets. Lest this sound negligent on our part, we should explain that socialism was an idea about how to rearrange ownership and distribution and, to an extent, governance. It assumed that there was a lot worth owning and distributing; it did not imagine having to come up with an entirely new and environmentally sustainable way of life. Furthermore, the history of socialism has been disfigured by too many cadres who had a perfect plan, if only they could win the next debate, carry out a coup or get enough people to fall into line behind them.

But we do understand–and this is one of the things that make us “socialists”–that the absence of a plan, or at least some sort of deliberative process for figuring out what to do, is no longer an option. The great promise of capitalism, as first suggested by Adam Smith and recently enshrined in “market fundamentalism,” was that we didn’t have to figure anything out, because the market would take care of everything for us. Instead of promoting self-reliance, this version of free enterprise fostered passivity in the face of that inscrutable deity, the Market.

Deregulate, let wages fall to their “natural” level, turn what remains of government into an endless source of bounty for contractors–whee! Well, that hasn’t worked, and the core idea of socialism still stands: that people can get together and figure out how to solve their problems, or at least a lot of their problems, collectively. That we–not the market or the capitalists or some elite group of über-planners–have to control our own destiny.

We admit: we don’t even have a plan for the deliberative process that we know has to replace the anarchic madness of capitalism. Yes, we have some notion of how it should work, based on our experiences with the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and the labor movement, as well as with countless cooperative enterprises. This notion centers on what we still call “participatory democracy,” in which all voices are heard and all people equally respected. But we have no precise models of participatory democracy on the scale that is currently called for, involving hundreds of millions, and potentially billions, of participants at a time.

What might this look like? There are some intriguing models to study, like the Brazilian Workers Party’s famous experiments in developing a participatory budget in Porto Alegre. Z Magazine founder Michael Albert developed a detailed approach to mass-based planning that he calls participatory economics, or “parecon,” and one of us (Fletcher, in his book Solidarity Divided, written with Fernando Gapasin) has proposed a locally based network of people’s assemblies. But all this is experimental, and we realize that any system for mass democratic planning will be messy. It will stumble; it will be wrong sometimes; and there will be a lot of running back to the drawing board.

But as socialists we know the spirit in which this great project of collective salvation must be undertaken, and that spirit is solidarity. An antique notion until very recently, it flickered into life again in the symbolism and energy of the Obama campaign. The Yes We Can! chant was the slogan of the United Farm Workers movement and went on to be adopted by various unions and community-based organizations to emphasize what large numbers of people can accomplish through collective action. Even Obama’s relatively anodyne calls for a new commitment to volunteerism and community service seem to have inspired a spirit of “giving back.”

If the idea of democratic planning, of controlling our destiny, is the intellectual content of socialism, then solidarity is its emotional energy source–the moral understanding and the searing conviction that, however overwhelming the challenges, we are in this together.

Solidarity, though, is an empty sentiment without organization–ways of thinking and working together, and of connecting the social movements that are battling injustice every day. We see a tremendous opportunity in the bleak fact that millions of Americans have been rendered redundant by the capitalist economy and are free to dedicate their considerable talents to creating a more just and sustainable alternative. But if we are serious about collective survival in the face of our multiple crises, we have to build organizations, including explicitly socialist ones, that can mobilize this talent, develop leadership and advance local struggles. And we have to be serious, because the capitalist elites who have run things so far have forfeited all trust or even respect, and we–progressives of all stripes–are now the only grown-ups around. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.” ~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Add comment March 6th, 2009