As the following interview of Ben Dangl highlights, leftist states such as Venezuela are not by themselves particularly revolutionary, and in fact often play a counter-revolutionary role. Democratic, participatory, grassroots social movements have always been the real engine of change. Political leaders can choose to follow those movements (“lead by obeying” in Zapatista language), or they can choose to be largely a facade for neoliberalism and reaction.  The question is not the quality of the leader, but the quality of the movement holding that leader’s feet to the fire.

This is the reason President Obama has been largely a flop.  As FDR said to labor organizers in 1932, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”  Real leadership comes from below.

Let’s hope we can follow the examples of Bolivia, Egypt, and Madison, WI and continue to work towards a global movement for justice. [alex]

Dancing with Dynamite in Latin America

by Nikolas Kozloff
Originally published by Huffington Post.
February 11, 2011.

Recently, I sat down with Benjamin Dangl, author of the recently released Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America, for an interview.

NK: You’ve written an extremely ambitious book which takes the reader all across South America. One of the most impressive things about the work is that it is largely based on your own personal interviews with political participants at the grassroots as opposed to mere secondary research. How long did it take to research and what was the most fascinating country that you worked in?

BD: The book is the result of over eight years of research, traveling and interviewing across Latin America. This period of time coincided with the rise to power of most of the region’s current leftist leaders, and so the interviews I draw from in the book reflect a lot of the initial hope and subsequent disappointment among many social movements. The most interesting place I’ve worked in is definitely Bolivia, where the power of the grassroots movements is the strongest, and the impressive relationship between these movements and the government of Evo Morales is constantly changing.

NK: It can be tough in many ways to conduct research in South America. What prompted your interest in the subject matter and what were some of the obstacles that you encountered along the way?

BD: The main things that drew me to writing about politics and social issues in Latin America were the impact US foreign policy and corporate activity had on the region, and the hopeful and relatively under-reported social struggles going on. On the one hand, the connection to the US in the so-called war on drugs, and the corporate looting of natural resources, were all issues I thought more readers of English-based media in the US should know about. And the sophisticated organizing tactics, grassroots strategies and victories of social movements in the region were stories I wanted to help amplify and spread in the US, for the sake of awareness, solidarity and lessons to be learned. The main obstacle in doing this research is the actual cost of the traveling. I’ve worked all kinds of odd jobs over the years, in construction, farming, and various kinds of manual labor, to pay for the plane tickets to get to Latin America in order to conduct research and writing on the ground.

NK: Here in the U.S., many on the left idealize Chávez and the like, yet you suggest that many ostensibly leftist regimes may sap the energy of today’s social movements. How has this happened, and could one say, therefore, that “Pink Tide” regimes may ultimately exert a counter-productive or even pernicious effect upon local politics in their respective countries?

BD: The way this relationship has played out is different in each country. Some Latin American presidents, upon taking power, have been more willing and able than others to collaborate with the social movements that help bring them into office. The relationships in Venezuela and Bolivia are probably the healthiest in this sense. In other countries, such as Brazil with President Lula and the Landless Farmers Movements, the Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and the indigenous movements there, the relationship has been more difficult, with the governments repressing, criminalizing and demobilizing movements when possible. Dancing with Dynamite looks at how this relationship, this dance, has played out in seven different countries. It tells a story beyond what the presidents and major politicians have been doing or saying, and focuses more on the history of the past decade from the perspective of the grassroots. And this view from below is something I think more people in the US left would benefit from focusing on, if anything to understand the full picture of what’s been driving these momentous changes over the past ten years.

NK: Of all the South American countries you describe, Bolivia seems to have the most revolutionary potential. Why is this so, and what new radical developments can we expect from Bolivia in the coming years?

BD: I think this potential comes in part from the legacy and strength of indigenous movements in the country. Over 60% of Bolivians self-identify themselves as indigenous, and this identity has manifested itself in powerful ways in key mobilizations over access to natural resources and making politics in the country more participatory and accessible. The rich history of labor, student, farmer and other activist movements have also contributed to today’s grassroots dynamics. Many people in Bolivia, which is the poorest country in South America, also have to turn to political activism and social organizing to survive; in many communities fighting for access to water, ousting a corrupt mayor, defending rights to grow coca crops, these are parts of everyday life. This capacity to mobilize translates into a diversity of movements that are ready to take action when necessary, whether it’s to hold Evo Morales’ feet to the flames, or mobilize against the right and foreign corporations. Because of this dynamic and often-changing landscape, it is difficult to say what will happen in the coming years.

NK: From a political and economic perspective, Brazil dwarfs all other South American countries. Recently, Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s protégé in the Workers’ Party, won Brazil’s presidential election. That is good news for Correa, Morales and Chávez since Rousseff is unlikely to harass leftist regimes in wider South America. Yet, as you point out Brazil has become an agribusiness juggernaut, displacing poor peasants both within and outside its borders through its soybean industry. How can the more radical bloc of Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador seek to contest Brazilian geopolitical hegemony in the region?

BD: The sad reality is that destructive agribusinesses, particularly soy, which displace poor farmers, destroy the environment and use toxic pesticides, are rapidly expanding across Latin America. Brazil is one part of this expansion. Soy crops are all over many parts of Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. There has not been a lot of political will on the part of the region’s left of center leaders to confront this trend. As far as Brazil’s power in the region, I think Lula helped pave the way for many progressive regional initiatives and diplomatic approaches. I think that Rousseff will likely continue in this tradition. If Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador seek to contest Brazil’s power, they will likely do so together, cooperatively against Brazil, rather than on their own against this imperial neighbor.

NK: Social movements in South America have not invested a great deal of energy in pushing for a more revolutionary foreign policy, preferring instead to concentrate on bread and butter issues at home. Should they advocate more loudly for a different sort of foreign policy, and if so what should it look like?

BD: Well, I think social movements have pushed for more revolutionary foreign policy. The grassroots, continent-wide push against Bush’s Free Trade Area of the Americas was historic. The anti-imperialist stance of many of the region’s new and recent presidents is largely a response to grassroots pressure against US-militarization of the war on drugs, against US military bases, against meddling from Washington, against foreign domination of natural resources and the economy. If there has been any lack of mobilizing for a more progressive foreign policy, I think it’s because many movements are relatively content with the policies of their presidents in this respect. The landless movement in Brazil, for example, applauded Lula’s foreign relations, but criticized his weak land reform. One of the most progressive aspects of Correa’s administration in Ecuador has been his foreign policy. That said, I think a further strengthening of regional independence from the US will remain a key goal of social movements in the region.

NK: As you point out, some leftist leaders have conducted anti-environmental policies. In their adherence to resource nationalism, they’re harking back to a rather outdated twentieth century model of development, one which has been contested as of late by the region’s rising environmental parties. In Brazil, Marina Silva of the Green Party netted a whopping 19% of the vote in the nation’s first round of presidential voting. What kind of a political impact do you expect green politics will have on the wider region, and how can social movements take advantage of growing environmental consciousness to bring about revolutionary change?

BD: Many social movements have been critical of the environmentally destructive extractive industries pushed by leftist governments, particularly in mining, gas and oil industries. While this will likely remain an area of contention between socialistic governments and the movements effected by these industries, there is a growing trend among leaders to address the causes of climate change and environmental devastation across the globe. The Evo Morales’ government demonstrated this in its participation in climate change talks and conferences. Sustainable policies based on the concept of Buen Vivir (Living Well) advocated by the region’s indigenous provides a fitting model for all nations and people to follow

NK: You seem to be particularly speaking to and addressing U.S. activists in your book, and one of your more intriguing chapters discusses the connections between South American and U.S. social movements. You cite the case of Chicago workers who were influenced by their Argentine counterparts as they took over a factory in 2008. Yet, you yourself concede that applying the South American experience to the U.S. may not work as both societies have very different histories and political cultures. If that’s true, then what can the U.S. left learn, concretely, from radical politics south of the border?

BD: I think a lot of activists in the US can learn from movements based in Latin America. As I discuss in the book, there a few key movements and actions in the US that drew from tactics and strategies of the landless movement in Brazil and water rights activists in Bolivia, for example. One major tactic is not allowing a fear of empowering the right dictate all actions as activists. I think that is particularly useful to people in the US right now. In Brazil, the landless movement continues to support the lesser of two evils in elections while also occupying unused land and working it for survival, regardless of the slow pace of land reform pushed by the government. Social movements in Bolivia have been able to both defend the progressive policies of the Morales government while radicalizing his policies by pressuring him from below. Translating these tactics, which I outline in the book, in the US, will be different for each community. The past ten years in Latin America have seen a historic shift to the left in the halls of government power and the streets, so it makes sense that people in the US need to learn from these examples if we are to break out of the stranglehold of our stagnant political culture.

NK: Thanks very much for your time!

BD: Thank you!

In fact it’s no mystery at all.

There’s no escaping it either. You can eat healthy and vegetarian, live out in a rural area where there’s no factories spewing death into the air, avoid filling your life with plastics and chemicals, and you’ll still be at risk, because even polar bears on the North Pole are getting dioxins built up in their fatty tissue.  Dioxin, by the way, is the most toxic and carcinogenic substance ever seen on the face of the Earth.  It can give you cancer from even a few parts per trillion – that’s 12 zeros. Dioxin is shot up into the air as a consequence of PVC production, and now it’s in our food, our bodies, and mother’s breast milk. (See “Dying from Dioxin” by Lois Marie Gibbs – on Google Books)

This article by Alan Grossman is succinct and clear. Studies show that cancer is caused by human activity, or more accurately, by industrial activity. I would go further and say that cancer is caused by the capitalist system, because in a human-scale and democratic economy, we could incorporate rational decision-making and say, “OK, if PVC is so fucking toxic, maybe we should make something that costs a bit more but doesn’t give us cancer.” 

Unfortunately, in our capitalist system Big Business runs the show and their concern is not rationality, but profit. Period.  That’s why capitalism is not only giving so many of us and our loved ones this deadly condition, capitalism is itself is a form of cancer. Capitalism sees ALL life, human or otherwise, through the lens of profit. ”Can this make money?” is the bottom line for why our biosphere is under assault in so many forms – from the Gulf spill to the melting of the climate.  As the late Edward Abbey once quipped, “Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

So I ask you, dear reader, is it fair to proclaim that the only cure for cancer is an end to the capitalist system?  Because that’s what it looks like to me.

[alex]

Cancer – The Number One Killer – And Its Environmental Causes

by Alan Grossman

Originally published by Huffington Post, August 17, 2010.

The World Health Organization projects that this year cancer will become the world’s leading cause of death. Why the epidemic of cancer? Death certificates in the United States show cancer as being the eighth leading cause of death in 1900.

Why has it skyrocketed to now surpass heart disease as number one?

Is it because people live longer and have to die of something? That’s a factor, but not the prime reason as reflected by the jump in age-adjusted cancer being far above what could be expected from increased longevity. And it certainly doesn’t explain the steep hike in childhood cancers. Is it lifestyle, diet and genetics, as we have often been told? They are factors, but not key reasons.

The cause of the cancer epidemic, as numerous studies have now documented, is largely environmental — the result of toxic substances in the water we drink, the food we eat, the consumer products we use, the air we breathe. (Some of the pollution is voluntarily caused — by smoking. But most is involuntary.)

As the President’s Cancer Panel declared in May, in a 240-page report titled “Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now,” : “The American people — even before they are born — are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures.” It said: “With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action.”

It pointed to chemicals and radiation as major causes of cancer and stated: “Cancer continues to shatter and steal the lives of Americans. Approximately 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and about 21 percent will die from the cancer. The incidence of some cancers, including some most common among children, is increasing…The burgeoning number and complexity of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compel us to act to protect public health.”

The panel urged President Obama “most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”

In 1980, another presidential panel, the Presidential Toxic Substances Strategy Committee, came to the same conclusion. It declared:

“Of the hazards to human health arising from toxic substances, cancer is a leading cause of concern. Cancer is the only major cause of death that has continued to rise since 1900. It is now second only to heart disease as a cause of death… Some of the increase in cancer mortality since 1900 is a function of the greater average age of the U.S. population and the medical progress made against infectious disease. But even after correcting for age, both mortality (death) rates and incidence (new cases) of cancer are increasing. Many now believe that environmental (nongenetic) factors — life style and work and environmental exposures — are significant in the great majority of cancer cases seen.”

Meanwhile, through the years solid science done by independent researchers — not those taking money from the chemical or nuclear industries — has extensively documented this cancer/environment connection.

“The evidence is there that the majority of cancer cases are environmentally caused,” says Dr. David Carpenter, founding dean of the University of Albany School of Public Health and now director of the Institute for Health and the Environment there. Among the research he points to is a 2000 study involving examining health records of 44,788 pairs of twins in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. If genetics were the main cause of cancer, if one twin developed cancer the other probably would, too. This was not found. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that “inherited genetic factors make a minor contribution” in most cancers. “This finding indicates that the environment has the principle role in causing sporadic cancer.”

Dr. Samuel Epstein, professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, in his book The Politics of Cancer concludes that cancer is a preventable disease “caused mainly by exposure to chemical or physical agents in the environment.” The huge problem, he said, is how “a combination of powerful and well-focused pressures by special industrialized interests, together with public inattention and the indifference of the scientific community” has warped public policy and thwarted “meaningful attempts to prevent the carnage.” Dr. Epstein now chairs the Cancer Prevention Coalition committed to eliminating those toxins that are causing the cancer epidemic (www.preventcancer.com).

The initiative, Prevention is The Cure, was founded by breast cancer survivor Karen Joy Miller and on its website declares that four decades have passed, “and the wake-up call put forth by Rachel Carson” in her book Silent Spring “and other activists has been blocked by powerful political interests that profit from pollution.”

These powerful interests have long had allies in government. The late James Sibbison, who went from being a reporter for the Associated Press to press officer at the Environmental Protection Agency, would tell the story of how immediately after Ronald Reagan became president, orders were given to the EPA press office “never to use the words cancer-causing in front of the word chemical.” Now the number of chemicals in commercial use in the U.S. totals 80,000. The EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 has been required to assess all of them. In over 30 years it has gotten around to examining 200.

The poisoning–and consequent cancer — is not necessary. The report by the President’s Cancer Panel emphasize how “the requite knowledge and technologies exist” to provide safe “alternatives” to cancer-causing agents.

But this doesn’t suit those doing the polluting — who have such a hold on government.

The fabricated outrage over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” is only the latest in a long string of xenophobic lies to divide, distract, and diffuse the legitimate outrage of working class Americans. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are leading these poor Tea Party suckers to destroy everything they claim to want to protect.

Wearing a tri-corner hat does not make you a patriot. Speaking the truth, and challenging the forces of tyranny, that makes a patriot. The tyrants of today are the corporations and banks that own our country, the Pentagon and security apparatus that violently impose their will, and the lying media like Fox News and CNN that fill our heads with propaganda 24/7. In short, the Tea Party are the unwitting pawns of tyranny.

Only a powerful grassroots progressive movement can blunt their hatred and redirect the public’s outrage towards the capitalist system which has bankrupted us. [alex]

Days of Rage — The Noxious Transformation of the Conservative Movement into a Rabid Fringe

Crusading to restore a holy social order, Tea Partiers have promoted disorder. Claiming to protect democracy, they smashed windows of elected representatives.

.

“He will tell you that he wants a strong authority to take from him the crushing responsibility of thinking for himself. Since the Republic is weak, he is led to break the law out of love for obedience. But is it really strong authority that he wish? In reality he demands rigorous order for others, and for himself disorder without responsibility.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, “Anti-Semite and Jew”

I am not sure when I first detected the noxious fumes that would envelop the conservative movement in the Obama era. It might have been early on, in April 2009, when I visited a series of gun shows in rural California and Nevada. Perusing tables piled high with high-caliber semi-automatic weapons and chatting with anyone in my vicinity, I heard urgent warnings of mass roundups, concentration camps, and a socialist government in Washington. “These people that are purchasing these guns are people that are worried about what’s going on in this country,” a gun dealer told me outside a show in Reno. “Good luck Obama,” a young gun enthusiast remarked to me. “We outnumber him 100 to 1.” At this time, the Tea Party movement had not even registered on the national media’s radar.

In September 2009, I led a panel discussion about this book inside an auditorium filled with nearly 100 students and faculty at the University of California-Riverside. Beside me sat Jonathan Walton, an African-American professor of religious studies and prolific writer, and Mark Takano, an erudite, openly gay former Democratic congressional candidate and local community college trustee.

In the middle of our discussion, a dozen College Republicans stormed the front of the stage with signs denouncing me as a “left-wing hack” while a hysterical young man leaped from the crowd, blowing kisses mockingly at Takano while heckling Walton as a “racist.” Afterward, university police officers insisted on escorting me to my ride after the right-wing heckler attempted to follow me as he shouted threats.

Who was this stalker? Just a concerned citizen worried about taxes? His name was Ryan Sorba and he was an operative of a heavily funded national conservative youth outfit, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Besides founding dozens of Republican youth groups across the country, Sorba has devoted an exceptional amount of energy to his interest in homosexuals. His intellectual output consists of a tract titled The Born Gay Hoax, arguing that homosexuality is at once a curable disease and a bogus trend manufactured by academic leftists. Adding to his credentials, Sorba has a history of run-ins with the law, he explained when I called him about the order.

My encounter with this aggressive right-wing cadre seemed a strange, isolated event. But the hostility turned out to be symptomatic of the intensifying campaign to delegitimize President Obama and his allies in Congress. The Right’s days of rage were only beginning.

Through his first year in office, Obama seemed oblivious to the threat of the far right. He campaigned against partisanship, declaring that there were “no red states” and no “conservative America.” Apparently, he thought it was merely a contrivance or myth that there were people who rejected science, demonized gays, assailed minority and women’s rights — or that they genuinely believed in what they said. Speaking of changing Washington, Obama seemed to think that the entire history of politics since the rise of Reagan and the Right and their strategies of polarization was not deeply rooted but a superficial problem attributable to certain “divisive” personalities, easily wiped away with gestures toward bipartisanship. His view of the parties was that they were simply mirror images sharing fundamental beliefs but separated by “partisans.” The skilled and devoted community organizer could bring them together.

Many of his supporters in the media, often part and parcel of political wars over the years, reinforced and amplified his innocence, proclaiming he was the one at last who could “bridge the partisan divide.” Andrew Sullivan, a disaffected conservative who once called critics of George W. Bush policies “fifth columnists” but now fervently supported Obama, wrote that the new president was destined to become “a liberal Reagan who can reunite America.” This optimism pervaded the Obama White House as the president and his aides sought out Republicans willing to vote for his programs. After all, why couldn’t we all just get along?

In his autobiographical book The Audacity of Hope, Obama highlighted a key component of his political strategy: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” Once he was elected, conservatives concluded that they could reverse Obama’s strength by transforming him into a human tableau for the most fearsome images they could conjure.

Obama’s multiracial background was crucial in cultivating resentment among the shock troops. Those who rejected Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president on the basis of his background gave birth to the “Birther” movement that sought to challenge his citizenship. The movement’s most visible figure, and therefore the most eccentric, was Orly Taitz, a dentist and self-trained lawyer who had immigrated from the former Soviet republican of Moldova to Israel before settling in the conservative bastion of Orange County, California. Convinced by claims on the far-right Web site WorldNetDaily that Obama planned to create a “civilian national security force,” Taitz told me she “realized that Obama was another Stalin–it’s a cross between Stalinist USSR and Hitler’s Germany.”

After becoming transfixed by online conspiracy theories claiming Obama’s family had forged his birth certificate in Hawaii, Taitz snapped into action. She filed a lawsuit in November 2008 with California Secretary of State Debra Bowen demanding an investigation into Obama’s eligibility to serve as president. Taitz’s plaintiff in the case was Wiley Drake, an Orange County radio preacher and former second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention who once publicly prayed for Obama’s death. While her lawsuit went nowhere, and subsequent suits earned her angry rebukes from judges, Taitz became an instant media sensation, delivering heavily accented screeds against Obama before friendly interviewers from Sean Hannity to CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who Taitz called her “greatest supporter” and who was eventually fired as an indirect result of his hosting of her.

In March 2009, Texas Rep. Randy Neugebauer signed on to a Birther bill proposing that future presidential candidates must prove their citizenship before becoming eligible to campaign. The Birther movement had found its voice in government and made an indelible impact on the Republican grassroots. By June 2009, 28 percent of Republican respondents to a Kos/Research 2000 poll said they thought Obama wasn’t born in the United States, while 30 percent “weren’t sure.” “Obama should be in the Big House,” Taitz shrieked to me, “not the White House!”

When Obama announced health care reform as the first major initiative of his administration, the conservative movement activated a campaign of demonization — transformational politics — designed to turn Obama into the “Other,” making him seem as unfamiliar, and therefore as threatening, as possible. When the president urged the Congress to deliver a health care reform bill in 2009, the Right staged a living theater of political hatred, Obama’s dream of bipartisanship transformed into a nightmarish version of “Marat/Sade.” On September 12, 2009, tens of thousands of far-right activists belonging to a loose confederation of anti-government groups called the Tea Party Patriots converged on Washington’s National Mall for a giant protest against the Obama health care plan. The date was significant: Fox News’s top-ranked talk show host Glenn Beck had declared the birth of the “9-12 Project” to restore the sense of unity — and siege mentality — that Americans experienced on September 11, 2001. But this time, Obama — not Osama — was the enemy.

While covering the rally, I witnessed sign after sign declaring Obama a greater danger to America’s security than al-Qaida; demonstrators held images that juxtaposed Obama’s face with images of evildoers from Hitler to Pol Pot to Bin Laden; others carried signs questioning Obama’s status as a U.S. citizen. “We can fight al-Qaida, we can’t kill Obama,” said an aging demonstrator. Another told me, “Obama is the biggest Nazi in the world,” pointing to placards he had fashioned depicting Obama and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi in SS outfits. According to another activist, Obama’s agenda was similar to Hitler’s: “Hitler took over the banking industry, did he not? And Hitler had his own personal secret service police. [The community-organizing group] ACORN is an extension of that.”

The seemingly incongruous Tea Party propaganda recalled signs waved by right-wing Jewish settlers during rallies against Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his support of the peace process, portraying him as an SS officer and as the French collaborator Marshall Petain. In 1995, amid the provocative atmosphere, a young right-wing Jewish zealot assassinated Rabin. The Israeli tragedy was a cautionary example of targeted hatred leading to violence.

Members of the Tea Party “Patriots” did not seem to care that their rhetoric was irrational, or that comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin was contradictory and obviously hyperbolic. Their motives were entirely negative. By purging government of the multicultural evil that had seized power through illicit means (several activists told me they believed ACORN helped Obama steal the election), they were convinced that a mythical golden American yesteryear would return. They had no interest in building anything new or even articulating an agenda, much less discussing the merits of policies. The Tea Party’s primary concern was cultural purification — freedom from, not freedom to. Against the dark image of the president and his liberal allies, Tea Party activists defined themselves as the children of light. The racial subtext was always transparent.

The Tea Party’s strategy rested on a guerrilla campaign of chaos and sabotage designed not only to intimidate Democrats but also to disorient independent voters who might have supported health care reform. The Tea Partiers were convinced this would be an easy feat, since they believed the majority of the country was on their side — that they represented the “Real America.” At the 9-12 rally Matt Kibbe, one of the march organizers, told the crowd that ABC News was reporting that 1 million to 1.5 million people were in attendance, something ABC denied, saying “ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters.” he name of a corporate-funded Beltway advocacy group, not the battle cry of Mel Gibson William Wallace in Braveheart.

Contrary to its image as a grassroots movement mobilized to stifle the machinations of Washington elites, the Tea Party movement was the creation of a constellation of industry-funded conservative groups with close Republican ties. The movement’s leading puppet-master was Dick Armey, who directed resources and talking points to the Tea Party “Patriots” from his Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, FreedomWorks. Among the corporate clients of Armey’s lobbying firm, which he was forced to leave as a result of his involvement in the Tea Parties, was the pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb, a company with a clear interest in defeating health care reform. (Armey’s other “real American” clients included the Marxist terror cult, People’s Mojahedin of Iran, which received funding and assistance from Saddam Hussein in order to launch terrorist strikes throughout the 1990′s against Iranian civilian targets.) Armey collected a consulting fee of $250,000 directly from FreedomWorks and $300,000 from allied astroturf front groups. FreedomWorks paid out much of its money to an assortment of Republican political consultants.

If Armey was the Tea Party king, Sarah Palin was eager to be crowned the Tea Party queen. Just days after Obama’s inauguration, Palin abruptly quit her job as Alaskan governor to vie for the honor. Palin’s motives for quitting became clear when she inked a lucrative deal to write her political memoir Going Rogue, signed on as a regular contributor to Fox News, and received $1 million an episode for a reality show on cable television, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” Palin’s book tour, which sent her through Middle America in a luxuriously outfitted bus, resembled both a presidential campaign and a traveling carnival.

Whether or not Palin intends to run for president, her growing media presence has magnified her influence within the Republican Party. Yet the ever-expanding Palin phenomenon was greeted with hostility by Republican politicos desperately seeking to expand the party’s base after the drubbing in 2008. Former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt warned that Palin’s nomination in 2012 would be “catastrophic” for the GOP. His doomsday prediction was backed by an October Gallup poll revealing her as one of the most polarizing and unpopular political figures in the country with a disapproval rating of over 50 percent. Unfortunately for Schmidt and other party pragmatists, those who approve of Palin represent the heartbeat of the Republican Party, its most fervent activists, and cannot be dissuaded from following her, even if she is leading the party off a cliff.

A November 2009 special congressional election in New York’s heavily Republican 23rd district was the first major test of Palin’s power. Along with a parade of nationally recognized conservatives, Palin endorsed Doug Hoffman, an unknown far-right third-party candidate closely allied with the Tea Party, helping to force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. In the end, Palin’s ideological purge in upstate New York led to an improbable Democratic victory, the first in that district in more than 100 years. After the disaster Palin and her allies claimed victory, insisting they had at least hastened the purge of ideologically impure Republicans from the party. She went on to endorse Rand Paul, the son of right-wing libertarian Rep. Ron Paul and a candidate in Kentucky’s GOP senatorial primary, while Dick Cheney went out of his way to endorse Rand’s regular Republican opponent, Trey Grayson, the Kentucky secretary of state.

Following the Tea Party script of avoiding social issues like abortion and gay marriage in order to obscure the large presence of the Christian Right within the movement’s ranks, the self-described “hardcore pro-lifer” Palin recast herself as a libertarian concerned primarily with issues of “economic freedom.” She claimed the Democratic “cap and trade” plan to limit carbon emissions would harm the livelihood of blue-collar workers, and she assailed health care reform as a Trojan Horse for “socialism” (though she admitted her family “used to hustle over the border” to take advantage of Canada’s single-payer health care system). But no Palin attack had as much effect as the one she blasted out on her Facebook page claiming the Obama health care plan included a provision for “death panels” that would recommend euthanasia for severely ill patients like her Down syndrome-afflicted son, Trig. With the click of a button, Palin transformed the tone of the health care debate from rancorous to poisonous.

The source of Palin’s “death panels” smear was a practiced propagandist, former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey. When President Bill Clinton introduced health care reform during his first term, McCaughey falsely claimed in an article published in the New Republic and widely circulated by Republicans, that the plan would force consumers to drop their private plans and buy into the government’s program (the article would go on to win a National Magazine Award and then be retracted years later by the New Republic’s editors). Now she was back in the spotlight, pushing a rumor that would be voted by the non-partisan fact-checking Web site Politifact.com as “the lie of 2009.” McCaughey’s latest innuendo was boosted by the cult of political crank Lyndon LaRouche, which mobilized to push the rumor into the mainstream.

In June 2009, one of LaRouche’s top lieutenants publicly confronted Ezekiel Emanuel, the National Institute of Health’s chief bioethicist and brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, accusing him of seeking to reintroduce Hitler’s T-4 program to kill the handicapped through health care reform. “President Obama has put in place a reform apparatus reviving the euthanasia of Hitler Germany in 1939, that began the genocide there,” LaRouche staffer Anton Chaitkin charged. Soon, LaRouche’s followers were on street corners around the country with posters depicting Obama with a Hitler moustache. At a town hall forum on health care reform hosted by Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, a LaRouche follower waved one of the Obama-as-Hitler posters and demanded, “Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has expressly supported this policy?”

Two months later, after Palin whispered the rumor on Facebook, prominent conservatives from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to ranking Senate Finance Committee member Charles Grassley parroted her claims before audiences of indignant Tea Partiers. Not to be outdone, Glenn Beck devoted an extended rant on his show to the reality of death panels. Echoing the LaRouche cultists, Beck accused Ezekiel Emanuel of “the devaluing of human life, putting a price on each individual.” He thundered, “The death panel is not a firing squad. Rationing is inevitable and they know it!”

The death panel rumor served a variety of functions, all useful to the movement, but not necessarily to the Republican Party. Most importantly, the rumor resonated both with hard-core libertarians who resented the very existence of the federal government and Christian Right activists who viewed the legalization of abortion as a slippery slope to government-sponsored euthanasia. The hysteria it engendered helped repair the rift exposed by the Terri Schiavo charade in 2005, when the evangelical conservative James Dobson publicly clashed with Armey, the libertarian leader, over the right of the government to interfere in a private family matter of life and death.

The slurring of Obama as a sort of sleeper agent crypto-Muslim helped bring the neoconservatives back into the fray. The new neo-con generation was led by Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz, who founded an anti-Obama advocacy group, Keep America Safe, by leveraging donations from pro-Israel sources. Asked by CNN’s Larry King about the Birther movement that was challenging Obama’s status as an American citizen, Liz Cheney remarked, “One of the reasons you see people so concerned about this is people are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas.” With the libertarians, Christian Right, and the neo-cons seated around the same table, united in resentment of the alien president, the conservative movement was whole again.

The experiments in “Terror Management Theory” of Sheldon Solomon, professor of psychology at Skidmore College, Jeff Greenberg, professor of psychologist at the Unviersity of Arizona, and Tom Pyszczynski, professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, have demonstrated the connection between fear of death and intensification of conservative attitudes. The findings help explain the effectiveness of the death panel rumor and insinuations by conservative figures that Obama was not truly American and somehow sympathetic to Islamic terrorists. Indeed, these seemingly irrational smears were guided by tactical reasoning, calculated to agitate voters with constant reminders of their own mortality. Whether or not Independents responded, the rhetoric of death kept the Tea Party crowd in a persistent state of panic and rage, ensuring a standing army ready to fan out to rallies and town halls at the first sign of liberal malfeasance.

Obama’s first year in office was marked by more than raucous protests; there were several disturbing murders committed by far-right extremists. In April 2009, a 22-year-old neo-Nazi wannabe named Richard Poplawsi mowed down a SWAT team of Pittsburgh cops, killing three. Poplawski’s best friend told reporters the young killer “grew angry recently over fears Obama would outlaw guns.” Later it was discovered that Poplawski had posted a video clip to a neo-Nazi Web site portraying Fox’s Glenn Beck contemplating the existence of concentration camps. (After a characteristically thorough investigation, Beck conceded they were not real.) On another occasion, the killer posted a video promoting Tea Party rallies. A month after the Pittsburgh bloodbath, Scott Roeder, a supporter of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, shot Dr. George Tiller to death while he prayed at his church in Wichita, Kansas. Tiller was declared fair game by the anti-abortion movement because of his role as Kansas’s only late-term abortion provider. During at least 28 episodes of Bill O’Reilly’s “O’Reilly Factor,” O’Reilly had referred to Tiller as “Tiller the baby killer,” a criminal guilty of “Nazi stuff.” “I wouldn’t want to be [Tiller] if there is a Judgment Day,” O’Reilly proclaimed.

In August 2009, a middle-aged professional named George Sodini walked into a health club in suburban Pittsburgh and gunned down three women. The mainstream press explained Sodini’s motives away by homing in on passages in his online diaries describing his loneliness, inability to convince women to have sex with him, and descent into chronic masturbation. Nearly every major media outlet omitted or ignored a long deranged entry in which Sodini projected his sexual frustration onto Obama, whom he seemed to view as a symbol of black male virility and predation.

The day after Obama’s election victory, Sodini wrote: “Good luck to Obama! He will be successful. The liberal media LOVES him. Amerika has chosen The Black Man. Good! In light of this I got ideas outside of Obama’s plans for the economy and such. Here it is: Every black man should get a young white girl … Kinda a reverse indentured servitude thing. Every daddy know when he sends his little girl to college, she be … real good. I saw it. ‘Not my little girl’, daddy says! (Yeah right!!) Black dudes have thier [sic] choice of best white?? [ellipses in original].”

In another posting to an anti-Clinton forum in 1994, during the height of the Republicans’ Whitewater investigation, Sodini revealed that he had purchased a bumper sticker reading, “Stop Socialism, Impeach Clinton,” from a National Review ad. A year later, Sodini ranted on an anti-government militia site, “I am convinced that more drastic action is required to bring the country back to the Constitutional order that it was 200 years ago. I don’t think any group of political leaders will achieve this for us.” Whether or not Sodini’s murder spree was motivated by his political passions, he was pathologically death-driven and fixated on the phantasmagoria of right-wing imagery. In his final diary entry, Sodini proclaimed, “Death lives!”

More than any other media figure of the Obama era, Glenn Beck encouraged the campaign of racial demonization and conspiracy that consumed the Tea Party “Patriots.” During a broadcast of “Fox and Friends,” Beck opined that Obama “has exposed himself over and over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture.” As evidence, Beck pointed to White House green-jobs czar Van Jones, an African American former community organizer who was eventually forced to resign as a direct result of Beck’s crusade. From there, Beck targeted another black Obama adviser, Valerie Jarrett, highlighting her ties to ACORN while upholding her and Jones as evidence of Obama’s “socialist” agenda. In another broadcast, Beck played an audio clip of unidentified African Americans referring to “Obama money” as they collected welfare checks in Detroit. Then he showed footage of members of a Kansas City-based youth group practicing a step show, a traditional African-American group dance apparently unfamiliar enough to Beck and his transfixed audience that he felt at liberty to claim the footage as evidence that “Obama’s SS” was being trained across inner-city America.

In September 2009, Beck relentlessly targeted ACORN, the Right’s new favorite hobgoblin, admitting that he intended to use the poor people’s advocacy group to distract his viewers from the health care debate. “Trust me,” Beck said, “Everybody now says they’re going to be talking about health care. I don’t think so.” (His statement was reminiscent of Rush Limbaugh’s scandal-mongering remark during the early Clinton administration: “Whitewater is about health care.”) Beck promptly cued up a series of hidden camera videos shot by conservative youth activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles inside ACORN field offices. In the videos, O’Keefe baited African-American staffers into making statements explaining that Giles, who claimed she was a prostitute, could obtain low-income housing.

O’Keefe edited in images of himself clad in an outlandish pimp costume to create the impression that he was dressed that way during the meetings with ACORN; however, Giles later admitted her partner had lied about wearing his costume to further incriminate ACORN. In the end, ACORN was exonerated of all criminal wrongdoing while in a separate incident O’Keefe was arrested and charged with a federal crime after he and several conservative pals disguised themselves as telephone repairmen and attempted to wiretap phone lines in the office of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Like Ryan Sorba, O’Keefe and his posse were movement cadres paid and directed by well-funded conservative outfits; O’Keefe had been trained by the Leadership Institute, the right-wing youth group that nurtured leading lights like Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, and Jeff Gannon.

While O’Keefe and his buddies plea-bargained with prosecutors, Beck basked in his formula for success. His show earned the highest ratings at Fox News, topping network franchises like O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. In the process, Beck’s opinions became firmly implanted in the nervous systems of Tea Party activists. “Glenn Beck has taught us everything we know,” a demonstrator at the 9-12 rally told me. “He’s opened our eyes to so much.”

But unlike the right-wing radio warhorses who helped usher in Newt Gingrich’s Republican counter-revolution of 1994, Beck was not an authentic product of the movement. When Rush Limbaugh first began dominating the AM airwaves, Beck was mired in the world of mid-level commercial radio, delivering corny yarns about lesbians and celebrity trash in hopes of becoming the next Howard Stern. By night, as he has tirelessly recounted, he medicated his anxiety with cocaine and alcohol, destroying his first marriage in the process. “We remember Glenn from the womanizing, the drinking, the drugs. Everybody who knew him at the time saw what a complete mess he was,” a shock jock from Tampa, Florida, who called himself Bubba the Love Sponge remarked to me during a broadcast of his nationally syndicated show.

Like Dusty Rhodes, the pseudo-populist demagogue of Elia Kazan’s 1957 film, A Face in the Crowd, Beck was a self-destructive drifter who might have been crumpled up with a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 in an alleyway or been locked away in a prison cell had fame not found him first. Beck was only able to stabilize his life when he made his escape from freedom, marrying a conservative Mormon, converting to her religion, and transmuting his urge to abuse drugs into conservative radio diatribes. When Beck first broke into television on CNN’s Headline News Channel, he struggled to articulate a coherent political worldview.

If he distinguished himself from other big-time conservative hosts in any way, he did so through strained and often snide attempts at humor, remnants of his failed radio career. Nevertheless, with help from his liberal agent, Matthew Hiltzik, Beck snagged a primetime slot at Fox News in early 2009. Around this same time, Beck began promoting the work of an arcane Mormon conspiracy-peddler named W. Cleon Skousen, whom he described as his political lodestar. Suddenly, Beck had something more to offer than irritable mental gestures.

Thanks to Beck’s designation of Skousen’s pseudohistorical tract The 5000 Year Leap as “required reading” on the Web site of his 9-12 Project, and his promotion of the book on his show, the previously obscure Skousen became the Hidden Imam of the Tea Party movement. By the summer of 2009, Skousen’s Leap was among the top 10 books on Amazon.com and a fixture on literature tables at Tea Party gatherings. It went from selling a puny couple of thousand copies in 2007 to selling over 200,000 copies in 2009.

Just why the book generated such an instant appeal is difficult to understand. It is little more than a slapdash of quotes from the Founding Fathers, often taken out of context and deliberately oversimplified, to explain why America is the greatest nation in history. In the process, Skousen claims that church and state separation is un-American, that “coercive taxation” is communist, and that marriage is the underpinning of a free society. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote at length on the merits of “amours” with “old women,” and who famously solicited prostitutes and fathered a son of out of wedlock, was the ultimate authority Skousen quoted on the importance of marriage.

Though Skousen claims the Founders as the world’s foremost source of eternal wisdom, he buttressed his points with fringe sources like the conspiracist Norman Dodd’s screeds about the Illuminati. According to Skousen, Dodd claimed that “powerful influences congregating in the United States” like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds had forced the United States into World War I. Skousen published Dodd’s manifestoes in his obscure journal Freemen’s Digest, which he founded for the express purpose of propagating conspiracies.

Skousen’s paranoid politics were an outgrowth of his participation in extreme anti-communist groups during the 1950s. He boasted of a close friendship with then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and said he provided him with research on communist plots, claims disputed by FBI historians. (During a recent interview, Skousen’s son, Paul, told me that contrary to rumors of Hoover’s cross-dressing and homosexual dalliances, he would set the top cop up on blind dates with live women.)

Skousen was fired from his job as Salt Lake City’s police chief for, in the words of the city’s conservative Mormon mayor, “conduct[ing] his office as chief of police in exactly the same manner in which the communists operate their government.” From there, Skousen sailed off to the far shores of the Right-peddling conspiracy tracts like The Naked Communist, and earning condemnation from his beloved FBI, which accused him in an internal memo of “promoting [his] own anti-communism for obvious financial purposes.”

Skousen’s vocal support for the far-right John Birch Society’s claim that communists controlled President Dwight Eisenhower cost him the support of the corporate backers who had paid for his Red-bashing lecture tours. He went off the radar for several years, returning during the late 1960s to accuse the Jewish Rothschild family of secretly bankrolling everyone from Ho Chi Minh to the civil rights movement. By the late 1970s, even the Church of Latter Day Saints distanced itself from Skousen and his conspiracy theories.

His work fell through the margins and might have disappeared entirely had Beck not revived it, turning The 5000 Year Leap into the bible of the Tea Party movement. Journalist Andrew Zaitchik observed in his authoritative profile of Skousen on Salon.com that Skousen’s renewed influence through Beck and the Tea Party “suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.”

Besides influencing Beck, Skousen’s teachings inspired one of the Tea Party movement’s most visible grassroots celebrities, retired Sheriff Richard Mack. I met Mack in February at a far-right rally just outside of Montgomery, Alabama. On a makeshift stage towed into the middle of a rodeo arena by a pickup truck, Mack recalled with reverence his mentorship by Skousen, who he said taught him everything he needed to know about the Constitution. Mack urged his spellbound audience to stockpile ammo and store food. “If you control the food supply,” Mack warned, “you control the people. And that’s the first step to slavery.”

Already a hero to conservatives for successfully suing the Clinton administration over the provision in the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act requiring law enforcement to conduct criminal background checks of gun purchasers, Mack reemerged in the Obama era as the archetypal local lawman who vowed to resist the tyrannical federal government. Along with a few dozen former and active military and law enforcement personnel, Mack helped form a self-styled Tea Party militia called the Oathkeepers.

Galvanized by their fear of creeping socialism, the Oathkeepers solemnly swore to refuse tyrannical federal orders such as cooperating with foreign troops and forcing Americans into concentration camps. Because the group’s members trained for combat, the vow came with suggestion of armed resistance.

Besides Mack, the Oathkeepers attracted a coterie of militia movement retreads into its ranks. The most well-established figure was Mike Vanderboegh, a longtime militia fanatic who published a booklet in the mid-1990s entitled Strategy and Tactics for a Militia Civil War, calling for sniper attacks on “war criminals, secret policemen, rats.” With Obama in office, Vandeboegh churned out anti-government screeds on right-wing blogs with renewed passion and supported his efforts by cashing in the $1,300 in federal disability compensation he received each month.

For all the energy the far right exerted in its campaign to strangle Obama’s agenda, it was a Democrat who posed the greatest threat to the passage of health care reform. Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan had been in office since 1993, placing him among the senior leadership of the so-called centrist Blue Dog Democrats. When health care reform was introduced in Congress, Stupak became the leader of an informal caucus of anti-abortion Democrats, making him the de facto swing vote on the House version of the bill. By extension, Stupak was the point man in the campaign to ensure that the bill would not allow federal funding for abortion for low-income women.

But after close consultation with leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Stupak went a step further. He introduced a draconian amendment to block women from paying for abortions from even their own private insurance plans. The amendment, which passed the House but was shut down in the Senate, became a key sticking point in health care negotiations. “He’s a big hero now in the pro-life community,” former Bush Catholic issues adviser Deal Hudson told me in November 2009. “Thanks to him, this is the first time I can remember the pro-life Democrats having any power.”

To the chagrin of the Republicans, Stupak entertained offers of compromise from the Democratic leadership. According to Hudson, the Catholic Bishops were keen to see health care reform pass, but only if the bill contained a clear provision forbidding patients from spending federal money on abortion. Finally, in March, after pressure from House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Obama agreed to sign an executive order forbidding the federal funding of abortion. Stupak had been mollified.

Now he and his anti-abortion caucus pledged to deliver the swing votes the Democrats needed to pass the bill. As soon as reports seeped out declaring the imminent passage of health care reform, major right-wing blogs like RedState.org churned out virulent denunciations of Stupak, calling him a traitor and sellout. The blog comment sections filled up with dozens of diatribes referring to Stupak in language previously reserved for Dr. George Tiller: “Bart the Baby-Killer.”

On March 20, thousands of Tea Party activists surrounded the Capitol’s Longworth Building in expectation of Obama’s pep talk to the House Democrats and the health care vote. Democratic Representative John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement, and Representative Barney Frank, the first openly gay member of Congress, passed through the crowd on their way inside the Capitol. “Nigger!” a demonstrator barked at Lewis. Another called Frank a “faggot,” eliciting laughter and cheers from nearby protesters. Meanwhile, as another African-American Democrat, Representative Emanuel Cleaver, ascended the Capitol steps, a protester who had been screaming at Lewis and Frank spat on his face.

With the demonstration carried on into the night, cries of “Kill the bill!” drifted into calls for violence. “I would gladly stand with any of you men here and take these fascists down,” a man in camouflage battle dress uniform proclaimed in front of an amateur videographer, pointing toward the Capitol. “You haven’t heard the last of me!”

The next day, Republican members of Congress emerged from the Longworth Building to salute the Tea Partiers. The demonstrators cheered wildly for their proxies on the inside. Finally, after hours of impassioned speeches on the House floor, the bill passed. But the drama was hardly over.

Republican Representative Joe Pitts, an anti-abortion Catholic who co-authored Stupak’s original amendment, demanded a motion to bring it back to the floor for a vote, a transparent exercise in grandstanding that was certain to fail. In response, Stupak rushed to the podium with a stinging rebuke to Pitts and the Republicans. “The motion to commit does not support life,” Stupak declared. “It is the Democrats who have stood up….” Heckling from the Republican side interrupted his statement.

As Stupak looked around the House chamber, Rep. Randy Neugebauer, a right-wing Republican from Texas who openly supported the Birther movement, began shouting at him from the backbench, “Baby killer!” Other Republicans joined in, parroting base insults.

While the Republicans sank their heads in defeat, some more militant devotees of the Tea Party movement called for a right-wing Kristallnacht. “If you wish to send a message that Pelosi and her party cannot fail to hear, break their windows,” Vanderboegh of the Oathkeepers wrote on a far-right blog hours after the bill passed. “Break them NOW. Break them and run to break again.” Within three days, windows and doors at Democratic Party headquarters in New York, Kansas and Arizona had been shattered.

Meanwhile, at least 10 Democratic members of Congress reported receiving death threats. Images of nooses were faxed to the offices of Stupak and James Clyburn, an African-American congressman from South Carolina. Representative Anthony Weiner, an especially vocal proponent of health care reform, received a menacing letter filled with white powder.

The brother of Representative Tom Perriello, another health care supporter, had his home gas line deliberately sabotaged after a local Tea Party organizer posted his address online (he had meant to post the congressman’s) and encouraged activists to “drop by” to express their anger about Perriello’s recent vote. In Tucson, Arizona, the windows of Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords’ office were shattered by shots from a pellet gun. And a brick was thrown through the window of Representative Louise Slaughter’s office in New York as her voicemail filled with threats of impending sniper attacks.

After the passage of the health care bill, the Tea Party floated into a gray zone between authoritarianism and anarchy. Crusading to restore a holy social order, they promoted disorder. Claiming to protect democracy, they smashed windows of elected representatives. Warning of death panels, they called in death threats. With the atmosphere of violence thickening, Palin took to her Twitter account to issue a battle cry: “Don’t Retreat, Instead–RELOAD!” Thus concluded the first phase of the Obama era that was to usher in a peaceable kingdom of bipartisanship.

The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway.

The interview will be available in four parts. Scroll to the bottom to read all of Prof. Carriere’s questions.

Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

MC: The current financial crisis is clearly a moment of peril for both individuals and the broader system of capitalism. But would it also make sense to see it as a moment of opportunity?

AK: Absolutely. I see opportunity springing from every crack in the structure of capitalism. For all those who wish to see a different world, this moment is dripping with opportunity because the old order is crumbling before our eyes.

Shock and Awe on the New York Stock Exchange

The crisis extends far beyond the broken financial system. Millions of people are losing their jobs, homes, and savings as the burden of the crisis gets shifted onto the poor and working class. Public faith in the system, both the government and the capitalist economy, has been shattered and is at an all-time low. And it’s not just the economic crisis. The bank bailouts, the endless wars in the Mid East, the BP spill and the meltdown of the climate, and about a dozen other crises have shaken us deeply. It’s become common sense that the system is broken and a major change is needed. Barack Obama was elected in the US precisely by promising this change. Now that he is failing to deliver, more and more people are questioning whether the system can provide any solutions, or whether it’s actually the source of the problem.

Shattered faith is the dominant sentiment today. You can see it in people’s faces – the disappointment, grief, worry, and anger. To me, this loss of faith presents an enormous opening for putting forth a new, non-capitalist way of life. People are ready to hear radical solutions now, like they haven’t been since the Great Depression.

Historic Crossroads

If we go back to 1929, we’ll see some interesting parallels to our current moment. When that depression started, millions lost their livelihoods to pay for the bankers’ crisis. Faith in capitalism sunk to rock bottom. The public flocked to two major ideologies that offered a way out: socialism and fascism.

Socialism presented a solution to the crisis by saying, roughly: “Capitalism is flawed because it divides us into rich and poor, and the rich always take advantage of the poor. We need to organize the poor and workers into unions and political parties so we can take power for the benefit of all.”

Socialism attracted millions of followers, even in the United States. The labor movement was enormous and kept gaining ground through sit-down strikes and other forms of direct action. The Communist Party sent thousands of organizers into the new CIO, at the time a more radical union than the AFL. Socialist viewpoints even started getting through to the mass media and government. Huey Long was elected Senator from Louisiana by promising to “Share Our Wealth,” to radically redistribute the wealth of the country to abolish poverty and unemployment. (He was assassinated.) Socialism challenged President Roosevelt from the left, pushing him to create the social safety net of the New Deal.

On the other side, fascism also emerged as a serious force and attracted a mass following by putting forth something like the following: “The government has sold us out. We are a great nation, but we have been disgraced by liberal elites who are pillaging our economy for the benefit of foreign enemies, dangerous socialists, and undesirable elements (like Jews). We need to restore our national honor and fulfill our God-given mission.”

When people hear the word fascism, they usually think of Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, where successful fascist movements seized state power and implemented totalitarian control of society. Yet fascism was an international phenomenon during the Depression, and the United States was not immune to its reach. General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in US history, testified before the Senate that wealthy industrialists had approached him as part of a “Business Plot” and tried to convince him to march an army of 500,000 veterans on Washington, DC to install a fascist dictatorship.

Today we are approaching a similar crossroads. When I hear the story of the Business Plot I think about the Tea Party, which has sprung from a base of white supremacist anger, facilitated by right-wing elements of the corporate structure like Fox News. This is an extremely dangerous phenomenon. The “teabaggers” have moved from questioning Obama’s citizenship, to now trying to reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the ability of everyone, regardless of color, to enjoy public accommodations like restaurants.

I think it’s fair to name the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Christian Right, etc. parts of a potential neo-fascist movement in the United States. Their words and actions too often encourage attacks on people of color, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT folks, and anyone they don’t see as legitimate members of US society. Ultimately, many in this movement are pushing for a different social system taking power in the United States: one that is more authoritarian, less compassionate, more exploitive of the environment, more militaristic, and based on a mythical return to national glory. This is not a throwback to Nazi Germany. It’s a new kind of fascism, a new American fascism. And it’s a serious threat.

Tea Party racism in Denver, April 15, 2009

On the other hand, this crisis is also an opportunity for all of us who see capitalism as a destructive force and believe the message of the recent U.S. Social Forum that “Another World is Possible. Another US is Necessary.”  “Socialism” in the post-McCarthy/Cold War era of the United States is a dead word, because it carries a lot of baggage from the Soviet Union. Rightly so, the USSR was a terrible dictatorship that is hardly an example to follow. The question is, how do those of us who are progressive and anti-capitalist articulate our ideas to resonate with a mass audience in this moment?

Common Values

I argue that we need to speak to the population in a language of our common values: democracy, freedom, justice, and sustainability.

Adopting this mainstream language is not an attempt to be deceptive. These words have captured people’s hearts for a real reason: they offer a window to the world we want to see. It is the government, corporations, and media who deceive us by evoking these words to justify their atrocities, as in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” (Over a million dead, and the Iraqi people are no closer to any kind of “freedom” I would want.) Rather than surrendering these noble ideals to the right wing, where they become meaningless dogma, I see immense potential to take language back and use it with honesty, as if words actually mean something.

So what if progressives reclaim these common values and make them guideposts on the way to a better society? For example, how can we talk about freedom if there is no self-determination, either in Iraq or here in the US? Let’s be honest, what freedom do we really have? The freedom to choose Coke or Pepsi, or similarly, to vote Democrat or Republican?

What about the freedom to determine our own destinies outside the constraints of corporations and government? What freedom is more basic than freedom from poverty and suffering? How can anyone speak of freedom if they have no income and no opportunity to escape unemployment? Or if they have nowhere to live because their home was foreclosed? What if their community is torn apart because so many youth are filling the prisons on nonviolent drug offenses? Is a prisoner free? Is their mother, spouse, or loved ones free? What does freedom mean if you’re queer or trans, and you face emotional and physical violence every time you express who you are and live your own life? How can we claim to be a free society if immigrants live in fear of being locked up by ICE and deported? What freedom do you have if your neighbor has none?

I think real freedom requires self-determination, the ability of an individual or community to choose their own destinies. We can’t pretend we have freedom in this country until “we, the people” have a say in our neighborhoods, towns and cities, in our workplaces, our schools, and our government. This requires that the public actively participate in managing their own affairs, for example through neighborhood councils to have a say in the neighborhood, through labor unions to have a say at work, student unions to have a say at school, and other democratic organizations that give people the power to defend their rights. There is a dire need to hold our corrupt representatives in Washington accountable to popular will. But to be truly free, might we also need to structure government in a new way, so it can be run by the people themselves? Or even to abolish the government, if it can’t do what the people say?

So I believe when we get to the meaningful core of the word “freedom,” it poses a radical challenge to capitalist society. We can say similar things about “democracy,” “justice,” and “sustainability,” and I would add, “love.” I’ll talk more about this in response to your third question. These values reinforce each other, and if we honor them for their true depth of meaning, they can be effective tools for change.

The Power of Imagination

This might sound good, but do progressives have the power to achieve these kinds of changes? It may sound farfetched. The media and government, especially in the U.S., have done an excellent job convincing us that we can never win. People with our views are routinely excluded from official conversation on the news or in elections. When we try to protest and take our voices to the street, they corral us within “free speech zones” so we look crazy and feel powerless. If a progressive voice does get through to the public somehow, it’s dismissed as “unrealistic.” We’re pressured to just vote for the lesser of two evils and be silent. The result of this silencing is that we have no idea how many people share our values and aspirations, because we’re often too intimidated to proclaim our views proudly. Worse, to some degree we’ve internalized this silencing so that we hesitate even to imagine our progressive hopes and dreams, lest they accidentally slip past our lips into polite conversation.

The stifling of progressive views is part of a larger culture of silence that helps the system maintain control. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman call it Manufacturing Consent, the use of media and propaganda to create a passive, obedient population. The message we receive constantly from media is that we are spectators, not participants. Rather than take a stand on an issue and risk being wrong or foolish, why not leave it to the experts? Besides, we’re too busy being consumers, workers and students to worry about politics. Better to not make waves. We might as well amuse ourselves with television, celebrity gossip, and Facebook, and try not to get involved. From all the propaganda we consume over the course of our lives, we come to develop the core belief that we are powerless to affect change. This myth of powerlessness is one of the biggest lies in the history of the world, and we need to dismantle it.

What the U.S. Social Forum proves is that there is a large, broad-based movement for change here in the United States, the very core of the global capitalist machine. There are millions of average, everyday people all across the nation who are working and pushing in a progressive direction in large and small ways, whether on immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, housing, health care, education, prison justice, queer and trans justice, environmental justice, peace in the Middle East, etc. The system doesn’t want you to know about this, which is why they don’t show it on television. Our movements are alive and well. They are strong. They are inspiring. And in many places they are winning.

Coalition to Save the Libraries confronts the Philadelphia City Council and its Budget Cuts, May 21, 2009

I’ll just share a local example from here in Philadelphia. In late 2008, Mayor Nutter announced he would close 11 libraries due to budget constraints. Seemingly out of nowhere – but actually out of strong communities throughout the city – a movement emerged to oppose and prevent this decision, facilitated by the multiracial, multigenerational Coalition to Save the Libraries. The coalition organized creative actions at library branches slated for closure and at City Hall. People from across the city came together to imagine what kind of library system would best serve the public. Pressure kept mounting until the Mayor had to abandon his closures. All the libraries remain open to this day, despite continuing budget cuts and layoffs.  Kristin Campbell wrote a fuller description of how grassroots organizing saved the libraries.

We can look at this victory and downplay it as limited because it only restored a public service that shouldn’t have been attacked anyway. But like all grassroots organizing it points towards a better future, for the simple reason that people became empowered by working together. Capitalism is a system of disempowerment. It cannot tolerate our active participation in public affairs. As soon as we begin to break our silence and speak out against the injustices we are being subjected to, the system begins to quake and it searches for ways to pacify and silence us again. If we remain alert, active, and vocal, we can break the culture of complacency and bring more and more people into the awareness of their own power. So I think that’s the opportunity we have in this crisis.

I want to excite people’s imaginations of what a better world might look like. There is no better time to do it. If my theory is right, then capitalism, the system that has dominated the world for the past 500 years, is coming to an end. Recognizing this opens up a world of possibility for the future. Maybe that’s scary, because who knows what will happen? We might be driven into a neo-fascist nightmare. Things might keep getting worse, in which case maybe we should just find reasons to enjoy our current way of life while it lasts. I can see some of my friends saying that. But that leaves out two crucial truths that I want to highlight.

The first truth is that capitalism is a terribly abusive and destructive system, which we would be better off without. The second truth is that if we organize and push for a better world, we might win. So the time for complacency is over, and the time for taking bolder steps toward our dreams is here.

—–

Alex Knight is a proponent of the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. He is working on a book titled “The End of Capitalism” and seeks a publisher. Since 2007 he has edited the website endofcapitalism.com. He has a degree in electrical engineering and a Master’s in political science, both from Lehigh University. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a teacher and organizer. He can be reached at alex@endofcapitalism.com

Michael Carriere is an assistant professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he teaches courses on American history, public policy, political science, and urban design. He is currently working on a book, with David Schalliol, titled “The Death and (After) Life of Great American Cities: Twenty-First Century Urbanism and the Culture of Crisis.” He holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago.

—–

Click the links below for more of the interview:

1. The current financial crisis is clearly a moment of peril for both individuals and the broader system of capitalism. But would it also make sense to see it as a moment of opportunity?
Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

2. Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?
Part 2A. Capitalism and Ecological Limits
Part 2B. Social Limits and the Crisis

3. Moving forward, how would you ideally envision a post-capitalist world? And if capitalism manages to survive (as it has in the past), is there still room for real change?
Part 3. Life After Capitalism

However I must disagree with Hedges on the phrase ‘liberal elite’ – the ruling class is hardly liberal, unless it’s liberal to invade countries and kill millions of innocent civilians based on lies, or to plunder the atmosphere and seas, or to torture and spy on Americans and others, or any of the other awful things the government and its corporate cronies are carrying out all the time.  Barack Obama may have a liberal streak as an individual, but he is carrying out a violent, imperialistic capitalist agenda for the real rulers. [alex]

Is America ‘Yearning for Fascism’?

Chris Hedges

Originally published by TruthDig, March 29, 2010

Tea Baggers - AP / Jae C. Hong

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.

The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in motion movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation. There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war, and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the Oath Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people, but they are not the fools. We are.

The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to protect the interests of the American people. If we do not embrace this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed through a terrifying right-wing backlash.

“It is time for us to stop talking about right and left,” McKinney told me. “The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized.”

We are bound to a party that has betrayed every principle we claim to espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy, to a demand for quality and affordable public education, to a concern for the jobs of the working class. And the hatred expressed within right-wing movements for the college-educated elite, who created or at least did nothing to halt the financial debacle, is not misplaced. Our educated elite, wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs. The shouting of racist and bigoted words at black and gay members of Congress, the spitting on a black member of the House, the tossing of bricks through the windows of legislators’ offices, are part of the language of rebellion. It is as much a revolt against the educated elite as it is against the government. The blame lies with us. We created the monster.

When someone like Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!” there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts “baby killer” at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of the violence they endure.

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that we can no longer afford to imprison nearly 2 and a half million Americans, a disproportionate number of them black and Latino.  The choice is clear: break the bank to continue to punish people for mostly nonviolent offenses, or figure out a new way to operate “criminal justice” that actually heals people rather than just putting them in cages.

If we continue down a neo-fascist path we will be unable to treat prisoners as human beings, and continue to drive a racial wedge into the heart of the nation. Obama must remember that he is Black and stop these Jim Crow shenanigans. [alex]

The New Jim Crow
How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste
By Michelle Alexander

Originally published by TomDispatch.

Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

*There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

Excuses for the Lockdown

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We’re told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal — complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods — but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That’s why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it’s all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes — sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton’s boastful words, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.” The facts bear him out. Clinton’s “tough on crime” policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the “New Democrats” championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal, if you’ve been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts

But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn’t the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that’s where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes… in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s — the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war — nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time — a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers — not to mention president of the United States — causes us all to marvel at what a long way we’ve come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that’s with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our “colorblind” society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure — the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010). The former director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU in Northern California, she also served as a law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court. Currently, she holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

Copyright 2010 Michelle Alexander

The Civil Rights Movement remains the most inspiring example of successful social movements in the United States, breaking down the evil system of racial segregation and opening up possibilities for Black people, as well as for other races, that never existed before. It’s important to remember that 50 years ago, most African Americans could not vote, but now we have a Black President.

Obviously the work of the Civil Rights Movement remains unfinished, as we still live in a racist society with many other severe social problems caused by capitalism as well. But as Eyes on the Prize displays so dramatically, the hope we seek lies not in politicians but in our very own hands. We must learn from the past in order to change the future.

I watched episode 1 today and will be viewing the others over the next few weeks. Would you like to watch and discuss the series with me? Please respond by leaving a comment!

Love and struggle,

alex

p.s. anyone know how to embed these videos on WordPress?

Episode 1: Awakenings (1954-1956)

Subjects: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Segregation, Black Soldiers in World War II, Brown v. Board of Education, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr, White Citizens Council, Ku Klux Klan, White Allies

Episode 2: Fighting Back (1957-1962)

Subjects: NAACP, Integration v. Segregation, Little Rock AR, The Little Rock 9, James Meredith, University of Mississippi

Episode 3: Ain’t Scared of Your Jails (1960-1961)

Subjects: Student Sit-ins, Nashville TN, Direct Action, Civil Disobedience, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Ella Baker, Boycott Movement, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Freedom Rides, Southern Jails

Episode 4: No Easy Walk (1961-1963)

Subjects: Martin Luther King Jr, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Freedom Songs, Albany GA, Bull Connor, Birmingham AL, Fire Hoses and Dogs, John Lewis, March on Washington, John F. Kennedy, Civil Rights Act

Episode 5: Mississippi: Is This America? (1962-1964)

Subjects: Medgar Evers, Murder of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, SNCC, Voting Registration Drives, Mississippi Freedom Summer, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Failure of the Democratic Party

[This is the BEST video in the series. What SNCC did in Mississippi changed America forever.]

Episode 6: Bridge to Freedom (1965)

Subjects: Voting Rights Movement, Selma, AL, March from Selma to Montgomery, Lyndon B. Johnson, Voting Rights Act

Episode 7: The Time Has Come (1964-1966)

Subjects: Malcolm X, Nation of Islam, Lowndes County Freedom Organization, Stokely Carmichael, Black Power, March Against Fear, James Meredith

Episode 8: Two Societies (1965-1968)

Subjects: Urban Rebellions, Martin Luther King Jr, Housing, Chicago IL, Richard Daley, Watts CA, Detroit MI, Kerner Commission

Episode 9: Power (1966-1968)

Subjects: Black Power, Carl Stokes, Cleveland OH, Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Oakland CA, Education, Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn NY

Episode 10: The Promised Land (1967-1968)

Subjects: Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, Vietnam War, Poor People’s Campaign, Resurrection City, Washington DC, Sanitation Workers, Memphis TN

Episode 11: Ain’t Gonna Shuffle No More (1964-1972)

Subjects: Muhammad Ali, Black Consciousness, African Heritage, Howard University, National Black Political Convention, Gary IN

Episode 12: A Nation of Law? (1968-1971)

Subjects: Fred Hampton, Black Panther Party, Chicago IL, Police/State Repression, Attica Prison Rebellion

Episode 13: The Keys to the Kingdom (1974-1980)

Subjects: Boston School Busing Controversy, Maynard Jackson, Atlanta GA, Affirmative Action, Allan Bakke

Episode 14: Back to the Movement (1979-1985)

Subjects: Miami 1980 Riot, Harold Washington, Chicago, Unemployment, Gangs, Jesse Jackson, Operation PUSH, New Hope

Despite the economic crisis, the ultra-rich seem to be making off quite well, even increasing their incomes while the rest of us worry about unemployment, foreclosure, and bankruptcy.

Crooks and Liars recently posted an article, “Richest 400 Americans See Incomes Double, Tax Rates Halved,” which has the latest statistics on income inequality, but to fully understand the widening gap between rich and poor, check out the following essay from David DeGraw.

How long will we permit this to go on? [alex]

The Richest 1% Have Captured America’s Wealth — What’s It Going to Take to Get It Back?

By David DeGraw / February 19, 2010

Originally published by Alternet. Recovered from The Rag Blog.

“The war against working people should be understood to be a real war… Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class… And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.” — Noam Chomsky

As a record amount of U.S. citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening, how did we get to this point?

The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on U.S. workers over the past few years; however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s. In 1970, CEOs made $25 for every $1 the average worker made. Due to technological advancements, production and profit levels exploded from 1970-2000. With the lion’s share of increased profits going to the CEO’s, this pay ratio dramatically rose to $90 for CEOs to $1 for the average worker.

As ridiculous as that seems, an in-depth study in 2004 on the explosion of CEO pay revealed that, including stock options and other benefits, CEO pay is more accurately $500 to $1.

Paul Buchheit, from DePaul University, revealed, “From 1980 to 2006 the richest 1% of America tripled their after-tax percentage of our nation’s total income, while the bottom 90% have seen their share drop over 20%.” Robert Freeman added, “Between 2002 and 2006, it was even worse: an astounding three-quarters of all the economy’s growth was captured by the top 1%.”

Due to this, the United States already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the average worker much harder than CEOs, the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99% of the U.S. population has grown to a record high. The economic top one percent of the population now owns over 70% of all financial assets, an all time record.

As mentioned before, just look at the first full year of the crisis when workers lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans increased by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion, which is more than the combined net worth of 50% of the US population. Just to make this point clear, 400 people have more wealth than 155 million people combined.

Meanwhile, 2009 was a record-breaking year for Wall Street bonuses, as firms issued $150 billion to their executives. 100% of these bonuses are a direct result of our tax dollars, so if we used this money to create jobs, instead of giving them to a handful of top executives, we could have paid an annual salary of $30,000 to 5 million people.

So while U.S. workers are now working more hours and have become dramatically more productive and profitable, our pay is actually declining and all the dramatic increases in wealth are going straight into the pockets of the Economic Elite.

If our income had kept pace with compensation distribution rates established in the early 1970s, we would all be making at least three times as much as we are currently making. How different would your life be if you were making $120,000 a year, instead of $40,000?

So it should come as no surprise to see that we now have the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world and the highest inequality of wealth in our nation’s history. The backbone of America, a hard working middle class that has made our country a world leader, has been devastated.

Now that we have a better understanding of how our income has been suppressed over the past 40 years, let’s take a look at how the economy has been designed to take the limited money we receive and put it into the hands of the Economic Elite as well.

Costs of living

Other than in the workplace, in almost all our costs of living the system is now blatantly rigged against us. Let’s take a look at it, starting out with our tax system.

In total, the average U.S. citizen is forced to give up approximately 30% of our income in taxes. This tax system is now strategically designed to flow straight into the hands of the Economic Elite. A huge percentage of our tax dollars ultimately end up in their pockets. The past decade proves that — whether it’s the Republicans or the Democrats running the government — our tax money is not going into our community, it is going into the pockets of the billionaires who have bought off both parties — it is obscene.

For an example of how this system flows to the Economic Elite, just look at the Wall Street “bailout.” The real size of the bailout is estimated to be $14 trillion — and could end up costing trillions more than that. By now you are probably also sick of hearing about the bailout, but stop and think about this for a moment. Do you comprehend how much $14 trillion is?

What could be accomplished with this money is almost beyond common comprehension.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg that has hit us. On top of the trillions given to the Wall Street elite, we already have a record $12.3 trillion in national debt — and we now have to pay $500 billion in interest to the Economic Elite on this debt every year, yet another way they are milking us dry. When you add in unfunded liabilities owed, like social security payments, we actually owe a stunning $74 trillion. That adds up to a debt of $242,000 for every man, woman and child in America.

Trillions more, 25% of taxpayer dollars allocated to military spending, goes unaccounted for every year, not to mention the billions spent on overcharging and outright fraud. During the War on Terror, the Economic Elite have used our tax money to build a private army that has more soldiers deployed than the U.S. military — a congressional study revealed that 69% of the “U.S.” fighting forces deployed throughout the world in our name are in fact private mercenaries, 80% of them are foreign nationals.

Private contractors regularly get paid three to five times more than our soldiers, and have been repeatedly caught overcharging and committing fraud on a massive scale. A congressional investigation revealed this and strongly recommended that we seize wasting tax dollars on these private military contractors. However, under Obama, there has actually been a drastic increase in total tax dollars spent on them.

In 2009, just over $1 trillion tax dollars were spent on the military, it’s safe to say that at least $350 billion of that was needlessly wasted.

When you research our tax system you see an unprecedented level of waste and fraud rampant throughout most expenditures. Our tax system is a national disaster of epic proportions. It is literally an organized criminal operation that continues to rob us in broad daylight, with zero accountability.

Politicians and mainstream “news” outlets will not tell you this, but most every serious economist knows that due to so much theft and debt created in the tax system, the only way to fix things, other than stopping the theft and seizing the trillions that have been stolen, will be for the government to cut important social funding and drastically raise our taxes.

Other than the record national debt, many states are running record deficits and are barreling toward economic disaster, raising the likelihood of higher taxes, more government layoffs and deep cuts in services. Our nation’s biggest state economies, like California and New York, are the ones in most trouble.

To merely say that things will not be improving economically is to be a delusional optimist. The truth that you will not hear: we have been hit by an economic deathblow and the United States lay in ruins.

It’s not just this criminal tax system; the theft is now built into all our costs of living.

Trillions more in our spending on food and fuel has been stolen due to fraudulent stock transactions and overcharging. Just 10 years ago, in 2000, American families paid 7% of our income on food and fuel. We now pay 20%.

This drastic increase is primarily driven by fraudulent market manipulation that drives up stock prices. Congress uncovered this in 2006; as part of the Enron investigation they found that companies manipulated the oil market to create major spikes in stock values, and then they didn’t do anything about it — nothing to see here, just move on.

As mentioned before, we have the most expensive health care system in the world and we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries, and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world. On average, U.S. citizens are now paying a record high 8% of their income on medical care.

Part of the reason why foreclosure rates are so high is because the percentage of income Americans pay on their housing has risen to 34%.

So for these basic necessities — taxes, food, fuel, shelter and medical bills — we have already lost 92% of our limited income. Then factor in ever-increasing interest rates on credit cards, student loans, rising prices for cable, internet, phone, bank fees, etc., etc., etc. We are being robbed and gouged in all costs of living, in every aspect of our life. No wonder bankruptcies are skyrocketing and the number of people suffering from psychological depression has reached an epidemic level.

The American worker is screwed over every step of the way, and it all starts with the explosion in the cost of a college education. This is one of the Economic Elite’s most devastating weapons. To have any chance of succeeding in this economy, it is commonly believed that you must attend the best college possible. With the rising costs involved, today’s students are graduating with record levels of debt from student loans.

At the same time, the unemployment rate among recent college graduates has risen higher than the national average, and those that do find work are making significantly less than they expected to make. This combination of extreme debt and reduced pay has crippled an entire generation right from the start and has put them in a vicious cycle of spiraling debt that they will struggle with for the rest of their lives. The most recent college graduates are now known as a “lost generation.”

The American dream has turned into a nightmare. The economic system is a sophisticated prison cell; the indentured servant is now an indebted wage slave; whips and chains have evolved into debts.

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by sword. The other is by debt.” — John Adams

Concealing national wealth

“Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life but now experienced as bondage… Today, it signifies liberation from material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources that are at hand.” — John Dewey

When you take the time to research and analyze the wealth that has gone to the economic top one percent, you begin to realize just how much we have been robbed. Trillions upon trillions of dollars that could make the lives of all hard working Americans much easier have been strategically funneled into the coffers of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. An entire generation of massive wealth creation has been strategically withheld from 99% of the U.S. population.

The U.S. public doesn’t have any understanding of how much wealth has been generated and concentrated into the hands of the Economic Elite over the past 40 years; there is no historical frame of reference. This withholding of wealth is truly the greatest crime against humanity in the history of civilization.

What could be done with all the money that has been hoarded by the Economic Elite is extraordinary!

Let’s consider what we could do with the money that has been stolen from us? On top of what should be our average six-figure yearly income, we could have:

• Free health care for every American,
• A free 4 bedroom home for every American family,
• 5% tax rate for 99% of Americans,
• Drastically improved public education and free college for all,
• Significantly improved public transportation and infrastructure,

The list goes on…

This is not some far-fetched fantasy. These are all things that Franklin D. Roosevelt talked about doing in the 1940′s, long before the explosion of wealth creation in our technologically advanced global economy. The money for all this is already there, stashed into the claws of the Economic Elite.

The denial of wealth to the masses is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. Outside of outdated and obsolete economic models and theories — and incredibly short-sighted greed — there is no reason why all this money should be kept in the hands of a few, at the immense suffering and expense of the many.

If Americans could just understand how much wealth is being withheld from us, we would have a massive uprising and the Economic Elite would be swept away, into the history books alongside the evil despots of the past.

[This is Part II of David DeGraw's report, "The Economic Elite vs. People of the USA," originally published at Amped Status. Click here for Part I. Read more of David McGraw's writing here.]

© 2010 Amped Status

Source / Amped Status / AlterNet

http://www.flickr.com/photos/midnight-digital/3427008037/

Also published on No Cure for That.

Last week President Obama announced an $8.3 billion loan of taxpayer dollars for the construction of two new nuclear reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia. He has also proposed tripling the loans for new nuclear reactors to $54 billion in his 2011 budget.

In his announcement he argued, “To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we’ll need to increase our supply of nuclear power. It’s that simple.”

Sadly, Mr. Obama is mistaken on all points.

If by “we” the President means to speak on behalf of his Wall St. advisers and the industrial capitalist system he represents, “our” energy needs are not growing. They’re shrinking along with the economy. And while preventing the worst consequences of climate change is necessary, nuclear power is not.  It’s not necessary by any stretch of the imagination.

Here are 5 simple reasons why nuclear is not a sustainable solution to the energy woes of the 21st Century:

1. Nuclear is Too Expensive.

In economic hard times such as ours, we need cheap, readily-available sources of energy to create jobs and keep the lights on.  Nuclear is the opposite. Nuclear reactors require billions of dollars of government subsidies just to be built, because no private investor wants to throw their money into an expensive and dangerous project that might never produce a return.

To grab those government subsidies, nuclear companies regularly low-ball their price tags, knowing they’ll have to beg for more money later and that the feds will always give in. The recent TIME article “Why Obama’s Nuclear Bet Won’t Pay Off” explains:

If you want to understand why the U.S. hasn’t built a nuclear reactor in three decades, the Vogtle power plant outside Atlanta is an excellent reminder of the insanity of nuclear economics. The plant’s original cost estimate was less than $1 billion for four reactors. Its eventual price tag in 1989 was nearly $9 billion, for only two reactors. But now there’s widespread chatter about a nuclear renaissance, so the Southern Co. is finally trying to build the other two reactors at Vogtle. The estimated cost: $14 billion. And you can be sure that number is way too low, because nuclear cost estimates are always way too low.

Environment America’s report, “Generating Failure: How Building Nuclear Power Plants Would Set America Back in the Race Against Global Warming”, explains nuclear’s faulty economics further:

Market forces have done far more to damage nuclear power than anti-nuclear activists ever did. The dramatic collapse of the nuclear industry in the early 1980s – described by Forbes magazine as the most expensive debacle since the Vietnam War – was caused in large measure by massive cost overruns driven by expensive safety upgrades after the Three Mile Island accident revealed shortcomings in nuclear plant design. These made nuclear power plants far more expensive than they were supposed to be. Some U.S. power companies were driven into bankruptcy and others spent years restoring their balance sheets.

At the end of the day, there are much cheaper and better ways to produce energy.  The TIME article points out, “Recent studies have priced new nuclear power at 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, about four times the cost of producing juice with new wind or coal plants, or 10 times the cost of reducing the need for electricity through investments in efficiency.”

Instead of pouring billions of dollars into something the market wants to keep its distance from, why not spend that money on efficiency improvements or wind and solar, for which there is a growing market and massive public support?

2. Nuclear is Too Inefficient.

A big part of why nuclear is so expensive is that it’s incredibly inefficient as an energy source, requiring a high proportion of energy inputs as compared to what it produces in output.  Between the cost of building the plants and equipment (tons of steel, concrete, and intricate machinery), mining the uranium, enriching the uranium, operating under stringent safety regulations, disposing the radioactive waste, and eventually decommissioning the plants, there is a tremendous about of energy and money poured in to nuclear reactors, making the energy they produce proportionaly less impressive than is often touted.

Because of all the secrecy and bureaucracy involved in nuclear operations, we have no thorough documentations of exactly how much energy must be invested in order to produce a return (this fraction is sometimes called Energy Returned on Energy Invested – EROEI).

Gene Tyner carried out one such study called “Net Energy from Nuclear Power” and estimated that “an ‘optimistic’ one‑plant analysis shows that one plant may yield about 3.8 times as much energy as is input to the system over a 40‑year period.” The “pessimistic” estimate was just 1.86, meaning less than twice the energy expended is returned through electricity.

Once again, these statistics are significantly worse than for wind, solar, or increased efficiency, each of which would produce much more net energy with the same level of inputs. Wind, for example, could reach in excess of 50:1 EROEI.

Nuclear’s energy numbers are only going to get worse as time goes on and the quantity of high-concentration uranium in the world continues to be depleted. Mining lower-quality uranium, in more difficult environments, will further reduce the net energy that nuclear can produce. Indeed, this is a whole separate problem, but nuclear is unlikely to be any kind of replacement for fossil fuels in the long run anyway, with studies stating that Peak Uranium will be here “before 2040 at the latest.”

3. Nuclear Emits Too Much CO2 and Other Chemicals.

Nuclear is often touted by corporations and politicians as a “clean” energy source because the electricity generation process itself produces little to no carbon dioxide, the most notorious greenhouse gas responsible for driving our climate into chaos. However, nuclear does emit substantial greenhouse gas pollution, of both carbon dioxide and other chemicals, if we look at its complete production profile:

the nuclear fuel cycle does release CO2 during mining, fuel enrichment and plant construction. Uranium mining is one of the most CO2 intensive industrial operations and as demand for uranium grows CO2 emissions are expected to rise as core grades decline. According to calculations by the Öko-Institute, 34 grams of CO2 are emitted per generated kWh in Germany. The results from other international research studies show much higher figures – up to 60 grams of CO2 per kWh. In total, a nuclear power station of standard size (1,250MW operating at 6,500 hours/annum) indirectly emits between 376,000 million tonnes (Germany) and 1,300,000 million tonnes (other countries) of CO2 per year. In comparison to renewable energy, nuclear power releases 4-5 times more CO2 per unit of energy produced taking account of the whole fuel cycle.

…

Aside from radioactive wastes, other waste and pollutants from the manufacture of nuclear reactor fuel include mercury, arsenic and cadmium, which are disposed of on and off site, and hydrochloric acid aerosols, fluorine and chlorine gas, which are released into the air.

None of this pollution is acceptable. Mercury and arsenic in particular are known carcinogens, meaning they cause cancer, along with birth defects and other devastating illnesses. The location of the plants, as is typical, tends to distribute the negative health effects primarily to poor communities and communities of color, making this an environmental justice issue as well.

It just doesn’t make sense. Why invest in a technology that is excessively dirty when compared to genuinely clean sources of energy like wind or solar?

Quoting once more from Environment America’s report:

Building 100 new reactors would require an up-front investment on the order of $600 billion dollars – money which could cut at least twice as much carbon pollution by 2030 if invested in clean energy. Taking into account the ongoing costs of running the nuclear plants, clean energy could deliver as much as 5 times more pollution-cutting progress per dollar overall.

4. Nuclear Risks Radioactive Disaster.

So far we haven’t mentioned the traditional argument against nuclear reactors, that they 1) produce radioactive waste which we have nowhere to put, and 2) have the potential to melt down or be struck by a terrorist attack, which could cause almost inconceivable ecological calamity.

Few Americans realize how close we came to having to evacuate most of the Eastern Seaboard if the partial meltdown of the reactor at Three Mile Island in 1979 had caused an explosion in the core.  This nearly happened, and the warning that the Three Mile Island disaster has given us about the extreme danger of nuclear reactors needs to be recalled today.

The reality is that even without an apocalyptic Chernobyl-style or 9/11-style event, nuclear fission everyday produces hundreds of poisonous and radioactive toxins which did not exist on Earth before the 1940s. Each nuclear plant creates approximately 1,000 metric tons of high- and low-level waste yearly, which will not fully degrade for literally thousands of years. And this is only the most controlled aspect of the problem.

As Harvey Wasserman explained on Democracy Now! Thursday, lesser-known radioactive leaks are sadly a regular occurance at nuclear facilities:

There’s a huge fight going on, by the way, in Vermont right now, where the people of the state of Vermont are trying to shut the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which has been leaking tritium. And if you’re not aware of this, twenty-seven of the 104 nuclear plants in the United States have been confirmed to be leaking tritium now. These are plants that have been around for twenty, thirty years. If they can’t control more than a quarter of the operating reactors in the United States and prevent them from leaking tritium, what are they doing turning around with this technology and pouring many more billions of dollars of our money into it? It’s an absolute catastrophe, and we will stand up to it.

An update on Wasserman’s story – yesterday (2/24) the Vermont Senate voted to close the Yankee plant in part due to these concerns about radioative leaks.

The bottom line is that while billions of dollars can be spent to secure the radioactive fuels and waste, there will always be a risk that things will go wrong due to technological breakdown or human error, and the consequences could be dire.

The only safe way to deal with nuclear reactors is to shut them down.

5. Funding Nuclear is Another Corporate Bailout.

So if nuclear energy is too expensive, too inefficient, too polluting, and too dangerous, why in the world are our well-intentioned political leaders like President Obama promoting such a technology? Have they lost their minds? No. The better question, as is usually the case in Washington, is who stands to benefit from this decision?

And the obvious answer is the nuclear industry, which has relied on government subsidies for half a century, and continues to swindle the public out of our hard-earned tax dollars with outdated lies about cheap, abundant, clean nuclear power.

Just like the defense industry or the banks, nuclear companies like Exelon use their high-placed connections in Washington to secure government contracts, loans and bailouts behind the backs of the public, and it doesn’t really matter whether there’s a Democrat or Republican in the White House.

Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! reported on the Obama Administration’s ties to Big Nuclear:

Exelon is not just a nuclear power industry generator, it’s the largest operator of nuclear power plants in the United States. I think it has seventeen. And the firm was a major—has historically been a major backer of President Obama. And two of his chief aides have ties to Exelon. Rahm Emanuel, as an investment banker, helped put together the deal that eventually merged, created Exelon. And David Axelrod was a lobbyist for Exelon. So there are very close ties between the chairman of Exelon, John Rowe, and the Obama administration.

We need to understand the actions of politicians within their context. The context for President Obama’s announcement of $8 billion in loans to a nuclear reactor in Georgia and tripling the federal government’s funding of nuclear energy in his 2011 budget, is a nuclear industry that’s been on the run from its crippling problems for 30 years, and needs a big boost from the taxpayers in order to compete with less expensive, less controversial energy sources like wind and solar.

Then you have the reality of a failed political system that relies far more on corporate donations and advertising than it does on genuine democratic participation, so that politicians like Obama are structurally dependent on pandering to corporate/financial donors to get elected and stay elected, and you have a recipe for systemic corruption and giveaways.

Ben Schreiber, climate and energy tax analyst of Friends of the Earth, put it succinctly, “The last thing Americans want is another government bailout for a failing industry, but that’s exactly what they’re getting from the Obama administration.”

So what should the government be putting its (our) money into instead?

I’ve made the obvious suggestion of wind and solar power, which are cheaper and produce energy more efficiently than nuclear. Wind and solar also have the added benefit of being appropriate for local, small-scale energy production. Given the resources and trained in the skills, communities can install wind towers and solar cells, maintain them, and distribute their output themselves, without the intermediaries of corporations or government. This not only creates many thousands of jobs, it also opens up possibilities for a 21st Century that could be more democratic, locally-rooted, and decentralized than the last one.

What are your ideas? What would YOU do if you were in Obama’s position and could throw $50-some billion around towards an actually sustainable economy?

Alex Knight

February 25, 2010

p.s. see my related post about Karen Silkwood, assassinated anti-nuclear activist.

Douglas Rushkoff is author of the book Life Inc. – How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back.

[update 2/5: I should also mention the completely misguided funding of nuclear power plants as well, see Obama's Nuclear Giveaway]

This news came alongside an announced “spending freeze”, which would exclude military/war and only affect social programs, like jobs, housing, education and health care. These are precisely the programs which need to be dramatically increased in this economic crisis, not frozen. This proposed freeze would last 3 years, meaning for the rest of Obama’s term in office we could see no new spending on any of the social programs that are desperately needed. The poor, the middle and working classes, and everyone who has hope for a more compassionate United States is essentially being locked out in the cold.

Candidate Obama himself campaigned against exactly such an “across the board spending freeze,” as we may recall if we can muster our memories back through one year of hazy distractions (luckily Youtube never forgets):

If they’re so interested in reducing spending, why not cut totally useless and destructive programs – like NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

Why is Obama backsliding on all of his campaign promises? It just so happens that even though there’s no sane use of additional nuclear weapons (the US stockpile is already over 10,000 warheads, and the Cold War is over), nuclear weapons corporations like Lockheed Martin spend millions of dollars to lobby politicians for this funding anyway. And sadly, they’re getting it because Obama is afraid of the Republicans.

Once again we are seeing the continued march towards war, death and neo-fascism. The needs of the population – from decent jobs and housing, affordable education and health care, to a healthy environment – are being denied in order to protect corporate and financial interests.

Here’s Democracy Now! with the nuclear weapons story, and an article from Norman Solomon on the spending freeze below:

Despite Non-Proliferation Pledge, Obama Budget Request Seeks Additional $7B for Nuclear Arsenal

As part of a record $3.8 trillion budget proposal, the Obama administration is asking Congress to increase spending on the US nuclear arsenal by more than $7 billion over the next five years. Obama is seeking the extra money despite a pledge to cut the US arsenal and seek a nuclear weapons-free world. The proposal includes large funding increases for a new plutonium production facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico. We speak with Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico. Watch video.

Those of us with a radical understanding of power know this government has always served the interests of the powerful as its primary mission. But in the past, the politicians at least paid lip service to the public interest in order to save face. This was the era of “hegemony”, roughly meaning the consent of the ruled to their domination.

The public was being screwed, but somehow it was ideologically prepared to believe that “we, the people” had the ultimate say. This was supposed to be a democracy, after all. Sure, the police, prison system, military, and federal enforcement agencies would step in if things got out of hand, but much more effective at keeping the system intact was the “cop in our heads”. As long as we truly believed that it was all for our own good, the corporations just rolled right along, plundering the planet and destroying our communities. And the media made sure we believed it. That’s hegemony.

The reign of George W. Bush really started the break from this paradigm, as we saw for example the outright defiance of the US Constitution and US law when it came to imprisonment of political enemies, justifying torture, spying on millions of American citizens’ phone calls, excessive lying in order to invade and occupy strategic countries, etc etc.  At first the public somewhat accepted these moves as “necessary” in the face of terrorism, but Bush’s popularity waned terribly in his second term as people became more informed of what was really happening. In this light Obama’s rhetoric about “change” seems to have initially served to reinvigorate the system with a revived hegemony – to give the US a new image, one of tolerance, diplomacy, and the rule of law.

But the first year of Obama has already shattered these illusions. Obama and his Democrats now appear totally befuddled, their strategy (of putting a smiling face and a few meaningless reforms on a fundamentally broken system) lies in rubble. And a resurgent, perhaps racist, Right appears ready to sweep back into control by playing with the public’s justified resentment and frustration of a continually deteriorating situation.

In this context Jeff Strabone asks us if hegemony is becoming a thing of the past: “Will the state shamelessly turn itself completely over to serving the interests of a powerful few without bothering to pretend that it’s not?”

I’ve written in my synopsis about the end of capitalism and the possible emergence of neo-fascism, a militarization of society in order to preserve the interests of the powerful, regardless of the environmental and social costs. It seems to me that one indicator of this possible paradigm shift is the increasing shamelessness of the elites. In market-driven capitalism, image is crucial. If a corporation gets bad publicity, they stand to lose money in the stock market. This is one of the few areas of capitalism that is open to democratic intervention. Another area where the public can occasionally intervene is through electing progressive representatives into office.

But it’s these avenues that appear to be closing to us now. Goldman Sachs, Exxon-Mobil, and Blackwater have all gotten terrible publicity in the past few years for their theivery, pollution and murder; but their stocks have never soared higher. Then the public gave Obama and the Democrats an enormous mandate to “change” the country, only to see them cave immediately on almost every campaign promise. The bank bailouts, torturing, and bombing of civilians have, if anything, increased in Obama’s tenure thus far. Perhaps the final insult was the Supreme Court’s decision last week that corporations are “people” with a First Amendment “right to speak” by directly buying politicians. Have they no shame? Apparently not.

So if the consent of the governed is no longer sought, and we’re truly moving into a post-hegemonic era, what can we do to make sure that the breakdown of the capitalist system leads to something better, and not far worse? As Mr. Strabone proclaims, it’s time for civil disobedience. The system has failed us, we must cut off our allegiance from it, confront the powers that be, and start envisioning and constructing the world we want to see replace capitalism. I, for one, wish to see that world based on shared values of democracy, justice, sustainability, freedom and love, and I urge all of you to consider the alternative. [alex]

Post-Shame: Time for Civil Disobedience

by Jeff Strabone

Originally published by Daily Kos.

Tue Jan 26, 2010

One of the duties of the modern nation-state is persuasion. Each state aims to keep its citizens convinced of the legitimacy of its rule. The state may be run chiefly for the enrichment of a few at the cost of the many, but the endurance of the state is widely thought to depend on its ability to sell its rule to the many as a common-sense truism. Or at least that was how it used to work. We may be entering a new era in the evolution of the state, one where the state approaches a state of utter shamelessness.

Will it be more authoritarian, based on mindless discipline and punishments in order to train students to be soldiers or prisoners? Or will it be more democratic, based on the free development of the potential of each child, and preparation for service to the community? That choice is up to us. [alex]

For-profit Education

Milton Friedman’s Dream

by Paul A. Moore / January 12th, 2010

Originally published on Dissident Voice.

Something for advocates of public education to keep in mind now is the changed face of the enemy. The oligarchs; Gates, Broad, the Walton Family, the Bush Family, Bloomberg and the CEO’s represented in the Business Roundtable, had a plan for the destruction of the public schools. They were supremely confident they could bring to fruition Milton Friedman’s dream that education could become a highly profitable industry. Unbeknownst to them though, they had an Achilles Heel. Their plan was fatally flawed because it was inextricably bound up with the dynamic growth of a global capitalist economy.

That’s over with now. Why? For one, because globalization was so successful in its brief heyday. It penetrated every market on the planet. Who would have thought China could become the largest market for autos the way it has this year? It found the absolute lowest wage possible in the undeveloped world. They bumped right up against outright slavery and where possible went over the edge.

The effect of this success was profits on a scale heretofore unimaginable but it also exhausted the systems possibilities for growth. And growth is its lifeblood. Growth kept it healthy and dynamic. When that growth became impossible capitalism turned in on itself. It began to cannibalize itself. That’s when you get Wall Street turning investment banks into casinos and investment vehicles into logarithms. No more real wealth was being created so the bankers turned to magic tricks, in the form of derivatives, to give the appearance of wealth creation. That’s when you get some of the largest corporate entities ever created disappearing into the history books. So long General Motors!

The other thing a global economy had to have if it was going to work was a plentiful and cheap supply of oil. If the world is not now on the downside of the Peak Oil curve, its close enough for government work in the US, China, India, Russia, the EU. Rulers in these developed and developing countries have begun to act along those lines. For instance, the US won’t be getting out of the Middle East anytime soon for the oil supply it offers. US military presence there has nothing to do with silly bleatings over “underwear bombers” or terrorist threats. And for another instance, economic nationalism, in the form of US tariffs on Chinese steel to give one example, is the wave of the future. Globalization cannot withstand the end of free trade or oil driven trade but it faces both.

A US soldier or two, away from the harrowing places they have been sent, given time to consider, has probably wondered why their government has contracted with Blackwater now Xe-type mercenaries at ten times the price to pull duties once assigned to them. It is completely absurd on its face. The product of a hidden agenda is always absurdity. Globalization, which seeks privatization of all things, is that agenda.

Teachers across this country have come to live everyday with this absurdity. Incessant testing with no relation to the real world, the mindless collection of trivia classified as data, forcing the “business model” (like Enron or Lehman Brothers or General Motors) on the public schools, driving the arts and the social sciences out of the curriculum, and having every Chancellor, Superintendent, Commissioner, and Secretary of Education promote charter schools over their own public schools at every turn. Absurd! But why? Globalization.

There is the temptation to believe the global economy will enjoy a “recovery” and in the US we will visit even greater heights of material prosperity. This is a delusion that is being foisted on the American people. There is no rational reason for this system to be revived and there are oligarchs, and people at Goldman Sachs, and people in the US government and military that know this. They have left behind some people in the public schools, “dead-enders” like Michelle Rhee in Washington D.C. and Joel Klein in NYC to soldier on with the corporate catechism. But they are no longer a credible threat.

The new danger appears in the rise of the seamless melding of the corporation and the state in the US. Our new corporate-state is reflected in the unprecedented amount of money Secretary of Education Arne Duncan suddenly has at his disposal to disrupt the public schools. Duncan has put the 50 states in a competition, he calls it the Race To The Top, to become the most effective at destroying public education and building the charter school movement. Over $4-billion will be spread among the winners. The denial of funds is expected to finish off the losers.

Some people are confused as to why President Obama’s education policy is indistinguishable from that of George W. Bush. It is because both are servants of the corporate-state. In regards to the public schools and every other vestige of democracy in US society the corporate-state is the last stage where fighting back will be possible. Next comes the national curriculum from Winston Smith’s world.

Paul A. Moore is a teacher at Miami Carol City Senior High School. He can be contacted at: Pmoore1953@aol.com. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul’s website.

But first, “Jake Gyllenhaal Challenges the Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize” by Diran Lyons, a political remix video of scenes from Jarhead and Donnie Darko mixed with Obama’s own words displaying the hypocrisy of power – as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to devastate. Check it out! [alex]

And here is the transcript of the Democracy Now! interview with Allan Nairn, entitled “Obama Has Kept the Machine Set on Kill.”

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s almost been a year since President Obama’s inauguration and his promise to close the prison at Guantanamo.

For a critical look back over the Obama administration’s foreign policy and national security decisions in the last twelve months, we’re joined here in New York by award-winning investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn.

In 1991, we were both in East Timor and witnessed and survived the Santa Cruz massacre, in which Indonesian forces killed more than 270 Timorese. The soldiers fractured Allan’s skull.

Over the past three decades, he has exposed how the US government has backed paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, in Guatemala, in Haiti. He also uncovered US support for the Indonesian military’s assassinations and torture of civilians.

He’s joining us now for the rest of the hour.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Allan Nairn.

ALLAN NAIRN: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don’t you start off with a broad overview, as we move into this first anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration, of his term in office?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism, the cultural blow. And he accomplished that on Election Day. That was huge. This is one of the most destructive forces in world history, and by simply—by virtue of becoming president, Obama did it major damage.

But once he became president, by virtue of his actions, just like every US president before him, just like those who ran other great powers, Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off. The President has—turned it off. The President has that power, but he chose not to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean? Explain more fully.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the machine. The US spends about half of all—almost half of all the military spending in the entire world, equal to virtually all the other countries combined. More than half of the weapons sold in the world are sold by the United States. The US has more than 700 military bases scattered across dozens of countries. The US is the world’s leading trainer of paramilitaries. The US has a series of courses, from interrogators to generals, that have graduated military people guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in dozens upon dozens of countries. The US has a series of covert paramilitary forces of its own that get almost no attention. For example, right now in Iran, there are covert US paramilitaries attacking Iran from within, authorized by secret executive order. This was briefly reported, but it dropped from notice. In addition to that, there are the open attacks, the open bombings and invasions. Just in the recent period, the US has done this to Iran—to, I’m sorry, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Kenya. Currently in the Philippines, there are US troops in action in the south. And you could go on. This is the machine.

And then, in addition, there’s the support for a series of what the RAND Corporation itself—you know, RAND is an extension of the Pentagon—called US support for repressive non-democratic governments and for governments that commit aggression. There are about forty of them that the US backs. And I could run through the list. And the point is, Obama has not cut a single—cut off a single one of these repressive regimes. He has not cut off a single one of the terror forces. He has increased the size of the US Army, increased the size of US Special Forces. He has increased the level of overseas arms sales. In fact, the Pentagon, his Pentagon, was recently bragging about it. The same thing happened under the Clinton administration with then-Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. He has tuned it up. But you could just run down the list of countries where civilians are being killed and tortured with US weapons, with US money, with US intelligence, with US political green lights.

ANJALI KAMAT: So, Allan, what would you say is the difference between the preceding eight years under the Bush administration and this past year, as we move forward under Obama?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, in this respect, on matters I was just talking about, there’s no substantive difference. In fact, as far as one can tell, Obama seems to have killed more civilians during his first year than Bush did in his first year, and maybe even than Bush killed in his final year, because not only has Obama kept the machine set on kill, but he had his special project, which is Pakistan and Afghanistan. He used this to get elected. He had to prove himself. He had to go through what the New York Times once called the “presidential initiation rite,” under which each president must, in their words, demonstrate his willingness to shed blood. Obama did that by saying, “I’m going to attack more vigorously Afghanistan and Pakistan.” And he’s brought chaos.

I mean, you just saw the report from Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has squeezed the Pakistani military to attack their own tribal and border areas with extensive civilian death and retaliation from the residents of those areas through a series of bombings across the major cities of Pakistan.

Likewise in Somalia, Bush backed Ethiopia in an invasion of Somalia, basically an Ethiopian-US invasion of Somalia. Now Obama is pumping in new arms, new weapons, into the midst of the killing and chaos there. Somalis are streaming into Yemen as refugees. The already disastrous level of hunger and starvation is increasing. His body count probably exceeds that of Bush.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what we’ve been seeing over the last few days, I mean, what happened with the jetliner, now President Obama coming out yesterday talking about other attempts that were thwarted, like even on Inauguration Day, and that was actually Somali. And what are the approaches you think that President Obama should take?

ALLAN NAIRN: Right. Well, you know, the issue is not the safety of Americans. The issue is the safety of people. All people. You have to count not just the American deaths and potential American deaths, but the deaths everywhere, since—you know, since everyone counts. And the best solution is the one that protects the maximum number of people. And if you happen to be the party that is committing the largest number of killings in the world, as the US is now, then the solution is easy: stop committing the killings.

In this case, in the present moment in history, that would have the added side benefit of most likely making Americans safer, as well, because you would take away the main provocation. Tom Brokaw, on TV this weekend, made a very interesting comment. He described what the US was engaged in as the “war against Islamic rage.” That’s actually the most telling definition I’ve seen. I mean, think about it. In Afghanistan, Karzai, the US/UN-installed president, basically the man thought of as a US puppet, the man previously lionized by the US press before he started speaking out against the US aerial killings of civilians, Karzai started to get enraged after a series of bombings of wedding parties by the US and NATO forces. Think about it. Somebody bombs your wedding, a foreign air force bombs your wedding. How are you supposed to react? Are you supposed to be delighted? Rage is the normal human response. If you stop that, you lower the rage, and you probably get fewer attacks on Americans.

You know, there’s a man named Kilcullen, who’s Australian by origin, who’s now one of the main intellects behind the US counterinsurgency policy. He advises Secretary Gates, who of course was Bush’s Defense Secretary, as well. He said that if he were a Muslim today in a Middle Eastern country, he would probably be a jihadist. Robert Pape, the leading academic specialist on suicide bombings who studied the entire database of all the suicide bombers in recent years, said it’s a consequence primarily of occupation. So, you stop committing mass murder overseas, and you immediately, immediately, just by that action, achieve the main goal, which is minimizing the overall deaths of people, and you most likely get the side benefit of also minimizing the deaths of Americans—

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Pape—

ALLAN NAIRN: —because you’re prodding fewer people.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Pape is a conservative academic?

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes. In fact, he went on TV recently saying he was a big fan of aerial bombing. I mean, he is no peacenik. But he honestly studied the data on suicide bombings, and that was his conclusion.

And by the way, the tactic of, you know, bombs in civilian places, like outside mosques, it was not originated by the current jihadists. You know, the current jihadists, of course, as is well known, grew out of the US and Saudi Arabian operation in Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion, and bin Laden and the others were backed by the US. But that actual tactic dates back to times like when the CIA used it in Lebanon to try to kill a cleric, and they blew up people as they were leaving the mosque. They used a car—the US used a car bomb to do that.

Even aerial bombings, even bombings of airplanes, three of the biggest incidents before 9/11 were actually incidents of US culpability. In ’76, a Cuban airliner was brought down with—I believe the death toll was—what was it? Seventy-three, I think, something on that order—by Luis Posada Carriles, a longtime CIA operative, who was later indicted for terrorism. And the US refused to extradite him. They’re harboring—they’re harboring him. Later, in—let’s see, what year was it? The Indian Airlines bombing in ’85, I believe, an Indian jetliner was blown up, almost—about 300 killed. The bombers were later found to have received training at a US camp in Alabama, US paramilitary camp that had also, with Reagan backing, had done operations against Central America. The Iranian jetliner shot down by a US ship, the Vincennes, also with roughly 300 killed, in ’88, the captain of the ship who did that, he got a medal from Bush Senior for exceptionally meritorious service.

So these tactics, you know, bombing civilian places, even blowing up jetliners specifically, are not new. And the US itself has used them.

And, you know, they talk about how the jihadists target civilians. Well, it’s certainly true. But when bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center, he was basically using—the attack on 9/11, he was basically using US targeting principles. He attacked the Pentagon, a military target, and he attacked the World Trade Center, which had a CIA—in fact, did have a CIA office in it. Now, on this end, especially here in New York, we can see that those targeting standards are absolutely insane. I mean, we could see the cooks and the firemen dying. You know, we could breathe the dust. We could see, no, even if you are going after a CIA office, you do not do this. We can see that that’s wrong on this end. It’s also wrong on the other end, when the US does it.

When the US opened—so it’s not just a matter of targeting, and it’s not just a matter of targeting civilians. The Goldstone report found that Israel targeted civilians specifically, when they invaded Gaza, and the US has often done it. For example, in Iraq, the US adopted what they called the El Salvador option, which is a reference back to the El Salvadoran death squads of the 1960s and ‘70s, which is something I investigated extensively. And these were launched under the Kennedy administration and basically sponsored and run by the US for decades. And similar operations were done in Iraq by the US, under the direction, by the way, of General McChrystal, who now runs Afghanistan. The technical term the Pentagon used for it—uses for it is “manhunting.” So they do target civilians.

But even when they’re not targeting civilians, which is probably most of the time, they end up killing massive numbers of civilians. The Pentagon has a word for that, too. They call it “bugsplat.” In the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, they ran computer programs, and they called the program the Bugsplat program, estimating how many civilians they would kill with a given bombing raid. On the opening day, the printouts presented to General Tommy Franks indicated that twenty-two of the projected bombing attacks on Iraq would produce what they defined as heavy bugsplat—that is, more than thirty civilian deaths per raid. Franks said, “Go ahead. We’re doing all twenty-two.” So that adds up to, you know, about 660 anticipated, essentially planned, what in domestic terms would be called criminally negligent homicide, at the least, probably second-degree murder. You might even be able to get it up to first, first-degree. And that, just if—if that was the actual toll, the bugsplat estimate of the toll on the first day, that right there would give you a third of the World Trade Center death toll, just on the first day of the Iraq operation. And, of course, the Iraq operation has gone on. And that’s essentially what’s happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They claim—or they claim—or let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and they say, OK, they have an al-Qaeda target, or whatever target, some armed man in some compound somewhere, and they bomb it, and they also kill the person’s wife and the kids and their extended family and the friends who were there for dinner. Imagine. Imagine if that happened here. Let’s say al-Qaeda occupied New York. They set up checkpoints on Seventh Avenue. And if a car tried to run the checkpoints, they’d machine-gun the car, as the US does in Iraq. Or they ran drones over Washington, DC, and they were taking out US officials in their backyards as they did barbecues in suburban Virginia or as they were going for coffee in Dupont Circle. How would Americans react to that? In fact, how would Americans react if some young American went out and killed some of those al-Qaeda occupiers? The question answers itself.

I mean, when you do things like this, when you make humans into bugsplat, you invite response. So, stop the killing, and you get a benefit. You’ll probably make yourself safer, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to award-winning journalist and activist Allan Nairn. We’re going to go to break, then come back. Want to get your reaction to President Obama’s Nobel address, also to his condemning torture just about a year ago. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOOMAN: Our guest for this hour is Allan Nairn, award-winning journalist and activist.

Allan, I want to get your response to President Obama’s invocation of the concept of a just war, this in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We must begin by acknowledging a hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations, acting individually or in concert, will find the use of force not only necessary, but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naïve, in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people, for, make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

AMY GOOMAN: An excerpt of President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo just about a month ago. Allan Nairn, your response?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, he’s right. There is evil in the world. And Obama should stop committing it. He should stop bombing, doing bombing raids that kill civilians. He should stop backing forces that kill civilians.

You know, it’s probably true that nonviolence couldn’t have stopped Hitler. There are just resorts to violence. If you’re standing there with your mother, someone comes in with a machine gun, you step in front. And if you’ve got a gun, you try to kill the machine gunner before they blow away you and your mother. Sure, there are lots of situations like that in life.

But that’s not in the situation of the US in foreign policy. As Obama was making that speech, he was saying, when we resort to violence, we will abide by the rules. This was exactly at the moment when the US was blocking the UN from doing precisely that. The Goldstone report had recommended, in just one example, that Israel be brought to the International Criminal Court for their assault on Gaza and that—as well as Hamas—and that let the chips fall where they may. Do an objective investigation and see if rules of law were violated, see if crimes against humanity were committed, as he said they were. And Obama blocked it.

The US itself, in its operations in dozens upon dozens of countries, is violating not just international law, but US law. People have forgotten about them, because they’re not enforced. Here are four US laws currently on the books. There can be no US weapons used for aggression. That’s the old Harkin amendment. There can be no US aid for foreign internal security forces of any kind. That’s Section 660 of the 1974 Foreign Assistance Act. There can be no US military aid for any regime that engages in a pattern of gross human rights violations. That’s 22 US Code 2304(a). There can be no US aid for any military unit that commits atrocities. That’s the Leahy amendment. Now, these are not radical political demands; these are existing US law. And the US systematically violates its own laws, not to mention the murder laws of local countries.

AMY GOOMAN: Where? Name the countries.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, just—you know, we mentioned before some of the places where the US is bombing and attacking. Less known, these are some examples of the machine being set on kill, repressive—what in RAND’s words—RAND Corporation’s words, repressive regimes being backed by the US: Algeria, where they annulled an election, they stole an election, they do systematic torture; Ethiopia, where there’s mass hunger among the population, but where the US is building up the Ethiopian army and using them against Somalia; Saudi Arabia, the most religious extremist, anti-woman dictatorship in the world; Jordan, a torture center—the Jordanian intelligence outfit was, in the words of George Tenet, owned by the CIA, and both the CIA and Israel use it for torture; Rwanda, whose army and paramilitaries have been pillaging and raping and massively killing in the eastern Congo; Congo itself, Secretary of State Clinton went there and made a good denunciation of rape by the Congolese army, and as that was happening, the US was delivering weapons and training to that same Congolese army; Indonesia, where the army now de facto occupies and terrorizes Papua and has recently resumed assassinations in Aceh, the other end of the archipelago; Colombia, where army and army-backed militaries are the world’s number-one killer of labor activists; Uzbekistan, massive torture backed simultaneously by the US and Russia; Thailand, where officers who—US officers who I spoke to use their US training in what they call “target selection” to assassinate and disappear Muslim rebels in the south; Nepal, where US Green Berets for years created old Guatemala-style civil patrols that carried out lynchings against pro-Maoist forces and civilians in the countryside; India, where the police do daily torture and where their own officers talk about using terror against villages in the Naxalite rebel areas; Egypt, one of the world’s leading torture states and Israel’s accomplice in the blockade and hungering of Gaza; Honduras, where the army recently staged a coup when the oligarchy’s president, Zelaya, turned against his fellow oligarchs; Israel, which committed aggression against Gaza using US white phosphorus and cluster bombs as the US was—the US was shipping in new materiel as this, you know, attack was underway; and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, where, as the British Guardian just reported, the security forces are doing systematic torture of Hamas people and other dissidents under CIA sponsorship. And that’s only a partial list. We’d need another twenty-minute segment to complete the list.

But in not one of these cases has Obama decided to comply with US law, comply with international law, and cut off the killer forces. In fact, in a number of them he has stepped it up. In Indonesia, for example, he’s made a push to renew aid to the Kopassus, the Red Berets, the most deadly of the killer forces, hated by the people, long trained by the US Green Berets.

AMY GOOMAN: You made a provocative statement at the beginning of this broadcast, comparing an Obama presidency with a possible Palin presidency, and whether you would see a difference when it comes to foreign policy.

ALLAN NAIRN: Right. Well, in terms of killing civilians overseas, no difference. Every single action I’ve laid out could easily be adopted by Palin. In fact, Obama is carrying them out using Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Gates, using Bush’s old counterterrorism man, Brennan, using Admiral Blair, Admiral Dennis Blair, who personally—this is something that we discussed on an earlier show and which I personally reported on—who green-lighted church massacres, massacres of Catholic churches by General Wiranto in occupied East Timor in 1999 to punish the Timorese for voting for independence. So Palin could do all those things.

AMY GOOMAN: Dennis Blair’s position at the time?

ALLAN NAIRN: He was head of the US Pacific forces, and he’s now Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. And he’s now getting some political heat over the Detroit underwear bomber incident, which I actually think is unfair. You know, you can reinforce the—I mean, Blair should have been indicted for crimes against humanity and put on trial. Blair should be in prison now for what he did with General Wiranto. But this is unfair criticism of him on the bomber. I mean, you can’t prevent someone from, you know, trying to sneak in. If you want real security, you stop it on the other end. You stop the provocations and turn down the heat.

ANJALI KAMAT: And Allan Nairn, one of the things that Obama promised—one of the ways he promised he would be different from the Republicans, different from previous presidents, and different from the enemy he’s fighting, is that he would adhere to the rule of law. There would be standards. He’s banning torture. He’s going to close Guantanamo. These were promises he made last year. Can you talk about where—you mentioned the Goldstone report and US efforts to block the Goldstone report at the UN. But can you give us an assessment of where Obama stands in terms of international law? You told us a little bit about domestic law.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the violations—and this is not—you know, we’re talking about Obama, but this is the whole US system. I mean, Bush did the same. Clinton did the same. Bush’s father, Reagan, Carter. It’s institutional policy. He’s violating not just law, but especially international law, which defines aggression as the supreme crime. And when you go in and bomb countries because you say there’s a—you know, there’s a militant there you want to kill, that is easily defined as aggression.

When you back forces that are systematically killing civilians, as many are in that list of countries I ran through, you are a party to crimes against humanity and maybe even, arguably, in some cases, genocide. That was certainly the case in Central America in the ’80s, where—actually, now a Spanish court has indicted and is trying various Guatemalan generals for those crimes, charging them with an array of crimes against humanity. And they did it with US backing, with US weapons.

Obama issued a torture ban, a supposed torture ban, which was actually a sham.

AMY GOOMAN: Let me play a clip of President Obama. It was just about a year ago, this executive order banning torture. On January 22nd of last year, this is what Obama promised to do.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This morning, I signed three executive orders. First, I can say, without exception or equivocation, that the United States will not torture. Second, we will close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and determine how to deal with those who have been held there. And third, we will immediately undertake a comprehensive review to determine how to hold and try terrorism suspects to best protect our nation and the rule of law.

AMY GOOMAN: That was President Obama just about a year ago. Allan Nairn?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, his torture ban is empty. Ninety-eight, 99 percent of the US-backed torture is not done by Americans; it’s done by foreigners acting under US sponsorship. And that continues. His ban does not affect that. And even when it comes to Americans doing hands-on torture, his ban only says they are prohibited from doing so in situations of armed conflict, like in the middle of a war. That means that even an American could today go into Venezuela, go into Cuba, going into Egypt, go into Jordan, go into most of the countries of the world and commit hands-on torture, and it would be perfectly permissible under the so-called Obama torture ban. So it’s fake.

AMY GOOMAN: And what do you mean that others can do it?

ALLAN NAIRN: An American can do it if it’s in a country that’s not in a state of armed conflict. But the vast majority of the torture is carried out by proxies. That’s the way they did it in El Salvador. That’s the way they did it in Guatemala. There’s an intelligence officer, an Army man, a policeman of the local country, and they are trained by the US, they are paid by the US, but they’re not an American citizen. And they’re the one who wields the razor blade. They’re the one who puts the hood on.

AMY GOOMAN: Allan, you spend your time traveling the world. Talk about wealth and poverty.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the biggest issue is there are more than a billion people hungry in the world. It recently increased by a hundred million or so because of the Wall Street-induced financial collapse, but it was at about 900 million during the days of top prosperity, as defined by our current economic system. That’s completely intolerable. Until everybody eats, no one should live in luxury.

You know how much it would cost to feed those billion people? Less, much less, than was spent on just the bailout of Citibank. No one in the US, no one in any party leadership, talks about shifting those resources to do that. In fact, the President could do that with his own executive authority. For a deeper, longer-term solution, you’d have to change trade rules, you would have to change the IMF and the World Bank, so that farmers in currently hungry areas would have the same opportunities and protections that US yeoman farmers once had back in the age of Jefferson, when the US protected its farmers. But a president or even a rich person like a Gates or a Carlos Slim or a Buffett could instantly feed half the world. The World Food Programme, every few months, comes out with a desperate bulletin, saying we’ve got to cut back the calorie rations because we’re not getting enough for this or that program.

You know, in US politics, people face a bitter choice. You can’t vote for the—with a two-party system, you can’t vote against murder, you can’t vote for ending starvation. So they say, “My god, I guess I’ll go for the Democrats, because if I don’t, they’re going to move my Social Security to Wall Street, they’ll end gun control, they’ll end women’s choice.” So you end up backing these direct mass murders and the allowing of babies to have their brains deformed due to lack of food. That’s not tolerable.

I agree with those lunatic tea party people: we need a revolution. We need—now, they’re talking about a revolution to put a white person in charge. I’m talking about a revolution for change. Nothing radical, really. Just enforce the laws, those US laws, the murder laws, and shift a few dollars from people who merely want it, people like us who—you know, we live in luxury; we have all the food we could possibly eat in many lifetimes—and shifting it to people who need it to keep from being stunted, who need it to keep breathing, people—we can do that. You know, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan—

AMY GOOMAN: We have fifteen seconds.

ALLAN NAIRN: —horrible regimes. Today, they’re peaceful and productive. They were crushed by violence. That’s how they transformed their societies. I hope we don’t have to be crushed in that way. We can transform ourselves, but people have to stand up and do it. Surround Congress. Occupy the military bases. The US can become peaceful also, but only if we decide to do so. And we do have that choice. We have freedoms here.

AMY GOOMAN: Allan Nairn, I want to thank you for being with us. Allan Nairn is an award-winning journalist and activist.

Life in Limbo?

By Turbulence

We are trapped in a state of limbo, neither one thing nor the other. For more than two years, the world has been wracked by a series of interrelated crises, and they show no sign of being resolved anytime soon. The unshakable certainties of neoliberalism, which held us fast for so long, have collapsed. Yet we seem unable to move on. Anger and protest have erupted around different aspects of the crises, but no common or consistent reaction has seemed able to cohere. A general sense of frustration marks the attempts to break free from the morass of a failing world.

There is a crisis of belief in the future, leaving us with the prospect of an endless, deteriorating present that hangs around by sheer inertia. In spite of all this turmoil – this time of ‘crisis’ when it seems like everything could, and should, have changed – it paradoxically feels as though history has stopped. There is an unwillingness, or inability, to face up to the scale of the crisis. Individuals, companies and governments have hunkered down, hoping to ride out the storm until the old world re-emerges in a couple of years. Attempts to wish the ‘green shoots’ of recovery into existence mistake an epochal crisis for a cyclical one; they are little more than wide-eyed boosterism. Yes, astronomical sums of money have prevented the complete collapse of the financial system, but the bailouts have been used to prevent change, not initiate it. We are trapped in a state of limbo.

Crisis in the middle

And yet, something did happen. Recall those frightening yet heady days that began in late 2008, when everything happened so quickly, when the old dogmas fell like autumn leaves? They were real. Something happened there: the tried and tested ways of doings things, well-rehearsed after nearly 30 years of global neoliberalism, started to come unstuck. What had been taken as read no longer made sense. There was a shift in what we call the middle ground: the discourses and practices that define the centre of the political field.

To be sure, the middle ground is not all that there is, but it is what assigns the things in the world around it a greater or lesser degree of relevance, validity or marginality. It constitutes a relatively stable centre against which all else is measured. The farther from the centre an idea, project or practice is, the more likely it is to be ignored, publicly dismissed or disqualified, or in some way suppressed. The closer to it, the more it stands a chance of being incorporated – which in turn will shift the middle more or less. Neither are middle grounds defined ‘from above’, as in some conspiratorial nightmare. They emerge out of different ways of doing and being, thinking and speaking, becoming intertwined in such a way as to reinforce each other individually and as a whole. The more they have become unified ‘from below’ as a middle ground, the more this middle ground acquires the power of unifying ‘from above’. In this sense, the grounds of something like ‘neoliberalism’ were set before something was named as such; but the moment when it was named is a qualitative leap: the point at which relatively disconnected policies, theories and practices became identifiable as forming a whole.

The naming of things like Thatcherism in the UK, or Reaganism in the US, marked such a moment for something that had been constituting itself for some time before, and which has for the past three decades dominated the middle ground: neoliberalism, itself a response to the crisis of the previous middle, Fordism/Keynesianism. The era of the New Deal and its various international equivalents had seen the rise of a powerful working class that had grown used to the idea that its basic needs should be met by the welfare state, that real wages would rise, and that it was always entitled to more. Initially, the centrepiece of the neoliberal project was an attack on this ‘demanding’ working class and the state institutions wherein the old class compromise had been enshrined. Welfare provisions were rolled back, wages held steady or forced downwards, and precariousness increasingly became the general condition of work.

But this attack came at a price. The New Deal had integrated powerful workers’ movements – mass-based trade unions – into the middle ground, helping to stabilise a long period of capitalist growth. And it provided sufficiently high wages to ensure that all the stuff generated by a suddenly vastly more productive industrial system – based on Henry Ford’s assembly line and Frederick Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ – could be bought. Bit by bit, the ferocious attack on the working classes of the global North was offset by low interest rates (i.e. cheap credit) and access to cheap commodities, mass-produced in areas where wages were at their lowest (like China). In the global South, the prospect of one day attaining similar living conditions was promised as a possibility. In this sense, neoliberal globalisation was the globalisation of the American dream: get rich or die trying.

Clearly, neoliberalism also relied on a ‘deal’ of some kind. But the word here has a different meaning; its mode of attraction/incorporation was quite unlike that of Fordism/Keynesianism. The latter involved visible, constituted collective forces through the likes of trade unions or farmers’ organisations; the former worked more as a buyout from the original deal, addressing individuals directly as individuals. It was a middle ground that emerged out of ‘deviant’ desires, discourses and practices that looked for ways out of the existing one (the fear that unions had become too powerful, dissatisfaction with the drab uniformity of everything, para-statal practices of corruption that compensated an over-regulated life), and as such were very much about individualisation. Indeed, it aimed to create a certain kind of individual, an atomised self-entrepreneur whose collective social ties are subordinated to the search for private gain.

Crisis of the common

Today, the neoliberal deal is null and void; the middle ground has crumbled away. We’ve gone past the era when cheap credit, rising asset prices and falling commodity prices could compensate for stagnant wages. Those days are over but no new middle ground has cohered. Nobody has ‘agreed’ any replacement ‘deal’. That’s why we find ourselves in a state of limbo.

Mind you, deals and middle ground don’t necessarily go hand in hand. A new middle ground might result from a deal, explicit (like that of the New Deal of the 1930s) or implicit (like neoliberalism) – indeed, it will be firmer, more stable, if this is the case. But a new centre of the political field can also emerge without one. A middle ground does not require the degree of consent implied by a deal; it’s a sufficient but not a necessary condition. It does, however, always involve a process of attraction and incorporation of forces that could threaten it – the extent of which is defined by the terms of each emerging middle ground itself.

Striking a deal is like agreeing – consciously or otherwise – to a (temporary) truce following a fierce battle. But a middle ground could establish itself in the midst of a period of ongoing conflict and contestation – a more protracted struggle of attrition. From our current vantage point, much is unknown. We certainly can’t predict the duration or outcome of the struggle over what becomes the new political ‘common sense’. Moreover, the sides aren’t even clear. Finding out who your allies are only really happens once a fight has been picked. So who will be fighting whom and about what? What will be the common ground among movements in the new struggles and those further down the line?

Our concept of ‘common ground’ is, like middle grounds, a theoretical tool. We use it to name the intersections and resonances of diverse struggles, practices, discourses, targets and referents. In the previous alter-globalisation movement, the common ground was the shared ‘One No’ – against the monopolising logic of neoliberalism – along with the acceptance that there were ‘Many Yeses’ – the multiplicity of alternative notions of economy, commons and sociality. For many years, many movements could meet and recognise one another as kindred on this common ground of rejection of neoliberalism – without denying their difference. But the shattering of the middle ground means a common ground rooted in antagonism to it now lies in ruins.

SHIFTING GROUNDS

From madness to mainstream?

Until recently, anyone who suggested nationalising the banks would have been derided as a quack and a crank, as lacking the most basic understanding of economics and the functioning of a ‘complex, globalised world’. So strong was the grip of ‘orthodoxy’ that such an idea would have been disqualified without the need to offer a counter-argument. Yet over the past year, governments around the world have effectively nationalised large parts of the financial sector, while handing over dizzyingly large amounts of public money to those institutions that remained in private hands. Similar moves into the mainstream have taken place with the discourses around climate change and commons. Every ‘serious’ politician must at least appear to be concerned about global warming. And the ‘commons’, long an exclusive focus of the left, has also entered the vocabulary of centrist intellectuals and politicians: from widening recognition of the ‘public benefits’ of access to cheap drugs and other intellectual property, to cautiously approving comments in The Economist, and the economics professions’ faux Nobel prize going to Elinor Ostrom for her work on commons. Put these together and some might argue that the centre of gravity of public discourse has shifted to the left.

Yet it cannot escape notice that the recent nationalisations were argued for precisely on the grounds that they are necessary to save financialised capitalism, not as part of a social democratic programme of redistribution, let alone a strategy for a socialist transition. Likewise, the new green economy that is now on politicians’ public agendas aims to maintain a big-business, productivist model of development by marrying it to more environmentally sustainable energies and processes.

So things have changed, but, trapped in limbo, the extent of change is by no means obvious. Let us be clear, then, about where things have started to happen. Perhaps the most obvious change is at the level of what can be said - what can be accepted as valid argument, rather than being consigned to a wilderness inhabited by raging ideologues, and the ignorant. In its heyday, neoliberal ideology was effective in banishing all other thought because it posed as non-ideological, as merely the ‘reasonable’ application of the ‘science’ of utility. Today, however, it is possible to see (and say) that the presuppositions of these reasonable decisions were, of course, ideological. The market does not tend toward equilibrium, the maximisation of self-interest can override instincts of self-preservation and lead to sub-optimal outcomes, and in times of crisis any trickle down is reverted into the upstream splurge of bailouts. The premises of those supposedly non-ideological arguments – such as the transformation of ‘the market’ into a natural given governed by scientific laws available to ortho-dox (‘correct opinion’) but not to hetero-dox (‘other opinion’) economists – have now been debunked. Hardcore neoliberal ideology will cease to shape the space of politics by defining its terms, what is good and bad (investment rather than public spending, efficient private versus inefficient public, markets not planning), and pulling the centre of gravity of the debate towards itself. Neoliberal orthodoxy no longer forms the middle ground of politics in regard to which all other opinions have to position themselves.

Zombie-liberalism

But does the disappearance of the ideological middle ground mean that the neoliberal era is actually over? Or is this just a pause, a kind of radical diet to shed inefficient capital and institutions, in order for neoliberalism to emerge leaner and meaner at the other end? On the one hand, rather than the banking system being restructured, and financial capital being subordinated to political direction, the recent bailout mania has simply been a massive robber-baron-style plunder of public resources, exacerbating 30 years of neoliberal upward redistribution of wealth. On the other, this major heist has lost its ideological justification, and been revealed as just that: theft. Neoliberalism has always had two sides. It was both a counterattack by elites against social gains won by workers’ and other movements from the 1930s onwards, an attempt to shift wealth back up the social ladder; and an ideological project claiming to rid ‘the markets’ of unwarranted intervention by governments and their ilk.

What remains of neoliberalism once the ideological padding comes off? It is no longer a (relatively) coherent politico-economic programme: it has become the plunder of a retreating army, a way of booby-trapping the political system before it has to relinquish control over it. But these booby traps, even if stripped of their ideological camouflage, are dangerous and deadly. In all the countries that have seen bailouts and/or financial crises, the enormous government deficits created are now being used by exactly those social forces that most benefited from them (in absolute terms) to argue that they should be paid off through yet more rounds of austerity and spending cuts. By handing over control to some ‘safe hands’ outside any form of accountability, neoliberalism gets locked in. A neat trick: the financial sector uses the debts incurred bailing it out to secure continued control over policy.

The picture is confusing, and gets even more so. As credit dries up and food and energy prices rise, workers are left underpaid and, in the North, over-indebted – a so-called recovery that doesn’t massively increase wages and/or cancel personal debt will not change that. Deal’s off, as it were. But if there is no more deal, and no more ideology, what of the social basis of neoliberalism – the neoliberal power bloc? In short, it is in disarray, if not totally shattered. There is no longer any social group that can credibly claim ‘leadership’ in society, politics, culture or the economy. ‘The centre cannot hold’, the middle ground is broken, leaving behind a confused and vicious army, institutions no longer guided by a coherent framework, political parties still vying for power but without any real programmes.

So if the power bloc is weak, engaged in obvious, large-scale looting of the system it used to run, and if – above all – the ideological core of neoliberalism is gone, why is a new middle ground failing to emerge? Why is the apparent discursive shift to the left not paying off in practical terms? The answer lies at least partly in the fact that the neoliberal project relied a lot less on ideology than its critics tended to think. Theories and ideologies are used to create neoliberal ideologues and activists, but persuasion through argument isn’t how it transforms our subjectivities and the limits of what we perceive possible. These changes are brought about more operationally than ideologically, that is, through interventions into the composition of society. Neoliberalism re-organises material processes in order to bring about the social reality that its ideology claims already exists. It attempts to create its own presuppositions.

Rather than being persuaded by the power of neoliberal arguments, people are trained to view themselves as rational benefit-maximisers, those elusive creatures of economic theory. This training takes place through a forced engagement with markets, not just in our economic activities, but in every sphere of our lives: in education, health care, child care, you name it. Take the school system in Britain. An army of government inspectors and statisticians compiles mountains of data on schools’ performance; parents, for their part, are expected to use this information to make the best decision regarding school choice. Education is seen as preparing bodies for the labour market, so ‘rational choice’ is invoked to justify the channelling of certain students into vocational training from an early age. Meanwhile, many ‘middle-class’ parents attempt to maximise their offspring’s chances of ‘getting the best start in life’ by engaging private tutors or dragging themselves to church every Sunday morning (Anglican faith schools having the best reputation).

Effectively, people are forced to become human capital, little enterprises locked in competition with others – an isolated atom entirely responsible for itself. In this context accepting the individual ‘deal’ offered by neoliberalism made sense. Neoliberalism isn’t – or wasn’t – just about changes in global governance or how states should be governed: it is about the management of individuals, about how you should live. It set up a model of life, and then established mechanisms that shepherded you towards ‘freely’ choosing that manner of living. The dice are loaded. Today, if you want to participate in society, you have to behave as homo economicus.

In many ways it is this neoliberal coding, not just of public institutions and policy programmes, but of our very selves, that keeps us trapped in limbo. Neoliberalism is dead but it doesn’t seem to realise it. Although the project no longer ‘makes sense’, its logic keeps stumbling on, like a zombie in a 1970s splatter movie: ugly, persistent and dangerous. If no new middle ground is able to cohere sufficiently to replace it, this situation could last a while… all the major crises – economic, climate, food, energy – will remain unresolved; stagnation and long-term drift will set in (recall that the crisis of Fordism took longer than an entire decade, the 1970s, to be resolved). Such is the ‘unlife’ of a zombie, a body stripped of its goals, unable to adjust itself to the future, unable to make plans. A zombie can only act habitually, continuing to operate even as it decomposes. Isn’t this where we find ourselves today, in the world of zombie-liberalism? The body of neoliberalism staggers on, but without direction or teleology.

Any project that wants to slay this zombie will have to operate on many different levels, just as neoliberalism did, which means that it must be tied to a new manner of living. And it must start from the here and now, the current composition of global society, large parts of which are still in the grip of the neoliberal zombie. This is the greatest challenge facing those advocating a New or Green New Deal. It isn’t a case of simply changing elite thinking or dabbling with government spending: it requires a more fundamental change. Not just a change of consciousness at the head of society, but a transformation of the social body.

The middle and the common

We can detect many symptoms of the waning of the old middle ground. In a way, this is where the significance of the Obama phenomenon lies: a political project that comes to power on a tide of vague promises of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ speaks less of the strength of its own ideas than of the weakness of others. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, we have seen the collapse of the parliamentary left in a number of recent elections. Whether in or out of power, Europe’s centre-left parties have been punished at the ballot box, while the vote for the right has generally held up better. Many have been mystified as to why the centre-left has taken the blame for the economic crisis, but the left that embraced neoliberalism became the truest of believers: it was they who came to see it as a progressive force that could bring development even to the world’s poor. (There is never a greater zealot than a convert.) It is the obliteration of this illusion that has led to the neoliberal left’s collapse.

So does that mean that the many left-wing critics of neoliberalism (and, sometimes, capitalism), from the radical left parties to the alter-globalists of Seattle and Genoa, can now simply bask in a self-satisfied glow? They can now claim to have been right all along in opposing not only the neoliberal triad of financialisation, deregulation and privatisation, but also the Blairite Third Way? We count ourselves amongst these critics, and we have certainly been right about some of these things – the instability of the neoliberal credit system, say. But one of the worst mistakes we could make right now would be to assume that old answers and certainties are still valid. With the disappearance of the old, anti-neoliberal common ground, and the emergence of new struggles, we must not only revisit the question of who ‘we’ are (or were). We must also construct a new ‘we’. We need a new attentiveness to emerging responses to the present conjuncture. We need a capacity to recognise at what levels these responses communicate and an active effort to identify the points where they overlap and reinforce each other. In other words, we need – collectively – to create, identify and name new common grounds.

The work of naming a common ground is for the most part analytic: it seeks to identify the components and directions of different trajectories, and to act back on them to strengthen commonalities, work through tensions that can be resolved, recognise the sources of those that can’t. Of course, the act of naming something as a common ground always entails proposing a partial synthesis; but this synthesis can only be as effective as the depth of the analysis that underpins it. It only works to the extent that what it names means something to those to whom it speaks.

Common grounds, like middle grounds, have a double character. On the one hand they have an ‘objective’ side: diverse practices, subjectivities, struggles and projects may share common aspects, or even resonate with one another, even if the one is unaware of the other. On the other hand, common grounds may have a subjective side, which requires a certain self-awareness and the ability to recognise what’s common in other struggles or projects. The ‘one no’ rejection of neoliberalism is an obvious example of a self-aware, subjective common ground. It takes an active effort to identify common grounds, but identifying and maintaining them helps make them more effective. This self-awareness creates a feedback loop that can allow the common ground to gain consistency and exceed the established middle ground’s ability to contain it. Common grounds contain an element of autonomy, asking their own questions on their own terms.

This leads to the next question: how do common grounds affect middle grounds? To begin with, this often occurs in ways that are invisible, as centrifugal forces countering the middle ground’s centripetal pull. They are new practices and ways of living and thinking that deviate from the synthesis; they spread out without necessarily becoming a visible challenge to the middle. Think of the many hidden struggles of factory or office workers that slow down the pace of work without organising a strike; the impact on society of gays and lesbians carving out of niches for their desires; of the syncretic religions of Latin America and Africa, where indigenous and slaves practised their traditions right under the nose of the colonisers. Think of the advent of the pill and the way it gave women more power over their own bodies, producing mutations in sexual relations, in social roles and identities.

Such phenomena become visible when they rub up against the middle ground, coming into conflict with existing institutions and practices. Common grounds problematise the way that the middle ground has composed the world, posing problems that it can’t get to grips with. The effects of such unnamed common grounds and the mutations they produce can still be limited, and are often accompanied by some form of disqualification or repression. Common grounds become more powerful and their effects more pronounced when they are made both visible and named. This is when their centrifugal force is turned into open antagonism.

But this antagonism is not simply an end in itself. During the 1990s, when the neoliberal middle ground was at its strongest, its most ‘hegemonic’, it was necessary to name and maintain an antagonism that remained at a distance to the middle ground precisely because one of neoliberalism’s dogmas – the ‘end of history’ – had proclaimed the end of all antagonism. Today, the situation is different. Globally, the left appears to be weak, but the simultaneous and equivalent weakness of the middle ground gives ‘us’ a unique ability to intervene into the shaping of the new middle ground. The work of naming new common grounds is at the same time the work of increasing our power to shape the outcome of the many global crises, by influencing the way they are dealt with.

We should be aware, however, that the emergence of a common ground that unsettles a middle ground is not necessarily a good thing. We could think here of the genesis of neoliberalism itself. The Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947, studied free-market ideas throughout Keynesianism’s ‘golden age’, as did that circle of admirers that gathered around Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand in the 1950s. The Mont Pelerin Society’s members included George Shultz and Milton Friedman – Shultz went on to serve in the Nixon and Reagan administrations and, at the University of Chicago, both men trained the ‘Chicago boys’ who liberalised Latin American economies in the 1970s and ’80s. The young Alan Greenspan, who later became Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a member of Rand’s circle. These free-market thinkers and activists articulated a common ground that profoundly unsettled the Keynesian/Fordist middle and went on to destroy it.

Towards new common grounds?

But while we might appear to be trapped in limbo, history is still being made. In the last few years we have seen the irruption of a multiplicity of struggles, some more visible than others. In parts of the global North a direct action movement against climate change and for climate justice has emerged and grown rapidly. There’s been an increase in political activity around universities – such as the wave of occupations and strikes across Italy against the country’s Education Reform Bill, and mass protests against the raising of tuition fees and job losses at the University of California. In some cases, protest movements have emerged around issues directly connected to the financial crisis, for example, in Iceland, Ireland, France (remember ‘bossnapping’?); or, as in Greece, they have tapped into the widespread social malaise concerning the lack of prospects for the ‘700-euro generation’. In Latin America, surely the part of the world where left forces are most ascendant, there have been explosive indigenous struggles around the control of natural resources. Indigenous people in Peru successfully confronted the government and its army to prevent the destruction of forests and livelihoods in the pursuit of new sources of oil. Elsewhere, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has fought the Nigerian army to a standstill and disrupted several of Shell’s operations in the area. In South Korea, sacked workers occupying the SsangYong car plant in Seoul fought pitched battles with the police and army, only to be dislodged after a massive security operation.

While the list could go on and on, it is hard to avoid the impression that these struggles have remained relatively separate from each other. By and large, they have not resonated sufficiently to constitute new common grounds. But: we can be certain on a few points and, from here, it may be possible to identify some emergent tendencies. First and foremost, we know that in an epochal crisis such as this one, both new middle and new common grounds will initially have to emerge around the problematics that brought the old era to its knees.

Take again the crisis of Fordism. By the 1970s, not only had persistently high wages led to a crisis of profitability, there were also widespread fears that unions had become too strong, the state too expansive and too bureaucratic, life too uniform. The success of the neoliberal project, at least in its Anglo-American heartlands, lay partly in the fact that it effectively tackled these problems, that it captured previously ‘deviant’ desires, discourses and practices by promising individuals the ability to realise them. When neoliberalism crushed the unions, shrank the welfare bureaucracy, ended stagnation and beat inflation, it on the one hand effectively addressed the problems that brought the old New Deal to its knees, and on the other, laid the groundwork for a new set of systemic problems to emerge.

The first, most immediately obvious, problematic apparent in the crisis of neoliberalism appears very different, depending on where you are standing. What from the top looks like an ‘economic crisis’ (not enough growth, not enough profits, not enough demand) is experienced, from below, as a ‘crisis of social reproduction’. Unemployment is soaring and national deficits are placing ever-greater constraints on social security. The zombie-liberal response has been ultimately self-defeating: bail out the banks and some well-connected industries (but at huge cost to governments, increasing deficit spending), try to re-inflate the bubble of cheap credit, and hope that someone will borrow the money that is made available. Alas, there is no source of mass demand, no consumer of last resort, no new large-scale investment opportunities. Along this road lies nothing but future ruin.

These two perspectives on the same crisis obviously call forth two different ‘logical’ responses. While the reaction of zombie-liberalism makes sense according to its own (undead) logic, the logical response to the crisis of social reproduction is perhaps a strategy of commoning. This would be a defence, creation and expansion of resources held in common and accessible to all: expanding public transport, socialising health care, guaranteeing a basic income, and so on. This type of strategy would achieve two linked and essential goals. First, it would address our immediate fears of losing our livelihoods – because it would create spaces where social reproduction becomes possible outside the crisis-ridden circuits of capital. Second, it would counter the atomisation caused by three decades of neoliberal subjectivation in markets – just as engaging in market-based interactions tends to create market-subjects, engaging in commoning tends to create ‘commonistic’ subjectivities. And if another, equally ‘logical’, response to the economic crisis is the attempt to exclude certain people from collective resources, then the creation of open commons as a response to the crisis of social reproduction would counteract this, too. Open commons would undermine the nativist, racist politics that are gaining ground, certainly in Europe, and in parts of Africa and Asia.

A second central problematic is that of the biocrisis, of the many socio-ecological crises that are currently afflicting the world as a result of the contradiction between capital’s need for never-ending growth and the fact that we live on a finite planet. Again, the biocrisis has two faces. From the perspective of governments and capital, it looks like an emerging threat to social stability. Climate change is undermining livelihoods, which increases the number of people forced to secure their reproduction through extra-legal means. Large-scale movements of ‘climate refugees’ are feared by many governments. Piracy is a response by Somali fisherfolk and others to over-fishing off the Horn of Africa. But states and capital also perceive precisely these threats to social stability as opportunities to relegitimise political authority, to expand government powers and to kick-start a new round of ‘green’ economic growth, fuelled by uranium and austerity.

But the biocrisis, as the name implies, is one that threatens life; and disproportionately the lives of those who have done the least to cause it. Increasingly, the movements coalescing around this contradiction – between capital and life, growth and limits – are doing so around the notion of climate justice: the idea that responses to the crisis should undo rather than exacerbate existing injustices and imbalances of power, and that their construction should involve the direct participation of those affected.

Of course, we cannot be sure that new middle and common grounds will emerge around either of these issues – the economic crisis/crisis of social reproduction and the biocrisis – but we are convinced that any successful new project will need to address both.

From commons to constitutions

Allowing a new common ground to emerge involves a moment of grace, a stepping back from the assumptions, tactics and strategies of the anti-neoliberal, counter-globalist protest cycle of the turn of the century. The common ground constructed and maintained from that period must be recomposed through the prism of our contemporary situation.

The counter-globalisation movement was suspicious of – often even opposed to – institutions per se, constituted forms of power. This suspicion was obvious, for example, in the tension within one of its most institutionalised forms, the World Social Forum (WSF). The reason for the counter-globalisation movement’s scepticism was, of course, well founded: the result of the generalised recognition that neoliberal ideology had successfully colonised most social democratic parties and trade unions.

But when the crisis of neoliberalism irrupted, it became apparent that this mistrust of institutions had translated into an inability to consistently shape politics and the economy. Antagonism against institutions as an end in itself is a dead end. The power to vacate institutions leaves a void that politics, which abhors vacuum, tends to cover up with the calculations of piecemeal cooptation. Moments of antagonism are either part of ongoing processes of building autonomy and constituting new forms of power, or they risk dissipation, or even worse, backlashes. Today, it is necessary to have more than the sporadic show of strength: we need forms of organisation that start from the collective management of needs, that politicise the structures and mechanisms of social reproduction, and build force from there. What form could these take in the present climate? Campaigns against foreclosures, around the cost of utility bills, private debt, energy resources…? In any case, what is needed are interventions that start from shared life and acquire their consistency there; that employ moments of antagonism in order to increase their constituent power, rather than as ends in themselves.

If a decade ago, with the neoliberal doctrine at the height of its power and most institutional roads well and truly blocked, outright rejection was a credible tactic, the brittle ground of today presents us with very different problems.

We do, in fact, have some present examples of important transformations that have managed to inscribe themselves in institutional forms. The most remarkable are undoubtedly the constituent processes in Bolivia and Ecuador, which have resulted in political constitutions that represent radical innovations not only in relation to the countries’ histories, but to constitutional law itself. First of all, because they give a form to a new arrangement of forces in which, for the first time in their history, the vast majority of the population actually has a voice, and some degree of representation. More than that, however, in instituting pluri-nationality as a principle of the state, both of them signal a remarkable break with modern notions of sovereignty by recognising multiple, autonomous sovereign forms within the state itself, as well as acknowledging the historical debt of the colonisation process. In the case of Ecuador, in fact, it is not only pluri-nationality, but also the indigenous concept of ‘the good life’ (sumak kausay) and the ‘rights of nature’ that are made into principles. The latter, a unique invention in legal history, follows directly from the former: ‘the good life’ necessarily involves the environment in which one lives – not as the source from which, but as the medium in which, one subsists. The idea that, in the modern parliamentary state, the world had found a definitive, non-perfectible form, was central to the ‘end of history’ doctrine. While emphatically opposing the doctrine, the alterglobalist cycle seemed to accept the premise in inverse form: institutions were not subject to change. But rejecting institutions as such does not follow necessarily from rejecting institutions-as-we-know-them.

But these constitutions can only be a beginning, and in a certain way, it is after they are written that the real constituent process begins: that of filling the letter of the text with real transformation. This, indeed, is the real test that the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ will have to confront very soon: it is not so much in an increasingly organised backlash (see Honduras), but in the future of its own most-vaunted ‘success’ stories, that the question mark lies. Of course, this is also a matter of new middle and common grounds: a question of how far from the old middle ground these processes can move, and what new common grounds will have to be constructed in order to affect them. The recent experiences in Latin America have been, and remain, contradictory: the recognition of ‘the rights of nature’ and ‘the good life’ goes hand-in-hand with a resurrection of ‘developmentalism’, increased exploitation of natural resources, and a renewed emphasis on primary commodity exports. The question is: has the constituent power of existing movements been entirely spent in this process? Is the coming time one of consolidating gains instead of raising the game – of tactical rearguard manoeuvres rather than strategic movements? In Brazil, as in Bolivia, Venezuela etc., will new dynamics below the state level rekindle the transformative energy that created the present situation, or will we see its cooling off and crystallisation?

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How relevant are these processes, and these questions, to those of us outside Latin America? In many ways the continent, with institutional actors responsive to social movements’ common ground, seems like an anomaly. Indeed its anomalous status is perhaps a symptom of neoliberalism’s breakdown. Most of the world faces very different symptoms and a different set of questions: If zombie-liberalism is an ongoing form of governance, then how can social movements affect the wider world? If there is no dominant middle ground for emergent common grounds to rub up against then how are struggles made visible? How do we form an antagonism against an incoherent enemy? If neoliberal subjectivities continue to be reproduced then how do we interrupt this process and create new subjects with expanded horizons?

However, many current struggles are also premised on the idea that zombie-liberalism won’t persist and a new middle ground will emerge. Just think of the movements around climate change where the battle is not only against inaction but simultaneously against the manner in which the problem is being framed and the solutions being offered. From this perspective the Latin American anomaly can seem like an outpost from a potential future and its problematics can suddenly seem timely. This is the true difficulty of acting in a crisis. When the future is so unclear we must operate in many different worlds at once. We must name a common ground, while keeping it open to new directions. We must look for institutional interlocutors while accepting that, in part, we will have to create them ourselves. We must set the conditions for a new middle ground to emerge while not getting trapped by it.

These are all, of course, difficult tasks but it is how a new ‘we’ is constructed. The smallest step may seem near impossible now, but we should remember that once a new common ground begins to take shape, things can move very quickly. Such is the fragility of the current state of things that a little movement could have a dramatic effect. It may not take too much to tip a world gripped by entropy into a world full of potential.