John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker. He has twice won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US.
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What they don’t want you to know about Canadian health care
As with most public policy issues, the American public is being fed a steady stream of untruths as part of the current debate over Obama’s health care initiatives. I’ve never understood the willingness of many Americans to take at face value the claims of politicians (and the mainstream media) who are so clearly controlled by corporate interests, but …
One of the main whipping boys in the current debate on health care policy in the United States is Canada’s health care system. US politicians and the media paint a picture of Canada’s “socialized” health care as bleak, gray queues of people lined up for months awaiting appointments with physicians not of their own choosing, for procedures that are inaccessible.
After living and working in Canada for six years there is no doubt in my mind that a single-payer health care system is better for individuals and society.
My family has had quick access to primary care physicians and specialists, short wait times in several visits to emergency rooms, and no co-pays. We have had family members and friends receive fast and high quality treatments for serious diseases over long periods of time, with no medical bills.
The Canadian system is not perfect, but unlike the U.S., where tens of millions of people have no or limited access to medical care (while the rich have unlimited access), the Canadian system values equal access to medical treatment for everyone.
Some Americans go to great lengths to deny the benefits of Canada’s universal health care, readily believing the lies that spew from the politicians and news media that serve the interests of US insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Take my sister, for example. She has never set foot in Canada, yet she argues with me about my own first-hand experiences with Canadian health care telling me that the “socialism” of Canadian medicine does not allow me to choose my own doctor, limits my access to care, and is run by a vast army of government bureaucrats hell bent on stamping out “freedom of choice.” There seems to be no room for the facts in the current debate on health care in the US, nevertheless I’ll offer up a few.
In the 1960s the US chose to provide health care for the elderly (Medicare) and poor (Medicaid), while Canada adopted universal coverage for hospital and physician services. All Canadians have insurance for hospital and physician services with no deductibles or co-pays. And most provinces provide care that goes beyond these areas to include home and long-term care, prescriptions and medical equipment, though there are co-pays for these coverages. Michael M. Rachlis, a Toronto physician and health policy analyst, has compared the results of these choices and identifies a number of lessons the US could learn from Canada on health care.
First, Rachlis notes that a single-payer system would eliminate most of the coverage problems in the US. The US spends 16% of its GDP on heath care compared to 10% in Canada—a difference of $800 billion which is almost entirely devoted to overhead costs instead of patient services. Rachlis points out that “Canadians don’t need thousands actuaries to set premiums or thousands of lawyers to deny care” and that US Medicare has up to 90% lower administrative costs than private health insurers.
Secondly, single-payer systems reduce duplication of administrative costs and allow lower prices to be neogtiated and, as a result of the difference in spending for non-patient care, Canadians actually get more services. Canadians see the doctor more often than Americans and take more drugs. Canadians have more lung transplants and get less heart surgery (but not so much less that they are more likely to die of heart attacks). Canadians live almost three years longer than Americans and their infant mortality is 20 per cent lower than in the US.
The bottom line according to Rachlis is that single-payer plans work because their funding goes to services not to overhead (and profits).
The Canadian system is not perfect, there are waits for elective care, and Rachlis notes that chronic disease management could be much improved. But, according to the Commonwealth Fund of New York has noted these are problems that Canada shares with the US.
The huge influence that drug and insurance companies weld over government is part of the explanation for why there is such resistance to universal health care among policy makers in the US.
But another piece of the puzzle is that most Americans are ignorant of what’s going on north of the border and thus more susceptible to being mislead by interests vested in the status quo. Rachlis points out that,
“The US media, legislators, and even presidents have claimed that our “socialized” system doesn’t let us choose our own doctors. In fact, Canadians have free choice of physicians. It’s Americans these days who are restricted to “in plan” doctors.
To top it all off, a recent study by Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives—Canada’s Quiet Bargain: The benefits from public spending – pdf—indicates that the majority of Canadians enjoy a higher quality of life because public services funded by their taxes come at a solid bargain.
The study concludes that an average middle-income family in Canada would have to spend more than half its pay check to buy health care, education and the other ‘free’ public services now paid for with tax dollars. The study shows middle‐income Canadian families enjoy public services worth about $41,000—or 63% of their income. Even households earning $80,000-$90,000 a year enjoy public services benefits equivalent to about half of their income. Yet another lesson to be learned, if the US was willing to pay attention to what goes on north of the border.
Rouge Forum Update: The good and bad resistance and More!
Dear Friends,
The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil page is up and updated at www.rougeforum.org.
Remember, nominations for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee can be made to Community Coordinator Adam Renner by August 15.
On the Capitalist Education for War and Inequality Front:
Obama to Schools: Change Tenure Laws or Else: The Ed Stim is Merit Pay
UC System Demands 9% Tuition Hike and 8% Pay Cut While Class Size Booms
CSU Boss Wants 20% Tuition Hike
Substance News carries the wrap up of the National Education Association Rep Assembly
Linda Chavez, a top aide to the American Federation of Teachers’ Albert Shanker, testifies against Sotomayor
On “The Depression can only be a passing fancy” Front:
Paul Craig Roberts: “This should tell even the most dimwitted patriot who “their” government represents.”
Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs and the Great American Bubble Machine
Chart on the Waves of California Jobs Lost
Reuters: Foreclosures Hit Record High
The International War of the Rich on the Poor Front:
The Bushamagogue Assassination Schemes
Michael Klare’s Shocker: Iraq as the New Oil Pump
And the Resistance (bad example/good example) Front:
So Long EFCA: Union Bosses Can Deliver—nothing
The many crises grow around us apace. Unemployment and foreclosures mean an eradicated tax base, meaning more demands for cuts on education and services, increased taxation of those who have a little, more PR to crush hope in the sense that nothing can be done, more police activity to raise funds and tamp down resistance, and more spectacles. On the war front, more war—for oil, regional control, that is, profits, using the children of the poor to fight the children of the poor on behalf of the rich in their homelands.
What stops the madness? Understanding that the core issue of our time is the relationship of rising color-coded inequality to the potential of mass class-conscious resistance. That has been the project of the Rouge Forum, connection reason to power, for more than a decade. Please join us and help lead the fight-backs that will come.
Thanks to Bob, Al, Sean, Amber, Tony, Kino, Marisol, the Dean, Candace, Sally, Sheri, Barb and Ken (yes, that is right), Donna, Brian, Adam and Gina, Koli, Jesus, Ashwana, Bill, Joe, Dariah, the Susans, and Ann.
Good luck to us, every one.
r
Banks “frankly own the place” (Congress that is)
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Glenn Greenwald reports,
Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis “own” the U.S. Congress — according to one of that institution’s most powerful members — demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.
Greenwald’s piece for Salon (and republished at Global Research), clearly illustrates how the US government functions as an executive committee of the rich when it comes to handling the economic crisis.
Greenwald points to the revolving door from Congress to K Street lobbyists; how Goldman Sachs has a lock on US Treasury jobs and is funding Congressional banking committee members like Evan Byah; and just happens to post a $1.8 billion profit, just coincidentally of course.
And why isn’t there more outrage? Greenwald thinks its because of what Matt Taibbi calls the “peasant mentality” of Americans:
After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like [Glenn] Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. . . .
Actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish . . . can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff.
Greenwald concludes,
That Congress is fully owned and controlled by a tiny sliver of narrow, oligarchical, deeply corrupted interests is simultaneously so obvious yet so demonized … that even Durbin’s explicit admission will be largely ignored. Even that extreme of a confession … hardly causes a ripple.
We need to start making ripples and waves…
Historians Against the War adopt new, broader statement
Historians Against the War
Historians Against the War have ratified a new, broader statement of aims that goes beyond criticism of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The new statement condemns US imperialism, and importantly, links US military aggression to global capitalism.
As historically minded activists, scholars, students, and teachers, we stand opposed to wars of aggression, military occupations of foreign lands, and imperial efforts by the United States and other powerful nations to dominate the internal life of other countries.
In particular, we continue to demand a speedy end to US military involvement in Iraq, and we insist on the withdrawal, not the expansion, of US and NATO military forces in Afghanistan. We also call for a sharp reduction of US military bases overseas, and an end to US financial and military support of regimes that repress their people, or that occupy the territories of other peoples. We favor as well a drastic redirection of national resources away from military spending and toward urgently needed domestic programs.
We deplore the secrecy, deception, and distortion of history, the repeated violation of international law, and the attack on civil liberties domestically that have accompanied US policies of war and militarism—policies that became especially belligerent in the aftermath of September 11.
We fear that the current, rapidly escalating crisis of global capitalism, which is creating suffering worldwide, will lead to escalating wars abroad and intensifying repression at home. We support solutions to this crisis that seek to enrich the lives and increase the power of people globally, and protect their fundamental human rights. We are unalterably opposed to any attempts to solve the crisis at their expense.
We are aware that, in the words of the late historian William Appleman Williams, “empire as a way of life” has long characterized the United States and is not easily changed. However, we are mindful as well that the current conjunction of international and domestic crises offers an opportunity to alter longstanding destructive patterns. As historians, we believe that we can and must make a contribution to the broad, international movements for peace, democracy, and environmental and social justice. In pursuing our objectives, we look toward building and joining alliances with a wide variety of intellectual and activist groups that share our concerns.
People who are in substantial agreement (broadly defined) with the statement are invited to go to the web site and become members of HAW.
One way NCLB transforms public money into private profit
Today the New York Daily News reports that Champion Learning Center pulled in more than $21 million dollars from the New York City Education Department in the past two years for tutoring NYC students.
The No Child Left Behind Act requires outsourcing of tutoring for students in schools that don’t meet their test score targets.
Champion’s contract with NY Ed Department shows they received $79 per hour for tutoring sessions and that each student could receive up to four hours of tutoring per week—or $320 per student, per week.
Champion paid its part-time tutors an average of $17 an hour—the tutors are mostly college students with no teaching experience. That’s a cool $62 in overhead for Champion for every hour its employees spent tutoring a child.
“We received very little training in our orientation,” said one college student hired by Champion. “They just told us to follow the instructions in the test prep workbooks they gave us.”
Champion hired the student and one of her friends at the same time. Both say they were offered only $15 per hour for their work. In addition, they were told they would have to pay transportation costs to each child’s home and they were required to pay a $150 fee each for the cost of fingerprinting and a security check before they could start work.
The Daily News reports that Champion has tutored nearly 9,000 city students this year and is one of dozens of private, for-profit companies with state approval to provide tutoring services under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Yet another example of education deform in the USA. And Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan are only ramping up the emphasis that NCLB puts on test scores and the shift of public money in to private profits.
Finance oligarchy captures US government; US government preps for civil unrest
The conventional wisdom, to this point, has been that current economic crisis cannot be as bad as The Great Depression. Conventional wisdom is apparently changing.
Last week, renowned investor George Soros said the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.
Soros believes the current economic crisis has created more severe turbulence than the Great Depression and former Fed chairman Paul Volker, speaking at the same conference at Columbia University, agrees: “I don’t remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world,” Volcker said.
Referring to events in Septmeber 2008, when Lehman Brothers went under, Soros said, “We witnessed the collapse of the financial system. It was placed on life support, and it’s still on life support. There’s no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom.”
The bailout money is being abused in a number of ways, all of which recycle bailout cash back to corporate elites and the political class:
- Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has criticize AIG, not for using bailout cash to give huge bonuses to its executives, but for repaying, in full, its investment banking partners—steering additional federal dollars to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase and others when they already were already being propped up by Washington.
- And, Newsweek reports that filings with the Federal Election Commission reveal that the political action committees of five big TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) recipients doled out $85,300 to members of Congress in the first two months of this year—with most of the cash going to those who serves on committees who oversee the TARP program. For example,
“Bank of America (which got $15 billion in bailout money) sent out $24,500 in the first two months of 2009, including $1,500 to and another $15,000 to members of the House and Senate banking panels. Citigroup ($25 billion) dished out $29,620, including $2,500 to House GOP , who also got $10,000 from UBS which, while not a TARP recipient, got $5 billion in bailout funds as an AIG “counterparty.”
But Spitzer and Newsweek are talking small potatoes compared to the Simon Johnson’s assessment of the current economic crisis. In “The Quite Coup” (The Atlantic, March 2009), Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, says that that the finance industry has “effectively captured our government” not through violence or bribes (Abramoff and K Street notwithstanding), but
Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.
What we have is an ideological coup. The government quite clearly acting as the executive committee of the rich. Johnson explains why we have been been denied the pleasure of of seeing fat cats jumping out of Wall Street skyscrapers—the financial oligarchy remains in control, blocking essential reforms and continuing to push us toward the Greatest Depression.
Johnson’s article is the most clearly reasoned, knowledgeable, and accessible piece I’ve read on root causes of the current crisis and he presents a “tried and true” strategy for solving it too—IMF shock therapy. He likens the U.S. economic and financial crisis to what has been seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets) like South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again).
In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.
The financiers who created the crisis with the able assistance of Wall Street alumni in government (particularly ex-Goldman Sachs executives who have been ensconced at the Treasury Department for multiple administrations) are now, according to Johnson, “using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.” Well, the financiers are the government.
For Johnson the two major, interrelated problems are the banking sector “that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate” and “a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.” On the former, he suggests the IMF’s nationalization approach. On the latter, Johnson suggests replacing our current elites, with a new batch. Hmm.
While Johnson’s analysis is compelling, his solutions, unsurprisingly, aren’t—two scenarios: IMF approach solves the problem or catastrophic global depression smartens up the elites).
Meanwhile the US government moves forward to on plans to use the military to control civil unrest as a result of the collapsing economy, as legislation to establish internment camps on US military bases has been introduced into the House of Representatives.
Doesn’t look to me like the finance oligarchy is planning to step down any time soon.
As the economic crisis sparks upheaval globally, analysts fear possibility of class war in the USA
As global capitalism implodes there is has been a marked uptick in social upheaval worldwide and now establishment analysts are expressing their concerns about “class conflict” and “civil war” in the USA.
The Economic Meltdown Sparks Global Unrest
The financial crisis has sparked unrest globally and particularly across Europe, with demonstrations, strikes, and protests in 16 European countries. Here are a just a few examples:
- Tens of thousands of workers marched in Lisbon, Portugal on March 13 against the policies of the Socialist government, which unions say are increasing unemployment and favoring the rich at a time of crisis;
- Hundreds of workers at Bulgaria’s Kremikovtzi steel mill protested on March 9 over planned lay-offs and unpaid salaries, demanding the Socialist-led government find a buyer for the insolvent plant; thousands of police officers marched in Sofia on Sunday to demand a 50 percent wage rise and better working conditions;
- In Greece, the fatal police shooting of a 15-year old in December sparked the country’s worst riots in decades, fueled by anger at economic hardships and youth unemployment. Anarchists and left wing guerrilla groups have followed up with a wave of attacks against banks and police; Greek unions, representing about 2.5 million workers, have also staged repeated protests against the government saying its measures to tackle the global crisis only burden the poor;
- Last month over 100,000 people marched against cutbacks in Ireland.
High unemployment rates have led to protests in Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.
Last month, a half-million Mexican truckers shut down the countries highways to protest high fuel prices.
In December, Russian riot police busted up protests in Vladivostok against new taxes intended to “help prop up Russia’s domestic car industry and prevent people buying cheaper, imported products.” BBC reports that the protests were fuelled by the severe impact of the global economic crisis on Russia. According to Newsweek, “the Russian Interior Ministry set up a special command center in Moscow, packed with surveillance equipment designed to deal with street unrest. The Duma, on Kremlin instructions, added seven new articles to the criminal code including a law that makes “participating in mass disorders” such as the one in Vladivostok a ‘crime against the state.'” 800,000 Russians lost their jobs in December and January, making the total number of unemployed more than 6 million or 8.1 percent. Gennady Gudkov, former KGB colonel and current chair of the Duma’s security committee, said, “We are expecting mass unemployment and mass riots. There will be not enough police to stop people’s protests by force.”
There a have been massive general strikes in the French territories of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion. The general strike in Guadeloupe prompted the French government to fly in riot police (Guadeloupe is a French “overseas department” in the Caribbean). And while the general strike lasted 6 weeks—it ended on March 4 with an agreement among the strike collective, the employers federation and local and French governments, which granted 20 of the strikers primary demands and set out negotiations on a long list of remaining issues—strikes and protests continue, involving tens of thousands of workers.
The agreement to end the Gaudeloupe strike , called the “Jacques Bino Accord”, identifies the underlying cause of discord as “the present economic and social situation existing in Guadeloupe [that] results from the perpetuation of the model of the plantation economy”. An economy “based on monopoly privileges and abuses of dominant positions that generate injustices.” The accord calls for an end to these obstacles “by establishing a new economic order enhancing the status of everyone and promoting new social relationships”.
Just as the general strike ended in Guadeloupe, social unrest over economic conditions spread to Réunion (a French “overseas department” in the Indian Ocean).
There is a definite pattern developing world wide. And now, US elites are starting to worry about what might happen if the American workers take action as a result of their frustrations with massive economic inequalities.
USA Prepares for Class War
In his latest monthly commentary (Mar. 15, 2009, Commentary No. 253), sociologist and world-systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein discusses the breakdown of taboos as the world’s economy continues to disintegrate.
He notes, for example, that “nationalization” of banks and industry is now being seriously discussed by establishment intellectuals and analysts such as Alan Greenspan, Senator Lindsay Graham, and economist Alan Blinder.
But Wallerstein’s most dramatic example of the breakdown of taboos is the open discussion of the possibility of class war breaking out in the USA. Wallerstein says that “after hearing nationalization proposals by arch-conservative notables, we are now hearing serious discussions about the possibilities of civil war in the United States. Zbigniew Brzezinski, apostle of anti-Communist ideology and President Carter’s National Security Advisor, appeared on a morning television talk show on February 17, and was asked to discuss his previous mention of the possibility of class conflict in the United States in the wake of the worldwide economic collapse.”
In Brzezinski’s interview with Joe Scarborough on MSNBC about his recently published book—America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy, co-authored with another former National Security Advisor (to Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush) Brent Scowcroft—Brezenzki was straightforward about the belief that class war in America is real possibility:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You also talked about the possibility of class conflict.
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I was worrying about it because we’re going to have millions and millions of unemployed, people really facing dire straits. And we’re going to be having that for some period of time before things hopefully improve. And at the same time there is public awareness of this extraordinary wealth that was transferred to a few individuals at levels without historical precedent in America…And you sort of say to yourself: what’s going to happen in this society when these people are without jobs, when their families hurt, when they lose their homes, and so forth?
We have the government trying to repair: repair the banking system, to bail the housing out. But what about the rich guys? Where is it? [What are they] doing?
Brzezinski went on to compare the current economic meltdown to the “Panic of 1907”:
It sort of struck me, that in 1907, when we had a massive banking crisis, when banks were beginning to collapse, there were going to be riots in the streets. Some financiers, led by J.P. Morgan, got together. He locked them in his library at one point. He wouldn’t let them out until 4:45 AM, until they all kicked in and gave some money to stabilize the banks: there was no Federal Reserve at the time.
Where is the monied class today? Why aren’t they doing something: the people who made billions, millions. I’m sort of thinking of Paulson, of Rubin [former treasury secretaries]. Why don’t they get together, and why don’t they organize a National Solidarity Fund in which they call on all of those who made these extraordinary amounts of money to kick some back in to [a] National Solidarity Fund?
Brzezinski continued saying,
“And if we don’t get some sort of voluntary National Solidarity Fund, at some point there’ll be such political pressure that Congress will start getting in the act, there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots!
Wallerstein points out that “almost simultaneously” LEAP/Europe a European agency that issues monthly confidential bulletins for its clients—politicians, public servants, businessmen, and investors—devoted its February issue to global geopolitical dislocation, discussing the possibility of civil war in Europe, in the United States, and Japan; and foreseeing a “generalized stampede” that will lead to clashes, semi-civil wars.
Wallerstein quotes the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin as saying:
“If your country or region is a zone in which there is a massive availability of guns, the best thing you can do…is to leave the region, if that’s possible.”
And Wallerstein also points out that, “the only one of these countries which meets the description of massively available guns is the United States. The head of LEAP/Europe, Franck Biancheri, noted that ‘there are 200 million guns in circulation in the United States, and social violence is already manifest via gangs.’ The experts who wrote the report asserted that there is already an ongoing emigration of Americans to Europe, because that is ‘where physical danger will remain marginal.'”
Wallerstein emphases that “these analyses are not coming from left intellectuals or radical social movements.…Verbal taboos are broken only when such people are truly fearful. The point of breaking the taboos is to try to bring about major rapid action – the equivalent of J.P. Morgan locking the financiers in his home in 1907.”
And US elites are obviously fearful enough to start planning for military responses to potential social upheaval as a result of the collapsing economy.
Last November, the US War College’s Strategic Studies Institute posited a number of “strategic surprises” that the country should be prepared for, including potential for disruption and violence caused by the economy’s failure. The report Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development, says “widespread civil violence inside the US would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”
And now, for the first time ever, US military units are staged and are training inside the country to address civil unrest rising from inequality. The Army Times has reported on the US Northern Command’s (NORTHCOM) deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Combat Brigade Team (BCT) on U.S. soil for “civil unrest” and “crowd control” duties. The 5,000-member force was one of first units deployed in Baghdad.
If politicians dressed like NASCAR drivers
Good Magazine shows us what politicans would look like if they were as honest as NASCAR drivers about their corporate overlords.
The Obamagoge and Capital vs The People
The Obamagoge and Capital vs The People
By Rich Gibson
19 million US homes stand vacant today. 600,000 people lost jobs in December, 2 million in all of 2008. The layoff rate only accelerates. Soon, public services will founder and homes will be re-valued, taxes unpaid. Every bit of this is coded with the sharpest end of many sticks aimed at those who were born with the least–but encompassing everyone who must work to live. It’s a whirlwind that is not going to end soon. In schools, we will see more and more kids homeless or moved by foreclosures, more hungry, sleepy kids, more incoherent delinquency, made reasonable only by a grasp of social circumstances.
The One who I named The Obamagogue seeks to use Keynesian measures to solve the waterfall of economic collapse and lost wars. Keynes was an elitist and an active racist who despised working people, who thought only the most favored should rule, but he sought to save capitalism. The myth is that he did.
He didn’t. Henry Morganthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury recognized that in the late thirties when he wrote that all that Keynesian spending had done little or nothing.
What ended the Great Depression was WW 2. Capitalism loves outright destruction. Thrives on that kind of chaos, and as an utterly fickle system, goes off and lets who ever wins at a given moment ride it.
What The Obamgogue’s spending will do is to bring out the lowest forms of opportunism in every sector of society which will, in effect, be saying, “what about ME!” That is why we see, right now, the AFL-CIO backing the most reactionary of the bailout measures, US protectionism.
It is also why we see the California Teachers Association leadership demanding a 1% sales tax hike, the most regressive of all taxes which will hit poor people hard, abandoning school workers’ most valuable allies, parents of children who need those educators the most.
So far, depending on which source one likes, maybe a trillion dollars has been doled out or will be doled out to the banksters by their procurers, the politicians.
That number will double, and another one or two trillion will go to the wars, which the US is going to lose (Afghans drove 300,000 Soviet troops out of their country, with help from the US—are we to think the Russians and Chinese don’t remember?).
There is, as Chalmers Johnson (author of Nemesis) insists, a relationship between imperialist expenditures and the economic collapse, something that few economists are willing to recognize, just as few Obamagogueites in education are not willing to admit that schools and capitalism exist in a relationship.
Arne Duncan is no mistake. He will intensify the three pronged project of most schooling: more curricula regimentation to regulate what is taught and how it is taught, to use high stakes tests to sort kids, and to deepen the militarization of schools. Where privatization is serviceable, Duncan will back privatization. Where he can get the working class to pay, through their taxes, for the mis-education of our children, he will do that. Arne Duncan leads, not public schools, but capitalist schools. Those who did not foresee this before The Obamagogue came to power should see it now, and say so.
Those who now claim The Obamagogue “betrayed them,” after a year of supporting his demagogic campaign and contributing to what only can be called national hysteria, should own up to the fact that their entire method of analysis was wrong, that they betrayed hundreds, maybe thousands of people themselves, and issue a self criticism about exactly why they got things completely wrong.
Is it not odd that nobody in power suggests that the way to halt foreclosures and keep the economy afloat is to just direct-pay people’s mortgages for a time certain, if they can prove they cannot pay?
But that is not how capitalist democracy, which is not democracy but an executive committee of the rich ruling behind populist rhetoric, bearing the same connection to democracy that the Pope does to, “do unto others,” works. Such a mortgage program would send up howls about “personal responsibility,” “welfare queens,” “socialism,” that were not sent up when the banksters began the robbery that continues today behind capital’s new sword and shield: The Obamagogue.
In education, a similar ploy might work. If we are to measure kids’ worth by test scores, and thus the wealth and health of the nation, why not just give the kids the test on the first day of school and simply work on it the rest of the year until everyone passes? But that would be cheating, eh?
But, beyond tongue in cheek measures, what is needed is a mass movement of resistance, rank and filers throwing off the bogus mis-leaders who steer struggle away from direct action, real resistors promoting test boycotts and freedom schools, and driving the Empire’s recruiters from campuses; in communities moving families right back into homes they are evicted from, at work places—no concessions, none, not one step back, in fact we want MORE and we will fight to get it, seizing plants, schools and properties; in the military, simply standing down, walking away from the wars for oil and profits; in sum, against the system of capital itself as it has obviously failed miserably everywhere in the world.
If we do not fight back, we will only see sharpened depression and war. Indeed the depth of that will be determined by the amount of resistance. Besides, the only way to be a truly whole person today, to be more than a loyal servant of Empire, is to protest and to join with like-minded people who, organized, can form a movement to win.
The Rouge Forum Conference is May 14 to 17 in Ypsilanti Michigan, Eastern Michigan U. You are welcome to submit a proposal or just come and join us.