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  • Means-testing Social Security: The kiss of death

         MEANS-TESTING SOCIAL SECURITY is a proposal that some policy-makers are considering. That would be the beginning of the end for the program. When Social Security was first begun, in 1935 during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, some people proposed means-testing it as they means-tested Aid to Dependent Children (now TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Roosevelt resisted it, knowing that would make it politically vulnerable. In order to protect it, Social Security needed to be universal. The rich as well as the poor would receive it.

         The idea of not giving government money to the rich has an appeal on the surface, and is gaining some adherence. Why should the rich get money when the poor need it more? But Roosevelt knew, as the British social welfare scholar Richard Titmuss said, “Programs for the poor are poor programs.” Witness the means-tested program for children which was begun at the same time as Social Security, as part of the Social Security Act. Women who worked for the Children’s Bureau created the program. They believed that assistance should go only to the deserving, and that parents needed to be supervised closely to insure they used the money wisely. Mothers were not included in the program until 1950. Since its beginnings ADC (later AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, when fathers were included) has been intrusive and stingy and the recipients have been subjected to arbitrary and capricious treatment by caseworkers. While it began as an entitlement, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 removed its entitlement status. It is now used as a club to browbeat mothers into finding work that often does not exist, and when it does, does not pay enough to support a family. Its main goal is to force people off the rolls, and it has succeeded at that.

         In contrast to that mean-spirited program, Social Security was crafted by men with male workers in mind.

         Another means-tested program is the state sponsored General Assistance, or General Relief. It is for able-bodied unemployed people without children to support. It has been the first program to be cut when states face fiscal problems. Most states no longer have it, and there is no assistance except for food stamps for able-bodied unemployed people if they do not qualify for unemployment benefits. (They were even prohibited from getting food stamps until a few years ago.)

         What is our answer to people who say the country could save money if they didn’t give Social Security to rich people? The answer is to recoup the money paid to them through progressive taxation. There is no reason rich people shouldn’t be taxed at a higher rate than poor people.

  • The Attack on Ohio's Working People: What's the strategy to fight back and win?

         Ohio’s working people—both those with jobs, the unemployed and their families—are under attack as they have not been for decades. And this is not just in Ohio. From Wisconsin to Florida, from California to New York, employers, the media and politicians are working 24/7 to lower our wages, reduce our benefits, postpone our retirement, cut social services such as health and education, and in many other ways large and small to take away hard-won gains from working people in order to increase profits for the corporations and dividends for the wealthy.

         While the Republicans, urged on by the Tea Party, have been most aggressive in attacking labor unions, Democrats have joined them in state after state in cutting budgets and laying off public workers. The slogan everywhere is the same: austerity. Bosses, politicians and the media tell us: Learn to live with less. A lot less.

         Working people aren’t accepting this prescription—and good for us: We shouldn’t. Since the election in November 2010 public employees have participated in massive demonstrations of more than 100,000 in Wisconsin and rallies as large as 25,000 in Columbus. In Madison, Wis., people of all sorts—unions, students and other community members—occupied the state capitol, preventing business as usual. Students by the thousands have walked out of high schools to protest education cuts and teacher layoffs in Wisconsin, New Jersey and California. In towns and cities throughout the country, working people and the unemployed have showed up at city council, county board and state legislative hearings to speak out against service cuts and layoffs; and, when that hasn’t been enough, they have rallied, protested, and demonstrated. And they have engaged in some of the largest popular political movements we’ve seen in years, circulating petitions to recall officials or to hold referendums on anti-worker laws.

         All of this is good: from the occupation of the capitol in Madison and the massive demonstrations there and in Columbus, to the student strikes and citizen outrage over the attack on our standard of living. So, too, are the political movements to recall anti-worker politicians and overturn anti-worker legislation. We should all be involved in this, working to educate the public to defeat Issue 2 (the former SB5), Ohio’s anti-union law, and to stop HB 194, the voter suppression law.

         While we’re involved in this political work, however, there’s a larger question: What is the strategy that can win and begin to turn the tide against these new, right-wing movements that threaten the livelihoods and way of life of millions upon millions? What will it take to turn the tide? For the last four decades unions have declined in members, in economic power and in political clout. Working people more broadly have lost power and consequently have lost their standard of living. What is it going to take to change things?

         While stopping Issue 2, the anti-union law, and H.B.194, the voter suppression law, are important, we need to be building a movement that uses its economic power in the workplace, its social power in the streets, as well as its political power in elections. Real social change in America happens when millions act. The great industrial labor unions were originally organized through sit-down strikes occupying factories and mass picket lines that fought for unions against the employers’ security guards and police. The civil rights ended legal segregation in the South and won voting rights through mass protests and civil disobedience in which thousands went to jail. The women’s movement won equality over several generations by direct action, voting in violation of the law, chaining themselves to the White House fence in the 1910s and protest marches in the 1970s. The environmental movement and the gay and lesbian movement have used the same tactics of protest, civil disobedience and a willingness to challenge unjust laws by breaking them. Such movements are not built from the top down by bureaucracies; they are built from the ground up by ordinary people in movements that are democratic, participatory, confrontational and threatening to the powers-that-be. That’s what we need now. How do we get there?

    Worker uprising

         Last winter, immediately after the election of Republican Gov. John Kasich, he pressed for—and the Republican Party in the Ohio State Legislature passed—Senate Bill 5 (S.B. 5), a radical, right-wing law that took away many of the rights of Ohio workers. S.B. 5 reduced public employees’ bargaining rights, increased workers’ contributions to their health care to a mandatory 15 percent, took away police and fire rights to negotiate over safety equipment, threatened striking workers with stiff economic penalties and jail, denied teachers the right to negotiate over class size, tied teachers’ wages to test scores and threatened college teachers’ right to negotiate a contract. The law affected hundreds of thousands of public workers in Ohio, threatening to reduce their bargaining power and lower their standard of living.

         Nor was that all. Shortly afterward, the Republican-dominated legislature passed Kasich’s budget, which cut $2 billion from local governments and school districts; some would have their budgets slashed by 50 percent. One report (“Innovation Ohio, Budget Job Loss Report”) suggests that Kasich’s budget would lead to the loss of 51,000 public service jobs. Something like a quarter of a million Ohioans in the families of those public workers will be directly affected. And, of course, as the public workers lose their jobs, they will be forced to stop eating out; buying food, clothing, TVs, cars and all the other usual stuff; leading to thousands more layoffs in the private sector. And this in the midst of the worst depression in our country since 1929.

         Kasich has not been alone his attack on working people. In Wisconsin last winter Gov. Scott Walker introduced his so-called Budget Repair bill, which contained provisions eliminating collective bargaining. That led thousands of workers—sometimes as many as 100,000—to demonstrate at the capitol building in Madison during February and March. The massive protests were accompanied by strikes by Wisconsin schoolteachers and by the day-and-night occupation of the capitol building by as many as 3,000 workers. Once the movement had begun, hundreds of workers from other states flew or drove in to join the protests. The United States had not seen such a massive worker uprising in years.

         Walker had cleverly attempted to divide the public workers by excluding police and firefighters from his anti-union law, and the media have worked to divide public employees against private sector workers. Yet both firefighters and private-sector workers showed up at the Statehouse to join public workers of all sorts, and then students and local residents joined them until Madison became the site one of the largest workers’ demonstrations in the United States in decades. A roiling, roaring river of demonstrators, carrying signs and banners, some festooned in union regalia and others in the Wisconsin football fans’ cheese-head hats, marched down State Street, then into and around the capitol. Only California has seen demonstrations as large as these in recent years. This was the beginning of a new American workers movement.

         The Wisconsin events gained an added significance because they happened to coincide with the beginning of the democratic revolution sweeping the Arab world. Many demonstrators in Madison, taking a clue from the rebellions against authoritarian and anti-worker governments in the Middle East, carried signs saying, “Let’s negotiate like they do in Egypt” and “Walk like an Egyptian.” Demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo responded by carrying signs in solidarity with Wisconsin workers. For a moment it seemed as if there were one revolutionary movement stretching from the Nile to Lake Michigan. While the situation in Madison was hardly comparable to the revolution in the Arab world, what we witnessed in Wisconsin was a working-class upheaval without precedent, at least not since the 1970s.

    Power turned off

         Feeling a sense of power and at the same time a need for greater force if they were to defeat Walker and the Republicans, Madison’s South Central Federation of Labor put the issue of a general strike on the table. The Capitol Times asked, “Could a General Strike Happen Here?” and answered that it seemed possible. Yet, as became clear, the consciousness, sense of solidarity, organization and will to risk a fight were not there. Key groups like teachers and firefighters declined the challenge, and many private-sector workers had not yet come to see the public employees’ fight as their own. Nor had African-American workers and Latino immigrants come to see the public employees’ fight as their own. The raising of the slogan of a general strike itself, however, had affected the consciousness of the strike activists and leaders, leading them to explore just how far they could push the resistance.

         Yet, within a week the AFL-CIO unions, the Service Employees International Union, the national leadership of AFSCME and the AFT were sending national leaders and staff to attempt to take control of the movement and channel it away from the building occupation and strikes and into political action and support for the Democratic Party. While some union officials in Madison, including local leaders of the AFL-CIO, talked about expanding the strike action of the teachers and even talked about the possibility of a “general strike,” most upper-level union officials worked to put the brakes on the movement. Union officials worked to get protesters out of the capitol building, while at the crucial moment the Wisconsin teachers union leader told teachers to get back to work.

         At the same time, state union officials, working with the Democratic Party, began to channel the Wisconsin movement into a recall effort. Union leaders and Democratic Party operatives, uncomfortable with the building occupations, strikes and raucous protests by workers and their supporters, wanted to channel the movement into mainstream politics. Union members were quickly organized to circulate petitions to recall Republican state legislators in order to change the balance of power in the legislature by removing them and electing Democrats. The Democrats eventually succeeded in forcing six Republicans into recall elections and defeating some of them. At the same time, the Republicans forced two Democrats into recall elections, but those two succeeded in holding onto their seats. The Republicans held on to control of the Senate by a slim 17-16 majority, and both sides claimed victory. Clearly the Democrats had succeeded in improving their representation in the Senate through the recalls, but they did not achieve the result they had hoped for.

         Similarly in Ohio, where there had been protests, but never the same kind of upheaval from below as in Wisconsin, labor officials and the Democratic Party worked to channel the movement into circulating referendum petitions to put Gov. Kasich’s even more draconian anti-union legislation on the ballot in November. The Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO and other unions succeeded in collecting almost 1.3 million signatures, a remarkable achievement and enough to put S.B. 5—now called Issue 2—on the ballot for November 2011. Never in my lifetime have I seen so many working people, thousands in Wisconsin and Ohio, going door to door to talk to workers about the need for workers’ rights and union power. We have a new American workers’ movement.

         Since then the unions and other opponents of the law have been walking the precincts, talking to voters and handing out literature at events like Black Family Reunion in Cincinnati. While there is a lot of public sentiment against the law, especially among working people white and black, overturning it November will be no easy task. This is an off-year election with no presidential or congressional candidates, and voter turnout is usually low.

         All of this has been complicated by the Republican attempt to make matters even more difficult by disenfranchising working people. Ohio’ Republicans passed H.B. 194, which will suppress the votes of workers, African Americans, the poor, the elderly, the homeless and other vulnerable populations through restrictive measures such as reducing in-person early voting from 15 to 12 days, reducing mail-in voting from 35 to 21 days, more aggressively purging voter lists and more demanding requirements such as full social-security numbers on absentee ballots. The law will also force election officials to throw out more ballots where simple errors still left a voter’s intent clear. Poll workers will not be allowed to direct voters to the right precinct or to help voters who request assistance in filling out forms. The state will not allow absentee-ballot requests to be mailed to all registered voters to shorten Election Day lines; but at the same time, poll cannot be opened early to accommodate those who would like to vote then. So the Democrats and the AFL-CIO have made H.B. 194 the subject of another petition, which would put a referendum on the ballot in November 2012.

    Choosing our turf

         There is no doubt that voters should take action to defeat Issue 2 (the former S.B. 5) and H.B.194. The problem is that defeating those bills will not in itself create the social power necessary to stop the attack on working people.

         Think about it: If we succeed in defeating Issue 2—and we will—that simply takes us back to last year. How were we doing last year? Were our unions strong then? Were we beating back the corporate attack? Were we expanding workers’ power and winning higher wages and better benefits, improving society for all?

         Going back to yesterday, to last year, or to two or three years ago won’t work because our problems didn’t begin with the most recent economic crisis or with the Tea Party. Our unions have been growing smaller, weaker and less influential since the 1980s. American workers’ wages have stagnated, our working conditions have gotten worse, and our voice on the job has been stifled.

         Today the Democratic Party and its junior partners in the AFL-CIO unions are determining the strategy for fighting Kasich, Scott and the Republican agenda in the Midwestern states. The strategy has been to move away from protests, building occupations and strikes and to channel all efforts into recall and referendum efforts. The results have been impressive: Thousands have been trained first to collect petition signatures and then to walk precincts, knock and doors and make phone calls to voters. So far things have gone pretty well, recalling a few Republicans in Wisconsin and putting the referendum on the ballot in Ohio. So what’s the problem?

         The problems are these.

         First, when we decide to play politics, we are playing on their turf. The political system of the United States is dominated by corporate financing and by the corporate media. With the corporations and the media in control of the system, we have little chance for victory even though we have the numbers. We should not play on only their turf, but also on ours: the workplace and the streets.

         The unions have, to their credit, summoned up an army of petition pushers and door knockers. They should turn those folks into an army of activists involved in union-organizing campaigns in the workplace and in social protests on the streets. Of the perhaps 10,000 union members who have worked to stop S.B. 5 would there be 1,000 willing to surround a non-union workplace, block a road, take over a public building at the risk of being arrested? We need to take the struggle to the streets—and most important, to work.

         Second, while it has been impressive in its way, the Democratic Party and AFL-CIO union-mobilization campaign has been entirely top-down, an approach that limits the movement’s effectiveness. Much like regular Central Labor Council meetings, the state and regional AFL-CIO leadership tells the ranks what to do, and the ranks are expected to obey. Every meeting is a pep rally or training meeting. Discussion of the political strategy and of the methods has never been on the table. Debate apparently has no place in the official union movement. There are no mass meetings where the floor is open and speech is free.

         The Democratic Party and AFL-CIO coalitions are entirely formalistic. Created from above by agreements between the leaderships of various groups, they do not make possible much engagement, and interaction among the ranks of the various organizations involved is not likely to take place. Unlike the first few weeks of protest in Wisconsin, which produced all sorts of activities, organization, opinions and strategies, since then in Wisconsin and since the beginning in Ohio, the creativity of working people has not been tapped. Nor do the leaders want it to be. The Democrats and the AFL-CIO share a fear that things might get out of hand—and who knows what would happen then?

         Third, the unions have adopted a rhetoric—”Save the Middle Class”—that narrows the movement’s goals and limits its appeal. Middle class? What does middle class mean? A home in the suburbs, a relatively new car, a big-screen TV, being able to afford to send kids to college? Middle class sounds all too comfortable —and all too white. If that’s the definition, then it excludes millions of working people, including millions of union members. I know union members who are working in union jobs as secretaries, teachers’ aids and in other positions, who qualify for food stamps. I know folks working at union factory or warehouse jobs at $9 an hour. Is that “middle class”? Many African-American and Latino workers have never entered the middle class if that means economic stability and real opportunity. We should not be talking about “saving the middle class” but rather about mobilizing the entire working class so that we can all lift ourselves and each other up out of poverty, insecurity, and in many cases out of exploitation and oppression.

         Fourth, the entire purpose of the recall and referendum campaigns has been to get people out of militant protest and into the electoral arena, where we are being asked to vote for the Democrats. While by and large they might be better than the Republicans, the problem is that, just like their opponents, the Dems are committed to austerity, budget cuts and layoffs.

    Time for a new party?

         Look at this little round-up of the states:

    • New York: “To the soundtrack of chanting protesters who draped banners from staircases and banged on the doors of the legislative chambers, lawmakers finished approving (Democratic) Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s budget early Thursday morning, making for the state’s first on-time spending plan in five years. … Outside the entrance to the Senate gallery, hundreds of people chanted about Mr. Cuomo’s cuts to schools and his opposition to extending a tax surcharge on wealthy New Yorkers.” (New York Times)

    • Connecticut: “(Democratic) Gov. Dannel P. Malloy unveiled one of the largest budget-cutting plans in recent history Friday, targeting more than 3,600 Executive Branch jobs for layoffs while eliminating funding for more than 6,500 jobs in total. The governor’s plan also carves deeply into social services and health care—an area Malloy pledged to protect during last fall’s campaign—(and) transportation, prisons and education while eliminating dozens of programs and closing numerous facilities. Those changes also likely mean a new asset test for certain Medicaid patients, increased bus, rail and other transit fares and a 1.5 percent cap on raises for unionized workers who weren’t laid off.” (The Connecticut Mirror)

    • Washington State: “House Democrats rolled out a budget plan Monday that closes a $5 billion-plus budget gap by slashing funds for public schools, colleges, hospitals and other pieces of the health-care safety net. The spending plan also eliminates 1,619 more jobs in state government and higher education after July 1, assumes a 3 percent pay cut for most state workers and ends automatic cost-of-living raises for some state pensioners.” (The News Tribune)

    • California: “(Democratic) Gov. Jerry Brown has released his proposal to close the state’s $25 billion budget gap, which makes up roughly a third of the state’s general fund budget. The plan includes $12.5 billion in spending cuts, primarily to entitlements and $12 billion from a five-year extension of the ‘temporary’ income- and sales-tax hikes that the legislature passed two years ago.” (Wall Street Journal.)

         Just like the Republicans, in state after state the Democrats are cutting budgets, reducing public services and laying off public employees. While in addition to cutting budgets they have sometimes sought some new taxes as well, in general they have passed regressive taxes while declining to tax banks, corporations, their profits and the wealthy. We cannot win as long as we make our strategy is entirely dependent upon the Democratic Party. We have to have an open discussion about political alternatives. Since the Democrats so often vote for austerity, maybe unions need to nominate their own members in the primaries, with the understanding that, if they lose, they will not loyally support some corporate candidate. With the Republicans and the Democrats both supporting an austerity budget, perhaps it’s time for a working people’s party.

         Perhaps the leaders of AFL-CIO themselves are beginning to understand that the Democratic Party doesn’t necessarily represent their interests. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka recently told reporters at a breakfast roundtable hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, “This is a moment that working people and quite frankly history will judge President Obama on his presidency. Will he commit all his energy and focus on bold solutions on the job crisis or will he continue to work with the Tea Party to offer cuts to middle-class programs like Social Security, all the while pretending the deficit is where our economic problems really lie?”

         Maybe we can now think the unthinkable: working people organizing themselves to give leadership to the nation.

         We in Ohio, in the Midwest, in America are facing the biggest challenge of our lives. We are foolish if we are not to hold open free-for-all discussions of our vision, our principles and our strategy. The abolitionists, the suffragists, the civil-rights militants, the anti-war activists, the feminists, the gay and lesbian freedom fighters would never have succeeded had they allowed themselves to be limited in their discussions and their actions. When a real movement arises—and there is no doubt that it will—it will sweep aside political tradition, bureaucratic caution and phony rhetoric, and as has happened every few generations throughout our history, create a broad, open democratic movement for change. We can help make it happen.

    Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati based teacher, writer and activist. This article was published in the Cincinnati-based independent non-profit newspaper, Article 25.

  • The Working Families Party: Stumping for Jesus

         An isolated Assembly race in underserved North central Brooklyn in an election off- year wouldn’t normally attract much interest — witness grudging coverage in The New York Times on the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend. It surely would be a snoozer to a national audience or to those New Politics readers who consider mainstream politics to be mad, bad and dangerous to know — the elephants’ graveyard of classic social movements, as though the movements weren’t already among the walking dead. Plus, following election races can be a hobbyist’s game when unions are getting bashed, the Obama administration is inert when it’s not otherwise shilling for finance capital, or when August job growth was stagnant and just 57 percent of the working age population hold any sort of job.

         Still, the race of Jesus Gonzalez, a 26-year-old community activist running as a third party candidate in the 54th Assembly District, which comprises all of once devastated and landlord-torched Bushwick as well as parts of Cypress Hills and Bedford-Stuyvesant, is worth a look.

         Gonzalez is running against type, battling two separate Kings County machine war horses. The candidate, a first-generation American of Dominican-Puerto Rican parentage who anglicizes his given name, is running on the Working Families Party (WFP) line, a more-or-less left-leaning party comprising labor union political directors, leaders of community-based organizations and a smattering of active general members. WFP rarely runs or even nurtures its own candidates. Instead, it takes advantage of New York State’s fusion election rules by co-endorsing and running mainstream hopefuls — invariably Democrats — on its own ballot line.

         Not this time.

         Garnering some 200,000 votes statewide in 2010 — which is nothing to sneeze at for a third party — it polls just behind the Conservative Party, a GOP kingmaker. In its 13 years the WFP grew from a curiosity to something of a Mighty Mouse, whose endorsement and ballot line is widely sought even by shoe-ins. With growing visibility, the group got targeted by the Right, survived an attack by former Giuliani operatives falsely charging it with funny-money handling. While a federal investigation led to no charges filed, it beat a strategic retreat when it agreed not to badmouth then gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo once he was elected — something even WFP staffers acknowledge in private was a Faustian bargain — in order to slate Cuomo as its own 2010 candidate and gin up enough votes to keep its ballot line for another four years.

         Then came the Gonzalez race.

         Slating Gonzalez, an organizer with the Youth Power project of Make the Road NY — the city’s largest Latino-based activist organization — the party seems to be doing what its founders promised it would do, which was to promote independent candidates when the Democratic hopeful was hopeless or reactionary, and where an independent candidacy was viable. A Sept. 6 party fundraising pitch reads: “If [Gonzalez] wins, for the first time in history, our legislature in Albany will include not just Democrats and Republicans, but also a proud and independent voice for the Working Families Party. Jesus isn’t carrying any other party’s banner but ours.”

         As reported by WNYC, the city’s public radio affiliate, “The Gonzalez campaign is re-establishing WFP as a force to be reckoned with by the Democratic establishment. A win would put a new member into the Assembly who is highly sympathetic to the party [WFP] and its labor base. A loss would reinforce the narrative that WFP isn’t the powerhouse it once was.”

         Gonzalez also benefits from a split in the borough’s Democratic Party machine. Brooklyn, as Kings County, has the largest voting population in the country, and now features a fractured Democratic machine with two leading factions running their own candidates. Each faction has troubles. The county leader is Vito Lopez, an Assemblyman currently up to his nose hairs in corruption investigations. His candidate, Rafael Espinal is running on the Conservative Party line as well. A third candidate, Deidra Towns, is running on her own cobbled-together party after failing to win the county leaders’ backing. She is the daughter of long-time African American Congressman Ed Towns. and sister to Darryl Towns, who resigned his Assembly seat to take the commissioners’ job in a reconstituted state housing agency. The resignation allowed the party organization and not its primary voters to choose a candidate for the special Sept. 13 election.

         Still, Gonzalez’s election is no slam dunk. Even if Lopez is one step shy of jail and the Towns dynasty is aging out, both of the older factions know the district terrain. That’s vital in an off-year election, when pulling out supporters to vote is key. In this context, Lopez’s legal problems or Towns’ fading power in an increasingly multiracial and Hispanic district matter less than in super-hyped city, statewide or national elections, where voting is at least a festival of the depressed. So while Gonzalez does have the support of neighboring Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez plus 1199/ SEIU and its estimable political operation — particularly effective among communities of color — some of his other endorsements are iffy. Communications Workers District 1, an early Gonzalez backer, is mired in contract talks with Verizon for its 45,000 long lines and FIOS workers so it can’t be expected to play much of a role in phone banking, door knocking or election day get-out-the-vote efforts, the things that win pull operations. Plus, public employee unions, those with the most consistent work with politicians on a national, state and local levels, are either taking a pass — “why make enemies,” is the thinking — or are backing one of the two connected candidates. Sure, a host of borough reformers are on board for Gonzalez, but except for staff members at Make the Road working as volunteers, few have immediate area creds.

         For the left — certainly for readers of this blog — an abiding question is whether the WFP effort represents a turn toward more independent and multifaceted political work by the party or results only in a change of clothing for a fresh-faced, attractive insurgent who even as a winner will have nowhere to go post-victory but back into the Democratic Party leadership’s fold. Or as a loser, someone with name recognition positioned for the 2013 City Council races. A Gonzalez win on Sept. 13, or even a strong showing, will give the WFP the bragging rights and sharpened elbows it craves to restore its reputation as a player. I don’t knock that effort; it’s what any party, even a workers’ party, would do in part. But Gonzalez himself can’t affect the Assembly much, except as a vocal tribune in a legislature tightly controlled by its leaders. With the New York State Assembly’s overwhelming Democratic majority, Gonzalez will likely caucus with the Democrats, which is something the independent Bernie Sanders does in the U.S. Senate. Either that or find himself a one-trick pony out of tricks representing a district for which he couldn’t bring home the bacon grease, let alone the bacon.

         Can Jesus Gonzalez be an insurgent inside the caucus? If he wins, we’ll see.

  • Labor Day and school reform

    This Labor Day, I’m hoping that teachers will press labor to fulfill its responsibilities to kids, by breaking with any politicians who don’t “put kids first” by creating jobs.
    The labor movement, and teachers unions in particular, has failed to challenge the Obama administration’s contention that education is the panacea for the nation’s economic malaise.  As labor shrinks back, its “friends” in the Democratic Party (not to speak of its avowed enemies among the Republicans), cast education as the key to economic revitalization. From employment to housing, social policy depends on accepting reforms that are destroying everything that makes school engaging, fulfilling, and enlightening. Arne Duncan’s announcement of community improvement grants, which will encourage gentrification and charter schools to serve the new demographic, puts the administration’s stance quite clearly: “Communities across the country recognize that education is the one true path out of poverty.”
    Education is the “one true path out of poverty”? The first tip off that we’re dealing with propaganda and not anything for which there is evidence is the term “the one true path.” What about jobs that pay enough for people to survive without food stamps? What about health care? How about housing?
     Education can democratize access to the labor market but it can’t change the number or type of jobs that capitalism is creating.  Sure we  need to work at improving schools that serve the kids who most need a superior education to compete for the diminishing number of well-paid jobs. But the way out of poverty is to put people to work. Labor has been cowardly and disoriented about pushing the Obama administration to create well-paying jobs, and that, not education reform, is what all the unions should be demanding.

  • Hyperactive Deficit Attention Disorder: the economic dyslexia of the Right

         Many on the left find it difficult to understand the right wing arguments against countercyclical activity. And I suspect no source of clarification will originate among the knuckle dragging idiots contesting the field for the Republican presidential nomination. Their pronouncements are as exasperating as they are primitive and self-contradictory. But to understand the mindset of the modern reactionary—to impart to it a coherency that it normally cannot do on its own, one cannot avoid plumbing the depths of gold bug-ism. That is not because gold bugs dominate the conservative camp. This species exists only in the backwaters of the movement. It is rather because the concerns that gave rise to the ideology of gold bug-ism nevertheless suffuse and unites the modern reactionary moment.

         What gold bugs desire above all is a system that prevents hyperinflation. They believe that a gold standard does this because it constrains the state by forcing it to operate by the same principles that govern the private sector. The private sector cannot spend without first appropriating funds to do so, either by first creating additional income or by borrowing. The state, having no independent source of income, could only expand its demand under the gold standard, by diverting resources either through raising taxes or by indebting itself to private lenders or some combination of the two. This means that the growth of state demand also comes at the present or future expense of private sector expansion. For debt presupposes future taxes to service interest that is accruing and to pay down the principle. Under the gold standard, any means of overstepping these limits by debasing the currency would produce a hyperinflation. But that would signify, in effect, the suspension of the gold system. And it would only be a short term fix. Ultimately it would leave the state coffers bereft of precious metals and thereby reduced to what gold bugs would say is its proper dimension. The system would make an end run around the state, reintroducing directly or indirectly gold within the private sector for its internal and foreign transactions and increasingly refuses to honor state demands issued in its own debased currency. At least that’s their take on it.

         So why do modern gold bugs call for a “tight money” policy? It’s difficult to tease this out of their own rhetoric, which is too often simply bar room gibberish and braggadocio. “Tight money” is itself a useless restraint on the federal government, because the state does not functionally have to borrow or tax in order to spend. A “strong dollar,” a term rooted in a bygone era of gold convertibility, is simply a recipe for worsening the balance of trade and even more unemployment. The only thing tight money and a strong dollar would constrain is the private sector.

         So let me try to offer something that lends some consistency to it. Fiat currencies unleash a new dynamic that conservatives fear to their marrow. It allows the state to spend without the prior appropriation of funds. That is, the state can provide permanent net additions to aggregate demand, beyond anything it could do within the confines of the gold standard. It therefore unleashes the potential for hyperinflation without any self-limiting feedback loop from below. It can pay its debt obligations and its foreign debt service in debased dollars, whatever the rate of inflation. The state can in effect repudiate its debt by making it worthless. It can enforce contracts with the private sector written in its own currency, whose purchasing power dwindles before the first payment installation comes due. Repudiating debt and enforcing contracts with worthless currency is tantamount to expropriation.

         So those infected with gold bug derangement syndrome, whether they actually wish to return to it or not—and more often they don’t—are increasingly compelled by their understanding of a fiat currency, to resort to forms of legal prior restraint to prevent this scenario: debt limits, restrictions on future spending, elimination of government programs, public debt defaults The fact that government spending at the federal level is still legally and operationally aligned with taxing and borrowing policies, when there is no functional need for this, is itself a form of prior legal restraint. Conservatives seek, by these means, to enfeeble the public sphere so that it acts as if it were, in fact, encumbered by a gold standard and therefore unable to unleash a hyperinflationary dynamic.

         This is why they fear meaningful countercyclical activity. The accumulation of debt as a result of deficit spending in their minds must be serviced by additional taxes. And if state spending induces inflation (and this is an article of faith in these circles), then that can also only be addressed by siphoning off excess demand by levying still more taxes.

         It is for these reasons, gold bugs—I mean, conservatives argue, that countercyclical activity by the state is counterproductive. The state injects demand into the system. But at the same time the private sector, sitting on an ocean of profits, is refusing to spend. It prefers to squirrel away its profits in anticipation of the massive tax bite to come. State spending is neutralized by private saving. The larger the deficits pushed on the system, the stronger the pull back by the markets. The private sector therefore—or so the argument goes—needs to be reassured, to regain confidence before it is again willing to invest. The only thing that can instill this confidence is a state that is neutered. So a do-nothing state is the pre-condition, by conservative lights, for unleashing private sector investment and hiring and usher in a true recovery.

         But this entire take is senseless. It plays with pieces of the puzzle without positioning them into a coherent image. Government can always service its debt simply by depressing the appropriate key strokes on the fed’s computers. Technically, this is financing the debt by means of additional debt. But it crucially bypasses the need for any additional taxes down the road. Fiat currency creates demand ex nihilo.

         Moreover, hyperinflations occur when the injection of additional net demand confronts the limits of the system to respond by generating additional output. At that point, the system can only respond by raising prices. A system suffering from unused capacity of almost 25% and a 20% unemployment/underemployment rate is in a contained contractionary spiral. The output and income lost can never be recovered. A systemwide increase in price levels is out of the question. Additional state demand would directly be translated into additional output and continue to do so until full capacity utilization was approached.

         The system is in fact in a balance sheet recession. Consumers have lost a massive part of their retirement wealth, with the deflation of the housing bubble. This will never return. And that bubble itself has yet to fully deflate sufficiently to revert to its historical trajectory. Workers are trying to rebuild their wealth through additional savings out of income. Collectively, this is a drag on aggregate demand. The business sector has suffered an enormous decrease in its return to assets over the past 40 years. It too is in the process of deleveraging, with massive debt obligations coming due before 2015. Profits are being locked away in short term financial instruments in preparation for the debt bills to be retired. Balance sheets are being cleansed. The economy is running a balance of trade deficit, which is an additional drain on aggregate demand. The automatic stabilizers (unemployment insurance, limited mortgage relief and nutritional supports) can only go so far. Without a massive dose of offsetting deficit spending, it is highly likely that prices will begin to collapse, profits will no longer be realized at present levels, unemployment will begin to grow and the system will nose dive.

  • New Politics 2.0

    New Politics is passing quite a milestone – or two of them, come to think of it. The first issue of its original series appeared in the fall of 1961. After it suspended publication in 1978, our founding editors, Phyllis and Julius Jacobson, still had the itch to foster radical ideas and debate, resulting an anthology, Socialist Perspectives (1983). They relaunched New Politics in 1986, which means that we can now celebrate both its 25th and 50th anniversaries.

    The journal has outlived its founders, but their commitment to an activist, thoughtful, and democratic radicalism remains as timely as it could possibly be. A few days ago, while setting up a Facebook page for New Politics, I imagined trying to explain it to P&J, and it felt like the strongest point would be that we’d be better able to bring articles to the attention of new readers. And young readers, in particular – some of whom might then become contributors.

    That would have clinched the deal, probably. At a time of global economic crisis, impending ecological catastrophe, and frequent eruptions of protest and democratic revolt, the legacy of New Politics can’t just be celebrated. We have to put it in circulation, and add to it. Please have a look at our Facebook page (here’s that link again) and consider joining the fray. And if you have ideas for articles, topics we should engage, or means to bring New Politics into emerging discussions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

  • Why a former teacher union president goes over to the dark side

    The LA Times reports that AJ Duffy, who just this spring stepped down as President of the second largest teachers union in the US, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), is opening his own charter school, which will use all of the union-busting techniques UTLA has long opposed. LA’s political establishment, most notably the former UTLA staffer who is now Mayor,  Antonio Villaraigosa, is, no doubt, chortling in glee at this act of treachery.
    I just returned from UTLA’s annual Leader Conference, where I spoke about the nature of the life-and-death struggle in which teachers unions are engaged. One of the points I made was that time is running out for union members to take ownership of their unions and to convert the out-dated “service model” or business unionism to a form of union that is more like social movements. Another point I made is that the unions face tremendously conservatizing forces and that union democracy – member pushback – is the most powerful countervailing tendency.
    AJ Duffy’s flip to the forces of evil should be no surprise to anyone who understands the tremendous power of the propaganda machine that has been put in place by the “Billionaire Boys Club.”  Yet, it’s a disappointment to see that someone who was trusted with safeguarding public education from privatization, keeping it a “public good” that is overseen and funded by the public, would, so easily, desert his former comrades.  Shame on you AJ Duffy!

    I hope UTLA members take this as a reminder that union leaders are only as strong and as courageous as the members who force them to be so.  Don’t mourn about AJ Duffy. Go back to your chapters and organize!

  • Cincinnati: First Outsider, First African American Police Chief

    A Victory After Decades of Struggle for Racial Justice

     

         Cincinnati's recent selection of someone who is not white and is not from the West Side of Cincinnati as the city's new police chief is a victory for justice and civil rights, and a vindication of the efforts of those activists who for decades have struggled against the racism, violence and abuse that have characterized the Cincinnati Police Department.

         The Cincinnati Police Department's long history of malfeasance reached a crisis on April 7, 2001 when a police officer pursued a young unarmed African American man named Timothy Thomas, wanted for nothing worse than traffic violations, and shot and killed him in a downtown alley. Thomas was the fifteenth African American man under 50 to have been killed by the police between 1995 and 2001, some of those black men had been unarmed and some were killed in police custody. The African American community, finally having reached the breaking point, erupted in four days of unrest, an uprising against racism and police violence by the African American inner-city community. The unrest was followed in June by a March for Justice of 2,500 Cincinnatians, both black and white.

         Shortly before Thomas was killed, the Black United Front and the American Civil Liberties Union had brought a federal lawsuit against the Cincinnati Police. During the same period, the U.S. Justice Department had begun to look into the CPD policies and practices. In 2002 under the watchful eyes of Judge Susan Dlott and despite the resistance of the Mayor Charlie Luken, Chief of Police Tom Streicher, and the FOP, all of the parties — the Front, the ACLU, the CPD, and the Justice Department — reached a Collaborative Agreement intended to end police misconduct. The Collaborative Agreement restrained the CPD's racist and violent behavior and ended the string of police killings of black men.

         Meanwhile, in response to the killing of Thomas, a group of African American ministers led by Rev. J.W. Jones and white allies from the March for Justice organizing committee formed the Coalition for a Just Cincinnati (CJC) and initiated a boycott of Cincinnati to protest both criminal justice and economic policies. The CJC demanded an end to social and economic apartheid, support for and enforcement of civil and human rights, the restoration of public accountability of the police force, and reform of government and election procedures. The CJC boycott demands constituted a call for bringing democracy and social justice to Cincinnati.

         When those demands were announced, Cincinnati was already being boycotted by the gay and lesbian community. The LGBT boycott of the city had come in response to a 1993 amendment to the city's Charter forbidding the City Council from enforcing equal protection in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. The Black United Front and other organizations also initiated their own boycotts of the city as the pressure mounted. The various boycotts by the LGBT community and by the African American community proved to be powerful economic levers that in the search for justice turned away many conventions and entertainers and eventually cost the city millions of dollars.[1]

         In another important development, in 2001 Cincinnati voters passed an amendment to the city charter permitting the selection of a police chief from outside of the department, a development fought by the Fraternal Order of Police all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court where the amendment was upheld. If today we have a new black police chief, it is less because of the good will of Mayor Mark Mallory and City Manager Milton R. Doheny, Jr., and more the result of a decade of struggle by African American Cincinnati residents and their white allies.

         The hiring of Police Chief James Craig represents a victory for the African American community and breaks with the city's bankrupt political traditions. Since 1912, every police chief in Cincinnati's history had come from the conservative, German Catholic neighborhoods of the West Side, the last several from either Catholic Elder High School or public Western Hills High School. The continuous selection of police chiefs from the conservative white neighborhoods of the West Side tended to perpetuate a good old boys mentality within the police department that militated against the acceptance and promotion of African American, Latino or female officers for years after the civil rights movement. The domination of a white West Side clique within the force made it virtually impossible for the department's leaders to understand the issues facing the African American community.

         Chief Craig, selected from among 40 candidates to head the Cincinnati Police Department, previously headed the Police Department of Portland Maine, a city of only 60,000 compared to Cincinnati's nearly 300,000. There he headed up a force of only 215 officers, while here he will be the chief of 1,057. Craig worked in the 1970s in the Detroit Police Department, in the 1980s in the Los Angeles Police Department and then Portland, Maine. As an officer and area commander he has worked in all sorts of police work, often in community relations, and has won praise and won awards for his achievements. Certainly, most in Cincinnati will be wishing him well and hoping that the Cincinnati Police Department's long history of racism, violence and abuse is coming to an end.

         Yet if we no longer have a police chief who comes from Western Hills, citizens still need to be vigilant in overseeing policing operations and the police culture. The police are about law and order. The police exist to enforce the laws and the laws exist to protect the existing order, and the that order remains one of capitalist exploitation of working people, of an increasing and shocking gap between rich and poor, of racist economic segregation of the community, and of patriarchy and homophobia. Cincinnati remains dominated by the same handful of powerful corporations — Proctor and Gamble, Macy's, Western & Southern, American Financial Group, Chiquita, Kroger, E.W. Scripps, Fifth Third Bank — that determined the city's economic and political destiny for the last century or so. The Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC), a not-for-profit created to enhance the profit of banks, realtors, developers and builders, continues to determine the future of the inner-city, aiming to replace poor African Americans with a cosmopolitan creative class all under the banner of economic mix. Everywhere the deeply entrenched patterns of racial segregation and class separation remain. And if the police enforce the laws to protect the existing order, then that is what they are protecting.[2]

         We do not look to the City of Cincinnati, the Mayor, the City Manager or the new Chief of Police to deliver us. We don't have faith that the Republicans or the Democrats can bring us social justice. Only working people organizing themselves and fighting from below against the system of "law and order" that typically protects the wealth, exploits workers, and deprives and humiliates the poor can change our city and our larger society. Ten years ago movements from below placed demands on the table that could not be ignored and led to the collaborative agreement and then to the new police chief that Cincinnati has today. Frederick Douglass's famous statement — "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will." — must remain our slogan. We need to continue building the movements from below of working people and the unemployed, African American, Latino, Asian, Native American, and white, both native born and immigrant, to fight to create a city that will be good for all of us, for our grandparents and parents, for our children and grandchildren.

    Notes

    1. For a more detailed account of these events see, Dan La Botz, "A Decade since the Rebellion of 2001. What Have We Learned," published as a three part series in The Cincinnati Beacon. Part 1 is available here.

    2. For a more detailed picture of Cincinnati's power structure see, Dan La Botz, "Who Rules Cincinnati?" It is also available on Kindle and through Barnes & Noble electronic downloads.

     

    Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati-based teacher, writer, and activist.

  • Obama in Hyde Park: “Black and White Together, Against the Lower Classes”

     

    “Black and white together, against the lower classes”—Nichols and May routine about Hyde Park (Chicago), late 1950s

     

         Liberals, and some leftists, have been disputing about whether Obama has “caved,” or is simply being Obama. I think the latter, and see no novelty in his behavior. I never had illusions to be crushed, never voted for him, and won’t. In addition to the blatant evidence before all of us of his essential conservatism, my views are influenced by having lived in, around and in spite of Obama’s communities—Hyde Park and the University of Chicago. This relevant background has been missing from the discussion of who he was and who he is.

         Negro Removal  Nichols and May performed with the Compass Players, which Wikipedia describes as “a 1950s cabaret revue show started by alumni, dropouts and hangers-on from the University of Chicago…. active from 1955-1958,” which gave birth to Second City in 1959. Their black-and-white-together routine grabbed hold of the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park Negro Removal program (as many of us understood what was euphemistically called “slum clearance”). By the time I arrived at 53rd and Dorchester in 1963 as an assistant professor in the Boorstinian History Department and the Straussian College, the neighborhood had a bombed-out look which reminded me of the London I had seen a few years after the Blitz. And there was a clear correlation between destroyed spaces and formerly lower-class black residences. All of this was overseen by the hideous Julian Levi of the University of Chicago, who the University later celebrated for having “saved the Hyde Park area around the University of Chicago from urban decay.” The neighborhood, surrounded by the vast South Side Ghetto, boasted endlessly of its racially integrated quality, which included famous black people like John Hope Franklin and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad (who greeted me by rear-ending my car, but that’s another story). There was resistance to this bombardment from the residents as well as a pioneering anti-segregation sit-in by CORE at the University of Chicago Administration building in 1962 (participated in by, among others, future Senator Bernie Sanders).

         Obama first moved into Hyde Park in 1984, and in 2005 bought a house at 50th and Greenwood (just over the line in classier Kenwood). Obama was not responsible for the above horrors. But it seems relevant to his later career and his distance from blacks of classes other than his own that he lived amidst the hypocrisy that dared to call all this “racial integration.”

         University of Chicago Law School  Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years beginning in 1991. The U of C Law School is a notoriously conservative place, with ideas compatible with the University’s Friedmanite economics department. One of many telling examples of this orientation may be found in Obama’s colleague Judge Richard Posner’s proposal in the 1990’s to reduce litigation in the federal courts by indigent prisoners who need lawyers but cannot pay. If their case has merit, Posner believes, a lawyer will take it on a contingent basis, so judges should apply this “market test” in deciding to refuse to appoint counsel. (For discussion, see here.)

         Was Obama at home with this truly Dickensian idea? Presumably not (though g_d knows where things are headed with the marketization of everything proceeding apace under Obama). But the U of C Law School offered Obama tenure. It’s a conservative place, and certainly Obama made no waves in the face of the reigning conservatism. Colleagues, the New York Times reported,

    “sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail—the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

    "'He just observed it with a kind of interest,' said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale."

    The evasions in this episode are sooo 2011.

         A Face for the University of Chicago in the Ghetto  Michelle Obama’s job before she became First Lady was as Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center, for which she had worked since 2002. Her responsibilities in this and her previous positions at the University of Chicago included “community relations [and] neighborhood outreach.” In other words, in the face of a long record of hostility between the University and the surrounding ghetto, her job was to present to the black community a U of C with a human face.

     

    * * * * *

     

         What does this all add up to? Obama was not responsible for Negro Removal in Hyde Park. But those familiar with the hypocritical ethos of the place will not be surprised by the inattention of his administration to the plight of poor blacks and the resultant increased suffering brought down on them by his policies. Obama is (not yet) responsible for the marketization of the right to counsel but certainly has advanced the cause of privatization and dependence on the market. Consider his cuts and intended cuts in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, and the immense gift to private insurers of his health care scam. And both Obamas’ coziness with the University of Chicago seems a good fit with Obama’s accommodation to the dominant conservative institutions in the society.

  • Matt Damon, Diane Ravitch, and scapegoating teachers

    Several thousand teachers and their supporters rallied in Washington July 30, for the SOS (Save Our Schools) march, a grassroots effort organized by an Oakland CA science teacher. I was out of the country and couldn’t attend but most reports have agreed that the the rally was spirited, and disappointingly small, given how hard the organizers worked at building it, and the amount of “celebrity” power behind it, including Diane Ravitch in a starring political role and Matt Damon in a starring role. Both the AFT and NEA endorsed the march and gave a token contribution, $25,000- probably not even as much as they spent on rubber bands and paper clips  at national headquarters last year. Even if you don’t  look closely at the AFT’s Facebook page coverage of its involvement in the march, it’s clear from the pathetic photos that it had a very small presence. If the AFT and NEA had put even one-quarter of the effort organizing for this march as they  did the get-out-the-vote for Obama, the march would have had tens of thousands of teachers. Post-march critiques that I’ve read have been split. On one side are the folks who essentially say “ Matt Damon was great! It was  a fine start and it’s a beginning on which we have to build.” On the other side are postings analyzing the political shortcomings of the march demands and speeches, like Susan Ohanian’s blog  and Alan Singer’s piece on Huffington.
    From the start the march organizers had great energy, high hopes, and lots of naivete. The underlying political message was that Obama’s heart is in the right place – and we just have to let him know that he has his facts wrong. Diane Ravitch was an articulate spokesperson for the march, a fact that’s been taken up by the supporters of multicultural education who (rightly) remember her long-time opposition to scholarship or curricula even faintly suggestive of systemic racism or sexism in US society.  I won’t repeat my analysis of what’s right and wrong with Ravitch’s current political work and writing, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that she has, essentially, substituted herself for what labor/liberals and the AFT and NEA national leadership should be doing and saying. I suggest we view Ravitch as our frenemy in the struggle to save public education. The problem is not Ravitch, but progressives, and especially the teachers unions, which have bowed to Obama and the Billionaire Boys Club in a way Ravitch has not.

    What the SOS march didn’t get at was why the neoliberal reforms have been accepted so readily. Granted, the Billionaire Boys Club has control of the popular media and lots of money to throw at the “problem” of teachers standing up for the dignity of their profession.  (Do see the real “indy” film about education,“The inconvenient truth behind waiting for superman.”) We have to understand that the ideological success of the neoliberal project in education also comes from its exploitation of  US education’s historic inequalities in education.  Minority parents and communities can’t be won away from charter schools and privatization unless we acknowledge the sad complicity of teachers, their unions, and the education establishment in supporting a status quo of educational inequality. We need credibility when we ask for parent support and explain how Walmart’s funding of charter schools and “fast track” teacher certification programs relates to its anti-union, sexist, and racist employment policies.

    Still, we can’t be too hard on the march organizers because their unwillingness to identify the politics behind the assault on teachers unions (and public education) has characterized most of the liberals in the education establishment, like the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. Even more disappointing has been The Nation’s analysis, or rather, lack of it. A recent story about “teacher quality” is typical of The Nation’s refusal to take note of Obama’s buy-in of policies advanced by  Democrats for Education Reform, who are indistinguishable from the neoliberal American Enterprise Institute.  Jane McAlevey’s fine piece about labor’s capitulation to Obama’s policies was an exception to The Nation’s failure to get at the deep problem we face in the bipartisan drive to refashion public education and destroy teachers unions. Another solid piece, by Pedro Noguera and Michelle Fine, explaining the politics of scapegoating teachers, is worth reading in The Progressive.

    The SOS march proved how much a movement to turn back these terrible changes to public education needs transformed teachers unions. The unions are being attacked so viciously because the Right understands the unions’ potential power, alas, better than do most teachers and progressives. Transforming the unions requires much more than replacing the faces at the top, though the head honchos in Washington certainly have to go. We need union democracy. And we need to shout out that schools can’t improve the economy and can’t create jobs. What schools, teachers, and their unions can do is stand up for the right of all children to  have their full human potential respected. 


  • The Economy Again in Crisis Mode

             “Debt crisis: stock markets panic” was the first entry to the Guardian on line in the aftermath of the Dow’s recent 4 percent rout. Bloomberg News noted that more than $4.5 trillion has been erased from the value of equities worldwide since July 26th. The Los Angeles Times headlined that “Global sell-off intensifies pressure on governments to stave off recession.”

             One could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that it is primarily concern over the US debt “crisis” that lies at the root of this debacle. The economic collapse of Greece and Spain, imposed politically by the European banking system, certainly can be contained without massively deepening the recession. It is rather the agonizing lead up to the Obama administration’s wholesale capitulation to Tea Party demands which solidified the consensus political belief — parroting the IMF — that the market would discipline an errant US economy, with worldwide ramifications, by dumping government debt for any perceived reluctance to impose further austerity. The mainstream punditocracy sees in this massive collapse of stock values additional verification of that contention.

             Yet nothing could be further from the truth. If investors feared the ability of the US government to “honor” its debt, it would have dumped Treasuries and fled to the stock market. The price of government paper would have cratered driving up interest rates. Stock market prices would have been launched through the stratosphere as investors sought safer havens for their capital. After all, we have been repeatedly reassured that profits have completely recovered and further expansion simply awaits believable confidence-building measures. The private sector, we have been told, has to have a reasonable expectation that it will not be saddled with massive future debt obligations in the form of taxes, state-induced inflation and higher interest rates due to the “crowding out effects” of government borrowing.

             Well, they have been reassured and the world economy is tanking. Government paper is being devoured by investors. Interest rates continue to hover around zero. Yet the Wall Street Journal cluelessly concocts a swill of self-contradictory explanations for this behavior. “Investors are getting pummeled by myriad factors: fears about a potential economic drag from the spending cuts, the risk of a downgrade on the US’s credit rating, signs of contagion in the euro zone spreading to larger economies and disappointing global data over the past several sessions.” One can only wonder how the risk of a degraded credit rating can by squared with the rush to Treasuries. How is the risk of euro zone contagion squared with the potential drag from spending cuts that the austerity mongers have imposed on their own constituent economies?

             Capitalism is in the throes of massive deleveraging. The rate of return on assets in the American economy has dropped continuously by 75% since the mid 1960s despite ongoing increases in labor productivity. Without deleveraging — writing off capital values and rebalancing asset sheets — acceptable levels of profitability cannot be restored. The current expansion has been the weakest on record since World War II and the trend, in the words of economist Eric Tymoigne, “shows that each economic expansion since the 1980s has been weaker and weaker and the rate of decline has accelerated.” The private sector is not looking to expand until it squeezes out its excess capital, and the banks will have slim pickings in their search to find credit-worthy businesses until that is completed. The Fed’s response of Quantitative Easing — of a forced swap of treasuries for cash — did not reverse this process. It simply fed speculative stock market and commodities bubbles, with the fictitious profits associated with this trend now deflating. Yet this is the only tool left, since Obama has agreed to box the economy into a corner. And it is no tool at all.

             It is an elementary accounting identity that when the private sector deleverages, the public sector must offset this contraction in spending if the economy as a whole is to expand. The Tea Party has repeatedly argued that private households are desperately trying to get their economic affairs under control and restore their savings. True enough. The great irony is, however, that without a massive expansion of the public sector, either through taxing and spending the idle balances of the wealthy or through additional accruals of deficits, this restoration of savings is all but impossible. This means that if the interests of the unemployed and dispossessed are not attended to by a massive program of public spending, the particular concerns of Tea Party adherents will also go unrealized. There is no way to disconnect the two as the Tea Party and the rest of us will now soon learn.

  • Hannah Arendt Against the Facts


         [The publication in 1963 of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt provoked a storm of controversy which has been going on for decades. Arendt, the author of the famed The Origins of Totalitarianism claimed that Eichmann, organizer of the Holocaust, was not a fanatic who hated Jews but a normal man, and that Jewish leaders and organizations cooperated with him to an extraordinary degree.

         In 1963 Gertrude Ezorsky wrote a review essay in the first series of New Politics ("Hannah Arendt Against the Facts," New Politics, vol. 2, no. 4 [1963]), in which she argued that Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem—aside from being replete with factual distortions—had a political point, one already indicated in her theoretical work The Origins of Totalitarianism: that the political efforts of normal people and their organizations are incapable of making the world habitable, but that end can be achieved if a few individuals live according to moral principles.

         We reprint that essay here because of its continuing interest.

    —Ed.]

     

     

         HANNAH ARENDT'S CONCEPTION of Adolf Eichmann [1] is presented as a paradox: the triviality of the man is set against the enormity of his deeds. In Miss Arendt's view, the man in charge of transporting Jews to death camps was "neither perverted nor sadistic" but an "average" man "terribly and terrifyingly normal." Eichmann "was not a 'monster', but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown." His empty, irrelevant and "self-elating" clichés, displayed "the undeniable ludicrousness of the man." Eichmann's vices of the everyday variety—bragging, careerism and social climbing, pose Miss Arendt's paradox most sharply.

         This paradox is, of course, a challenge to common sense. One does not usually judge a man apart from his deeds. But as Miss Arendt has it, in this case, customary ways of thinking are inadequate. The Jerusalem Court, following ordinary standards, could not see what was displayed in the person of the accused: the banality of evil. To her Eichmann paradox Miss Arendt adds another, also ignored by the court: the readiness of Jewish leaders to cooperate with Eichmann, to assist in the murder of their own People.

    I

         THOSE WHO ARE FAMILIAR with Miss Arendt's earlier work, The Origins of Totalitarianism will recognize the outlines of her Eichmann portrait. In that book she argued that at a later stage of the totalitarian movement, normal men replaced the "armed bohemians" of the early period. The normal philistines were capable of even greater crimes than the so-called criminals. While Miss Arendt's theory of the totalitarian mentality presumably inspired her portrait of Eichmann, this of course does not prove that her image of Eichmann is a true one. Quite the contrary, if Miss Arendt's theory is contradicted by the facts about Eichmann, one may suspect that it will not hold up in other instances either.

         Miss Arendt introduces psychiatric evidence to bolster her impression of Eichmann's normalcy:

    Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as "normal." "More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him." one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters and friends, was "not only normal but most desirable." (p. 22) (Italics added.)

          One wonders why Eichmann was "certified" as normal. The only certification which the court required was not that Eichmann was normal but that he was legally sane otherwise they could not have tried him. My suspicion that Miss Arendt is blurring the distinction between psychological normalcy and legal sanity is confirmed by her comment on an article by Gideon Hausner, Israel's Attorney General:

    Mr. Hausner's recent revelations in the Saturday Evening Post of things he "could not bring out at the trial" have contradicted the information given informally in Jerusalem. Eichmann, we are now told, had been alleged by the psychiatrists to be "a man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill," "a perverted, sadistic personality." In which case he would have belonged in an insane asylum. (pp. 22-23) (Italics added.)

         Miss Arendt is wrong by legal standards. Sadists and killers are not sent by courts to insane asylums. If they are pronounced legally sane, that is capable of distinguishing right front wrong, they stand trial. Moreover, Hausner's report flatly contradicts Miss Arendt's psychological picture of Eichmann. She seems to be complaining that Hausner did not bring this information into the trial. But she had the information when she wrote this book. Its relevance to her thesis is not impaired by the passage of time. And why her use of the phrase "alleged by the psychiatrists" in her comment on Hausner's report? If psychiatric opinion belongs in the disreputable category of what is "alleged" then what is the value of the psychiatrists' statements Miss Arendt cites to support her own view of Eichmann? One wonders too where Miss Arendt obtained the psychiatrists' statements that she prefers. In the first passage quoted she gives away her source: "one of them was said to have exclaimed." Is this hearsay evidence what Miss Arendt means by the information given "informally" in Jerusalem? As for the psychiatrist who supposedly found Eichmann's attitude toward his friends and .family "not only normal but most desirable," speculation about her source for this information is unnecessary. Surely, Miss Arendt can recognize the sadistic, murderous psychopath who is good to his mother.

         One of Hausner's articles (Saturday Evening Post, November 3, 1962) contains a most striking piece of evidence concerning Eichmann's personality. Unlike Miss Arendt, Hausner supplied his readers with the name of the psychiatrist who wrote a report on Eichmann: L. Szondi, inventor of the test bearing his name.

         Hausner stated that Eichmann was given the Szondi test in Israel and the material was sent to Szondi for interpretation. The identity of the subject was not revealed to him. In his reply Szondi "started by saying that he never analyzed tests of people who had not been identified for him but then added that when he'd glanced briefly at the results they were so extraordinary that he performed a complete analysis. The person who'd taken the test, he declared, revealed in all phases 'a man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill, arising out of a desire for power.'" Szondi reported that in twenty-four years of practice as a criminal psychologist, he had never found such uniform results.

         Miss Arendt, having read Hausner's article, knew the facts about the Szondi test. She did not, however, pass this information on to her readers. As an investigator, Miss Arendt had the responsibility of reporting and appraising evidence which challenged her own opinions.

    Eichmann, a Man Who Didn't Hate Jews

         Let it be borne in mind that Eichmann was really trying to defend himself in the Jerusalem Court. Miss Arendt might have considered this when she wrote that: "his was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind." (p. 23)

         Her sole evidence for this is what Eichmann said before his Jewish accusers. Did Miss Arendt think that if Eichmann hated Jews he was going to tell it to the Jewish court? On the basis of this sort of evidence, none of the leading Nazis tried at Nuremberg hated Jews. Like Eichmann, they denied it. Indeed, Julius Streicher proclaimed himself to be a Zionist.

         Miss Arendt reports that Eichmann said to his fellow Nazis: "I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction." Here is how Miss Arendt explains such a strange source of satisfaction for a normal man who did not really hate Jews:

         In his mind, there was no contradiction between "I will jump into my grave laughing," appropriate for the end of the war, and "I shall gladly hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth," which now, under vastly different circumstances, fulfilled exactly the same function of giving him a lift. (p. 48) (Italics added.)

         The "vastly different circumstances" are that he did not say "I will jump into my grave laughing" before his Jewish accusers. Instead he offered to hang himself as an example to anti-Semites. This should have warned Miss Arendt that anything he told the court concerning his attitude toward Jews was suspect.

         How does Miss Arendt explain the fact that Eichmann joined the Austrian Nazi party in 1932? After all, anti-Semitism was a rather prominent feature of Nazi propaganda. She writes:

    "A leaf in the whirlwind of time . . . he did not enter the Party out of conviction, nor was he ever convinced by it . . ." as he pointed out in court, "it was like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectations and without previous decision. It happened so quickly and suddenly." . . . he did not even know the Party program, he never read Mein Kampf. Kaltenbrunner had said to him: Why not join the S.S.? And he replied, Why not? (p. 29)

         All this is rather negative. Were there positive reasons for Eichmann's joining the Nazi party?

    Of course that was not all there was to it. . . . From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him—already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well—could start from scratch and still make a career. (p. 29)

         Why should Miss Arendt's readers believe that "he did not enter the Party out of conviction, nor was he ever convinced by it?" Her supporting evidence is culled exclusively from Eichmann's self-defense.

         Eichmann's friend, Dr. Kaltenbrunner, who brought him into the Nazi party, was a leader of the Austrian Nazi movement and an organizer of the S.S. The Dolfuss government imprisoned him for sedition. Was he, too, without Nazi convictions? Did this leader of the S.S. keep the Nazi program secret from his friend, Eichmann? Miss Arendt notes, but does not really notice, that Eichmann had been a member of the youth section of a "violently pro-German and anti-republican, German-Austrian organization of war veterans." (p. 28) The wind that blew Eichmann, this "leaf in the whirlwind of time," into the Nazi movement did not have to blow very hard.

         Miss Arendt's account of Eichmann's early years in the Nazi movement casts doubt on her notion that Eichmann "did not enter the Party out of conviction. . ." In 1934, Eichmann applied successfully for a job in Himmler's S.D.* The activities of the S.D. were top secret. How could this Nazi organization draw Eichmann, a recent recruit, into its top secret operations if he showed no signs of political convictions? Within a few months, Miss Arendt recounts; "he was put into the brand-new department concerned with Jews." (p. 33) Is it conceivable that Eichmann was given this assignment without having indicated that he had a "proper" attitude toward Jews?

         The picture Miss Arendt sketches of Eichmann's entry into the Nazi party may not be entirely false. A person may find a role in a political movement attractive because it gives "significance and consequence" to his life. But this attitude is not an alternative to political conviction. On the contrary, those who have such motives are most in need of justifying reasons. They are most anxious to be convinced. The dullest Communist who finds a role for himself in the Party knows and believes the Party line.

    Eichmann as a Loyal Follower of Hitler's Orders

         If Eichmann had no fanatical hatred of Jews, what brought him to accept his role in their murder? Miss Arendt explains: "this was the new law of the land based on the Fuhrer's order; whatever he did he did as far as he could see as a law-abiding citizen." (p. 120) This is also Eichmann's self-portrait and once again Miss Arendt is convinced by his testimony. Indeed, as she has it, Eichmann prompted by conscience continued to murder Jews at the end of the war even when other Nazis, like Himmler, faltered. Himmler became "moderate" in the hope that he could assume a role in the peace. But "probably . . . his [Eichmann's] very conscience . . . prompted 'Eichmann to adopt his uncompromising attitude." (p. 131) Eichmann remained loyal to Hitler's orders. Miss Arendt displays Eichmann's conscience at work during the deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944. The episode she describes is most interesting. In her version of the incident, Eichmann is seen as a loyal follower of Hitler's orders. But the facts exhibit not Eichmann's conscience or his obedience to Hitler's orders but his fanatical hatred for Jews. Here is Miss Arendt's tale of the loyal Eichmann struggling against Hitler's agreement with Horthy for the emigration of Jews from Hungary:

    When Himmler's order to stop 'the evacuation of Hungarian Jews arrived in Budapest, Eichmann threatened, according to a telegram from Veesenmayer [Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary] "to seek a new decision from the Führer . . ." (p. 131)

         Why did Eichmann have to seek a new decision from Hitler? The picture becomes clarified if one reads more of the Veesenmayer telegram from which Miss Arendt has torn a quotation:

    Eichmann took the position that as far as he knew Reichfuhrer SS (Himmler) did not at all agree to the emigration of Hungarian Jews to Palestine. The Jews concerned are all biologically valuable material . . . He says he intends in regard to the Fuhrer's decision about which he was informed to report to Reichfuhrer SS (Himmler) and if necessary to seek a new decision from the Führer. . . [2]

         So it is Hitler, not Himmler, whose decision Eichmann opposed! Indeed, Eichmann used Himmler's authority to back him up against Hitler. The very document that Miss Arendt quotes shatters her picture of Eichmann as merely a loyal follower of Hitler. Notice, too, that the Hitler directive which Eichmann protests grants emigration to Hungarian Jews. Why did Hitler make this concession? "Hitler agreed to the emigration of several thousand Hungarian Jews, on condition that Horthy should hand over the rest of the Jews of Hungary (especially the Jews of Budapest) to the Germans." [3] This is the decision that Eichmann opposed: a concession of several thousand Jewish lives (the actual figure was 7,000 families) in order to achieve the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Even Hitler was willing to make that concession. Not Eichmann. No Jews were going to live if he could help it.

         Eichmann did more than protest Hitler's order. According to Veesenmayer, Eichmann decided that "to the extent that further deportations of Jews from Budapest would be agreed to, the attempt shall be made to carry them out as suddenly and as speedily as possible so that those Jews eligible for emigration would have been deported before the formalities had been concluded." So Eichmann not only opposed Hitler's order, he planned to block its implementation. Jews eligible for emigration would already have been deported to gas chambers when emigration negotiations were completed.

         This is the man whom Miss Arendt sketches as a law-abiding citizen, loyal, out of conscience, to Hitler, but free of hatred for Jews. But the real Eichmann was a killer, ready to take the initiative even against Hitler's order, so that no Jews should live.

         Miss Arendt's tale that Eichmann was without fanatical hatred of Jews seemed initially implausible and turns out to be plainly false. She does not, however, confine herself to insistence on his lack of hatred for Jews. It seems that Eichmann had some positive ideas on the Jewish problem.

    Eichmann as a Zionist

         Miss Arendt informs her readers that Eichmann, early in his career, was required "to read Theodor Herzl's Judenstaat, the famous Zionist classic, which converted Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism." (p. 36)

         It is hard to believe that Miss Arendt means what she says. Is she being ironic? On the contrary, her own comments on Zionism would suggest that Eichmann's conversion is quite believable. Throughout her book she shows similarities and points of converging interest between Zionism and Nazism. The unwary reader who knows nothing of Zionism would have no reason to question Eichmann's acceptance of Zionist views. For example, in the early period, official Nazi policy favored emigration of Jews to Palestine.

         Miss Arendt comments on this policy:

    During its first few years, Hitler's rise to power appeared to the Zionist chiefly as 'the decisive defeat of assimilationism." . . . the Zionists too believed that "dissimilation," combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a "mutually fair solution." At the time, many German officials held this opinion. To be sure, no prominent Nazi ever spoke publicly in this vein . . . (pp. 54.55)

         Miss Arendt refers to the early pre-extermination period in Nazi Germany as the "pro-Zionist" stage. She calls upon Hans Lamm to support her characterization: "For 'it is indisputable that during the first stages of their Jewish policy, the National Socialists thought it proper to adopt a pro-Zionist attitude' (Hans Lamm)" (p. 53). She reports that Jews who returned to Vienna after forced expulsion "were registered in the police records as 'returning from vocational training'" and describes this registration as a "curious relapse into the pro-Zionist stage of the [Nazi] movement." (p. 70) She points out that "it was during these first stages that Eichmann learned his lessons about Jews." (p. 53) and finds that "it is worth noting that his schooling in Jewish affairs was almost entirely concerned with Zionism." (p. 37) She also discovers an affinity of language and attitudes between Eichmann and Zionist representatives:

    These Jews from Palestine spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann. They had been sent to Europe by the communal settlements in Palestine and they were not interested in rescue operations. . . They wanted to select "suitable material." (p. 53)

         Miss Arendt insists that Eichmann's "first personal contacts with Jewish functionaries, all of them well-known Zionists of long standing, were thoroughly satisfactory (p. 37) and records his admiration for the Hungarian Zionist, Rudolf Kastner, with whom he negotiated in 1944:

    The greatest "idealist" Eichmann ever encountered among the Jews was Dr. Rudolf Kastner, with whom be negotiated during the Jewish deportations front Hungary and with whom he came to an agreement. . . . The few thousand saved by the agreement, prominent Jews and members of the Zionist youth organizations, were, in Eichmann's words "the best biological material." Dr. Kastner, as Eichmann understood it, had sacrificed his fellow-Jews to his "idea," and this was as it should be. (pp. 37-38)

         The implication is clear enough. Both leading Nazis and leading Zionists were concerned with saving "the best biological material."

         To sum up: Miss Arendt's story is that during the early "pro-Zionist" stage of the Nazi regime, when many Nazi officials privately thought Zionism a "mutually fair solution" to the Jewish problem, Eichmann "learned his lessons about the Jews." She discovers a similarity of language and political methods between Eichmann, a Nazi, and Zionist functionaries whom Eichmann admired, even as late as 1944, In other words, Miss Arendt claims that Eichmann simply swallowed the pro-Zionism of the early Nazi period and in his typically ludicrous fashion never gave it up. Getting "some firm ground under the feet of the Jews" remained fixed in this clown's mind as a proper solution to the Jewish question even in the era of the Final Solution.

         One of Miss Arendt's troubles is her conception of Zionism. It is surely obvious that a Zionist is someone who believes that an independent Jewish state will serve Jewish interests. Yet Miss Arendt does not find Eichmann's 1939 Nisko project inconsistent with his Zionist opinions—although that project called for a "Jewish state" in an area without water and ridden with cholera, dysentery and typhoid. The earlier Nazi policy was to rob Jews and let them emigrate to Palestine for there were few countries which would accept Jewish emigrants. This is the stage that Miss Arendt consistently characterizes as "pro-Zionist." Were the anti-Semitic hooligans who chased Jews in the streets of Eastern Europe yelling "Go back to Palestine" also pro-Zionist? The directive to allow Jews to leave Germany for Palestine came from Hitler after he had studied not the Zionist classic, Der Judenstaat, but a Nazi tract of Alfred Rosenberg's on the racial question. Was Hitler also pro-Zionist?

         There was evidence, real evidence, at the trial concerning the nature of Eichmann's "Zionism." In 1937, Eichmann and a journalist from his office, Herbert Hagen, met with a Haganah man in Cairo. Here is Miss Arendt on the incident:

    . . . according to Eichmann, what he [the Haganah man] told them there became the subject of a "thoroughly negative report" Eichmann and Hagen were ordered by their superiors to write for propaganda purposes; this was duly published. (p. 57)

         But Miss Arendt does not repeat what was stated in this report, although the court paid great attention to it. Here is a statement from the Eichmann-Hagen report of 1937:

    Since the above mentioned program of 50,000 Jews per year would chiefly strengthen Jewry in Palestine, this plan is out of the question in order to avoid the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. [4]

         Not a word from Miss Arendt to indicate the plainly anti-Zionist character of the Eichmann-Hagen report, or the attitude taken by the court toward it. Eichmann tried to defend himself by claiming that the report had been written by Hagen, not himself. Eichmann's own handwritten corrections and signature were taken by the court as proof of his responsibility. A strange Zionist, this Eichmann, who opposes an independent Jewish state in Palestine!

         A most tantalizing contradiction now appears in Miss Arendt's view of Eichmann. She has sketched him as a mediocrity who is "no case" of "indoctrination of any kind." He exemplifies the totalitarian personality who, without ideological convictions, does anything he is ordered to. But in discussing Eichmann's attitudes toward the Jewish question she informs her readers of his conversion to Zionism. So Eichmann did have political ideas and opinions! Side by side with her portrait of Eichmann the totalitarian personality who, with no convictions of his own blindly follows orders stands a different version: Eichmann, the early convert to Zionist opinion, who sends Jews to the gas chambers. The contradiction between these two portraits (both false) goes unrecognized by Miss Arendt. Yet, her notion that Eichmann exemplifies the totalitarian mentality is the major theme of her book. Did her persistent desire to link Zionist and Nazi attitudes render her deaf to her own discord?

    Eichmann as a Banal Mediocrity

         Miss Arendt's paradox of Eichmann—the contradiction between the nature of the man and the nature of his deeds—can only be maintained against the facts. Her paradox is itself a warning of the author's indifference to living fact. What Eichmann did belonged to his life. To separate a man from his actions is to deny that the life he lives is his own. Eichmann lived as a Hitlerite. Why should one imagine that his mentality remained unaffected by his deeds which were Nazi deeds, served Nazi purposes and could only be justified in his mind by Nazi ideology? Miss Arendt's notion of Eichmann is a timeless abstraction, not a living history. She traces the role Eichmann filled in his lifetime: an unemployed salesman, a lowly bureaucrat, a high-ranking Nazi organizer of Jewish extermination, an outlaw in hiding among Nazis in Argentina, the accused in the Jerusalem courtroom. She follows his life but never sees it as a development, a history, never suggests that the different roles he assumed had any effect on him. Someone who saw Eichmann in the thirties, handling Jewish emigration, might have summed him up as a banal and trivial bureaucrat. But the limitation of the summary is the limitation of the circumstance. That situation did not bring out—what must have been there already—a capacity for mass murder. That capacity was realized in his crime. It was Eichmann the man who became a mass murderer.

         A witness at the trial described a transformation in Eichmann's personality in 1939 when he assumed executive powers:

    "I immediately told my friends that I did not know whether I was meeting the same man. So terrible was the change. Here I met a man who comported himself as a master of life and death. He received us with insolence and rudeness.." (p. 59)

         Miss Arendt finds this notion of Eichmann's transformation too "simple" (p. 59). Yet her own portrait is notably devoid of complexity. She records no change in Eichmann at any point in his career or its aftermath. From her picture of Eichmann one could never recognize the man who was in fact "a master of life and death." That time had long past when he stood in the Jerusalem courtroom. It should have occurred to Miss Arendt that the defeated Nazi she saw in the courtroom was no longer a master of life and death. Murderers are invariably dwarfed when they stand, not among their henchmen, but on trial before their judges. A murderer must appear even more insignificant when his defense, like Eichmann's pleads his smallness. The trivial proportions Miss Arendt gives him come closer to the shrunken Eichmann of the trial. To serve her timeless picture of the banal Nazi philistine, Miss Arendt seeks out details to cut Eichmann down to the size she has selected:

    In the disorganized, rambling notes he made in Argentina . . . every line of these scribblings shows his utter ignorance of everything that was not directly, technically and bureaucratically connected with his job, and also shows an extraordinarily faulty memory. (p. 49)

         She finds that his bad memory "must have plagued him even in school—it amounted to a mild case of aphasia." (p. 43)

         I am willing to believe that Eichmann's capacities declined after he had fallen from power. They may have declined even further in Jerusalem. But to describe Eichmann for history as a man who wrote "disorganized, rambling notes" and had an "extraordinarily faulty memory," indeed a mild case of aphasia is simply wild. He was a high-ranking German administrator, cited in promotion for executive ability. The efficient system he created for handling and swindling Jewish emigrants was held up as a model for the expanded Reich. Consider Miss Arendt's description of some of the "difficulties" that came with his role in organizing the Final Solution:

    . . . the difficulty in synchronizing departures and arrivals, the endless worry . . . over fixing timetables and directing trains to centers with sufficient "absorptive capacity," over having enough Jews on hand at the proper time so that no trains would be "wasted," . . . over following the rules and directives with respect to the various categories of Jews which were laid down separately for each country and constantly changing—all this became a routine. . . . (p. 137)

         The monster had a very good memory. I take this to be indisputable.

         Miss Arendt, her eyes focused on the Eichmann of the courtroom sees him as an exemplification of the banality of evil. Did she forget the following incident which took place during the deportation of Slovakian Jews? Reports that deported Jews were being murdered circulated in Slovakia. A scheme to counteract these reports was devised by the camp command in Auschwitz and the Eichmann Referat of the RSHA. Jews on arrival in Auschwitz were encouraged to write postcards to their families and friends. After they had been murdered, the cards were sent out in small batches to create the impression that the writers were still alive. Eichmann, replying to a Foreign Office communication concerning a request from the Slovakian Prime Minister for an inspection of one of the camps, wrote:

    . . . to counteract the fantastic rumors circulating in Slovakia about the fate of the evacuated Jews, attention should be drawn to the postal communications of these Jews with Slovakia, which are forwarded directly through the advisor on Jewish affairs with the German Legation in Bratislava [Wisliceny] and which, incidentally, amounted to more than 1000 letters and postcards for February-March this year. [5]

         Had Miss Arendt reflected on this communication she might have concluded, that its author, Adolph Eichmann exemplified not the banality, but the cunning of evil.

    II

         MISS ARENDT'S NOTION of the Jewish leaders is also paradoxical. One would expect to find that a good many Jewish leaders facing Nazism had behaved with some concern for their fellow Jews. Instead, Miss Arendt claims Jewish leaders cooperated to an extraordinary degree with the Nazis. She writes:

    But the whole truth was that there existed Jewish community organizations and Jewish party and welfare organizations on both the local and the international level. Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. (p. 111) . . . he [Eichmann] did expect more than compliance, be expected—and received, to a truly extraordinary degree—their cooperation. This was "of course the very corner stone" of everything he did. . . . To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. . . . (p. 104)

         Miss Arendt's paradox of Jewish cooperation in the destruction of the Jews is even more implausible than her Eichmann paradox. Her readers are asked to believe that "wherever Jews lived," that is in every country, city and village where six million Jews had lived, recognized Jewish leaders, "almost without exception" served in the murder of their fellow Jews. The very uniformity of her picture renders it suspect. Against Miss Arendt's extraordinary notion of "extraordinary" Jewish cooperation, I would suggest an alternative, not so contradictory to common sense expectation. The Jews of Europe were heterogeneous and the reaction of their leaders to Nazism ranged from terrorized submission to heroic resistance. The strength of their response depended on their situation, personal qualities, traditions, and political habits. Is it farfetched to think that once it became clear that the Nazis were bent on murdering the whole Jewish people, a good many Jewish leaders showed "extraordinary" heroism?

         I should also like to flatly deny Miss Arendt's startling assertion that Jewish cooperation was essential to the Final Solution. Hitler did not regard himself in any area of his activities as a Jewish dependent.

    The Indispensability of Jewish Cooperation

         Miss Arendt claims that without the assistance of Jewish officials and Jewish police in the extermination, "there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower." (p. 104) Yet she fails to consider the fact that the first wave of Nazi mobile death vans in Russian territory killed half a million Jews without the assistance of Jewish officials. In this "complete chaos" one hundred thousand Jews a month were murdered. Alter the first wave, Jewish councils were appointed in a few -localities where forced labor was temporarily employed. This had no effect whatsoever on the extermination drive in Russia. Moreover, why should one believe that without the manpower of Jewish officials—who by a generous estimate numbered in the thousands—there would have been an impossibly severe drain on German manpower? Hitler most certainly would not have regarded such a drain on German manpower as impossibly severe. He exterminated six million Jews, an enormous reservoir of labor, at the height of the war, when the labor shortage was acute. The fate of the Nazi regime depended on its war machine and Nazi officials intrigued to save essential Jewish labor. Yet Hitler ordered the deportation of Jewish workers from armament factories. An important manpower consideration, Jewish labor, did not count in the balance against Hitler's insane desire to murder all the Jews of Europe. Miss Arendt's claim that the replacement of Jewish officials in the extermination program would have created "an impossibly severe drain on German manpower" is most astonishing in The Origins of Totalitarianism she wrote: "Neither military, nor economic, nor political considerations were allowed to interfere with the costly and troublesome program of mass extermination and deportations." [6]

    The Jewish Leadership

         What does Miss Arendt mean when she asserts that Jewish leaders gave "more than compliance" to the Nazis, that they cooperated to a "truly extraordinary degree"? In what sense is she using the term "cooperate"? Negotiation, compliance or submission performed under extreme duress can—if the context is made clear —be described as "cooperation." is Miss Arendt using "cooperation" in this somewhat extended sense of the word? If so, what are her criteria for distinguishing normal from extraordinary cooperation in the face of Nazi terror? She never explains her conception of normal cooperation under such conditions. Miss Arendt cannot imagine that Jewish cooperation was freely offered. This would indeed have been extraordinary cooperation. She knows that those Jewish leaders who cooperated "in one way or another" were in all ways—themselves and their communities—under the duress of Nazi terror. At any rate, let it be said that some Jewish leaders—not the majority—"cooperated." The Hungarian Jewish community leaders personally terrorized by threats of Dachau and immediate execution, complied with Nazi orders and counseled the Jews against the consequences of resistance.

         Although Rabbi Leo Baeck ordered passive resistance in Thereisenstadt when death for anyone taken was certain, he "cooperated" up to that point. He was not personally terrorized for he had many opportunities to leave Germany and escape Nazi persecution; yet he refused to desert the German Jews. But he saw no way of helping Jewish deportees except to make the ordeal easier. Hence he "cooperated" by deciding that "Jewish orderlies should help pick up Jews for deportation . . . because they would be more gentle and helpful than the Gestapo." [7]

         Now let us turn to the other side of the story: the non "cooperative" Jewish leaders. The response of Jewish leaders in Eastern Europe is a significant test of Miss Arendt's thesis. Of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, three and a half million were the Jews of pre-war Poland. Moreover, the Polish Jews were organized in their own political parties. Let us see if Miss Arendt's picture of "extraordinary" cooperation in which "there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish speaking masses of the East" accords with the facts. (p. 104)

         The late Philip Friedman, a Columbia historian who undertook a compilation of literature on the Jewish catastrophe, reported that "there were underground movements of General Zionists, Socialist-Zionists, Hashomer Hatzair, Revisionists, Mizrachi and the Bund." [8] The largest Jewish party in impoverished pre-war Poland was the Jewish Labor Bund. In the municipal elections before the war the Bund "scored a great victory over all other Jewish parties." [9] When the Nazis occupied Poland they immediately arrested "recognized" Bundist leaders in Warsaw, Lodz and other cities. Bundists carried on illegal trade union organization and underground resistance throughout the Nazi occupation. The Bund maintained a political opposition to the Nazi organized Judenräte (Jewish Councils) almost from the beginning. When the Warsaw Judenrat was formed, its chairman demanded that the Bund supply a labor representative. Arthur Zyglboim, Bundist delegate to the Polish National Council** and a member of the 1939 Committee for the Defense of Warsaw, who had undergone arrest as a hostage, joined the Council for a short period. He threw in his resignation when the Judenrat submitted to the formation of a Jewish Ghetto. Zyglboim addressed a crowd of over ten thousand Jews in the streets of Nazi occupied Warsaw.

         In the name of the Jewish trade unions and the Bund, he told the people to keep up their courage, to refuse to go into a ghetto and to resist if the were forced to do so. . . [10]

         The name of this extraordinarily uncooperative Jewish leader does not appear in Miss Arendt's book.

         In Eastern Poland Jewish political leaders had been killed or imprisoned by the Soviet occupation before the Nazi invasion. Three and a half million Polish Jews were murdered without the "cooperation" in any sense whatsoever of the major pre-war Jewish political leadership. Yet Miss Arendt would have her readers believe that Jewish leaders and Jewish party organizations "almost without exception" cooperated with the Nazis. The fact is that the ghetto resistance against the Nazis in Eastern Europe was spearheaded by Jewish organizations. The Zionists and Bundist parties and their youth organizations, together with Communists, formed the resistance organization that led the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto. In Bialystok a bloc of Jewish parties, the "Anti-fascist committee," together with their youth movements prepared armed action in defense of the ghetto. In Vilna an "Emergency Committee" representing the Jewish parties set up a ghetto combat force, the "United Partisan Organization." Resistance in Lemberg remained weak. Why?

    These brave efforts never eventuated into a real large-scale insurrection on the model of Warsaw, Bialystok, Czestochowa and others. This was due in part to the fact that the Germans were more thorough in Lemberg in eliminating the leaders of the community. Without proper leadership, organized resistance was bound to be futile. [11]

         Miss Arendt finds the absence of testimony at the Eichmann trial concerning cooperation between Jewish leaders and Nazi rulers to be "the gravest omission from the 'general picture'." (p.110) Yet the gravest omission from her "general picture" is her failure to mention the "extraordinary" heroism of so many "recognized Jewish leaders." Emmanuel Ringelblum, a Labor-Zionist leader, "one of a triumvirate representing his party in Warsaw, was an underground fighter. [12] He and two other resistance leaders rejected an offer of rescue from the Polish government-in-exile. They answered, "We must fulfill our duty to society." Ringelblum stayed with the remnant of Polish Jewry and was murdered by the Gestapo. Abrasha Blum was the first ranking Jewish Bundist leader under the Nazi occupation Blum, a sick man, fought unarmed against Nazi soldiers in the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. Nathan Widavsky, a leading Zionist of Lodz, took his life lest he reveal under torture the names of his underground acquaintances. Rabbis Zemba, Stockhammer and Shapiro, the last three rabbis to remain alive in Warsaw refused to abandon their congregations for the safety guaranteed them by the Court of Bishops. In Warsaw, Mordechai Anielewicz, a twenty-four year old leader of the Hashomer Hatzair, was the commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

         I do not intend to commit an absurdity—parallel to Miss Arendt's—and claim that all or even most Jewish leaders in Eastern Europe were heroes. Yet her wholesale damning of Jewish leaders, as Quislings who cooperated in the Final Solution seems willfully ignorant. A glance at the history of modern East European Jewry could have warned her against her own pronouncements. For decades before the Nazi occupation Jewish leaders had battled anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. They organized Jewish self-defense units that fought on the streets of East European cities with anti-Semitic hoodlums and pogromists. Two years before the war, anti-Semetic regulations in Polish universities were authorized by the government. Jewish leaders organized nation-wide protest strikes in which every Jewish worker laid down his tools. How could anyone believe for a moment that Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations bred to a militant stance against anti-Semitism would become "instruments of murder" in the slaughter of Jews. (p. 105)

         Let it be noted that the name of not a single "recognized" East European Jewish leader appears in Miss Arendt's book. Not one. Miss Arendt, who proclaims the cooperation of "recognized" Jewish leaders "almost without exception," did not produce a single name from Eastern Europe—where millions of Jews lived—to support her story. She refers to Judenrat officials, the Nazi-appointed councilmen, and declares that "whereas the members of the Quisling governments were usually taken from the opposition parties the members of the Jewish Councils were as a rule the locally recognized Jewish leaders." (p. 104) In Eastern Europe, where the majority of Jews were located, the reverse is true.

    "Locally Recognized Jewish Leaders"?

         Miss Arendt mentions two Polish Judenrat Chairmen, Adam Czerniakow in Warsaw and Chaim Rumkowski in Lodz. Her references are worth pursuing, for there were three-quarters of a million Jews in Warsaw and Lodz. The fact is that neither of these men was a "recognized" Jewish leader. Czerniakow was a "little-known leader in the Artisan's Union." [13] Under his chairmanship the Warsaw Judenrat degenerated into a "gang of operators and swindlers," despised by the starving Jewish population. [14] In Lodz, no recognized Jewish leaders offered to serve in the Nazi-organized Judenrat. Rumkowski and two others were appointed. Thus Rumkowski, a small welfare official, emerged from obscurity and whispers of corruption to become dictator of the Lodz Ghetto. In the early days of his despotism, there were strikes and public demonstrations of protest. Rumkowski asked the Nazis for troops to shoot down Jewish demonstrators. [15] Miss Arendt refers to Rumkowski as a Jewish leader. She fails, however, to inform her readers that it was not the Jews of Lodz but the Nazis who raised him to prominence.

         The Judenräte of Eastern Europe were not usually elected by the Jewish population. They were Nazi appointed bodies. Moreover, the councils had a history and a development—something one would never imagine from Miss Arendt's timeless picture.

         At the beginning, when no one could suspect that the Jews were to be exterminated there were some with diverse political backgrounds who saw participation in the councils as a social obligation. It "was a question of responsibility for the life of the community." [16] There had to be some machinery for distributing the starvation rations, procuring funds for schools and hospitals, etc. This sort of "cooperation" was not confined to the Jews. Throughout Europe local governments engaged in day-to-day administrative relations with the Nazi occupation.

         But the caliber of the Judenräte deteriorated as Nazi administrators brought in "weak and corrupt" people, Friedman reported.

    I have in my possession material relating to Poland and other countries testifying to repeated dismissals, deportations or executions of the members of the Judenrat by the Nazis—even several times in a single town. In one town, Belchatow, near Lodz, the member, of the Judenrat were thus changed eight times. This was a sort of "negative selection." The Germans sought weak and corrupt characters, and continued their search until they found a suitable person. Among the members of the first Judenrat of this town (Belchatow) there were still a number of persons guided by a sense of social responsibility. Consequently, they were executed. The same thing happened in other places. [17]

         Officials from the First Lodz Judenrat were tortured, blackmailed and sent to a punishment camp. The chairman of the Lemberg Council, Josef Parnas was executed for refusing to increase the contingent of forced labor deliveries. Friedman sums up the results of "negative selection"—the Judenräte were staffed with "men utterly unfit to assume any social responsibility."

         Miss Arendt's assertion that the Jewish Councils were made up as a rule of locally recognized Jewish leaders, fails to accord with the facts. But in denying her contention, I am not implicitly endorsing her notion of the Councils as Quislings who cooperated in the Jewish extermination. There is, after all, a considerable moral gap between a corrupt, incompetent or ruthless official and one who would assume this role in the unparalleled crime of exterminating his own people. Consider that Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the graft-ridden Warsaw Council, committed suicide when the Nazis raised the quota of Jews to be deported. The tendency of Judenrat officials to commit suicide is an index of the desperation that beset the Councils.

         Take this passage from a speech by Jacob Gens, Chairman of the Vilna Jewish Council, to a meeting in the ghetto.

    If I am asked to supply a thousand Jews, I do it, because it we, Jews, will not supply, the Germans will come and take with violence not a thousand but thousands. . . . In order to enable a remnant to survive. . . . I had to plunge into dirt and act without conscience. [18]

         I would like to know the political or moral view that Miss Arendt would have proposed at the time, had she been in Jacob Gens' position. In her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, she wrote:

    The alternative (under totalitarianism) is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed? (p. 452)

         Did Miss Arendt mean what she wrote then? Does she mean now in her Eichmann in Jerusalem, that it would have been better to choose murdering the many rather than to murder a portion in the hope of saving some? Or does she feel free to castigate Judenrat officials because she knows now that their policy didn't work? It is to be noted that at the time Jewish underground fighters violently objected to Jacob Gens' view. They were for resistance, the only alternative. But the political lesson of Miss Arendt's book on totalitarianism was that in a totalitarian society, resistance is impossible. Even today Miss Arendt does not say that resistance was possible. She berates those who ask why the Jews didn't fight back as "cruel and silly." (p. 9) I will not go so far as to say that Miss Arendt's attack on the Judenräte is cruel and silly. But where in her book is there a consideration of these Jewish councilmen trapped in the inferno of Nazism that is sympathetic and serious?

    The Jewish People

         Miss Arendt selects from the Jewish ranks a special group of cooperators. She writes:

    The well-known fact that the actual work of killing in the extermination centers was usually in the hands of Jewish commandos had been fairly and squarely established by witnesses for the prosecution—how they had worked in the gas chambers and the crematories, how they had pulled the gold teeth and cut the hair of the corpses, how they had dug the graves and later, dug them up again to extinguish the traces of mass murder… (p. 109)

         According to Jacob Robinson, special assistant to the prosecution at the Eichmann trial, no worries for the prosecution testified that Jews did 'the actual work of killing in the extermination centers." Jewish death commandos, the "most pitiable wretches," worked on the corpses while the extermination machinery was operated by S.S. men and Ukrainian guards. [19] But let us give Miss Arendt the benefit of the doubt. She thinks that she heard otherwise. Earlier in her book Miss Arendt endorses David Rousset's account of the effect of concentration camp existence on the inmates. The victim is destroyed "to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity." (p. 9) Yet Miss Arendt does not hesitate to affirm the identity of these death commando victims as Jews.

         Miss Arendt, who is so ready to detail the "cooperation" of the Jewish death commandos says very little about the activities of the Jewish resistance. She emphasizes in her brief remarks how "incredibly weak and essentially harmless" the resistance groups had been and "how little they had represented the Jewish population." (p. 108) How, one wonders, did the ghetto revolts take place?

    And the witnesses in Jerusalem… confirmed once more the fact that only the very young had been capable of taking "the decision that we cannot go and be slaughtered like sheep." (p. 10)

         Her view that only the very young could resist does not withstand a moment's reflection. Consider that before the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, the resistance organization won governmental power from the Judenrat, levied taxes to buy arms, and prepared the battle. Can Miss Arendt imagine that the sixty thousand Jews still in the ghetto would have permitted some hundreds of youths to engage in a political and military insurrection unless, as Emanuel Ringelblum in fact noted in his diary, most were set on resistance. [20] The ghetto fighting force was, of course, composed primarily of youth. Only a tiny store of arms (including two machine guns) could be obtained; barely enough for the trained fighters-none for the rest of the population.

         Miss Arendt's stress on the "incredible" about the Jewish resistance was not its weakness, but, given the conditions under which Jews lived under Nazism, the strength of the will to fight. Acts of resistance brought massive and unspeakably brutal retaliation. The Nazis practiced "collective responsibility" hundreds of times. Yet there were large scale uprisings in Warsaw, Vilna ad Bialystok; a general strike in Lodz, revolts in Tarnov, Bendin, Czenstochow and Borislaw, partisan fighting, even a successful rebellion in the death camp of Treblinka.***

         Consider the condition of the sixty thousand Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. For years they had starved, slaved in murderous forced labor and listened to loudspeakers blaring news of Nazi victories. Twenty-five per cent of the population had died in the ghetto of starvation and disease. The official ration before the uprising was one hundred and eighty calories. Everyone knew that the revolt would be defeated. Yet they faced the Nazis with exemplary courage-the armed fighters and the population as well, "Every Jew in the ghetto was a soldier," writes Bernard Goldstein, an organizer of the revolt. Girls strapped hand grenades to their bodies in preparation for their last encounter with German soldiers. S.S. Major General Stroop noted the insane courage of the ghetto women. Thousands of people were burned alive when the Nazis set fire to factories. Yet workers threatened with the same fate refused to surrender. Miss Arendt refers to the glory of the Warsaw uprising and proceeds to deny that nay but the "very young" had a share in that glory. (pp.9-10) Yet the heroism of the willing to consign the population of the Warsaw ghetto to historical oblivion. They get in the way of her paradox of Jewish cooperation with Hitlerism-that paradox which is Miss Arendt's "scholarly" tale of Europe's murdered Jews.

    III

         WHY DOES MISS ARENDT promote paradoxes? Why does she insist that Eichmann was a normal, average man without anti-Semitic convictions and that Jewish leaders were necessary instruments of the Final Solution? Some may think Miss Arendt's portraits are imaginative sketches drawn by a philosopher. In my opinion, a paradox constructed in willful disregard of fact is a caricature of philosophy. Moreover, Miss Arendt does not claim to be a philosopher. She is a political thinker and it is in this context that her views should be understood.

         The implication of a political hypothesis for organized action is for those who are seriously concerned with political problems, a matter of first importance. Miss Arendt's will to the irrational has a definite implication for political action. In a world that is paradoxical, unpredictable and incomprehensible, rational political projects are doomed. And where reason and experience cannot guide us, intelligent organized action is impossible. This is the political point of Miss Arendt's penchant for paradox. She is an apostle of political doom, an opponent of organized action, an anti-ideological ideologue.

         The essence of her theory of totalitarianism is its incomprehensibility. (Can this even be called a theory?) In The Origins of Totalitarianism she stressed the inability of common sense to cope with the totalitarian movement whose aim was the realization of a "fictitious, topsy-turvy world." (p. 437) She wondered how many people, "once they have fully grasped their growing incapacity to bear the burdens of modern life, will gladly conform to a system that together with spontaneity, eliminates responsibility. . . . (p. 437) (Italics added.) Miss Arendt's suggestion that men might "gladly" conform to the most oppressive regime in history is, of course, contrary to rational expectations. It is also contrary to political hopes that are pinned on the desire of men to be free. Happily, this picture of masses "gladly" conforming to totalitarian terror was dramatically shattered by the revolts in Berlin, Hungary and Poland.

         At least one might have expected that Miss Arendt's voice of political doom would be softened after the Hungarian revolt, instead, in an essay. "Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution," (in the 1957 re-edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism) her first paragraph finds the revolution's greatness to be "secure in the tragedy it enacted." The reader is already warned that such action ends in tragedy! She immediately proceeds to describe some figures of the revolution. Who are they? The intellectuals who fired it? The youth who threw themselves before Russian tanks? The workers who took over the industrial plants? Not at all. Miss Arendt writes in this same first paragraph:

    …who can forget the silent procession of black-clad women in the streets of Russian-occupied Budapest, mourning their dead in public, the last political gesture of the revolution?

         This "last political gesture" brings forth Miss Arendt's first dark word on the glory of the Hungarian revolution. Her last word on the subject could have been predicted. In the closing paragraph of her essay she counsels that it would be "rather unwise" to expect the Hungarian revolt (which she never expected) to be paralleled in Russia.

         The paradoxes Miss Arendt foists on the readers of Eichmann in Jerusalem strike the same note of political doom. From the ranks of those average men on whom democratic aspirations rest, rises an Eichmann, the mass murderer while those who should have stood in organized opposition against him, the Jewish leaders, are shown as his accomplices.

         Miss Arendt's attitude toward political ideology, organization and leadership points up her anti-political views. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she declared all political ideologies to be incipiently totalitarian. (p. 458) In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Miss Arendt castigates Jewish ideological movements, organizations and leaders. Surveying the Jewish leaders who stood unaided against Nazism, she extends her approval only to "the few who committed suicide." (p. 105) She claims that had the Jews been "unorganized and leaderless" more would have survived. (p. 111) Could the political point be plainer?

         Miss Arendt proclaims her anti-political line openly in this book. After damning the German nation for its "moral debacle" (the same people, mind you, whom she had doomed to atomized impotence), Miss Arendt spots a good German: Sergeant Anton Schmidt, an officer who helped Jewish partisans. Miss Arendt swiftly draws a political lesson from his case.

         Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation. (p. 212) (Italics in original.)

         Let it be noted that when Europe's Jews were being murdered and the toll of Stalin's victims had reached millions, Miss Arendt's political requirements for this planet were still satisfied. Some people (not most) who faced totalitarian terror were living up to Miss Arendt's moral principles and the Final Solution was not happening everywhere. But who with any real moral concern would think that humanly speaking nothing more was required, or could reasonably be asked, to make this planet "a place fit for human habitation"?

     

    Notes

    [1] Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt (The Viking Press, N.Y. 1963).

     

    * The intelligence arm of the Nazi Party.

    [2] A photostat of the Veesenmayer telegram is available at the YIVO office in New York.

    [3] Judgment issued by the Jerusalem court. (Vide T/1214. para 5; N/85.)

    [4] A photostat of the Eichmann-Hagen report is available at the YIVO office in New York.

    [5] Eichmann to von Thadden, June 2, 1943, Document Steingracht 64. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1961), p. 471. The above account of this incident is based on Hilberg, pp. 470-471.

    [6] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Meridian Books, 1958), p. 411.

    [7] See Rabbi Baeck's memoir in We Survived, edited by Eric Boehm (New Haven, 1949), p. 288.

    [8] Philip Friedman, "Preliminary and Methodological Problems of the Research on the Jewish Catastrophe in the Nazi Period" Yad Washem Studies in the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance. Vol. II, edited by Shaul Esb (Jerusalem 1958), p. 126.

    [9] R. L. Buell, Poland, Key to Europe (A. A. Knopf, N.Y., 1939), p. 298.

    ** He later became a member of the Polish National Council in London (with the government-in-exile.)

    [10] Bernard Goldstein, The Stars Bear Witness (The Viking Press, N.Y., 1949), p. 37. Arthur Zyglboim later joined the Polish Government in Exile in London and in 1943 committed suicide in protest against the indifference of the Allies to the Jewish extermination.

    [11] Joseph Tenenbaum, In Search of a Lost People (The Beechhurst Press, New York, 1948), p. 119.

    [12] Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, edited and translated by Jacob Sloan (McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., N.Y., 1958), Editor's Introduction, p. xiii.

    [13] Bernard Goldstein, The Stars Bear Witness, p. 35.

    [14] Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, p. 107.

    [15] Sol Bloom, "Dictator of the Lodz Ghetto," Commentary, February 1949.

    [16] Philip Friedman, "Preliminary and Methodological Problems of the Research on the Jewish Catastrophe in the Nazi Period," Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. II, p. 103.

    [17] Friedman, "Preliminary and Methodological Problems of the Research on the Jewish Catastrophe in the Nazi Period," p. 106.

    [18] Mark Dovrjetski, The Struggle and Destruction of Jerusalem of Lithuania: Memoirs of the Vilna Ghetto, 1948, p. 308 (Yiddish). See the July-August 1963 issue of Facts, published by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, prepared by Jacob Robinson.

    [19] Facts, July-August 1963, published by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

    [20] Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, p. 236.

    *** A [1943] communication from the Jewish underground in Poland reports the following: "A characteristic trait of this new extermination campaign waged by the Germans against the Jews is—ARMED RESISTANCE on the part of the Jews. During the previous wave of extermination such acts of armed resistance were seldom dared. Once in a while we would receive word about such desperate deeds from on small town or another. Now, the entire situation has changed radically. Now in the midst of a new wave of extermination we are receiving urgent demands for weapons from the ghettos. However, we have very few left. That is why the resistance of the Jews is now not what it was in Warsaw. (Excerpt from Report "A," reprinted in Marek Edelman's The Ghetto Fights, pp. 45-48.)

  • Blues on the Border: Legendary Rock Guitarist Javier Batiz Plays and Sings for 'My Beloved and Beautiful Tijuana'

         Javier Batiz, the great Mexican rock-and-roll guitarist, played and sang last week in a concert that embodied and gave voice to everything that is most wonderful about Tijuana and the U.S.-Mexico border region. Batiz who since he was thirteen played in the bars and nightclubs of Tijuana, performed this time with the Baja California Orchestra (OBC) before a sell-out crowd of 1,100 in the auditorium of Tijuana's Center of Musical Arts in a concert that sometimes contrasted, sometimes juxtaposed and occasionally synthesized the styles of blues, rock, jazz and classical music. This is the Tijuana that most Americans don't know, the border — where I grew up — that represents not a political wall that divides peoples and cultures, but two-way cultural bridge that unites them.

         Batiz's concert exemplified the bicultural world of the border — or perhaps better tricultural for in addition to the Mexican and the American, the border has its own culture as well. Batiz performed favorites from his repertoire of blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, song both by others and of his own composition, from the traditional "House of the Rising Sun" (the Spanish version), to Otis Redding and Jerry Butler's "I've Been Loving You Too Long," to his own "Montañas." Listening to Batiz run up and down the neck his electric guitar with the greatest virtuosity one could hear echoes of Jimmy Hendrix and B.B. King, but also infusing it all Batiz's own highly personal and passionate style.

    Echoes and Resonances

         There were so many cultural resonances in Batiz's performance from so many quarters, not only the great African American blues and rock musicians, but also the great Mexican performers. While the orchestra and the members of Batiz's band who played with them were dressed in black, Batiz himself was dressed all in white and wearing a calf-length, sleeveless vest. One could not help but be reminded of the great northern border performer Tin Tan (Germán Valdés) of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, dressed in pachuco style with his zoot suit, an artist whose tremendous musical talent, sharp wit, and audacious in your face style first validated the border culture and its pocho Spanish in the 1940s.

         While playing his guitar Batiz has all the authority and presence of a great artist, but between numbers he is the club entertainer who minces about the stage, bent over, shouting out challenges or making jokes sotto voce to the audience, and one cannot help but think for a moment of Cantínflas (Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes), the actor whose great films of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s portrayed the experiences of those millions of Mexican peasant migrants to Mexico City and the other growing cities of Mexico including Tijuana with all of their struggles, hopes, and anxieties. And, of course, once we have Cantínflas in our minds we cannot help but think of Charlie Chaplin. So, if you are an Anglo, imagine Charlie Chaplin on stage playing the guitar like Jimmy Hendrix and you will have an inkling of what this concert was like.

         Then, in one of the marvelous juxtapositions of this concert Batiz paused and conductor Eduardo García Barrios and the OBC played Igor Stravinsky's "Ragtime for Eleven Instrument" (1917-1918). Who better than the Russian-French-American Stravinsky to exemplify cross-cultural synthesis and what better piece than "Ragtime" with its combination of classical, jazz and the emerging new music of early twentieth century in the Europe of war and revolution. And then back to Batiz again, the vato of the border, sometimes playing with his own back-up band — José Villa on base and Ramón Cortéz or wife Claudia Madrid on drums — or sometimes backed up by the 20-piece OBC, something like Ray Charles in those records of the 1960s. What a concert, and where else but Tijuana?

    Tijuana

         We might think of the diversity and multiculturalism of Tijuana as something particularly modern, the result of globalization, mass migration, and the communications revolution, but of course, multiculturalism as old as humanity itself. The Kumeyaay (Kumiai or as the Spaniards called them Digueño) people, descendants of the Asians who had migrated across the Bering straits thousands of years before, were living in Baja California when Cortéz crossed the gulf that bears his name to invade their territory. Later, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, most of Baja's inhabitants migrated from the neighboring state of Sonora. Tijuana, the isolated little border town of a few hundred at the turn of the last century and virtually inaccessible from Central Mexico until the 1950s, grew up into a modern metropolis as an extension of the economic power of the United States. The U.S. Navy's early decision in the 1910s to expand its facilities in San Diego making it one of the important ports of the Pacific Fleet, led to the growth of San Diego and also therefore to the growth of Tijuana. Los Angeles area business men and racketeers first invested in Tijuana, constructing the racetracks, bars and bordellos that served American tourists. By 1928 work had begun on the great Agua Caliente Hotel and Casino and then shortly afterwards the Agua Caliente Race Track, attracting thousands of tourists from San Diego and Los Angeles.

         Many of those who worked in the Tijuana clubs were Eastern European Jews who had migrated first to New York City where they worked in Vaudeville, then to Hollywood to get into the movies, and, when that failed, moved on to Tijuana where they became the singers, dancers, and comedians on the stages of the city's clubs. Not surprising that one of Tijuana's oldest neighborhoods is the barrio Dinnerstein. Entertainers from England, France and Spain sometimes trod the boards in Tijuana too. In those early days Mexicans weren't allowed to work in the city's nightclubs and bars, except in the most menial positions. As historian Jorge Bustamante has noted, the musicians and other hotel and restaurant workers formed unions in the 1930s first to demand the right to perform on stage and then to fight for housing, leading to the construction of Colonia Libertad. Chinese immigrants, who had been in northern Mexico since the late nineteenth century, migrated from Chihuahua to set up their shop ins Tijuana.

         By Spaniards, mestizos, the indigenous, Americans, Chinese, and Eastern European Jews who immigrated in the 1910s and 1920s formed the Tijuana's population until the 1930s. During that same period, millions of Mexicans had migrated to work in the United States, mostly in the fields of the Southwest, but also in the steel mills of Chicago and on the Pennsylvania Railroad. With the coming of the Great Depression, local police and social workers and ordinary Americans drove 500,000 Mexican immigrants from their homes and communities, sending them by railroad back to Mexico. Many of them, waiting for a change in the economy and in American attitudes, decided to stay on the border, in Tijuana. So the city was filled with Mexicans who had lived in the United States, many of whom spoke English.

    The Condes of Tijuana

         I was invited to the concert by my friend Lucila Conde whose brother Jorge Conde would be singing with Batiz in the concert. The Condes grew up in the old downtown of Tijuana where their family had a jewelry shop, the Central de Joyas. The parents Jorge Guillermo Conde Otáñes and Laura Mabel Zambada Valdez had met because of their common interest in music. Laura Mabel was a Singer in the Follies Vergier and for the Mexico City radio station XEW, "The Voice of Latin America," which in the 1930s, 40s and 50s presented the most talented musicians and singers to audiences in Mexico and beyond. Jorge, Sr. was a travel agent and musical composer, who followed his wife on her tours throughout Mexico as together they wrote music. Two of their most famous songs, "El sapito" recorded by the Hermanos Reyes and "El mahometano" recorded by Fernando Rosas, achieved national recognition. Not surprising then that some of their children would have an interest in music. Their daughter Rosina Conde, poet and novelist, often gives reading of her work where she also sings ballads and boleros, and Jorge Conde, Jr. has since he turned 50 begun to sing with Batiz.

          My friend Jorge came on stage in the middle of the concert to sing, performing the Doc Pomus (Jerome Solon Felder) song "Lonely Avenue," which became a great Ray Charles hit in 1956. Jorge was in his element, singing in the style of Charles' soft and sexy blues, swaying and snapping his fingers to the heavy beat of the drum and base and backed up by a three young singers. Batiz meanwhile could not be kept on the stage but migrated toward his public. Ignoring the conductor, he wandered off stage, down the stairs, into the front row to get close to the customers, so to speak, the club entertainer in his element.

         Before the concert Lucila and I, and her two daughters, Maya and Marlies, went by Jorge's house, a modern little apartment at the foot of Cerro Colorado in the outskirts of Tijuana. Jorge had cut his hand while trimming a bougainvillea in the backyard and was trying to staunch the bleeding while his wife Jitka ironed her dress and Jorge's shirt, and supervised the dressing of their daughters Tamara and Laura in preparation for the concert. Once the ironing was done, amidst the domestic hubbub, Lucila, Jorge, Jitka and I sipped becherovka, the Czech liqueur. Jorge met his wife, Jitka Crhová, when they were both working as interpreters at a political meeting in Europe. In 1992 Jitka, a ploygot who speaks her native Czech, Spanish, English, Russian fluently and has studied several other languages as well, and holds a Ph.D. in linguistics. took a position as a professor of modern languages at the University of Baja California. Together Jorge, Jitka and their children may be said to represent one part of that Tijuana that most Americans don't know, a highly educated and cultured middle class that arose in the late twentieth century as a result of the growth of commerce and industry on the U.S.-Mexico border.

    Batiz's Tijuana

         When in 1965 the United States ended the Bracero Program that had brought millions of workers to labor in American fields since the 1940s, Mexico and the United States agreed to create a tax-free industrial zone along the border. U.S. corporations saw an opportunity for cheap labor and Mexico the opportunity for economic development and jobs for its burgeoning population. By the 1970s construction began on what would eventually be hundreds of industrial plants called maquiladoras that stretched along the Mexican border from the Gulf to the Pacific, employing over one million workers. The creation of the maquiladora zone would lead to an influx of hundreds of thousands of people to the border region, swelling its cities and above all Tijuana. The growth in population and the economic importance of the border transformed it as infrastructure was created, not only highways and industrial parks, but also colleges and universities. Tijuana became not only a magnate for peasants seeking better paying jobs in factories in the city, but also for managers, technicians, and professionals working either in industry or for the government. Together the mangers and industrial laborers, the professionals and the new service workers transformed the little border town of Tijuana into a modern city.

         Batiz grew up with Tijuana, playing for its expanding and youthful population. In 1954, when Batiz began playing Tijuana had about 75,000 inhabitants, while today it has almost two million with five million in the metropolitan area stretching from Tijuana to Mexicali to Ensenada. The centers of Tijuana then, back in the 1940s and 60s, were the tourist strip of bars and trinket shops on Avenida Revolución and the Mexican business shopping district on Avenida Constitución. The American middle class and working families who shopped by day on Revolución never wandered over to the next block where the Mexicans worked or into the neighborhoods where they lived. Wealthier Americans made it to the Agua Caliente Race Track and to the nightclubs and better restaurants, but theirs too was a quite limited picture of Tijuana. The U.S. sailors and marines who frequented the bars and brothels stumbled drunk back across the border, and then back to the base. They never knew another Mexico. All of those groups at different moments formed parts of Javier Batiz's audiences, they and Tijuana's cosmopolitan population of mestizo and indigenous immigrants from all over the country as well as immigrants from China, the United States, and Europe. (My favorite example of cultural and linguistic synthesis in that era was the Nuevo Kentucky Chinese Restaurant on Avenida Revolución.) Like rock and roll everywhere, Batiz's was the music of youth, working class and middle class youth, alienated from the old music and the old values of their parents, the youth who came of age with it, and are now Batiz's age (and mine), or who grew up into it and now, underage, sneak into the clubs to hear it.

         Batiz's town, Tijuana, has not had an easy time of it. For years, Tijuana's residents lived with the stigma that their city was the vice-district for the U.S. servicemen. Tijuana was beleaguered. Americans simultaneously exploited Tijuana and condemned it as an open city where anything goes. Mexicans from Mexico City and Central Mexico denigrated the North of Mexico as the place where culture ends and the barbeques begin (Donde termina la cultura y empieza la carne azada.) The border was held in especially low esteem by Mexicans as region of crime and corruption, moral decay and social degradation. Americans ridiculed border residents for speaking Spanglish and Mexicans condemned them for speaking pocho.

         For decades Tijuana was the stepping off point for undocumented immigrants crossing into the United States until the border walls drove them further East into Arizona's dangerous deserts. More recently Tijuana like other border cities has suffered both from the powerful drug lords and from President Felipe Calderón's war against them in which 40,000 have died, dozens of those in Tijuana. No wonder then that when in the midst of the concert Batiz paused to tell the audience how proud he was to play before "my beloved and beautiful Tijuana," for which he had written the song "Montañas," the audience, pleased for once to hear their beleaguered city spoke of in such tender loving words by one of its great cultural icons, cheered and applauded.

         What a presence, what an entertainer Batiz is, with his great head of kinky black hair at shoulder length, his thick Zapata mustache and scraggly beard, his great toothy smile, alternately the proud artist and the self-deprecating comic. At one point during the concert Batiz paused and said that this a great time for him, "I am 67 years old, and," gesturing to his wife, Claudia Madrid, "married for 30 years, and have been performing on stage for 54 years." At the age of 16, in 1957 Batiz created his first rock-and-roll band, "Los TJ's con Javier," founding Mexico's rock-and-roll movement. By 1968 Batiz was playing in the Terraza Casino in Mexico City's Zona Rosa, which during those same years hosted other stars such as Jim Morrison of the Doors. Batiz served as teacher and example to players such as Carlos Santana and Fito de la Parra of Canned Heat. Most recently he was honored with the Creador Emerito 2011 by the Mexican National Council for Culure and the Arts. He is the subject of a forth-coming documentary by Francisco Javier Padilla with the title "El Brujo," (the Black Magician), so-called because of Batiz's magical playing style.

         The concert, which had been punctuated throughout by applause, culminated in an uproarious standing ovation and cries of "¡Bravo!" and "¡Otra!" Like the others, I felt proud when Batiz spoke about his "beautiful and beloved" Tijuana, proud to have grown up on this border, even if a mile or two north of it. With all of the reports of the violent drug wars, the killings and kidnapping, the Mexican Army's violation of human rights, and the rest of it, it was wonderful to experience this concert, an apotheosis of the border's great musical culture.

  • Alas, we who wished to lay the foundations of kindness . . .

    …Alas, we
    Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
    Could not ourselves be kind.

    But you, when at last it comes to pass
    That man can help his fellow man,
    Do not judge us
    Too harshly.

    — Bertolt Brecht, “To Posterity”

             When the great left-wing poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht penned these lines in 1938, the world was in crisis and cataclysm. In the Soviet Union, the Purge Trials of the Old Bolsheviks were underway, and Stalin’s arch-nemesis, Leon Trotsky, was seeking refuge in exile. Japan had invaded China, and the impending threat of World War II loomed across Europe. In the United States, the CIO was being born, the New Deal was underway, and the country was still reeling from the Great Depression that had begun in 1929. There was reason for gloom and pessimism, as fascism was rising and socialism was divided and fratricidal. Especially for socialists such as Brecht, the hounding of Trotsky and the show trials of Lenin’s associates for counterrevolution and treason were troubling for many; for the Stalinists, however, these were causes for glee. Under these conditions, Brecht penned these troubled and lamenting lines.

             Yet overlooked by Brecht, and many socialists both before and after 1938, was the very fundamental question: “If we ourselves can’t be kind, but only doctrinaire and self-assured, how can we honestly lay the foundations of kindness? Aren’t we being as bricklayers who don’t know how to lay bricks? And why should we not be judged too harshly for this failing? Haven’t we, by this failing, let the masses down, betrayed their trust in us?”

             My answer is Yes, and it is one shared by other socialists as well. If we of the left can’t ourselves be kind, we can’t lay the foundations for kindness in a serious way; we can only accomplish Political Correctness, and that is indeed a failing, a betrayal of trust we foist on the masses, for which we can’t be judged too harshly.

             I write thus as a forty-five year veteran of the left who has himself tried to be kind, only to frequently have others on the left treat him none too kindly. Same as others on the left have experienced. Left-wing sectarianism and heresy-hunting are unfortunately all too well known, and all too common, and stem from the same flaw—self-assurance degenerated into self-righteousness, desire for truth degenerated into cruelty toward those who differ with us. All too many of us on the left have endured such, and rare indeed is the leftist who hasn’t had to endure these at least once. In an important way, it’s what’s turned many a former leftist into a rightist, many a socialist or communist into a virulent enemy of both.

             Not all of us on the left who’ve endured these have abandoned the left, and I am one who has not, although I often feel the left has abandoned me. More important, since these serious flaws can’t be easily hidden, the working people the left is trying to reach end up feeling abandoned by the left also, of being used and manipulated in internecine witch-hunts and doctrinal squabbles, of being pawns in a chess game of interest and relevant only to sectarian chess players. They thus lose faith in the left too.

             The antidote is for the left to realize that people count just as much as programs, and without kindness to our fellow human beings, we of the left can’t lay the foundations of kindness. Without caring, without empathy, what we try to build will not be humane, despite what our now merely abstract programs say. We will be as bricklayers who cannot lay bricks, and it won’t matter even if a thousand bricks are laid before us. We will render them useless.

             So the left’s first need is kindness. Kindness toward ourselves, and kindness toward those outside our circles. Or, in other words, simple human decency. And the essence of that is caring what people really think, what they really care about, and honestly dialoguing with them about it, not preaching our own particular nostrums and programs at them. For we are not so infallible that we of the left know for all time what the masses need, and what we can give them that will fulfill those needs. Nor should we be so arrogant to assume we do.

             But this does not lead to not having programs and proposals, strategies, principles and tactics, nor to a solipsistic skepticism. There are basic ground rules that have been proven to work and work well, and one of the most basic of these was articulated by Engels at Marx’s graveside: “Marx proved that man must first of all eat before he can do philosophy, the arts, etc.” Or engage in politics, or organize a union, or do anything at all. Another way of saying, Economics is paramount. But we of the left have too often forgotten that, and tried to replace it with ideology. When the masses spurn our preoccupation with ideology as lacking relevance, we become angry and unkind toward them, as though they were fools for rejecting our wisdom. But they are the ones who are right, not we.

             Certainly that’s true now, true overwhelmingly, especially given that we of the U.S. and worldwide are in an economic crisis where the people are basically reeling and hurting for strictly economic matters: unemployment, job insecurity, low and stagnant wages, decline of trade unions, foreclosures, high gas and food prices, unaffordable education, and the rich gobbling up the lion’s share of the wealth. All economic. That’s what the people are concerned with now, that’s what’s on their minds, not leftist abstractions many of the left feel more comfortable talking and theorizing about. But they also come down to economics. Think how much wealth would be available for jobs if the war in Afghanistan weren’t being waged. Think how much Green Jobs and building Green Infrastructure could both put people to work, and work in meaningful ways that would positively address global warming and the polluted environment. And this only begins the list! So economics is paramount to the left’s being kind, considerate of people’s real needs, not our abstract wishes.

             Last, in terms of kindness, it’s crucial to remember that people are diverse, messy, not always articulate, and, especially now, hurting and fearful; this is most important to remember, for many of us radicals are from more secure backgrounds, are more affluent and less troubled. We are thus given to more impatience toward those who are not “like us.” And people have emotions as well as brains, disturbances as well as serenity. All needing, and deserving of, kindness. Finally, we of the left are people too. We need to be treated with kindness by our fellow leftists same as the masses, the working people. We may work more with our brains than with our hands, we may be looking for our first job while others are in despair because they’ve been unemployed for months or even years, and yet we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin. We all need kindness. And if we of the left can’t provide it, we can’t be judged too harshly.

     

    GEORGE FISH is an anti-authoritarian socialist writer living in Indianapolis, Indiana whose work has appeared in several left publications He has also published extensively on blues and other pop music, has published poetry, and does Lenny Bruce/George Carlin-style stand-up comedy. He may be reached at georgefish666@yahoo.com. This article was first published in the June 2011 issue of The Movement, formerly the Indianapolis Peace & Justice Journal.

  • Sense and Nonsense in the Balanced Budget Debate: A Socialist Response

         The Republicans have successfully changed the economic debate from jobs to deficit control. Why the urgency? After all, this anemic “recovery” has been marked above all by the lack of job growth. Growth needs to considerable exceed 3% per annum if the private sector is to make any significant headway in reducing unemployment. Instead growth is actually trending downward from its post Great Recession peak. The intractability of long term unemployment now exceeds the duration experienced in the 1930s. Combine this with the fact that economy wide wage gains in the past decade have even lagged those in the Great Depression, when adjusted for deflation, and one can easily appreciate why workers’ portion of the national income has continued to drop consistently, since the recession was declared to have ended.
         Yet the American right wing, including of course the business community, insists that deficit spending is already entirely excessive and is leading the country inadvertently down the path to socialism, by which they mean “statism.” This may appear absurd on the face of it, but let me try to put their argument in a coherent form, something right wingers — including right wing economists — seem incapable of doing, and to explain why this is a well-grounded fear.
         The theory is that when government finances its activities by borrowing, for instance to alleviate unemployment, it increases the national debt. The increased national debt invokes additional interest payments necessitating government to jack up taxes still further to raise the money to meet its mounting interest obligations. This may not be in the immediate offing, but is, at any rate, eventually unavoidable. The higher taxes, or threat of higher taxes, in turn make investment still less profitable, by reducing the anticipated after tax returns. The private (nonfinancial) sector recedes, adding to the problem of private sector unemployment while generating a spiral of additional government sector borrowing, state expansion and private sector shrinkage. A willingness on the part of government to raise the debt ceiling moreover signals to the markets that the administration is not willing to arrest this cycle. This, in turn invokes a capital strike, wherein the private sector liquidate its inventories, and sits on its revenues, but refuses to broaden investment beyond, say, certain tech industries or foreign markets that promise exceptional short term returns sufficient to offset the anticipated additional tax burdens to come. In the context of a stagnant private sector, bond holders will come to fear a state default and therefore demand additional premiums in the form of higher interest payments before they will relinquish additional funds to the government. This eats further into the net profitability of the non-financial sector — which is now squeezed both by higher taxes (or the immanent threat of higher taxes) and the increased costs of financing its capital formation through recourse to the credit markets.
         A mild depression is therefore postponed by government spending, only to give rise either to a more dramatic downturn or prolonged stagnation and paralysis.
         Most leftish answers to this scenario are designed to appease the business community. As a practical political imperative, straying too far from this common understanding is expecting too much from political elites educated by the business class to view political economy in these terms. Political economy is fundamentally ideological. Its consequence is to present an evolving picture of reality that reflects how the ruling class perceives its place in the social order. Its basic thrust is to suppress the aspirations of the working class, which, as a propertyless class, can only challenge entrenched interests by wielding political force; by winning the battle for democracy. This means clinging to a framework in which the state is limited to maintaining a general legal and infrastructural framework favorable for accumulation with the flexibility to grant limited concessions needed to secure social peace, without abdicating terrain directly useful to the democratization of economic power. The principles of “sound finance” tethers the growth of state functions to that which can be financed out of profits without threatening capitalism’s ability to accumulate. So long as state finances find their immediate limit in the profit system, private property can hold the pretensions of the working class in check largely through instilling a sense of self-restraint and discipline in the face of overwhelming and impersonal market power. The threats of “outsized” deficits, “run away” entitlements, and unemployment consequential to wage demands nonresponsive to downward international competition are so much a part of the internalized view of society’s rank and file that they are largely drained of the capacity for fight back. It is the market itself that disciplines democracy.
         Even progressives such as Paul Krugman, have found fit to work within this narrow compass of understanding — that there is no alternative. It is argued quite rightly, that in the short term the fundamental political and social problem that liberals and the Democratic Party face is chronic unemployment. Mainstream liberals have largely accepted the framework that as long as a reasonable (i.e., manageable) ratio can be established between additional employment — as a result of deficit spending — and debt, the interest payments on the national debt can easily come out of future taxes paid out of a growing national income. This therefore means that both taxes on the wealthy and reductions in spending will both be needed. The former now, with additional taxes to come from a broadened base; the latter down the road when economic momentum has been reestablished. This sort of Laffer curve Keynesianism, in which deficits are said to pay or largely pay for themselves through the economic expansion that deficits breed, still operates within the world view — if not the priorities — of the business class. But in the long run, the consensus of both wings of the establishment is that servicing an outsized state debt is unsustainable. It will be met — if not reined in — by draconian limitations imposed by a punitive bond market acting in preemptive fear of runaway inflation. The question is when to cut, not the certainty of doing so.
         So too, the endless arguments over the health of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, one proposal no less unpalatable and reactionary than the next. Should taxes be raised in anticipation of future shortfalls? But what then becomes of an already anemic recovery? Should the age requirements be augmented or means testing be invoked to limit access to these programs or will a shift to private markets be preferable because it controls state costs by passing them on to the individual? But what then of the permanent spike in poverty among the elderly and infirm that will surely result from a market based voucher system? The Obama administration has fully accepted the premise that the budget deficit is an immanent flashpoint and has offered a program for reducing the debt by $4 trillion, while placing all social programs “on the table.” Even AARP has given the green light to throwing Social Security under the bus.
         And if we don’t tackle these problems, aren’t we facing a sovereign debt crisis such as Greece and Ireland now experience with even more dramatic consequences to ourselves and world capitalism?
         There is no satisfactory way out within the confines of the dominant parameters. And without an adequate and believable alternative, which socialist ideology no longer provides, the working class will acquiesce to its own victimization, each defeat further sapping its regenerative powers of resistance.
         And yet on the face of it, this entire line of reasoning — which encompasses the omnibus of alternatives from A to B — is utter nonsense. Borrowing or taxing, the prior appropriation of funds, in order to finance government spending, is a self-imposed system constraint. So too are government imposed debt ceilings. They are not operational constraints. The ability of a society including a capitalist society to provide a decent existence for its elderly and disabled as well as for its working class wealth producers is not based on the ability of capital to finance state activities out of private revenues. Capital’s ability to keep economic demands held hostage to its priorities alone is. That is the reason for such prior constraint. Society’s actual ability to provide a decent and secure existence is only limited by its accumulated productive capacity, a capacity that is currently unused to the tune of approximately 25%. Even under the best of times 15-20% of capacity lies fallow. No economy can be said to be living beyond its means as long as there is excess capacity — unused factories, idle machines, and unemployed labor. So while the mainstream debates the level of austerity and sacrifice “we” should be willing to accept being imposed upon ourselves — naturally, for the sake of our “grandchildren”, the accumulated surplus labor extracted from the working class has produced a sufficient and ever growing productive structure that, if fully tapped, could readily be the source of more generous social benefits, including universal health care, deep anti-poverty programs and ample Social Security remunerations. Capital is unwilling to unlock that capacity simply because it lacks current profitable potential and because the resulting tight labor markets would embolden the working class to abandon its habits of submission and subservience to power. It has therefore so constrained the system through legal encumbrances prohibiting it for operating beyond these limitations.
         More central is the ruling class concern that the output of idle capacity, once consumed by the state as a result of deficit spending, no longer functions as capital in process. Or worse still, if it were to be used by the state for commodity production, such production would introduce a form competition that would enjoy an enormous inbuilt advantage against the private sector. The bail out of the auto industry — which represented a crimped, anti-working class, microcosm of this possibility, generated howls of fear and outrage on the part of the broader business community. Either way, if consumed as revenue or put to use in state production, that excess capacity impressed into state service would be largely lost to the private accumulation process. Taxing idle balances(or borrowing, which assumes future taxes) and rechanneling them back to the private sector in the form of state purchases will, it is true, have a multiplier effect that will expand economic activity. But unless the additional profits generated through that activity exceeds the taxes needed to finance the process, the exercise has little attraction for capital beyond the immediate beneficiaries of state contracts.
         And this is the crux of the matter. These constraints paralyze the public debate.
         What is not clearly appreciated by the public is that current state operations are in no way operationally dependent on the prior withdrawal of funds from the private sector. Whatever may have been the true when currencies were backed by a fixed metallic content, modern money is a state issued, state enforced, fiat currency. It is no longer commodity money and is not exuded by the system through the spontaneous interfunctioning of the private sector. The historic function of the capitalist state, when currencies were gold backed, was to guarantee convertibility and thereby preserve the “soundness” (the commodity integrity) of its currency. This meant that the issuance of currency was constrained by the supply of gold in the state’s treasury. This tied the hands of government requiring it to appropriate funds (gold) from the private sector before undertaking or continuing any activity. The gold standard effectively subordinated the state to the needs of private accumulation and prevented the outsized growth of the state for fear of strangling the source of its revenue. A state which did not toe the line and debased its currency would ultimately face the prospects of insolvency. It would be compelled to transfer state properties to the financial system, thus allowing private capital to put such properties to profit-making use, before it could regain its ability to access credit markets. This reestablished the “proper” equilibrium between the state and capital.
         But fiat currencies shatter and invert the inherited logic of the metallic based monetary system. Fiat currencies are not a byproduct of private commerce. They are a creature of the state, which has a monopoly on its issuance. Of course, the point of reference here are political entities that are sovereign, not in the juridical sense, but with respect to the issuance of currency. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain for instance are no more capable of issuing fiat currency than are California or Wisconsin. That being understood, fiat issuing entities — such as the US, Britain, China and the EU — have to spend in order to inject liquidity into the system in sufficient quantity to accommodate the interests of commerce. They have to spend, that is, prior to their ability to tax; reversing the polarity of economic causality. With the advent of fiat money, taxation and borrowing no longer exist as necessary adjuncts of state appropriation.
         That is, payment due for state wages, for the rental of state buildings, for the purchase of infrastructural products, to fund Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, to finance the interest due on the national debt, to share revenues with local governments, or, unfortunately, to fight imperialist wars do not require the state to mobilize funds, either in the form of additional taxes or by selling state bonds to the private sector — or foreign governments — prior to meeting its obligations. These obligations can be met simply by computer generated entries from the state into the ledgers of its private sector customers or its own self-administered trust funds, its private and foreign bond holders, and its employees’ payrolls. This adds to the budget deficit in a way that never has to be repaid, or paid down and does so at a zero rate of interest. This, as a practical fact, is how wars are financed until, that is, they become so unpopular or counterproductive that politicians conveniently awake to the discovery that the treasury is “out of money.” All of which suggests that even ruling class functionaries can with the proper motivation come to recognize that there is no functional requirement to maintain the fiction that a complex network of taxation and borrowing is the precondition for the state to function. The modern state cannot go bankrupt. The interest owed on the trade deficit is an accounting problem, not a social crisis waiting to happen. The state does not have to sell bonds to run a deficit. It does not have to tax its populace or borrow from them to pay the interest. The entire idiotic kabuki performance of haranguing over debt ceilings, debt defaults or government shutdowns, or of acquiescing to mass unemployment, or of negotiating down social benefits to keep the state afloat can all be dispensed with. There is no more imperative for the debate we are currently suffering through than there is a functional requirement to tie one’s hands behind one’s back and lap up food from a bowl like an animal. Unless, of course, one wants to experience life as a dog. Even so, reasonable individuals acknowledge that this is not a requirement of human existence. So too there is no functional requirement for workers to be kept at the level of animal insecurity merely to satisfy capital’s social need for a “sound financial policy,” a policy that periodically grinds the state under its heel, arbitrarily checking its ability to expand public consumption at the expense of capital accumulation. Once fiat money replaced commodity money, the genie of state reorganization was already released from the bottle.
         This is not meant to imply that there is no further need for the state to tax and borrow. It is rather that these activities properly fulfill different functional requirements; namely to cool down an overheated economy by draining excess demand for consumption and assets that may have been induced by additional state spending. Functionally, these should be tools not for the appropriation of operating funds, but for the regulation of aggregate demand and the adjustment of interest rates needed to preserve price stability including an access to investment capital commensurate with cyclical moderation. The size of the government budget, in short, should only be determined by the shortfall of aggregate demand at levels that would otherwise accommodate full capacity utilization, with the understanding that there are no intrinsic financial constraints on federal spending, beyond those artificially imposed by capital and the political inertia yoked to it. Were these shackles not in place, resources idled by the lack of adequate profit potential could readily be translated into additional decommodified public goods and services with no cost to the consumer. Within this context, the struggle over budget priorities would take on an entirely different cast, not least of which would be the need to combine fiscal stimulus with progressive redistribution.
         And if government estimates were to overshoot, building inflationary pressures, excess demand could be skimmed by introducing taxes starting at the top of the income/wealth chain and working their way down on a sliding scale, and through the sale of bonds to drive up interest rates. The government can, in other words, also run budget surpluses. But to reemphasize — the question of surpluses (or deficits) should relate solely to the management of aggregate demand, not to the financing of government operations.
         The lack of aggregate demand is primarily a function of an insufficient rate of capital formation due to the chronic lack of adequate profitability. The Bush era boom masked this by means of a massive speculative housing bubble. This, like other financial bubbles, imparted to the falling rate of profit — the developmental trend of capitalism — a wave like character. But, the collapse should have been entirely predictable. The boom was based on asset stripping of the American working class, rather than on the buildup of productive capacity. Home equity was exchanged against surplus value so that declining wages could be offset and supplemented by debt fueled consumption. What remained was canalized into small business expansion and stock market purchases. The profit crises remained latent by the injection of an estimated $2.3 trillion in supplemental demand extracted from the housing market between 2003 and 2008. When this deflated, that is when the issuance of financial instruments outstripped the ability of capital to extract sufficient surplus value to service the accumulated pyramid of obligations, the financial system was forced to the brink of collapse. The hastily cobbled TARP program — a stunning exemplar in itself of ex nihilo money creation — recapitalized the hemorrhaging banks, but the restored financial system had no further interest in injecting capital back into a failing system of private production. The expansionary potential of almost half of the stimulus was thereby neutralized at inception.
         Consider what might have occurred if the state had stimulated the economy from the bottom up: if the state had, for instance, abolished all taxes on the working class, including payroll taxes. And this is the most modest, most right-wing of populist friendly proposals. This would have constituted a massive wage increase at no additional expense to employers. Of course, this is simply a thought experiment. No wing of the ruling class would dare do that, unless it could also exploit the opportunity to defund the Social Security and Medicaid/care trust funds as a pretext to later abolish or diminish future benefits. But let us follow this through. Had the improbable happened, workers would have gained sufficient additional income to massively obviate the mortgage debt crisis, pay down credit cards, expand consumption out of income and build savings. As the financial intermediaries of the private sector, the banking sector would have been indirectly recapitalized and the economy massively stimulated. The imaginary responsive state would simply credit the trust funds electronically to compensate for the engineered shortfall insuring no future sacrifices could be retrofitted on a working class as it ages or becomes infirm. And, if the recapitalization of the banking system was not deep enough to penetrate up the ladder to the investment bankers and hedge fund jockeys, a layer of social parasitism would simply have been wiped out with minimal impact on the broader public.
         Consider alternatively or additionally, if the federal government temporarily or even permanently assumed the financial obligations of state and local governments. These are entities that cannot create money. Again this would have involved a key stroke on the part of the federal government; entering a credit into the bank accounts of states, cities and municipalities. Like the tax holiday for payroll taxes, this proposal too would further recapitalize the banks and contribute to a meaningful reversal of the mortgage crisis as knock on effects. Demand would again be created by the feds without incurring additional tax or borrowing liabilities. There would be no loss of services, no layoffs, and no pension shortfalls. No raison d’etre for the Christies, Walkers, Kasiches and Cuomos. No answerability to Wall Street bond traders. The current capital strike would have been very effectively broken by the avalanche of additional aggregate demand that would compel idle capacity into play.
         The state has the ability not to prevent but to radically reshape the character and impact of capitalist crises. But this requires in the first instance making proper use of the economic latitude accorded by the state monopoly over currency. It is this monopoly that fundamentally alters the mechanism of state operations. It liberates the state from the constraints of revenue, breaking the functional parallel between itself and the private sector where the necessity of financing its spending remains an inescapable constant. It is elite interests working their way through the political process that saddles that restraint on the system, long after its functional necessity has expired. Maintaining that symbiosis is crucial in preventing the emergence of the state as a semi-independent social factor. The point is to make that clear and to break that symbiosis. It requires the real democratization of the budget process.
         And there is a mass constituency for this. It appeals not only to the working class, but to that section of the anti-tax crowd, not so drunk on racist poisons that it has lost its capacity to respond to overwhelming self-interest. It is the left and the labor movement that can provide a crucial role for this message by acting as a ginger group for this agenda. But it is equally unlikely that this will find resonance with Democratic Party elites. The Democratic Party remains a ruling class institution, not a rank and file controlled membership organization. Its pro-business agenda is set primarily by its financiers, who pepper its platform with sufficient offers of largess and decorative concessions needed to assure itself a reliable electoral base. It performs what the Republicans cannot: keeping society’s working and lower classes docile, lest their unruliness unleashes the far greater repression of Republican social thuggery. It has no interest in loosening the grip of entrenched interests over the state. The DP is a steam valve on the pressure cooker of capitalist society rather than an agent for fundamental redress. Failure to break with the Democrats, in part attributable to a lack of an independent economic perspective, chains labor to the hamster wheel of permanent retrenchment — where all previous social gains are both perpetually negotiable and all new gains vexingly provisional.
         But the rationalization of the budget process combining all the modern financial tools at the state’s disposal, even if it were to open new terrain for public participation, would not be socialism. And we should be clear about this. Production and distribution would still not be managed democratically from below by society’s constituent elements. Market generated inequalities would continue to exist, though they could to a large extent be shrink fitted, and markets would continue to act in response to these disparities assuring that class privileges are faithfully reproduced. Neither would have capital relinquished its tentacled grip over the forces that shape public opinion and define the feasibility of social alternatives. And to the extent that political space is expanded, any vacuum not filled by greater democratic participation from below will be filled by managerial or bureaucratic “experts,” with the potential to develop and propagate their own independent class interests and to impose them on society. Though no panacea, unlocking the potential of modern monetary system nevertheless has the raw potential for a civilizational upgrade within capitalism.
         More crucially, it in no way dispenses with the need for socialism. The functional basis of the entire system still rests on capital accumulation. The state can therefore never attain full independence from the laws that govern the contradictory process of value-expansion. The tendency to replace living labor with ever more automated production processes tends to drive down the rate of profit. Each unit of capital becomes associated with an ever declining base from which surplus value can be extracted. The NY Times, for instance, recently reported that spending on machinery and technology has increased by 26%, while spending on employees has inched up by just 2%. And the goods producing sectors of construction and manufacturing in particular have actually shed 26% of its workers. Still, as long as the rate of accumulation is sufficiently high, the fall in the rate of profit can be offset in practice by a rise in the mass of profits. When this is no longer possible, it signals the need for a purgative of excess capital values. This is the necessary deflationary function that accompanies economic downturns. It recalibrates the system by devaluing capital, allowing the aggregate production structure to recombine on a more efficient, leaner basis which leads to rationalization and the intensified exploitation of labor power. When this process works its way sufficiently through the system, it removes the previous barriers to production and reestablishes the ability to again accumulate on a profitable basis.
         Effective countercyclical activity such as proposed here would paralyze that function. Removing the downward pressure on prices allows the least efficient capitals, which would otherwise first feel the brunt of the crisis, to maintain their pre-crisis values. Rather than be reorganized into a more productive capital complex, the equivalent output value of these sectors would be indirectly converted into public consumption. But capital formation is critically determined by the excess of production over consumption. The expansion of consumption without a parallel increase in productivity and capacity hinders the process of capital formation and moderates the critical rate of accumulation. And it does so in a context in which state buttressed demand creates tight labor markets compounding further the urgency to replace living labor throughout the reproduction process.
         The crisis mechanism is part of the biological functioning of the system. It is the automatic feedback mechanism, the high fever, of capital that forces upon itself the need to exude the toxic poisons of excess capital before it can be restored to health. So too, the budget crisis, as it is currently waged, is an historic outgrowth of the genetic need for capitalism to suppress nonproductive state consumption and to reconcentrate, when called upon, economic resources from the state to the accumulation process. The modern state can temporize the nature of economic crises — as has been argued here — by directly, realizing a portion of produced goods outside the mechanism of the market. And it can do so effectively while dispensing with the entire labyrinthine and functionally superfluous process of budget appropriations now underway. But at length this neutralizes and reverses the function that crises otherwise perform of converting currently unprofitable capacity into conditions where its redeployment will again allow it to participate in the process of capital self-expansion
         The state, therefore, can at length only expand the sphere of decommodified use-values if the accumulation of total capital is not impaired by their production. If capital cannot resume accumulation on its own terms, state-induced production will lose its driving force and become an obstacle to its resumption. This means that the state cannot avoid consciously assuming responsibility for the restructuring process that the crisis mechanism now periodically performs organically with such massive social disruption and dislocation. The alternative is long term stagnation. This of course would be a new type of stagnation — stagnation without mass unemployment, spikes in poverty and idled resources and, therefore, from an historical perspective, — a monumental step forward. But it would still be ultimately characterized by pitiably insignificant improvement in aggregate living standards; virtually a stationary state. The already low rate of capital formation in the Unites States exasperated by the claims of war, armaments production and the meager social benefits now in place have long enticed American capital to export surplus value to where more favorable investment opportunities await. A rationalized process of restructuring that supplants the haphazard social chaos of the business cycle necessarily requires a degree of social planning, an industrial policy, capital controls, aggressive infrastructural initiatives and a massive retraining program supported from below by an equally effective educational policy.
         The question then unavoidably presents itself. If all this planning is needed to avoid the crisis mechanism of capitalism and to manage aggregate demand, while expanding the sphere of decommodified production and mass consumption, why should society continue to suffer the indignities, the inequalities, the oppression and exploitation of capitalism? Why not take democratic control over the sum total of surplus value and put it directly to social use?

  • CPD Statements on Syria and Israel

    The Campaign for Peace and Democracy issued two statements on June 9, one on the movement for democracy in Syria and the other on Israel’s brutal response to unarmed demonstrators.

     

    CPD Salutes Syria’s Courageous Democratic Movement

    June 9, 2011

          The Campaign for Peace and Democracy expresses its deep admiration for the amazing courage shown by the people of Syria, struggling for democratic reforms in the face of horrific repression. Though they have been subjected to lethal force time and again, unarmed demonstrators have repeatedly taken to the streets.

          Syria has been under brutal authoritarian rule for decades, and many Syrians, and others, had hoped that Bashar al-Assad would move to democratize the system. However, the past three months have shown that Assad is determined to maintain his dictatorial grip on power no matter what the cost in Syrian lives.

          Despite the attempt by authorities in Damascus to prevent information from getting out, enough has been documented to show the criminal behavior of the regime.

          Amnesty International has evidence of 120 people killed this past weekend alone and “has the names of 986 people reported to have been killed by the Syrian security forces during the past 11 weeks. Thousands have been arrested, with many held of them held incommunicado.”[AI, “UN urged to act following deadly weekend in Syria,” June 6, 2011.]

          Human Rights Watch has reported: “Since the beginning of anti-government protests in March 2011, Syrian security forces have killed hundreds of protesters and arbitrarily arrested thousands, subjecting many of them to brutal torture in detention¼.The nature and scale of abuses, which Human Rights Watch research indicates were not only systematic, but implemented as part of a state policy, strongly suggest these abuses qualify as crimes against humanity.” [HRW, “‘We’ve Never Seen Such Horror,’” June 1, 2011.]

          Among its more cynical pretenses to legitimacy, the Assad regime claims to protect the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. In response, opposition forces meeting in Antalya, Turkey, have affirmed that the Syrian people are of many ethnicities, and called for “the legitimate and equal rights of all under a new Syrian constitution based on national unity, civil state and a pluralistic, parliamentary, and democratic regime. “[Text.]

          We stand with the people of Syria in their remarkable struggle for democracy.

    CPD Condemns Israel's Murderous Attack on Unarmed Palestinians

    June 9, 2011

          Twice now, unarmed Palestinians demonstrators and their supporters from the refugee camps around Israel, adopting the tactics of the Arab Spring, have challenged the Israeli occupation and their own historic dispossession by marching on Israel’s occupation borders. And on both occasions, Israel has adopted the vicious tactics of the most ruthless Arab regimes by responding to these unarmed demonstrators with lethal force.

          On May 15, Israeli officials hid behind the excuse of being unprepared for massive protests — as if they couldn’t read the same social media that the demonstrators used to organize their actions. Human Rights Watch reported: “In a too-familiar pattern, Israeli troops responded to stone-throwing youths with live bullets, with predictably deadly consequences. The evidence shows a disturbing disregard for protesters’ lives.”[HRW, “Israel: Investigate Killings During Border Protests; Troops Responded to Stone-Throwing With Live Bullets,” May 20, 2011.]

          On June 5th, Israeli officials charged that the Syrian regime was responsible for the deaths because it didn’t keep people away from the Israeli-controlled frontier fence. No doubt, Damascus was happy to divert attention from its own atrocities. But this doesn't negate the fact that Israel's brutal actions were morally unacceptable — whatever Syria's motives might have been in allowing Palestinians to approach the territory that Israel has annexed in violation of Security Council and General Assembly resolutions. The demonstrators were killed in cold blood by Israeli snipers who were in no danger, acting on the orders of their superiors.

          Washington too directed all its criticism at Syria. A State Department spokesperson declared: “we condemn what appears to be an effort by the Syrian Government to incite events and draw attention away from its own internal issues…. And I just would add that Israel, like any sovereign nation, has a right to defend itself.” A reporter asked, “Even if the people are unarmed?” to which the spokesperson replied in full: “But again, this is clearly an attempt by Syria to incite these kinds of protests, and they [the Israelis] have a right to protect their — this disengagement line.” [U.S. Dept. of State, Daily Press Briefing (Mark C. Toner), Washington, DC, June 6, 2011.]

          The cruel and unjust Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories conquered in 1967 as well as of the Golan Heights must be ended. And so must U.S. support for the occupation.

  • A Thousand Platitudes: Liberal Hysteria and the Tea Party

    [Comments by Marvin and Betty Mandell and others are posted below the article.]

         Noam Chomsky is afraid. Addressing a crowd at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison last April, the left's leading intellectual sent out a warning. "I'm just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler's speeches on the radio," he said, "and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering here."[1] Chomsky continued, "The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime." The impetus for the professor's alarm is the Tea Party, the latest in a long line of right-wing social movements. The emergence of this movement in 2009 rattled the parameters of the American national discourse and shook commentators on the liberal-left into a frenzy. MSNBC ran specials on Timothy McVeigh and right-wing militias, while The Nation columnists like Melissa Harris-Perry invoked the specter of "a vicious new Jim Crow terrorism." The Tea Party was, from the outset, targeted with invective designed to isolate and marginalize.

         This strategy is not surprising. The American left's response to grassroots activity on the right has historically been punctuated by hysteria, exaggeration, and appeals to the coercive power of the state. This article aims to identify the dominate narratives spun by the liberal-left, as represented by its major intellectual organs and prominent commentators, which have ranged from identifications of a proto-fascist movement animated by the resentments of downwardly mobile white workers to, on the other extreme, apologias for the political activity of a besieged and embittered petit-bourgeoisie. Furthermore, an alternative reading of the Tea Party will be offered, a movement that is not fascistic, racist, nor particularly novel, but rather a new expression of a venerable American right-wing populist tradition. Finally, this essay endeavors to reveal the roots of reigning liberal-left analyses in the historic lack of a national labor party, a particularity that has focused the left's vitriol onto their opponents on the right rather than the true stakeholders of power.

    Misreading the Tea Leaves

         In March 2010, just days before Chomsky's speech, The Nation's subscribers were e-mailed their own breathless appeal. The message noted the "bigoted language," allegedly encouraged by GOP officials, of right-wing protesters outside the Capitol. It warned that, "There are historic lessons to be learned. But they are the lessons of the 19th century not the 20th. We must now guard against the descent of a vicious new Jim Crow terrorism."[2] Readers and potential donors were reminded that "since 1985, subscribers have known The Nation as a kind of early warning system." This call-to-arms matched the tenor of a swath of the left that saw the Tea Party as a threat to be confronted using the language of the anti-fascist and anti-racist movements of bygone eras.

         The content of this particular attack on the "Tea Party resistance" was the product of Melissa Harris-Perry, an intellectual who has become increasingly prominent on MSNBC and in the liberal print press over the past two years. Her commentary on the Tea Party, alongside those of other Nation contributors like Richard Kim, can be regarded as representative of dominant liberal opinion during this period, an opinion that, through the launching of a regular column "Sister Citizen" in The Nation and the marginalization of more radical, dissident voices like Alexander Cockburn, represents an effective editorial shift to the right, as the liberal press, strident in their opposition to Bush, transformed itself to play the role of critical supporter during the early years of the Obama administration.

         This critique of the Tea Party, harping on the movement's rhetoric and supposed "extremism," comes from the political center and not the left. The legitimacy of insurgent popular protest itself, as opposed to tactical lobbying and electioneering has been explicitly called into question by Harris-Perry. Writing in late 2009 for The Nation, in a piece titled "Lose the Love/Hate, But Keep the Hope," Harris-Perry expounded on ways to "hold onto hard won optimism while still demonstrating emotional restraint in the public sphere."[3] Progressives, she argues, have been too confrontational, apt to adopt a posture of "holding Obama's feet to the fire," a strategy that represents "an old fashioned way to approach being part of a governing coalition." The rise of the "screaming" Tea Party, with its "town hall shouting matches," Harris-Perry argues, shows the limits of this adversarial form of politics.

         In place of "outsider angst," Harris-Perry proposes that members of the working class who wish to effect change should remember the lesson of the Obama campaign, which saw unprecedented numbers of donors successfully fund his push to the presidency. "[Getting] friends to commit $50 to Obama 2012 if he commits to saving the public option," or creating a blog or YouTube videos are proposed tactics in this new political strategy. The left is urged to "Put down the hammer and try a screwdriver" and to "ask what we can do to help Obama achieve a new direction for America." Even these tactics, however, should be used tepidly. The election of Obama opened up new avenues of political engagement, but did not give progressives the mandate to fulfill the policy agenda that Obama ran on. Lambasting "a winner-take-all mentality that has led to tyrannical governance, which fails to protect the interests of political minorities," Harris-Perry reminds readers that, "We won an election; we did not stage a coup. The left will get some, but not all of what it wants, and that is OK. It is better than OK, it is the heart of democracy. Winning does not give us a mandate to ignore the interests of those we defeated." This style of political engagement is a corollary to U.S. labor's focus on insider lobbying and fundraising, as opposed to the street mobilizations seen in Europe. Speaking to the New York Times, Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, postulated that all labor needed was enough expert lobbying in Washington to attract the support of a few more senators.[4]

         Harris-Perry's frequent evocation of the Civil Rights movement is used in this context to damn the radical forces thwarting, rather than facilitating, President Obama's agenda. In an essay written for the occasion of Martin Luther King Day in 2010, "How Barack Obama is like Martin Luther King, Jr.," she attempted to deconstruct the left's false burnishing of King.[5] She presents King as a pragmatic political strategist who shrewdly turned his back on Bayard Rustin, among other leftists, specifically because he was a homosexual socialist. Furthermore, King's undercutting of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party is lauded by Harris-Perry as a precondition for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The piece is indicative of a shift in The Nation from the scathing denunciations of the "war crimes" of the Bush administration to one that urges patience and faith in the Obama White House.

         This ethos also displays a hostility to the popular democratic expression exemplified by the Tea Party movement, as well as far-left activism, and an allegiance to the capable administrators of American capitalism found in our own era's vital center. Harris-Perry's critique of the Tea Party is fundamentally conservative, defending institutionalized power against the forces she perceives as threatening it. In "Is this the Birth of a Nation," the article excerpted in the aforementioned Nation e-mail appeal, the professor offers her conception of the state: "The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force and coercion.… To the extent that a state is challenged as the sole, legitimate owner of the tools of violence, force, and coercion, it is challenged at its core."[6] Harris-Perry concludes that the Tea Party is an existential threat to the U.S. state:

    "The Tea Party is a challenge to the legitimacy of the U.S. state. When Tea Party participants charge the current administration with various forms of totalitarianism, they are arguing that this government has no right to levy taxes or make policy. Many GOP elected officials offered nearly secessionist rhetoric from the floor of Congress this weekend. They joined as co-conspirators with the Tea Party protesters by arguing that this government has no monopoly on legitimacy."

    The very ethical and legal legitimacy of right-wing protest is called into question in the context of the racial slurs allegedly hurled at Representative John Lewis, a veteran of the Civil Rights movement, at a Tea Party mobilization in March 2010. Harris-Perry argues that such animus directed at " duly elected representatives of the United States government is more than an act of racism. It is an act of sedition."

         Whereas the John Lewis of the 1960s was just a dissident, now an elected official, Harris-Perry sees him as an "embodiment of the state." MSNBC contributors Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow paralleled scenes of overwhelmingly white throngs of protesters heckling the representative to the iconography of the Civil Rights-era. Harris-Perry, however, prefers an even more provocative analogy: that of mid-nineteenth century Reconstruction. Harris-Perry describes how the precarious equality of the post-Civil War period was only maintained by the coercion of the federal government. She claims that once the government withdrew, following the Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877, terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan were able achieve almost a century of violent hegemony in the South. The Tea Party reminds Harris-Perry of these reactionary social forces, real-life manifestations of the mobs in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation:

    "[That] 1915 film depicts the racist imagination currently at work in our nation as a black president first appoints a Latina Supreme Court Justice and then works with a woman Speaker of the House to pass sweeping national legislation. This bigotry assumes no such government could possibly be legitimate and therefore frames resistance against this government as a patriotic responsibility."

    It is assumed, without sustained analysis of the actual social forces and ideological composition of the Tea Party, that their opposition to the Obama administration is rooted in its diversity rather than the content of the "sweeping national legislation" that liberals champion. The Tea Party, by virtue of opposing an African-American president, is condemned to an original sin of racism. They are criticized not for their specific policy goals — revolving mostly around the federal budget, the defense of Second Amendment rights, and taxation — but simply for their alleged opposition to the mainstream consensus and its respected doyens, such as Representative Lewis.

         The cries of treason and sedition are striking, but not without precedent in the history of American liberalism. In particular, the "brown scare" of the 1930s saw liberals and communists complicit in not only the demonization, but the denial of personal liberties of their right-wing opponents.[7] Such tactics were used again in the McCarthy-era, only against communists and their alleged "fellow travelers." But the allegiance to an Establishment political consensus is not at odds with the legacy of an American left that has long, in all but its most petty and marginal quarters, ceded legitimacy to the bourgeois state. It was in this context that Harris-Perry argued in a Nation piece on the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that "Military service is at the heart of citizenship."[8] She continued, "The implied social contract that binds a nation to her people is most fully realized in two primary acts: tax paying and military service," defining the military as, "Those who willingly risk their lives to protect the borders and ideals of their country." Such rhetoric does not contradict the corporatist class compromise that sustains the center-left's political and economic agenda. But The Nation, the self-proclaimed "flagship of the left," was described by its former editor, Victor Navasky, as a debating ground between liberals and radicals. With the global collapse of the anti-capitalist movement, the debate has seemingly ended, as well. I will discuss below the historic factors that encouraged facile analysis, centered around cursory and unsubstantiated allegations of racism, as well as questions of "legitimacy," in The Nation and other left-wing outlets commenting on the Obama administration's right-wing opponents.

         Melissa Harris-Perry was not the only self-avowed member of the left adopting the lexicon of nationalism. Justine Sharrock's "Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason,"[9] a narrative piece starring Private First Class Lee Pray, is a riveting account of a blue collar delinquent turned soldier who became radicalized by conspiracy theories. Pray is a member of the Oath Keepers, a group formed by former Ron Paul aide and Yale-bred constitutional lawyer Stewart Rhodes. The Oath Keepers pledge to not obey any future "un-Constitutional order" — from warrantless searches to herding citizens into internment camps. The group has been surprisingly well-received by figures on the right. Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs, in addition to more radical voices like Alex Jones have sung its praises. The reception from the Anti-Defamation League and liberal commentators like Chris Matthews was, as expected, less than cordial. In a combative interview with Matthews, Rhodes stated that members of his group would not have been complicit in many of the crimes of the 20th century — the My Lai Massacre, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the rise of Nazism in Germany, among them. Does the reaffirmation of a Constitutional oath constitute treason? Sharrock's charge against the Oath Keepers — "treason" — is significant, because it charges the group with presenting a danger to the state, rather than ordinary citizens. It is an allegation that fits within the organization's own ideological framework — loyal Oath Keepers versus a potentially tyrannical government. The piece also deliberately plays up the Oath Keepers involvement in the Tea Party movement, while presenting no empirical documentation of its membership size or how popular it is within the wider social movement. It is significant that Mother Jones devoted so much space to a group of little discernible import. The operative effect was to stoke fears of a rising and vengeful right, a group Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi calls "nativist freaks, village idiots and Internet Hitlers," at a time when both houses of Congress and the presidency were in Democratic hands.[10]

         But these liberal publications were just part of a larger trend. The New York Times' Frank Rich responded to the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the terrorist who flew a small plane into a Texas Internal Revenue Service office building, by summoning the memory of the Oklahoma City bombing.[11] Drawing upon the Times' own David Barstow's "chilling, months-long investigation" of the Tea Party movement, Rich identifies an "axis of the obsessed and deranged," writing, "Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history." The author points to the far right's resurrection of familiar conspiratorial tropes, as well as an alleged uptick in white supremacist and paramilitary militia activity. Rich cites an August 2009 publication, "The Second Wave: Return of the Militias," from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which documents the resurgence of the anti-government "Patriot" movement, a hodgepodge of militia members, tax defiers, and self-proclaimed "sovereign citizens." Another article produced by the organization, "Nativists to 'Patriots,'" contends that the border vigilantes of the Minuteman Project have shifted their attention from "border security" and defense against "reconquista" plans by the Mexican government to retake the American Southwest to the anti-Washington politics of the "Patriot" movement.

         An important source for Rich's missive, the Southern Poverty Law Center was founded as a civil rights law firm by Alabama lawyer and businessman Morris Dees and his associate Joseph J. Levin Jr. in 1971. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the group engaged in litigation against, and monitored the activity of, the Ku Klux Klan and its affiliates. Its original Klanwatch project, now Hatewatch, has been expanded to include new types of discrimination. More recently, the Law Center has documented and publicized the 75 supposed plots, conspiracies and acts of terrorism engaged in by the American right since the Oklahoma City bombings. Their annual "The Year in Hate & Extremism" reports have also claimed to register a massive uptick in the number of hate groups, which now stands at "926, up 4 per cent from 2007, and 54 per cent since 2000." However, their definition of a "hate group," as "one with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people," is broad. By this criteria, the advocates of class struggle and industrial action on the left are engaging in the same kind of hatred as biological racists and white supremacists. Harper's Ken Silverstein has called the Law Center "essentially a fraud [that] has a habit of casually labeling organizations as 'hate groups'," with the effect of stifling free speech and debate.[12]

         Silverstein and a group of other journalists, including Alexander Cockburn, have also scrutinized the Law Center's finances and the tone of their appeals for donations. The organization's treasury stands at $168 million, close to the annual GDP of Tonga, spending twice as much on fundraising than legal services.[13] This is despite the fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center only spent $29 million out of the $44 million it brought in throughout 2005. Eight million of the dollars spent were allocated to compensation, in the form of benefits and salaries, to its small staff. The disparity became even more exaggerated as the decade progressed, but as Cockburn notes, "The 990 non profit tax record for the SPLC indicates that the assets fell by about $50 million last year, meaning that like almost all non profits the SPLC took a bath in the stock crash."[14] Money donated by people, not all of them wealthy, to combat discrimination and racism vanished without a trace. The warnings of an organization — determined to recoup its losses and struggling to retain relevance in an era of mollifying race relations — about budding right-wing insurgencies should be regarded, Cockburn argues, with suspicion. Regarding the Ku Klux Klan, Cockburn writes that:

    "[D]espite the SPLC's predictable howls about an uptick in its chapters, is a moth-eaten and depleted troupe, at least 10 per cent of them on the government payroll as informants for the FBI. As Noel Ignatiev once remarked in his book Race Traitor, there isn't a public school in any county in the USA that doesn't represent a menace to blacks a thousand times more potent than that offered by the KKK, just as there aren't many such schools that probably haven't been propositioned by Dees to buy one of the SPLC's 'tolerance' programs. What school is going to go on record rejecting Dees-sponsored tolerance?"

    Commentators like Rich uncritically use Law Center broadsides to present a view of the United States' political landscape that is ravaged by racial animus and filled with menacing foes doing combat drills in the woods, preparing for a coming insurrection. Such a national portrait, I argue, is distorted, misrepresents the Tea Party mainstream, and illustrates a disconnect from the hardships and threats actually facing working families.

         More exhaustive than Rich's, Barstow's more sympathetic account of the Tea Party describes the movement as sprawling, loosely structured, and defying easy definition.[15] The shared commonalities are worrying, however: paranoid views about government activity, opposition to existing public services, and a fear of co-option through "hijack attempts" from more moderate state and county Republican Parties. Not all Tea Party "patriots" are newly politicized. Barstow notes coalition work done with cadre from established fringe organizations such as the anachronistic John Birch Society and the Oath Keepers.

         The Birchers in particular, a group that hasn't entered the public imagination since the height of the Cold War, have caught Sean Wilentz's attention. In "Confounding Fathers," a New Yorker essay from October 2010, Wilentz connects Glenn Beck's view of American history and that of the Tea Party to the "paranoid politics" of the 1950s.[16] Wilentz's analysis is indebted to Richard Hofstadter's Cold War-era historical essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which surveys "movements of suspicious discontent" throughout American history.[17] For Wilentz, one of the "defenders of national cohesion and tempered discourse in our politics, it is an alarming state of affairs," that the "extreme right-wing," represented by Beck, the Birchers, and their fellow travelers in the Tea Party, might achieve a measure of clout in Congress. He invokes the struggle of William F. Buckley, Jr., the editor of National Review and an intellectual guidepost for anti-Bircher conservatives during the Cold War. Such an analogy represents an explicit attempt to differentiate between a "legitimate" right-wing and an extremist one, echoing attacks on Goldwater Republicans during the 1960s.[18] It seeks to marginalize and isolate the Tea Party by placing its rhetoric and demands outside of the mainstream of acceptable politics, instead calling for a conservative force capable of playing the role of "loyal opposition."

         Commentary from the far-left of the political spectrum has been even more effacing. New Politics, an independent socialist journal with a "Third Camp," democratic Marxist editorial bent, features an editors' note in their Winter 2010 issue that epitomizes leftist fears about a more visible right. The editors describe the progressive's dilemma at the present conjecture. They are "disappointed" with the initiatives of the new administration and feel like "Obama has sold short his progressive supporters," but they also "are appalled by the neofascist right wing assaults on Obama."[19] These assaults are said to have support from millions. To combat this threat the editors urge leftists to not despair or relent in resisting right-wing enemies of the Obama administration for fear of "[replicating] the actions of many German leftists of the early 1930s who directed their main fire not at the Nazis, but others on the left." Though opposition to the administration from the left is still encouraged, it is made explicit that the left's "main fire" should be directed at their mirrors on the right and not policy makers in Washington.

         This analysis, however, does not go uncontested in all the forums of the American left. Editor of CounterPunch and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, for one, has offered a different interpretation of the Tea Party phenomenon. Cockburn sees the profiles of the right offered up by liberals as seething with class hatred and hysteria. He offers a class-based interpretation of the Tea Party's rise, finding its social base in the lower middle class, "people who own auto repair shops, bakeries, bicycle shops, plant stores, dry cleaners, fish stores and all the other small businesses across America — in sum, the 'petite bourgeoisie,' stomped by regulators and bureaucrats while the big fry get zoning variances and special clause exemptions."[20] Cockburn believes that the left had traditionally neglected the petit-bourgeoisie, designating the urban proletariat as the agent of revolutionary change. The situation hasn't changed now that the left "doesn't believe in revolutionary change." Cockburn doesn't think there is anything to fear from this group. "Ninety-five percent of all the firms in America hire fewer than ten people. There's your petite bourgeoisie for you: not frightening, not terrifying and in fact quite indispensable." The Tea Party's complaints are presented as legitimate grievances:

    "Whatever backwash they got from the stimulus often wasn't readily apparent. They can't afford health plans for themselves or their employees. They're three or four payrolls away from the edge of the cliff, and when they read about trillions in handouts for bankers, trillions in impending deficits, blueprints for green energy regs that will put them out of business, what they hear is the ocean surge pounding away at the bottom of that same cliff."

    With no one in establishment politics in their corner and a left oozing with disdain, the Tea Party is this class's only outlet for political articulation. While acknowledging the "nuts and opportunists" within their ranks, Cockburn contests that these types are found in any social formation. In his conception the Tea Party aren't the heirs to "Jim Crow terrorism," but can trace some of their ideology to another nineteenth century movement of the right: the Know-Nothings, an anti-Catholic nativist group that espoused "Protestant republicanism." The core of Cockburn's critique of the left is that they are wasting valuable column space and political capital scaremongering about the right at a time when the center-left is nominally in power and the only political ferment is coming from the Tea Party.

         There are other left-wing commentators willing to commiserate with the supposed grievances of the new right. In an interview with the radical quarterly Jacobin, literary theorist and critic of "identity politics" Walter Benn Michaels, identified the Tea Party as a reaction against neoliberalism.[21] Michaels doesn't view the challenge as a serious one, but also stresses that the movement, "is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist right." He contests the American left's desire to summarily reduce the Tea Party to racists: "They're thrilled when some Nazis come out and say 'Yeah, we support the Tea Party' or some member of the Tea Party says something racist, which is frequently enough." Michaels finds the subversive content of their political program in an opposition to illegal immigration. The Tea Party recognizes that "one of the primary sort of marks of the triumph of neoliberalism in the U.S. is a very high tolerance of illegal immigration, and that illegal immigration is the kind of ne plus ultra of the labor mobility that neoliberalism requires." The rise of illegal immigration represents a new form of capitalism, as opposed to the old "meritorious" capitalism of the post-war period. When right-wing ideologues attack "communism," the argument goes, they are actually conceptualizing neoliberalism.

          Michaels concedes that the Tea Party is a disproportionately upper middle class movement, but argues that even segments of the top twenty percentile of Americans by income have been hit hard in recent decades. The top one percent have been the big winners of the neoliberal-era, while the other 19 percent in that bracket anxiously see their position falter in comparison. Responding to those who place the roots of this angst in the growing diversification of the elite, Michaels says:

    "… people in the Tea Party movement have a problem that is realer than 'White male status anxiety,' that the economic shifts that are taking place, the more and more extreme inequality, the more and more going to the top, no doubt some people may be unhappy because of loss of status, but many millions more are going to be unhappy because of the loss of actual money. So my point isn't really to deny the phenomenon of status anxiety, it's just to point out the extraordinary eagerness of American liberals to identify racism as the problem, so that anti-racism (rather than anti-capitalism) can be the solution."

    Michaels' conclusion is, in sum, that students of Friedrich Hayek and exalters of Ayn Rand are the most visible source of resistance to neoliberalism on the American scene. Such a view, I believe, is as contradictory as it appears. Furthermore, Michaels' attack on the concept of "open borders," which he believes is a neoliberal construct to be combated, is representative of a left-nationalist outlook that opportunistically plays to xenophobic tendencies in American politics. A truly radical political discourse would be one that confidently defends the right of people to free movement, while critiquing the economic pressures that cause social dislocation in the first instance.

    An Alternative Analysis

         Dispassionate examination of contemporary movements is not an easy task. With little empirical evidence and only a few surveys to rely on, with the contradictions endemic to any inchoate movement on display, the task becomes almost impossible. Still, the impressionistic and polemical quality of the majority of the liberal-left's coverage of the Tea Party has been striking. So too has been the reply of dissenters like Cockburn and Michaels, who have made sweeping pronouncements about the social basis, grievances, and political aims of the new right with little substantiation.

         Several significant national surveys of the Tea Party movement have been conducted. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released in February of 2010 indicates that Tea Party activists heavily favor Republicans over Democrats, despite describing themselves as "independents," and tend to be male, rural, "upscale," and conservative.[22] The "upscale" descriptor refers to both above average educational attainment and annual income. Nearly three quarters of Tea Party cadre have attended college, compared to the 54 percent national average. Three quarters of them also self-identify as conservative. The study places active support — those donating money or attending a rally or meeting — for the movement at 11 percent of the population. 24 percent more have a favorable disposition of the movement. This group can also be described as disproportionately male, high-income, and conservative. A plurality, 45 percent, don't know enough to form an opinion on the protests, while only 20 percent oppose the Tea Party.

         With a sample size of only 1,023, including just 124 Tea Party activists, the CNN study is by no means definitive. A survey from the conservative Winston Group, a firm headed by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, however, came to similar findings, demonstrating the conservative nature of the group and their alignment behind key planks in the G.O.P. Platform.[23] The most exhaustive study on the movement, a New York Times/CBS News poll from April of 2010 also shows the Tea Party to be loyal Republicans, conservative, as well as more affluent and better educated than the public at large.[24] The study makes clear that their opposition to the Obama administration is rooted in political ideology and not personal anxiety about household finances.

         Tea Party activists see themselves as speaking for a large cross-section of the country. 84 percent claim, as opposed to 25 percent of all respondents, that the views of people in the movement reflect the views of most Americans. They also overestimate their political visibility. 50 percent of activists say that the movement is active in their local communities compared to just over a fifth of those others surveyed. Tea Partiers show a heavy preference to prioritizing the reduction of federal government size as their main political objective. Nearly all of them, not surprising for an opposition movement, hold unfavorable opinions about President Obama's job performance and believe the role of government has expanded too much during his administration. Almost all, 92 percent, believe the country is moving towards socialism and pursuing policies that favor the poor. Tea Party activists also believe the economy is continuing to deteriorate, but less of them hold Wall Street and financial institutions culpable for the state of the economy than their peers. The vast majority, all but 17 percent, believe the financial bailout to be unnecessary. Similar majorities hold unfavorable views of the stimulus package and want the government to spend money to reduce the budget deficit rather than create jobs. (As a point of reference, the majority of Americans prefer job creation.)

          Public trust in government institutions hovers near historic lows and the Tea Partiers reflect this trend. The 92 percent of them would like to see a smaller government even if it means fewer social services. This is despite the fact that activists were more likely to be directly benefiting from Social Security and Medicare. They, not surprisingly, share the general public's support for those two programs.

         Surprisingly, only 40 percent of Tea Partiers polled in the New York Times/CBS News study think that Sarah Palin would make "an effective President." Large majorities, however, hold favorable opinions of both George W. Bush and Glenn Beck. On race relations, a point of important contention for Tea Party critics, cadre, 89 percent of whom are white, were more apt to think that blacks and whites already have an equal opportunity to succeed. 52 percent venture to say that too much has been made of the issues facing African-Americans in recent years. A strong 65 percent, however, think the policies of the Obama administration do not disproportionately favor either blacks or whites.

         Significantly, Tea Party "patriots," like their fellow citizens, care more about economic issues than social ones. Activists are split, making them almost exactly in line with the general public, on legal immigration. Yet 82 percent see illegal immigration as a "very serious" problem. But the majority, 57 percent, favor gay marriage or civil unions. Most also favor abortion rights, while at the same time believing the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade to be a "bad thing." This meshes with data indicating that activists are older, more religious, and likely to be married.

         The Tea Party identifies as "middle class" and focus on bread-and-butter economic issues. These are concerns that liberal writers like Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, thought would drive the rural "middle class" back towards the Democratic Party.[25] On policy, however, they stand firmly on the libertarian right. They oppose universal health care and any increases in upper-bracket ($250,000 and up) taxes to fund health insurance for the less fortunate.

         Judging from this data and the protesters' rhetoric, there is no basis for warnings of a rising tide of racism or sightings of a nascent fascist threat. Nor is there cause to see the Tea Party as the political articulation of a downwardly mobile white working class. The implication of this last thesis is to imply that, if not for disorganization and elitism on the left, anti-tax protesters could have been lining the streets in favor of a European-style welfare state. Concerning racism, there has been no evidence that Tea Partiers support policies that would reintroduce structural forms of racism — in the form of literacy tests, segregation, etc. Whether or not Tea Party activists are prone to holding racist views within their subconscious or to what extent the opposition to Obama is due to his racial background, cannot be ascertained and any attempt to do so would be irresponsibly speculative. One only needs to look back as far as the response following Caucasian Bill Clinton's election in 1992, which mirrors in terms of demands and social base, if not media attention, the "Tea Party tempest" today, to see that opposition to Obama is based mainly on perceptions of his liberalism rather than race. Similarly, Tea Party views on immigration are in-step with the mainstream. The attempts of Neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan elements to benefit from mobilization on the right represent a predictable opportunism and there is no indication that their rhetoric has wider resonance in the movement.

         Claims of fascism are indicative of the wild and speculative way that word has traditionally been bandied about on the left. Though many of its shock-troops have come from lumpenproletarian elements, fascism has historically been a petit-bourgeois movement that can only be understood within the context of a militant left. German and Italian fascists disrupted strikes and physically attacked left-wing meetings. This historically specific brand of reaction implies that there was a vibrant workers' movement challenging capitalist class rule, forcing elements of those on top to attempt to gamble on empowering the fascists in order to ultimately preserve the existing class structure.[26] The American left is a marginalized and besieged political force, not exactly ready to storm the barricades. It's also worth remembering that fascism's economic policies were wildly interventionist, while the John Galt fellaters in the Tea Party trumpet their fear of "big government." The Tea Party's own critique of Obama often invokes images of fascism — an ideology they connect to welfare state corporatism.[27]

         The data also indicates that members of the new right are not disgruntled members of the working class. Nor are they social conservatives duped by straw man arguments into supporting policies that go against their economic interests, but rather individuals primarily concerned with policies that limit the scope of government, especially redistributive measures that benefit low income families. They push for conditions that would facilitate capital accumulation — deunionization and a small national debt, for example. The Tea Party stands firmly in a well-established libertarian tradition that draws from the inherited "common sense" of Americans. As Seth Ackerman writes, "At the center of the Tea Party lies this stolid Taft Republicanism. It's leagues away from the passions of the noisiest fringe types, the birthers and deathers and tenthers who fret about masturbation and the gold standard. It's a politics about the man who stands alone, about life as a solitary struggle, about society as a silent stream of elementary particles."[28] Neoliberalism and the erosion of old forms of social integration have only fostered this philosophy. With a moderate stance on social issues, an economic program that meshes well with hegemonic neoliberal ideology, and a discourse rooted in a venerable American ethos of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism, it is unclear what "extremism" liberal commentators are alluding to.

         Finally, one has to question the actual reach of the Tea Party and its long-term prospects. Even at their widely acknowledged peak, the 2010 Tax Day protests, it was not politicizing a particularly large number of activists from outside traditional right-wing constituencies nor were they well received among growing demographic groups — the young and ethnic minorities. Large Republican gains in the 2010 midterm elections, which gave the party control of the House of Representatives and threatened the Democratic leadership of the Senate was taken to be a sign of the Tea Party's sway. This is another misreading. Republican victories in 2010 should have come as no surprise, even without the emergence of the Tea Party.[29] The party that commands the Executive normally loses seats in midterm elections and poor economic indicators are sound predictors of ruling party electoral collapse. Public confidence in both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, has dipped, but a poll has shown that a Democratic message focusing on the middle class and job creation would garner more public support than a Tea Party-esque one based around spending and the deficit.[30] The perception of the Tea Party as an anti-immigrant movement has also helped alienate Hispanic voters, a key component in Karl Rove's strategy for building a right-wing majority coalition. Even with dozens of representatives in the so-called "Tea Party" caucus, it remains to be seen what tangible legislation the movement will push through. If the history of the 1990s — which saw Democratic gains in 1998 in the best showing for an incumbent president's party since the Great Depression — is any example, then the right's electoral gains may be short-lived.

         Despite the media attention, from FOX News' adoring coverage to hysterical denunciations on MSNBC, the Tea Party's real importance is still up for debate. Other social movements, those of the left, that barely garner media attention — the immigrant rights movement, the protests against austerity in Wisconsin, and union mobilizations like the One Nation rally held last fall in Washington — certainly seem better positioned demographically to make a lasting impact. The tale of the Tea Party, full of sound and fury, may signify nothing.

    The Agony of the Left

         If the Tea Party is part "media event" and part the resurgence of a trite anti-government populism among conservatives of relative wealth, some will question the pedagogic value of a sustained analysis of it. In my opinion the liberal-left's response to the Tea Party "tempest" is of interest, because it points to a political paradigm and ideological climate that is uniquely American. These features are indebted to the United States being the only advanced capitalist nation without a labor-based party.

         Traditional explanations for the lack of a working class political formation — Werner Sombart's Why Is There is No Socialism in the United States?, for example — argue that there was too much prosperity and too few economic grievances to catalyze such a party.[31] Other accounts focus on the impact racist ideology had on the development of class consciousness or the structural constraints the American electoral system places on third party efforts. Louis Hartz's thesis in The Liberal Tradition in America is that a prevalent egalitarianism of social status in a country without a feudal legacy meant that a liberal ideology of "Americanism" could serve as a substitute socialism for the masses.[32]

         However, it is more likely that a party could have been formed but was not. Robin Archer argues in Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? that the aforementioned theorists were making a mistake by comparing "virginal" America with the Old World.[33] A comparison to Australia is more apt. That country was also prosperous, had entrenched racial divisions, and in the late nineteenth century boasted a single-member district plurality system. Though American activists faced more repression than their Australian counterparts and their country was more rife with religious differences, it stands to reason that the lack of independent class representation for American workers was a result of conscious political decisions and defeats in industrial confrontations rather than a preordained outcome.

         Without a labor party, the bulk of the American left has been tied to the Democratic Party, a social liberal, not socialist, formation. The dominant intellectual climate has, similarly, favored liberals rather than radicals. The growth of highly organized, mass membership political parties was a development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, starting first in Germany. It was a conscious advance by the proletariat. That the Democratic and Republican parties retain a looser political structure than their counterparts elsewhere finds reflection in their relatively inchoate, and at times self-contradictory, politics. They are only parties in the broadest sense.[34] Open to all, they have no ideological requirements for membership. Anyone can register as either a Democrat or a Republican, making them little more than coalitions of social forces in which various groups contest for influence under a common banner.

         Class interests are watered down in the big tent of the Democratic Party, a party that has historically stood in the political center. Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Cannon's study, The American Perception of Class, showed that self-identified "working class" voters in the United States, without a party like Labour to flock to like their British peers, simply do not vote.[35] The Democratic Party, which has a monopoly of left-of-center social forces, finds its support among those who self-identify as "middle class," hampering class consciousness. The left, without a natural base and condemned to support the "lesser evil," has traditionally conceded ground to "legitimate" forces governing in the center. Their enemy has never been systemic — capitalism or the state — but rather the political right.

         Coverage at The Nation during the past two decades shows this logic at work. Clinton was critically supported by the publication, despite his position at the vanguard of neoliberal restructuring through his pursuit of "welfare reform" and other entitlement cuts. Democratic policy could be wrong, but the idea that all segments of the diverse Democratic Party were good faith partners with "progressives" was rarely questioned. The result was a synthesis of dull policy-based objections to individual Democratic Leadership Council proposals only occasionally interrupted by the magazine's few radical voices like Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn, writers who pitched their criticisms of the Clinton administration at a polemical, personal level. In the 2000s, the magazine was once again an opposition force, but its hyperbolic rants against the new Bush administration never articulated a clear critique of the structures and social forces that brought to bear on that presidency.

         Today, it should come as no surprise that the left has wedded its analysis of the right to examinations of "paranoid styles," or "false consciousness," as if right-wing political opinion were a disease to be treated or a form of mass hallucination. The preponderance of identity politics epitomized by Melissa Harris-Perry's examination of the Tea Party through the prism of race and racism has filled the void of class analysis. Moralizing bombast and guilt by association have taken root over concrete examination and good-faith argument, as the American liberal-left press has settled for impressionistic pieces filled with contempt. There is nothing novel about this hysteria. Nor is there anything novel about the Tea Party, a loud but fleeting explosion of right-wing populism.

    Notes

    1. Matthew Rothschild, "Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America," The Progressive, 12 Apr. 2010.

    2. The Nation ("Health Care's Bitter Opponents," 7 April 2010).

    3. Melissa Harris-Perry, "Lose the Love/Hate, But Keep the Hope," The Nation, 28 Sept. 2009.

    4. Steven Greenhouse, "In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse," New York Times, 5 Apr. 2009: WK3.

    5. Melissa Harris-Perry, "How Barack Obama is like Martin Luther King, Jr.," The Nation, 17 Jan. 2010.

    6. Melissa Harris-Perry, "Is this the Birth of a Nation," The Nation, 22 Mar. 2010.

    7. Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: the Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War, Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1983.

    8. Melissa Harris-Perry, "End Don't Ask, Don't Tell," The Nation, 2 Feb. 2010.

    9. Justine Sharrock, "Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason," Mother Jones, March/April 2010.

    10. Matt Taibbi, "The Truth About the Tea Party," Rolling Stone, 28 Sept. 2010.

    11. Frank Rich, "The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged," New York Times, 27 Feb. 2010: WK10.

    12. Ken Silverstein, "'Hate,' Immigration, and the Southern Poverty Law Center," Harper's Magazine, 22 Mar. 2010.

    13. Ken Silverstein, "This Week in Babylon," Harper's Magazine, 2 Mar. 2007.

    14. Alexander Cockburn, "King of the Hate Business," CounterPunch, 15-17 May 2009.

    15. David Barstow, "Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right," New York Times, 16 Feb. 2010: A1.

    16. Sean Wilentz, "Confounding Fathers," New Yorker, 18 Oct. 2010.

    17. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1965.

    18. Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: the Conservative Capture of the GOP, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995.

    19. Marvin and Betty Mandell, "From the Editors," New Politics, Winter 2010: 5.

    20. Alexander Cockburn, "Move Over, Axis of Evil," The Nation, 22 Mar. 2010.

    21. Walter Benn Michaels, "Let Them Eat Diversity," interview by Bhaskar Sunkara, Jacobin, Winter 2011: 17-22.

    22. "Who are the Tea Party activists?" CNN Politics, 17 Feb. 2010.

    23. "Behind the Headlines: What's driving the Tea Party Movement?" The Winston Group, 1 Apr. 2010.

    24. Kate Zernike and Megan Thee-Brenan, "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated," New York Times, 14 Apr. 2010: A1.

    25. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, New York: Metropolitan, 2004.

    26. Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, New York: Pathfinder, 1972.

    27. Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: the Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, New York: Doubleday, 2007.

    28. Seth Ackerman, "The Politics of Being Alone," Jacobin, Winter 2011: 25.

    29. "How To Tell If Obama Blew the Election, Or If It Was Blown At All," New Republic, 29 Oct. 2010.

    30. "Can Democrats Still Win?" New York Times, 23 Oct. 2010: WK12.

    31. Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences, 1976.

    32. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, San Diego: Harvest Book, 1991.

    33. Robin Archer, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.

    34. Jason Schulman, "On 'Realignment' and the Left," New Politics, Winter 2002.

    35. Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Weber Cannon, The American Perception of Class, Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987.

     

    BHASKAR SUNKARA is the editor of Jacobin and an undergraduate at The George Washington University.

  • Hundreds of Bahrainis join call to end US support for Bahrain gov't

    NEW YORK, N.Y., May 24 2011 — In a response that surprised U.S. organizers of a campaign calling on the United States government to repudiate its partnership with the Al Khalifa regime in Bahrain, hundreds of people from Bahrain joined in signing the Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s launching statement “End U.S. Support for Bahrain’s Repressive Government.”

           “The statement was originally circulated for signatures in the United States, but we have been deeply moved by the fact that hundreds of Bahrainis have added their names,” said Joanne Landy, CPD Co-Director. “Given the violent government crackdown in Bahrain, the very act of signing is incredibly courageous. Bahraini signers have implored us to pressure the Obama administration to decisively repudiate its support of their brutal and authoritarian government.”

           On May 16, the New York-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD) began circulating its statement, which has thus far gathered more than 1200 signatures including those of Ed Asner, Medea Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, Martin Duberman, Daniel Ellsberg, Mike Farrell, Chris Hedges, Adam Hochschild, Jan Kavan, Kathy Kelly, Dave Marsh, Frances Fox Piven, Katha Pollitt, Alix Kates Shulman and Cornel West. The statement is below and on the CPD website. Signatures are still being accepted. The statement will be sent to President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and key members of Congress, as well as to domestic and international media.

           In the United States, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) gave organizational endorsement to the statement. Stephen Soldz, PsySR president, stated, “We cannot be silent. Many of our members are health providers. The government of Bahrain has arrested nearly 50 doctors and other health providers, many of whom have been tortured. Their ‘crime’ is refusing to let injured protesters die and informing the world press about the abuses they witnessed.  [See the report by Physicians for Human Rights.]

           In the face of mounting complaints against Washington for muting its criticisms of repression in Bahrain, President Obama did say in his May 19 speech on the Middle East, “…we have insisted both publicly and privately that mass arrests and brute force are at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens. The only way forward is for the government and opposition to engage in a dialogue, and you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail.” However, in the same speech Obama referred to Bahrain as a “friend” and partner” of the U.S., thus signaling that the massive human rights violations in that country would not stand in the way of continuing U.S. support for the regime or the continuing presence of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, a naval force supporting an interventionist foreign policy.

         In words reminiscent of the Administration’s disgracefully neutral stand on the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt up until the last moment, when the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes were clearly no longer sustainable, President Obama has called on both the government and the opposition in Bahrain to “engage in dialogue.” What is needed now, however, is not episodic toothless reprimands to Bahrain’s government or pressure on the opposition to engage in dialogue with the regime, but a clear U.S. break with the Al Khalifa government. This would involve:

    • An unambiguous statement from Washington that because of the atrocious government repression, Bahrain is not a “partner” or “friend” of the U.S.
    • An immediate end to all U.S. aid to Bahrain
    • Vigorous condemnation of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for sending in forces at the request of Bahrain’s government to back up the repression

        CPD has launched this campaign in order to build pressure on Washington to stop propping up the Al Khalifa government. The brave people of Bahrain deserve no less.

    For the full statement, click here.

  • Swiss Labor Activists’ “Think Network” Proposes Alternatives on Public Policy

             Swiss German labor activists on the left have over the last few years undertaken a project which might be of interest to those of us in North America. Denknetz or Think Network is a leftwing think tank created in 2004 by a group of labor union activists, staff members, and others to address policy issues. The fundamental principles of the group are the promotion of freedom, justice and solidarity and the view that those three things must be fundamentally linked to each other.

             “We think that a collective like Denknetz can make a real contribution,” says Beat Ringger, staff member of the Swiss Public Employees Union and the Director of the project. “We recognize that some people work through building leftist political organizations and parties, and we think that’s fine—some of us are members of such groups. But we think this sort of project, that is, organizing political discussion and carrying out serious analyses, and developing alternative proposals an make a unique contribution. Since the 1990s, the Swiss German-speaking left has been fragmented, and we believe that this sort of project can help re-establish a common language, methods and ideas. We develop analyses and alternatives and off them to the left.”

             The group now has 750 members, most of the German-speaking Swiss but also some French-speaking Swiss and others from Germany and other places. The group publishes articles and books and organizes about 5 to 10 forums a year on social issues of importance to the Swiss labor and social movements and to the Swiss people in general.

             Since its founding Denknetz has created working groups on various issues which have published articles, position papers and books. The working groups tackle issues such as a guaranteed national income (called a “conditional income” in Europe), taxation policy, education issues, social security, informal and precarious work, the status of women and the “care economy”—child care, elder care and other issues.The organization has published a variety of position papers, six yearbooks, a book dealing with social insurances and a book on taxation to appear this summer.

             “For twenty years we have had attacks on our social security system,” says Ringger. “We have a big problem with the general direction our society is heading. We argue that we have to take back money from the financial institutions and redistribute it to the society as a whole. Our first two books take up these issues.” The Great Reform: A General Earnings Insurance (Die grosse Reform: Die Allgemeine Erwertsversicherung) analyzes the current, complex Swiss workers’ insurance system and argues that it be streamlined and simplified by creating one insurance for unemployment, on-the-job injuries and health issues. A second book which is in the works The Right Course—The Right Taxes (Richtig Steuern) argues that the the Swiss people should take back five percent more of the annual GDP of the wealth of the rich to pay for social and ecological programs.

             The Denknetz group also published proposals for the reorganization of the financial markets. “We believe that regulation is not enough,” says Ringger. “We think that basic banking functions such as savings and checking accounts should be in the hands of publicly owned financial institutions,” meaning something like our American credit unions.

             “We need a new direction in our society,” says Ringger. “We believe that this project will help to begin to set us on a better course.”

  • End U.S. Support for Bahrain's Repressive Government

    [This sign-on statement organized by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, “End U.S. Support for Bahrain’s Repressive Government,” will be of interest to many NP readers. Please support the statement by adding your name to the signer list by clicking here.]

    End U.S. Support for Bahrain’s Repressive Government

    Statement by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy

    May 2011

         On Feb. 13, 2011, inspired by the forced resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, peaceful democratic protests erupted in Bahrain. Protests grew and, in response, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa invited other Gulf states to send security forces into the country to assist in violently suppressing the demonstrators. The March 15 invasion by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates brought an intensification of torture, secret trials, demolition of Shia mosques, and repression against human rights activists, journalists, labor, lawyers, medical professionals, students, political figures, and others. On March 18 the regime destroyed the Pearl Monument that had served as the protest center.

          Like many other autocracies in the region Bahrain has been a key U.S. partner. It has provided a home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, responsible for naval forces in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and the coast of East Africa as far south as Kenya. This is why Washington’s response to the vicious repression in Bahrain has been so muted and pro-forma, in contrast to forceful denunciations of repression in countries outside the U.S. orbit, such as Iran and Libya.

          Richard Sollom from Physicians for Human Rights says health care workers in Bahrain have been targeted on a scale he has never encountered. Government forces have invaded hospitals; doctors have been dragged out of the operating room, abducted and detained for giving care to wounded protestors. The government says it will try 47 medical workers it accuses, incredibly, of causing the deaths of protesters by inflicting additional wounds on them.

          Hundreds of workers, including union leaders, have been fired for striking for democratic change. Security forces closed down the General Bahraini Federation of Trade Unions headquarters. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights writes, “Bahrain is currently considered a dangerous zone for the freedom of press and journalists.” On April 3 the government suspended the country’s only independent newspaper, Al Wasat. On May 2 it arrested two politicians belonging to the opposition Al Wefaq party.

          Bahrain’s population is 60 percent or more Shia, with the government dominated by a Sunni minority. There is systematic discrimination against the Shiite majority in political representation, employment, wages, housing, and other benefits. The government has tried to split the opposition along Shia-Sunni lines, but uprising leaders insist their struggle for democratic rights is non-sectarian.

          Zainab Alkhawaja wrote to President Obama after her father, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, former head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was beaten unconscious in front of his family and arrested by masked men: “if anything happens to my father, my husband, my uncle, my brother-in-law, or to me, I hold you just as responsible as the Al Khalifa regime. Your support for this monarchy makes your government a partner in crime. I still have hope that you will realize that freedom and human rights mean as much to a Bahraini person as it does to an American, Syrian or a Libyan and that regional and political considerations should not be prioritized over liberty and human rights.”

          Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, the International Crisis Group and many others have exhaustively documented the brutal terror of Bahrain’s government. No further evidence is needed. As long as the repression continues, the promise to lift the state of emergency is only an empty public relations gesture. The United States should end all aid to Bahrain, condemn the invasion by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and sharply denounce Bahrain’s horrific suppression of democratic rights.

          As the Arab Spring has swept through North Africa and the Middle East, the role of the United States has been truly shameful. Washington’s rhetoric cannot conceal a deep fear of democracy. Its first instinct was to stand behind its old friends. Only when it became obvious that Ben Ali’s and Mubarak’s days were numbered were they abandoned. As for Saudi Arabia, this ultra-reactionary monarchy, with its appalling treatment of women and religious minorities, is almost never criticized by U.S. officials.

          There are those who, while deploring repression in Bahrain, justify continuing U.S. support for that country’s brutal tyranny as “realism”; in a dangerous world, they argue, our security depends on having a Middle Eastern state willing to host the Fifth Fleet. This argument is profoundly mistaken. Interventionist naval forces are part of a foreign policy that, by siding with despots and pitting the United States against the Arab people’s longing for responsible government and a better way of life, guarantees endless terrorism and bloodshed and an even more dangerous world for everyone. For good reason, democratic movements around the world today do not trust the United States, which they see as motivated by imperial interest. That is why the U.S. desperately needs a new foreign policy, one that welcomes democratic forces — not hypocritically, in order to manipulate them and blunt their impact, but to stand in solidarity with their struggles to win political power for the people and achieve social and economic justice.

     

    Ervand Abrahamian, Bashir Abu-Manneh, Frieda Afary, Janet Afary, Michael Albert, Greg Albo, Elahe Amani, Kevin B. Anderson, Stanley Aronowitz, Parvin Ashrafi, Ed Asner, Rosalyn Baxandall, William O. Beeman, Medea Benjamin, Ruth Benn, Norman Birnbaum, Blase Bonpane, Ph.D., Eileen Boris, Sam Bottone, Joan G. Botwinick, Laura Boylan, MD, Frank Brodhead, Stephen Eric Bronner, Richard J. Brown, MD, Gene Bruskin, Steve Burns, Beth Bush, Leslie Cagan, Antonia Cedrone, Noam Chomsky, Marjorie Cohn, Blanche Cook, Margaret W. Crane, Charles D’Adamo, Hamid Dabashi, Gail Daneker, Bogdan Denitch, Manuela Dobos, Tina Dobsevage, MD, Stephen R. Early, Carolyn Eisenberg, Michael Eisenscher, Daniel Ellsberg, Gertrude Ezorsky, Richard Falk, Samuel Farber, Thomas M. Fasy, MD, Dianne Feeley, John Feffer, Barry Finger, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Ron Forthofer, Ph.D., Jean Fox, David Friedman, Bruce Gagnon, Barbara Garson, Irene Gendzier, Jack Gerson, Joseph Gerson, Suzanne Gordon, John Gorman, Jules Greenstein, Arun Gupta, Ernest Haberkern, Mina Hamilton, Thomas Harrison, Nader Hashemi, Howie Hawkins, Chris Hedges, Judith A. Hempfling, Doug Henwood, Monadel Herzallah, Michael Hirsch, Adam Hochschild, Madelyn Hoffman, Nancy Holmstrom, Doug Ireland, Marianne Jackson, PhD, Melissa Jameson, Mark Johnson, Sally Jones, Toby Jones, Temma Kaplan, Jan Kavan, Kathy Kelly, Assaf Kfoury, Mina Khanlarzadeh, Ynestra King, Dan La Botz, Micah J. Landau, Joanne Landy, Roger E. Leisner, Jesse Lemisch, Traven Leyshon, Nelson Lichtenstein, Martha Livingston, Staughton Lynd, Betty Mandell, Marvin Mandell, Dave Marsh, Scott McLemee, David McReynolds, Deborah Meier, Martin Melkonian, Marilyn Morehead, Molly Nolan, Mary E. O’Brien, MD, Derrick O’Keefe, David Oakford, Rosemarie Pace, Mike Pattberg, Christopher Phelps, Charlotte Phillips, MD, Frances Fox Piven, Katha Pollitt, Charles Post, Danny Postel, Psychologists for Social Responsibiity, Bill Quigley, Saeed Rahnema, Judy Rebick, Leonard Rodberg, Richard Roman, Bruce Rosen, Ruth Rosen, Elizabeth R. Rosenthal, MD, Peter Rothberg, Matthew Rothschild, John Sanbonmatsu, Jennifer Scarlott, Jay Schaffner, Jason Schulman, Peter O. Schwartz, Azadeh Shahshahani, Stephen R. Shalom, Cindy Sheehan, Alix Kates Shulman, Gar Smith, Stephen Soldz, Stephen Steinberg, Cheryl Stevenson, Paul L. Street, Bhaskar Sunkara, David Swanson, William K. Tabb, Jonathan Tasini, Peter Tatchell, Chris Toensing, Bernard Tuchman, Adaner Usmani, Judith Podore Ward, Lois Weiner, Peter Weiss, Naomi Weisstein, Laurie Wen, Cornel West, Billy Wharton, Reginald Wilson, Sherry Wolf, Kent Worcester, Julia Wrigley, and Leila Zand.

  • Human rights activist Mazin Qumsiyeh has been arrested by Israeli soldiers

    Human rights activist, Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, was arrested by Israeli soldiers along with two other Palestinians on early May 15, 2011 (Israel time) as he took part in non-violent, peaceful civil disobedience with people from many countries. Mazin’s newsletter is one of the most valuable sources of information about the Palestinian struggle for justice I’ve come across. I think his courage, integrity, and empathic way of discussing the terrible treatment of the Palestinian people is a model for social justice activists throughout the world. Elsewhere in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Golan Heights, dozens of people were wounded, including more that 150 at Qalandia checkpoint, during the Nakba events. (Nakba marks the creation of the state of Israel and is the occasion for protests against Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians.) The Israeli government is now debating legislation that would ban Nakba protests.
     We are asked to contact the US State Department, Senators, and Congresspersons about Israeli  violations of human rights during Nakba and  Mazin’s continued detention.
    A video of Mazin being arrested is on youtube.