The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
published 1939 during the last Great Depression.
Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com, May 25, 2010

Also posted on The Rag Blog and TowardFreedom.

Arizona SB1070, signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, requires Arizona’s local and state law enforcement to demand the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally, and arrest them if they lack documents proving citizenship or legal residency. Effectively making racial profiling into state policy, this law is the latest in a series of attacks on Latin American immigrants, as well as the entire Latino community, who must live with the fear of being interrogated by police for their brown skin. Then on May 11, Arizona went one step further, outlawing the teaching of ethnic studies classes, or any classes that “are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity”. This same law also states that schools must fire English teachers who speak with a “heavy accent.”

Perhaps these new laws make sense if we imagine that undocumented immigrants are merely “aliens”, a danger to the good, mostly white citizens of this great country. But suppose we look at the problem of immigration from the perspective of the immigrants? Why are they risking life and limb to come to a foreign land, far from their home and families? Why aren’t they deterred from making this trip no matter how many walls we put up, no matter how many police collaborate with ICE, no matter how many angry armed “Minutemen” vigilantes are conscripted to guard the border?

John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, following the Joad family as they migrate to California during the “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s, sheds light on these questions in a way that perhaps every American can relate to. One of the most popular and well-written American books of all time, The Grapes of Wrath provides a very human perspective on the harsh lives of migrants, personified by the Joads – a family of poor sharecroppers from Oklahoma. Evicted from their family farm, just as the millions of Mexicans who have suffered enclosure from their land and become homeless and jobless because of NAFTA, the Joads travel to California in a desperate search of work, only to encounter the harassment of authorities and the hatred of the local population.

There are important differences between the “Okies” who traveled to the Southwest in the 1930s and Latino migrantes of the 2000s. The Joads, of course, were white, and did not cross a national border when they made their exodus. But at its core the story of the Joads is the story of the migrant workers, their troubles, their fears, but also their humanity, and their hope. It is a story that can inspire us to recognize the historic nature of the moment in which we live, understand why these enormous transformations are occurring, and recognize that justice for the immigrants is justice for everyone, regardless of color or citizenship status.

Enclosure

In order to understand the migrantes we first have to understand the story of their displacement, or the enclosure of their land, which has left them homeless and with no other options than to leave their homeland in search of a wage. What can The Grapes of Wrath tell us about this reality?

People usually do not resort to risky and desperate moves unless they have nothing left to lose. Steinbeck begins the Joads’ story with the loss of everything they had: the small farm on which they had sustained their family for generations by growing cotton. Young Tom Joad, fresh out of prison, returns to his home to find it deserted. “The Reverend Casy and young Tom stood on the hill and looked down on the Joad place… Where the dooryard had been pounded hard by the bare feet of children and by stamping horses’ hooves and by the broad wagon wheels, it was cultivated now, and the dark green, dusty cotton grew… ‘Jesus!’ he said at last. ‘Hell musta popped here. There ain’t nobody livin’ there.’” (51).

Mexican farmer with corn / image courtesy of "© Juan_de" on flickr

Whether as tenants or small landholders, either for subsistence or for markets, the vast majority of the poor migrantes now coming to this country are fleeing the loss of their farms and their livelihoods, just as the Joads. Perhaps for generations, maybe hundreds or even thousands of years, they had lived in connection with the land and had been able to depend on it for the survival of their families and culture. The loss of this land is devastating to those cultures, but larger forces stand to gain by driving these people into homelessness.

The phenomenal book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004) details the violent origins of capitalism in 15th-17th century Europe. In it, author Silvia Federici defines the “enclosures” that were necessary for giving birth to capitalism by divorcing the European peasantry from their traditional lands and leaving them with no other choice but to sell their labor for a wage in the emerging industrial economy.

She goes on, revealing that this enclosure process remains a core element of the capitalist economy we live in:

Enclosure is precisely the part of the story we never hear about in the mainstream immigration debate in America. It is never questioned why hundreds of thousands of workers are scrambling to come to the U.S., other than for “our freedom” or to “take our jobs.” But Steinbeck boldly begins The Grapes of Wrath by highlighting the enclosure process as it operated in rural America during the Great Depression.

This famous photograph shows a family of homeless migrants fleeing the "Dust Bowl."

In the 1930s, Oklahoma was ground zero for the “Dust Bowl“. Unsustainable industrial farming practices such as the monoculture of cotton without crop rotation caused the soil to die, then be picked up by the wind and create enormous dust storms. On page 41, Steinbeck laments, “You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.” The settling layers of dust killed the crops and made it harder for small farmers to earn a living, and many were driven into debt and became tenants on land that was then technically owned by the bank. At the same time, large, wealthy landowners were able to use tractors and other new farming machinery to replace the many tenants who had previously been needed to work the land. “Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company – that’s the bank when it has land – wants tractors, not families on the land” (193).

In this passage, Steinbeck brilliantly exposes the evictions as part of the normal functioning of capitalism, as a land owner arrives to evict a tenant family:

As far as capitalism is concerned, whatever will maximize profit is the arrangement that must be pursued, regardless of the human consequences. The situation in Mexico today resembles that of Oklahoma 75 years ago. Small family farms are no longer profitable enough, and people are being thrown off their land every year by the thousands.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed into law by Bill Clinton on December 8, 1993, created the largest “free trade” zone in the world: Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The treaty stipulated that there could be no “barriers to trade”, such as a tariff/tax on foreign products. In this video MIT professor Noam Chomsky, interviewed by Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha, explains how the modern enclosures in Mexico are a result of NAFTA, which has not had the effect it was promised to have for the U.S. and Mexican economies.

As mentioned by Prof. Chomsky, one direct result of NAFTA was the flooding of the Mexican market with artificially cheap agricultural products from the United States, such as corn, which is heavily subsidized by the U.S. government. From 1990-2000, the price of corn in Mexico fell by 58 percent, and as there is simply no way for the vast majority of Mexican tenant farmers to compete with this artificially low cost of American corn and other products, millions were driven into poverty and debt, and soon faced eviction.

This excellent article from the Institute for Food & Development Policy states that “Since NAFTA, 80 percent of rural Mexicans live in poverty, with 60 percent living in extreme poverty.” It also points out that as of 2004, a total of 1.7 million subsistence farmers had been pushed off their land because of NAFTA. So it should be no surprise that the number of Mexican immigrants entering the U.S. increased by 75 percent in the 5 years after NAFTA became law.

The form of enclosure has changed, but the fact has remained. People driven from their land will search for work in other places.

Xenophobia

The second great lesson The Grapes of Wrath reveals about the immigrants is how they are feared and hated, by the local population as well as the authorities, and what it means to endure and overcome this xenophobia.

Throughout the book, as the weary Joads meander west on their old jalopy, their eagerness and optimism about finding decent work and a better life in California are dashed against the rocks of poverty and hatred. Early in the book, Tom’s pregnant sister Rose-of-Sharon Joad goes on about her expectations for life in California.

But shortly after crossing the border into California, the Joad family encounters the authorities, who are less than pleased by the arrival of more migrants into their state. After setting up camp by a river, Ma settles down for a nap in the tent, only to be disturbed by a law enforcement agent who gives her a threatening welcome.

"Minutemen" vigilantes patrol the U.S.-Mexico border / picture courtesy of boinboing

It becomes clear through the story that the California police and authorities tolerate the presence of the “Okies” so they can be exploited for their extremely cheap labor. Sheriffs and rangers even guard the grounds of large private farms where migrants are bussed in. However, the cops maintain a close eye on the Okies, and are not afraid to resort to violence when they step out of line.

The Joads arrive one night in a “Hooverville,” the name for the slums on the edges of towns during the Great Depression where unemployed would set up camp. Here a contractor comes to find desperate workers, escorted by a deputy sheriff with whom Tom Joad gets into an altercation.

The goal of the authorities in the story, as in the country today, is to keep immigrants in a constant state of precariousness, where they cannot make waves for fear of being imprisoned or deported. This climate of fear is the real effect of Arizona SB1070, not to actually deport all the undocumented workers from the state, because that would hurt the economy that depends on their cheap labor. In fact, this CNN video documents that SB1070 has already driven away too many workers from the state and hurting the businesses that had employed them. It seems it has backfired so much that even Russell Pearce, the author of the legislation, has now reversed his stance and is supporting “guest worker” legislation to invite undocumented workers back into the state.

What does the climate of fear surrounding immigrants do for the U.S. capitalist economy and its ruling class?

First, it keeps undocumented immigrants in that precarious state where they will not seek help or point out injustices, nor will they try to organize unions and demand higher pay or working conditions. It guarantees they will mostly toil for less-than-minimum wages and suffer in silence. Most Americans are not even aware that since NAFTA was enacted, at least 3,000 Mexicans have died trying to cross the border. Every wall that goes up on the border drives the immigrants into more remote deserts to reach their destination, increasing the likelihood of injury and death, but precious few U.S. citizens are willing to stick their necks out to help prevent such unnecessary deaths.

Second, the xenophobia encouraged by measures like SB1070 is useful for the ruling class because it drives a racial wedge into the American working class. Instead of uniting to fight for better jobs, affordable education, health care, housing, an end to environmental nightmare and endless wars, the anger of the common people is directed at the scapegoat of the immigrant. Steinbeck illustrates this phenomenon when “a crowd of men… armed with pick handles and shotguns,” confront the Joads after they flee the Hooverville. Interrogating and threatening the Joad family, these self-styled vigilantes act just as the “Minutemen” who today rove the deserts of Arizona, looking for “illegals.”

Though these people’s anger and fear over the economy and lack of democracy in the U.S. is warranted, they are failing to confront the actual thieves and criminals who have plunged the world into a new Great Depression. Because by identifying “foreigners” and people with brown skin and different accents as the reason why wages are low and jobs are lost, corporations and politicians are able to deflect attention away from the real source of economic hardship: themselves.

Conclusion

The crisis in the Southwest in the 1930s is unfortunately similar to the situation today. Hundreds of thousands of poor migrants, their land enclosed and with nowhere to go, facing long trips through the heat of the desert and the ice of xenophobia, are nevertheless persisting to do what they need to do to feed their families.

There is a tidal wave coming north now, which resembles one that 3 generations ago came west, but like that one there will be no stopping it by putting up walls and threatening people with violence or deportation. Desperate people will always do what they need to do to survive.

The only way to stem the flow is to repair the dam that has burst, through poverty and enclosure. Latinos need decent livelihoods in Latin America before they will stop coming here, “scurrying to find work to do.” Repealing NAFTA and ending the massive corn subsidies for U.S. agribusiness would be two huge steps in the right direction. Rather than making the United States into a nasty place that no one will want to come to, why not focus on helping Mexico, Latin America and the world as a whole, to be suitable places to live, work and raise a family?

The Grapes of Wrath, though it details the hardships of the migrant workers at great length, won the Pulitzer prize and captured the hearts of the nation because it is ultimately a hopeful book that inspires us to act for positive change. John Steinbeck, flexing his radical muscles, argues in the book that by targeting the weak and poor with desperate measures such as those currently being enacted in Arizona, capitalism is only putting off its inevitable demise. “The great owners ignored the cries of history.” “[Especially,] the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

He explains:

Many people today have heard the cries of history and are taking a stand. The website Alto Arizona is coordinating a national day of action on Saturday, May 29 to repeal SB1070, which they call “a law that creates 21st century apartheid in the United States.” They invite us to “join the right side of history” by standing up for immigrants’ rights and against racial profiling.

A wonderful note that’s currently circulating on Facebook from the Catalyst Project shows us ten ways, large and small, to meet this challenge:

[Thanks to Beau Bibeau for sharing.]

by Kristin Campbell

Reposted from Organizing Upgrade, March 1, 2010

Organizing Upgrade is honored to offer a preview of this insightful reflection on organizing – Engaging the Crisis: Organizing Against Budget Cuts and Building Community Power in Philadelphia – which will appear in Left Turn magazine #36 (April/May 2010).  You can subscribe to Left Turn online at www.leftturn.org or become a monthly sustainer at www.leftturn.org/donate.

On November 6, 2008, just days after Philadelphians poured onto the streets to celebrate the Phillies winning the World Series championship and Barack Obama the US presidency, Mayor Michael Nutter announced a drastic plan to deal with the cities $108 million budget gap. Severe budget cuts were announced, including the closure of 11 public libraries, 62 public swimming pools, 3 public ice skating rinks, and several fire engines. Nutter also stated that 220 city workers would be laid off and that 600 unfilled positions would be eliminated entirely, amounting to the loss of nearly 1,000 precious city jobs. In classic neo-liberal style, the public sector was to sacrifice, while taxpayer money would bail out the private banking institutions.

City in crisis

Well before the economic crises of 2008, a decades-long process of economic restructuring and deindustrialization had left Philadelphia, with a population just over 1.4 million, an incredibly under-resourced city. Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate out of the ten largest cities in the US, an eleven percent unemployment rate and a high-school dropout rate that hovers dangerously around 50 percent.

The proposed budget cuts sparked waves of popular outrage especially concerning the closure of the libraries, many of which are located in low-income communities of color and serve as bedrock institutions for many basic resources. Eleanor Childs, a principal of a school that heavily relies on West Philadelphia’s Durham library, and later a member of the Coalition to Save the Libraries, recalls “a groundswell of concern about the closing of the libraries… people rose up. We had our pitchforks. We were ready to fight to keep our libraries open.”

Nutter’s administration set up eight townhall meetings across Philadelphia, designed to calm the citywide uproar. Thousands of people filled the townhall meetings poised to question how such drastic decisions were made without any public input. Under the banner “Tight Times, Tough Choices,” Mayor Nutter and senior city officials attempted to explain the necessity of such deep service cuts. They explained that the impact of the economic crisis on the city had only become apparent in recent weeks, and because the city could not raise significant revenue to offset its financial loses in the timeframe that was needed, rapid cuts were mandatory and effective January 1, 2009.

Community response

In the following days and weeks, Philadelphians quickly mobilized against the decision that their public services and city workers pay for the fallout of a economic system that had already left so many of them struggling. Neighborhood leaders organized impromptu rallies at the eleven branch libraries. Along with organizing people to turn out at the Mayor’s townhall meetings, these rallies gained media attention on both the nightly news and in the major newspapers, demonstrating widespread opposition to the budget cuts. Sherrie Cohen, member of the Coalition to Save the Libraries and long-time resident of the Ogontz neighborhood of North Philly remembers her neighbors coming together to say, “We are not going to let this library close. It’s not gonna happen. We fought for 36 years for a library in our neighborhood.”

"We Love Our Library" Day, Feb. 14 2009

In mid-December 2008, Sherrie Cohen and attorney Irv Ackelsberg, along with plaintiffs from the eleven branches and three City Council members, filed suit against the City citing a 1988 ordinance that says that no city-owned facility may close, be abandoned, or go into disuse without City Council approval. After two days of court hearings packed with library supporters and just hours before the mandated closure, Judge Idee Fox ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and council members by granting an injunction against the closures. In her ruling Judge Fox said, “The decision to close these eleven library branches is more than a response to a financial crisis; it changes the very foundation of our City.”  Commenting on the major victory, Sheila Washington, who lives just a few doors down from the Haddington branch library in West Philadelphia recalls: “I’ve never been so proud in my life to sit in that courtroom and see justice get served. The Coalition out-maneuvered the Mayor and I don’t think he’s gotten over it yet!”

Grassroots leadership

Initially a non-profit advocacy organization, the Friends of the Free Library (FFL)—itself largely funded by the city—coordinated the opposition to the mayor and positioned itself as the leader of the struggle by attempting to negotiate with the City. Without community input, FFL proceeded to put forth a series of low-level demands calling for “shared sacrifice” and a three day-a-week schedule for the entire library system. Having established itself as a mediating force, FFL’s centered its efforts around media attention and backroom negotiation, shying away from any community organizing or alternative legal and civil disobedience strategies.

Community leaders, rooted in the neighborhoods where libraries were about to close, decided they could not afford to settle with the FFL’s “shared sacrifice” strategy. People who organized the very first rallies to defend their neighborhood branches came together with a broader layer of organizers and activists who wanted to support the fight against the budget cuts and the Coalition to Save the Libraries (CSL) was formed.

The CSL quickly set up a working group structure, loosely based on a spokes-council model that allowed for a multiplicity of work to happen simultaneously. We divided into working groups representing our tactical focuses; media, action, outreach, and influencing decision-makers.  Each working group included a mix of people, some experienced in a particular area and others who were coming to the work for the first time. Members taught each other how to draft media talking points and phone scripts for outreach calls, prep meeting agendas and media spokespeople and write press releases for actions at City Hall. With the intention of structuring the leadership of those most affected by the budget cuts at the center of the organization, CSL formed a coordinating committee where multi-racial and cross-neighborhood membership was prioritized.  Weekly meetings featured rotating co-facilitators, usually paired across difference as way to underline the importance and power in multiracial and intergenerational organizing in Philadelphia.

The CSL was born just weeks before the libraries were mandated to close, which left us with a very short timeline and very high stakes. Organizing in the midst of the economic crisis was fast-paced, anxiety-ridden and offered little time to think about long-term vision and strategy. Nonetheless, CSL’s campaign to keep the libraries open and fully functional consistently attempted to combine short-term demands with a long-term vision for educational and economic justice. The Coalition argued that defending community access to public educational resources—computers, books, librarians—becomes even more important in times of economic crisis, especially in light of how many low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia have been systematically stripped of these resources over the last few decades.

CSL developed a collective analysis that saw libraries as much more than mere buildings with books, but rather, as powerful organizing bases across the city. As Sherrie Cohen put it: “Libraries are one of the few government sponsored institutions left in our communities. They are a beacon of light in our communities, a sanctuary, a community center, a hub of information and resources.” Closing the 11 libraries would be an attack on poor and working people throughout our City, because as Carolyn Morgan, Coalition leader and Southwest Philly resident put it unequivocally, “Taking away these materials would be a form of murder because the mind is not being fed. Just as the physical body needs to be fed in order to be healthy, the mind needs to be fed in order to grow in wisdom and knowledge.”

While the Mayor was proposing stark neoliberal solutions—including a proposal to sell the eleven library buildings and turn them into privately managed “knowledge centers”—we were demanding that public services be considered common, neighborhood-owned institutions. A common refrain of the CSL has been, “You can’t close these libraries because they are not yours to take!” Looking for more action oriented strategies to involve people outraged by the Mayors proposal, the CSL began to create a community budgeting process for Philadelphia by establishing a ‘People’s Court’—a series of actions outside of City Hall coinciding with the opening day of legal hearings, which stated that it was ‘illegal’ to close down the 11 libraries.

Strategic alliances

Building a strong cross-neighborhood alliance to fight the library cuts became central to CSL’s strategy and was successful for a few reasons. Connecting structurally segregated neighborhoods in Philadelphia meant that we were inevitably building a multi-racial, cross-class, intergenerational organization, which we learned holds tremendous power and potential. Gregory Benjamin, Coalition leader and Southwest Philly block captain remarked, “The citywide coalition was dynamite. It gave us an opportunity to connect with other people, communities and  ethnic groups that really had the same concerns that we had.”

By bringing different people from different neighborhoods together the Coalition built a very real feeling of collective power. Sheila Washington recalls: “I was invited to a Coalition meeting and it was wonderful because I was so stressed out. They were removing books and packing up our library. They were moving the after-school program. And I thought, oh my God, what is this neighborhood going to do?” Organizing to defend the libraries helped us cope with the incredibly difficult economic times, together. The budget cuts were coming down in multiple neighborhoods across the city, mostly low-income neighborhoods, and by building alliances among people who were experiencing the affects of these budget cuts our organization replaced feelings of isolation and shock with feelings of strength and a belief that together we could win.

People's Court action - Jan. 13, 2009

Strategic alliances were built not only across neighborhoods but also across generations. In Philadelphia, a majority of elementary schools rely heavily on their closest public library. With this in mind, a group of third graders led one of our most creative actions—a two-mile book trek from their school to the library. Through the action, young people demonstrated the extremely negative effects of the proposed closings simply by the distance they walked.  Along with strengthening the popular struggle to save the libraries, youth-led actions like these served to build power among the students themselves. Katrina Clark, the students’ teacher, says that whenever they talk about the civil rights movement or other human rights issues the students refer back to the book trek and say, “Like what we did with the libraries?” She added,  “They now have prior knowledge about what it means to fight for their rights…Honestly, that’s what education is about. It’s about empowering students to change the world and giving them the tools they need to do it.”

Long haul

What ultimately stopped the eleven libraries from closing, was the combination of CSL’s short term demands along with its long term vision and popular organizing strategy targeting multiple pressure points. The Coalition accurately assessed the moment and turned widespread anger around the budget cuts into an organized power base; we helped file a lawsuit against the City and organized turnout at legal hearings; and we seriously prepared for a library takeover in the event that the lawsuit failed. Together, the CSL implemented a successful model of crisis-response organizing, by channeling popular outrage into a strong, unified cross-neighborhood force that framed the debate in terms of economic and racial inequity.

Even after winning the court injunction, Philadelphia is still struggling with constant staffing shortages and reduced operation hours due to an $8 million budget cut to the library system. As the library campaign drew to a close, the CSL redirected its efforts to protesting pool closings, attempting to grow and develop into a multi-issue organization.  It was a logical extension of our initial work, as the pool closings affected the same constituencies that were hit hardest by the library closings, poor and working people of Philadelphia.

Because we see this as a long-term struggle, we’ve been working to transition our organization from a crisis-response, single-issue coalition into a multi-issue, long-term grassroots institution in Philadelphia. In order to build for the long haul as an organization, we have continued to tie the budget cuts together and show how they are interconnected, train and develop our leaders, and maintain our cross-neighborhood network. This article is part of our effort to document and reflect on our work as we gear up for the US Social Forum in Detroit this summer.

Our city is in dire need of multi-issue grassroots organizations that are led by poor and working people fighting for social and economic justice and oriented towards organizing to build power in our communities.

Our victory and the relationships we’ve built in the process have given us the inspiration to continue to struggle. Betty Beaufort, Coalition leader and a resident of the Point Breeze neighborhood of South Philadelphia offers powerful advice – “Fight for what you want cause if you don’t fight, you not gonna get nothing. Cause life is a struggle and you wanna turn a struggle into a movement. Don’t get discouraged, cause some days you might say to heck with it, but we need to fight on. Being involved in the Coalition has reminded me of my own strength. We have to be reminded of our own strength because there’s always gonna be something we got to fight for and I’m ready for the fight!”

Kristin Campbell wrote this piece in collaboration with Andalusia Knoll and with additional help from Alia Trindle and Sarah Small. inspired by Eleanor Childs, Sherrie Cohen, Sheila Washington, Carolyn Morgan, Katrina Clark, Gregory Benjamin and Betty Beaufort.

Kristin Campbell grew up in Philadelphia and is a member of the Coalition to Save the Libraries. She has been involved with student, anti-war, global justice, and community organizing efforts over the years. For more information on the CSL please see their blog at: http://coalitiontosavethelibraries.blogspot.com

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.

[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.

Spokane Considers Community Bill of Rights

by Mari Margil, November 4, 2009

Yes! Magazine

Of all the candidates, bills, and proposals on ballots around the country yesterday, one of the most exciting is a proposition that didn’t pass.

In Spokane, Washington, despite intense opposition from business interests, a coalition of residents succeeded in bringing an innovative “Community Bill of Rights” to the ballot. Proposition 4 would have amended the city’s Home Rule Charter (akin to a local constitution) to recognize nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods.

Communities Take Power - Barnstead, New Hampshire was the first town in the nation to ban corporate water mining.

A coalition of the city’s residents drafted the amendments after finding that they didn’t have the legal authority to make decisions about their own neighborhoods; the amendments were debated and fine-tuned in town hall meetings.

Although the proposition failed to pass, it garnered approximately 25 percent of the vote—despite the fact that opponents of the proposal (developers, the local Chamber of Commerce, and the Spokane Homebuilders) outspent supporters by more than four to one. In particular, they targeted the Sixth Amendment, which would have given residents the ability, for the very first time, to make legally binding, enforceable decisions about what development would be appropriate for their own neighborhood. If a developer sought to build a big-box store, for example, it would need to conform to the neighborhood’s plans.

Nor is development the only issue in which resident would have gained a voice.  The drafters and supporters of Proposition 4 sought to build a “healthy, sustainable, and democratic Spokane” by expanding and creating rights for neighborhoods, residents, workers, and the natural environment.

Legal Rights for Communities

Patty Norton, a longtime neighborhood advocate who lives in the Peaceful Valley neighborhood of Spokane, and her neighbors spent years fighting a proposed condominium development that would loom 200 feet high, casting a literal shadow over Peaceful Valley’s historic homes.

Proposition 4 would ensure that “decisions about our neighborhoods are made by the people living there, not big developers,” Patty said.

For years, she and her neighbors have participated in protests, spoke at City Council hearings, attended meetings, and educated their neighbors. But, as with other neighborhoods in Spokane who’ve come together to fight off Wal-Mart stores and other unwanted developments, the residents of Peaceful Valley found that they didn’t seem to have the legal authority to make a decision about something that would have a significant impact on their neighborhood.

Then, in 2007, Patty and several of her neighbors went to a Democracy School in Spokane. Democracy Schools—run by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund—are weekend workshops in which communities examine why the structure of law often gives corporations more power to make decisions than the communities in which they seek to do business. Participants look at why our system of government seems to hamper our efforts to protect the places where we live, rather than to help us protect them.

Because the U.S. Constitution legalized slavery, abolitionists had to change existing law in order to end it.  Democracy School students study this and other examples of people’s movements fighting unjust laws, recognizing that sometimes legal changes are the only way to protect their communities and the environment.

Patty and other Spokane graduates of Democracy School began talking with one another about how they might address their concerns about the future of their neighborhoods, the health of the local economy, the heavily polluted Spokane River, and a host of other issues.

A Community Bill of Rights

In the spring of 2008, grassroots organizations, labor unions, neighborhood councils, and other groups across the city began meeting together as part of a coalition they called Envision Spokane. Over the spring and summer, they drafted a series of ideas for addressing the needs of residents, workers, neighborhoods, and the environment. These ideas formed a draft “Community Bill of Rights” for the city.

During the winter, Envision Spokane held a series of 12 Town Halls across the city to engage the community in a conversation about the proposed Bill of Rights.

Taking the community’s feedback, the board of Envision Spokane revised the Bill of Rights and, in March of 2009, began to collect signatures. Despite opposition from the Spokane City Council and a concerted effort by business interests to block the Bill of Rights from reaching the ballot, Envision Spokane collected over 5,000 signatures from voters, successfully qualifying the Community Bill of Rights for the November ballot.

The Community Bill of Rights proposed nine amendments, written to address some very real needs in Spokane, to the city’s Home Rule Charter. By recognizing broad rights instead of proposing specific legislation, the amendments were written to change the fundamental structure of Spokane’s legal system so that it would prioritize the protection of the local environment, economy, neighborhoods and residents.

• First. Residents have the right to a locally-based economy. Recognizes the rights of residents to protect their local economy by denying permits to big-box and chain stores.
• Second. Residents have the right to affordable preventive health care. Creates a fee-for-service program for the thousands of Spokane residents who lack health insurance and currently rely on the emergency room for health care.
• Third. Residents have the right to affordable housing. In response to the loss of thousands of units of affordable housing in Spokane over the past few years, the city would have been obliged, through incentives or other measures, to ensure that an adequate supply of affordable housing is available for those most in need.
• Fourth. Residents have the right to affordable and renewable energy. Requires the city and local utilities to make renewable energy accessible to residents.
• Fifth. The natural environment has the right to exist and flourish. Under current law, nature has no legal standing—to prove environmental damage, a person has to prove that he or she has been harmed. The Fifth Amendment would have protected the Spokane River, one of the most polluted in the nation following years of mining and toxic dumping, would have been protected under the Bill of Rights.
• Sixth. Residents have the right to determine the future of their neighborhoods. Patty Norton and her neighbors—and other residents of Spokane—would have been able to enforce their decisions about what’s best for them. (The condominium complex hasn’t been built yet, but it is approved. The Sixth Amendment would have done what years of protesting haven’t been able to: allow the residents to say, “No.”)
• Seventh. Workers have the right to be paid the prevailing wage and to work as apprentices on certain construction projects. As skilled labor leaves Spokane, the Bill of Rights would have protected workers’ right to competitive wages and created apprenticeship opportunities so that young people could learn a trade and stay in the city.
• Eighth. Workers have the right to employer neutrality when unionizing, and the right to constitutional protections within the workplace. Workers would have been free from interference by employers when seeking to form a labor union, as well as from having to attend “captive audience” meetings.
• Ninth. Residents, workers, neighborhoods, neighborhood councils, and the city of Spokane shall have the right to enforce the Community Bill of Rights. For the first time, residents would have the legal authority to enforce their own decisions.

While Spokane is the largest city to attempt these legal changes, and the first whose adoption would have meant a change to a city constitution, other communities have already succeeded in securing similar rights. Towns in Maine, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Virginia have passed ordinances recognizing the rights of nature, prohibiting corporate mining and water extraction, and stripping corporations of constitutional protections and the right to contribute to political campaigns.

The board of directors of Envision Spokane recognizes that fundamental change doesn’t come easily or quickly, and will be meeting in the next few weeks to discuss how to continue the work that they’ve started. Other communities are now reaching out to learn from Spokane about how they might do something similar.

Interested? Stand Up to Corporate Power :: YES! Magazine’s special issue on the citizens’ movements that are proving we can take on corporate power.

On Tuesday, the NY Comptroller’s Office released a report showing that “broker-dealer operations of New York Stock Exchange member firms earned a record $35.7 billion in the first half of 2009.” Through September, $22.5 billion in profits were reported from the four largest firms alone —Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase. These are the same banks who got bailed out by the Federal Government last year – which means that taxpayers like you and I paid for these creeps’ bonuses.

Not coincidentally, these obscene profits were recorded at the same moment that the Department of Agriculture released a report showing that “nearly 50 million people — including almost one child in four — struggled last year to get enough to eat” (as written in the Washington Post on Monday). While the economy has been in the tank and unemployment has surpassed 10% officially, food prices have been skyrocketing, and so millions more Americans are being forced to go without needed nutrition.

Why isn’t it a coincidence? Because the crooks who sent global markets into a freefall last September, causing millions to lose their homes and jobs, have been rewarded for their bad behavior with preferential treatment from Uncle Sam. These Wall St. piggies have been gorging themselves on trillions of U.S. Federally approved dough, while regular folks struggle to pay the rent or put food on the table – without so much as a measly health care reform bill to give hope to their deteriorating condition. Now 1 out of every 4 of our kids are going hungry while the government subsidizes the very stock market slimeballs responsible for creating the trouble to begin with.

“Where’s OUR bailout?” struggling folks are wondering, as they see food prices climb and jobs shipped overseas by the day. 50 million folks are wondering where their next meal is gonna come from… and it’s time to entertain innovative, cost-effective proposals, even if they may seem exotic.

Well it turns out there’s one way to solve this problem without tapping the Treasury for so much as a penny!

It would bring down the cost of high-protein, high-quality food, providing much-needed nutrition to the hungry.

It could create high-paid and unionized manufacturing jobs, right here in the U.S. of A!

It would be environmentally friendly, dolphin-safe, and carbon-neutral (although there may be some associated methane emissions after the plan is implemented).

Best of all, this solution would remove the parasitic, bonus-hungry, pyramid-scheming, derivative-trading, regulation-gutting, President-advising, economy-wrecking, bailout mongers from the picture, allowing the American people to determine our economic future democratically!

And it’s so straightforward even Timothy Geithner could understand it:

Eat the Rich!

[alex,  Nov. 19]

below is the transcript from Democracy Now!’s interview of Robert Scheer on these 2 unprecedented reports and what they mean for the economy:

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the latest on the economy. A pair of new government reports released this week paint a startling picture of where the country is, more than a year after the economic meltdown. On Tuesday, the New York Comptroller’s Office said Wall Street profits are set to exceed the record set three years ago. The four largest firms—Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase—took in $22.5 billion in profits through September. The top six banks set aside $112 billion for salaries and bonuses over the same period. In a recent interview, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, defended the bank’s massive profits, saying Goldman is, quote, “doing God’s work.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture has revealed that far more people are going hungry in the United States than previously thought. The Department estimates 50 million Americans, including a quarter of all children, struggled to get enough to eat last year. The number of children who live in households in which food at times was scarce last year stands at 17 million, an increase of four million children in just a year.

Our next guest has been closely following the impact and causes of the economic meltdown. Robert Scheer, editor at Truthdig.com, author of many books, including The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. His latest column is called “Where Is the Community Organizer We Elected?” He joins me here in Burbank, California.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Robert Scheer. OK, just talk about these figures, from hunger to Goldman Sachs.

ROBERT SCHEER: Well, first of all, I mean, the whole thing about the profit of Wall Street that makes it particularly obscene is that we gave them that money. Your previous guest talked about how China is carrying $800 billion of our debt. We’re running up a $1.4 trillion deficit. And what happened was, we threw a lot of money at Wall Street. In particular, in relation to Goldman, we had this buyout of AIG, $180 billion. We’ve guaranteed the toxic assets of these enterprises. And that money, in a really truly shameful way, was passed on directly to the very companies that you mentioned that are giving themselves profits. So there’s something—yes, I’ll use the word “obscene.”

It’s also interesting that he should say he’s “doing God’s work,” Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs. And my goodness, if Scripture is clear on anything, it’s condemnation of those who take advantage of the poor. You know, after all, Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple. Scripture is devastating in its condemnation of usury, the immorality of usury. And yet, in your promo, you mentioned Chris Dodd is trying to get a bill passed that would cap interest rates. You know, where is the Christian right? Where are the Christians? Where are the Jews, for that matter? Or the Muslims? At least the Muslims, in their religious practice, don’t believe in interest as a principle, but the idea that we’re jacking up credit cards to 30, 35—this is loan sharking. And we can’t even get a bill passed through Congress that would cap interest payments.

The other thing is, their rationalization is they’re somehow saving the economy. It’s the old blackmail thing. They ruined the economy; they got the legislation, the radical deregulation they wanted, that permitted them to become too big to fail—Citigroup and these companies; and then they turn around and say, “If you don’t throw all this money at us, the economy is going to go into the Great Depression.” But they haven’t solved the main problems. Mortgage foreclosures this month are higher than they’ve been in ten months. We have the commercial housing market exploding, you know, apartment building rentals exploding, going into mortgages. And so, you know, they are not dealing with the fundamentals. What has happened is an incredibly expensive band-aid was put on this. And these people don’t even have—they’re not even embarrassed.

And the reason I wrote that column is they’ve also captured the President. And, you know, I voted for this president. I even contributed money that I didn’t have to his campaign. You know, I still feel great that he’s the President. You know, I’m biased. I like the guy, you know. I like everything about him.

AMY GOODMAN: Yet you ask, where’s the community-organizer-in-chief?

ROBERT SCHEER: I am appalled. This is not a minor criticism. I think the guy is betraying—betraying—his own presidency, the promise of his presidency, because he has taken these thieves—and I use the word advisedly. You know, I think people like Lawrence Summers, who pay themselves—you know, maybe he’s not legally a thief, but, you know, a guy who pays himself, or gets paid from hedge funds and other people, $15 million in ’08, while he’s advising Obama about the economy. And he’s the guy who, more than anyone else, when he was Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, pushed through the radical deregulation that allowed these businesses to get in all this trouble and refused to regulate derivatives and all that sort of thing. And then these guys are made the head of the—what? They’re going to save us now?

And so, you have the one I attack, particularly, Neal Wolin, who was the general counsel of Hartford, but before that he’d been the general counsel to the Treasury Department, he’s now Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, and he’s the guy that pushed through the reversal of Glass-Steagall. He wrote the actual words in, you know, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. And now he’s our deputy. And he condemns—the point of the column was that there’s actually a chance to do something now. Chris Dodd has finally seen the light. He is the most important—

AMY GOODMAN: While he is running for reelection.

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah, running for election.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader could run against him possibly.

ROBERT SCHEER: Right, and he’s also under pressure, because he did get insurance money and all that sort of thing. But the fact is, he’s got a bill that makes sense, which is, you know, the Fed has been at the center of the problem. Ron Paul is right. The Libertarians are right. You know, the Fed is out of control. It has a higher degree of secrecy than the CIA. We don’t know what they’re doing with our money. There is no accountability there. Basically it’s run by the banks themselves on the regional level. They’re the ones that are listened to. And what’s happened is that Chris Dodd said, no, you’ve got to take power away from the Fed, and you have to put a new agency that will control these “too big to fail” agencies. And the administration is opposed to it. I can’t—I mean, I know why they’re opposed to it.

AMY GOODMAN: The administration is opposed to it, and the Republican senators are opposed to it.

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah, exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: Why are they opposed to it?

ROBERT SCHEER: Because they think—they like business as usual. I mean, they are for Wall Street going its own way. They haven’t learned the lesson that capitalism uncontrolled is capitalism destroyed.

You know, I really found your previous interview on the China thing fascinating. And why is China doing well? You know, this is a startling lesson here, because we were always told unbridled capitalism is the best capitalism. Well, the Chinese have a marriage, like western Europe, but even more so, of government and the free market. It’s not unbridled capitalism. And they’ve been able to come out of this recession that we created. It’s an incredible object lesson here. These commies over there were able to take the capitalist energy and free market model and control it to a considerable degree, and they have an eight, ten percent growth rate now at a time when we’re floundering.

AMY GOODMAN: OK, so you have Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, saying they’re “doing God’s work.”

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And then a week later, they issue this apology, apologizing for past mistakes that led to the financial crisis and announcing a plan to work with Warren Buffett to help 10,000 small businesses recover from this recession and spend $100 million a year for five years. Now, the Financial Times did point out the $100 million annual cost is the equivalent of one good trading day, but explain what’s going on here.

ROBERT SCHEER: Well, first of all, Buffett is the biggest holder in Goldman Sachs, and Buffett is a man of social conscience. I think he’s a very decent, enlightened capitalist of the kind you would hope exists, a long-term view, doesn’t want to destroy the system. And Buffett has said a number of sensible things over the years. And I think he put pressure on them. He said, “Look, you guys are out to lunch here. You don’t understand how much the people hate you at this point.” You know, and Buffett is out there in real America, you know, and he called them on it. But it’s chump change, what they’re talking about. It’s a program to help small businesses.

I just want to say something emotionally, since you brought up the poverty. I happened to be in Riverside, California last week, and this is a place where the American Dream died at this point. These are people who work hard. You know, they clean our buildings. They work in factories. They got conned into buying homes they couldn’t afford by people who were then going to package them and sell them somewhere. And you go out there now—I talked to a young man, he bought a house for $350,000, scraped up everything. He works like a dog. His parents have been cleaning buildings for forty years. That house is now worth $120,000. He lost not only—he lost everything his family had ever saved. OK? So we’re talking about human tragedy. These people—he went to college, he went to Riverside, UC Riverside, did everything he was supposed to do, works, you know, twelve-hour days. As I say, his family has always worked hard, paid their taxes, scraped up this money. They buy this house and to have the American Dream. And every fourth house—they’re making their payments, but, you know, house next door, house over there goes back.

Why didn’t we have a freeze on foreclosures? The smartest thing to do. Jon Stewart recommended it on The Daily Show. He’s the only person. I mean, where are these pundits, you know? And they would laugh. His guests on The Daily Show would laugh at him when he brought it up. But, you know, a freeze on foreclosures, we still need it. A moratorium on foreclosures for two years. They’re not doing it. What they’re doing is throwing more and more money at Wall Street.

And I go back to Obama and the point of my column: he has betrayed his own—what is it? It wasn’t a revolution, but his own promise. You know, he gave a speech at Cooper Union in ‘08, in March at Cooper Union. This was two months after Robert Rubin, the mentor of all of these people, said there’s no problem, we don’t have any flap in the economy, it’s just a little mild blip. And Obama gave a speech that was right on. You could give that speech now, and it would be on target. He blamed Wall Street. He blamed radical deregulation. And then, inexplicably, when he got the nomination, he turned to these very same people that had created the problem and said, “OK, now you get us out of it.”

And they’re not doing it. You know, maybe if they’d gotten religion, maybe if they’d learned their lessons, you know, maybe if they were a different breed—but they’re not. You know, and this Neal Wolin, he attacked Chris Dodd. You know, and they say, “Oh, you’re going to create nervousness for Wall Street.” That was the word they used: you’re going to make Wall Street nervous. I want to make Wall Street nervous. You know, the next time these guys figure out another way to fleece us, they should worry they’re going to get caught. Maybe they won’t do it.

AMY GOODMAN: What about this new government report that’s found Goldman Sachs could have suffered dramatic losses if the federal government hadn’t intervened to bail out AIG, American International Group, the report by the special inspector general for the government bailout program raising doubts about Goldman’s previous claims that it was hedged against potential AIG losses?

ROBERT SCHEER: Yes, well, first of all, this has been—

AMY GOODMAN: What does all that mean?

ROBERT SCHEER: This is the big lie from Goldman, is that, you know, we didn’t—look, look what happened. Lehman was Goldman’s competitor, was allowed to go belly up, OK? The Secretary of the Treasury was a former head of Goldman Sachs. I don’t want to get into conspiracy theories here, but Robert Rubin was a head of Goldman Sachs, OK? And Paulson was a head of Goldman Sachs. They decide not to—you know, and Rubin was involved in these discussions, Lawrence Summers, Paulson and so forth. Timothy Geithner, who is our Secretary of Treasury, was head of the New York Fed for five years while all this was going on. So they say, “Let Lehman go, you know, down the tubes,” which is great for Goldman Sachs, because now you have basically two investment houses that are getting all the business. “But on the other hand, we’ll put all this money into AIG,” which was backing these junkie derivatives, these mysterious packages, “and it will be a pass through. People won’t notice, because we’re giving it to AIG.” $180 billion of our taxpayer money, we taxpayers get nothing in return, AIG is still in the toilet, but Goldman got its money. You know, it got upwards of $20 billion, that they don’t have to pay back. They make a big thing about “We’re going to pay back some of the TARP funds” and everything. And by the way, they were allowed to become a bank. No hearings, no judicial proceedings and so forth. You know, the very thing Lehman was asking for—“Let us become a bank so we can get some of this TARP funds and everything”—that was granted to Goldman Sachs.

You know, Ron Paul, by the way, who has been trying to go after the Fed, and he has an accountability piece of legislation that the Democrats have gutted, and said, “Let’s have an audit of the Fed. Let’s find out what does the Federal Reserve do. What are the deals they made? Where did the money go?” We don’t have that. And the inspector general of the Treasury Department, the inspector general, you know, Elizabeth Warren, all of these people have pointed—from the Congressional Oversight Panel—all of these people point out, “We don’t have the facts. We don’t know where the trillions are going.” We know trillions have been committed. We know all of these huge pools—Bank of America’s $300 billion of toxic assets have been backed up. But there’s no accountability.

I have covered the CIA, I’ve covered national security, and I’ve covered banking. I did it for the LA Times in one way or another for thirty years, OK? It is more difficult to cover Wall Street, in terms of secrecy and classification and their protection, than it is to cover the CIA and the Pentagon. That much I’ll tell you. You know, you get greater claim on the truth covering the Pentagon, as I did in my last book, than I’m having in my current book called The Great American Stick-Up that Nation Books is publishing. And, you know, these people go, “No, it’s proprietary. It’s our business. It has nothing to do with you.” And that goes for the Fed, which is supposed to be a government agency.

And so, for Chris Dodd to say, “No, we have to take power away from the Fed. We have to create a new independent agency to supervise these too big to fail institutions to make sure that they don’t go belly up and we taxpayers pay for them again,” he’s absolutely right. And people watching this, if there’s one thing they should demand from the Obama administration, is get behind the Dodd bill on taking power from the Fed and creating a new publicly accountable agency. That’s absolutely critical. Without that, we’re not going to get out of this mess, and we’re not going to prevent a future one.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, you profile—you profile Brooksley Born in an article, “They Shot the Messenger.”

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What was his message?

ROBERT SCHEER: That was in Ms. Magazine, that my wife wrote, Narda Zacchino, and I worked with her. Brooksley Born is the great hero of the whole drama. Brooksley Born was the head of the Commodity Futures Board. And Brooksley Born, seventeen times, testified before Congress that this was a disaster in the making. And the old boys’ club that is now in power—Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, and it was Robert Rubin and Neal Wolin, who condemned Dodd the other day—they smashed Brooksley Born. They took away her power. They pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that said there can be no regulation of these over-the-counter derivatives. That’s why we’re in this big mess today. So Brooksley Born should have statues to her, you know? She is on the committee—Nancy Pelosi appointed her to the committee that’s supposed to be, you know, overseeing the rewrite of legislation. I’m hoping, you know, that she’ll be listened to. But basically it’s the old boy club that got us into this mess that is scamming us once again.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Scheer, I want to thank you for being with us, of Truthdig.com, author of many books, including, appropriately, The Pornography of Power.

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Peak Oil and Peak Capitalism

by Professor Richard Wolff, March 27, 2009.

Originally posted on The Oil Drum, and on Rick Wolff’s homepage.

Worker Productivity (blue) vs. Wages (pink), 1890-2009

The concept of peak oil may apply more generally than its friends and foes realize. As we descend into US capitalism’s second major crash in 75 years (with another dozen or so “business cycle downturns” in the interval between crashes), some signs suggest we are at peak capitalism too. Private capitalism (when productive assets are owned by private individuals and groups and when markets rather than state planning dominate the distribution of resources and products) has repeatedly demonstrated a tendency to flare out into overproduction and/or asset inflation bubbles that burst with horrific social consequences. Endless reforms, restructurings, and regulations were all justified in the name not only of extricating us from a crisis but also finally preventing future crises (as Obama repeated this week). They all failed to do that.

The tendency to crisis seems unstoppable, an inherent quality of capitalism. At best, flare outs were caught before they wreaked major havoc, although usually that only postponed and aggravated that havoc. One recent case in point: the stock market crash of early 2000 was limited in its damaging social consequences (recession, etc.) by an historically unprecedented reduction of interest rates and money supply expansion by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. The resulting real estate bubble temporarily offset the effects of the stock market’s bubble bursting, but when real estate crashed a few years later, what had been deferred hit catastrophically.

Repeated failure to stop its inherent crisis tendency is beginning to tell on the system. The question increasingly insinuates itself even into discourses with a long history of denying its pertinence: has capitalism, qua system, outlived its usefulness?

Repeated state interventions to rescue private capitalism from its self-destructive crises or from the political movements of its victims yielded longer or shorter periods of state capitalism (when productive assets are owned or significantly controlled or regulated by state officials and when state planning dominates markets as mechanisms of resource and product distribution). Yet state capitalisms have not solved the system’s crisis tendencies either. That is why they have repeatedly given way to oscillations back to private capitalism (e.g. the Reagan “revolution” in the US, the end of the USSR, etc.)

Moreover, the history of FDR’s efforts to counteract the Great Depression teaches fundamental lessons about capitalism as a system that cannot forever be deferred. Since the New Deal reforms then all stopped short of transforming the structure of corporations, they left in place the corporate boards of directors and shareholders who had both the incentives and resources to evade, undermine and abolish those reforms. Evasion was their focus until the 1970s, and abolition since. Capitalism systematically organizes its key institutions of production – the corporations – such that their boards of directors, in properly performing their assigned tasks, produce crises, then undermine anti-crisis reforms, and thereby reproduce those crises

Hence, attention is slowly shifting to question the one aspect of capitalism that was never effectively challenged, let alone changed, across the last century and more: the internal organization of corporations. Their decisions about what, where, and how to produce and how to utilize profits are all made not by the mass of workers (nor by the communities they impact) but rather by a board of directors. Composed typically of 15-20 individuals, corporate boards are tiny elites responsible to the only slightly larger elites comprising corporations’ major shareholders. Each corporate board is charged by its major shareholders with maximizing profit, market share, growth, or share price. The mass of workers has to live with the results of board decisions over which they exercise next to no control. This is a position they share with the communities surrounding and dependent on those same corporations.

This capitalist organization of the corporation consistently generates investment, production, financial, marketing, and employment decisions that produce systemic instability – economic crises. Much as this bipolar system brought us to peak oil by its expansions, so its contractions have now brought us to peak capitalism. This system’s profoundly undemocratic organization of production demands radical transformation.

Suppose, as one such transformation, that workers undertook to function as their own board of directors. All weekly job descriptions would henceforth specify four days of particular production tasks and one day participating in collective decisions about what, how and where to produce and what to do with profits. Having required political autocracy to give way to democratic mechanisms, workers would then have achieved the same in relation to the economic autocracy that structures capitalist corporations. The economy and society would then evolve very differently from the capitalist pattern. If we are to redesign our interactions with nature taking account of peak oil, why not redesign our enterprise structures to take account of the history of failed efforts to contain capitalism’s crisis-producing dysfunction.

Might we consider a mutually beneficial alliance between critics of abusing our energy resources and critics of abusing our productive capabilities? How about an alliance focused on a radical, democratic, and therefore anti-capitalist reorganization of production? The point would be to make citizens and workers – those who must live with the results of what enterprises do – conjoint decision-makers focused on meeting collective needs, both productive and environmental.

Friday Mar 27, 2009
Rick Wolff

Anti-Capitalism Goes Mainstream
Michael Moore’s New Film Names the System and Presents a Radical Democratic Critique
Alex Knight, October 16, 2009

Capitalism: A Love Story, which opened in 962 theaters earlier this month, is Michael Moore’s most ambitious work yet – taking aim at the root cause behind the injustices he’s exposed in his other films over the last 20 years. This time capitalism itself is the culprit to be maligned in Moore’s trademark docu-tragi-comic style. And by using the platform of a major motion picture to make a direct assault at the root of the problem, Moore has created space in the political mainstream for a radical conversation (radical meaning “going to the root”).

It’s a conversation that is desperately needed as the economic crisis continues to devastate low- and middle-income Americans in spite of President Obama’s and Congress’ efforts to stop the bleeding by throwing trillions of dollars at the banks. Yesterday, Democracy Now! reported that while the Dow Jones topped 10,000 for the first time in a year, foreclosures have reached a record level of 940,000 in the third quarter. But with this film airing in major chain cinemas across the nation, the normally taboo topics of how wealth is divided, who owns Congress, and how vital economic decisions are made are now open for discussion in a way they haven’t been in the U.S. for decades.

In Capitalism, Michael Moore features the reality of the economic crisis for America’s usually-invisible poor and working class. The movie begins with a family filming their eviction from their own home. In a terrifying scene, we watch from inside their living room window as 7 police cars roll up to throw the ill-fated family onto the street for failing to make their payments. Moore explained in an interview, “You see [a foreclosure] really for the first time from the point of view of the person being thrown out of the house.” This same bottom-up viewpoint carries the audience through the rest of the film, from the stories of kids in Pennsylvania sent to private detention centers for minor offenses by judges who received kickbacks from the prison company, to airline pilots whose wages are so low they have to go on food stamps.

By grounding the viewers in the human costs of out-of-control capitalism, Moore finds firm footing for launching his attacks on the Wall St. firms who he believes are responsible for this crisis. As the film points out, the richest 1% of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 95%, a sorry state of affairs that has grown steadily worse since the 1980s. Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan, and his two buddies Larry Summers and Robert Rubin are implicated in Capitalism as responsible parties behind the gutting of regulations and the deliverance of the federal government into the hands of the bankers.

Michael Moore’s conversations with congressmen and women about the $700 billion bank bailout passed last October best illustrate this transfer of sovereignty. The congresspeople are remarkably candid in their dismay at what was essentially a blank check to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup. Representative Baron Hill from Indiana recounts that the bailout bill was pushed through Congress in a similar manner as the Iraq War authorization, under threat of catastrophe and terror. Marcy Kaptur, congresswoman from Ohio, however, does one better. “This was almost like an intelligence operation,” she laments. And when Moore asks her if the bailout represents a “financial coup d’etat” by the bankers, she responds, “I could agree with that. Because the people here [pointing to the Capitol] really aren’t in charge. Wall Street is in charge.”

We also see Kaptur’s courageous honesty on the floor of the House, urging Americans to resist foreclosure by remaining in their homes. Detroit sheriff Warren Evans stands out as another hero in the film when he announces he will cease foreclosure evictions in his jurisdiction because of the damage to the community caused by making more houses vacant and more families homeless. Moore also features grassroots organization Take Back the Land, which has dramatically responded to the crisis by moving evicted families back into their homes in the Miami area.

Regular folks fighting back against a system that is depriving them of income, housing, health care and other basic needs is inspiring stuff to watch, and it’s not something we’re used to seeing up on the big screen. Capitalism displays this grassroots defiance surprisingly well by humanizing those on the bottom of the pyramid. One man whose farm is foreclosed angrily warns, “There’s got to be some kind of rebellion between people who’ve got nothing and people who’ve got it all.” His words are buttressed by a behind-the-scenes look at Republic Windows & Doors, where laid-off workers occupied their Chicago factory and refused to leave until receiving their promised severance pay. For Moore this represents the kind of direct action that everyday people must now begin to take to protect themselves from having to pay for the misdeeds of the wealthiest one percent.

This call to action is well taken. However, one piece lacking in the film’s analysis of capitalism is how the system of economic power interlocks with other structures of oppression, for example U.S. imperialism, patriarchy and white supremacy. Capitalism affects different people in extremely different ways, and while some fear losing their jobs, others fear imprisonment, rape, or even being hit by a drone attack. But Michael Moore seems to avoid a conversation about racism, sexism and homophobia in order to appeal to a mythical homogeneous American working class. And besides a brief comparison to Rome, the movie also shies away from discussing the U.S. role in the world and how a militaristic foreign policy serves the interests of corporate and financial elites – even though opposition to the wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq have never been greater.

Another weakness is how Moore handles Barack Obama with kid gloves. Even while his economic advisers are skewered in the film, President Obama’s role in the bank bailouts is downplayed, and he comes out looking like a champion of the people, or at least a potential champion. In this respect Michael Moore bestows honors like the Nobel Committee, not so much for what the president has done, but for the “hope” of what he might do.

So what does Michael Moore propose as an alternative to capitalism? Not socialism, but a kind of economic democracy – an opportunity for average folks to have a say in how their money is used, from the workplace on up to the government. Moore takes us inside co-ops in America where workers vote on decisions about finances democratically, and where salaries are equal and adequate for everyone in the company. In one factory, assembly line workers and the CEO each make about $60,000.

To reinforce his economic prescription, Moore even dug through archives to recover lost footage of FDR’s long-forgotten proposal for a “Second Bill of Rights,” which called for guaranteeing meaningful work and a living wage, decent housing, adequate medical care, and a good education for every American. It is striking how such common-sense ideas in our current political climate appear dangerously radical, even coming from the lips of a U.S. president. It seems the overriding purpose of Capitalism: A Love Story is to flip these expectations on their heads. For Michael Moore, guaranteeing basic economic security is as American as apple pie; what is radical is a system that would deny such prosperity to bolster the wealth of a tiny few.

If there is to be any solution to the economic crisis that doesn’t involve millions more people thrown out of their homes or dropped from their health care, it will have to involve a sharp break from a system that values private profits higher than meeting people’s basic needs. To this end, Michael Moore has done a great public service by making a film that is essentially an invitation for views outside the bounds of established mainstream discourse to propose what might be done about the economic quagmire we now find ourselves in. It is time for an American Left to come out of the wilderness and speak out with proposals for better ways of organizing our economy. I see no reason to be any less bold than President Roosevelt was 65 years ago.

Here is an excerpt from President Roosevelt’s 1944 “Second Bill of Rights” speech:

“We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.”

$12 Trillion has been given by the US government to large banks and corporations since last year

 
Great short news video on why the protesters were in Pittsburgh.

Exposes the police repression felt by the whole city last week, not just protesters.

The successes of mass protest.

IVAW held a press conference and action Friday morning about no longer sacrificing for war

Finally, see this audio report from Free Speech Radio News for more context.

A Call to Join the People’s Caravan

Pennsylvania, along with the rest of the world, is in crisis. Many people do not have access to decent housing, education, healthcare, jobs, healthy food, transportation and communication. While we are told that there are not resources to provide for our basic needs, bankers and the ultra-rich get trillions of dollars in bail-out funding, and our services are cut and costly wars are waged. From pools, libraries and health centers in urban areas closing, to factory lay-offs and families losing their farms, Pennsylvanians are feeling the impact of an economic and political system that has placed profit over people. We will not pay for their crisis!

In the coal mines, steel mills, textile mills, family farms and in the front seats of rigs, poor and working Pennsylvanians built this state. As one industry after another has collapsed in Pennsylvania, we’ve become poorer. Our economic crisis didn’t start in 2007. Now, all across the state, local governments and business people are spending our taxpayers’ money on developments that benefit developers and not the communities that paid for it. Meanwhile, our population has been in decline for generations because too many of our young people see no future in our state, and need to look for jobs elsewhere.

What is the G-20?

The G-20 summit is a gathering of financial ministers and heads of states of the 20 richest countries in the world. They are meeting in Pittsburgh, September 24-25 to advance their agenda: cutting essential social services; privatizing schools, healthcare, and social security, promoting “free-trade,” which cuts labor and environmental standards across the globe and places corporate profit above human needs. They are meeting to rebuild the world’s economies- in a way that keeps them on top.

Pittsburgh’s history of economic decline is why it was chosen to host the G-20. It will be promoted as an example of how to rebuild an economy. They’ve done this by bringing in companies that provide low wage jobs while reaping large profit and rebuilding the region with little thought to community benefit. This is unfortunately a familiar story to not just Pennsylvania, but much of the country.

The Caravan

We want to take this opportunity to focus on Pennsylvania, and strengthen our statewide networks. We want to meet up with people who are organizing locally for their dignity and a better Pennsylvania. Whether you are working for better wages, organizing for childcare, demanding healthcare, fighting pollution, struggling to keep your home and put food on the table or to keep your family’s farm; we all have an interest in making our voices heard and working together to advance an agenda for economic human rights.

We will be taking our own vehicles, carpooling and splitting the travel costs. The caravan will depart Philadelphia on Monday morning, September 21, stopping in Lancaster, traveling to York for the afternoon, and then spend the evening in Harrisburg. On Tuesday, September 22, we will rally at the state capitol, make a stop in Altoona, and arrive in Pittsburgh for the G-20 summit.

Join Us!

This is a perfect time to make connections between our struggles and communities so that we can break our isolation and work together. We want you to invite your neighbors, church, family, school, VFW chapter, and your community organizations to join us on this caravan. While we bring stories of our struggles in Philadelphia, we want to learn from people struggling throughout the rest of Pennsylvania.

Contact us if you are interested in organizing a local event along the route that can benefit your work, joining or supporting the caravan. We need RSVP’s, and we can tell you about costs, ride information and answer any other questions.

www.g20caravan.info
g20caravan@riseup.net
215-586-9198

Welcoming Change at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The guards are also holding a rally next Sunday to welcome Mr. Rub, check it out! Also see below for more information on the campaign from a recent article in Philadelphia Weekly. [alex]

Welcoming Party for Timothy Rub

2 pm, Sunday, September 6, 2009

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, front “Rocky” steps

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Join the Philadelphia Security Officers Union and Philly Jobs with Justice as they hold a — “welcoming party” — for incoming museum CEO, Timothy Rub.

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Security Guards at the museum earn less than $20,000 per year, below the federal poverty line.
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The Philadelphia Security Officers Union supports the Employee Free Choice Act.
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We have signed up a majority of the security officers at the Philadelphia Museum on union representation cards.
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If the Employee Free Choice Act was law right now, we would already be a union.

March with the Philadelphia Security Officers Union in support of card check and the Employee Free Choice Act

2:00 pm—3:30 pm,
come early and take advantage of the free day at the museum

Featuring NYC’s Rude Mechanical Orchestra! It’s a party!

Info: phillyjwj.org

Financial Insecurity

Museum guards ask new director to hear them out.

On April 19, Jennifer Collazo woke up with a $2,882.47 hospital bill. The 33-year-old Army veteran is a Philadelphia Museum of Art security guard employed by the private contractor AlliedBarton. Collazo pays into the medical insurance offered by her employer, but when she came down with severe neck and back pain on the job, she discovered that her health benefits didn’t even cover things like the ambulance ride.

Paltry medical coverage combined with low wages has driven Collazo and other museum guards to organize the Philadelphia Security Officers Union (PSOU). While the museum and AlliedBarton have rebuffed them in the past, guards hope that the institution’s incoming director, Timothy Rub, will be open to dialogue when he takes charge early next month. He succeeds long-time director Anne d’Harnoncourt, who died last year.

The guards say they want Rub to prod AlliedBarton to give them a pay raise and recognize their union.

Museum guards earn approximately $19,257.60 a year before taxes, which breaks down to $10.03 per hour. At that wage, many say they cannot afford to pay for AlliedBarton’s health care plan. One long-time guard says she’s forced to rely on the city’s public health clinics. Another guard says her children are covered through the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

The security team wants wages increased to $13.48 per hour, an amount that is equal to the occupation’s federally determined prevailing wage.

“We are not getting paid for the work we’re doing,” says Collazo. “All we’re asking for is a small piece of the pie. We just want to talk to Rub and the current [interim] director and have a dialogue.”

Museum staff declined to reveal Rub’s salary, but his predecessor made a base salary of $326,397 according to the Inquirer. The Museum declined a request to interview Rub for this article.

On August 6, labor rights group Jobs with Justice filed a complaint with the City of Philadelphia’s Labor and Standards Division, alleging that AlliedBarton’s wages are not only low, but illegal. Jobs with Justice helped organize the Philadelphia Officers and Workers Rising (POWR) campaign.

The complaint charges that the museum is violating the city’s prevailing wage law, which sets standard pay for jobs receiving city funds. The Art Museum received $2.4 million from the city in 2009 and is supposed to receive $2.3 million in 2010. A representative of the Mayor’s office declined to comment on the complaint, since it’s currently being reviewed by the Law Department.

“It’s a choice between paying your bills and eating,” says Collazo. “It’s a shame for anyone to have to make that choice. And I feel even worse for people who have kids.”

Collazo has been working for AlliedBarton since 2004, about two years after she returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. She hoped that the experience she picked up working in a warehouse and managing inventory during her seven-year stint in the Army would land her a decent job once she returned home. But in today’s ever weakening job market, a low-wage service job is the best she could find.

According to Collazo and other guards, shifts can be long and tedious, with workers getting just one paid 15-minute break and an unpaid 30-minute lunch. And according to some guards interviewed for this story, they were denied a promised 25 cent raise in July.

Cecilia Lynch, 52, contends that the raise wasn’t promised, but expected, as guards had received cost of living raises of at least 28 cents in years past. Lynch, who has worked as a museum guard for nine years says, “$13.48 is not a lot to ask. Then maybe I could afford their health care.”

AlliedBarton spokesman Larry Rubin denied that workers were ever promised a raise. “She hates her job, doesn’t she?” he says, referring to Collazo. “In my opinion, she seems to have been mistaken with regards to the facts.”

The Art Museum referred questions regarding security guards to AlliedBarton, saying only, “It is our understanding that their compensation package is competitive.”

The guards have been in a labor no-mans-land of sorts since 2006, when the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) stopped organizing Philly officers as part of a broader (and controversial) deal with AlliedBarton.

The firm’s guards had been organizing at sites around Philadelphia since 2005, including at universities like Drexel, Penn and Temple. The deal, by which the company pledged to stay neutral during union organizing drives if SEIU dropped the Philly campaign, angered many labor advocates.

But the POWR campaign and Jobs with Justice have continued the campaign, fighting to create the homegrown PSOU. They say that a majority of museum guards have signed cards supporting the union.

The unionization drive is now intensifying in the lead up to Rub’s arrival. In June, it was announced that 57-year-old Rub, decamping from the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he served as director for three years, would replace d’Harnoncourt. The POWR campaign says that d’Harnoncourt wasn’t receptive to their demands. Guards did win additional paid-sick days after her death—one for every year employed, up to a maximum of three per year.

But the Museum may be heading into fiscally choppy waters. In February, the institution took a seven percent budget cut and laid off 16 employees. And in June, admission to the museum was raised by $2, to $16. In addition, there may be potential elimination of city funding if Mayor Nutter’s Plan C goes into effect. If Harrisburg refuses the city’s requests for a sales tax increase and changes in public employee pension payments, the mayor is predicting 3,000 layoffs and incredibly deep cuts across the board.

Financial troubles or not, the POWR campaign contends that the Museum already pays AlliedBarton enough to boost wages. The guards hope to get that message across during a series of events planned around Rub’s installation, including a big rally in front of the museum on September 6.

Activists see Rub’s arrival as an opportunity for the museum to make a clean break with its past. After all, guards at the Cleveland Museum are union. Collazo says that she’s cautiously optimistic about their odds.

“I’m 50-50. Right now we have a majority [of worker support], but we want to have a bigger one.”

It seems unlikely that Museum trustees hired Rub with expectations that he will improve labor relations. Nonetheless, the large number of public (and swanky) events offer activists the perfect opportunity for high-profile mischief—enough disrupted cocktail parties will certainly have Rub and the 
Museum’s big donors calling for security.

For background and updates, see the workers’ blog: http://savevestas.wordpress.com or this article: Vestas Protest, What’s it All About?

Send messages of support to savevestas@googlemail.com

The events at Vestas have been just one in a series of worker occupations around the world in the wake of the current economic crisis. Workers are not allowing their jobs to be closed down, when corporations and banks are receiving large financial bailouts. This article gives some of the highlights of the new wave of worker militancy. [alex]

Global Trend for Sit-ins and Occupations as Mass Redundancies Continue

Terry Macalister

Originally published by The Guardian, UK – July 24, 2009

Trade union leaders warned tonight that the direct action seen at the Vestas factory was likely to be repeated elsewhere as workers refused to “bend their knee and accept their fate” in the face of mass redundancies caused by recession.

The sit-in at the Isle of Wight wind turbine plant was the latest in Britain, they said, and was part of a wider trend of militant tactics being used as far afield as the US, South Korea and China.

In France, where such tactics have been more common, the manager of a British company was taken hostage by workers today in a dispute over redundancies. About 60 workers at Servisair Cargo at Roissy airport in Paris prevented the director, Abderrahmane El-Aouffir, from leaving the firm’s offices after he refused to meet their demands in the latest case of so-called “boss-napping” to hit France.

The four day Vestas sit-in, which is an embarrassment both to the world’s biggest turbine manufacturer and a government trying to launch a low-carbon jobs revolution, follows a similar occupation in April at three Visteon (car parts manufacturer) plants in the UK in addition to action at Waterford Crystal in Ireland and Prisme Packaging in Dundee.

Tony Woodley, the joint general secretary of the Unite union, whose members were involved at Visteon, said: “I think it is absolutely understandable and justified for workers to fight back where they feel there are no other alternatives and employers act badly.” Asked whether he thought that Britain could see more sit-ins of the type seen at Vestas, where the staff are not unionised, Woodley said: “I would not be at all surprised. Labour laws do not protect people here and it’s all too quick and easy for employers to sack people.”

Bob Crow, the general secretary of the RMT union, who addressed Vestas workers yesterday, said: “The Vestas occupation, and the action at Visteon earlier this year, show that workers under attack can develop tactics that drive a coach and horses through the anti-union laws rather than just bending at the knee and accepting their fate.

“Occupations are immediate, focused and high profile and can force a dispute right into the headlines at short notice. “

In all cases of such action, the workforce came away with either improved severance arrangements or a reduction in the number of planned job cuts, trade union leaders said.

One of the more unexpected sit-ins outside the UK involved a company called Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago where a traditionally peaceful workforce bit back after managers announced a shutdown.

Workers, who assembled vinyl windows and sliding doors for a market hit hard by the housebuilding recession, refused to leave the premises, saying they were given three days instead of the legally required 60 days’ notice of closure and were owed holiday and severance cash.

Even though the staff were breaking the law when they took action last December, they won support from Barack Obama, then president-elect.

“When it comes to the situation here in Chicago with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned, I think they are absolutely right,” Obama said.

Union militancy of this kind in the US is rare but 500 staff at the Hartmarx suit factory in Des Plaines, Illinois, authorised a sit-in over a threat that the company’s largest creditor may close it down.

In South Korea, up to 600 car workers are continuing with a two-month occupation of a plant in Pyeongtaek, south of the capital Seoul. They are in dispute with their employer, Ssangyong Motor Company, which has been in court-approved bankruptcy protection since February.