Wikileaks reveals Kissinger the War Criminal. Free Bradley Manning

Wikileaks has released some 1.7 million archived records and cables from the 1970's, many of them written by the war criminal Henry Kissinger.  Kissinger is complicit in the murder of Rene Schneider, the Chilean constitutionalist general and Salvadore Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile who was overthrown by a US supported coup in 1973. He is also responsible for the murder of millions of Vietnamese people.

Cables also reveal that in order to justify sending the Brazilian dictatorship money and military aid in the mid-seventies, the US government gave Brazil a "torture exemption".

The information also reveals that the Vatican's response to claims of mass killings and torture by general Pinochet who the US favored over the democratically elected Allende was that the claims were "communist propaganda".

The journalist interviewed above who has looked at some of the documents points out:

We’re talking about 1969, for example, the bombing of Cambodia; this is secret policies, which were going on from the White House in the 1970s; the South American Operation Condor; death squads running around in South America, killing thousands and disappearing thousands of people; 1973, [Salvador] Allende’s Chile, where Henry Kissinger ordered the assassination of the president of Chile because he wasn’t going in the [desired] political direction and installed General Pinochet; 1974, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. There are little bits of details on all of these, in which Kissinger was involved. I mean Kissinger basically gave a green light to Turkey to invade Cyprus. So once there was an official foreign policy going on, which was quite, you know, nice from the US, going alone with human rights – there was unofficial police going on, with Henry Kissinger in the White House, with all those kinds of human right abuses and war crimes going on.

During a conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Turkey in 1975 Kissinger gave a little glimpse in to his world view when he said,  "Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, 'The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.' [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that."

Kissinger is a mass murder of some stature.   An excellent little book sharing some examples of his murderous activity is The Trial of Henry Kissinger by the late Christopher Hitchens

So many Americans have no idea of the role our government has played internationally, the assassinations, coups, supporting some of the most notorious mass killers in history on behalf of the US corporations.  Part of it is that so many feel there is absolutely nothing that we can do, so they bury their head in the sand and keep plodding along.  Our media is very controlled and they saturate the airwaves with sports and mind numbing entertainment.  But this cannot continue indefinitely as American are finding out through declining living standards, a bankrupt infrastructure and eternal insecurity. 

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Keynes, Marx and austerity: Meeting Keynes Meadway

by Michael Roberts

My recent article for the Socialist Review (What’s wrong with the Keynesian answer to austerity?, http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=12273.) has provoked a mild ripple of debate within leftist economic circles in the UK.  In particular, James Meadway, the lively leftist economist, has sprung to the defence of Keynesian ideas in the struggle against ‘austerity’.  He commented on my piece critically and referred to a blog post he did last October explaining how Marxists like me are too hard on Keynesians (http://faithfultotheline.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/keynes-keynes-and-keynes/).  Meadway’s main argument is that you should not tar with the same brush leftist or so-called post-Keynesians like himself (I think he is) that are anti-capitalist in their objectives with the so-called New or ‘bastardised’ Keynesian views of people like Paul Krugman that stick to sustaining capitalism and basically follow all the old neo-classical economic models (see my recent post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/keynesian-economics-in-the-dsge-trap/).

Of course, it is true that there is a spectrum of views within the Keynesian economics fold – there was back in the 1930s and early 1940s.  There were communists or socialists like Joan Robinson and Michel Kalecki whose ideas have been developed by post-Keynesians like the brilliant Engelbert Stockhammer, Ozlem Onaran and other Kalecki followers (for more see, http://hussonet.free.fr/postk.htm).  But the vast majority of economists who consider themselves Keynesians do not espouse the view of the post-Keynesians and are much closer to the position of Krugman in the US, or Richard Layard or Malcolm Sawyer (http://www.classonline.org.uk/pubs/item/fiscal-austerity-the-cure-which-makes-the-patient-worse) in the UK.  Let me remind you of The Manifesto for Economic Sense that Krugman and Layard wrote back in summer 2012 as their way forward to solve the economic crisis.  On my blog, I re-edited it as A Socialist Manifesto to show the strong differences between Keynesian and Marxist policies against austerity (http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/a-manifesto-for-socialist-sense/).    Have a look.

Within the Marxist or socialist spectrum, there are also many different strands.  Divisions are great about what Marx ‘meant’ and what is the ‘Marxist theory of crisis’.  Indeed, I would say that my own set of views is probably a minority opinion within the Marxist school of economics, which is led by the likes of Gerard Dumenil, David Harvey, Richard Wolff or Michael Lebowitz.  The majority of Marxists look to underconsumption or overproduction, inequality, financialisation or financial instability as the main causes of crises under modern capitalism, and not to profitability and fictitious capital, as I do.  And I am not even dealing the wide range of views on imperialism, the euro single currency and so on.

But having said there is wide range of views within Keynesian and Marxist economics, that does not mean that we cannot draw a line in the sand both theoretically and policy-wise over the differences between a Marxist view of the capitalist economy and even the radical post-Keynesian one.  In my view, there are qualitative differences between Keynesian and Marxist view of what is happening in a capitalist economy and what to do about it.

James Meadway says in his post (op cit) that a “radical Keynesian” programme in this case would mean *hugely* more than just “governments spending more money”: it would include, inter alia, the overhaul of the financial system, the democratic direction of investment, and so on. Keynes himself – to come to the third confusion –at least toyed with this, concluding his General Theory with a call for the “euthanasia of the rentier” and the “socialization of investment”. Keynes was unabashedly, unashamedly pro-capitalist and elitist (retaining, for example, his Presidency of the Royal Eugenics Society right up until his death); nonetheless he identified circumstances in which in order to save capitalism it was necessary to destroy it. It is this tension in his work that the radical left needs to play up to, rather than smothering: that the (correct) insights of Keynes (in aggregate demand, in the dysfunctionality of finance) need bringing out and the contradictions need exacerbating. The anti-capitalist elements should be brought to the fore. A blanket dismissal of “Keynesianism” as such cannot do this.

But that’s just the problem.  Keynes ‘toyed’ with ideas like the ‘socialisation of investment’ but in the final analysis – and it is in the analysis – he remained in the pro-capitalist camp.   His vague ‘socialisation’ never even got as far as the programme of the Labour Party at the time for ‘the common ownership fo the commanding heights of the economy’, let alone workers’ control or democracy.  As Meadway says, Keynes was very elitist and a great supporter of ‘bourgeois values’.   And his ‘euthanasia of the rentier’ implies only some gradual natural phasing-out of the rent-seeking financial sector.  There was no call for the public ownership of the banks – indeed, I don’t hear that from the lips of many post-Keynesians now.

In a recent post (op cit), I pointed out the positive contribution that Keynesian theory has made to economics.  But there are three things that distinguish Keynesian theory (in all its forms) from the Marxist one and thus decide the issue for me on what”s wrong with it.  The first is that Keynes does not break from the neoclassical model of perfect markets and factors of production.  There is no theory of value based on the exploitation of labour power.  That is a fundamental error in understanding the laws of motion of capital.

That leads to the second reason.  For Keynes, profit is not the independent variable driving investment, employment and growth.  On the contrary, profit does not appear in Keynes’ calculation, except as a dependent variable of investment.  Keynes gets it the wrong way round.  His macro aggregates hide the exploitative nature of the capitalist system and thus also miss its Achilles heel, profit.  Even his foray towards profitability in his discussion of declining returns on capital is conceived in neoclassical marginalist terms i.e. the ‘marginal efficiency of capital’, not profit from labour power.   Thus Keynesian policies for more government spending to boost ‘aggregate demand’ pay no attention to the impact of such spending on profitability.  So Keynesians cannot understand or explain why capitalists do not support more government spending even in a slump – it is irrational.  Don’t capitalists want to save capitalism?

And third, what also flows is the view that there is no flaw in the productive manufacturing sector of a capitalist economy.  Crises and slumps are caused by flaws in the financial sector.  The capitalist mode of production for profit through markets is basically fine.  As Meadway puts it, Keynes had “very roughly, in Marxist terms, a concern with the problem of realization and the issues raised by volume 2, rather than (as in more supply-side approaches) a concern with the problems of volume 3.”  Well, you cannot do without Volumes 1 and 3 that deal with exploitation and profitability.

The issue is not whether Marxists should work with Keynesians against the policies of austerity.  Of course, they should (although I am not sure some Keynesians will always work with Marxists!).  For my part, I’d work with President Obama or Nick Clegg if they opposed ‘austerity’ (but they don’t).  The issue I was looking at in the article in Socialist Review was whether Keynesian economics can show a way out of the fall in living standards and employment for the majority of people in the US and Europe, imposed (only partly) by austerity.  Also can Keynesian economics offer a way to end permanently the cycle of booms and slumps under capitalism?  I don’t think it can.

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Tony Smith: What He Did to Oakland Schools, What He’ll Try in Chicago

By Jack Gerson            

On April 4, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) Superintendent Tony Smith gave notice that he was resigning effective June 30 and relocating his family to Chicago to be near his ailing father-in-law. There is little doubt that Smith will soon be a visible presence in Chicago education – quite possibly the next CEO of Chicago Public Schools. It is important for Chicago teachers and community to know just who they are likely to be dealing with – and to those fighting back against the corporate education agenda elsewhere too, given the importance of the struggle in Chicago.

My guess is that Tony Smith’s job in Chicago will be to break or weaken the powerful alliance between teachers, students, parents and community so evident during and after last September’s teacher strike.  There are few who can match him when it comes to talking about the importance of neighborhood schools providing wraparound services to combat the effects of poverty; to recruiting, rewarding, and retaining good teachers; to stimulate authentic learning based on concepts and creativity rather than skill-based rote learning; to provide all the resources that teachers need to teach and students need to learn; to acknowledge and work to overcome racism and its effects; to forge real authentic collaboration between faculty, staff, community, students, parents, and administration; to crack down on mismanagement, excess administrative overhead, and needless outsourcing; etc.  For that is exactly what he did when he was appointed superintendent in Oakland four years ago. He talked so well, in fact, that even some skeptics were willing to suspend disbelief and give him a shot.

But in Oakland, it was just talk. Indeed, throughout his career, Smith has been a proponent of the corporate agenda for education and a practitioner of divide and conquer, of charter schools and privatization, of school closures, downsizing, and union busting. Smith takes funding cuts for granted; he goes hat in hand to his corporate patrons to solicit marginal funding (in exchange for carrying out their policies), but does not go after corporate and individual wealth. So in the end, he is just another proponent of “do more with less” austerity sacrifice. He executes the cuts demanded by his corporate patrons. This goes back to his roots.

Tony Smith graduated from U. of California Berkeley in 1992, where he was captain of the football team. He went on to get masters and doctoral degrees in education from UC Berkeley, and from 1997 to 2004 was one of the leaders of the Oakland-based Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools (BAYCES – now the National Equity Project).  At the time, BAYCES was the Oakland conduit for Gates Foundation money, and Gates was heavily promoting the “small school miracle”, engineering the breakup of thousands of comprehensive secondary schools nationally.

In Oakland, starting in about 2001, BAYCES “designed” the breakup of three of the city’s six comprehensive high schools – the three “lowest-achieving” schools, those serving the city’s highest poverty areas, with overwhelmingly black and Latino enrollments – Fremont, Castlemont, and McClymonds High Schools. I was a teacher at Castlemont, which was broken into three small schools in 2003.  BAYCES “redesign” included permanently closing the school’s library and consolidating the librarian’s position; eliminating French and eliminating the French teacher position; closing all three vocational academies (construction, culinary, and fashion), although all three provided job training in an area of sky-high unemployment for blacks and Latinos under 25 years of age.

We said at the time that this under-resourced breakup of Fremont, Castlemont, and McClymonds would drive out students and teachers, encourage the growth of charter schools, and make already unstable neighborhoods still more unstable. And that is what happened: Castlemont’s enrollment went from 1,750 in 2003 to fewer than 600 last year. McClymonds went from 1,000 to 250; Fremont from 2,300 to 750. At the same time, charter school enrollment in Oakland quadrupled.

In 2003, in the midst of the BAYCES-led breakup of Oakland secondary schools, the state of California put OUSD in receivership, ostensibly because the district’s budget was $37 million in the red. For the first two years of the state takeover, BAYCES openly co-administered OUSD with Eli Broad’s handpicked State Administrator for OUSD, Randy Ward, and an army of other Broad Institute graduates. During this period, scores of custodians, nearly all maintenance workers and many food service workers and drivers were laid off; libraries in nearly every middle school and several high schools were closed; charter school enrollment soared. Randy Ward introduced Results Based Budgeting (RBB), in which school sites were told that they were responsible for nearly all expenses, including teacher salaries – pressuring principals to try to force out veteran teachers in favor of lower-paid and untrained Teach for America recruits, and to cut supplies and resources to the bone (at more than one school, teachers were told that they needed to pay for copier paper out of their own pockets).

Tony Smith was a BAYCES leader when these policies were put in place. He left BAYCES in 2004 – not in protest, but to advance his career. From 2004 to 2007 he ran the Emeryville, California schools. From there, he went to San Francisco for a year and a half as Deputy Superintendent.

Fast forward to Spring 2012. Tony Smith has been OUSD superintendent for three years – ever since the state takeover ended in 2009.  Despite his passionate and eloquent rhetoric, Smith has continued – even deepened – the harmful policies put in place during the state takeover. He has maintained Ward’s Results Based Budgeting and, like Ward, has used RBB to target veteran teachers.  Now, in April 2012 Smith, who participated in the ill-conceived break-up of the three high schools while at BAYCES, announces that the position of classroom teacher will be abolished at Castlemont, Fremont, and McClymonds, where now all teachers will be “teachers on special assignment” and the small schools replaced by “Acceleration High Schools”.  The reconsolidation was as ill-conceived and as poorly designed as the breakup had been: the libraries remained closed; custodial, food service and clerical staffing remained inadequate; support services were scarce; overall the schools remained terribly resource-starved.  The elimination of the classroom teacher position was a transparent excuse for violating the due process and seniority provisions by forcing all teachers at the three high schools to reapply for their jobs every year.

School size isn’t the primary determinant of success. BAYCES breakup of the comprehensive high schools a decade ago was destructive. Smith’s reconsolidation has been destructive too. And Smith has gone a step beyond to overt union busting, by forcing teachers at these three schools to reapply for their jobs every year.

Indeed, Smith has trampled on virtually every hope he raised in his smooth but false talk of three years ago:

·      Neighborhood schools? Smith closed several, including five elementary schools last June (scaling to adjust for the difference in size between Chicago and Oakland public school enrollments, those five closures alone would be equivalent to the 54 schools Rahm Emanuel et al plan to close). When a group of parents, teachers, and community staged a 17-day sit-in at Lakeview Elementary to protest the closure of the five schools, Smith sent in the cops to evict us.

·      Wraparound services? Two years ago Smith gutted Adult Education – from 25,000 students when he arrived in 2009, the program now has been all but wiped out. He made cuts to Early Childhood Education. He eliminated counselors at the district’s largest high school. Etc. Those few services he did introduce were partial, and based on soft money from his friends and patrons in the corporate foundations.

·      Combating racism? All of the schools Smith closed last year were majority minority enrollment – four black, one Latino. Many of the schools in the black and Latino communities that remain open have become more segregated under Smith.

·      Recruiting, rewarding, and retaining good teachers? Establishing collaborative relations? Oakland teachers have been without a contract since 2008, and are paid 20% below the state and county averages for public school teachers.  In 2010, when negotiations broke down over Smith’s demand that the teachers union accept no pay increase, larger class size, weakened seniority and academic freedom, Smith imposed his terms on the union – the first Superintendent in OUSD history to do so. Union-busting then in 2010, just as he did two years later by forcing the Castlemont, Fremont, and McClymonds teachers to reapply for their jobs.

·      Providing the resources teachers need to teach and students need to learn? Several Oakland elementary schools were chosen by the state to receive supplementary funding for class size reduction, resources, and support under the Quality Education Improvement Act (QEIA) funding, a program aimed at helping the state’s lowest-achieving schools. For the past two years, OUSD has lost millions in QEIA funding because all but one or two of the QEIA-eligible schools failed to meet class size targets – clearly not a problem of poor site administrators, but rather of an inept and unsupportive district administration.

·      Cracking down on mismanagement, excess administrative overhead, and needless outsourcing?  Relative to its size, OUSD under Smith has double the administrative overhead and double the outsourced contracts compared to the average California school district.

Last year, Tony Smith said he wouldn’t care if all Oakland schools were charter schools. Oakland already had the state’s highest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools, and that percentage has increased under Smith (from about 17% to about 20%).

And when Tony enters the game, be prepared to ante up. Although Oakland teachers have not had a raise in five years and are among the lowest paid in the Bay Area, Smith demanded and got a 6% increase over his predecessor’s salary when he signed on as superintendent in 2009. Smith earns a base salary of $265,000 / year. His total annual compensation, including benefits, comes to more than $352,000.

A thread runs through Tony Smith’s career: to attempt to counterpose, in practice, what he asserts to be the interests of students and community to those of teachers and staff. This aligns him with the corporate agenda. And, in fact, he is one of their rising superstars: witness the "philanthropic" funding to OUSD, cited in Smith's resignation letter and in the school board's accompanying statement. (This goes back at least to his BAYCES days [1997 - 2004], where he managed BAYCES connections with the Hewlett Foundation.). But smooth though his tongue may be, Tony Smith’s divide and conquer strategy was beginning to backfire on him in Oakland -- witness the widespread, if passive, support from the community for the sit-in at Lakeview Elementary, or the increasing heat he has been taking at board meetings from community in west and east Oakland.

So while Smith’s family health issues may well be real, I have to believe that he was looking to get out of town. And I have to believe that his corporate patrons want him in Chicago, where they think he’ll be able to win the community back to their side and break the teacher – community alliance. Prove them wrong.

(Originally posted on the Chicago education resistance website, substancenews.net)

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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.

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Student debt: the next bubble? Let's confront this class war.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444 retired

Iran has been downgraded for a minute or two as North Korea offers US capitalism’s spin doctors a better option for keeping its population focused on imaginary external enemies.  The intention in the Korean Peninsula is regime change which would open up new territory and a new source of cheap Labor power. US capitalism presents North Korea as a serious threat (see previous post) as it wages a domestic war on all aspects of our lives and the misery and death that is a result of this war far outweighs anything foreign.  The details of this war on its own people, this class war, are available if you look for them, if you ignore the propaganda and the absurd War on Terror.

Leaving aside the more brutal forms of oppression here in the US, the prison industrial complex that houses more than 2 million souls, more than any other country, the homelessness or the miserable health care system that leads to thousands of deaths and is the leading cause of bankruptcy, we should consider debt.  Millions of people are enslaved by debt.  People use credit cards to buy food, purchase health care and other necessities.

As we saw with the onset of the Great Recession when poor and low income people, desperate for shelter and keen to avoid the clutches of the landlords and rent payments where your rent pays the mortgage on someone else’s home, were conned in to loans that they would inevitably default on. The consequences of not paying the moneylenders are dire:

"I just wanted to be able to eat and sleep in my house and have a roof over my head…” one 89 year old woman still working told the Wall Street Journal*,  "Every day at midnight when I go to sleep, I think maybe when I wake in the morning they'll tell me to get out."

This is how capitalism treats older workers; this wasn’t a foreign plot. Then we should consider the human and financial cost to society of all the illnesses caused by the stress brought on through living in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity in modern day debt bondage.  A bad credit rating in the US can keep you from getting a roof over your head, a car, and other important needs.

The new potential debt bubble is the student loan market.  I have written about this in the past and that there shouldn’t even be such a thing as a student loan market. Education, like health care, a job, housing, would be a right in any society that claims the mantle civilization.  The cost of a university education has risen more than 40% in the last ten years and student loans with some $1 trillion in outstanding debt have surpassed credit cards and auto and are now second only to home mortgages as a source of consumer debt according to the US Federal Reserve. As recently as nine years ago, outstanding student debt was around $250 billion.

Some economists are alarmed at what they see as a debt bubble that will equal the housing bubble that led to the 2007 meltdown.  Their concern as always, is the damage to the system, an economic disruption that halts profit taking and creates the potential for social unrest.  Others say the figures are not so bad, “….average debt for graduates with debt is around $27,000, which is small compared to mortgage debt,” saysNeal P. McCluskey of the Cato Institute, "For students going to good schools and pursuing in-demand degrees, it should not be hard to pay off.” Oh, I have lots of friends at Harvard and Brown and that’s just what we need, more MBA’s.

In the wake of the austerity war on wages and working conditions, in particular public sector jobs, leaving college owing $27,000 (this is the average) is a considerable burden even if you find employment.  There are hundreds of thousands of young people with college degrees that cannot find work in their field. “If a college student takes a $25,000-a-year job, as many are, the debt to income ratio is very high,”, says Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University. He adds that there are thousands of students that owe way above the average.

And total student debt is not just in the form of official public or private loans.  Parents are loaning their children money either through their savings or through taking out lines of credit or second mortgages. Meanwhile, not only is the delinquency rate on student debt climbing, the amount of debt is increasing even faster. In 2005 average student loan debt was $17,233 rising to $27, 000 by 2012, an increase of 58% in seven years according to MAINST. COM.   Credit card and auto loan balances decreased during that period.

Professor Vedder says he is opposed to forgiving the debt because the taxpayer will not be able to absorb it.  The bankers, auto bosses and other coupon clippers got to our pocket books first but there is still plenty of money in society, I have shared those sources on these pages many times.  There is the more than $26 trillion the super rich stash away in offshore accounts, an amount equal to the combined GDP of the US and Japan.  "Studies have estimated that cross-border flows of global proceeds of financial crimes total between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion a year," says the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists after receiving leaked information about tax havens and offshore accounts where the 1% hide the money they have stolen from us.

And what does it cost to fly stealth bombers and B52’ around the Korean Penninsula?  The cost to the US taxpayer of these predatory incursions and occupations and the bases that go with them is extensive. And these ventures are not defensive measures, they are to protect and expand the influence of US capitalism.  These are not our wars.  The policies coming out of Washington and the Pentagon do us far more harm than some 7^th century Mullah in Pakistan.

The psychological, physical and inevitably financial costs to us brought about by market forces are huge. This is a domestic war being waged on us day in day out.  As their policies deprive so many Americans of health care, education, a roof over our head a job, and certainly a vacation abroad, we night consider a nice camping trips to one of the beautiful state and national parks we have in this country but they’ve blocked what was once a cheap alternative to Paris as they close our natural wonders in order to place the burden of their crisis on to our backs.  This will not continue unchallenged forever.

As you mull over whether or not this poverty stricken little country called North Korea that suffered almost total annihilation in an imperialist war will take away your rights or the crazed Mullahs of Tehran will destroy your freedoms, remember the WMD’s in Iraq---remember Powell telling the world how dangerous they were and how they could destroy us all.  Remember the Gulf of Tonkin.

Most of all consider that more and more parents are taking out life insurance policies on their children because they have taken out loans to pay for their education. They don’t want to lose their own homes if they are saddled with a student debt if their child dies. This is what happened to one woman who told her story to the Financial Times:

“The loans company calls two or three times a day. They’re just coming after me like sharks to repay loans that funded an education my son will never get to use…..I’m worried that my home will be taken away if I don’t pay. They will not forgive the loans. Had I known the severity, I would not have let my child go to college. It’s a nightmare,”

It’s not some foreign terrorist creating this nightmare; it’s a domestic one.

“Clearly we are in a tipping point and there will be repercussions,” says the above quoted Professor Vedder.  He is right about that. But it’s quite clear if we take the time to think about it that it is not the little man in Iran, or the rather youthful leader of the Stalinist regime in North Korea we need fear.  The most devastating war we are facing is the domestic one, the class war and it’s time we took the offensive in it.

From our previous blog on this issue:

No to austerity, money is everywhere:

* Cancel all student debt, make the rich pay
* Federally funded education at all levels
*Corporations out of education
* Reduce class sizes K thru 12 to 15
*student, parent teacher control of curriculum
* Take the banks and finance houses under public ownership and control
* Allocation of capital on the basis of social
*Build an independent working people's political party based on our organizations and communities
*For a democratic socialist society--production for social need not profit

* WSJ 3-12-07

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US escalating tensions in Asia, wants regime change in N Korea

Here is a review  of the situation on The Korean Peninsula from reprinted from Global Research (see link to the right).  Much of this information is unknown to the US public except those that keep abreast of the history of this region.  The US mass media as we  know, is severely censored and controlled, perhaps the most controlled of all the advanced capitalist countries. We share this for the interest of our readers.  We would not, as the author does, refer to North Korea as a "socialist" state.

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The Dangers of War: What is Behind the US-North Korea Conflict?

By Jack A. Smith

Global Research, April 01, 2013

What’s happening between the U.S. and North Korea to produce such headlines this week as “Korean Tensions Escalate,” and  “North Korea Threatens U.S.”?
The New York Times reported March 30:

“This week, North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jung-un, ordered his underlings to prepare for a missile attack on the United States. He appeared at a command center in front of a wall map with the bold, unlikely title, ‘Plans to Attack the Mainland U.S.’ Earlier in the month, his generals boasted of developing a ‘Korean-style’ nuclear warhead that could be fitted atop a long-range missile.”

The U.S. is well aware North Korea’s statements are not backed up by sufficient military power to implement its rhetorical threats, but appears to be escalating tensions all the same. What’s up? I’ll have to go back a bit to explain the situation.
Since the end of the Korean War 60 years ago, the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) has repeatedly put forward virtually the same four proposals to the United States. They are:

1. A peace treaty to end the Korean War.

2. The reunification of Korea, which has been “temporarily” divided into North and South since 1945.

3. An end to the U.S. occupation of South Korea and a discontinuation of annual month-long U.S-South Korean war games.

4. Bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang to end tensions on the Korean peninsula.

The U.S. and its South Korean protectorate have rejected each proposal over the years. As a consequence, the peninsula has remained extremely unstable since the 1950s. It has now reached the point where Washington has used this year’s war games, which began in early March, as a vehicle for staging a mock nuclear attack on North Korea by flying two nuclear-capable B-2 Stealth bombers over the region March 28. Three days later, the White House ordered F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets to South Korea, a further escalation of tensions.
Here is what is behind the four proposals.

1. The U.S. refuses to sign a peace treaty to end the Korean War. It has only agreed to an armistice. An armistice is a temporary cessation of fighting by mutual consent. The armistice signed July 27, 1953, was supposed to transform into a peace treaty when “a final peaceful settlement is achieved.” The lack of a treaty means war could resume at any moment.  North Korea does not want a war with the U.S., history’s most powerful military state. It wants a peace treaty.

 2. Two Koreas exist as the product of an agreement between the USSR (which borderd Korea and helped to liberate the northern part of country from Japan in World War II) and the U.S., which occupied the southern half.  Although socialism prevailed in the north and capitalism in the south, it was not to be a permanent split. The two big powers were to withdraw after a couple of years, allowing the country to reunify. Russia did so; the U.S. didn’t. Then came the devastating three-year war in 1950. Since then, North Korea has made several different proposals to end the separation that has lasted since 1945. The most recent proposal, I believe, is “one country two systems.” This means that while both halves unify, the south remains capitalist and the north remains socialist. It will be difficult but not impossible. Washington does not want this. It seeks the whole peninsula, bringing its military apparatus directly to the border with China, and Russia as well.

3. Washington has kept between 25,000 and over 40,000 troops in South Korea since the end of the war. They remain — along with America’s fleets, nuclear bomber bases and troop installations in close proximity to the peninsula — a reminder of two things. One is that “We can crush the north.” The other is “We own South Korea.” Pyongyang sees it that way — all the more so since President Obama decided to “pivot” to Asia. While the pivot contains an economic and trade aspect, its primary purpose is to increase America’s already substantial military power in the region in order to intensify the threat to China and North Korea.

4. The Korean War was basically a conflict between the DPRK and the U.S. That is, while a number of UN countries fought in the war, the U.S. was in charge, dominated the fighting against North Korea and was responsible for the deaths of millions of Koreans north of the 38^th parallel dividing line. It is entirely logical that Pyongyang seeks talks directly with Washington to resolve differences and reach a peaceful settlement leading toward a treaty. The U.S. has consistently refused.

These four points are not new. They were put forward in the 1950s. I visited the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a journalist for the (U.S.) Guardian newspaper three times during the 1970s for a total of eight weeks. Time after time, in discussions with officials, I was asked about a peace treaty, reunification, withdrawal of U.S. troops from the south, and face-to-face talks. The situation is the same today. The U.S. won’t budge.

Why not? Washington wants to get rid of the communist regime before allowing peace to prevail on the peninsula. No “one state, two systems” for Uncle Sam, by jingo! He wants one state that pledges allegiance to — guess who?

In the interim, the existence of a “bellicose” North Korea justifies Washington’s surrounding the north with a veritable ring of firepower in the northwest Pacific close enough to almost, but not quite, singe China. A “dangerous” DPRK is also useful in keeping Japan well within the U.S. orbit. It also is another excuse for once-pacifist Japan to boost its already formidable arsenal.

In this connection I’ll quote from a Feb. 15 article from Foreign Policy in Focus byChristine Hong and Hyun Le: “Framing of North Korea as the region’s foremost security threat obscures the disingenuous nature of U.S. President Barack Obama’s policy in the region, specifically the identity between what his advisers dub ‘strategic patience,’ on the one hand, and his forward-deployed military posture and alliance with regional hawks on the other. Examining Obama’s aggressive North Korea policy and its consequences is crucial to understanding why demonstrations of military might — of politics by other means, to borrow from Carl von Clausewitz — are the only avenues of communication North Korea appears to have with the United States at this juncture.” Here’s another quote from ANSWER Coalition leader Brian Becker:

“The Pentagon and the South Korean military today —and throughout the past year — have been staging massive war games that simulate the invasion and bombing of North Korea. Few people in the United States know the real situation. The work of the war propaganda machine is designed to make sure that the American people do not join together to demand an end to the dangerous and threatening actions of the Pentagon on the Korean Peninsula.
“The propaganda campaign is in full swing now as the Pentagon climbs the escalation ladder in the most militarized part of the planet. North Korea is depicted as the provocateur and aggressor whenever it asserts that they have the right and capability to defend their country. Even as the Pentagon simulates the nuclear destruction of a country that it had already tried to bomb into the Stone Age, the corporate-owned media characterizes this extremely provocative act as a sign of resolve and a measure of self-defense.”

And from Stratfor, the private intelligence service that is often in the know:

“Much of North Korea’s behavior can be considered rhetorical, but it is nonetheless unclear how far Pyongyang is willing to go if it still cannot force negotiations through belligerence.”

The objective of initiating negotiations is here taken for granted.

Pyongyang’s “bellicosity” is almost entirely verbal — several decibels too loud for our ears, perhaps — but North Korea is a small country in difficult circumstances that well remembers the extraordinary brutality Washington visited up the territory in the 1950s. Millions of Koreans died. TheU.S. carpet bombings were criminal. North Korea is determined to go down fighting if it happens again, but hope their preparedness will avoid war and lead to talks and a treatry. Their large and well-trained army is for defense. The purpose of the rockets they are building and their talk about nuclear weapons is principally to scare away the wolf at the door.

In the short run, the recent inflammatory rhetoric from Kim Jong-un is in direct response to this year’s month-long U.S.-South Korea war games, which he interprets as a possible prelude for another war. Kim’s longer run purpose is to create a sufficiently worrisome crisis that the U.S. finally agrees to bilateral talks and possibly a peace treaty and removal of foreign troops. Some form of reunification could come later in talks between north and south.

I suspect the present confrontations will simmer down after the war games end. The Obama Administration has no intention to create the conditions leading to a peace treaty — especially now that White House attention seems riveted on East Asia where it perceives an eventual risk to its global geopolitical supremacy. Jack A. Smith, editor of Activist Newsletter

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US and World economy: Unsteady as she goes

by Michael Roberts

The US economy added just 88,000 new jobs in March, a reading sharply lower than expected.  However, the unemployment rate ticked down to 7.6 per cent, because the share of Americans in the labour force dropped to its lowest level since 1979.   On the other hand, jobs figures for January and February were revised up.  March was the poorest monthly jobs figure in nine months. In the private sector, manufacturing lost 3,000 jobs and retail lost 24,000.  Again, on the other hand, little noticed, the U6 unemployment rate (that includes those not registered but looking for work) fell from 14.3% to 13.8%.

The stock markets greeted the news by selling off and many analysts preached doom and gloom.  But these are same experts that jump with delight when there are good figures.  Can we see through the noise at the underlying state of the US economy and elsewhere?  Well, as readers of this blog know, I rely on a few ‘high-frequency’ indicators to guide me.  I start with my ‘combined’ US manufacturing and services sectors purchasing managers’ index (PMI).  After the March data came in last week, it looks like this

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On this indicator, the US economy continues to trundle along in a crawl.   If we look at the less reliable but even more frequent ECRI weekly indicator, it’s much the same story – if anything, it’s a little bit stronger in the few months.

What about the world economy as a whole as of March 2013?  Well, using the PMIs from around the
globe, it looks like this.




It seems that most parts of the world capitalist economy are expanding, if at a crawl.  Only the Eurozone is in a significant contraction.

Yet this may be the best picture for some time ahead.  The US government again faces a close down in the summer unless Congress agrees to raise the debt limit and reaches agreement on budget measures.  As it is, the Obama administration is preparing spending cuts in its 2014 budget starting in October, including cutting the real value of average pensions by changing the inflation indexation (see my post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/the-fiscal-cliff-okuns-law-and-the-long-depression/).

And the private sector remains in the doldrums with investment growth poor, even though profits are at record highs (see my post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/its-still-a-bear-market/).   Sales growth is low by historic standards (see pink in graph below) and there is a limit on how much labour’s share of national income can be squeezed further.  At that point, profitability could start to fall.

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