Under pressure from below, Obama tries to calm the masses in the face of the Zimmerman verdict

Don't be fooled: he's not a friend of black folks or working people

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

The racist George Zimmerman has been freed by a jury after stalking and murdering a black teenager, Trayvon Martin.  Martin should have known better, eating Skittles and talking to a friend on a cell phone while black is a very threatening activity in some circles.

This is not so much about Trayvon Martin but all the young black males shot by the police and wannabe cops like Zimmerman.  The reality is, Zimmerman hunted down and murdered Martin vigilante style as the law allows; that’s why he got off. As President Obama said in his speech earlier this week, “The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury has spoken, that's how our system works.” Don't laugh. More on this later.

The reaction in the black community has been as it should be, one of horror, anger, disgust and every other emotion that any normal community would express at such injustice, not simply the injustice in this particular case, but the ongoing killing and incarceration of young black males. It is a credit to their humanity, that this anger hasn’t expressed itself in more brutal ways like the random mass killings of whites.

“But more blacks are killed by other blacks; black on black crime is worse” I have heard more than a few times the past few weeks.  What lies behind this comment is that black people are to blame for their own condition, for the poverty, lack of opportunity and incarceration of their youth.  Women are raped because they dress provocatively as well. “Look at those blacks, they are animals.” is the implication here; it’s just another way of cloaking the racist argument.  Anyway, as Jamelle Bouie pointed out in a commentary on July 15^th,

“Yes, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by black offenders, but that racial exclusivity was also true for white victims of violent crime—86 percent were killed by white offenders. Indeed, for the large majority of crimes, you’ll find that victims and offenders share a racial identity, or have some prior relationship to each other.”

Glen Ford writing in the Black Agenda Report reminds us that initially it was hoped this issue would go away:

The White House also wanted Trayvon to be forgotten. Three weeks after the shooting, speaking through his press secretary, the president declared, “obviously we're not going to wade into a local law-enforcement matter." A few days later, Obama sought to placate Black public opinion with a statement of physical fact: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Let’s recall that the Florida authorities initially refused to arrest Zimmerman for the murder which occurred last February.  It was the public outcry and pressure from below that forced their hand.  This week, in response to the verdict, there have been rallies and protests in hundreds of US cities.  Major black entertainers and public figures have spoken out in opposition to the verdict.  Here in Oakland there have been numerous rallies and protests all overwhelmingly peaceful.  A group also blocked a major freeway and it was interesting that the reporter that I saw anyway, normally eager to share images of one group of workers attacking another, or whites and blacks having opposite opinions on such issues,, spoke to a couple of motorists who although inconvenienced spoke favorably about the need to get people’s attention.

This has forced that superb and eloquent representative of the US capitalist class, or the 1% as they are sometimes referred to, to speak out.  On Friday Obama spoke in very personal terms about the case and about how it could have been his son shot, or him 35 years ago. “There are very few African American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store.” Obama said, reaching in to the hearts of black folks showing how much he identifies with them, “There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.” 

He went on, "You know, I think it's understandable that there have been demonstrations and vigils and protests, and some of that stuff is just going to have to work its way through as long as it remains nonviolent.”

Obama is representing his class well.  He is smart, learned; very slick, " The poverty and dysfunction in those communities "can be traced to a very difficult history,"  he said reminding people also that there was a greater chance of Trayvon Martin being killed by his peers than the likes of Zimmerman or a white person.

He followed his effort to calm the black working class through this rare attempt to identify with them with a few suggestions on how to proceed like a sort of diversity training for the cops; in other words, how to arrest young black men without killing them and how to police the black community with a smile.

He wants to “gather together business leaders, elected officials, celebrities, athletes -- to address the need for African-American men to feel that they are "a full part of this society."

“I'm not naïve about the prospects of some grand, new federal program.” Obama added assuring the class he represents that their interests are secured, and that there will be no New Deal on his watch.  “I'm not sure that that’s what we're talking about here.” He continued, “But I do recognize that as President, I've got some convening power, and there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front.”

Speaking to his victims he assured black folks that,  “I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better.”  He talked about his children and children in general, “I think, (Children) have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did; and that along this long, difficult journey, we’re becoming a more perfect union -- not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.”

It was a masterful piece of propaganda. It was so good it pretty much silenced the conservative talk show hate mongers.  “We are all Americans” there is no racism, no class conflict, just some bad historical precedents and mindsets that we have to overcome.

There was no talk of black on black crime being a product of third world conditions in the richest nation that has ever existed. No mention of what is an occupation of the black community by the police. Poverty, low wages  and not just a lack of a way out but an impossibility of a way out except for a tiny handful.  No mention of housing, slumlords the incarceration of black males finding the very same condition when they are returned to society.  No mention of the war on drugs that is not a war on drugs but a war on black people. This is what underlies black on black crime.

Look at Obama’s cabinet, the thug and former Israeli Defense Force member Rahm Emmanuel who is closing 150 public schools in Chicago. Arne Duncan, Obama’s education secretary who is connected to all the forces in society aiming to privatize public education.  The savaging of social services and elimination of public sector jobs as well as hundreds of thousands of teachers all affects the black community with a vengeance.

And look at Detroit a city with a majority black population.  Kevin Orr, the emergency manager appointed to deal with this once great city’s bankruptcy who is black, is about to violate the Michigan constitution and cover the city workers pension for a period of six months only although the constitution states these benefits will not be “diminished”.

The Obama administration has refused to help Detroit.  I guess after providing former Egyptian dictator Mubarak among others with billions of US taxpayer dollars, and spending a few trillion more on predatory wars we have no money. Obama’s aggressive drone policy that kills hundreds upon hundreds of young children and babies also cost a few bucks to maintain and certainly doesn’t make us any safer.

“Can we help Detroit? We don’t know,” Vice President Joe Biden said last week. Jay Carney, the White House spokesperson has ruled out any assistance for Detroit.  Obama’s phony claims to feel the pain of black folk and how much better things are holds no water with me. Things are worse for white workers so we know damn well the situation isn’t improving for blacks.

Jobs for all, a massive infrastructure spending program on housing, transportation, schools and a $20 an hour minimum wage is what will cut across black on black crime and crime in general. Training centers in every community organized by the construction unions and community organizations is what is needed to train workers to rebuild what capitalism and the market has destroyed.  It is the system that Obama heads as commander in chief that has destroyed Detroit where three or four generations of American workers gave their labor to make this country rich. Everything that amounts to a real solution to the capitalist crisis waged in the black community will be opposed by the Obama administration.

I have been surprised by the response to Obama’s speech from some folks, even socialists who have been impressed by his connection to the human side of it.

I am neither fooled nor moved by Obama’s comments he was forced to make due to the pressure from black America and more whites than I think people realize.  He is an astute and slick representative of the bourgeois. A nasty character indeed.

He did a very good job for them last Friday.

Read More

Obama on Trayvon Martin: The Word and the Deed

by Jack Gerson

Several weeks before the 2008 presidential election, candidate Barack Obama gave a moving speech on the experience of black people in the U.S., their struggle for civil rights, and his personal encounters with racism growing up and living in the U.S. He appeared to be speaking from the heart, a departure from his frequently emotionless demeanor. The speech was widely hailed, and many liberals, left-liberals, and "anti-racist radicals" declared that we'd seen a glimpse of a new and different kind of politician, one whose experiences and heart-felt connection with the downtrodden masses would give substance to his slogan of "change we can believe in".

Then he was elected. And within days of the election, Obama appointed his transition team. Lo and behold, the foreign policy team was dominated by many of the same tired faces that had dominated policy in the Clinton administration -- Zionists, militarists, and Hillary herself.
 
The economic policy transition team featured Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers & Co. (the Goldman Sachs "Democrat" team, as opposed to the Goldman Sachs "Republican" team that takes the field during Bush administrations).  It's worth recalling that in 2008 Obama received several times the funding from Wall Street than did Republican John McCain, and that his liaison to Wall Street was Penny Pritzker of the Chicago Pritzker billionaires (I believe that all but one or two of Chicago's billionaires are named Pritzker). Soon thereafter, Obama appointed Timothy Geithner secretary of treasury -- Geithner, then head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, was a proven and craven servant of big Wall Street finance capital.

In education policy, Obama showed his commitment to "change we can believe in" by appointing as secretary of education Arne Duncan, then-CEO of the Chicago Public Schools who was the point person for the corporate assault on public education in Chicago (Duncan had closed many schools, grossly expanded charter schools, promoted high stakes test-based accountability, engaged in blatant victimization and harassment of veteran teachers as well as other forms of union-busting, grossly expanded outsourcing to private contractors while downsizing public schools, etc.).

We all know what followed: gross handouts of trillions to the banks ("They got bailed out; we got sold out") coupled with calls for "shared sacrifice"; moving the locus of war from devastated Iraq to Afghanistan (and then escalating the war there with "the surge"); a national Obama / Duncan education policy that actually deepens the damage done under Bush, advocating more charter schools, more test-based accountability, turning the development of national education standards over to the publishing and education conglomerate Pearson (whose chief education officer is one Sir Michael Barber, the "Speaking Clock" who was in charge of shutting down British schools in Tony Blair's first term and of pushing austerity across public sector programs in Blair's second term), and compelling states to compete with one another for federal funding. Not to mention expanding "Homeland Security" surveillance and harassment; rolling over to the big energy companies; etc. The victimization of black and brown youth -- and especially young black men -- has if anything increased.  (one example: last month Philadelphia announced over 3,000 layoffs of school employees in addition to closing 23 schools, citing as cause a $300 million deficit. A few days later, work began on the construction of a $400 million prison just north of Philadelphia).

Downsizing and privatization of public education. Punitive measures against students, teachers, and schools in the lowest-income communities (that's what high stakes test-based accountability enforced by school closures does). Increased surveillance and harassment. Austerity cuts to essential public programs in cities, counties, and states across the country. Continued and escalating police harassment in the black and brown working class communities (here in Oakland, unarmed black teenager Alan Bluford was murdered by Oakland cops right outside his home; unarmed young black man Raheim Brown was murdered by Oakland school police in a high school parking lot; unarmed young black man Oscar Grant was murdered by BART police while handcuffed and lying face down; etc.) Criminalization of young black men (in Washington DC, for example, three out of every four young black men under age 25 is or will be in the penal system). These are the conditions that breed the climate under which Trayvon Martin was executed by George Zimmerman. Conditions that cry out that it's open season on young black men in the U.S.

Now, in the context of the wave of indignation, anger, and revulsion at the freeing of Trayvon Martin's murderer, Obama has once again given a moving speech that draws on his personal experiences with racism in the U.S. What he says may well be heartfelt. It's important to recognize that. But what he says is intended to corral and confine sentiments within safe channels. We are guaranteed to hear more about the need for us to all pull together, but the goal will be to pull together for austerity (he will say, as he always does, "shared sacrifice"). And he will no more deliver on any aspirations raised than he did in the aftermath of that moving speech he gave in the fall of 2008.

Obama is not Bush. He is Obama. An extremely intelligent and formidable man, but a loyal servant of capital.

Read More

Irish MP Clare Daly slams Obama the "hypocrite"

Facts For Working People shared Clare Daly's speech on our FB page and add it here on our blog. We commend Clare for her comments and for standing up for working people everywhere. The US Congress could do with a few politicians like Clare. She is an independent member of the Irish Parliament for Dublin North.

Read More

NSA surveillance won't be used against you. Will it?

C'mon: we can trust these guys

 "All of us who have served in this office understand that the office transcends the individual," Bush said as Obama nodded in thanks. "And we wish you all the very best. And so does the country."

by Richard Mellor

As to be expected, the Wall Street Journal is defending the massive surveillance and spying on millions of Americans (and others) in the interests of public safety and the defense of individual freedoms that are so important to the Journal as a voice of big capital.

Freedom is a word that is thrown around quite a bit these days.  The War on Terror came about as a result of people throughout the world who oppose freedom and are jealous of us because we have it. Nonsense, I know, but the truth as the Journal and the billionaires want us to understand it.

But freedom for the coupon clippers means economic freedom-----freedom for capital to exploit labor, not economic freedom in the sense of a wage that keeps one from starving. Their freedom is the right to hire and fire workers at will. It is the freedom to pay someone $8 an hour or the freedom to bribe politicians or to throw someone out of their home if they fall on hard times and can’t pay the moneylender their interest money. It is the freedom to pollute the environment in their rapacious quest for profits. It is the freedom for someone like Larry Ellison who owns $300 million yachts and a 141-acre Hawaiian island. It is freedom for the coupon clippers to take the collective wealth that productive labor (physical and mental) creates and give it to their offspring.

So when the capitalist class and its cheerleaders like the WSJ talk about freedom it actually means a lack of it for workers, the poor and middle class.

And secretly gathering data, phone conversations, e mails etc. on millions of Americans is necessary because, the Journal tells us, “the safety of citizens is the first—and in our view, the principal—obligation of government.”

“A government that cannot ensure peace cannot protect individual rights” the Journal announces in its own defense of these Stalinist measures.  What individual rights is the Journal referring to I wonder?  I am sure it is the right to ride one’s Harley without persecution. And the right of the mentally  to beg for money at stop signs and the right of some poor slob to get inside a cage with another human being and beat each other to pulp, and the freedom of  the coupon clippers that own the media to make entertainment out of it.

It is the right to say what you want as long as you don’t act on it and campaign for your ideas to become mass ideas, especially if these ideas threaten the worship of the market and the accumulation of capital in the hands of a tiny minority of us.

It is not the right to productive labor.  It is not the right to expect society to provide basic health care, education shelter and leisure time. We all want peace as well.  But how can we have peace or feel secure when whether we earn a means of subsistence or not depends on the gamblers and speculators on Wall Street and their GDP estimates?   How can we be at peace in this world when shelter, the ability to access medical care, access to education for youth and a secure and safe existence for the older generation, is not guaranteed by the very society that the labor and sacrifice of generations built?  How can we claim to live in a free society when capitalism incarcerates two million people, mostly youth and youth of color and 30 million have no work and even more have work that can’t provide security and a future? There are millions of working poor in his country. 

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, people were walking away from their homes abandoning their “moral obligation” to pay off the moneylenders but kept their car payments up.  At least if their car was repossessed they could get to work and sleep in it in some Wal Mart parking lot perhaps.  That is another freedom and right that is not high on the Wall Street Journal’s list of rights, public transportation.

While past heroic struggles of workers and the poor, the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements as well as the great labor battles over a couple of centuries have won us freedoms that we should be grateful for, and while we do not suffer the fate of many people in other countries, we can see that the 1% are gradually eroding them under the guise of fighting terrorism. They have beefed up their security apparatus and are preparing for the battles that lie ahead as they are forced to put the US working class on rations.

We cannot be free under these conditions. 

Like the so-called War on Terror, there is language to describe what the coupon clippers want us to believe, and what we describe through the reality of our material existence.

The data collected on millions of Americans is not going to be used against us, not going to be used to deprive us of our rights the Journal explains. The purpose of collecting all our private e mails (or what we thought were private) and records of our phone/skype conversations is that though we are all caught up in the net, the aim is to“detect potential threats and prevent attacks before they occur, not prosecute them after the fact”

You don’t have to worry Jane Q Citizen, the Wall Street Journal assures us, “The NSA is screening the data system in general for conduct that threatens the security of the system, not targeting any particular individual or group using the system.”

Don’t be afraid, fellow Americans, the Wall Street Journal insists, “It should also be some comfort that two Presidents as distant in temperament and philosophy as George W. Bush and Barack Obama both endorsed the NSA programs.”

Well, that’s made me feel better.  But Bush and Obama, while different in temperament and I should add brainpower, have the same philosophy. They both agree that the market is god and social production cannot be organized in any other way except on the basis of profit. They both believe, and Obama is the better representative for the coupon clippers on this one, that workers and the middle class will pay for their crisis, a crisis of capitalism. They differ only on the details.

As I pointed out in a previous blog, the FBI defines terrorism as, “The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

A strike under this definition is terrorism.  It always was, we won the right to strike by forcing the bosses and their government to legalize it. An activity that limits the rights of corporations and capitalism is terrorist activity according to the FBI.  Young people or homeless people squatting in abandoned buildings or the vacant property of slumlords are committing terrorist acts if they defy the sheriff’s calls to leave. If you try to force the state through mass direct action, occupations, economic disruption to change priorities by shifting capital and human resources from waging wars around the world to social need you are a terrorist.  The only protests that are not acts of terror are those that don’t work.

We should remember that the American Revolutionists were "terrorists" according to the colonial authority and surely this statement from the Declaration of Independence would trigger a look at the author's phone records:

-->

“..when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

We shouldn’t compare this snooping to spying, the Journal says, “The right comparison is a cop on a beat who patrols public spaces. He's not investigating a crime or enforcing a law; he's watching for suspicious behavior” Yes, but in examples such as this, (the beat cop) we can see the cop.  But even here, as in the stop and frisk methods of the NYC police, this is their answer to poverty and its by-product, crime.

As a young man I went traveling in Europe.  I ended up in Istanbul and took a train to Baghdad. It was 1971. US capitalism’s stooge Saddam Hussein was in power.  But Iraq was a fairly secular country by Middle East standards. Women were in government I think and I saw many people dressed in western clothes; the Iraqi's were kind to me given the role of British Imperialism in the country. It was a good experience and I talked to some of them about their lives. I recall getting the impression that life under a US supported dictator wasn’t so bad as long as you never got involved in politics, as long as you didn’t oppose the regime. The CIA had helped Hussein rid the country of any opposition.  Keep out of opposition politics and you’ll be fine.

The billions of e mails and private conversations the NSA has stored may never affect some people as they are correct in saying that they are not targeting people unless they threaten the system.  An Arabic name for one will trigger some interest. But when those millions who thought they would never get involved in politics are forced to do so by the capitalist offensive, the snoops will do a little research.  Everything they can find to discredit you will be dragged out.  That affair with the neighbor; the little detail you left off your tax return or and other details about your private and personal life you thought you were discussing with your counselor, parent, friend will now become very valuable information.

Freedom means different things to different people who have different economic interests in society.

We can thank Edward Snowden for bringing some of these things to light

Read More

Is Obama Keeping the World Safe for Democracy? Ask Mumia!

by Jack Gerson

On June 6, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald's blog on the Guardian newspaper site broke the story of Edward Snowden's revelations of the U.S. government's massive cell phone and internet surveillance program that "keeps the world safe for democracy" by spying on everyone, everywhere and by recording everything we say, everything we write. Within hours, black revolutionary and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal recorded a piercing commentary from his jail cell in a column he titled "Big Brother".

We think Mumia's powerful conclusion should be taken to heart:

When Bush left the presidency, he did so armed with the greatest arsenal of presidential power in American history. That vast array of power was transmitted into the hands of his successor, where it has only grown.  Under Barack Obama, the national security state has only broadened its reach, in ways Bush/Cheney could only have dreamed.

We learn, then, that it matters little which party wins the White House; their essential elements are the same: amass more and more power to the President.

And whittle away the ‘rights’ of The People.

I urge readers to take this message to heart. And then find a way to view Stephen Vittoria's two recently released documentaries on Mumia: the full-length "Long-Distance Revolutionary", which vividly portrays his great spirit and courage, and the short film "Manufacturing Guilt", which presents records of investigations and court filings from 1995 to 2003 -- evidence denied in court and ignored by the press.  You will walk away convinced that the Philadelphia establishment -- the DA's office, the police, the state apparatus -- have conspired to frame an innocent man for the alleged 1981 murder of a Philadelphia cop, and continue to conspire to keep him locked up for the rest of his life.

Bush and the Republicans. Obama and the Democrats. They spy on us all. They victimize those who fight back, and reserve the harshest treatment for those, like Mumia, who they fear most. But all the surveillance and all the victimization and all the drone murders will not be enough in the end to save them. Our job is to take them down and their capitalist system with them and build a new world before they destroy this one.

Read More

Obama budget: Welfare capitalism – it’s just great!

by Michael Roberts

President Obama’s administration announced its proposed budget for the year beginning October 2014.  The US Congress is paralysed between a Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a Democrat majority in the Senate.  So the Obama budget won’t get through in its present form.  Nevertheless, that is not a lot to choose between the two parties on their objectives for the budget and public sector spending for next year and onwards.  Both sides agree that governments deficits are too large and public sector debt levels must be reined in.  The difference is that the Republicans want no tax increases to do it, while the Democrats want some.  But both agree that welfare spending is ‘too high’.  So just as in the UK with the Conservative-led coalition, Obama proposes sweeping reductions in real federal spending on the poor, unemployed, the sick and the old.

One of the most pernicious measures proposed is to change the inflation index used to increase state social security pensions and welfare payments.  I have commented on the iniquity of this before (see http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/the-fiscal-cliff-okuns-law-and-the-long-depression/).  The impact of using the so-called ‘chained CPI’  to index pensions will be to reduce annual increases in pensions and tax thresholds by 5% over 12 years, hitting living standards for average American households six times more than the rich. Over a course of an average retirement, future pensions would be reduced by 10%.  Of course, it is even worse with the Republican proposals for the budget,which combine tax cuts for the better-off with a huge reduction in federal spending, by half in cash terms and by 20% of GDP by 2023.

But apparently there is no alternative as the US economy cannot afford decent pensions that people have paid into through social security contributions over their working lives and/or proper federal public services and Medicare etc.  We cannot afford them, even at their current meagre levels, because we are all getting older and living longer and the workforce as a share of the total population is shrinking, even if it was fully employed (which we know it is not).  So there is no way around either reduced pensions, or higher contributions or a longer period staying at work, or all three.  Across the major capitalist economies, pension and welfare ‘reform’ is the order of the day and on the agenda of every government, whether ‘centre-left’ or ‘centre-right’.

But is it unaffordable?  Well I wrote about this issue in an earlier post (http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/the-pensions-myth-part-one/) and tried to show that if economies just raised their long-term annual output growth just a little, even just 1% a year more, the ‘problem’ would disappear. Recently, John Cochrane, a leading neoclassical mainstream economist and backer of the Republicans, came out with the same point (http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/fun-debt-graphs.html). As he put it: “Suppose growth is 1% and then 2% greater than the CBO (budget office) projects. What effect does that have? To keep it very simple, I assume that spending stays the same, and revenue stays the same fraction of GDP. Thus, I just divide spending/GDP by a 1% and then 2% growth rate (e^(0.01 t)) and we have the new spending as a fraction of the larger GDP. ” His graph repeated below shows that government spending (without ‘reform’) as a percentage of GDP falls from an expected 45% in 30 years time to below where it is currently (23%) if US real economic growth is just 2% pts a year faster than currently projected over the long term.  And the budget deficit (the difference between spending and revenues) would also be insignificant.

So just an increase in the US projected growth rate from 2.5% a year over the next 30 years to 4.5% a year would allow the Federal government to sustain current pensions and welfare spending without changing spending or taxation revenues as a share of GDP at all.

But of course, such a long-term growth rate in any of the major capitalist economies is a pipe-dream.  Long-term trend real GDP growth has steadily declined over the last 50 years and is likely to continue to do so over the foreseeable future (see my post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/crisis-or-breakdown/).  In reality, the global capitalist economy is in a Long Depression, or as the FT put it, “stuck in a rut, unable to sustain a decent recovery and susceptible to a sudden stall”.  At least that is the estimate of the latest Brookings Institution-Financial Times Tiger (Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery) as it is called.  The world economy is sluggish with the advanced economies flat-lining and the emerging capitalist economies growing below trend compared to before the Great Recession (see graph below).

This estimate was repeated by Christine Lagarde of the IMF at a business economists meeting last week.  She said “We do not expect global growth to be much higher this year than last. We are seeing new risks as well as old risks….In far too many countries, improvements in financial markets have not translated into improvements in the real economy.”  This story is confirmed by another index of global economic activity complied by Bank America.  Their Globalcycle indicator which tracks business conditions in economies covering 80% of the world GDP suggested that the world economy was growing at about 3.5% a year but is beginning to ‘soften’ and go ‘below-trend’ in 2013 to 3.2% a year.  And remember this includes China and all the faster large economies.  And the World Trade Organisation also reported that world trade growth fell to 2.0% in 2012 — down from 5.2% in 2011 — and is expected to remain ‘sluggish’ in 2013 at around 3.3%. “The events of 2012 should serve as a reminder that the structural flaws in economies that were revealed by the economic crisis have not been fully addressed, despite important progress in some areas. Repairing these fissures needs to be the priority for 2013,” Director-General Pascal Lamy said.  So the chances of getting sufficient growth out of these economies to enable governments to protect pensions and living standards (even if they wanted to) are non-existent.

Of course, the likes of Paul Ryan in the US or the Conservatives in Britain would not improve pensions, welfare or Medicare anyway.  They would always argue that there was not enough money or resources to do so.  And it would be best for the poor, vulnerable and sick to have an ‘incentive’ to work by reducing their benefits or pensions.  That contrasts with the view that the best way to incentivise the rich is to reduce their taxes, raise their bonuses and stop trying to ‘regulate’ them.

So the myth of the social security ‘scroungers’ is perpetuated and promoted on both sides of the Atlantic pond.   I dealt with this issue in the UK context in a recent post (http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/who-are-behind-the-blinds-george/).  But the New Economics Foundation has just released an excellent paper exposing the fallacies and lies perpetrated by the British government in its drive to persuade people that there are too many ‘shirkers and scroungers ‘living off the rest of us’ and unwilling to work (Strivers_vs._skivers_online).
As the authors of the paper put, the lies are :“There are two distinct groups of people, one good and one bad; individuals choose to be in one group or the other. ‘Strivers’ work hard and put money into the economy while ‘skivers’ are just lay-abouts who take money out. Claiming benefits traps people in dependency, which is a social evil, passed from one generation to the next. People not in paid work contribute nothing of value to society.”

In reality, people slip between employment and unemployment, often within the space of a few months, as the economy relies increasingly on short-term, low pay, insecure contracts. This happens even more in areas where the economy is especially weak.  The vast majority of those who are not in paid employment are unable to work because they are disabled or have caring responsibilities, or because there are no jobs available. Even in the best of times, it is harder for disabled people and carers to find suitable employment.  A far greater proportion of social expenditure is spent on people in paid work, through working tax credits, than is spent on the fit and able-bodied unemployed. Only 2.6 per cent is actually spent on the able-bodied unemployed (see graph).


For the first time ever in the UK, in-work poverty has overtaken workless poverty, with 6.1 million people in working households living in poverty. Instead of tackling the problem of low income, the government is subsidising employers offering poor quality employment through working tax credits. Taxpayers are picking up the bill by topping up wages so that paid workers can feed and house themselves and their families.  The vast majority of people claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance do not claim over the long-term. Less than half claim for more than 13 weeks and only 10 per cent of all claimants claim for more than a year.  And a great many people who are not in paid employment do valuable unpaid work, caring for others, bringing up children and looking after their families, homes and neighbourhoods.  The formal economy would grind to a halt without it. Even if time spent on child care and housework were paid no more than the minimum wage, it would still be worth the equivalent of 20 per cent of GDP. Many people are not in paid work because they have prior responsibilities that involve unpaid labour. These so-called ‘skivers’ contribute a great deal more than nothing for the something they receive.

So there it is.  Reduced pensions, reduced public services, reduced welfare and health services – because capitalism cannot afford them.

Read More

Militant talk from the AFL-CIO as Obama cuts social security benefits

Politico.com reports that, "President Obama's labor allies are unhappy about cuts to entitlements and benefits that are expected to be proposed by the administration in its forthcoming budget." Politico is reporting on the AFL-CIO's response to Obama's olive branch to his friends across the aisle, an offer to cut social security benefits.

I received the AFL-CIO's response earlier today from Damon Silvers, the organization's policy director.  What we have to understand here is that the likes of Mr. Silvers and other members of the Labor hierarchy are Obama's allies, not the 12 million or so members that the organization is supposed to represent.  In the e mail to the troops, Silvers called,  the proposal "Obama's really bad idea.".  Silvers is so incensed, he even titled the e mail "Obama's really Bad Idea".

He's a militant character that Silvers. Our living standards are in good hands with folks like Silvers at the helm.

Back in 1996 the newly elected President of the AFL-CIO John Sweeney warned the bosses that continued attacks might lead to him to organize "blocking bridges." That was before the election, after it this became "building bridges", not with the members whose interests he was supposed to represent, but the bosses.

Perhaps we're now seeing a new face of the previously moribund Labor bureaucracy. Perhaps, after years of collaboration in the form of the Team Concept and prostrating themselves before the bosses and their political representatives, the folks atop the Labor movement are changing course. I mean Silvers really let's Obama have it. In one short e mail he says that Obama's attack on social security is:

a "bad idea"
"Bad policy"
"unconscionable"
"wrong"

This is some pretty tough talk.  Silvers goes further. he warns that the only way to stop these cuts is that we have to tell the President and the other millionaires in Congress that we're not going to tolerate them and Silvers has a petition all written up for us to sign. He is hopping mad and Obama better watch out. I can tell that because in the e mail he says we should sign the petition NOW. Capital letters, that's very threatening in e mail speak. Not only that, I found out today I can join the AFL-CIO's "text action team". Oh, boy! I'm gonna love this. Here's the petition:

"Benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare are unacceptable. I’m calling on you to oppose any and all cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid benefits and focus on immediate solutions to get Americans back to work, like repealing the sequester and ending tax loopholes for corporations and the richest 2%." It can be found here

Were the consequences of the Labor hierarchy's collaboration with the bosses not so dire we could laugh at this pathetic response to a violent attack on workers' and our families as it went viral on You Tube just like Gangnam Style. Gangnam style took a little more thought to put it together but the reality is that Silvers and the rest of his colleagues atop the AFL-CI0 are traitors, are enemies of the working class. They are somewhat like the old Stalinist bureaucracy without state power.

Silvers insults us. Why would he be surprised?  What happened to EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act.  I had paid Union staffers pushing this every chance they could get, it was the most revolutionary thing since the wheel.  It was great for the bureaucracy, they could get new members without doing anything at all. Obama shafted them on that one.  Then there was the "public option" in the health care debate. There was NAFTA under Clinton, who also repealed Glass Steagall claiming it was "No longer appropriate."

We saw 100,000 people in the streets of Madison Wisconsin, does Silvers and his chums atop the AFL-CIO think us so stupid that signing a petition asking Obama to help us will make a difference?
The minority of us that remain in Unions have to face the fact that we are in a war on two fronts.  One is against the bosses' whose goal it is to drive us back to conditions that existed before the rise of the CIO and the other is against the likes of Silvers and the stifling bureaucracy that is the bosses representatives inside our organizations.

We cannot avoid this battle if we are serious about fighting back against the austerity agenda of the bosses and their two political parties. We have said before on this blog that to do this we must openly campaign against the hierarchy's policies, against the Team Concept in all it's manifestations, and we have to build fighting caucuses around a program that demands what workers, union and non union, need and link this struggle to our community struggles and the pressing social issues of today, the unemployed and to workers internationally.

We must return to the direct action fight to win tactics that built our Unions in the first place, occupations, mass picketing, defying the law as the Occupy Movement has shown.  We must reject their realism based on the return on investments and implement ours based on social need.

That Silvers and his friends would even suggest such a worthless strategy after what millions of workers are going through shows what contempt his kind have for the people whose contributions pay his salary.  These officials, many of them Ivy League educated, are like rotten apples in a tree that appear secure.  The slightest breeze though and to the ground they fall.  Stand up and fight, there's  no other alternative.

Read More

Obama woos Democratic bigwigs, offers to cut social security benefits

Happy after lunch with the billionaires in SF

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

So President Obama was here in San Francisco this week meeting with his constituents, not the vast majority of people who vote for him, but the people who bankroll the party that represents their interests and that Obama leads.

He had two do’s Wednesday night, one at Tom Steyer’s house where 100 people turned up to hand over cash for the party and the other at the house of another billionaire, Gordon Getty.  Steyer is a coupon clipper worth $1.4 billion according to Forbes.com. Getty, worth $2 billion, has his money by virtue of being the product of a union between two folks one of them the oil magnate J Paul Getty.

Steyer is looking to get in to Democratic Party politics more actively and has been suggested as a candidate for governor.  The two events raised more than $3 million and part of this drive is to get more Democrats in to the House and Nancy Pelosi returned as speaker. Pelosi, from an established eastern bourgeois family is the poor one in the crowd worth anywhere from $26 to $58 million.  Like all of them though, Pelosi’s wealth comes from investments, real estate, stuff like that.

It might have been a bit tense at the Steyer’s as Tom is a “…vociferous opponent of the Keystone Pipeline..”,  according to the media.  But Steyer won’t make too much fuss over that.  With his eyes on political prizes, making an issue of the pipeline, by pointing out Obama’s hedging the issue, would not be useful.  Like a lot of billionaires, Steyer likes to dabble in areas that are of concern to millions of people but not seriously; at 55 he has high hopes of playing a major role in the Democratic Party in the period ahead. “He (Obama) is doing everything he can on the issues that we care about.”, he is quoted in the media as saying, “He has political limitations ----so we really have an obligation to help him.”

Obama was not shy on climate change but never mentioned the Keystone Pipeline, he is among friends with the billionaires that finance the Democratic Party and wants unity.  He pointed out that  the issue of the temperature of the planet is not the main concern of most workers, workers main concern is “How do I feed my family” “The politics of this are tough.” Obama said. They are indeed, and keeping people in a state of debt bondage and in everlasting insecurity is one sure way of keeping people’s attention focused on the immediate, necessities food, shelter, health.  His billionaire backers gave him the “most enthusiastic applause” when he pointed out the gains that have been made in LGBT rights.

This should come as no surprise, such advances in no way threaten the interests of the people he is talking to, the class whose interests the Democratic party represents.  This is not to say this is not an important issue to those who are denied rights the rest of us have due to their sexual orientation, it is.  But we have to clearly see that this and other issues are used by the parties to avoid the most important issues for all people regardless of their race, religion, sexual orientation etc. and that is food, shelter, education, a job (including for the immigrant population) instead of prison, health care, homelessness.

It is comical to hear politicians and supporters of the other party of the 1% harangue Obama for being, “On billionaire’s row” as a Republican Party ad did. The Republican Party is funded by the same class that funds the Democrats. After the two SF billionaires, Obama headed over to the Peninsula to meet with another coupon clipper that loves the environment, investor Mark Heising. He topped it off with lunch with Levi Strauss heir, John Goldman, and his wife Marcia. Goldman is a “philanthropist” apparently. For billionaires this means giving away other people’s money.  You don’t have too look far to see on whose backs Goldman’s wealth was made.

More often than not I have gotten in to some hot water with friends who vote Democratic because they are forced because they vote for this party to defend it.  Actually, they shy away from defending it because it’s impossible to defend it without admitting it is hostile to workers’ interests and defends the interests of the 1% ; so they simply omit the party at all when they’re voicing opposition to the capitalist offensive.  It is always the Republicans that are blamed for the offensive, for cuts in social services, wages, benefits etc. 

This morning (I started this yesterday) I see that Obama has opened the door to cutting social security benefits if Republicans will agree to higher taxes.  This horse trading is done under the cloak of shared sacrifice, us and Warren Buffet joining forces to save capitalism from the abyss.  The White House assures us that, "This isn't about political horse trading……it's about reducing the deficit in a balanced way that economists say is best for the economy and job creation."

How nice of them.  Their economic gurus limited to a perspective based entirely on capitalist economics want what’s best for the economy, for their economic interests that is.  Their interest in jobs, or setting the Labor process in motion is only if they control it and reap the benefits of it in the form of profits.

“He who pays the piper names the tune” as the old adage goes. The Democratic Party heavyweights Obama spent the last few days with are not the friends of workers and the middle class. We won’t be hearing loud protests from them on the reducing of social security benefits which Obama is offering to do by reducing the program's cost of living increases. They talked about that with him this week in private and gave him the OK   Our youth who are being driven deeper in to poverty, prison or the streets will not be dragged from the morass by these people.  But it is also not about Obama as an individual.

A political party does not exist in a vacuum, it represents forces in society, it is financed by those same forces, inextricably linked to them and the Democratic Party, like its counterpart across what they call “the aisle” is a party of the capitalist class.  The assault on workers and our living standards has continued under Democratic and Republican alike, the difference is a matter of degrees.

The 138 million or so eligible voters that opted out of the last election are not simply apathetic as many liberals claim. They have drawn the correct conclusion that neither party represents their interests.

Workers can only rely on our own strength, rely on it here and by linking with workers throughout the world under attack by the same forces. There is no way out relying on the generosity of billionaires, even the trendy ones.  Building a united mass movement in our workplaces, streets and communities using direct action tactics is what will bring results; is what can drive the austerity agenda back and build an offensive of our own against capital.  An independent political alternative arising out of such a movement is the answer to the betrayals and dead end of the Democrats.

Read More

What the 1% Heard During Obama's State of the Union Speech

Saturday, 23 February 2013 10:09 By Shamus Cooke, Countercurrents Op-Ed

President Barack Obama acknowledges applause before he delivers the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., February 12, 2013. (Photo: Pete Souza / White House)When President Obama speaks, most Americans hear what he wants them to hear: lofty rhetoric and a "progressive" vision. But just below the surface the president has a subtly-delivered message for the 1%, whose ears prick up when their buzzwords are mentioned. Obama's State of the Union address was such a speech – a pro-corporate agenda packaged with chocolate covered rhetoric for the masses; easy to swallow, but deadly poisonous.

Much of Obama's speech was pleasant to the ears, but there were key moments where he was speaking exclusively to the 1%. Exposing these hidden agenda points in the speech requires that we ignore the fluff and use English the way the 1% does. Every time Obama says the words "reform" or "savings,” insert the word "cuts.” Here are some of the more nefarious moments of Obama's :

"And those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms [cuts]..."   

"On Medicare, I'm prepared to enact reforms [cuts] that will achieve the same amount of health care savings [cuts] by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms [cuts] proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission."

This ultra-vague sentence was meant exclusively for the 1%.   What are some of the recommendations from the right-wing Simpson-Bowles commission? Obama doesn't say. Talking Points Memo explains:

Force more low-income individuals into Medicaid managed care.
Increase Medicaid co-pays.
Accelerate already-planned cuts to Medicare Advantage and home health care programs.
Create a cap for Medicaid/Medicare growth that will force Congress and the president to increase premiums or co-pays or raise the Medicare eligibility age (among other options) if the system encounters cost overruns over the course of 5 years.

There were many other subtly-delivered attacks on Medicare in Obama's speech, all ignored by most labor and progressive groups, who clung tightly to the "progressive" smoke Obama blew in their face. Obama's speech also included a frightening vision of a national privatization scheme to previously publicly owned resources. But it was phrased so inspirationally that only the 1% seemed to notice:

"I'm also proposing a Partnership to Rebuild America that attracts private capital [wealthy investors] to upgrade what our businesses need most: modern ports to move our goods; modern pipelines to withstand a storm; modern schools worthy of our children...we'll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers [corporations]..."

Obama's proposal plans to "rebuild America" in the image of the wealthy and corporations, who only put forth their "private capital" when it results in a profitable investment; resources that previously functioned for the public good will now be channeled into the pockets of the rich, to the detriment of everyone else.

Allowing the rich to privatize and profit from public education and publicly owned infrastructure (ports and pipelines, etc.) has been a right-wing dream for years. This will result in massive user fees for the rest of us, while further dismembering public education, which Obama's ill-named "Race to the Top" education reform is already successfully accomplishing. 

Obama's speech also put forth two massive pro-corporate international free trade deals, which would further drive down wages in the United States: 

"We intend to complete negotiations on a Trans-Pacific Partnership [a massive free trade deal focused mainly on Asian nations]. And tonight, I am announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership [free trade deal] with the European Union – because trade that is free and fair across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs."

While praising free trade Obama disarmed labor and progressive groups by throwing in the meaningless word "fair.”  

Lastly, Obama's drone assassination policy was further enshrined in his speech. Drone assassinations are obvious war crimes — see the Geneva Convention — while also ignoring that pesky due process clause — innocent until proven guilty — of the constitution.  

But Obama said that these programs will be "legal" and "transparent,” apparently good enough to keep most progressive groups quite on the issue. 

There were plenty of other examples of sugar-coated poison in Obama's speech. It outlined a thoroughly right-wing agenda with no plan to address the jobs crisis — sprinkled with pretty words and "inspiring" catchphrases. 

Some labor leaders and "progressive" groups seem dazzled by the speech. President of the union federation, AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, praised Obama's anti-worker speech:

"Tonight President Obama sent a clear message to the world that he will stand and fight for working America's values and priorities. And with the foundation he laid, working families will fight by his side to build an economy that works for all."

And here is the real problem; as President Obama follows in the footsteps of President Bush, labor and progressive groups have found their independent voice stifled. The close ties between these groups and the Democratic Party have become heavy chains for working people, who find themselves under assault with no leadership willing to educate them about the truth, let alone organize a national fightback to win a massive jobs-creation program, prevent cuts to social programs, and fully fund public education. Obama's second term will teach millions these lessons via experience.

Read More

Obama to Pre-Schoolers: This Won't Hurt a Bit

In his State of the Union message earlier this week, Barack Obama announced his intention to focus on "improving" early childhood ("pre-K") education -- in much the way he and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have "improved" K-12 education. Here's a poem by the writer Mark Naison, circulating on education activist lists, that gives a pretty good preview of what Obama has in mind:


On the President's New "Pre-School Initiative”
By Mark Naison

Test them in the cradle
Test them in the crib
Test them in the infant seat
And when they wear a bib
Test them eating baby food
And when they ride a bike
Test them when they fall asleep
Or picking up a mike
If you don't test your infants
They'll never get a job
Sorting shirts in Wal-Mart
They'll probably steal and rob
The entire US economy
Depends on taking tests
We'll never compete globally
And fall behind the rest

Illustration:
http://www.susanohanian.org/show_nclb_cartoons.php?id=852

Read More

JSoc: Obama's secret assassins

We reprint this piece from the British Guardian for our reader's interest.

JSoc: Obama's secret assassins

The president has a clandestine network targeting a 'kill list' justified by secret laws. How is that different than a death squad?

Naomi Wolf
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 February 2013 09.00 EST

 

US Navy Seals on a night mission in the Middle East. Seal Team 6, which killed Osama bin Laden, is a secret elite unit that works closely with the CIA. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global "war on terror". It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation's contemporary history.

Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding "kill lists". It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.

Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the "kill lists" they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.

Our conventional forces are subject to international laws of war: they are accountable for crimes in courts martial; and they run according to a clear chain of command. As much as the US military may fall short of these standards at times, it is a model of lawfulness compared with JSoc, which has far greater scope to undertake the commission of extra-legal operations – and unimaginable crimes.
JSoc morphs the secretive, unaccountable mercenary model of private military contracting, which Scahill identified in Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, into a hybrid with the firepower and intelligence backup of our full state resources. The Hill reports that JSoc is now seeking more "flexibility" to expand its operations globally.

JSoc operates outside the traditional chain of command; it reports directly to the president of the United States. In the words of Wired magazine:

"JSoc operates with practically no accountability."

Scahill calls JSoc the president's "paramilitary". Its budget, which may be in the billions, is secret.
What does it means for the president to have an unaccountable paramilitary force, which can assassinate anyone anywhere in the world? JSoc has already been sent to kill at least one US citizen – one who had been indicted for no crime, but was condemned for propagandizing for al-Qaida. Anwar al-Awlaki, on JSoc's "kill list" since 2010, was killed by CIA-controlled drone attack in September 2011; his teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki – also a US citizen – was killed by a US drone two weeks later.

This arrangement – where death squads roam under the sole control of the executive – is one definition of dictatorship. It now has the potential to threaten critics of the US anywhere in the world.
The film reveals some of these dangers: Scahill, writing in the Nation, reported that President Obama called Yemen's President Saleh in 2011 to express "concern" about jailed reporter Abdulelah Haider Shaye. US spokespeople have confirmed the US interest in keeping him in prison.

Shaye, a Yemeni journalist based in Sana'a, had a reputation for independent journalism through his neutral interviewing of al-Qaida operatives, and of critics of US policy such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Journalist colleagues in Yemen dismiss the notion of any terrorist affiliation: Shaye had worked for the Washington Post, ABC news, al-Jazeera, and other major media outlets.

Shaye went to al-Majala in Yemen, where a missile strike had killed a group that the US had called "al-Qaida". "What he discovered," reports Scahill, "were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs … some of them bearing the label 'Made in the USA', and distributed the photos to international media outlets."

Fourteen women and 21 children were killed. "Whether anyone actually active in al-Qaida was killed remains hotly contested." Shortly afterwards, Shaye was kidnapped and beaten by Yemeni security forces. In a trial that was criticized internationally by reporters' groups and human rights organizations, he was accused of terrorism. Shaye is currently serving a five-year sentence.
Scahill and Rowley got to the bars of Shaye's cell to interview him, before the camera goes dark (in almost every scene, they put their lives at risk). This might also bring to mind the fates of Sami al-Haj of al-Jazeera, also kidnapped, and sent to Guantánamo, and of Julian Assange, trapped in asylum in Ecuador's London embassy.

President Obama thus helped put a respected reporter in prison for reporting critically on JSoc's activities. The most disturbing issue of all, however, is the documentation of the "secret laws" now facilitating these abuses of American power: Scahill succeeds in getting Senator Ron Wyden, who sits on the Senate intelligence committee, to confirm the fact that there are secret legal opinions governing the use of drones in targeted assassinations that, he says, Americans would be "very surprised" to know about. This is not the first time Wyden has issued this warning.

In 2011, Wyden sought an amendment to the USA Patriot Act titled requiring the US government "to end practice of secretly interpreting law". Wyden warns that there is now a system of law beneath or behind the law that we can see and debate:

"It is impossible for Congress to hold an informed public debate on the Patriot Act when there is a significant gap between what most Americans believe the law says and what the government is using the law to do. In fact, I believe many members of Congress who have voted on this issue would be stunned to know how the Patriot Act is being interpreted and applied.
"Even secret operations need to be conducted within the bounds of established, publicly understood law. Any time there is a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the government secretly thinks the law says, I believe you have a serious problem."

I have often wondered, since I first wrote about America's slide toward fascism, what was driving it. I saw the symptoms but not the cause. Scahill's and Rowley's brave, transformational film reveals the prime movers at work. The US executive now has a network of secret laws, secret budgets, secret kill lists, and a well-funded, globally deployed army of secret teams of assassins. That is precisely the driving force working behind what we can see. Is fascism really too strong a word to describe it?
• This article originally referred to Scahill and Rowley's documentary as Secret Wars; this was amended to Dirty Wars at 5.20pm ET on 3 February. The phrase "US kill list" in the subhead was also amended to "kill list" in order to remove possible ambiguity.

Read More

Obama's new CIA man: A man of peace who has always opposed torture

Obama with Hagel, Panetta, Brennan Source WSJ

by Richard Mellor

President Obama, the “socialist”president according to some, has nominated John Brennan to be the next head of the CIA, the US equivalent of the old KGB. According to the Wall Street Journal, Brennan is a “..trusted deputy and architect of the administration’s unconventional, covert war against radical adversaries.”. We can assume that would include Republicans can we?

Critics from the left and the right, (of whatever the center is in US bourgeois politics) have argued that Brennan has been responsible for much of the “War on Terror” policies from torture, spying on and assassinating US citizens, bombing civilians and the like. Some liberals claim that he is responsible for what are euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” during his stint as the deputy director of the CIA under the imbecile Bush. Obama says of Brennan, “You’ve been a great friend. I’m deeply grateful for your extraordinary service.

Brennan’s friendship with Mr. Obama is no doubt built on solid foundations and agreements on policy, particularly foreign policy.  Brennan has been the main force behind the expansion of Obama’s CIA drone program and its “expansion in to Yemen” the WSJ adds.  US drones now operate in Afghanistan, Iran , Pakistan, Somalia and of course, US cities.

It’s necessary for political activists of any stripe to read the serious journals of US capitalism but it can be frustrating indeed.  Brennan, and those who worked with him under Bush claim that he always opposed the torture of terror suspects (enhanced interrogation) and anyway, “the officers running the program wouldn’t have reported to Mr. Brennan…… he had no authority over it.”, his supporters claim. One of Brennan’s co-workers under Bush, Fran Townsend, told the Wall Street Journal that Brennan had “no ability to influence policy decision on the interrogation program when he was at the CIA.”

So, Brennan opposed the torturing of whomever Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and the folks at the Pentagon determined was a “terrorist” that threatened the American way of life but for some reason we never heard him.  Not only that, as deputy director of the CIA he had absolutely no influence over these decisions.

Well, here’s a bit of advice for heroic dissenters like Brennan. Take a cue from Bradley Manning’s playbook and appeal to the rest of us; tell us what’s going on, be a hero like Manning. You have no influence at the office? Go to the public?  Can’t get any information from the guys that work for you about what they’re doing?  Ask US workers and the middle class for help. 

It seems to me that Brennan’s role as deputy director of the CIA was pretty worthless. But on further research I think Brennan is just giving us the old “rope a dope”. This guy  saw a newspaper ad in 1980 and joined the CIA. He has been there through all the dirty lies, assassinations, destabilizing of regimes that weren’t friendly to Wall Street and came on board after years of drug running, covert operations violating nations’ sovereign rights (CIA agents were the first US forces in Vietnam after the exit of French colonialism) and other exploits.  No, Brennan, like Obama, is a right wing representative US capitalism.

To have opposed what he and his supporters claim would have never gotten him nominated for the present position.  Obama wouldn’t be referring to him as a “great friend” that’s for sure.

Bradley Manning, or the average soldier that dies or serves in their misnamed conflicts for democracy and freedom (the economic draft) put him and people like him to shame, are historical giants by comparison.

There is one last thing we should consider about all these representatives of the corporations, every damn one of them. Brennan was CEO of Analysis Corporation, a defense contractor which was bought out by Global Strategies Group. These firms are incorrectly referred to as defense contractors but they are companies that develop technology and strategies for defending the interests of US corporations abroad and at home; they’re “offense” contractors.  Like Bechtel, these companies are inextricably linked to the government as a source of taxpayer funds and political office that helps facilitate the plunder of the wealth of the American people and the world.

Weinberger and Schultz came from Bechtel.  US military contractors like Bechtel and Halliburton get the chance to make some money rebuilding a country after the US military bombs it in to the stone-age.  Goldman Sachs employees deal with the money and the US government and especially the treasury is a favored place to work for these characters. Public sector workers ands services are being scapegoated for the deficit and the decline in our living standards but these characters keep their snouts firmly in the public trough.

Ok, the next to last thing. Every one of these characters is from the highest echelons of the capitalist class.  They are all movers and shakers in one or the other of the two Wall Street parties that have a monopoly over US political life and get to govern US society every for years.  If you’re a nurse, a teacher, a truck driver, a welder, a fast food worker, a social worker----there’s no one like you up there, no person or party representing your interests. Running over Iraqi children in Humvees, firing missiles at Afghan weddings from unmanned drones, or supporting the numerous despots throughout the world that Brennan, Obama and all those like them do, is not in our interests. Having a pact with bin Laden wasn’t in our interests either as we learned. If Castro supported the market Washington wouldn’t care what he does, Communist and all.

That’s why they deny that the US is a class society until they’re blue in the face. Why they disparagingly accuse us of “class warfare” whenever we fight back. Why they will discuss race, religion sexual orientation, discrimination against tall people, short people the disabled, as forms of oppression (which they all are) but not class. It is undoubtedly a historical moment that the US has a black man as a president given the history of racism and the existence of an apartheid state within a state in the US, but like Thatcher in Britain who never excluded women from her savage attacks on workers, his loyalty is to the capitalist class and the capitalist mode of production, not gender, color or race.

This false view of society gets an echo because there is no social force that challenges them, that mobilizes a working class offensive challenging their plunder of society.  The silence of the heads of organized Labor on these issues is deafening.

Read More

From fiscal cliff to fiscal farce

by Michael Roberts

So after months of argument, threats and dispute, the leaders of the US Congress duly trooped out before the cameras and said they have ‘saved America’s middle class’ from facing a steep fiscal cliff. In reality, the politicians had turned the fiscal cliff into a fiscal farce. As American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein put it: “This fandango was an immense embarrassment,” calling it “cringeworthy.” And “the fact that we are going to have another disastrous confrontation over the debt limit in two months, with the radical right wing of the House Republicans determined to send us over the edge if they don’t get their way, is actually frightening.” It was “the worst Congress in our lifetimes.”

Sarah Binder, another ‘expert’ on Congressional politics, described the politicians as “a Congress that can barely get its work done – especially when confronting the most important issues of the day”. The farce is set to continue as Congress must deal with avoiding the federal ‘debt limit’ being breached by Valentine’s Day and then work out a way to reduce welfare spending for the next generation of Americans in need by March. All that Congress agreed on the New Year holiday was to extend the tax cuts first introduced by George Bush, except for those taxpayers earning more than $400,000 a year – the infamous 1%. This saves about $100bn from the budget in 2013. However, for that small concession to Obama in agreeing to raise the tax burden for the very rich just a little, both the Republicans and Democrats alike were happy to impose higher social security contributions on every American, or what America’s opinion makers like to call the ‘middle class’. Apparently in the US, there is no working class. There is the rich, the middle class and the poor. But no working class.

The 2% cut in payroll taxes introduced to boost employment just three years ago has been reversed, raising employee contribution rates to 6.2% of gross pay. This is the biggest hit to average Americans, in order to ‘save’ $126bn, as it reduces middle quintile incomes by roughly $700-1000 a year. Altogether the fiscal cliff of about $600bn has become a more moderate slope of under $300bn.

But that’s still a sizeable hill of pain for most Americans and there’s more to come. So the boast of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress that they have ‘saved the American people’ is so much hogwash. The deal is really the first signal that in a couple of months time when Congress gets round to deciding how much government spending needs to be cut to reduce the public sector debt burden, that social security costs are going to rise for the average American, there will be more taxes and further cuts in government services. Nevertheless, Keynesian guru, Paul Krugman, thought it a reasonable deal in the circumstances as there were no serious cuts in social benefits and tax cuts for the middle class were to be continued for the next five years. But he recognised that Obama has already pushed through an increased medicare age and reduced social benefits in his 2012 budget. So we can expect more hits to the poor and ‘middle class when the 2013 budget is finally agreed.

That other Keynesian guru, Brad de Long, was less happy as he was worried that the agreement to raise payroll taxes would hit the purchasing power of employees and so weaken the ability of the US economy to recover. But it’s not the lack of workers’ purchasing power that is the problem. Indeed, despite real wages falling, consumption as a share of GDP has hardly moved as households run down savings and save less. It’s investment by the business sector that holds back recovery in a capitalist economy. That’s why the Congress agreement includes yet more tax relief to the capitalist sector in the form of investment allowances, more special subsidies for various key industries and no closure of any corporate tax loopholes. Indeed, about $46bn in business tax breaks were included with an extension of research and development tax credits, a provision allowing businesses to write off immediately half the value of new investments and a wide range of other favours for select industries, including tax breaks for railroad track maintenance, restaurant and retail store improvements, auto racetracks, film and television production and rum production in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands!

There was no mention of ending key tax breaks for the oil and gas business, or for senior managers of private equity firms and hedge funds. And the banks also did well. They retained a key tax break allowing them to defer paying US taxes on certain financial transactions undertaken outside the US. This offshore tax loophole is worth more than $150bn a year, larger than the money raised by increasing workers’ payroll tax. The deal is heralded by the worthy Senators and Congress men and women as saving middle America. In reality, it is saving business from a tax hike. The US corporate tax burden is now at a post-war low.

Now some more radical Keynesians like those from the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) group reckon that any cuts in government spending to reduce the $1trn-plus budget deficit are unnecessary. As leading MMT exponent, Randall Wray, put it: “MMT has always argued that a sovereign government that issues its own currency cannot become insolvent.” So increased government borrowing to cover deficits is not a problem and rising public debt is not an issue because governments can always print money to honour any debt payments. It is impossible for a government to default (unless it owes money to foreigners). Leaving aside the issue that about 40% of all US federal debt is owed to foreigners, who will worry if the value of the dollars they own in US treasuries should plummet, can it really be right that government debt can go rising indefinitely without consequences for the capitalist system?

As Wray correctly points out, the ratio of debt to GDP will only rise if the interest cost on that debt rises faster than GDP and governments do not raise enough extra revenue over spending to cover the difference. But that is exactly what is happening in the US now. If the level of debt rises, then the cost of servicing that debt (repaying maturing debt plus interest) will rise too and start to eat into spending that could otherwise be used on welfare or government investment in infrastructure or education etc. Indeed, if the US government debt ratio to GDP is to be stopped from rising, then the current annual primary budget deficit (excluding interest payments) of 5% of GDP, will have to be turned into a surplus. That would mean a huge rise in taxes or cuts in federal spending, or both.

So one of the reasons that government debt matters to the capitalist economy is that, if it keeps rising, the cost of servicing it will drive up taxes for capitalists or reduce government spending on ‘necessary’ things like defence and homeland security.  The capitalist solution then (for both Republicans and Democrats alike) will be to try to get the deficit and debt down by welfare cuts and taxes on the ‘middle class’. Given that government spending on so-called discretionary items have already been cut to the bone (see graph below), the next cuts will be aimed at so-called entitlement programmes like medicare, medicaid and social security.

Remember what Obama said recently:“The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.” The only difference is that Obama and the Democrats want to make any cuts in welfare slower and more gradual and raise taxes on the better off a bit more. The Republicans want to cut welfare more quickly and preferably not raise taxes at all.

Jeffery Sachs, newly converted radical from mainstream economics, condemns the Congress agreement because it does not allow the Bush tax cuts to expire! He wants the fiscal cliff to remain. Sachs argued that many people will say, “Yes, but why tax the middle class to collect more revenues?” Sachs answers by saying by that Americans need to be taxed more in order to pay for welfare and education etc. It’s the only way, he says. So the Keynesian position is to save welfare and government services by more taxation. It does not enter into their thinking that faster economic growth and employment along with the reversal of payouts and tax exemptions to the rich and the corporate sector could preserve and even improve welfare and government services without raising taxes on the ‘middle class’. As I said in my previous post, The fiscal cliff, Okun’s law and the Long Depression, neither the Keynesians nor the Austerians offer any policies on how to raise the rate of economic growth on a long term basis. Both accept whatever the capitalist sector can deliver, on the whole. So they are forced to consider budget reductions either through more taxes or less spending to stop federal debt rising inexorably.

Marx once said in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that history can repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. But farce can also turn into tragedy. And over the next two months when Congress imposes a range of cuts in government services and welfare benefits for the foreseeable future, along with more tax increases, this farce may well end up tragically for America’s working class.

Read More