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  • They hoped for FDR; all they got was the "F"

    [The following appeared as a contribution to a symposium on electoral politics in the September 2011 issue of Yankee Radical, DSA’s Boston-area socialist monthly. While the piece makes reference in places to the perspectives of a particular organization, its analysis is meant to apply to a broad swath of the US left as well.]

         Barack Obama is the worst Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. Sure, there’ve been some real sweethearts since. Woodrow Wilson segregated the armed services, mired the U.S. in World War 1, that poster child for imperialist adventures, and launched a Red Scare that makes the McCarthy years look like drizzle on a Sunday afternoon. Harry Truman nationalized the steel mills to break a strike, vetoed Taft-Hartley and then unleashed it once it was law. LBJ and his schizoid regime of napalm abroad and butter at home unraveled an already frayed New Deal coalition. Obama promised to be audacious. He was; for the wrong side.

         I expect no one in DSA is defending the Obama administration on the merits—such as there are. Its failure of imagination and nerve combined with a toadying to Wall Street and enabling of corporate America would have embarrassed Richard Nixon, if indeed anything could embarrass Nixon. What attracts many to Obama isn’t his accomplishments in office, but the threat of a mad-cow-like GOP that would make the ills of the Obama presidency seem like robust health by comparison. But the GOP is always worse, and unless progressives are willing to pull the trigger and withhold support sometime for wayward Democrats, the drift toward the Right will continue.

         We can’t read Obama’s mind, so we can’t know if the once-frisky Chicago community organizer is a knowing tool of capital, an inveterate capitulator, or both. Through inattention, ineptitude, gutlessness or design, his administration serves no progressive purpose. All we can do is judge it by its works, from recalling the vile Larry Summers from exile the morning after the election and carrying on Bush administration war aims to folding on the deficit fight, coming late to the unemployment dance with a lame jobs bill and being at best inconsistent on whether Medicare and Social Security need cutting. By those yardsticks, Obama’s is a failed presidency.

         If not for the threat posed by the GOP and its teabagger ankle biters, no one on the Left would wish this president four more years in office. Thanks to the GOP’s virulent war against working people liberals are already lining up to re-elect the enabler of that war.

         I don’t minimize the damage that Republican control of all three branches of the federal government—especially the federal courts—would wreak. Nor do I accept, as too many on the radical Left do, that Obama has been an even more useful idiot for the business class than would any Republican—so useful that he’s foreclosed opposition from the social movement leaders who would be in full-throated rebellion otherwise. That’s a common enough trope, but impossible to prove, too rarely questioned and probably wrong.

         I do think that socialists ought to say plainly: this far and no further! It’s time DSA stopped playing the good classroom attendance monitor and became irritants and critics, not just of neoliberalism in general but of an administration that does the man’s work, by omission if not commission. It’s also time to stop blaming the weak state of the social movements for the failure to let Obama be FDR. That lack of street heat may be an explanation for why no path-breaking legislation has come out of Washington, but it’s no excuse for the emasculated Obama health care bill that wasn’t a reform, the kid gloves with which the administration handles the financial industry or the educational programs the administration trumpets that would destroy the nation’s common schools.

         DSA’s national political committee perspective on 2008, which I had a hand in formulating as an NPC member, argued that an Obama administration—bottom line—would give the social movements and especially labor options foreclosed under a GOP regime. Those options never materialized. And breaking with Obama is no face slap to the African American community, who, with other people of color, have been this administration’s chief victims. So let’s put distance between us and the Obama campaign.

         True, we socialists don’t function alone, nor should we. Organized labor, who were owed the world by the administration after the 2008 campaign and got only a third friendly vote on the National Labor Relations Board, may think it has no choice, but we do. Individuals with ongoing or wannabe careers as political operatives may not be able to break with the national and state Democratic committees, but that’s not DSA’s problem, either.

         DSAers can profitably integrate themselves into this election cycle, but only on the state and local levels. In November, I’ll be one more voice urging the convention to take no stand on Obama, not even one expressing a preference and issuing guidance on voting. DSAers know how to vote. Like the rest of the left, we’re just not yet sure how to move forward together.

     

    Michael Hirsch is a board member of New Politics magazine

  • The Greek and the European Crisis in Context

         AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, Greece, a weak, peripheral nation in the European economy, was still licking its wounds from the greatest politico-financial scandal in its post-war history — the collapse of the Athens stock exchange. The wild stock market speculation had been fueled by often-repeated statements from various government officials (with Finance Minister Yiannos Papantoniou leading the chorus) that the upward trend was an accurate reflection of the robust state of the real economy. Millions of Greeks, with no prior experience in stock market investing, rushed to take advantage of the apparently golden opportunity to strike it rich overnight. The result was an estimated loss of approximately one hundred billion euros, mostly from small investors, and the largest redistribution of private wealth ever in the country's history. It was a scam of grand proportions, equal in conception to Albania's 1996-97 Ponzi scheme frenzy, even if the latter had far greater economic, political, and social consequences.

         The socialist government of then prime minister Costas Simitis was indeed directly responsible for the dramatic rise and collapse of the Athens stock exchange but this development was not an aberration: under the reign of Costas Simitis, Greece's prime minister between 1996-2004, the socialist party (Pasok) had been radically converted from a populist but kleptocratic political organization into a neoliberal party of political thugs who practiced systemic political corruption but preached the virtues of untamed markets. A prime example of eye-popping political corruption involved the bribery of socialist party and government officials by the German industrial multinational Siemens — and the passing (1997) and amending of laws (2001) which makes it impossible to prosecute ministers for crimes committed while in office.

         Yet, in spite of all this, an optimistic view of the future of Greece prevailed among the general public. Though wildly unqualified, the country had been accepted into Europe's economic and monetary union on June 19, 2000 and Athens had been chosen as the host city for the 2004 Summer Olympic Games. In both instances, the nation's politico-economic and media elite played key roles in spreading a strong sense of national pride among the population while conveniently concealing the huge problems and inefficiencies of the Greek economy. With regard to hosting the Olympic Games, only the Left had expressed reservations and even objections, wondering aloud whether the country could sustain the cost for this extravaganza event, which was going to carry a prize tag of several billion euros.

         In many and no non-essential ways, the organizing of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games was just the prelude to the solvency crisis that erupted a few years later and which has forced so far the EU to extend two rescue packages of unprecedented size in order to avoid a contagion effect into the rest of the eurozone. Typical of the way the corrupt Greek state authorities are accustomed to conducting public affairs, the actual cost of the Olympic Games has yet to be made public; however, estimates range anywhere from 10 to 20 billion euros. Moreover, the return benefits have been insignificant while most of the sports venues built (Greek authorities refused to build temporary ones, probably aware that the kickbacks would have been far smaller in size) remain idle, and nearly all facilities around the Olympic Village are abandoned.

         Spending money on public sector investment of dubious value, total absence of accountability, and sheer administrative incompetence are all hallmarks of the Greek state and striking characteristic features of the way the nation's two main political parties have been ruling the country since the reestablishment of parliamentary democracy 37 years ago. While the alleged bloated public sector (which is no bigger than the average public sector in Europe) draws the media's ire for the fiscal woes of the Greek state and its employees have become a political punching bag even for government officials themselves, the Greek capitalist class has been thoroughly dependent on the state and, like any parasitic capitalist class, has lived largely off the state budget. The plundering of the public wealth for the benefit of the domestic economic elite has been done largely in the form of huge public work contracts (always with a hefty kickback to the politicians involved) and massive tax evasion. State protection is also provided to the domestic business/industrial/financial class for labor law violations, environmental pollution, illegal construction, etc.

         The corrupt "exchange system" is so entrenched in every aspect of the public administration system, but also quite prevalent throughout civil society and the private business sector, that a disillusioned and cynical citizenry has been formed, often enough incapable of exhibiting social and political responsibility or for standing up for what might be loosely called the "common good". By the same token, professionals and trade unions have become narrowly based special interest groups who engage in strikes and other forms of political protest only when their own interests are threatened, and frequently do so at the expense of other sectors of the economy, as this summer's taxi drivers strike clearly revealed. In fact, the history of the Greek syndicalist movement (syndicalist organizations are aligned with different political parties) is full of examples where what passes for radical action is in fact a subversion of the public interest. (It is quite typical in Greece for a few hundred people to block access to all main roads in the capital of Athens so they can stage a demonstration or a march!).

         From the perspective of contemporary political science, all of the above are traits not of developed and democratically run societies, but of backward, clietelist-based political systems and deformed political cultures. Indeed, in surveying Greece's political landscape, one would be hard-pressed to identify a single Greek leader in recent years from any point on the political spectrum who possessed the ability, or the courage, to conceive and articulate a long-term vision for the future of the country's political life and pedagogically engage the public in the rebirth of a civic virtue. Similarly, the political elite as a whole — including intellectuals — has shown no interest at all in charting a national development strategy, or in tackling, in a concerted and systematic manner, the plethora of domestic and international challenges the nation faces. In consequence, whenever a full-fledged crisis — whether domestic, international, or environmental — has surfaced in the past few decades, the country has experienced significant trauma. Hence the current situation in Greece is not merely one of a severe economic crisis but also one of deep political, social, and even moral decay.

         The Greek political system has failed as tragically as it has because the two main political parties (socialists and conservatives) have governed via clientelist practices and undemocratic principles. Political leaders have taken turns locking voters into a long-term relationship based not on the delivery of public goods and a just social order, but on promises of targeted resource redistribution to party faithful. Political leaders have treated the state not as an instrument for carrying out just and effective social and economic policies, but, instead, as a tool for realizing party-based goals, clientelist relations, and purely personal interests.

         This undemocratic and corrosive political process helps to explain, in large part, why the Greek public administration system is so inefficient and notoriously corrupt, but it also sheds light on why the nation as a whole seems to lack a culture of public attitudes and projects built around common interests and civic life. Indeed, in a world of ceaseless competition, possessive individualism, and social decay, all too often we forget what is most critical in the idealization of true democracy: the creation of good citizens and the pursuit of the good life.

         The ills and anomalies in Greek political culture are truly astonishing when we consider that Greece is a European Union (EU) member state. Greece's underground economy generates more than 40 percent of official gross domestic product (GDP); tax evasion is so widespread that it covers virtually every aspect of society, and the percentage of people on disability pensions or early age retirement far exceeds that of any other country in the EU. In addition, political scandals and financial crimes — many of them of gigantic proportions and with such severe legal and political implications that, in other countries, they would have led to the collapse of entire governments and heavy prison sentences for the culprits — routinely go unpunished. Laws are violated systematically on virtually every basic civil matter, ranging from drunk driving and double parking and parking on sidewalks to smoking in public places, and often with the complicity of the authorities themselves.

         In this sense, Greece's sovereign debt crisis, which exploded in 2009 (the country's budget deficit stood that year at 15.4 percent of GDP) may have been precipitated by the financial global crisis of September-October 2008, but it had long been in the making. It was, in effect, a time bomb waiting to explode. In Greece, income tax rates were always very low, tax evasion massive, and Greek governments have run deficits since the early 1980s and produced a public debt which was consistently well over 100 percent of GDP. Moreover, the nation's fiscal deficit remained outside of the world's view for so long because of the systematic use of cooked statistics, which were sometimes submitted with the cooperation of the EU authorities. Even the budgetary statistics that were the basis for Greece's entry into the eurozone had been manipulated in order to present a rosier economic outlook.

         The fact that Greece ran huge deficits for at least the last two decades is only part of the story. The other part is the nature of the economy itself. Greece has an economy which is not only predominantly service-oriented (based largely on tourism and agriculture), but also highly inefficient. The domestic economy is controlled by an oligarchical structure in which large business conglomerates and wealthy individuals, in alliance with the domestic political elite, own the bulk of the country's wealth, control the media, and set the political and economic agenda. Its major inefficiencies hamper severely the country's international economic relations. Indeed, the Greek economy is in such dismal condition that a restructuring with a 20% haircut, as the second rescue package seems to entail, will hardly address its problems.

         In the decade ending in 2007, Greece's GDP grew by about 4 percent a year; however, everyone now recognizes that this growth was due almost exclusively to heavy government borrowing and historically high levels of private debt and consumer spending. In a word, Greece's economic development of the last ten years was based on a bubble economy.

         HAVING SAID ALL THIS, we should not underplay at all the significance of the neoliberal global crisis, especially since Greece has been fully incorporated into the neoliberal framework of the European economy for nearly a decade now. Global neoliberal capitalism has plunged much of the advanced world into a crisis of unprecedented proportions and is causing misery and suffering for millions of people. Economic insecurity, mass unemployment, declining wages, poverty, social marginalization, crime, fear, and social decomposition are now defining features of many advanced societies. With growth concentrated largely on speculative financial activities and the suppression of wages, wealth is so unequally distributed in many advanced capitalist societies that the social and historical boundaries between rich and poor nations have completely broken down. Wealth and poverty coexist in close proximity in many cities in advanced societies just as they do in the less developed world.

         With the belief that markets on their own terms are the best means for the maximization of growth and development and that societal interests are best served when individuals act more like consumers than citizens, the neoliberal dogma is by far the most dangerous ideology of our times. Essentially, neoliberalism represents a counterrevolution to the post-war regime in the area of economic and social rights and connects to the interests of the rich, corporations, and the needs of the dominant form of capital in contemporary capitalism, that of finance.

         Under neoliberalism, politics has surrendered power to the wealthy elite and to the financial markets and institutions. The state, through complex forms of intervention and mediation in the public arena, has sought to balance out the sources of large-scale friction between competing social forces. In an effort to assure the stable reproduction of capitalist economic and social relations, it has been converted into an instrument for carrying out the policies of the global neoliberal project without concern for the cost on human lives.

         Neoliberalism has allowed the liberalization of labor rules, privatization of state assets, budget cuts in social programs, public education, and public health. It has protected sharp tax cuts for the rich, real estate, banks, and financial transactions. It has worked to strengthen the penal state. It has supported the penalization of poverty and criminalization of many social movements resisting the collapse of the public sphere.

         Europe as a whole is the latest victim of global neoliberal economic policies. The global financial crisis that reached its peak in September-October 2008 has become a global employment crisis. This crisis has engulfed Europe, threatening to dismantle the last vestiges of its social market economy and complete the destruction of fundamental social rights of workers.

         Since the Maastricht Treaty in which Europe fully expressed its intention to embrace and reinforce the global neoliberal project, the erosion of social welfare guarantees has proceeded with only popular resistance standing in the way of the complete dismantling of social democracy. Now, as the global crisis has spread all over Europe, bringing to the forefront the flaws of the euro as a single currency throughout the EU, fiscal problems and sovereign debt have emerged as pressing issues. Fiscal discipline and severe austerity measures are being implemented in order to tame the global financial markets and provide stability to the European banking system.

         Greece, having already received one gigantic rescue package in order to avoid bankruptcy and the contamination of the rest of the euro-periphery, is under the command of the EU and the IMF and has become subjected to unprecedented draconian austerity measures. But Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, and England have also joined Europe's austerity club with deep budget cuts. Latvia and Romania are also under EU/IMF supervision and their economies have been subjected to shock-therapy treatments for the bailout loans they received.

         The wave of fiscal austerity that has spread across Europe can be seen as a reflection of the worries of European governments over market reactions following the Greek debt crisis and is fundamentally a manifestation of Europe's strict adherence to the neoliberal dogma and EU leadership's unwillingness or inability to provide an alternative policy framework to financialization in the context of the global neoliberal economy.

         In Greece, Portugal, and Spain, "social democratic" governments came to power with a mandate for the implementation of a progressive agenda, but, in the face of market pressures and direct orders from the EU and the IMF, quickly discarded even the pretext of being agents of progressive reform and began to impose unprecedented cuts and austerity measures which reduce significantly the standard of living for working people through the rollback of long established social programs, social entitlements and social rights. Programmatically there is no longer anything that sets apart southern European "social democratic parties" from neoliberal parties.

         Greece is by far the most striking example of how politically opportunistic social democratic parties have become in the age of global neoliberalism. In its 2009 electoral campaign, Greece's socialist party, Pasok, led by George Papandreou, offered the model of "participatory democracy" as the foundation of a new politics. It rejected the claims of the centre-right political party, New Democracy (which was in power since 2004), that huge deficits and a lack of state funds made any talk about massive public spending and investment highly irresponsible, and promised a break with rightist policies. Worse, Papandreou (also the leader of the Second International) wooed voters by telling them "there is plenty of money around" and declared that, if elected as prime minister, his government would manifest "the political will" to find money for the common folk, just as it had been found to bail out the banks. Papandreou continued this tactic all the way up to his win in the national elections of October 2009.

         Yet, the first action Papandreou took as new Prime Minister was to prepare the ground for turning Greece over to the IMF. Next he set in place the most austere measures ever undertaken by any European government, which involved sharp pay cuts, sharp increases in added value taxes, pension reductions, slashes in social programs, increases in the legal maximum number of people companies could lay off each month, extreme pension reforms, privatization of state assets and tax breaks for the rich and the banks. He accepted without a fight the EU/IMF terms and conditions for the first rescue package (worth 110 billion euros) in spite of the usurious nature of the agreement (it carried a 5 percent interest, while Germany borrows at very low rates) and went out of his way to convince the Greek public that it had to show patience and exhibit "patriotic duty" (just as he did!) as the crisis would be over by mid-2011. What happened of course is what every economist had been predicting and warning about from the start: the economy took a sharp turn for the worse (GDP shrank by 4.5 percent in 2010 and is expected to decline again by more 4 percent in 2011; in fact, the GDP dropped the second quarter of 2011 by 7.3 percent), unemployment reached catastrophic levels (it presently exceeds 16 percent, but all labor analysts estimate it to be closer to 20 percent), and the debt increased. If this wasn't enough, Papandreou has not taken a single action to combat corruption or to go after the rich and the big businesses which owe some 42 billion euros in back due taxes. Nor has he shown any willingness to collaborate with the Swiss government in order to go after the estimated 600 billion euros that Greek tax fugitives have stashed away in Swiss bank accounts. And neither has his government reduced state expenditures or even undermined the power of vested interests. The Greek political class seems to act as if the crisis does not apply to itself, imposing in the process an ever heavier burden on the laboring population and the pensioners.

         Papandreou's popularity rate is now at 20 percent, an all time low for any Greek prime minister who served in office the last 20-30 years, and is probably the most reviled public figure in the nation. At the present moment, the main task that the Papandreou government has embarked on is the sale of all state assets under the model implemented in the privatization plan by former East Germany. Indeed, the government policy, under the direct command of the European Union and the IMF, may be aptly summarized in a few words: "Greece: A Nation for Sale."

         Papandreou's stance to the sovereign debt crisis of Greece illuminates a symbiotic relationship between the neoliberal project and EU interests. The EU has proven to be a disastrous economic experiment largely because of its single-minded commitment to the neoliberal economic dogma and because it has made a mockery of democratic values and institutions. It has spread general disillusionment among the European citizenry. Poverty, unemployment, inequality, stagnant wages and deteriorating living standards are becoming the hallmark of the policies generated in Brussels. In the midst of the worse crisis in post-war Europe, the European Central Bank regards the fight against inflation as its exclusive legal task, with growth, prosperity, full employment, and social rights having been sacrificed in order to secure the financial system's primary interests.

         Neoliberal global capitalism, which Europe has fully embraced, represents a highly destructive socio-economic order. Millions of people in scores of communities around the world have been ravaged by the functions and operations of global casino economics. As for Greece, the country went bankrupt because of its domestic political, social, and cultural attributes and because, economically, the country was not ready for the challenges posed by single currency without fiscal unity. Now, as the "weak link" in the eurozone economy, Greece is in a long fight for its economic and possibly national survival. It is a crisis of profound severity. This crisis may have even greater implications. As Antonio Gramsci once said, "The old is dead, but the new not yet born." In due time, we may see similar developments in other eurozone countries. While Europe has become the last bastion of global neoliberalism, the task at hand is putting in place the conditions for radical social change — a revolt against the existing order, where competitiveness on international markets demands the pauperization of work, and an attempt to create a more decent one.

         The second Greek "rescue package" (laid out at the European Union Summit in late July 2011 but currently on hold due to "technical" and political reasons) is nearly as flawed a financial plan as the first one. It will intensify the structural adjustment program already under way and will dismantle whatever is left of Greece's scant welfare system. (For the record, Greece already ranks among the most unequal societies in the world, with over 20 percent of the population living below the poverty level, and its social services resembling those of an undeveloped rather than those of a developed country). Second, it acknowledges that Greece is bankrupt but hopes that this will be treated by markets as a temporary development!), pushes the debt problem into the distant future and makes some vague promises of a development program along the lines of "a new Marshall plan." The latter is typical of the type of empty rhetoric that the EU leadership has employed from the start of the crisis, and it would be very naïve on the part of anyone to place any value in this idea. Finally, this is a plan through which, as Eurogroup Chairman Jean-Claude Juncker said recently in an interview to Germany's Focus magazine, "The sovereignty of Greece will be massively limited."

         EU's latest reaction to the Greek sovereign debt crisis is the continuation of a bad theatre play, something for which both Greece and the eurozone as a whole may end up paying quite dearly. First, the Greek debt drama has touched off a firestorm of public reaction that is uncommon even for Greece itself. The wrath of the people is not directed simply against the austerity measures but also against the political establishment. In Greece, it seems that almost everyone now has finally realized that the domestic political class is not only thoroughly corrupt and irredeemably irresponsible, but also infuriatingly inept, horribly ignorant and profoundly incompetent. In gestures of apparently complete frustration, citizens are, nowadays, physically attacking ministers and members of the parliament in broad daylight and routinely stage massive demonstrations outside of the parliament, shouting, "Thieves!" and, "Traitors!" at the elected officials inside. As to what they think about the system of parliamentary rule, the following popular slogan captures quite accurately the public sentiment: "Burn the parliament down, it is a bordello."

         The public anger over corruption, the harsh austerity measures and political incompetence is certainly justified even if it comes from the same citizenry that has allowed the two major political parties to retain their monopoly of political power by voting largely on the basis of clientelist expectations. As noted earlier, the failure for the emergence of civic virtue and a culture based on a common good lies firmly and squarely on the back of the political establishment, the media and the intellectual classes.

         The prospects for progressive change in Greece are virtually none. The Left, even though it has gained some popular backing over the last few months, remains caught in its old-fashioned fractionalist mentality and dangerous machinations for hegemonic leadership over the working class movement. It also lacks any clear vision for programmatic change and confines itself to anti-capitalist rhetoric. (The extreme right is also gaining in strength, but its leadership is keener on becoming part of a future government coalition than instigating social unrest). At this juncture, the biggest bloc of voters seem to be angry and frustrated citizens who have become fed up with politics in the traditional sense and with politics as usual. The extent to which this segment of the citizenry may emerge in the near future as a potent social force to be reckoned with remains unknown, but the chances for this happening are rather slim given the very broad and diverse background of their participants.

         The future of Greece in general, and possibly of the eurozone periphery, is also rather grim. Germany and the northern EU countries have shown clear unwillingness to deal with the European sovereign debt crisis (lack of support for the European project is far greater among the citizens of the northern European countries than it is among the southern EU member states) in a firm and decisive way. As a result, Spain and Italy have already become a target of the bond vigilantes, and countries like France and Belgium will certainly be next. But the game may not go into any extra innings if Spain and Italy begin to show signs of insolvency. Unlike Greece, the size of those economies is too big to be rescued. At that point, the party is all over and several EU member states may be forced to return to their national currencies. This would be a great pity, but one cannot ignore the fact that the EU institutions have become a bastion of the neoliberal project and that the European project itself is turning into a scary dystopian nightmare.

     

     

    C.J. Polychroniou has taught in universities in Greece and the USA and is an author and journalist who writes frequently on contemporary global, political, economic and social affairs.

    [A version of this article will appear in the Winter 2012 issue of New Politics]

  • The Existential Robert Fitch

    An overflow crowd at New York’s Brecht Forum on Sept. 18 commemorated the life of the late journalist, author, scholar, educator, activist, union organizer and frequent New Politics contributor Bob Fitch, who died in March after complications from a fall. Among the speakers were Bertell Ollman, Steve Bronner, Doug Henwood, Christian Parenti, Jonathan Fitch and NP‘s Michael Hirsch. Below are Hirsch’s remarks.

         Those of us who ever saw Bob Fitch make a presentation know he followed the showbiz adage that “if it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage.” Bob said extemporaneous speakers risked shortchanging their audiences. In keeping with Bob’s precept, I’ll read these remarks.

         Shakespeare talks about the seven stages of man. For the Bard they ran sequentially. For Bob they ran more or less simultaneously.

         The lover, sighing like furnace; the soldier full of strange oaths, though never “seeking the bubble reputation,” And if Bob was on occasion the Justice with the “beard of formal cut” he never grew the “fair round belly,” nor sported “eyes severe” nor was he “full of wise saws.”

         If there were any Globe Theater analogues to Bob, they were John Falstaff, Puck and Henry 5th at Agincourt, who could stir listeners to glory and thought of his friends as “we lucky few, we band of brothers.” I was proud to be one of those friends.

         Bob was a remarkable guy. He was three dimensional when most of us are lucky to live in two. He was honest to a fault. He had a bullshit meter that was always on and never failed him. He abominated clichés—probably even this one.

         He was ruthless in his criticisms of postmodernism, likening it to a disbelief in gravity. He joined me in pronouncing Foucault as “Fuck All” and considered “transgression” nonsense when not strictly homoerotic.

         BTW, that bullshit meter got him into plenty of trouble. A brilliant researcher, gifted writer and galvanizing speaker, he was an old-school public intellectual but not enough of a corridor player, elbow bender and hale-fellow-well met to land a tenure-line university job. If I needed one more reason to despise so many leftists supping at the high tables of the elite academic world, it was for their studied refusal to hire Bob.

         He was considered collegial enough to adjunct at a smattering of urban campuses, where part-timers had the mystique of savants and the pay, benefits and job security of car washers. Bob was a thoroughbred earning a living as a dray horse.

         He was also one of the most impolitic people I knew, not because he was clueless—he was hardly that—and not really confrontational.—It’s just that he wasn’t a flatterer when flattery was called for. When for example, he was tasked to review a book dear to the heart of a certain Tikkun magazine editor, he decided the book was rubbish and said so in the draft. It didn’t run and he didn’t get asked again.

         So while he was the Peck’s bad boy of iconoclasm, he was intellectually scrupulous. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, he was ferocious about words meaning one thing. A blood enemy of union corruption who believed that institutional shape-changing from four legs to two was endemic to the American trade union structure, he also insisted that trade union tops weren’t bureaucrats, but elected officials, a distinction with great difference for Bob. That distinction didn’t make them better for Bob; it was only more accurate, more factually descriptive, more explanation than epithet.

         And he and I argued intensely about some of his formulations, especially his key one; that today’s unions as bargaining and service agents were hopelessly parochial and padrone-like, ripe for —or already mired in —oligarchy and corruption. He wanted the unions torn down and rebuilt as class institutions.

         If I didn’t and couldn’t go that far—at least not to the tearing-down bits—I never for an instant thought his ideas came from either jealousy or hatred or sloppy thinking or inexperience or wish-fulfillment or even from exhaustion over what else is to be done. Intellectually he was never exhausted. For him breaking up service-model and undemocratic unions and starting over was just his Occam’s razor.

         I think we do a piss poor job of supporting our iconoclasts. Instead of playing “What’s my line? ” or my dogma’s bigger than your dogma or my CV winds down the street and around the corner while yours barely makes it to the kitchen, we should all have the intellectual curiosity of Bob Fitch.

         Any of us who knew him well can tell stories about how he made us better, both as thinkers, writers and as people. He was generous with his time. For me, he was unendingly helpful when I started freelancing. He was there with suggestions on stories, on venues, even on how to massage editors. He was extremely supportive of others’ work. His critiques of my work were often penetrating even as they were often ego-deflating. And he always repaid a kindness with a kindness.

         He never turned down a request to speak—always did his job well—and always agreed to write for New Politics when I asked. He even thanked me once for picking a topic he wasn’t on top of. By the time his talk was ready, he was way on top, mounted with bridle in one hand and whip in the other. Only it wasn’t the steed that took the whipping. Those of you who ever got a chance to phone Bob at home should remember his answering-machine voice—and least on those rare occasions when he wasn’t at home, working, reading, writing, listening to music. “Hi, this is Bob Fitch. Can we talk? Of course!”

         Bob was a great talker, and a great listener. Time spent with Bob was time when your brain percolated. Sure, he was a master at pushing the envelope; a read of any article or book of his will tell you that. But he was also someone who pushed to see the logic in his own ideas, and yours.

         In a review I did of Christopher Hitchens’ memoir for New Politics, I basically panned the book for, among its sins, a sort of fawning after people he liked for the instant, while scurrilously blasting those he did not. After the piece came out, Bob summarized that point as “He’s either at your feet or at your throat,” and I told him I wished that I written that.

         Later, when I found it was Churchill who said it first in regard to “the Hun,” Bob insisted that Churchill had cribbed it from someone else. I’m sure he was right.

         So I owe him a lot. He was my truest critic. He even helped get me a job. In a world where know-who overshadows know-how, this was my solitary experience in that milieu. He even went to bat for me when a piece I’d submitted to The Nation languished in someone’s in-box.

         A lifetime ago I attended a memorial service for Lenny Bruce. One of the speakers—and it could have been Ed Sanders or Paul Krassner—asked what would Lenny have wanted? He answered his own question: Lenny would want to be here! I don’t know that Bob would want to be here. “Why are you guys talking about me?” he’d say. “Aren’t there more important subjects to tackle? This is after all the Brecht Forum!”

         Well, I’m going to disagree with Bob again. No, there are no better things to do here. When a comrade passes, one who brought insight out of everything he examined, it’s worth considering what he taught us, and what we’ve lost. Bob was an atheist, he didn’t believe in an afterlife. We are what we do here.

         I remember when his book, The Assassination of New York, came out. Others would have had the publisher organize the event and keep the proceeds. Bob held his at the Chinese Restaurant Workers Association and gave the proceeds to them. Who does that?

         Now he’s gone. We can learn from his example. He was always presente! He was one of the least schematic and most intellectually curious people I ever knew. That curiosity was infectious. I learned from him not only how answers could be found, but how hunting for them could be joyous, too.

  • Is Something Wrong With Single Payer?

         With all the advocacy efforts expended over the last 20 years, it might be reasonable to expect some results by now for the Single Payer (SP) movement. Of course, SP would be a great way to provide health insurance in America. Instead of thousands of private insurance companies (payers for health care services) competing with each other to see who can fool the most people, there would be one source of payment, the federal government, for doctors, clinics and hospitals. Healthcare would be much more accessible, distributed more fairly, be a whole lot cheaper, and everybody would be covered. What a deal!

         So why does it look like the chances of passing an SP bill in Congress, like the ones proposed by Jim McDermott or John Conyers, are next to nil? It's more than a little perplexing, isn't it?

         We need to look into a couple of sources power and money in our political system, and then it gets a little easier to understand. First, we should keep in mind that the top priority of every member of Congress is to get re-elected. Democrats, Republicans, & Independents—all have to raise millions of dollars for their campaign war chests, or they will lose the next election and be looking for a job. Raising money to spend on the next campaign is priority number one for members of Congress.

         Among the most lavish sources of campaign money, for both Democrats and Republicans, are the pharmaceutical industry (Big Pharma), the private insurance industry, and the healthcare industry. I don't think anybody would expect any of these three to be very friendly to SP. Least of all insurance, which would be obliterated in healthcare by SP. According to the website MapLight.org, these three together contributed over $100 million to members of Congress during the 2009-10 biennium. That's a lot of financial oomph to overcome, no?

         For many years, progressives have accepted the challenge of all that money and power by saying, "Our arguments are sound, and we're going to organize mass support around our ideas in order to overcome the huge financial advantage of our opposition." Makes sense, so far.

         But, SP is complicated and difficult to understand. This is nobody's fault, it's just the nature of the beast. There are many "what if's" involved. Like, "what if they won't let me stay with my doctor?" or "what if my father's illness isn't covered?" We can point to Canada, and say these things won't be problems. But it would take a huge educational effort backed by big-time resources to overcome the hesitations in everyday people's minds. An educational program is needed that is big enough to help a large portion of the American people join a movement capable of swaying members of Congress away from those huge campaign contributions.

         For most progressives, the force in America that would be capable of overcoming the big money, by rallying a mass movement, is the labor movement. This is the nub of the whole business, in my opinion. Should we look to the unions to do all they can to win SP? A little history helps answer that question.

         Right after World War II, most people expected labor to exercise its power and make life fundamentally better for all American workers. This would happen by winning good labor contracts. Also by influencing the political process to win a better social contract for all Americans, both those inside and outside of unions. Instead, the U.S. experienced the McCarthy era. For the most part, communists and socialists were purged from the unions. The Taft-Hartley anti-union law, passed in the late forties, ushered in a period of slow and steady decline for unions that continues to this day. At their peak in the 50's, American unions represented roughly 1/3 of the American workforce. This has dropped to about 12% today, with less than 8% of non-government workers in unions.

         No one knows exactly where this is headed, but it doesn't look good. One thing it seems to have caused is a hardening of big labor's attitude toward fighting for reforms relevant to all workers. When presented with a choice, you can easily imagine a labor official saying, "let's do this so that my members will have an advantage in their contract provisions over people doing the same work who aren't part of a union. Otherwise, why would my members want to keep paying their dues?" For labor officials, that's the main problem. Under SP, everyone would get exactly the same health care, union member or not. Healthcare benefits would no longer be a reason to join a union and pay your dues.

         I can almost hear the chorus of criticism from SP advocates. They will say that many union organizations, perhaps more than half, have taken a position in favor of SP. My answer is that these shrewd, dynamic leaders are well aware of what it would take to build the kind of mass, public movement capable of overcoming the big money against SP. It would take ALL HANDS ON DECK to effect that big a change in America. There would have to be thousands of union members going door to door in all our cities, to explain the complications that the big money guys would keep throwing at people. Demonstrations would have to be mounted across the U.S. on the scale of the anti-Vietnam war and Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1960's. It wouldn't hurt to have a few city-wide general strikes on the scale of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle a few years back.

         Union officials are simply not going to mount a campaign on a scale like that, especially when they feel like they would be cutting their own throats, if successful.

         I realize that there is a lot of support, at least verbal support, coming from the labor movement for SP. Don't be fooled. Posturing, pretending to be in favor of something you're sure will fail, is a long established tradition here in the U.S. For example, take the California Legislature. As long as Arnold Schwarzenegger was the governor and a veto was assured, California Democrats were only too happy to pass SP. But, with Democrat Jerry Brown as governor, SP can't get through the legislature. Most believe this is because there is a chance that Brown might sign it into law!

         Recently, Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, attended the national convention of a group called "Labor for Single Payer." This group represents a goodly (thousands?) number of people (probably mostly union staffers) associated with the labor movement. Why, you might ask, would the national leader of the union movement go to this meeting, if he wasn't truly in favor of SP? Well, it looks good, and there is little chance SP will happen. Remember, it would take all hands on deck, and the biggest campaign ever waged by labor in the U.S. In front of some audiences, it looks good to say you're for SP, even if you're really not.

         I'm not saying that labor could have pulled it off, had they really tried. Maybe even all the unions together don't have the strength necessary to win SP. I am saying that they've never really tried, and they aren't likely to.

         Maybe we should try a route that requires a little less of an educational effort. That way, we could proceed without the total and immediate commitment of the labor movement. Here's what we did in Seattle, back in 2005.[1]

         We decided to adopt the slogan of "Healthcare is a Right!" instead of "Single Payer." We reasoned that most people would have no problem understanding and agreeing with our slogan. When we went to the public with our petition, the most frequent reaction was for somebody to read our statement until she/he got to the part about healthcare being a right, then quit reading, smile, and sign. Unlike "Single Payer," people understood and identified with our slogan immediately. "Healthcare is a Right!" was a successful mass slogan.

         From the beginning, my plan was to make Seattle a launching pad for a movement that would mobilize enough mass sentiment to influence the healthcare debate then taking place in Congress. The message would be: No minor adjustments, do whatever is necessary to make equal, high quality healthcare a right in America! We did great in Seattle, 70% yes. Then, a member of the Seattle bunch, who lived in Tacoma, Washington, ran a similar campaign where she lived with the same results; about 70% yes.

         I wish we could have kept the Right to Healthcare campaign going to cities across the country. I really think it would have made quite a difference in 2009, if 30 cities had gone on record that they believe healthcare is a right. It might have helped make the Public Option (PO) part of the final legislation. The PO wouldn't have made healthcare a right in the U.S. right away, but we would have had something to fight for and improve. Maybe make it a little more difficult for private insurance to rip people off, by setting an example of what fair health insurance would look like.

         The key here is that we need a mass slogan that works. That means it has to be both simple and powerful. It has to be easy to grasp by the person-on-the-street, and it's meaning has to be clear. Once organized around the idea of healthcare being a right, the people of the country could exert real pressure on their Congressional representatives to "Make it so."

         Most developed countries that make healthcare a right for their citizens do not have SP health insurance systems. Some do. Many utilize private insurance companies to distribute health insurance. What those countries have in common, according to T.R. Reid,[2] is that they have all eliminated profit on health insurance and heavily regulated how insurance companies provide it. I think a strong public option would result in regulation by competition. Health insurance companies wouldn't dare to charge more or cover less than what the government does, or else people would simply switch.

         But first, we have to organize a mass movement, and we're not going to be able to do that with the slogan "Single Payer." It's too confusing. We can organize people with "Healthcare is a Right!" Then we will be able to really pressure Congress.

         Probably, the next few years will be spent waiting to see how Obamacare works out. If the new health reform law doesn't work any better than it looks like it will, organizing on a mass scale for health reform will again be on the agenda.

         There are some particularly vulnerable sections of the new law to keep an eye on. If Republicans are successful in their court challenge to the individual mandate portion of the law, the whole thing will probably start to collapse. Individual mandate is necessary if the portion outlawing the consideration of pre-existing conditions and guaranteed issue of policies are to hold up.

         The subsidies are pretty generous, limiting the amount people would have to pay for individual coverage to a reasonable amount. But it's hard to imagine Congress, in the current cost cutting climate, coming up with enough funding to cover the subsidies year after year. If that happens, look for uninsurance to be on the rise again.

         Is there something wrong with Single Payer? No, not as a medical insurance system. But it just doesn't work as a way to organize a movement.

    Notes

    1. For more on the Seattle "Right to Healthcare" campaign, please see here at the Monthly Review website, MRZine.

    2. The Healing of America by T.R. Reid, Penguin Books, 2010.

  • On Strike

    On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner told the Economic Club of Washington, DC, “Job creators in America are essentially on strike.”

         He was quite right. Although most people have heard of a strike by workers, capital too can go on strike, and often has done so to achieve its political and economic goals.

         Economists Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis explained in their book Democracy and Capitalism how the capital strike works:

         “The electoral prospects of an incumbent government depend on the general performance of the economy in the period preceding the election, particularly the level and growth of employment and personal income. The overall performance of the economy, in turn, depends on the level of investment. The level of investment in any given country depends on the anticipated domestic profit rate compared with expected returns in the rest of the world, and compared also with returns to non-investment uses of capital. Therefore the adoption of public policies that reduce the expected rate of profit also tend to reduce the electoral prospects of the incumbent government.” (p. 88)

         So even though corporate profits are at extremely high levels – they grew by 44 percent from 2008 to 2010 and have continued to grow — and even though the internal cash available to corporations for investment increased by more than a third over these same years — corporations are not hiring. Capital is essentially saying to Obama: unless you lower our incredibly low tax rates even further, unless you reduce even more the minor regulations that impede us, we’ll refuse to invest, and thus maintain the devastating unemployment rate and doom your re-election prospects.

         The capital strike is not a new phenomenon. Both the British Labour Party and the French Socialist Party “reneged on electoral promises in order to avoid antagonizing capital.” Leaders of these parties, “from Harold Wilson to Laurent Fabius, confirmed that these revisions in policy were made in order to maintain levels of profitability high enough to encourage investment.” (Peter Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France, 1986, pp. 262–63.) In the United States, President-elect Bill Clinton was told by his advisers the constraints within which he had to operate. Said Clinton, “You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” (Bob Woodward, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House, 1994, p. 84.)

         Does this mean that we are helpless against the power of corporations, that we have to give them what they want and what they demand or else the economy will be crippled and working people and the poor will continue to suffer? No, but it does show the limits of small incremental reforms. You can’t defang a tiger one claw at a time, as R.H. Tawney once said. In the same way, you can’t make tiny dents in the capitalist system because corporations will use their remaining power to crush you. The only solution is to take strong measures to break the power of capital, and that means removing the investment decision from them. Mitterand could have pursued a social democratic program, but only if he dared to nationalize key sectors of capital. Clinton could have freed himself from the constraints of the bond-traders, but only if he challenged their power directly. Instead, he appointed these very representatives of capital to the key economic positions in his administration (Indeed, it is another dramatic instance of how narrow the difference is between Democrats and Republicans that while Clinton’s Treasury Secretary was the former co-chair of Goldman Sachs, Robert E. Rubin, George W. Bush chose as his Treasury Secretary the chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson. At least when John F. Kennedy chose a Defense Secretary to follow Eisenhower’s George Wilson, the head of General Motors, he picked Robert McNamara, the head of a different auto giant, Ford.)

         Obama too has staffed the upper economic positions of his administration with investment bankers and corporate honchos. There is no doubt that Obama would like to lower the unemployment rate — which threatens his presidency and the Democratic Party going into the 2012 elections. But to do so he’d have to directly confront the corporations. Those whom he’s chosen to oversee the economy and those on whose campaign contributions he depends (as well as the whole record of his presidency) make it exceedingly unlikely that he’ll undertake such an attack. Perhaps the fear of being a one-term president will jolt him into adopting a new approach. But don’t hold your breath.

  • Slandering Nonviolence

    [Originally published as an Op-Ed, Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal, October 2008. Updated, corrected and partially rewritten, January, May and September 2011. ]

         Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines “nonviolence” in its political sense as “nonviolent demonstrations for the purpose of securing political ends.” It also defines it as “abstention from violence as a matter of principle” and “avoidance of violence,” but, of course, as the civil rights movement of the 1960s showed, nonviolent demonstrations don’t always avoid the violence directed against them by the state, and those protected by the state. However, as the movements of nonviolence led by Martin Luther King and Gandhi demonstrated so well, determined nonviolent political struggles can often achieve significant ends. The quiet dignity of such demonstrations puts the onus on the state and the forces it backs and directs when they engage in violence against nonviolent demonstrators, making nonviolent demonstrations effective both as moral witness against oppression, and as a tactic that succeeds in achieving at least some desirable ends.

         Ironically, three great advocates of using nonviolence to achieve freedom and justice in the 20th Century—Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Robert Kennedy—all died violently, felled by assassins. Their nonviolence could not prevent the violence of others. (Of course, Kennedy came only lately to the “nonviolence” mantle, after King’s assassination; yet, his pleas for civility and for negotiating an “acceptable” end to the Vietnam War were derided as appeasement and wistful pacifism by the U.S. right. Here in Indianapolis where I live, mention of Robert Kennedy’s renowned speech announcing the murder of Dr. King and calling for peace nonetheless, given in an Indianapolis park, was buried deep in an unrelated story by the Indianapolis Star, a consistently archconservative, pro-Republican newspaper.)

         Nor was the civil rights movement of the 1960s spared from the violence of those who couldn’t tolerate its nonviolent insistence on justice. According to official statistics, at least 217 civil rights activists lost their lives in that campaign. And the list of martyrs for that cause is sickening to comprehend. It ranges from four African American children killed in the fire bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama church to the gunning down of Medgar Evers, and to the death by torture of those three civil rights workers in Mississippi whose names read in unison rings as a tocsin—Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. Then there was Viola Liuzzo, gunned down in her car, and up North (or what Malcolm X called “up South”) in Cleveland, the Rev. James Reeb, crushed beneath a bulldozer as he sat protesting the razing of Black homes. And so many others. Those who are nonviolent are often not spared from the very violence they resist doing themselves.

         This, to me, can separate nonviolence from simple pacifism. Nonviolence used as a tactic to fight for justice does not prevent the violence of those determined to maintain the injustice. Nonviolent struggles against oppression, despite their quiet moral dignity and tactical efficacy, do not prevent, or even necessarily curtail or dissuade, the violent retaliation of the oppressor. Nonviolence itself carries the risk of being struck down violently, despite its merits.

         And yes, nonviolence may generate anger among its practitioners, who get tired of being beaten and jailed, and seeing their friends and fellow nonviolent activists beaten and jailed, and sometimes killed. And yes, they can get angry at the obdurate state, which lets the perpetrators of violence against them get away with it. Malcolm X understood this, and while some in the IPJC [Indianapolis Peace & Justice Center] have invidiously contrasted Malcolm X against Martin Luther King as the “apostle of violence,” Malcolm X never killed anybody, even though he was killed. Nor did the mid-1960s Black armed self-defense group in Cairo, Illinois, the Deacons for Defense, ever kill anyone, and neither did 1960s Black self-defense advocate Robert Williams of Monroe, North Carolina, who had to flee the U.S to avoid being framed for kidnapping.

         While some member of the Black Panther Party in New York state were convicted of killing police officers, commonly in legally dubious trials, the Party itself was continually infiltrated, besieged and harassed by the forces of “law and order.” Black Panther Party head Huey Newton was charged with killing a cop, but was not convicted; Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale was also charged with murder, but was also acquitted. Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Bobby Hutton were both killed by the police, though both were unarmed. Hutton was a teenager living on Oakland, California. Hampton, prominent Black Panther Party leader in Chicago, was actually killed while he was sleeping!

         Terry Bisson wrote trenchantly for New York Newsday in 1995:

    The Panthers are not America’s only political prisoners; there are scores of American Indians, MOVE militants, Puerto Rican Independentistas and white radicals serving draconian sentences for what can only be deemed “political” crimes. But I single out the Panthers because they have been in jail the longest; because every veteran of the sixties, black and white, was inspired by the courage and commitment of these politicized ghetto youth; and because their treatment is so transparently, so cruelly, so shamefully vengeful.

    The Panthers are still being punished for the violence of a decade of struggle in which crimes were committed on both sides. Policemen were killed, it is true (though far more Panthers were killed by police). But it is no secret that violence and criminality by police was a desperate issue in the Black community, then as now….Rodney King was not the first African-American man beaten unmercifully by police; he was only the first on prime-time TV. And J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program was only the most notorious of many illegal government operations aimed at preventing the rise of a “Black Messiah.”

         Let this remind us not so easily to forget the violent “nonviolence” directed against Martin Luther King and other justice advocates by constant FBI spying, and through its attempts to brand King and others as dangerous subversives. Let us not so easily forget the defaming of King for standing up to Lyndon Johnson and the liberal Democratic Party establishment on the war in Vietnam. (King was, in fact, called “the most dangerous man in America” by J. Edgar Hoover. He was not nearly so eulogized in his lifetime as he was in death, and certainly not embraced as an advocate of “color-blindness” by the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the 1960s. In fact, just the opposite—he was a racially-motivated agitator who deliberately stirred up people without justified grievances, according to the conservatives and segregationists of that time, while “racial moderates” would often separate King’s goals, which they lauded, from his confrontational tactics, which they decried.)

         Nor let us so easily forget the legacy of violence directed throughout U.S. history against those who sought simple economic and social justice and an end to imperialist wars, from Haymarket Square to Kent State, from the murderous outrages committed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911 to the police rampage against the Little Steel union picnickers in 1938. All the way up to torturing prisoners suspected of “terrorism” today, ever since 9/11, at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, and “renditioning” others to friendly foreign countries for torturing and forced confessions there. But, as Alfred W. McCoy’s book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror shows, it happened much earlier as well. Violence is, indeed, “as American as cherry pie.”

         State violence against the downtrodden and oppressed rising up to demand justice is the great red thread woven through world history. It was put very well in the “Appeal from Russian Intellectuals” in honor of the 90th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution (2007):

    The October Revolution is often termed a “violent overthrow.” Yet the actual “overthrow” in Petrograd occurred almost without human victims. While we are not advocates of violence, we recognize that it is inevitable at particular stages of historical development, when it is bound up with the presence of class and national antagonisms.

    Revolution is indeed associated in many respects with violence, as was clearly evident, for example, in the bourgeois revolutions in the Netherlands, England, France and so forth. The ending of slavery in the United States was accompanied by the bloodiest conflict of the 19th century, the American Civil War. In Russia, the ending of feudalism was also accompanied by wars and revolutions.

    These developments were not called forth by the machinations of political intriguers, but by the crisis of the old system and by the impossibility of solving age-old problems by evolutionary methods. People resort to revolutionary violence in specific circumstances, when the ruling classes, blinded by thirst for their own enrichment and for the maintenance of their privileges, neglect the well-being of the people.

    The dispossessed classes then have no choice except to take their fates in their own hands. (Against the Current 131, November/December 2007, p. 19)

         This makes nonviolence, then, but one weapon in the hands of these “dispossessed classes [who] have no choice except to take their fates in their own hands.” Such was the context of the nonviolent movement of Gandhi, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa: all of them facing the armed, violent might of the oppressor state. To thus conflate nonviolent struggle with pacifism, to righteously decry the “violence on both sides” when the massively greater means of violent power are held by one side only, and by holding such power can contemptuously ignore these solemn pleas, can only disarm the “dispossessed classes,” tie their hands behind their backs as they face a formidable foe, and in fact, in doing so, only engender more violence. Nonviolence is an honorable and useful tactic in the struggle for economic, political and social justice; pacifism, too often, is only a pious and utopian wish, a phantasm. Thus, to me, to conflate nonviolence with mere pacifism is to dishonor nonviolence, to soil it, and, ultimately, to slander it.

  • Talking about race and Haiti

    Though these two pieces about education, one about the terrible way the US is destroying any possibilities for a real system of public education in Haiti, the other reasons the author is NOT talking about race, do not make this connection, they point to the fact that education in the US has to be seen in the context of international policy, and in particular US imperialism, in which racism is profoundly embedded. This connection is not a new one, but it’s one worth repeating. As Jesse Hagopian notes in his piece on Haiti “Haiti and New Orleans have an inextricably linked history, including the 10,000 refugees that left Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) and arrived in New Orleans in 1809, doubling the population of the city. They brought with them the Creole culture and voodoo religion, elements of which persist in the bayou to this day. “
    What events in Haiti drive home is that we have to talk about race, although it is very hard to do so. And I think one of the reasons we are having trouble having that discussion is the complexity of feelings about our having an African American president.  His victory was an electrifying moment in US history, for everyone who cares about racism. Yet,  Obama has been able to escape responsibility for the increased pauperization of millions of people in the US, especially people of color, because many of his supporters have been profoundly  disheartened by the fact of an African American man being the person who, in the end, has agreed to policies that are so harmful to the vast majority of Americans.  We’re not going to be able to set education on a better course unless we do talk about race, in the US and in US foreign policy. Teachers in Swazi and in Congo are courageously resisting  policies endorsed by the US government through the World Bank and IMF. Their struggles are invisible to most US teachers. And that invisibility cannot be explained without talking about race.

  • Jobs and Deficits: Obama Squares the Circle

         President Obama outlined his new American Jobs Act before a packed Congress, more than half of whom believe the poor and jobless are undertaxed moochers and that the government does not create jobs. The Democrats will have their hands full.

         The Obama speech signifies that he is again in campaign mode. He’s challenged the conservative contention that “the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle the government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own…” But has he offered an adequate alternative?

         The earlier stimulus packages stabilized the economy and arrested its freefall plummet. But it was too underpowered to reverse the downturn. How do these proposals shape up? According to the Congressional Budget Office, the GDP gap (the difference between actual or projected GDP and full capacity GDP) is 5.1% for 2011. The corresponding unemployment gap, the difference between actual or projected rate of unemployment and “natural” rate of unemployment, is 4.4%. These deficiencies translate into an $805 billion shortfall in aggregate demand, according to economist William Mitchell. For Paul Krugman, “The lingering effects of the housing bust and the overhang of household debt from the bubble years are creating a roughly $1 trillion per year hole in the US economy.”

         Either way the $447 billion in combined tax cuts and spending outlays that Obama has proposed is still woefully inadequate to the size of the problem. Yet, there are few means by which the President can bypass this deeply reactionary congress. The Federal Reserve has ruled out another round of quantitative easing (the buying back of long term bonds). But this is also a head nod to reality. Placing additional reserves in the coffers of banks is basically useless. Even if quantitative easing was what was needed to provide adequate banking reserves for the expansion of business and consumer lending (which is a widely held myth), banks cannot find a sufficient scale of profitable businesses and creditworthy consumers in a down economy to make this worthwhile. There is no straightforward way to translate additional bank reserves into additional private demand.

         Inadequate though it may be, the union movement will be behind this plan and will predictably take up the call to pressure congress to enact it. By some measures, the job performance during this “recovery” is even worse than during the Great Depression and this speaks to their level of frustration and desperation. But there are no real departures here: an extension of the payroll tax, limited mortgage relief, a continuation of unemployment benefits, infrastructure spending, revenue sharing with the states. Obama is still singing in the austerity choir and these proposals fully reflect this.

         All his initiatives are “fully funded,” meaning that they are designed not to add to the deficit. If the past is any evidence this will entail, for example, shortfalls in social security revenues occasioned by the proposed cuts in pay roll taxes being made good out of deductions from general revenue. Other government programs will simply be shortchanged. And Obama’s warnings of cuts to Medicare and Medicaid are ominous harbingers of where offsetting future funds will come. One part of Obama’s working class constituency will largely be paying for the benefits for the others. It’s hard to find the expansionary thrust to all these “balanced” programs.

         Obama, it is true, also proposes to open new revenues sources by lowering corporate tax rates, while closing loopholes. Even assuming that this is acceptable to the Republicans — which it isn’t — this would be largely a leap of faith. There is no certainty that this will result in more than a mere wash or worse, as corporations remain ever resourceful in squirreling away their profits in off shore tax havens. The predictable result of “unforeseen” revenue shortfalls will be further cutbacks in social spending to keep the overall project in balance. These proposals simply perpetuate tired old supply-side nostrums — useless under Reagan, self-defeating under Obama.

         A private-sector recovery requires 300,000 jobs each month. No series of proposals that cannot adequately supplement aggregate demand sufficiently to create the need for 300,000 jobs each month can be expected to make a dent in the problem. In the black community where unemployment and underemployment is double that of the population as a whole, the urgency is particularly acute. As the business sector and workers pay down debts, the government has to offset these by massive injections of net spending. Business has already put Obama on notice that proposed tax incentives will not be a spur to hiring because markets are themselves too weak to justify ramping up production. Obama is boxed into a corner, a corner that he himself helped designate.

         The economy needs to deficit spend its way out of this. Otherwise a contractionary spiral will be unleashed. Business has been content with government providing a minimal demand floor that protects profits. But it has fought against any expansionary proposals that might go beyond that fearing that tight labor markets might embolden labor. A truly expansionary agenda can be financed by taxing the idle balances of the wealthy, provided they don’t respond by ratchetting up their savings. Or it can come by creating a real jobs program funded by the federal government’s ability to create money, without first appropriating resources through taxes or borrowing. This technically adds to the deficit, insofar as government spending would be in excess of tax revenue. But this additional “debt” is owed to no one. Obama might have explained that this is how the TARP was “funded.” There were after all no sources in the midst of the financial crises to borrow or tax from.

         And the left should remind the public that the ruling class knows full well that this is eminently doable. Its unfunded imperialist wars have been underwritten in the past decade precisely along these lines.

         The labor movement needs to identify and expose the weaknesses of the Obama initiatives, welcome as they may now sound. These proposals cannot provide an adequate basis for a new beginning because they are constrained in their ability to augment aggregate demand. They are welcome only to the extent that they nudge the national conversation from deficits to jobs.

         What is needed is nothing less than the call for adequately paying government jobs on demand. The labor movement needs to launch a campaign urging government to assume the role of employer of the last resort. These proposed government jobs should come with living wages, COLA provisions to secure workers a share of productivity gains in the larger economy and the right to collective bargain, a right that the President has now so conveniently rediscovered in his jobs speech. Unemployed workers have no stake in whether government jobs augment the profit making capacity of the private sector and are therefore immune to the Republican claim that flows from that contention that such jobs are “not real.”

         The problem with making sensible demands — and these, with roots in the New Deal, are neither socialist nor radical — is that there is no vehicle at present through which they can be channeled. The Democratic Party remains a company union party. It’s not a membership party and cannot be controlled by its voting base. This means that it is forever at the mercy of its wealthy donors to finance its campaigns and it directs its appeals largely on a lesser evil basis. If the Republicans oppose the President’s proposals, the Democrats will argue that the conservatives have again turned their backs on the working class. It will matter little that the administration’s proposals are weak tea.

         This highlights all the political infirmities that bind the hands of workers and minorities. The Democratic base urgently requires a party that is structurally capable of implementing a consistently progressive agenda, and of transcending liberal constraints if, as socialists believe, those constraints will be obstacles to the achievement of liberal goals. It needs a party that can, in other words, actually defend and advance working class interests — not on our socialist grounds, welcome as that might be — but on the basis of their immediate jobs and economic security centered understanding of the issues. That requires a party shorn of its corporate tentacles. Such a party may have all the ideological weaknesses and inconsistencies of the Democratic Party. It might not even have progress beyond the Democrats’ formal agenda. Objectively it would still serve the interests of capitalism to one degree or another. But it would not be a genetic instrument of social control from on high. It may well be a captive of bourgeois ideology at the outset, but not an organic tool of the existing social order.

         American socialists need to connect with the disaffected liberal and minority base of the party by orienting around a perspective that addresses the immediate needs of the that base, a base which would provide the mass constituency of any future socialist party. This means raising the need for a real jobs program, robust enough to actually put the unemployed back to work. If the capitalist duopoly cannot deliver, we must use this to expose the frailty of the political system. But socialists need to make clear that our call to break with the Democratic Party does not derive from a sectarian insistence on ideological purity, but from a substantive analysis of why the Democrats cannot consistently represent the mass support of those who are called upon to put it in power.

  • 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.