Chomsky on America

here.

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A Solidarity Tax?

Just to get a grip on how tepid and worthless the Democrat Congress and Obama are, consider the following.

EXHIBIT A

Right now, state governments across the country are facing major budget crises as a result of the economic downturn caused, crudely speaking, by bankers. Working people are being hit the hardest.

California is the eye of the storm, where there is a $42 billion deficit that grew out of a convergence of decades of regressive taxation, crashing financial and construction industries, and the bursting of the housing bubble.

Across the US, all 50 states are facing a combined $180 billion budget gap . What that means is that if they don't get that amount of money, they won't be able to maintain their (already inadequate, as the result of three decades of attacks from Democrats and Republicans alike) public services.

Teachers are being laid off, schools are being closed, public transit is being massacred, tuition is being hiked, public workers are being fired, patients are being thrown out on the street, libraries are being boarded up, infrastructure is rotting. There is mass unemployment all over the country, but the jobless rates for people of color are heart-stopping.

EXHIBIT B

At present, the top marginal rate of taxation is 35%. President Reagan lowered it from 70% to 30% from 1980-83. George H.W. Bush raised it slightly, and Bill Clinton raised it a touch more so that it was 40% in 1993. And W. lowered it in 2001 to 35%.

The current holdings of wealth (not income) of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans adds up to $21.9 trillion.

Just for the sake of argument, ignore the $1 trillion in military spending alotted for 2010.

ENTER OBAMA

Obama campaigned on the "radical" program of reinstating the pre-Bush Jr. tax rates (top marginal rate of 40%) for the rich in order to pay for more extensive public spending on health care. People turned out in droves to vote for him.

Now, I'm told that a small windfall tax on corporate profits or a one-time 3% tax on the wealth of the wealthiest 1% would more than double the amount of money that state governments have on hand right now.

Moreover, we can do a little mental math and quickly see that a, shall we say, "solidarity tax" that increased the top marginal rate of taxation by 5% would raise the money to stave off all cuts to public services, infrastructure and employment. An increase of 10% could even expand and shore up already anemic services in a time when more and more people are falling back on public services.

This is not even a radical proposal. It's simple math: we could slice and dice public services (education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc.) or we could simply raise the marginal tax rate on the very very wealthiest of the wealthy.

Yet voters are not asked to weigh in on these issues (except in Oregon, where they supported it).

Instead, they are asked to support one of two pro-business parties, both of whom are happy to eviscerate public goods and bow down to the wealthy and powerful.

It is the heavily Democratic Congress who are cutting public transit, slicing the social safety net, busting teachers unions, laying off public workers, raising tuition and closing schools. And before the much-hyped and overblown "Scott Brown Incident", don't forget that the supermajority-wielding Democrats couldn't even put together a stimulus bill that covered the state budget shortfalls since they were so keen on including tax breaks in the bill. And don't forget: Obama has proposed a freeze on discretionary spending (except for, of course, military spending).

I ask you: what is the purpose of supporting the Democratic Party? This is what they do when they wield the largest Congressional majorities I've seen in my lifetime.

What progressive and left-leaning people need to do right now is, first of all, completely divest from the Democratic Party and organizations subservient to it. The next goal has to be to build on (and forge new) movements already under way against budget cuts. If we ever hope to see important reforms like single-payer or fully-funded public transit in our lifetimes, we're going to have to form independent social movements to place demands on the existing order. Asking nicely and sending money to Moveon.org isn't a case of "not doing enough"; on the contrary, this kind of "activism" is precisely what's preventing meaningful change.

Can there be any doubt, even among liberals, that the function of the Democrats, intentionally or not, is to keep existing political arrangements intact?

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Diluting Political Discourse

If you muddy the discursive waters enough, you can convince people of some pretty wild propositions.

For example, if you can convince people that Bill Clinton was a "progressive" or a "man of the Left", then this speaks to the sense in which "progressive" and "Left" have been evacuated of any substantive political meaning at all.

Richard Seymour has a nice post on this matter, pertaining to the present electoral situation in Britain. There, the Conservatives, under the leadership of David Cameron, are on the up and up and threaten to squash New Labour in the next election. But, as Seymour points out, the strange part about this is that many left-liberal voices are claiming that Cameron "isn't that bad", and even that he's a "progressive". For instance:

The question is how did such claims even become vaguely intelligible? How did 'progress' as a discourse become a byword for reaction? The obvious answer is that New Labour made this possible. On every theme I've mentioned above, every objectionable facet of Tory policy, there is a New Labour counterpart - not exact, and not necessarily as extreme, but very real nonetheless. You want a party that baits immigrants, cuts taxes for the rich, allies itself with European reactionaries, trucks with neoconservatives, and calls all this progressive? It's been the ruling government for thirteen years. You want a party that prefers free markets and 'meritocracy' to 'the old structures', 'the old class systems', etc? You want a party whose matey populism abets an elitist agenda that adulates the rich and the unelected, pampered, scum royals? You want a party whose approach to crime is to sensationalise, and blame the poor, and ethnic minorities? You want a party of moralising and social authoritarianism, hedged with a modest concession to gay rights? And calls all that progressive too? Yeah, well, I think you've got the point by now. Tony Blair and New Labour systematically marketed every crackpot Tory idea they could lay their hands on as "progressive". And now David Cameron is a "progressive".

And the same is true of the US case. One hears often about "moderate" Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) as though this were something that should meet with immediate praise. But what is the political content of "moderate" right now? If it means: for further privatizing health care, cutting taxes, constricting spending and escalating foreign wars... then this speaks to how out-of-wack our political vocabulary is. We lack even the common language to articulate our own oppressive situation. For example, if Obama really were "the Left", a "socialist", full stop.... then what could one possibly say that was critical about the status quo? If that were true, then we really would have to conclude that maybe the Right "alternative" (hah) was the way to go... but of course Obama is neither Left nor progressive, and we need not choose between the narrow pro-Business agenda of either the Democrats or the Republicans. But it isn't clear that our political vocabulary leaves us much room to make this critical point.

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Against Electoral Politics

What is politics? What is the terrain of the political? What's at stake?

Ask many people these questions and their answers will understandably point to Washington, elections, Democrats, Republicans and so on. Having an interest in politics, on this view, means watching CNN, following the inane daily hubbub on Capitol Hill, etc.

But as Alain Badiou astutely points out, "If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apolitical procedure." This is a fecund observation that is worth unpacking further.

The definition of politics offered above seems, on the face of it, uncontroversial. What should the raison d'etre of our electoral institutions be, if not to facilitate collective decision-making, organized by certain principles, aiming to unfold the new possibilities currently repressed by the dominant state of affairs?

Yet this is patently not what electoral politics are about in the US. Here, elections are about an endless, narrow see-saw maneuver between Democrat and Republican parties. Consider for a moment what this narrow back-and-forth is not: it is not a struggle between different substantive political visions. Nor is it a disagreement over how a just social order would be organized. It is, for all intents and purposes, a process of narrow bickering between two pro-business entities. Politics, if it has any place in this process at all, is merely a small, incidental side-effect.

Today we're trained to think that the highest form of political activity possible is voting for either a Democrat or a Republican. We're encouraged, then, to think that politics itself is an individualistic practice in which we go, alone, behind a curtain to decide to cave in to one or other pro-business organizations. I think it's fair to say that things haven't always been like this. At other periods in world history, there have been serious debates about big questions, about what kind of society we want to live in. It is helpful here to revisit some of the debates from the early 20th century on the Left about tactics, strategy, and elections.

At the very beginning of the 20th century, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the strongest Marxist, left-wing party in the world. The labor movement in Germany had been growing steadily in membership and in power, and it looked for a time as though the SPD was leading the charge for another, more just kind of society. The SPD's leading theoretician was Karl Kautsky, a fiercely dogmatic defender of Germany's existing parliament as a strategic means for constructing a socialist society.

An interesting debate was instigated by a polemical brochure entitled "Terrorism and Communism", penned by Kautsky, directed at discrediting the tactical and strategic trajectory of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Trotsky wrote a reply in 1920 with the same title, that was later published as a book (republished recently by Verso, and introduced by Zizek).

For Kautsky, the debate between reformists in the SPD and Bolshevik revolutionaries is one of "democracy" versus "dictatorship". He casts his own reformist view as the "democratic" alternative to the allegedly violent, impetuous and "authoritarian" strategy endorsed by the Bolsheviks. The crucial question here, however, is what does Kautsky mean by "democracy"?

He means a representative parliamentary system coupled with capitalist control of industry and social life. In other words, he conflates democracy as such with a certain kind of electoral procedure situated in the context of a particular configuration of capitalism. In short, he reduces democracy itself to the parliamentary mechanism such as it was in early 20th century capitalist Germany.

Trotsky's reply (and we might add here that Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxembourg, Lenin and others shared this view) is that we cannot speak of democracy at all unless we talk about the conditions it would require to realize it. The view is simple: you can't speak of "democracy" (or freedom and equality) in the legal sphere if workers are in chains in the social and economic spheres. You can't institute true democracy by legal procedures alone if such procedures are instituted against the backdrop of massive inequalities of power. As Slavoj Zizek puts it in the foreword to the recent Verso edition of Trotsky's text:

"For Trotsky the true stakes of the debate are not simply democracy versus dictatorship, but the class 'dictatorship' which is inscribed into the very form of parliamentary dictatorship.... the true question is... how the very field in which the total political process takes place is structured."

In other words, our question here must be: what extra-electoral conditions would have to obtain in order for democracy to be realized?

Now, surely some will object here that if this is Trotsky's view, he'd do well to eschew the language of 'dictatorship'. This objection, however, misses the mark. What Kautsky blithely dubs "democracy", Trotsky calls a form of dictatorship. In other words, parliamentary democracy under capitalism is, for Trotsky, a form of class "dictatorship". This is analogous to Rosa Luxembourg's distinction between "bourgeois democracy" and "socialist democracy", the main difficulty with "bourgeois democracy" being that there's not enough of it. It not extended to the social and economic sphere; those spheres are under the control of the capitalists who own the commanding heights of the economy.

Let me try to spell this out a little more clearly. If Trotsky and other Marxists are correct to define capitalism as a mode of social organization in which the major productive resources and institutions are privately owned by a specific class (rather than democratically, by all), then we must conclude that parliamentary procedures are compatible with a high concentration of undemocratic economic power. Another way to put the point is to lean on Marx's distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation. For Marx, the transition from feudalism to liberal capitalism represented a great step forward in that it granted a larger degree of "political" (read "legal", "electoral") equality and freedom than feudal societies allowed. But, Marx held, merely political emancipation is not enough; the bourgeois revolutions that overthrew feudalism didn't go far enough. Democracy, he argued, had to be extended not only to political/legal institutions, but to social and economic institutions as well.

Thus, if you're committed to human (rather than merely legal) emancipation, if you're committed to radically rethinking economic and social organization, Trotsky's worry is that you cannot accomplish this within the parameters of parliamentary procedures under capitalism.

Here's the argument for why this might be the case. Holders of large concentrations of economic power can make use of this power outside of the electoral arena. Capitalists can make threats. They can lay off politically active workers that are 'trouble makers', they can close factories, they can threaten democratically-elected governments with disinvestment, layoffs, etc. They may purchase and privately control and own media institutions. Often, after hundreds of years of capitalist development, they've managed wield military institutions to serve their interests.

The point here is that economic power is not relinquished without a fight, and we have no reason to expect that fight to be waged "fairly", within parliamentary bounds, by the ruling class. Even when regulations and limits are imposed upon capitalists by governments, capitalists will relentlessly deploy their economic power to game the system and find ways to get such limits and regulations repealed. In extreme cases, when it appears that a government will make real, systemic changes... the ruling class has been known to support right-wing coups and reject parliamentary democracy entirely. An instructive case study here is socialist head of state Salvador Allende in Chile circa 1970-73.

Allende was elected by a broad coalition of center-left and left-wing parties in Chile amidst uproar from the landed elites and ruling classes in Chile. When Allende tried to reform economic institutions and put land reform into law, his efforts were stonewalled and sabotaged by economic elites who used their power to "go on strike", lay off workers, suffocate the economy and try to bring the country to its knees.

Multinational corporations in Chile such as the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) set to work quickly to fight against Allende, and they weren't interested in trying to win the battle over electoral terms (a battle, the company's owners realized, they'd have little way of winning in the face of a broad popular mandate for Allende's policies). We now know from memos circulated amongst elites in ITT and the American-owned Kennecott Copper Company that their goals were to "“to strangle the Chilean economy, sow panic, and foment social disorder in order to encourage and create the opportunity for the armed forces to step in and replace Allende". Also- their influence convinced the US and related institutions like the World Bank to impose an economic blockade on Chile to help the destabilization effort.

The point of this is that all of these efforts were effective against a democratically-elected government precisely because of the concentrations of economic power under capitalism. Admittedly, "dictatorship" somewhat overstates the case, but the case of Chile in 1973 makes the point that capitalist's stranglehold on economic power must be challenged directly in order for real democracy to be possible.

So, either you are open to the reconfiguration of social/economic organization or you are not. If you are, as socialists purport to be, then you cannot be dogmatically committed to the narrow strategy of merely trying to elect certain people within predetermined parameters (e.g. Democrat or Republican). You must be committed to a broader conception of political activism, one that embraces extra-electoral struggles (strikes (conventional, sit-down, wildcat, etc.), community organization, grass-roots protest and demonstration, sit-ins, etc.) as a means to alter the entire political center of gravity. In other words, the goal of a progressive social movement is not to merely operate within narrowly circumscribed procedures prescribed by the existing order, but to dynamically create the conditions for its own success.

We've recently lived through a massive change in electoral holdings of power. In 2004, people were talking about a "permanent Republican majority". Four years later, the GOP has lost control of both chambers of Congress and the Presidency, while the Democratic majority in the Senate sky-rocketed to 60. But for all this massive changing in electoral terms, the political content of the change (as we see today) is extremely thin. The continuity between the last days of the Bush government and the Obama administration is extremely discouraging. Foreign policy has essentially stayed the same. Regulation of financial markets is about as forthcoming under Obama as under Bush in 2008. The response to the crisis of giving spectacularly large amounts of welfare to Wall Street was virtually the same under Paulson as under Geithner, in fact the "Paulson Plan" was implemented lock stock and barrel under the latter's tenure. After all of these massive interventions to save the assets of powerful economic elites, Obama even had the audacity to talk of the importance of "market solutions" and the "private sector" when discussing health care. The message was clear: massive government spending for economic elites will be forthcoming and plentiful, but all we've got fo the majority of the population is the thin gruel of laissez-faire.

Aside from snagging a bit of low-hanging fruit (raising the minimum wage, redirecting some much-needed, overdue funds into education and infrastructure), the Obama administration has not deviated from the course taken by Bush. For all the talk of change, this has been a rather smooth transition from 8 years of Bush compared to what, in electoral terms, was a major alteration of course.

What further proof do we need that the end-in-view must not be "getting Democrats elected"? Whatever else is true, the Civil Rights Act was not passed by a drive merely to "get the right people elected". Neither do not have Social Security or unemployment benefits because of electoral fetishism.

Rather than being a means of change, current Federal elections in the US are a way of staving off real change. We must not forget that the large swells of community energy, activism and volunteerism that was poured into getting Obama elected reflected real needs and real discontent with the existing order. The heartbreaking reality, however, is that the election of Obama siphoned off all of this important energy and defused it.

The question we are confronted with is: now that this swell of energy and excitement has been betrayed, what can be accomplished within the parameters of electoralism? Do we have an electoral means of holding those in power accountable? However we answer, no honest response could have anything to do with getting more Democrats elected or with staving off a Republican backlash.

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Newsmax lunatic calls for US Coup

Read about it here. Evidently Newsmax backed off the article and has since retracted it. Here's a nice chunk:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic. [...]

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”

Yup. There you have it folks. This waco-type violent paranoia is definitely gaining ground with Obama in the White House, which is as painfully clear an indication as any that reactionary forms of racist hatred still animate substantial sectors of the United States.

All McVeigh-type lunacy aside for a moment, what's most frustrating about this totally absurd narrative about Obama as a radical, 'Marxist', etc. is that it isn't even a recognizable exaggeration of what his presidency is about. If Obama were another FDR or LBJ, it would be an absurd exaggeration to say that he was a radical leftist. But at least it would be identifiable as an wild exaggeration of the character of some policies those presidents put forward (e.g. social security, Medicare, etc.).

I'm not even sure I'd want to say that calling Obama a 'radical' is a wild exaggeration in the above sense. For that to be true, it would have to be an exaggeration of something recognizably progressive that he's doing... but what is that?

What is it about Obama's policies that is pissing these lunatics off so much? What has he done that is so radical or 'fundamental' or 'irreversible'? I wish that he had even tried to do anything that fits the bills above, but it's not even clear that that's true. In so many ways, his presidency has been continuous with Bush, but the Fox News coterie of wackjobs certainly wasn't pulling this teabagging coup garbage while W was in office. What's going on here? What are they so angry about?

I suspect that much of this violent day-dreaming about the 'Obama Problem' has little to do with policies. Most of this is just racism pure and simple. No one needs any reminding about the 'birther' stuff and how much traction that got.

But there is a grain of truth to the conviction that something 'irreversible' has occurred with Obama, a black man, taking office: it was a massive blow (although hardly the final knockout) to the racism that this country was founded on and continues to be deeply infected with. And surely the paranoid bigots slurping up this sort of Newsmax tripe sense that their 'cause' is losing a long-term battle here.

Still, as someone staunchly on the Left, however, it's beyond frustrating for me to watch an emerging Right-wing backlash with no Left-wing stimulus that seems to be provoking it. It's like we're getting all of the bad reactionary baggage and none of the good that actually comes out of having a movement truly aiming to enact radical change. We get the teabagger backlash on the one hand, and a phantom "left" threat on the other. We get a Congress so tepid that it isn't even fair to call them paper-dragons, meanwhile the marginalized GOP has basically adopted Sen. Joe McCarthy's rhetorical playbook.

But why is it that in America it's as though you're always being made to navigate between reactionaries and tepid centrists? The only repose to this proto-fascist lunacy cannot just be a wholesale defense of Obama and the Democrats. But that's the either/or we're always been contorted to accept when politics only appears to us as the dialectic of lesser evils.

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Die Linke in the German Elections

Germany's genuinely left-wing party, "The Left" (Die Linke) did quite well in the Federal elections this week. 'Lenin' is calling it a breakthrough.

Before getting into why the election results might be good for the German Left, consider what a disaster it was for Germany's neoliberal 'center-Left' party, the traditionally strong SPD. The SPD suffered the worst losses in a general election since 1949. Between 2005 and this week they lost 11% of the vote. Why?

The SPD did all of the things that Obama and the Democrats have been praising since they trounced the GOP in the 2008 elections. In 2005 the SPD formed a "grand coalition" with the center-Right CDU, they spoke of compromise and gestured toward an electoral programme that pundits in the US would be quick to praise as "bipartisanship".

In 2005, the SPD's Schroder ceased to be chancellor because his party vehemently opposed forming a government with the support of the Left Party, Die Linke. Perry Anderson points out that "had the SPD and Greens been willing to do so, the three parties together would have enjoyed a robust parliamentary majority of 40." What followed was that the SPD "joined in arms with the CDU-CSU as a junior partner, unsurprisingly to its detriment".

Of course in Germany, unlike our putrid electoral situation here, the demise (or right-ward shift) of the mainstream center-left does not therefore mean more votes for the Right. Although Merkel's CDU has retained its control of government, her party received a little over a third of all the votes cast. She will form a government with the aid of the right-wing FDP (who made sizable gains since 2005), so its not the case that the CDU's victory depended on a shift of voters from SPD to CDU. The CDU didn't need a large net increase in votes to form a government.

Thus I agree with 'Lenin' that

"The media will tend to focus on the fact that Merkel can now run a right-wing tax-cutting administration in coalition with the FDP. This is hardly unimportant, but the biggest story that obtains here is the way in which the historic collapse of social democracy played out."

I think 'lenin' is absolutely right, as well, to say that the collapse of Second International social-democracy (all over Europe, from Italy, France to (soon) the UK) does not mean, necessarily, gains for the radical Left. But in Germany's case it did, and it will be important to understand why and what we can learn from their "breakthrough". It's remarkable that a party that declares it wants to overthrow capitalism is making impressive inroads and growing its ranks in one of Western Europe's wealthiest nations.

Consider how things are worlds apart in the US: should the Obama Administration shift ceaselessly to the Right and eventually lose power, Americans have at present no electoral means of challenging him from the Left. Pundits and other electioneering cretins always assume that any loss for one player in the American Duopoly necessarily entails a gain for the other. But while it's true that this does hold right now, it hardly follows that things must continue to be this way (although the assumptions of the pundits and 'experts' do a lot in the way of maintaining things as they are). I think this explains the endless apologetics from the liberal-Left about the Democrats; they feel that if they don't defend Obama at all costs that they'll therefore be aiding the Republicans.

But this need not be so. In fact, it's instructive to see, in recent cases, what many of these apologists do when there actually is a budding movement to challenge the Democrats from the Left: they balk and accuse the challengers of abetting the GOP.

Part of what's great about Die Linke's surge is that the neoliberals and compromisers in the SPD hate Die Linke, just as the Eric Alterman's of the world despise challengers like Ralph Nader. But rather than remain endlessly shackled within the tepid confines of the SPD, as do the 'progressives' in the Democratic Party, lefties in Germany are abandoning the SPD. And because many of them have voted for Die Linke, they've publicly repudiated the SPD's rightward tilt. The German Left has a means of putting pressure on the right-wing leadership of the SPD and they are using it. The SPD risks sinking into irrelevance.

Die Linke is already talkng of 'creating a broader left-wing camp', and they've got bargaining chips to make it happen. SPD will have to listen to them. There are legitimate questions about whether, tactically and politically, Die Linke should risk joining with the SPD in a coalition in the future. But, American readers, ask yourself this: what can the marginalized 'progressive caucus' in the Democratic Party do to make it's presence felt? What bargaining chips do they possess?

What's worst about the 'progressive Democrats' is that they don't even use the little clout they do have. Witness long-time supporters of single-payer like Henry Waxman repudiate his former beliefs and pull for whatever tepid bill Obama supports. Here it's always the dialectic of lesser evils. Despite the fact that the GOP was completely, totally demolished in the last 2 elections... the only licit criticisms of Obama according to the mainstream media are those that draw on the same dusty old rejoinders from the "teabag" Right. Why are they even a part of the discussion? There can be no doubt that the framing of electoral politics in the US media is consistently, fundamentally conservative, that is, in the broad sense of being preservative of existing political arrangements. With its head in the ground, mainstream media seems to always lag behind dynamic political realignments and tectonic shifts in the economy, perpetuating the same "discussions" we had about health care 'reform' in the 1990s into the present.

Yet if Obama was elected by talking about 'spreading the wealth' and fighting health insurance companies, why is his failure to accomplish these tasks immediately interpreted as a moment to consult Republicans or the Right? When Obama reneges on promises, the media suggests that there must be something wrong with the promises themselves. But why isn't the critical focus on his inability to fulfill these promises?

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Socialist Worker editorial on the defeat of health reform

(Excerpts from SocialistWorker.org):

Surrendering to the status quo

A president who was hyped as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt is conceding to the right on every question.

August 25, 2009

[...]

Certainly it was expected that the health insurance and drug companies would use their clout to try to block real health care reform. On the campaign trail last year, Obama explicitly promised to keep them in line. "I'll have the insurance and drug companies at the table," he said. "They just won't be able to buy every chair...And I'll be at the table. I'll have the biggest chair, because I'm president." Obama even promised to televise negotiations on C-SPAN.

Yet it was President Obama who empowered Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus to frame health care legislation in a closed-door session with six senators from both parties--and it was Baucus who gave Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa veto power over any deal.

Now Obama is poised to junk the so-called "public option"--a government-run insurer that was supposed to compete with private companies. Obama once championed the public option as an essential way to force private insurers and the industry generally to control runaway health care costs--now he calls it a "tiny sliver" of health care reform.

[...]

For health insurance companies, this proposal is "a bonanza," Robert Laszewski, a former health insurance executive, told the Los Angeles Times. He said the insurance companies' reaction to the plan can be summed up in a single word: "Hallelujah!"

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60 seat filibuster-proof majority

“Look, the fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option.” - Kent Conrad (D-North Dak). 7/16/09

OK. So what the fuck is the point of voting for the Democratic Party? If the Democrats can't pass low-hanging fruit like a public option (similar to RomneyCare in Mass), with a filibuster-proof 60 seat majority, what is the use?

I can already hear the litany of excuses from some on the liberal left to explain why the public option crashed and burned. But this is not only the doing of a handful of conservative Democrats in the Senate. This is a deep institutional problem with the Democratic Party, with our electoral procedures, with the weight of economic power that prevails within our political institutions.

I hate that I was right about this, but I recall being totally alienated at the Obama victory-rally amidst huge numbers of elated people in the streets. I recall feeling stressed, thinking to myself: all of this energy has been spent for this moment, but this moment is only (at best) the opening of a small amount of space for other things to happen. And what's going to ensure that they do?

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Lance Selfa Rip of the Current Health non-Reform

(via socialistworker.org)

"Given this constrained vision--where the "progressive agenda" becomes increasingly melded with the White House's agenda--even liberal complaints about Obama's concessions to corporations and "centrist" politicians fall by the wayside. Perversely, of course, this gives even greater license to the White House to make concessions to business and conservative politicians.

Until there is independent pressure from a mobilized social movement, combined with a real political challenge from Obama's left, the type of reforms--even the prospect of reforms--are likely to follow the pattern we're currently seeing in the health care debate."

In a way, I wish that Selfa was wrong about this but he's not. I can't tell you how many times I've heard from liberal friends that the problem is Max Baucus, Blue Dogs, Republicans, etc. Yes, they're all blowhards. Yes, they're doing their best to thwart reform. But they're not alone. Obama and friends are doing plenty to screw this up as well. I think most of Selfa's criticisms are right on -Obama didn't try to mobilize popular support, but tried to broker a deal among elites with the assumption that if he played their game that they would bargain, with the result that we get 'something' without having to start a fight with Big Pharma, the insurance companies, etc.

There's also the related issue of Obama's rhetoric: he speaks about reform in terms of technical points which are admitedly important in some respects, but he leaves the normative punch of why we need health reform largely out of the message.

I agree wtih Selfa. I think most liberals know all of this, but feel strongly that the Democratic Party is the best that we can do. If not Obama, then John McCain. If not Harry Reid, then Mitch McConnell. But where does this leave anyone remotely close to the Left in this country? Is there no other viable option other than to sit down, shut up and resign ourselves to health care 'reform' that's beginning to look less progressive than RomneyCare?

This is a serious dilemma, and its not hard to see where the liberals have a point here.

But its also not difficult to see that the meagre electoral Left (to the extent that there even is one) has no bargaining chips. They are marginalized in the Democratic Party. Its even worse for voters, who don't get to vote on legislation but only between a canditate from one of the two dominant parties. The voting Left is powerless; the Democrats never fear for a second that they won't get these votes, because they know that these people have nowhere else to turn. They know that anyone remotely progressive despises the Republicans and that that alone will turn them out. And it does, I've seen it. I've seen anti-war friends committed to mariage equality and social justice campaign for right-wing Democrats committed to war, homophobia and cutting funding for education. I'm hardly exempt here; I've helped out and cast many votes for 'centrist' and 'Blue Dog' Democrats.

Still, the ISO invocation to 'build an independent social movement' is appealing yet frustrating. The reason that many people don't join an independent social movement isn't that they don't agree with the ISO here; its tough work that pits one against a heavily-funded institution with shock-troops who themselves claim to be 'progressive'. Most media, 'pundits', etc. won't even take note of what you're doing- and if they do they'll just distort you. Meanwhile, they'll be playing up the next election like its the most important even of the century and making you look more and more irrelevant. Its not an easy struggle. Its not easy to see what an independent Left-wing organization should be try primarily to do -its not claer what the goal should be if the organization lacks the ability to threaten to take votes from the Democrats. Of course, building a separate party is another dilemma entirely. I'm not saying its not worth trying again -there are probably many lessons to be learned from the demise of the Green Party. Still, I'm not convinced that's the place to begin putting time and energy.

The thing that intrigued me the most about the EFCA, wasn't that the big unions would get more members. In general, I'd rather that they did, but this wasn't the most interesting part of the card check. Think of the political reverberations of having more people join a union and encounter some of the values (solidarity, community, equality) that accompany the experience of striking together, fighting for a contract, etc.

Alas, I don't know what the right way forward is. But I'm not getting sucked into the next round of elections where I am supposed to bite the bullet and canvass for Democrats (no matter how conservative).

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Lance Selfa adds to Baker's Obama-Hoover comparison

Read Selfa's piece here. I posted excerpts from the generally-excellent Baker piece, which appeared in last month's Harper's, here.

Its also worth reading economic historian Robert Brenner's excellent 2006 NLR piece on post-WWII American politics to place all of this in context. Brenner's piece is prescient. He argues, against the excited supporters of Democrats in 2006, that the political shift in 2006 (and now, it might be said, in 2008) represents not a sharp left turn, but a moment of a much broader Rightward trajectory. Although the complications arising from the deepness of global financial crisis have changed things a bit (incidentally, Brenner was one of the few people in the 90s in economics claiming that the 'irrational exuberance' of that era would crash), a survey of the first 100 days of the Obama administration bears out Brenner's thesis.

Although the FDR-Obama comparisons have (understandably) ebbed, the tendency to recall the New Deal in discussing recent events has been frequent on the liberal-left as well as elsewhere in the political spectrum.

As I mentioned in a recent post on wildcat strikes in Britain, the New Deal was hardly a unified, well-intentioned reformist package. It was a strange amalgam of different policies which had, admittedly, some Keynesian coherence. But it was a collage of different policies because of the complex political situation in the US at the time. In the early 30s, unprecedented labor militancy, sit-down strikes and so forth created a formidable political force that could not be ignored.

As Brenner points out, many in the labor movement at the time wanted to create a separate Labor Party (or a Farmer-Labor party) that would give labor an undiluted political arm with independence from the Democrats/Republicans. Despite the fact that many rank-and-file initially voted within their unions to pursue this option (the newly-formed UAW, for example, refused at first to support the Democratic ticket), union leadership ultimately refused to go this route. Labor decided to get behind the Democrats, and FDR and the New Deal coalition got a legion of loyal electoral footsoldiers for more than a generation.

But the Democrats are not called the 'graveyard of american social movements' for nothing. Soon it became apparent that as long as the two-party system was intact, labor would have little choice but to vote for whatever Democrat was up for office. It is unsurprising that after the 1930s, labor consistently lost clout and political influence. By the end of WWII, labor militancy was effectively defanged and the Republicans and conservative Democrats had little trouble ramming the anti-union Taft-Hartley bill through the Congress, overriding Truman's veto. By the 1980s, it wasn't even difficult for Reagan to stomp out and demoralize the Air-traffic controller strike.

Absent the militancy that fomented the watershed reforms of the 1930s, I doubt that we will get any changes comparable to the creation of Social Security, the introduction of the Progressive Income Tax, or the Minimum Wage.

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Redbaiting Obama's Climate Czar

From the (always reactionary) Washington Times:

"Obama climate czar has socialist ties
Group sees 'global governance' as solution

Stephen Dinan

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group's congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world's social democratic political parties such as Britain's Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

[...] "

Yes... 'global governance'. What a frightening idea! That governments might join together in halting the unbrideled quest by the barons of global capitalism to ravage the environment and burn down the last tree on the planet to enable their stock to increase by 1%.

Socialist International says it 'supports socialism'. What a revelation! *An accusatory, balding old white man's voice snarls*: "Carol Browner, are you or have your ever been a member of the Communist Party? Are you a member of the Screenwriters Guild of America?"

The sort of 'socialism' supported by the Socialist International is the most tepid, third-wayist, reformist incarnation of European labor/social-democratic parties on offer in the world. (Like most social-democratic european parties, their statement of principles is more attractive than the actual (neoliberal) policies they support).The group does have a few semi-radical parties as members, but these are not to be found on the Continent. The German SPD (who is now in a coalition with the CDU and whose leadership leans more toward the CDU than Die Linke, the only serious leftist party in Germany), the pathetic Parti Socialiste Francais, the Blair-ized British Labour Party and the now powerless Italian Democratic Party (formerly Democrats of the Left, formerly the PCI (the party of Gramsci) back when Italian Eurocommunism was a serious movement) are all members of the Socialist International. How ignorant would you have to be to think that Browner's membership in this organization was in any sense subversive (nevermind that subversive should be a term of praise rather than rebuke!)?

"Mr. Obama's transition team said Mrs. Browner's membership in the organization is not a problem and that it brings experience in U.S. policymaking to her new role."

Gasp! You mean he didn't find her when he found out that she was a Stalinist agent!?

"Her name has been removed from the Gore organization's Web site list of directors, and the Audubon Society issued a press release about her departure from that organization."

Good thing. Gore and Audubon sure wouldn't want to have to admit that they had a dirty Stalinist thug in their organizations.

Most Americans don't have any clue what socialism is. And how would they? Our culture, history books, etc. are all saturated with Cold War tropes... meanwhile the tradition of home-grown radical movements (like the IWW, the Socialist Party under Debs, the Black Panthers, etc.) is completely occluded from most mainstream sources of information.

Even in graduate-level political theory courses, you can frequently hear 'progressive' students wondering out loud why anyone would mention Marx anymore given that we've "been there and done that". The equation of Marxism with Stalinism and Socialism with the Soviet Union didn't emerge from thin air... neither did it emerge from any particular student's 'individual critical faculties.' Tropes of this kind represent the most crude legacy of Cold War ideology, pure and simple. Flavor-of-the-month fans of gentrified versions of post-structuralism (itself born of a reaction against a particular kind of Marxism and the experience of post-68 Maoism) would do well to canvass the history of ideas once in a while.

Seriously though, the WT article is truly disgusting... this sort of Redbaiting makes my stomach turn. When will this kind of garbage end? The Washington Times is famous for this kind of trash, but it would hardly surprise me if this had been printed in the Washington Post or the New York Times.

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