Comeuppance: A Revenge Fantasy

I have a revenge fantasy.
I hope the Greeks will have long memories.
They will remember not only their contributions to Western civilization and their willingness to say ‘Oxi’ when it feels right.
Maybe they will not only remember the Nazi occupation and Churchill making common cause with the collaborators and their brothers and sisters in the battered Resistance gunned down in the streets. Maybe they will also remember the tweeting Finns and the scolding Ostie physicists and the smiling damned villains in their white hair and pearls and the bespectacled Dutchmen in their three-thousand-Euro suits and the Slovaks and the Irish and the you-name-its who’ve gotten back into lifeboats after Charybdis’ maelstrom and stomped on the knuckles of the desperate Odysseii still trying to climb back in and the Latvians parvenus who’ve lost a quarter of their population and want the Greeks to taste some of the toxic food that their own people have been force-fed…
I hope the Greeks remember them when the Gucci is on the other foot. Or rather, when a Europe has been built that places a greater premium on the lives of its peoples than on the pockets of its coddled, bailed-out bankers who want their like-minded servants in goevernment, Greek-speaking and non-, to privatize the Parthenon…
Better yet, maybe the ideologues will, recalling that the name of their beloved “Troika’ was borrowed from the NKVD, realize that structural violence can be more murderous than the kind involving sidearms and bullets in the back of the neck, and be persuaded by the reported utterances of Matteo Renzi, who, on the evening of July 11th, was first heard to express the sentiment that “Enough is enough”. Humiliation, after all, cannot be measured in actuarial tables and bottom lines, but immiseration can …
A thousand years from now, if the world still has breath in its body, I hope that the metaphorical hoes and the metaphorical pitchforks will have been put back indoors with the grain stores after having scared the wits out of the lords of the manor and the masters of the universe, and that somehow the Austerians or their ideological offspring who have sowed the wind will reap the whirlwind and get their comeuppance. A metaphorical comeuppance, to be sure...
Or maybe memory will be its own revenge...

A Lyrical Manifesto...

Or
What’s A Progressive?
(January of 2004)

Part One

Lemme be blunt. The single most important question facing America and the world today is the power of corporations over the lives of ordinary people, and whether ordinary people are going to prevail. All else flows from that.

Imagine a world that has done away with all laws governing the conduct of corporations in the countries in which they operate, but kept in place their current legal obligation to maximize the profits to their shareholders. They would still, of course, be legally obligated to get away with as much as they can get away with, to be as rapacious as they can be. Without taxes levied on them, without environmental laws and anti-trust laws, without a system of laws to protect the workers in their employ, of course, there would be no benefits at all that would accrue to the society at large, and none to their workforce either. It’d be something close to a state of nature.

As corporations are released from the restraints of social legislation that have meekly been placed on them over the last hundred years or so, as they gleefully cast off the social obligations that had become a part of a general consensus as to what constitutes civilized behavior, the price we pay in democracy is high.

This is where we are heading. This is the logical future to which current trends are pointing. Socializing the risk and privatizing the profit, as the poet said. And it is only ordinary people pushing back at that, all over the world, that is slowing the process down.

With me so far?

Democracy and capitalism are antithetical. You can further one or the other but not both.

Where does that leave us? What do we do about it? Having come to that conclusion, what kind of world are we then under a moral obligation to try and help build?

~ ~ ~

I’m going to try in this article to sketch out broadly for the country at large what it means to be progressively-minded on some of the great questions of our time. To distil down to its essence what it means to me to be a Progressive today.

A tall order, for sure, not least because there are as many strands of belief in the Progressive movement as within any other, so using the “we” is fraught with danger. I have little doubt that many of my best friends and most cherished allies will find much to disagree with me on.

It’s a tall order, too, because any movement that tries to raise questions about a society’s underpinnings is going to have an even more daunting task than those concerned mainly with tinkering around the edges, and a couple of hundred words will never be enough.

Comparisons are unavoidable, and though I’m loath to try to characterize American Liberalism in the pages of a Liberal publication, I’ll do so. This being a Liberal publication and so, by definition, tolerant to a fault, I will of course try to be polite.*

On so many things, of course, Liberals and Progressives stand shoulder to shoulder on common ground. On the brutish nastiness of today’s Republican Party, for example.

Fiery language uttered while trying to hold that ground is another matter. And it may be that one big difference between us is in the tone of the words that come out of us, even our ways of being. Liberals may be more gentle and polite, at least towards “Conservatives”; some Progressives are tired of being polite to the rabid Right. We are angry. It’s not in our genes, the Right has made us livid.

I get the feeling, too, from many of my liberal friends, that they are genuinely offended by our anger, though I suspect there are some for whom the truths that we utter, and the ramifications of those truths, are deeply disturbing.

Liberals are excited by the possibilities that inhere in a healthy debate in the marketplace of ideas, argue valiantly and admirably for giving more airtime to the Right in the name of balance. Many are eager to believe that in fair debate, where more light is shed than heat, that Good will triumph. We’re more worried about who owns the stalls in the marketplace and who holds the megaphones and the power that gives them. (Megaphones? More like foghorns. Foghorns versus piccolos…)

And that may be the crux of it. That might be at the heart of the differences between us. I dare say that the brightest of Liberal lights are doing a heroic job arguing the great civil questions of our time, the great questions of liberty. It is harder to get my Liberal friends to talk economics, except around the margins. To talk about the economic foundations of our market system. To talk about who owns the bulk of the world’s wealth and whether they actually should.

Maybe we accept capitalism out of a sort of sad pessimism, out of a belief that despite what we see as the observable fact that market forces work against democracy, we ain’t gonna see a popular, peaceful, democratic overthrow of the people who hold all the power any time soon. Liberals, sweetly, sometimes seem to still harbor the hope that the best in human beings can be elicited without a big change in the world’s economy.

A big change of our outlook and our country and our world is not even on the radar screens of our national conversation. And it should be.

*This article was first published in the pages of the Liberal Daily Beacon

Part Two

It may be that the irreconcilability of capitalism and democracy is okay with some people: Life itself, after all, is about balancing and trade-offs. Others might say that a bit of comfort and a bit of stability and a bit of what we’ve learned to call freedom is worth the price we pay in diminished democracy. Or that what we’ve got is the best we can do, that it’s a lousy system but it’s a damn sight better than all the others we could ever come up with

But if you were building a civilization from scratch, where would you begin? If you were drawing up a charter for the founding of a society (and were interested in something a bit more democratic than kleptocracy), wouldn’t you first ask yourself “How do we do this in such a way as to benefit the largest number of people?” Would you not put people first on the list of priorities? Rather than pick a system that purports to bring sizeable but incidental benefits to the great majority?

Because of course those who argue for keeping things as they are ask us to believe that by giving first priority to the interests of big business, the benefits will necessarily flow to all the rest of us. That the way to “put people first” is to liberate the efficiency of the markets. To let those who own most of the wealth keep it all so they can make even more money. That what’s good for the big moneymakers is good for everybody. That “what’s good for business is good for America”. And all that.

How nice for them and their consciences. Convenient. What’s good for them is good for the world. They’ll be sure to go to heaven, then, and make a killing on the way.

Gallows humor aside, let’s concede that one point for just a moment. On the surface, at least, the markets do seem to be pretty good at delivering goods and services to those consumers that have the means to buy them.

But that way of doing things has proven, pretty definitively, to be spectacularly incapable, on its own, of providing even adequate education and health care to all Americans.

So let’s start by saying “Alright, Health. Education. These should belong to all of us.” Maybe throw in the broadcast airwaves so an honest conversation can be had without the corrupting clutter of vested interests battering at the walls of our spirits.

I can’t begin to do justice to all this now, but check it out:

· It’s cheaper for us as Americans to send a kid to college for a year than to put him in jail. It has been proven that investment in education pays for itself and more by the money saved in jailing people.

· We pay more per capita for health than just about anybody in the world and have higher infant mortality rates than fifteen countries in the European Union. Our life expectancy is lower than most of them too. There are few -- if any -- developed countries that spend less public money on the health of their people than we do, and our way is the most costly. The other way is the smart way to go, fiscally and every other way.

Suppose tuberculosis starts to rear its head in a big way in America once again because people can’t afford to be treated? Does anybody really think that neighbors won’t catch it? Neighbors that earn a living cleaning rich folks’ homes? Will wealthy people stay healthy for long?

Of course not.

Suppose your home catches fire? Should fire fighters be dispatched only after a determination has been made that the inhabitants can pay for them to drop by, some time between 8 and 5? Presumably it has long been understood that if a poor working family’s abode next door to yours is allowed to burn, your own home might catch fire too.

Think about our business relations with the rest of the world. Supporters of corporate globalization argue that given current economic circumstance, a race to the bottom in paying for labor is necessary because we’re competing with labor elsewhere in the world that is much cheaper. And to a degree it’s true (though less true than we’ve been led to believe) that a country that places its social obligations in higher priority than we do may operate at a disadvantage when competing in the “markets” with us and those other countries that don’t.

But would we stomach someone arguing for the formal reintroduction of slavery just because we’re competing against countries that produce goods using slave labor? I think not. (And yet. In this country our use of prison labor and workfare can come pretty damn close.)

And ultimately the point of all this is an even more fundamental question: Where on the spectrum do we draw the line and still get to call ourselves civilized? We draw lines every day between what’s right and what’s not. What should belong to all of us and what should be geared to making a profit?

That is the big question of our time. The answers will be difficult to utter. Or even contemplate. But the words have to be spoken. And the journey begun. It’s not about charity or compassion. It really is a matter of enlightened self-interest.

Part Three

So now what?

Start back down the road of using the public treasure for the public good. Throw money, for a start. Big money.

~ ~ ~

The best arguments against “big gummint” (by which the Right always means everything but the martial plans of what, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is easily the largest command economy in the world) are the ones that charge inaccessible and unresponsive bureaucracy.

The access question first. Bankrolling political campaigns with private money has meant that unconditional and disproportionate access is granted to the bankrollers. Public campaign financing and mandated access to broadcast airtime are obvious policy responses to the undemocratic access to those who govern us, and have proven track records.

The quandary presented by big, clunky, unresponsive bureaucracy is no small thing. There are no easy solutions, and like everything else, these solutions will require detailed blueprints drawn up by very smart people, but it’s my sense that the answer lies in a careful balancing of local, democratic decision-making with universal national standards.

The efficient delivery of goods and services that we touched on before is also basic, and would be no small matter either, in any society that has decided upon a strong public sector to serve the needs of its people.

These arguments, cogent as they are, just can’t be seen as dealbreakers. If a civilization decides upon a great shift in priorities towards a public sector that's as big as its population, these challenges have to be seen not as insuperable obstacles that should quash that shift in priorities, but problems to be addressed once founding principles have been established.

~ ~ ~

There is no scarcity of financial resources. It’s a question of who owns those resources. There are fabulous riches in the world and in this country. The top 1% of households in America in 2001 held 33.4% of all net worth. Mind boggling. Think they need more of it? Been the trend for years. While we slept.

Here are just a few obvious examples of where throwing a bit of money at the problem would do some good:

· There are schools all over the place that have 35:1 ratios of student to teacher. Does anyone really think that if we reduced the ratio to 11:1 or 1:1 that we wouldn't have children that were better educated? And does anyone imagine that if teachers were paid like CEOs it’d be hard to entice the brightest lights in our country’s firmament into the classroom to teach our children?

· Housing? Public housing wouldn’t be so abhorrent if instead of tower blocks with people piled on top of each other like rats we had 3-family homes in their stead…

Oh, do it your own self. The list of things that can be made better by investing big money stretches to near infinity. It’s a matter of having the national will to do it.

~ ~ ~

So at the very least, Liberals and Progressives should be able to agree that the question then becomes: “What economic and political models do we see in our dreams?” And there are some really smart people out there, people with big hearts and hard heads, who are dreaming up answers to that very question, answers based on founding, grounding principles, and with practical solutions attached. +

I can imagine the 3 pillars of American political democracy, the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary, living alongside new economic models, models that will wrest a bit of wealth and power and power over wealth from some people, and put more power into the hands of a greater number of ordinary people. Isn’t that what democracy is by definition?

Tall order? Fer shurr. No-one said it would be easy.

~ ~ ~

Okay. Definitions.

We know for a fact that there has been a concerted effort by the Right, a thirty-three year project, founded on an expenditure of some three billion dollars, to frame the terms of the national conversation and then to seize power and hold on to it. Call it a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. The strategy has been stunningly successful, and it has been helped along by capitalism’s natural inclinations.

There was a good word around way back when. Radical. Sounds nasty. Sounds like a good word for the Extreme Right, and it’s sometimes used that way these days.

It comes from the Latin word radix, though, meaning root. And in one sense, at least, there’s nothing especially radical about the Right-Wing project, as it really just wants to allow capitalism to grow to its natural jungle thickness, not alter its nature in any fundamental way.

I think Progressives pay close attention to the health of the roots. And to the other subterranean goings-on beneath the topsoil, the connections and processes that underpin the economy and power politics.

Milton Mayer, an American who spent a lot of time interviewing German Jewish survivors of the Nazis, quoted a friend of his in a recent book:

“One must foresee the ends in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings”

which, if you think about it, is an even more profound statement than might first appear, if we take the word “ends” to mean the end purpose as well as the end result.

We are no longer in the beginnings. The dark clouds are already gathering. We must embark on fundamental change.

~ ~ ~

For a few weeks now it has been impossible for me to look at the world without thinking about the unbearably sad loss of so many lives in the Earthquake Tsunami. The magnitude of the catastrophe just beggars understanding.

I don’t know if something like this has the capacity to change us all for ever. I don’t hear too many people talking about leaving the rebuilding to market forces though. The world is responding for the common good.

Jeremy Seabrook has said it better than I ever could:

"Assertions of our common humanity [seem to] occur only at times of great loss. To retrieve and hold on to it at all other times - that would be something of worth to salvage from these scenes of desolation."

That is what the Progressive vision is about. Imagining other ways of doing things. Like how to make our dreams actual. And legislate them.

The challenge is as big as the world, and so is the importance of meeting it. We need a Marshall Plan for the world. The martial plans we’ve grown accustomed to always cost a whole lot more and won’t cut it, and neither will defensive tinkering around the edges. We can afford to do no less.

~ ~ ~

I sometimes hear Beethoven’s Ninth being played on New Year’s Day. Can you hear the distant strains of another Ninth Symphony beginning to swell in the early days of this New Year? Or are we stuck inside a Radetsky March?

No harm in dreaming. Let’s get good at it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

+ See for example two great articles in the November/December issue of Dollars and Sense:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/1104barnes.html
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/1104alper.html

© January 2004
Can be used with attribution and without permission in not-for-profit ventures;
for commercial ventures, ordinary copyright protections apply.
See CreativeCommons.org

Bread and Butter

(January, 2004)

On November 21st of 2003, in an inspiring display of grassroots democracy, a rarely-seen committment to democratic processes and responsiveness to membership, thousands of MoveOn members took part in an online vote to help establish the organization's main concerns over the next four years, The leadership of the organization allows its course of action to be determined by membership, and
membership doesn't wait around for charismatic preachers to tell us what to do.

The results were tallied, in descending order, as follows:

Election reform.
Media reform.
The War on Iraq.
The environment.
The Supreme Court.
And Civil liberties.

I didn't agree. I was in a minority. As I so often am.

Noam Chomsky pointed out recently that "overwhelming majorities favor expansion of … healthcare…aid to education and Social Security". These people can and should form a natural, sizeable and very real electoral majority in this country. And it is on matters like these, in my view, that our hopes should hinge, and on which we should be focusing, in order to build that working majority.

So I'm faced with a dilemma. 'Cos I also happen to believe that it is incumbent on me and on other dissenters to get on-board, for the sake of democratic processes, to be sure, but also for the sake of a Movement's internal discipline: we've all seen from our political opponents just how scarily effective being On-Message can be…

If it can be safely concluded, as I think it can, that we cannot begin to harbor hopes of resisting the Right Wing agenda, let alone of transforming our country into a society that cherishes -- to use the admirable phrase seen right under this paper's banner -- Common Community, until we are able to persuade those many many people who are under economic stress, nickel-and-dimed or downright poor, that what the Right is doing is deeply harmful to them, or that it's even worth voting, then it follows that we have got to start having an honest national conversation in this country about economics, about economic fundamentals, about economic justice. About Bread and Butter.

Let us suppose for a moment that these crucial issues have been your main concerns as well. To me prioritizing these concerns over all displays a characteristic weakness in the thinking of many middle-class Liberals and "centrists". For what do those 6 priorities have in common? On the surface at least, none of them are about economics.

A case can be made, of course, that they are. And we need to talk about them as such to the country at large, lest our priorities continue to seem to be abstractions, seem to be elite concerns unconnected with those day-to-day pocket-book concerns and worries about the physical quality of life of most of our fellow citizens.

Come to think of it, there aren't too many issues that don't in some way have an impact on our physical lives. Test that proposition yourselves sometimes. But let's start with those six for now.

Here then are some Talking Points:

1. Election reform

Accounts to supply and manage voting machines go to Republican donor
companies who promise to "deliver" for Bush. A company is under a legal
obligation to profit its shareholders, not the consumer. If Bush and Co. are
seen as the more likely crowd to bring profits to these companies, why not
engage in massive fraud on their behalf if they're not going to get caught? This
insidious connection between business and government in no way can be said to
benefit the voting public. It's your money… and your vote.

2. Media reform

The attention paid in the corporate news media to political process at the
expense of talk about substance, under the guise of objectivity, serves the
advertisers and their clients well because the public is kept in the dark about
issues that might adversely affect their bottom line if they were actually discussed
seriously.

As for the supposedly liberal media, you might point out that it is highly unlikely
for millionaire TV Talking Heads to support with any fervor a steeply-progressive
tax structure to replace regressive payroll or sales taxes, say, or how unlikely
it is that the multi-national conglomerates who own the news divisions will hire
reporters who might seriously cast doubt on the right of those companies to
act with impunity. It's in your interest to have a wider spectrum of
opinion represented on the channels you watch so you can make your own
choices. The airwaves have been entrusted to the broadcasters but they have
long belonged to YOU.

3. The War on Iraq

While there may still be people out there who need to be asked to imagine
screaming hot metal ripping through flesh and bone and leaving human
beings in the desert dust with the life draining out of them along with their
blood, we may want to talk about other costs too.

The huge drain on the nation's treasure, of course, prevents money from
being spent on people: on education, on health care, on roads, you name it.

It's also pretty clear who's making money from this war. Look at the list of
Bush Family friends and Republican supporters who are profiting from the
war to see where your tax money is going. Isn't that corruption by definition? Isn't
that war profiteering? By definition?

4. The environment

It is more costly for a company to stop its chemicals from polluting your child's
air and water than it would be if our government forced it, under severe
penalty, to clean up its poisons. Your health care costs will go up with the
increased poisons in your air and your water ($242 million was just slashed from
water cleanup), and who will benefit from that? It's your money.

5. The Supreme Court

This is a harder one for me off the top of my head, help me out. How about
asking people you're talking to to think about how easy it is already for big
business to get away with tearing up workplace safety standards, or locking out
health watchdogs at chicken-processing plants, or punishing whistleblowers by
battling them into bankruptcy or or or…? How easy is it already for Right Wing
judges to find reasons and precedents to rule against punitive damages in law
suits…or pick Presidents?

6. Civil liberties

This category of course would seem by definition to preclude talk about the
pocket-book. Besides which, many or even most Americans associate these
cherished liberties with the very notion of "democracy", so it shouldn't be so hard
to reach out on this one. Conversations about the Right's use of fear to
consolidate its power at the expense of our freedom might hit home, though
they've been pretty good at it so far.

And those bread and butter connections are less obvious. Howsabout pointing
out that the erosion we've seen of habeas corpus, a legal principle that some
people think of as the bedrock of democracy, dates back at least to 13th Century
England, can mean the disappearance into a legal black hole of a family's
breadwinner for months or more at a time.

On top of all that, we often forget those other civil liberties enshrined in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There's the right to free assembly. The
right to organize. The right to "just and favorable conditions of work", to a
"reasonable limitation of working hours", to "protection against unemployment"...

You get the gist. The point is to make the connections. These issues too are about our physical well-being.

So let the gentle battle of ideas be joined. Always remembering who the real villains are. And who just might become our life-long friends.

See you on the barricades. Or at the kitchen table.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

© January 2004
Can be used with attribution and without permission in not-for-profit ventures;
for commercial ventures, ordinary copyright protection applies.
See CreativeCommons.org

A Plea to Dubya's Ditto-Heads

(January, 2004)

There's something I really want to know from anybody who voted for George W. Bush and/or a Republican ticket during those two fateful Novembers:

Do you think that any or all of the behavior I detail below in a far from exhaustive list has been -- or even might turn out to have been-- good for the country? It would seem to me
that you either have to say "yes", or somehow produce evidence to deny the charges, all of which are a matter of public record.

Here we go then. This Administration and the Republican 'Majority', slyly or brazenly, have

1. Claimed the air at ground zero was safe after the 9/11 attack, when they possessed documentary evidence to the contrary, thus endangering the lives and health of its nominal heroes.

2. Gone to war on false pretenses, the cast of characters including at least three men who were engaged in the business of manufacturing justifications for costly bellicosity as far back as the mid-seventies.

3. Committed war crimes as a matter of course by targeting hospitals and civilian infrastructure for bombardment, using phosphorous, napalm and depleted uranium, and barring entry of emergency aid into civilian areas. In some cases the civilian leadership could qualify for the death penalty according to the War Crimes Act of 1996.

4. Become, in the words of the British Ambassador to Italy, Al Qaeda's "best Recruiting Sergeant".

5. Tortured its prisoners at home and abroad. As a matter of policy.

6. Cut real pay and benefits to our armed services personnel and their families. Something like a third of the country's homeless are veterans.

7. Deprived hundreds and maybe thousands of U.S. residents of legal rights enshrined in Western jurisprudence since the 13th century. Some were 'disappeared' for months.

8. Removed basic safety protections from the workplace lives of working people, eviscerated their chances of legal redress, and allowed one worker to be fired or discriminated against every 23 minutes for exercising his or her freedom of association on the job.

9. Begun the process of gutting Section 8 provisions for public housing, with either a new and extraordinary burden placed on cash-strapped cities or an eminently predictable swell in the numbers of homeless in our immediate future if they are not stopped.

10. Allowed health care costs to rise over 30% and millions more people to becomeuninsured.

11. Allowed government drug researchers to accept fees from the pharmaceutical industry. Tens of thousands have died from Vioxx.. Bad reactions to medications are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States

12. Hidden from public view hundreds upon hundreds of politically inconvenient or embarrassing documents on indefensible grounds of national security.

13. Taken revenge against anyone who has blown the whistle on their misdeeds, not least against a career diplomat, who had revealed inconvenient truths, by unveiling the name of his wife, a covert C.I.A. agent.

14. Abrogated or withdrawn from binding treaties on land mines and the international criminal court, to name but two.

15. Used junk science to justify its withdrawal from the Kyoto treaty and deny global warming. No serious scientist not in the employ of interested corporate parties disputes the ecological trends.

16. Rewritten environmental laws, in language dictated by their corporate backers, so as to remove protections against the plunder of our natural resources and the fouling of our air for the profit of those paymasters.

17. Rewarded those and other paymasters with fiscal give-aways from the public coffers;

18. Used national security as an excuse to throw billions of dollars at crony companies developing a missile shield that has had almost a 0% efficacy in tests and 0 usefulness after the end of the cold war.

19. Rendered impotent those regulatory agencies whose mandates are to rein in corporate abuse.

20. Squandered our nation's treasure and put us in unimaginable debt and at the mercy of China and Japan, our main creditors, should they decide some day to call it in ... or switch to the euro.

21, 22 …77, 99…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

© January 2004
Can be used with attribution and without permission in not-for-profit ventures;
for commercial ventures, ordinary copyright protection applies.
See CreativeCommons.org