Grave Diggers
by Stephen Fleischman
I didn’t believe I’d ever see it.
Grave diggers at work.
It’s an honest profession, I know. Bodies need to be buried. Right now they’re working at a frantic pace. You can barely hear the moaning for the swishing of the shovels.
There are bodies lying all around. Lehman Brothers (both of them), Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and other familiar names we’ve seen on television. Some of the dying are trying to survive by clinging to each other. They can come up with all kinds of Byzantine arrangements. But most of them are too far gone. They need to be gotten out of the way before the stench of the toxic assets becomes overwhelming.
Spurred on by their foreman, Hank Paulson, who is only the Secretary of the Treasury, the diggers are working at breakneck speed. You’ve got Bob Rubin, one time arbitrage expert for Goldman Sachs, an old crony of Hank and a pal of Bill Clinton in whose administration he learned to swing a shovel. You’ve got Joe Cassano, formerly Chief Executive Officer of American International Group’s Derivatives Unit. Cassano’s business was underwriting a huge proportion of the global credit bubble – including the vast American subprime mortgage market. And as house prices in the US fell, the AIG books began to unravel. You’ve got Richard Fuld, Jr. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc., under Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection, one brokerage firm the government didn’t think worth bailing out. You’ve got John J. Mack, Morgan Stanley’s chief. The New York Times says Jack Mack, just “cannot catch his breath”. His bank was hit hard by the wallop of the market, its share price plummeting 26% to $12.45. Jack angered many hedge funds by getting regulators to restrict short sellers. It didn’t last long. Within twenty-four hours, regulators lifted the temporary ban. But Jack wasn’t out of the woods. His cohorts were at him again when Morgan Stanley tried a Hail Mary by fomenting a deal to raise $9 billion from Mitsubishi UFJ in Japan but with the way the market is there, it doesn’t look too promising. But Jack is pretty good at wielding a shovel.
Back in the middle of the 19th Century, a young man in Germany with a full head of hair and a bushy beard predicted all this would happen.. He made the most extensive analysis of the workings of the capitalist system to that time. He wrote a book called “Das Kapital”; its first volume was published in 1867.
When the authorities didn’t like what they read, they kicked Karl Heinrich Marx out of Germany. He spent most of the rest of his life in Paris, Brussels and London meeting with other budding socialists and making trouble. He participated in the organization known as the International Workingmen’s Association, otherwise known as the “First International”. He also finished writing the other three volumes of his book with his collaborator, Friedrick Engels.
They spent a lot of time at the British Museum in London.
Marx predicted that the clash, under capitalism, would come between the bourgeoisie and the working class. You don’t hear those words today—bourgeoisie—working class. No Siree. You hear entrepreneur—working families—working together as one big family, we are told. That’s because the bourgeoisie (establishment) doesn’t want you to understand the nature of the class struggle or to question where “profit” comes from.
That’s the question. What is the source of profit?
It was a monumental discovery of Marx. It was a discovery that ranked with Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Sigmund Freud’s ego, super-ego and the id.
Profit, Marx proved, is the gain capitalists receive by paying workers less than the full value of their labor. Here’s how it works: In a free labor system, under capitalism, labor is a commodity like any other. You pay your worker a wage that represents only a part payment for the value he produces. You have only to extract the surplus value that the worker contributes to the making of the product. You call it profit and say it is derived from entrepreneurial skill, reward for taking risks, from the machinery, the land, or other such gibberish. Once you extract the surplus value the worker creates, let him be free to go his own way and the devil take the hindmost. There is always a plentiful supply of labor to be had.
What! Our revered capitalist system is based on out-and-out thievery! The capitalist steals the surplus value of the labor the worker puts into the commodity being produced! What a discovery!
Marx made another earthshaking discovery. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction. “What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
Is that what we’re seeing now in the USA?
We’re a long way from socialism even though we’re nationalizing part of our financial structure. Perhaps Socialism is sneaking in through the back door. It might not be such a bad idea!
Under capitalism, the assault on labor has been overwhelming, continuous, inhuman and destructive from the beginning of the industrial revolution to this very day. No wonder unions are dysfunctional and chaotic. So are most of their leaders. If they’re not coerced, co-opted or corrupted, they’re framed, jailed or neutralized in some way. Only when capitalism is in the throes of crisis, deep depression and near collapse can labor leaders like Eugene V. Debs or John L. Lewis emerge.
Marx believed that capitalism, like previous economic systems will lead to its own destruction. Capitalism cuts from under its own feet the very foundation on which it produces and appropriates products. What it creates, in the process, is its own grave-diggers.
Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, capitalism, itself, will be replaced by another form, be it communism or some form of socialism allowing for a public and private sector in the economy.
There are few parts of the world that were not significantly touched by Marxist ideas in the course of the twentieth century.
The Razzle Dazzle
by Stephen Fleischman
Razzle Dazzle ‘em
Give ‘em an act with lots of flash in it
And the reaction will be passionate
Give ‘em the old hocus pocus…
Bead and feather ‘em
Razzle dazzle ‘em
And they’ll never catch wise!–Richard Gere
“Chicago”
We’ve been through two weeks of bread and circuses. Nothing new. It’s an old tradition, an ancient Roman metaphor for people choosing food and fun over freedom.
The Democratic and Republican presidential conventions gave us bread and circuses without the bread. They’re history, now. The show is on the road.
Barack Obama may have some razzle left but John McCain’s dazzle has fizzled and his “Straight Talk Express” is something closer to a morgue on wheels. But we have the Alaskan Baracuda, the VP nominated Sarah Palin, to make up for it.
Sarah is a hard Christian right-winger and it’s obvious her selection was made to shore up McCain’s Evangelical base, if not to corral some of Hillary Clinton’s disgruntled supporters. Sarah has enhanced her anti-abortion, pro-life credentials by bringing a Downs Syndrome child into the world, apparently to advance her political career.
The vice-presidential pick on the Democratic side wasn’t much better. Joe Biden, establishment hack, supporter of war from Serbia to Iraq and congenital plagiarist, knocked Barack Obama off his high road. Not much hope and change in Joe Biden. We’ll see how well he does against the Baracuda in the upcoming vice-presidential debate.
“The Federal Election Commission (FEC) - the body that supposedly enforces campaign finance laws in this country - has been out of business for more than six months,” says Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone Magazine (Aug, ’08). In a hard-hitting investigative report, ‘Candidates for Sale’, he provides irrefutable evidence, with facts and numbers, showing that both candidates, McCain and Obama, are in the pockets of the corporate oligarchy - the same big donors who will expect to have their way no matter who wins. “Normally,” says Taibbi, “the FEC tries to root out infractions and loopholes - fining campaigns for incomplete reporting, or for taking short cuts around spending limits - in the early months of a campaign season. But that ship sailed way too long ago to take the stink off the 2008 race.”
The main concern of the oligarchy is to get you, the taxpayer, to clean up the mess left by the loose canon stampeding around this country for the last eight years. You’ve already taken care of Bear Stearns and now you’re kicking in to salvage Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. There’ll be plenty more before the crash. Looks like Lehman Brothers is next.
Corporate America has devised a new gimmick for campaign fund raising called “joint committees”. Donors can dump huge amounts into them. Although only the legal limit of $2,300 per individual can be given to the candidate, the bulk of the moolah can be given to the political party and used in the candidate’s behalf.
Sixty-three million has been laid on John McCain via these joint committees from more than 1000 megadonors. McCain should be their poster boy but Wall Street is putting its money on Barack Obama, the Senator from Goldman Sachs, to do the dirty work. The Obama campaign tries to imply that most of Obama’s funds are coming from contributions of individuals giving $200 or less. But there is another side of the story they aren’t telling you.
Taibbi says, “Obama is flat out kicking McCain’s ass when it comes to Wall Street contributions, raking in nearly $9 million from securities and investment executives, compared to $6.2 million for McCain. Obama has received more contributions from Goldman Sachs than from any other employer, more than $627,000 at this writing not to mention $398,021 from JP Morgan Chase, $353,922 from Lehman Brothers and $291,388 from Morgan Stanley.”
Barack Obama knows he can’t deliver on his promises but his liberal and progressive following are so bedazzled by his charm and rhetoric and the idea of a black man in the White House, they blind themselves to the obvious.
So once again, your choice is limited to the lesser of two evils.
This doesn’t mean there are no other presidential candidates to vote for, but they’ve been blacked out by the mainstream media, as with a grease pencil.
There’s Cynthia McKinney, Congresswoman from Georgia’s 11th District, candidate for president on the Green Party ticket.
There’s Bob Barr, also from Georgia, a former Congressman from the 7th District, the Libertarian Party nominee for president.
There’s Chuck Baldwin, pastor and radio talk show host nominated by the Constitution Party.
And, of course, there’s Ralph Nader, who chose to run, this year, as an Independent.
The two main parties, Democratic and Republican, have successfully maintained a stranglehold on our electoral system in recent years. They have colluded in creating the Commission on Presidential Debates to establish the way that debates between candidates for President of the United States are run. The Commission is set up to restrict independent and third party candidates from participating in presidential and vice presidential debates. That precludes any dark horse from threatening either of the two major parties.
The last candidate to break through that barrier was Ross Perot and his Reform Party in the 1996 election. He brought some dissent into the discussion by opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and he aptly described the “sucking sound” as American jobs flew overseas. Ross Perot addressed vital problems largely ignored by the two major parties. On these strengths, he won two of the three presidential debates and placed second in the other, according to some polls at the time. He ended up receiving about 18.9% of the popular vote, a record level of popularity not seen in an independent candidacy since former President Theodore Roosevelt ran on the “Bull Moose” Progressive ticket in 1912.
Third parties have always been the stimulus for new ideas eventually adopted by the two major parties. Third parties allow for dissent.
Dissent is democracy.
Empire In Extremis
Empire in Extremis
by Stephen Fleischman
“…they stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast…”
– the Eagles
Hotel California
How many Americans know the actual number of US military bases their tax dollars support around the world?
What would be your guess?
Would you believe 737, spread over 130 countries, according to the Defense Department’s annual “Base Structure Report”—and that’s not counting another 6000 bases in the United States and its territories?
Chalmers Johnson, in his latest book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic” cites the “worldwide total of U.S. military personnel in 2005, including those based domestically, to be 1,840,062 supported by an additional 473,306 Defense Department civil service employees and 203,328 local hires.”
Overseas bases, according to the Pentagon, contained 32,327 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and 16,527 more that it leases; and more than 29,819,492 acres of land worldwide, making the Pentagon one of the world’s largest landlords.
The Roman Empire at its height in the year 117 AD had only 37 bases to police its realm from All Gaul (which was divided into three parts) to Egypt.
Ike Eisenhower’s parting shot, when he left the presidency of the United States in 1961, was his warning about the military-industrial complex.
It was too little, too late. We had been a nation born in genocide, destroying the Native American tribes and taking possession of their land. We developed a major part of our economy through slavery, a plantation system and a three way slave trade broken only by the industrial revolution and the development of capitalism. The Civil War brought us into the modern imperialist era. The Monroe Doctrine. Manifest Destiny.
We allowed ourselves to become a militarized nation, a militarized economy. We needed to set an example for the world. Any defiance of our hegemony meant war. There was the Mexican War. The Spanish-American War. We took Cuba and the Philippines. It went on from there.
So now we have a war-like beast that cannot be restrained. Slick propaganda got us into World War I and Pearl Harbor into World War II (conveniently arranged, some say). The Korean War and the Vietnam War were set-ups. Dominoes just don’t fall that way. But we’ve managed to leave military bases in the lands of most of the vanquished, in South Korea and in Germany, to name a few, still there after fifty and sixty years.
US elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, has finally admitted, in his recently published memoir, that the Iraq War was primarily about oil (something the Bush administration has vehemently denied).
So our simple democracy has spawned a global empire.
What does this portend?
Must we start another war to keep the economy going? Bush would like to get someone to bomb Iran before he leaves office. Maybe he can get Israel to do it? They’ve been champing at the bit, just waiting for the nod from Bush. But even the Israelis must be struck by what a world-wide catastrophe the bombing of Iran would cause.
So what is a nation to do?
This nation must militate! Like Mussolini did in Italy. A little Fascism might be a helpful thing. Make the planes fly on time. It could also keep activists in their place. Inactive. They didn’t build Guantanamo for nothing. America’s first concentration camp? No, it’s second. There were the Japanese relocation centers during World War II.
And extraordinary rendition might also be a useful tool to keep the lid on. A little kidnapping. A little torture by proxy, off-shore.
Does it fit the Project for the Old American Century criterion for fascism, comparing the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet and the 14 characteristics common to those fascist regimes? Well, maybe not all—but enough.
You must glorify war in order to get the public to accept the fact that they’re going to send their sons and daughters to die. And don’t forget to wear your lapel flag pin.
There was a little juice in the anti-war movement before the onslaught on Iraq in 2003. But then it went blah. What happened?
In the mid-term election of 2006, the Democrats took both houses of Congress. Polls showed that a majority of Americans, some as high as 73%, wanted an end to the Iraq war and they counted on the Democrats to get it for them.
What they got was a continuation of the war with enough Democrats joining the Bush War Party to vote for funding. Among them were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama who, in the midst of their primary squabble over who was the most anti-war, both voted to fund the war. That’s the kind of steely knives they used!
We now have two presidential candidates representing different wings of the ruling oligarchy. You’re trapped in our two party-one party system.
“…you can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!”
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Change
by Stephen Fleischman
The American people want change!
They’re entitled to it. It’s written into their Constitution.
The two presumptive candidates for president, in the upcoming 2008 election, both believe in change.
John McCain, the Republican, believes in climate change. He’s said so many times. Barack Obama, the Democrat, believes in change we can believe in.
Polls show that the #1 issue weighing on the minds of Americans today is the collapsing economy. How do you stop the free fall we’re experiencing now? If it lands it could make a hole in the ground that will make 1932 look like an apple sale on the street?
George W. Bush must have been chuckling to himself when he signed Congress’ economic stimulus package, sending out $300 to $1200 rebate checks. Maybe he thinks that’s the way to keep the flow of wealth upwards.
Americans need purchasing power worth a damn! They need jobs like those they had when there was a strong labor movement in this country and good, high paying wages in manufacturing won through blood and guts and strikes.
The Reagan revolution ended all that.
Reagan mercilessly broke the air traffic controllers when they went out on strike. That kicked off the onslaught.
The corporate oligarchy took their shot. They undercut the unions by off-shoring factories and out-sourcing jobs.
As Ross Perot described it when he was running for president in 1992, you could hear the “sucking sound” as jobs and plants went flying off to countries that paid the lowest wages. It was a race to the bottom and the beginning of what we now call “globalization.” They hollowed out the country for profits. They exported their plants and brought back their products as imports. That gave a strong manufacturing base to our foreign competitors and piddling wages at service jobs to American workers. “Yeah, I work at McDonalds, but I can buy cheap at Walmart’s”.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership, nationwide, was down to 12 percent in 2007. There was a time when things were different. In the mid 1950’s more than 35 percent of all employees on private payrolls were union members.
We had some great labor leaders in our time. There was the great Eugene Debs who organized the American Railway Union in 1893. He wanted to see change in the country, too. He ran for President of the United States four times on the Socialist Party ticket, the last time from prison in 1920 and received nearly one million votes.
And then there was the great John L. Lewis, head of the mine workers, who organized the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and created great change. He brought industrial unionism to this country for the first time.
In 1936, Lewis joined the Reuther brothers, Walter and Victor, in organizing
the United Auto Workers’ sit-in strikes against General Motors at their Flint, Michigan plants.
For 44 bitterly cold winter days the auto workers in Flint held out, eventually inspiring more than two-thirds of General Motors 145 thousand other production workers to strike.
Change came to Flint and the auto industry with a bang. The strikers seized, shut down and occupied one, then two, and then three of the key GM plants. Suddenly, workers everywhere were sitting-down. There were 477 sit-down strikes by the end of 1937, involving more than half a million workers. What hath change wrought!
Mighty GM had vowed publicly that it would never allow the UAW to represent its employees. But the General Motors Corporation ended up granting that crucial right—and more—to the union. It was a stunning victory for the United Auto Workers.
The two major union organizations united. The AFL-CIO was formed. Solidarity! It led the way—and swiftly—to the unionization of workers throughout heavy industry and, ultimately, to unionization in all fields. It brought higher wages, pensions and health care benefits to union members. It certainly was the high water mark of labor power in America. Finally, labor had a seat at the table!
Where has it all gone?
With growing corporate power, class conflict reached new heights. The assault on labor became overwhelming, continuous, inhuman and destructive.. No wonder unions are dysfunctional and chaotic. So are most of their leaders. If they’re not coerced, co-opted or corrupted, they’re framed, jailed or neutralized in some way.
Only when capitalism is in the throes of crisis, deep depression and near collapse can strong labor leaders emerge. Must we relive the 1930’s?
Maybe our two presidential candidates, believers in change, will come up with something better than Bush’s economic stimulus package to save our collapsing economy—like repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, the epitome of anti-labor legislation. Or enforcement of the Wagner Act (which is still on the books) that guarantees workers the right of collective bargaining, a product of Roosevelt’s New Deal that raised the standard of living of the middle and working classes.
Where do the candidates stand on these issues? I haven’t heard any meaningful discussion of how to save our economy. McCain seems to be set in concrete, but Obama seems to be changing the change we can believe in since he assumed his presumptive nomination in the Democratic Party. He seems to have adopted the Bill Clinton strategy of triangulation. Go after those shaky votes on the right! It worked for Bill; maybe it will work for him. There’s been a sea change, lately, in Barack’s change we can believe in.
Can you imagine Obama supporting Bush’s intelligence surveillance law?
Well, he says he will when the compromise FISA bill comes to the Senate, granting immunity to the telecommunications corporations for their participation in warrantless wiretapping programs. So far, there are 40 lawsuits against them alleging privacy invasion.
The latest Obama glitch—his adoption of the Bush faith-based initiatives. Is he going for the evangelical vote? One of the essential principles of this democracy, I always thought, was separation of church and state. Religious charities are well and good, but isn’t it the responsibility of the state to look after the welfare of its people?
End the war in Iraq? Obama says he is against the war. Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son, Casey, in the war, was hoping Barack would say “Troops out now!”
But we haven’t heard anything like that from him. Each year, since 2005, we’ve heard a different plan. Now, he says he “will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within sixteen months…” and, of course, some will have to remain to protect our embassy and diplomats and – er – man our “impermanent bases” in the country that we will occupy permanently.
We won’t go into Obama’s other flip-flops. It’s too painful. They are amply covered, even in the mainstream media.
So who are you going to vote for?
There are other candidates, you know, although you would never suspect it from reading or listening to the mainstream media.
There’s Cynthia McKinney, Congresswoman from Georgia’s 11th District, candidate for President on the Green Party ticket.
There’s Bob Barr, also from Georgia, a former Congressman from the 7th District, the Libertarian Party nominee for President.
There’s Chuck Baldwin, pastor and radio talk show host, nominated by the Constitution Party.
And, of course, there’s Ralph Nader, who chose to run, this year, as an Independent.
If you vote for any one of these, people will say you’re throwing away your vote.
Let them say it. They will be giving their votes to the corporate oligarchy.
Vote your conscience. Vote your hopes, not your fears.
You don’t want to walk out of that voting booth with a grimace on your face, after holding your nose and once again voting for the lesser of two evils.
You want to walk out of there feeling good about yourself, holding your head high knowing that you exercised your first amendment rights—freedom of speech, and of the press and your right to freely assemble.
Good luck and God Bless America!
Which Side Are You On?
by Stephen Fleischman
Is Barack Obama a social democrat or a capitalist tool?
Is John McCain a Glory Boy or a POW songbird?
If these are the choices we have in the upcoming presidential election, a faked out war hero, pushing the Bush agenda, and a corporate tool talking like a social democrat, you’ve got to know this country is up the creek or down the shaft.
If Barack Obama is a social democrat (read neoliberal), talking Universal Health Care but meaning Chicago School of Economics and going ga-ga over markets, you know there’ll be no singer payer health plan in his, or our, future.
Obama’s association with the Milton Friedman “gang of four” tells the story—receiving advice or campaign financing from Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist, billionaire Kevin Griffin, CEO of the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group, Robert Rubin, former Goldman-Sachs chief, and the Crown family of General Dynamics.
The tip-off, if any further confirmation is needed, was the speed with which Obama raced to the obligatory appearance before the Israel Lobby (AIPAC) and groveled as no candidate ever has before, even giving Jerusalem to Israel undivided, a thorn in the peace process that has kept the Palestinians at bay for 40 years. Moreover, Obama said he will do everything in his power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything! Did that include bombing Iran?
This is nothing new in American politics. There has always been more fiction than fact in the run-up to national elections.
This is a country born in genocide (the Native Americans), grew up in slavery (the Africans), and finally arrived into the capitalist era with the emancipation and the Civil War. I guess it’s a truism that war enhances corporate profits, the mother’s milk of capitalism, as it’s doing in Iraq, today.
To make it all work, capitalism has to have a tweedledum and a tweedledee—two faces, one smiling, one grim, and they can swing between one and the other, depending on the temper of the times.
We’ve just come through eight years of the grim face (the Bush administration and his war on terror) and now, with Bush’s popularity down in the muck (below 30%), the oligarchy is looking for a smiling face. It certainly can’t be McCain’s, joined at the hip with George Bush, as he is, with his love of the Iraq war and tax cuts for the rich.
With 70% or more of the American people against both, it is now time for the smiling face. So, they say, let’s create our ideal candidate. And so they did. They didn’t mind swinging to the Democratic Party, the party that traditionally plays the “chump” role.
They chose Obama, the perfect black sheep, in looks, demeanor and intelligence, to lead the liberal elite down the garden path. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin he also got lots of the kids behind him.
Well educated, with degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama went into politics and in short order became junior United States Senator from Illinois after a stint in the Illinois Senate. He grabbed the oligarchy’s attention when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He was their man!
Is it all as calculated and crafted as that? Yes, it is. Just look at the facts. Isn’t it as clear as the fable of John McCain’s war heroism?
It’s astounding how this man, John Sidney McCain III, could become a US Senator and a presidential candidate with the amount of credible evidence proving him to be, at best, a collaborator, at worst, a traitor, while he was a POW in North Vietnam during that ill-fated war.
Where was the Pentagon? Where was the government? Where was the media? Who has investigated the allegations?
McCain was routinely bombing Hanoi from an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. On October 26, 1967, a surface-to-air missile knocked a wing off his jet. His plane splashed into Truc Bach Lake. A compassionate Vietnamese dragged him out of the water and saved McCain’s life. He was taken to a POW camp.
What actually happened to McCain in his POW camp? Was it abuse, as he claims, or was it, in fact, that he collaborated and had to cover up?
Fellow prisoners of war, Ted Guy and Gordon “Swede” Larson, have provided eye-witness accounts of McCain’s treatment by his captors.
“My only contention with the McCain deal,” Larson told the Phoenix New Times, “is that while he was at “The Plantation” (POW camp), to the best of my knowledge and Ted’s knowledge, he was not physically abused in any way.”
Another source is John McCain himself who has confessed that after three or four days after his capture, he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.”
His captors soon realized that McCain came from a high-level naval family, his father and grandfather, admirals in the US Navy. While John III was being held captive, his father, Admiral John McCain, Jr. was in charge of all US forces in the Pacific, including those fighting in Vietnam. Any wonder then that John III was taken to a hospital reserved for Vietnamese officers, and received care from a Soviet doctor?
McCain was released in 1973, and claims to having been tortured by his North Vietnamese captors, and so the myth of the McCain war heroism began.
Now, we have those two, Obama, McCain, as our only choices for President of the United States. Which of the lesser of the two evils will you vote for?
Where is Ralph Nader now that we really need him?
Slouching Toward a Population Die-Back
Is there a famine in our future?
When we start putting food in our gas tanks, we know Americans would rather drive than live.
“We’re having a world-wide food crisis,” murmured the New York Times. The rest of the media took their cue, as they usually do, and headlined the new event.
The Los Angeles Times put it this way, “Vegetable oil isn’t a crime—is it? Diesel owners who switch to cooking grease can run afoul of the law. Just ask the governor.” The state wants its tax on alternative fuels just as they get it from the sale of gasoline.
Drivers, in all the esoteric places, are converting their cars to run on used cooking and frying oil. Some restaurants that once found it a burden to dis-pose of used fry-oil are now thinking of charging for it.
But, of course, the 800 lb gorilla in the world is Ethanol.
The fear of oil peaking has caused a stampede of biofuel production across the world in the frantic search for a substitute.
As Wikipedia defines it, ”Biofuel is a solid, liquid or gas fuel derived from recently dead biological material, most commonly plants…distinguishing it from fossil fuel, derived from long dead biological material.”
Brazil is currently the world’s leader in ethanol production. The chippie is sugarcane. It grows like topsy in that part of the world. Imperial systems were founded on it. Sugar and rum were the chief exports from the Caribbean and South America to Europe during the colonial period. Every sailor on the slave ships that plied the Atlantic to the Americas has his ration of rum.
In the United States, ethanol is made principally from corn. Its development has been a bonanza for the American corn conglomerates. The largest producer of ethanol in the U.S. is the Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) that touted itself, for years, as “Supermarket to the World” in TV ads.
ADM is an agricultural giant. It has made profits of $10.98 billion in 2006, and operates in North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Pacific Rim. The company has a transportation network that circles the world capable of delivering ethanol just about anywhere.
Included in the agribusiness cabal is Monsanto reporting a net income this year that more than doubled the earnings in 2007, from $543 million to $1.12 billion.
The earnings of Cargill, another cabal member, soared by 86 % from $553 million to $1.03 billion in one year.
Any wonder, the cost of food, everywhere, is going through the roof?
Staples like wheat, rice, corn and beans, what most of the people of the third world (and other world’s, too) live on, are out of reach for many. As of March this year, wheat and maize prices were 130 and 30 percent higher, re-spectively, than a year earlier. Rice prices have more than doubled since late January
The food price index of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization rose by 9 percent in 2006 and 23 percent in 2007. While millions are being driven toward starvation, giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits.
In typical corporate style, with no concern for the lives of people, specula-tors have turned the growing worldwide food shortages into a bonanza.
“The corn-to-alcohol scheme may well be the largest single financial crime of all time,” says Global Research, an educational think-tank, “Its cost to consumers in higher food prices will exceed the total cost of the so-called war in Iraq, plus the cost of escalated oil prices. There cannot be a bigger is-sue than food. No problem in America comes close to it in importance, because no one can escape depending on food for survival — and we are talking about doubling or tripling the cost of basic grain commodities on which the non-rich survive.”
Cars should be powered by energy from the sun or hydrogen—not food grains. The elegant process of plant creation by photosynthesis should be re-served for humanity and the other animals that walk the earth.
We can go back to the theories of Thomas Malthus, 19th Century English demographer and political economist. He opined that the number of people the earth can sustain depends on the amount of food that can be grown. Sooner or later, it will simply be impossible to feed all the people and there will be mass starvation. Malthusians continue to warn that the disaster is al-most upon us.
Is there an answer for this? Sure there is. Tax the agribusiness giants instead of subsidizing them.
Subsidies began with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, in the depth of the Great Depression. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt, through the New Deal, to save the family farm by paying poor farmers not to raise crops thereby stabilizing food prices that were falling through the floor.
Through the decades, the small farmers were pushed out and the specter of corporate farming haunted America. Today, the family farm is all but gone, corporate agribusiness is aggressively robust and the subsidies are still there!
Every year, when the Farm Bill, now reaching into $300 billion, comes up for debate, the members of Congress make a Faustian deal. Those from non-farm states will vote for the subsidies if the farm state members vote for food stamps and other benefits for the poor thrown into the bill. The Presi-dent usually vetoes it and we wind up with a pot pourri.
Meanwhile, food riots are breaking out across the globe from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso, from China to Cameroon, and from Uzbekistan to the United Arab Emirates.
“What we are seeing is unprecedented,” says Catholic Relief Services food aid expert Lisa Kuennen-Asfaw. “If immediate needs are not met, and if resources and policies supporting increased agricultural production are not put in place soon, we are heading for a cascade of hunger the world over.”
Have a good day.
On the Eve of Destruction
by Stephen Fleischman
(with apologies to Barry McGuire)
“The eastern world it tis explodin’,
violence flarin’, bullets loadin’ …”
The surge in Iraq is working, says George W. Bush through his military mouthpiece, General David H. Petraeus, at recent Congressional hearings. The war goes on and Iraqis (and US GIs) are being killed daily although polls show the American people never wanted this war and want their troops out now.
The presidential candidates for both parties in the 2008 election—McCain, Clinton, Obama—are proposing timetables for troop withdrawal, anywhere from six months to one hundred years. No one has yet come up with a reason why we’re there, or a definition of victory, for that matter. To prevent chaos and bring democracy to the Middle East just doesn’t cut it.
In any war of occupation, if the occupied nation has strong leaders who are willing to unite and lead their people into a fight, they will eventually win.
You can safely wager that long before the 100 years are up, if we don’t willingly withdraw, the remnants of US forces in Iraq are likely to be evacuated from the roof of the American embassy building in Baghdad’s green zone by helicopter. When the Sunnis and the Kurds and the various Shia factions and militias get together, that will be the end of the little al-Maliki puppet government in Baghdad and the destruction of US power in Iraq; as happened in Vietnam when the Viet Cong and the Viet Minh came together in the Tet offensive and as happened to the French in Algeria when the resistance poured out of the Casbah in a great human wave…
“…but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction…”
Economists, across the board, are telling us we’re heading into a recession, if we aren’t already in one; and some say we’ll be going deeper, into a depression. Well, what do you know? A war and a depression at the same time! In capitalist societies, war is frequently the antidote to depression; the cure worse than the malady. These days, economies are linked worldwide. Is there a world economic collapse in our future? Does anyone really know?
We know about the sub-prime mortgage disaster, the credit card crunch, the bail-out of Bear Stearns with taxpayer money and others yet to come (socialism for the capitalists) and things of that sort. And we’ve been hearing of mass layoffs of workers in manufacturing and service industries. Who needs a working class? The good paying jobs are mostly gone with the off-shoring and outsourcing of the hardware (factories) and the software (workers).
A free market system cannot exist without the purchasing power of the working class. But we’ve done away with all that; smashed the union movement that once gave trade unionists a living wage. We have to import the very commodities we used to make and pay more for them—unless you can shop at Walmart that has an inside track to cheap.
The government has been cooking the books for years. It’s been standard procedure. One administration after another has been addicted to “la vie en rose”.
We have three fundamental measurements on which we determine the state of our economy—the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI), an indicator of inflation—the quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which tracks the economy’s overall growth—and the monthly unemployment figure, an indicator of economic health. These statistics are vital to obtain a true picture of the economy. Important decisions for government and business depend on their accuracy.
Kevin Phillips, a noted commentator on economic issues and a former Republican Party strategist, charges, in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine (May ’08), that the economy is worse than we know, and he is able to make those charges stick.
“Since the 1960s,” he says, “Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured.”
“How much angrier would the electorate be,” Phillips asks. “if the media, over the past five years, had been citing 8 percent unemployment (instead of 5 percent), 5 percent inflation (instead of 2 percent) and average annual growth in the 1 percent range (instead of the 3-4 percent range) … the corruption has tainted the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy.”
How much longer can this system survive playing those games, plunging its head in the sand and letting the lies roll over. We’ve built a world of distraction in the media, in academia, in arts and entertainment; in the gross distortions we call “news” to hide it all.
The ice caps are melting, the honey bees are dying, the oil is depleting, and food is being raised to go into your gas tank. And for the Bush Administration, life is just a bowl of cherries…
“…the pounding of the drums, the pride and disgrace,
you can bury your dead, but don’t leave a trace,
hate your next-door-neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace.
and you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.”
Fundamentals
by Stephen Fleischman
Let’s get down to fundamentals.
The two warring Democratic candidates in the presidential election have their slogans.
Obama wants change. Hillary wants solutions. Yes, they discuss all the issues that are fit to discuss. Even McCain talks about death and taxes.
But nobody wants to take on the fundamentals—the source of the status quo requiring change and the root cause of the problems for which Hillary wants solutions. It’s not just the economy, Stupid! It’s the system…to use a Clintonian euphemism.
A system based on greed, profit and exploitation of one class by another will eventually land it in the ditch. You don’t need Karl Marx to tell you that. He made a landmark analysis of Capitalism in the 19th Century and so far his predictions have been right on the money. Empires fall—from the Roman to the German. They dig their own graves.
Capitalism, by its name and nature supports the rich, propertied and corporate class. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a Marxist to see that. Competition between corporate entities, in various nations, leads to monopoly and war. When corporations control a government, it’s Corporatism. We’re in that stage of capitalism right now. Benito Mussolini, pre-World War II dictator of Italy, gave it a name. He called it Fascism.
For the capitalist system to survive—it must have constant economic growth and find new markets and sources of raw materials.
There are two ways to do this, the first, by going into countries, anywhere in the world, and taking what you want by military means (commerce follows the flag, as the British used to say), or it can be done by diplomacy and economic penetration. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is an example of the second way, the war and occupation of Iraq, an example of the first. Of course, the natives of those countries don’t like either method. So, one way or another, they fight back.
Right now, we’re spilling blood for oil and heading into a recession at the same time. We have a new complication that ranks with global warming. Oil is peaking. Supplies can only diminish from here on. Are we going to fight for the last drop of oil on earth before putting maximum effort into looking for alternative forms of energy? Looks that way. Big oil still has clout.
Wealth produced by the working people of this country flows in only one direction, up. According to University of California statistics, the top 1% of Americans own 33.4% of the wealth while the bottom 80%, the overwhelming majority of wage and salaried workers, are left with a measly 16%.
Do the presidential candidates discuss any of this, and if not, why not?
The answer to that is easy. They’re all corporate candidates. The oligarchy can’t lose, whoever is elected. The American mainstream media, that molds popular perception, supports one or another of the corporate candidates. And why not? The same corporate entities own the mainstream media. So they keep the public distracted by endlessly debating the fine points of their choice, turning the election into an entertaining horse race. The average Joe would do better going to the track.
The presidential candidates are fighting for the votes of “We the people…”
So why isn’t it fair game to take on some of the faults and flaws of the capitalist system? Many of Obama’s needs for change and Hillary’s solutions to problems stem from capital’s depredations. But no candidate dares to mention the “C” word.
It was not always thus. In the depth of the last depression, Roosevelt saved capitalism with the New Deal—the NRA, the WPA, the TVA and the rest of FDR’s acronyms. Of course, the beginning of World War II helped. War frequently pulls capitalism’s chestnuts out of the fire.
But, in 1935, the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) was passed. This put government on the spot. It had to support the working class. Government supported unionization and collective bargaining that helped distribute the wealth more equitably. So, you see, workers rights can be protected even under capitalism. All it needs is a president and an administration to fight off the economic royalists.
If that doesn’t happen, there can be trouble in River City. Times change and conditions have a way of turning into their opposite. Marx’s historical materialism demonstrates that. There are nodal points in history, when quantitative changes leap to a qualitative change. Revolution is such a nodal point. All phenomena in the universe consist of “matter in motion”; all things are interdependent and interconnected.
We’re headed into the great unknown right now. Most economists agree a recession looms. Some pessimists see a deeper recession, some a depression rivaling that of the 1930s.
There are all kinds of ideas out there lying dormant. If understood more universally, they could be helpful in advancing the welfare of this country.
Why don’t our presidential candidates talk about them? Stand up to their corporate sponsors.
It’s Wake Up Time
by Stephen Fleischman
We don’t have nightmares asleep any more—we wake up into them.
An endless war. An imminent crash. An election campaign in which the three contenders are corporate candidates. High crimes and misdemeanors that go unchallenged.
The perfect storm.
This is the United States where the America Dream, at one time, could become a reality. This is the America of Franklin Roosevelt who built a safety net under his people. This is the America of Watergate that forced accountability on its leaders.
No more. We’ve wakened from the dream into a nightmare.
The Iraq war must go on, says John McCain, Republican presidential candidate, who thinks it will take a hundred years to achieve victory. No one has yet come up with a definition of victory. Democratic candidates talk about ending the war with a variety of timetables that everybody knows will never happen. Big Oil calls the shots.
We’re all getting along just fine with the war as a background hum, so why rock the boat? The anti-war movement of 2003, that seemed so promising at the time, has evaporated into a feel-good miasma.
There is no draft. Your son or daughter will not be affected. They’ll probably go on to college. It’s only those invisibles down there, America’s new underclass that provides the cannon fodder. So why bother? The corporate owned mainstream media has joined the parade with colors and lies flying, eating out your brain. The hype of the “surge” has become a dirge. Better wear that lapel flag pin to prove you’re patriotic!
Everyone is waiting for that other shoe to drop. The Bush-Cheney gang is down to its last nine months. In January of 2009, something new happens.
It’s a long wait. The joisting has been going on for almost a year.
While Barack Obama is a favorite boy of Wall Street, Hillary not only does well on the “street”, but is also the darling of the defense (war) industry. Obama picked up a respectable $474,428 from Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs as well as anywhere from a quarter million or more from Time Warner, Citigroup, Inc, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase & Co among others.
Hillary did better with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics who gave Democratic candidates $103,900, Hillary getting the lion’s share of that.
According to the Federal Election Commission, Republican John McCain raked in a whopping $58,950,601 as of March 1st, $684,294 of it coming from PACs.
The oligarchy always hedges its bets. One way or the other, it gets the man (or woman) it wants.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush, whose rating are in the gutter, continues to decimate this country with impunity. While Dick Cheney is on a fishing trip to Iraq, baiting the waters for an attack on Iran, Bush continues to tweak Ahmadinejad. The two war criminals are trying to squeeze another war into their repertoire before they leave a desecrated stage of history in January of 2009. One war isn’t enough. Or is this just another “wag the dog” strategy; a political move to get Republican John McCain elected—your Commander-in-Chief for the hundred years war…?
Wars are usually started to pull the economy out of recession. With Iraq, we have a recession and a war going on at the same time. As Ike warned, beware the military-industrial complex. Now we have a military-industrial-contractor complex.
Notwithstanding the 160,000, or so, US military troops in Iraq, there are about 180,000 private contractors, including up to 50,000 employed in military functions. Blackwater, the leading mercenary contractor, has made deals with both the State and the Defense Departments. When top brass come to visit, it’s the Blackwater mercenaries that protect them. Apparently, they don’t trust our American troops; another good reason for them to go home pouting.
There is a world economic collapse in the making and the US is in the eye of the storm. The Fed inflates the money supply to stave off recession which drives prices up as wages fall due to the off-shoring of our manufacturing plants.
You can count on this government to do the wrong thing. The Bush administration gives tax cuts to the rich when they should be soaking them, as Roosevelt did to help the nation climb out of the last depression. What we need is a new New Deal, putting people to work rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, instead of a stimulus package handing out $600 checks. The money will mostly be used by debt-loaded Americans for paying off overdue credit cards. No shot in the arm for the economy there.
Our two-party system is broken. That will become evident at the Democrat’s Denver convention, in August, when a choice has to be made between their squabbling candidates, Billary and Obama. Early primaries were a disaster. Enmities have hardened after months of cloying, boring debates. If super-delegates have to be used to decide on a candidate, the Democratic Party might as well fold its big tent and disappear into the night.
The beginning of another bad dream?
Where Have All the Profits Gone?
by Stephen Fleischman
The stock market has been bouncing around like a yo-yo on steroids.
The term “subprime” that most of us hadn’t heard before, has become a household word.
Household mortgages have been avalanching and foreclosures piling up. Banks are locked in a credit crunch.
Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street’s biggies, had to be bailed out by the Fed.
Banks, like bookies of yore, are laying off bad bets. The government is dancing as fast as it can, printing $600 checks to send out to everybody, hopefully creating some purchasing power for people to go out and buy stuff.
Yet, despite the stimulus package, and other fables being told by George W. Bush, reputable economists and dour newsmen are predicting a deep and long recession ahead.
According to Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, a recession is a decline in a country’s gross domestic product for two or more successive quarters. Recessions may be associated with falling prices, called deflation, or rising prices, called inflation, in a process known as stagflation.
A severe or long recession is referred to as an economic depression. A devastating breakdown of an economy is called economic collapse.
Is that where we’re headed?
It’s got to be somebody’s fault. Who are the villains of the piece? Capitalists? No. Entrepreneurs? No. The working class? Well, maybe.
It’s the profit motive, Stupid! In the end, you know, every crook gets caught.
Where does profit come from? That is the question.
It took Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) Prussian philosopher, political economist and revolutionary, to find out where profit came from. It was a discovery that ranked with Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Sigmund Freud’s ego, super-ego and the id.
Profit, Marx found out, is the gain capitalists receive by paying workers less than the full value of their labor. It’s called “exploitation” of one class by another—an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets.
What! This whole capitalist system that has taken over the world is based on out-and-out thievery! The capitalist steals the surplus value of the labor the worker puts into the commodity being produced! What a discovery!
Well, it’s better than slavery where the slave owner stole 100% of the slave’s labor power, except for what it cost to keep the slave alive. It’s also better than feudalism where the serf was allowed to keep only about 50% of his produce, while the feudal lord took the rest for allowing the serf to work on his land. It was called share-cropping in this country and continued for quite a while after slavery was abolished in 1865. So some progress has been made.
Another landmark discovery of Marx and his collaborator, Frederick Engels, was the concept of the “class struggle”. As expressed in the “Communist Manifesto”, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of ‘class struggles’”
Marx believed that capitalism, like previous economic systems will lead to its own destruction. Capitalism cuts from under its own feet the very foundation on which it produces and appropriates products. What it creates, in the process, is its own grave-diggers.
Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, capitalism, itself, will be replaced by another form, be it communism or some form of socialism allowing for a public and private sector in the economy.
There were few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxist ideas in the course of the twentieth century.
Of course, the most prominent of these was Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution which led to the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR). We don’t mind talking about that. You’ve got to look at these things in the long sweep of history. It took capitalism a couple of hundred years to shake itself out. Since the Industrial Revolution in England, in the late 1700s, there have been many panics, booms and busts and experimentation. Capitalism leads to monopoly and war and today we’re in the stage of empire building and globalization.
Now, new forms of socialism are taking the world stage. The Soviet Union was a failed experiment. China seemed to be using revisionist Marxism to transform itself from communism to a new form of aggressive capitalism, Cuba is continuing in the old tradition with Castro and his brother Raul barely keeping the old form of classical Marxism alive. But there is a new wind blowing over Latin America, with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and socialist ferment in the rest of the South American continent.
The United States today is reaching a stage of critical mass. With an un-winnable war in Iraq costing an estimated 3 trillion dollars of borrowed money, an infrastructure showing signs of wear, a wobbly stock market, a bloated defense budget and a military force falling apart and Congress authorizing tax cuts for the rich, isn’t it time we considered making some changes in our economic system before changes are thrust upon us?
George W. Bush and the US capitalist oligarchy backing him up, must be a part of the grave-digging team.
About Us
Sangemon
Nyack, NY
A 50-something, empty-nesting, lefty-blogging, guitar pickin’, sound mixer and private pilot with a passion for political debate, an affinity for smart people, and a love of Beech Bonanzas and Martin guitars.
Things I’m grateful for:
1 fabulous bride of 28 years
3 brilliant kids
3 adorable grandkids
A warm home
A fulfilling career
My far-flung extended family
My lifelong friends
______________________________
Stephen Fleischman
Los Angeles, CA
Stephen Fleischman’s career as a television writer-director-producer spanned more than three decades beginning in the early 1950’s. In 1959, he participated in the formation of the renowned Murrow-Friendly “CBS Reports” series. In 1983, Steve won the prestigious Columbia University-Dupont Television Journalism Award.
His memoir, “A Red in the House”, about his thirty years in network news, is now in print.
For additional information, see: www.read2greatbooks.comE-mail to: stevefl@ca.rr.com
