In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. "'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'." Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies." He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country." In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the US attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations security council. There was no UN authority. He said that "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of the September 11 2001 attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that the US invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden." In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, Pakistan's military regime reported, and they were ignored.
Even Obama's mystification of the September 11 attacks as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the twin towers were attacked, the former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik was told by the Bush administration that a US military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure US control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go. Obama's most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaida's attacks on the west. His own national security adviser James Jones said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power." The war is a fraud; only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace." Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McChrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world still beyond Oceania's reach. This is known as Coin (counter- insurgency), and draws together the military, aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings.
Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, it aims to incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbeks against Pashtuns. The US did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They built walls between communities which had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunnis and driving millions out of the country. Embedded media reported this as "peace;" US academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true. Something similar is planned for Afghanistan - people are to be forced into "target areas" controlled by warlords, bankrolled by the CIA and the opium trade. That these warlords are barbaric is irrelevant. "We can live with that," a Clinton-era diplomat once said of the return of oppressive sharia law in a "stable," Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured Western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands. That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia, where ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once-peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam, where the CIA's "Strategic Hamlet Program" was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Vietcong - the US's catch-all term for the resistance, similar to "Taliban."
Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the US in both the Iraq and the Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance - these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet, for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds. The most telling forerunners of the Obama plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and his general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it. "It was curious," wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. "And the people under the sky were also very much the same - everywhere, all over the world ...people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same - people who ...were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."
Showing posts with label obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obama. Show all posts
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
Monday, 22 March 2010
Tea party tempest is harming America
In January, Scott Brown, a little known Republican, won a by-election for the late Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat in the solidly Democratic state of Massachusetts. Brown’s upset victory deprived the Democrats of the 60-vote majority needed to overcome the Republican filibuster and pass legislation in the Senate. It also asserted the strength of the rightwing, anti-Obama backlash that is now targeting not only Democrats, but ‘moderate’ Republicans throughout the country. In a rural New York constituency, one such ‘moderate’, a supporter of gay marriage and abortion rights, was forced to resign as a candidate for the House of Representatives in favour of a more solidly ‘conservative’ contender (who went on to lose the election to a Democrat). Rick Perry, the Christian fundamentalist governor of Texas, who suggested secession from the United States as a possible answer to Obama’s ‘socialism’, was challenged (unsuccessfully) from the right in a primary contest for the gubernatorial nomination. Senator John McCain of Arizona, the party’s former presidential candidate, facing a similar challenge for the Senate seat in his home state, has become something of a target for the party’s right wing, which considers him the personification of a moderate, establishment Republican.
These challenges are strongly influenced by a new presence on the political scene: the so-called Tea Party movement. The Tea Partiers (or Teabaggers) first erupted into national consciousness last summer, when thousands descended upon town hall meetings called by legislators to discuss Democratic healthcare proposals. With placards picturing Obama as Hitler, and in a few cases symbolically carrying rifles and pistols, they methodically disrupted the speeches of elected officials. They commonly denounced the several proposed reform bills pending before Congress not for anything they actually contain, but for imaginary provisions bearing only the faintest resemblance to real ones. From the fact that the bills had no specific mechanism to prevent illegal aliens from getting emergency care (since added), they concluded that the Democrats were proposing to extend medical cover (perish the thought!) to all illegal aliens. (When Obama denied this charge in a special Congressional healthcare address, a Republican backbencher from South Carolina, Joe Wilson, interrupted him with a shout of “You lie!” from the floor. This breach of etiquette made Wilson an instant Tea Party hero.)
From the fact that one version of the legislation proposes to fund voluntary end-of-life counselling, the disrupters asserted that the bill sought to establish government ‘death panels’, which would deny the elderly permission for life-prolonging treatments in order to save the government money. In vain did hapless legislators attempt to refute these canards by reference to actual legislative text. What was soon to become known as the Tea Party movement insisted on arguing not simply on the basis of its own opinions, but of its own facts. The town meetings of July and August were followed by a national Tea Party march on Washington. The date chosen was September 12, to commemorate the day after 9/11 in 2001, when, according to the organisers, America stood united as never before in the face of the terrorist danger. Upwards of 70,000 turned out that day in what was perhaps the biggest rightwing demonstration the capital had witnessed since a big Ku Klux Klan march in the 1920s. Any marcher who may have momentarily forgot what country s/he was in would soon have been reminded by the profusion of American flags in the hands, and on the jackets and jeans, of the nearly all-white and not exactly youthful participants.
Many also dangled from the brims of their hats the teabags that have come to symbolise their movement; they are meant to evoke the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when rebellious colonists disguised as Indians dumped a shipment of British tea into the harbour. (The movement is apparently oblivious to the fact that “teabagging” is a slang term for a certain sexual practice.) The by now familiar placards were there, equating Obama with Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Most signs avoided overtly racist themes, with a couple of notable exceptions: one read: “The zoo has African lions - the White House has a lyin’ African”; another pictured Obama with a wild afro and a bone through his nose over a hammer-and-sickle emblem. The rise of the Tea Partiers has played havoc with the Republican establishment. Some, such as John McCain, have sought to take their distance, fearing that the new movement will further marginalise an already weakened party in coming elections. Others, however, see in the teabaggers a potential for renewal and rebranding in the wake of a historic defeat. Many hover between these positions. Sarah Palin appears to be hedging her bets. She was the main speaker at the National Tea Party convention in February, but recently endorsed mainstream Republican candidates in opposition to the ultras.
The Tea Party movement is unmistakably a phenomenon of the right. Beyond this, however, it is sprawling and amorphous, with only a rudimentary national apparatus and nothing resembling a coherent political programme. One core element consists of professional Republican Party operatives and their corporate backers. Another is extreme-right outfits who sniff new recruitment opportunities: white supremacists, John Birchers (a few are still around), and various militia and ‘patriot’ groups, which continue to nurse their anger over the violent government suppression of armed religious cults at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas in the 1990s. But thousands without a history of political activism have been swept into the trend. One recent poll indicates that 20% of Americans identify with the movement in some way. The unifying theme seems to be paranoia in relation to the federal government in general and Obama in particular. Tea Partiers oppose the Bush/Obama bank bailout, healthcare reform and Obama’s stimulus package, not because these measures are corporate-friendly, but because they are seen as adding to an already heavy national debt burden, and, among the movement’s more extreme elements, as the initial steps in a vast government conspiracy to destroy the constitution and impose totalitarian rule.
The closest thing the movement has to a national spokesperson and ideologue is the clownish Fox News television commentator, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party’s Mad Hatter. It was Beck who issued the initial summons to the march on Washington. Watching his daily five o’clock rant, which reaches over three million viewers, has become a ritual for teabaggers from coast to coast. Beck specialises in stoking fears and paranoid delusions. Although forced to back off from some of his more outlandish assertions - that Fema (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is preparing secret concentration camps for dissenters, that Obama is an anti-white racist - Beck presents himself as a relentless unmasker of government plots against American liberty, past and present. He claims to base his thinking on the work of the libertarian philosopher, Ayn Rand, according to whom the highest human calling is unlimited pursuit of individual riches. In this optic, the proper role of government is to protect the acquisitive freedom of citizens, and the US constitution - a fictionalised version of which is for Beck the embodiment of eternal truth - was established chiefly for this end. Attempts by ‘progressives’ (the preferred current self-description of liberals, and Beck’s chief term of opprobrium) to redistribute wealth or achieve ‘social justice’ is nothing less than subversion of the original intent of the founding fathers. They supposedly believed in minimal government, not the bloated regime of big-spending, tax-guzzling bureaucrats and social engineers that now occupies official Washington.
Beck styles himself a strict constitutionalist, and has gone on the road with a one-man show clad in knee breeches and a tricorn hat, intended to evoke the American war of independence. Beck’s small-government creed, like that of most ‘conservatives’, is suspended at the door of the local police headquarters and the Pentagon. He advocates zero tolerance for criminals, is a staunch supporter of US troops abroad and has mounted a spirited defence of the waterboarding of ‘terrorists’. That George Bush swelled the federal budget deficit by a far greater amount than anything Obama is proposing goes virtually unmentioned. The trouble, according to Beck, began not with Obama, or even Franklin D Roosevelt, but under the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), when ‘progressives’ got their hands on the federal government for the first time. Civil service reform, anti-trust legislation and the progressive income tax (Beck says the adjective refers to political philosophy rather than income-based calculation) - all were schemes to use the government as an instrument for human perfection, and thus amounted to nothing less than an early attempt to impose communism by peaceful means.
Beck surrounds his historical fictions with a good deal of pseudo-scholarly hocus-pocus, consisting of charts, elaborate blackboard demonstrations and panels of ‘experts’ and ‘scholars’. One regular guest on his show, Jonah Goldberg, is the author of a book titled Liberal fascism, which argues counterintuitively that fascism is a phenomenon of the left, as opposed to the right. Although echoing many Republican themes, Beck is careful to put some distance between himself and the actually existing party. There are ‘progressives’ lurking in both camps, he says, reminding us that that Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican president, adopted the progressive label as well as Woodrow Wilson. Much about the Tea Party movement is hardly extraordinary. Its ‘libertarianism’ represents the ideology of bourgeois individualism raised to the highest power, a doctrine that has always had widespread appeal in a country for which getting and spending are a secular religion. This ideology also dovetails neatly with the neoliberal agenda. Many leftist and liberal commentators were therefore initially inclined to dismiss the Tea Party movement as an ‘Astroturf’ phenomenon: ie, a pseudo-grassroots front for big corporations and the Republican Party.
This characterisation contains more than a grain of truth. One of the biggest early backers of the movement was a shadowy “free enterprise political advocacy group” named Americans for Prosperity. Its chief executive, Tim Phillips, is a professional Republican operative, while its founder, David H Koch, an oil and natural gas magnate, owns the second-largest privately held company in the US. The group refuses to disclose the identity of its donors. Another visible Tea Party presence is an outfit called Freedom Works, headed by Dick Armey, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives and outright corporate shill. Among its contributors are John Mellon Scaife, a notorious billionaire funder of rightwing causes, and business giants such as Olin and Exxon Mobil. And it is, of course, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch who supplies Glenn Beck with his national media platform. The Republicans, moreover, are so discredited by eight years of Bush that they can only be repackaged by a movement that has a separate identity from the official party leadership and that attempts to capitalise on the current anti-Washington mood. Tea Partiers can be useful to the Republicans, provided that their discontents can ultimately be channelled into a vote for the party, whose immediate objective is to weaken or eliminate the Democratic majority in the 2010 Congressional elections. But Republicans can never hold this base without in some way addressing the causes of its anger at current economic distress.
This is why even the most corporate-loyal hacks must engage in a certain amount of anti-corporate rhetoric and profess opposition to the continuing bank bailout. The trick is to interlard this theme with the standard rightist mantra, including opposition to taxes (on the rich), rejection of economic regulation and government spending on anything but the military - slogans that can be turned to the advantage of the ruling class, including the great financial houses, at the end of the day. A certain amount of programmatic vagueness works to the advantage of Republican politicians, who seek to manipulate the right-populist base of the party in much the same way that the Democrats deceive their left-populist, ‘progressive’ followers: with a game of electoral bait and switch. Yet it is also undeniable that the spontaneous popular anger the teabaggers have harnessed lends itself more to exploitation by the right than mobilisation by the radical or even liberal left. There has to date been no movement of insurgent Democrats to exert comparable leftward pressure on their party. The viewing audience for Glenn Beck is more than twice as large as that of the leftish television commentators, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. And so we once again come up against the perennial American riddle explored by Thomas Frank in What’s the matter with Kansas (America): large numbers of lower middle class and working class people espousing a politics clearly contrary to their material interests.
Americans certainly have no monopoly on eruptions of irrational mass anger. The biggest one in western history occurred not in the US, but in Europe between the two world wars. It took the greatest living Marxist of his day, Leon Trotsky, to unravel the logic of fascism. In his under-appreciated German writings, Trotsky argued that Hitler’s stormtroopers could not be understood simply as tools of bourgeois reaction, but represented an independent plebeian upsurge based on the fury of the wildgewordene Kleinbürger, or petty bourgeois run amok, under extreme crisis conditions. he current crisis in the US is not nearly as profound as that of the 1930s, nor are the Teapartiers an incipient fascist movement. Rightwing anti-statism is an old current in American politics, which bubbles to the surface during times of uncertainty. But, like fascism, it cannot be explained simply by capitalist manipulation of public opinion. It also contains some of the elements of lower middle class frustration and rage that can be found in fascist movements - but with a particular American twist. One of the most thought-provoking attempts to understand American rightwing populism comes from the late liberal historian, Richard Hofstadter, in a collection of essays on the far right of the 1950s and 60s, The paranoid style in American politics (New York 1965).
Hofstadter contrasts interest politics (which are based on material interests, and to that extent rational), with what he calls “status politics”, often embraced by those unable to pursue their material interests successfully. One of the most prized status emblems in his view is the title of American. United States citizens are possessed of a stronger urge than most to proclaim their national fealty. In no other country is the flag so widely and self-righteously waved or saluted. The patriotic paraphernalia of the teabaggers has always been a staple of a far right that can trace its origins at least as far back as the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964. One cannot avoid the impression, especially given the political indifference of most Americans, that something other than a set of civic principles is being proclaimed with these patriotic asseverations. Since the US is the world’s hyperpower, being an American is the only high-status category available to many of the less privileged. This is why the ultra-right tends by and large to favour the strong assertion of US imperial might. But the identification of broad popular layers with the country’s global power hardly distinguishes the US from other actual or aspiring imperial hegemons of the past. More unusual, Hofstadter points out, is the conflation of two things normally regarded as distinct: nationality and social status within the nation.
Who is an American? The answer to this question has changed over time, but, in a country comprised of multiple and shifting immigrant layers, it has always included some to the exclusion of others. In the 18th and 19th centuries Anglo-Saxon Protestants exercised exclusive rights to the American brand. Native Americans, blacks (slave or free) and Catholic and Jewish immigrants and their offspring (citizens or not) stood squarely outside the prevailing definition. At different periods, previously excluded groups have been allowed inside the tent. The New Deal not only involved limited guarantees of worker rights, but was a symbolic welcome into the mainstream for the people who comprised large chunks of the working class: Irish, Italian and eastern European Catholics, and, to a lesser but significant degree, Jews. The older Anglo-Americans, of course, remained on the inside, and one branch of them, southern whites, demanded - and received - assurances that the expanding definition of ‘American’ would not be broadened to include black people. Agricultural labour, in which most blacks were employed, was deliberately denied the right to organise. Southern segregationists remained entrenched in the leadership of the Democratic Party. It was this new, all-white constellation of ‘Americans’ that emerged into the 50s and 60s to enjoy the fruits of post-war prosperity. Thus national identity throughout US history has been selectively bestowed and functions not, as in most other countries, as a condition of birth to be taken for granted, but as a status to be acquired.
Those who already possessed or had recently attained that status from about 1950 to 1965 came of age in the heyday of the American empire. The GI bill made it possible for millions of World War II veterans to attend university. Steadily rising wages permitted higher-paid union workers to earn, with overtime, as much as a junior doctor or lawyer, and hence to avoid female and child labour and think of themselves as middle class. For the children of immigrants, a nationwide network of highways were avenues of flight from the squalor of city tenements to private suburban homes; ‘bedroom communities’, in turn, became the centres of a culture of mass consumption, with the one-wage nuclear family as its primary unit. Although this period lasted for only a comparatively short time, it was for many so far superior to the depression and war decades that had gone before and the turmoil of the 60s that came after as to form a distinct - and idealised - golden age, which remains a reference point and object of nostalgia, not only for the people who were adults at the time, but for many of their children and grandchildren. Its ‘values’ were widely celebrated in Norman Rockwell paintings and countless television shows. Its unequalled standard of living was a potent weapon in the cold war, as well as a means of cementing the loyalty of a generation of white people to the ruling class.
It is the beneficiaries of this era, and those who still cling to its myths - more numerous in the south and the heavily white ‘heartland’ between the Atlantic and Pacific than in multi-ethnic coastal cities - that Sarah Palin refers to when she speaks of “real Americans”, and who supply most of the ageing white faces on display at Tea Party events. Their ‘patriotism’ has little to do with the founding fathers, the constitution or any of the other symbols they invoke. It is rather a public affirmation of the kind of people they happen to be. Who, in fact, are they? The more comfortable Anglo-Saxons among them have always considered themselves the country’s custodians. But the more dynamic and hence defining element probably comes from lower middle class white southerners, as well as the descendants of immigrant groups that came to these shores over the past 125 years or so. For these groups flag-waving and loud proclamations of patriotism have tended to serve as entry tickets into the society - for southerners a means of reasserting themselves after their attempt to secede during the civil war, and for the children of immigrants a way of assuring older layers of their eagerness to shed their European ways and loyalties in order to embrace a new American identity. Military service, compulsory for young men from World War II through the 70s, was also a path to integration.
Hofstadter also remarks upon the attitudes to authority characteristic of immigrants and their second-generation offspring. They were, first of all, ‘little people’, who witnessed only the effects of political power without participating in it. They, were, moreover, responsible for disciplining their children - in whom their hopes for the future were invested - to the harsh demands of the new society. The family patriarch often taught his children unconditional obedience to the existing civil authorities, enforced by the unconditional obedience of the rest of the family to himself. When, however, the government began to deviate from the rigid morality and civic code on which they had been reared, these groups became bewildered, and were inclined to view change in a paranoid light. For them authority was not something to be negotiated with; it was univocal: either an unquestioned good or a malign conspiracy. Starting in the mid-60s, just about every constituent part of this newly forged American identity came under challenge, from inside and outside the tent. Within, there was the rebellion of many of this generation’s sons and daughters, who were more educated and took for granted the affluence that their parents regarded as a crowning achievement. Among them, scepticism and a cult of pleasure were replacing conformity and abstinence.
From without came the clamour of previously excluded populations demanding to be let in - but on their own terms, which were markedly different from the ones on which previous generations had gained admittance. The black Americans who took on Jim Crow in the south and the de facto segregation of northern and western cities saw little point in flag-waving or social climbing; neither had got them anywhere during centuries of racial oppression. They rather sought to challenge white dominance by methods of direct confrontation, and in some cases embraced a black nationalism that counterposed itself to white American chauvinism and identified with third-world anti-imperialist causes. There was also a growing Latino immigration from Puerto Rico, central America and Mexico. These groups had not, like earlier immigrant waves, left their countries of origin thousands of miles behind. Mexicans, from whom Texas and other parts of the south-west had been stolen by the US in the 1840s, could still think of themselves as an external colony of their native country, which lies just across the Rio Bravo. They were understandably less anxious to prove their patriotism than their European predecessors. The irregular white militias that now patrol the Mexican-American border to prevent the entry of ‘illegal aliens’ form an important component of the far right.
Thus, from all these quarters and in all these ways, the white, post-war generation of ‘real Americans’ came to feel themselves under siege, and began to suffer from what Hofstadter calls “status anxiety”, which in more extreme cases morphed into the paranoia that has reared its head once again with the Tea Party movement. That paranoid mentality extends to the federal government not because teabaggers have read Ayn Rand or Friedrich von Hayek (though these authors provide convenient ideological cover), but rather because the government, which was dominated by Democrats until 1980, did in fact make some attempt, often reluctant, to integrate new layers into the larger society. For white southerners, who regarded the government as something of an alien presence since the civil war, Washington was the enforcer of racial integration. In the country as a whole the government supported such things as affirmative action (programmes to promote the selective hiring and educational advancement of blacks and other minorities), English-Spanish bilingualism in state schools in certain regions, and welfare programmes that handed out money to minorities.
So, beginning in the late 60s, there began to materialise what became known as the ‘white backlash’. In 1968, thousands of youths of mainly eastern European Catholic descent stoned organisers sent into Chicago by Martin Luther King to agitate for the racial integration of housing. In Boston in the 70s, Irish-American mobs attacked black youths being bussed into their neighbourhoods to integrate the schools. During the same decade California witnessed a ‘tax revolt’, the aim of which was to rescind income taxes that supposedly went to fund various social programmes. Yet, spontaneous as this ‘backlash’ was, it could not have achieved scope or durability without being consciously exploited by the Republican Party. In the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972, the Republicans deliberately crafted a so-called southern strategy, designed to capture the votes of southern whites who had become disillusioned with the Democrats due to their support for black civil rights. Racist sentiments were thinly disguised by tough-on-crime rhetoric and denunciations of ‘welfare cheats’. The Republicans have since replaced the Democrats as the main party of the south, which, because it has also supplanted the north-east as a manufacturing centre, exerts a national influence beyond its demographic weight. The southern ‘good ole boy’ culture of white plebeian resentment against ‘north-eastern liberals’ - symbolised by tattoos, Confederate flags and Nascar racing - has also gained a certain currency among status-anxious whites throughout the country.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan made a conscious appeal to the mainly Catholic blue-collar workers who had voted Democratic in the past, but were coming to feel that blacks and other minorities were gaining at their expense. These were the ‘Reagan Democrats’, who, together with southern whites, came to constitute the broad social base upon which the Republican Party relied in subsequent decades to carry forward a comprehensive project of capitalist retrenchment. This project, as Thomas Frank has argued, had little to do with the fears and resentments of the voting bloc that brought the Republicans to power, and in fact undermined the economic position of the base in the end. The Tea Party movement may be a new political presence, but it also represents a reactivation of political forces long in the making - the product of sentiments arising from below, but artfully fostered to the advantage of those at the top. The present political conjuncture - the election of a black president amid the deepest recession in 70 years - could almost have been designed to trigger the deepest anxieties and resentments of backward-looking layers. And, whether or not the Republican leadership shares their passions, they are only too content to ride back to power on the momentum of a movement that points the finger of blame for the current economic downturn at minorities and big government - or anyone but their corporate capitalist paymasters.
The concern of the latter is that the anti-banker rhetoric and denunciation of ‘country club’ Republicans now heard at Tea Party gatherings could get out of hand, even leading to some kind of rightist third-party challenge. But most Republican bigwigs remain confident that the movement is still small enough to be controlled, and that its favourites, Sarah Palin and Texas libertarian Ron Paul, who stand no chance of winning a presidential election, can be excluded from serious contention as candidates in 2012, when a somewhat more conventional standard-bearer will emerge to claim the allegiance of their followers. Leftwing alarmists who fear that the Tea Partiers could become home-grown brownshirts miss one essential fact: that the generational cohort of white Americans at the centre of the movement is a slowly diminishing quantity. It is being undermined by the gradual decline of anti-black racism and new immigrant waves. By 2040, most Americans will be non-white. This statistic is no doubt feeding the fires of white anxiety at the moment. The ‘post-racial’ society said to have been announced by Obama’s election has by no means arrived. But the erosion of old ethnic and racial identities in the cities and suburbs where most of the population live does constitute a powerful counter-trend, making racism and xenophobia less viable as a basis for any kind of mass politics.
The major unanswered question concerns the strength of the other ideological current in the present rightwing surge: the worship of ‘free markets’, ‘small government‘and ‘balanced budgets’. These are shibboleths of bourgeois ideology, which ruling class members of all political shades have an interest in keeping alive, and which have long had resonance among the lower social strata of a country that embodies bourgeois social relations in a purer form than any other. The Tea Partiers are at the moment attempting to use the government deficit as a metaphor for the indebtedness with which so many ordinary households are burdened in order to oppose further spending on healthcare and jobs. Yet free-market dogma requires more to remain viable than a historical pedigree: it must to one extent or another be grounded in the life-possibilities of at least a portion of the majority that does not live off the profits of capital. Free-market dogma received a new lease of life during the neoliberal apogee of the 1980s and 90s, when the ruling class renewed its ranks from among successful dot-com entrepreneurs, and when many who worked for a living, though deriving only a fraction of their income from investments, were nonetheless seduced by climbing stock prices to see themselves as members of a ‘stakeholder society’. But now, with no new apparent future bubble to sustain popular illusions, neoliberal platitudes may be losing even the semblance of plausibility they once possessed. The main current asset of the Tea Party movement thus seems to be its ability to act as a magnet for the inchoate rage against the status quo felt by many who do not necessarily share the prejudices of its chauvinist-libertarian core. Like so many times in the past, the latter are directing that anger at false targets. The growing distance between their rhetoric and reality may present the possibility of directing it at the right ones.
These challenges are strongly influenced by a new presence on the political scene: the so-called Tea Party movement. The Tea Partiers (or Teabaggers) first erupted into national consciousness last summer, when thousands descended upon town hall meetings called by legislators to discuss Democratic healthcare proposals. With placards picturing Obama as Hitler, and in a few cases symbolically carrying rifles and pistols, they methodically disrupted the speeches of elected officials. They commonly denounced the several proposed reform bills pending before Congress not for anything they actually contain, but for imaginary provisions bearing only the faintest resemblance to real ones. From the fact that the bills had no specific mechanism to prevent illegal aliens from getting emergency care (since added), they concluded that the Democrats were proposing to extend medical cover (perish the thought!) to all illegal aliens. (When Obama denied this charge in a special Congressional healthcare address, a Republican backbencher from South Carolina, Joe Wilson, interrupted him with a shout of “You lie!” from the floor. This breach of etiquette made Wilson an instant Tea Party hero.)
From the fact that one version of the legislation proposes to fund voluntary end-of-life counselling, the disrupters asserted that the bill sought to establish government ‘death panels’, which would deny the elderly permission for life-prolonging treatments in order to save the government money. In vain did hapless legislators attempt to refute these canards by reference to actual legislative text. What was soon to become known as the Tea Party movement insisted on arguing not simply on the basis of its own opinions, but of its own facts. The town meetings of July and August were followed by a national Tea Party march on Washington. The date chosen was September 12, to commemorate the day after 9/11 in 2001, when, according to the organisers, America stood united as never before in the face of the terrorist danger. Upwards of 70,000 turned out that day in what was perhaps the biggest rightwing demonstration the capital had witnessed since a big Ku Klux Klan march in the 1920s. Any marcher who may have momentarily forgot what country s/he was in would soon have been reminded by the profusion of American flags in the hands, and on the jackets and jeans, of the nearly all-white and not exactly youthful participants.
Many also dangled from the brims of their hats the teabags that have come to symbolise their movement; they are meant to evoke the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when rebellious colonists disguised as Indians dumped a shipment of British tea into the harbour. (The movement is apparently oblivious to the fact that “teabagging” is a slang term for a certain sexual practice.) The by now familiar placards were there, equating Obama with Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Most signs avoided overtly racist themes, with a couple of notable exceptions: one read: “The zoo has African lions - the White House has a lyin’ African”; another pictured Obama with a wild afro and a bone through his nose over a hammer-and-sickle emblem. The rise of the Tea Partiers has played havoc with the Republican establishment. Some, such as John McCain, have sought to take their distance, fearing that the new movement will further marginalise an already weakened party in coming elections. Others, however, see in the teabaggers a potential for renewal and rebranding in the wake of a historic defeat. Many hover between these positions. Sarah Palin appears to be hedging her bets. She was the main speaker at the National Tea Party convention in February, but recently endorsed mainstream Republican candidates in opposition to the ultras.
The Tea Party movement is unmistakably a phenomenon of the right. Beyond this, however, it is sprawling and amorphous, with only a rudimentary national apparatus and nothing resembling a coherent political programme. One core element consists of professional Republican Party operatives and their corporate backers. Another is extreme-right outfits who sniff new recruitment opportunities: white supremacists, John Birchers (a few are still around), and various militia and ‘patriot’ groups, which continue to nurse their anger over the violent government suppression of armed religious cults at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas in the 1990s. But thousands without a history of political activism have been swept into the trend. One recent poll indicates that 20% of Americans identify with the movement in some way. The unifying theme seems to be paranoia in relation to the federal government in general and Obama in particular. Tea Partiers oppose the Bush/Obama bank bailout, healthcare reform and Obama’s stimulus package, not because these measures are corporate-friendly, but because they are seen as adding to an already heavy national debt burden, and, among the movement’s more extreme elements, as the initial steps in a vast government conspiracy to destroy the constitution and impose totalitarian rule.
The closest thing the movement has to a national spokesperson and ideologue is the clownish Fox News television commentator, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party’s Mad Hatter. It was Beck who issued the initial summons to the march on Washington. Watching his daily five o’clock rant, which reaches over three million viewers, has become a ritual for teabaggers from coast to coast. Beck specialises in stoking fears and paranoid delusions. Although forced to back off from some of his more outlandish assertions - that Fema (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is preparing secret concentration camps for dissenters, that Obama is an anti-white racist - Beck presents himself as a relentless unmasker of government plots against American liberty, past and present. He claims to base his thinking on the work of the libertarian philosopher, Ayn Rand, according to whom the highest human calling is unlimited pursuit of individual riches. In this optic, the proper role of government is to protect the acquisitive freedom of citizens, and the US constitution - a fictionalised version of which is for Beck the embodiment of eternal truth - was established chiefly for this end. Attempts by ‘progressives’ (the preferred current self-description of liberals, and Beck’s chief term of opprobrium) to redistribute wealth or achieve ‘social justice’ is nothing less than subversion of the original intent of the founding fathers. They supposedly believed in minimal government, not the bloated regime of big-spending, tax-guzzling bureaucrats and social engineers that now occupies official Washington.
Beck styles himself a strict constitutionalist, and has gone on the road with a one-man show clad in knee breeches and a tricorn hat, intended to evoke the American war of independence. Beck’s small-government creed, like that of most ‘conservatives’, is suspended at the door of the local police headquarters and the Pentagon. He advocates zero tolerance for criminals, is a staunch supporter of US troops abroad and has mounted a spirited defence of the waterboarding of ‘terrorists’. That George Bush swelled the federal budget deficit by a far greater amount than anything Obama is proposing goes virtually unmentioned. The trouble, according to Beck, began not with Obama, or even Franklin D Roosevelt, but under the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), when ‘progressives’ got their hands on the federal government for the first time. Civil service reform, anti-trust legislation and the progressive income tax (Beck says the adjective refers to political philosophy rather than income-based calculation) - all were schemes to use the government as an instrument for human perfection, and thus amounted to nothing less than an early attempt to impose communism by peaceful means.
Beck surrounds his historical fictions with a good deal of pseudo-scholarly hocus-pocus, consisting of charts, elaborate blackboard demonstrations and panels of ‘experts’ and ‘scholars’. One regular guest on his show, Jonah Goldberg, is the author of a book titled Liberal fascism, which argues counterintuitively that fascism is a phenomenon of the left, as opposed to the right. Although echoing many Republican themes, Beck is careful to put some distance between himself and the actually existing party. There are ‘progressives’ lurking in both camps, he says, reminding us that that Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican president, adopted the progressive label as well as Woodrow Wilson. Much about the Tea Party movement is hardly extraordinary. Its ‘libertarianism’ represents the ideology of bourgeois individualism raised to the highest power, a doctrine that has always had widespread appeal in a country for which getting and spending are a secular religion. This ideology also dovetails neatly with the neoliberal agenda. Many leftist and liberal commentators were therefore initially inclined to dismiss the Tea Party movement as an ‘Astroturf’ phenomenon: ie, a pseudo-grassroots front for big corporations and the Republican Party.
This characterisation contains more than a grain of truth. One of the biggest early backers of the movement was a shadowy “free enterprise political advocacy group” named Americans for Prosperity. Its chief executive, Tim Phillips, is a professional Republican operative, while its founder, David H Koch, an oil and natural gas magnate, owns the second-largest privately held company in the US. The group refuses to disclose the identity of its donors. Another visible Tea Party presence is an outfit called Freedom Works, headed by Dick Armey, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives and outright corporate shill. Among its contributors are John Mellon Scaife, a notorious billionaire funder of rightwing causes, and business giants such as Olin and Exxon Mobil. And it is, of course, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch who supplies Glenn Beck with his national media platform. The Republicans, moreover, are so discredited by eight years of Bush that they can only be repackaged by a movement that has a separate identity from the official party leadership and that attempts to capitalise on the current anti-Washington mood. Tea Partiers can be useful to the Republicans, provided that their discontents can ultimately be channelled into a vote for the party, whose immediate objective is to weaken or eliminate the Democratic majority in the 2010 Congressional elections. But Republicans can never hold this base without in some way addressing the causes of its anger at current economic distress.
This is why even the most corporate-loyal hacks must engage in a certain amount of anti-corporate rhetoric and profess opposition to the continuing bank bailout. The trick is to interlard this theme with the standard rightist mantra, including opposition to taxes (on the rich), rejection of economic regulation and government spending on anything but the military - slogans that can be turned to the advantage of the ruling class, including the great financial houses, at the end of the day. A certain amount of programmatic vagueness works to the advantage of Republican politicians, who seek to manipulate the right-populist base of the party in much the same way that the Democrats deceive their left-populist, ‘progressive’ followers: with a game of electoral bait and switch. Yet it is also undeniable that the spontaneous popular anger the teabaggers have harnessed lends itself more to exploitation by the right than mobilisation by the radical or even liberal left. There has to date been no movement of insurgent Democrats to exert comparable leftward pressure on their party. The viewing audience for Glenn Beck is more than twice as large as that of the leftish television commentators, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. And so we once again come up against the perennial American riddle explored by Thomas Frank in What’s the matter with Kansas (America): large numbers of lower middle class and working class people espousing a politics clearly contrary to their material interests.
Americans certainly have no monopoly on eruptions of irrational mass anger. The biggest one in western history occurred not in the US, but in Europe between the two world wars. It took the greatest living Marxist of his day, Leon Trotsky, to unravel the logic of fascism. In his under-appreciated German writings, Trotsky argued that Hitler’s stormtroopers could not be understood simply as tools of bourgeois reaction, but represented an independent plebeian upsurge based on the fury of the wildgewordene Kleinbürger, or petty bourgeois run amok, under extreme crisis conditions. he current crisis in the US is not nearly as profound as that of the 1930s, nor are the Teapartiers an incipient fascist movement. Rightwing anti-statism is an old current in American politics, which bubbles to the surface during times of uncertainty. But, like fascism, it cannot be explained simply by capitalist manipulation of public opinion. It also contains some of the elements of lower middle class frustration and rage that can be found in fascist movements - but with a particular American twist. One of the most thought-provoking attempts to understand American rightwing populism comes from the late liberal historian, Richard Hofstadter, in a collection of essays on the far right of the 1950s and 60s, The paranoid style in American politics (New York 1965).
Hofstadter contrasts interest politics (which are based on material interests, and to that extent rational), with what he calls “status politics”, often embraced by those unable to pursue their material interests successfully. One of the most prized status emblems in his view is the title of American. United States citizens are possessed of a stronger urge than most to proclaim their national fealty. In no other country is the flag so widely and self-righteously waved or saluted. The patriotic paraphernalia of the teabaggers has always been a staple of a far right that can trace its origins at least as far back as the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964. One cannot avoid the impression, especially given the political indifference of most Americans, that something other than a set of civic principles is being proclaimed with these patriotic asseverations. Since the US is the world’s hyperpower, being an American is the only high-status category available to many of the less privileged. This is why the ultra-right tends by and large to favour the strong assertion of US imperial might. But the identification of broad popular layers with the country’s global power hardly distinguishes the US from other actual or aspiring imperial hegemons of the past. More unusual, Hofstadter points out, is the conflation of two things normally regarded as distinct: nationality and social status within the nation.
Who is an American? The answer to this question has changed over time, but, in a country comprised of multiple and shifting immigrant layers, it has always included some to the exclusion of others. In the 18th and 19th centuries Anglo-Saxon Protestants exercised exclusive rights to the American brand. Native Americans, blacks (slave or free) and Catholic and Jewish immigrants and their offspring (citizens or not) stood squarely outside the prevailing definition. At different periods, previously excluded groups have been allowed inside the tent. The New Deal not only involved limited guarantees of worker rights, but was a symbolic welcome into the mainstream for the people who comprised large chunks of the working class: Irish, Italian and eastern European Catholics, and, to a lesser but significant degree, Jews. The older Anglo-Americans, of course, remained on the inside, and one branch of them, southern whites, demanded - and received - assurances that the expanding definition of ‘American’ would not be broadened to include black people. Agricultural labour, in which most blacks were employed, was deliberately denied the right to organise. Southern segregationists remained entrenched in the leadership of the Democratic Party. It was this new, all-white constellation of ‘Americans’ that emerged into the 50s and 60s to enjoy the fruits of post-war prosperity. Thus national identity throughout US history has been selectively bestowed and functions not, as in most other countries, as a condition of birth to be taken for granted, but as a status to be acquired.
Those who already possessed or had recently attained that status from about 1950 to 1965 came of age in the heyday of the American empire. The GI bill made it possible for millions of World War II veterans to attend university. Steadily rising wages permitted higher-paid union workers to earn, with overtime, as much as a junior doctor or lawyer, and hence to avoid female and child labour and think of themselves as middle class. For the children of immigrants, a nationwide network of highways were avenues of flight from the squalor of city tenements to private suburban homes; ‘bedroom communities’, in turn, became the centres of a culture of mass consumption, with the one-wage nuclear family as its primary unit. Although this period lasted for only a comparatively short time, it was for many so far superior to the depression and war decades that had gone before and the turmoil of the 60s that came after as to form a distinct - and idealised - golden age, which remains a reference point and object of nostalgia, not only for the people who were adults at the time, but for many of their children and grandchildren. Its ‘values’ were widely celebrated in Norman Rockwell paintings and countless television shows. Its unequalled standard of living was a potent weapon in the cold war, as well as a means of cementing the loyalty of a generation of white people to the ruling class.
It is the beneficiaries of this era, and those who still cling to its myths - more numerous in the south and the heavily white ‘heartland’ between the Atlantic and Pacific than in multi-ethnic coastal cities - that Sarah Palin refers to when she speaks of “real Americans”, and who supply most of the ageing white faces on display at Tea Party events. Their ‘patriotism’ has little to do with the founding fathers, the constitution or any of the other symbols they invoke. It is rather a public affirmation of the kind of people they happen to be. Who, in fact, are they? The more comfortable Anglo-Saxons among them have always considered themselves the country’s custodians. But the more dynamic and hence defining element probably comes from lower middle class white southerners, as well as the descendants of immigrant groups that came to these shores over the past 125 years or so. For these groups flag-waving and loud proclamations of patriotism have tended to serve as entry tickets into the society - for southerners a means of reasserting themselves after their attempt to secede during the civil war, and for the children of immigrants a way of assuring older layers of their eagerness to shed their European ways and loyalties in order to embrace a new American identity. Military service, compulsory for young men from World War II through the 70s, was also a path to integration.
Hofstadter also remarks upon the attitudes to authority characteristic of immigrants and their second-generation offspring. They were, first of all, ‘little people’, who witnessed only the effects of political power without participating in it. They, were, moreover, responsible for disciplining their children - in whom their hopes for the future were invested - to the harsh demands of the new society. The family patriarch often taught his children unconditional obedience to the existing civil authorities, enforced by the unconditional obedience of the rest of the family to himself. When, however, the government began to deviate from the rigid morality and civic code on which they had been reared, these groups became bewildered, and were inclined to view change in a paranoid light. For them authority was not something to be negotiated with; it was univocal: either an unquestioned good or a malign conspiracy. Starting in the mid-60s, just about every constituent part of this newly forged American identity came under challenge, from inside and outside the tent. Within, there was the rebellion of many of this generation’s sons and daughters, who were more educated and took for granted the affluence that their parents regarded as a crowning achievement. Among them, scepticism and a cult of pleasure were replacing conformity and abstinence.
From without came the clamour of previously excluded populations demanding to be let in - but on their own terms, which were markedly different from the ones on which previous generations had gained admittance. The black Americans who took on Jim Crow in the south and the de facto segregation of northern and western cities saw little point in flag-waving or social climbing; neither had got them anywhere during centuries of racial oppression. They rather sought to challenge white dominance by methods of direct confrontation, and in some cases embraced a black nationalism that counterposed itself to white American chauvinism and identified with third-world anti-imperialist causes. There was also a growing Latino immigration from Puerto Rico, central America and Mexico. These groups had not, like earlier immigrant waves, left their countries of origin thousands of miles behind. Mexicans, from whom Texas and other parts of the south-west had been stolen by the US in the 1840s, could still think of themselves as an external colony of their native country, which lies just across the Rio Bravo. They were understandably less anxious to prove their patriotism than their European predecessors. The irregular white militias that now patrol the Mexican-American border to prevent the entry of ‘illegal aliens’ form an important component of the far right.
Thus, from all these quarters and in all these ways, the white, post-war generation of ‘real Americans’ came to feel themselves under siege, and began to suffer from what Hofstadter calls “status anxiety”, which in more extreme cases morphed into the paranoia that has reared its head once again with the Tea Party movement. That paranoid mentality extends to the federal government not because teabaggers have read Ayn Rand or Friedrich von Hayek (though these authors provide convenient ideological cover), but rather because the government, which was dominated by Democrats until 1980, did in fact make some attempt, often reluctant, to integrate new layers into the larger society. For white southerners, who regarded the government as something of an alien presence since the civil war, Washington was the enforcer of racial integration. In the country as a whole the government supported such things as affirmative action (programmes to promote the selective hiring and educational advancement of blacks and other minorities), English-Spanish bilingualism in state schools in certain regions, and welfare programmes that handed out money to minorities.
So, beginning in the late 60s, there began to materialise what became known as the ‘white backlash’. In 1968, thousands of youths of mainly eastern European Catholic descent stoned organisers sent into Chicago by Martin Luther King to agitate for the racial integration of housing. In Boston in the 70s, Irish-American mobs attacked black youths being bussed into their neighbourhoods to integrate the schools. During the same decade California witnessed a ‘tax revolt’, the aim of which was to rescind income taxes that supposedly went to fund various social programmes. Yet, spontaneous as this ‘backlash’ was, it could not have achieved scope or durability without being consciously exploited by the Republican Party. In the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972, the Republicans deliberately crafted a so-called southern strategy, designed to capture the votes of southern whites who had become disillusioned with the Democrats due to their support for black civil rights. Racist sentiments were thinly disguised by tough-on-crime rhetoric and denunciations of ‘welfare cheats’. The Republicans have since replaced the Democrats as the main party of the south, which, because it has also supplanted the north-east as a manufacturing centre, exerts a national influence beyond its demographic weight. The southern ‘good ole boy’ culture of white plebeian resentment against ‘north-eastern liberals’ - symbolised by tattoos, Confederate flags and Nascar racing - has also gained a certain currency among status-anxious whites throughout the country.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan made a conscious appeal to the mainly Catholic blue-collar workers who had voted Democratic in the past, but were coming to feel that blacks and other minorities were gaining at their expense. These were the ‘Reagan Democrats’, who, together with southern whites, came to constitute the broad social base upon which the Republican Party relied in subsequent decades to carry forward a comprehensive project of capitalist retrenchment. This project, as Thomas Frank has argued, had little to do with the fears and resentments of the voting bloc that brought the Republicans to power, and in fact undermined the economic position of the base in the end. The Tea Party movement may be a new political presence, but it also represents a reactivation of political forces long in the making - the product of sentiments arising from below, but artfully fostered to the advantage of those at the top. The present political conjuncture - the election of a black president amid the deepest recession in 70 years - could almost have been designed to trigger the deepest anxieties and resentments of backward-looking layers. And, whether or not the Republican leadership shares their passions, they are only too content to ride back to power on the momentum of a movement that points the finger of blame for the current economic downturn at minorities and big government - or anyone but their corporate capitalist paymasters.
The concern of the latter is that the anti-banker rhetoric and denunciation of ‘country club’ Republicans now heard at Tea Party gatherings could get out of hand, even leading to some kind of rightist third-party challenge. But most Republican bigwigs remain confident that the movement is still small enough to be controlled, and that its favourites, Sarah Palin and Texas libertarian Ron Paul, who stand no chance of winning a presidential election, can be excluded from serious contention as candidates in 2012, when a somewhat more conventional standard-bearer will emerge to claim the allegiance of their followers. Leftwing alarmists who fear that the Tea Partiers could become home-grown brownshirts miss one essential fact: that the generational cohort of white Americans at the centre of the movement is a slowly diminishing quantity. It is being undermined by the gradual decline of anti-black racism and new immigrant waves. By 2040, most Americans will be non-white. This statistic is no doubt feeding the fires of white anxiety at the moment. The ‘post-racial’ society said to have been announced by Obama’s election has by no means arrived. But the erosion of old ethnic and racial identities in the cities and suburbs where most of the population live does constitute a powerful counter-trend, making racism and xenophobia less viable as a basis for any kind of mass politics.
The major unanswered question concerns the strength of the other ideological current in the present rightwing surge: the worship of ‘free markets’, ‘small government‘and ‘balanced budgets’. These are shibboleths of bourgeois ideology, which ruling class members of all political shades have an interest in keeping alive, and which have long had resonance among the lower social strata of a country that embodies bourgeois social relations in a purer form than any other. The Tea Partiers are at the moment attempting to use the government deficit as a metaphor for the indebtedness with which so many ordinary households are burdened in order to oppose further spending on healthcare and jobs. Yet free-market dogma requires more to remain viable than a historical pedigree: it must to one extent or another be grounded in the life-possibilities of at least a portion of the majority that does not live off the profits of capital. Free-market dogma received a new lease of life during the neoliberal apogee of the 1980s and 90s, when the ruling class renewed its ranks from among successful dot-com entrepreneurs, and when many who worked for a living, though deriving only a fraction of their income from investments, were nonetheless seduced by climbing stock prices to see themselves as members of a ‘stakeholder society’. But now, with no new apparent future bubble to sustain popular illusions, neoliberal platitudes may be losing even the semblance of plausibility they once possessed. The main current asset of the Tea Party movement thus seems to be its ability to act as a magnet for the inchoate rage against the status quo felt by many who do not necessarily share the prejudices of its chauvinist-libertarian core. Like so many times in the past, the latter are directing that anger at false targets. The growing distance between their rhetoric and reality may present the possibility of directing it at the right ones.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
A budget only Republicans could love
Barack Obama's budget contains a message to everyone concerned about mass unemployment, ramped-up military spending and social service cutbacks: Get used to it. "We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don't have consequences, as if waste doesn't matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money," Obama said. He was channeling the Republican Party's talking points in defense of a budget proposal that would impose a three-year freeze on non-military discretionary spending, while devoting a relative pittance to additional stimulus measures to create jobs. The budget proposal that the administration submitted to Congress--a broad outline that, once passed, is meant to serve as the guide for appropriations legislation worked out during the year--predicts record federal deficits for next year and a high level of debt for at least the decade to come. But under the $3.8 trillion proposal, the Pentagon war machine is exempt from the freeze. So military outlays would continue the upward curve begun under George W. Bush to pay not only for endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but to maintain the U.S.'s military grip on its worldwide empire.
Just in case some Pentagon contractors whose profits have grown fat off the "war on terror" got the wrong message from the talk about the government tightening its belt, Defense Secretary Robert Gates invited top defense company executives to a meeting last week. Gates emphasized "the need for a closer partnership with them and [pledged] to work with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon's budgets over time, according to his spokesman," the Politico reported. Meanwhile, other discretionary spending will be frozen--which amounts to a cut, given inflation and population growth. A freeze would be negative at any time, but it would be especially devastating in the context of the halting recovery from the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. For example, although education will fare better than most domestic programs under the proposal, Education Week noted that "school districts are facing a major drop-off in funding when the up to $100 billion in education aid made available under the stimulus package is gone--a prospect known as 'the funding cliff.'"
Moreover, the budget shifts additional education spending into "competitive grant" funding that requires school districts to embrace charter schools and attack teachers' unions. Even the American Federation of Teachers, normally uncritical supporters of Obama, noted: "While there is much to applaud in the budget, we are concerned that virtually all of the proposed increase is for competitive grants, while Title I--the lifeblood for our most disadvantaged children is flat-funded. Students with the most needs should not have to rely on how well adults compete for dollars." And by settling for a small jobs creation program, Obama has thrown in the towel on ambitious measures to drive down joblessness. "In essence," economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, "the administration is accepting mass unemployment as just one of those things we have to live with...What we're witnessing is an awesome national failure." In reality, the freeze on discretionary spending - which excludes Medicare and Social Security - will barely make a dent in the deficit.Krugman estimated that without the freeze, total public debt would be 78.7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product by 2020, while the Obama administration estimates that a freeze would reduce that to 77.2 percent--in other words, very little change.
The reason the spending freeze proposal will make so little difference is that it would apply to only a small part of overall government spending. Besides exempting the Pentagon, the budget freeze also excludes big entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention payments on existing debt.
But Obama isn't opposed to putting entitlement programs under the knife. He has embraced longstanding Republican calls for a "bipartisan" commission to consider ways to cut spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Republicans favor such commissions because they would allow their members in Congress to avoid the political heat for cutting popular programs; now, Obama wants to do the same thing. It wasn't so long ago that presidential candidate Obama denounced exactly what he's proposing today. "The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel," Obama said in the first presidential debate with John McCain. "There are some programs that are very important that are under-funded." Likewise, Democrats last year ridiculed House Minority Leader John Boehner's response to the Obama administration's economic stimulus legislation. "It's time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we 'get' it," Boehner said.
So what did Obama have to say in this year's State of the Union address? "Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same."
You don't need to be a radical to see the absurdity of this pronouncement. Given the collapse in business investment and the drop in consumer spending because of unemployment and the housing crash, government spending is providing a large part of whatever energy the halting U.S. economy has. That's why there have been a series of economic stimulus packages coming out of Washington--not only from Obama, but even George W. Bush in his last years. Now, though, Obama, ever subservient to the Pentagon and Wall Street, has concluded that once the bankers and generals have taken their cut, there's nothing but crumbs left for the rest of American citizens. Of course, the national debt and the federal budget deficit aren't irrelevant. They could undermine the U.S. economy in the long term by forcing the government to pay higher interest rates to finance spending, and lead investors to ditch the U.S. dollar. But the alarmists who insist on spending cuts now, while the U.S. economy is still staggering, are prepared to sacrifice millions of people's livelihoods through mass unemployment in order to please the bond market.
Meanwhile, in all the talk about the deficit, neither Republicans nor the Obama White House will discuss the measures that could have a real effect on it--raising taxes on the rich and derailing the Pentagon gravy train. One of the two chief reasons for the ballooning federal deficit during the 2000s was George Bush's $1.3 trillion in tax cuts that went overwhelmingly to the already obscenely wealthy. Obama plans to allow these tax breaks to expire next year, as they were supposed to under existing legislation. But what's really needed is to raise taxes on the rich- to get back the billions they made off tax cuts for the last decade. The other chief reason for the deficit is military spending, whether in the form of the Pentagon budget, the hundreds of billions for U.S. wars and occupations, or the construction of the national security state. But Obama has exempted every part of this spending from the freeze. The Obama budget underscores the steady rightward shift of his administration. The president has made his priorities clear. Those who want a different agenda are going to have to fight for it.
Just in case some Pentagon contractors whose profits have grown fat off the "war on terror" got the wrong message from the talk about the government tightening its belt, Defense Secretary Robert Gates invited top defense company executives to a meeting last week. Gates emphasized "the need for a closer partnership with them and [pledged] to work with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon's budgets over time, according to his spokesman," the Politico reported. Meanwhile, other discretionary spending will be frozen--which amounts to a cut, given inflation and population growth. A freeze would be negative at any time, but it would be especially devastating in the context of the halting recovery from the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. For example, although education will fare better than most domestic programs under the proposal, Education Week noted that "school districts are facing a major drop-off in funding when the up to $100 billion in education aid made available under the stimulus package is gone--a prospect known as 'the funding cliff.'"
Moreover, the budget shifts additional education spending into "competitive grant" funding that requires school districts to embrace charter schools and attack teachers' unions. Even the American Federation of Teachers, normally uncritical supporters of Obama, noted: "While there is much to applaud in the budget, we are concerned that virtually all of the proposed increase is for competitive grants, while Title I--the lifeblood for our most disadvantaged children is flat-funded. Students with the most needs should not have to rely on how well adults compete for dollars." And by settling for a small jobs creation program, Obama has thrown in the towel on ambitious measures to drive down joblessness. "In essence," economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, "the administration is accepting mass unemployment as just one of those things we have to live with...What we're witnessing is an awesome national failure." In reality, the freeze on discretionary spending - which excludes Medicare and Social Security - will barely make a dent in the deficit.Krugman estimated that without the freeze, total public debt would be 78.7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product by 2020, while the Obama administration estimates that a freeze would reduce that to 77.2 percent--in other words, very little change.
The reason the spending freeze proposal will make so little difference is that it would apply to only a small part of overall government spending. Besides exempting the Pentagon, the budget freeze also excludes big entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention payments on existing debt.
But Obama isn't opposed to putting entitlement programs under the knife. He has embraced longstanding Republican calls for a "bipartisan" commission to consider ways to cut spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Republicans favor such commissions because they would allow their members in Congress to avoid the political heat for cutting popular programs; now, Obama wants to do the same thing. It wasn't so long ago that presidential candidate Obama denounced exactly what he's proposing today. "The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel," Obama said in the first presidential debate with John McCain. "There are some programs that are very important that are under-funded." Likewise, Democrats last year ridiculed House Minority Leader John Boehner's response to the Obama administration's economic stimulus legislation. "It's time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we 'get' it," Boehner said.
So what did Obama have to say in this year's State of the Union address? "Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same."
You don't need to be a radical to see the absurdity of this pronouncement. Given the collapse in business investment and the drop in consumer spending because of unemployment and the housing crash, government spending is providing a large part of whatever energy the halting U.S. economy has. That's why there have been a series of economic stimulus packages coming out of Washington--not only from Obama, but even George W. Bush in his last years. Now, though, Obama, ever subservient to the Pentagon and Wall Street, has concluded that once the bankers and generals have taken their cut, there's nothing but crumbs left for the rest of American citizens. Of course, the national debt and the federal budget deficit aren't irrelevant. They could undermine the U.S. economy in the long term by forcing the government to pay higher interest rates to finance spending, and lead investors to ditch the U.S. dollar. But the alarmists who insist on spending cuts now, while the U.S. economy is still staggering, are prepared to sacrifice millions of people's livelihoods through mass unemployment in order to please the bond market.
Meanwhile, in all the talk about the deficit, neither Republicans nor the Obama White House will discuss the measures that could have a real effect on it--raising taxes on the rich and derailing the Pentagon gravy train. One of the two chief reasons for the ballooning federal deficit during the 2000s was George Bush's $1.3 trillion in tax cuts that went overwhelmingly to the already obscenely wealthy. Obama plans to allow these tax breaks to expire next year, as they were supposed to under existing legislation. But what's really needed is to raise taxes on the rich- to get back the billions they made off tax cuts for the last decade. The other chief reason for the deficit is military spending, whether in the form of the Pentagon budget, the hundreds of billions for U.S. wars and occupations, or the construction of the national security state. But Obama has exempted every part of this spending from the freeze. The Obama budget underscores the steady rightward shift of his administration. The president has made his priorities clear. Those who want a different agenda are going to have to fight for it.
Monday, 8 February 2010
Can Obama deliver the goods for working Americans?
To the activists Obama promised a timely end to the war in Iraq, an easing of tensions with Latin America and immigration reform; to the unions he promised the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA); to millions of Americans without coverage, he promised health care reform. But above all, he promised social stability and the continuation of business as usual to the capitalist class. So what promises has he kept? US troops remain in Iraq and even more are being sent to Afghanistan; the democratically-elected government of Honduras has been overthrown, more US troops are to be sent to Colombia, and the embargo on Cuba remains; the plight of immigrant workers is worse than ever and some 250 Mexicans have died crossing the border in just the first few months of this year. EFCA and single-payer health care are off the table. And as for job creation and saving people’s homes, forget about it. Millions more jobs have been lost since he came to power and hundreds of thousands have been thrown out on the streets. The only promise he has kept is to Big Business, with billions in handouts to the biggest and greediest corporations of them all and a continuation of the wars in the Middle East. Merrill Lynch, one of the main culprits in the crisis, awarding of $3.6 billion of bonuses last year, as it tries to persuade a federal judge to approve a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its own disclosures. The White House forecasts that the 10-year federal deficit will top $9 trillion; more than the total of all previous deficits since the USA was founded.
By 2020 the national debt will equal three-quarters of the entire US economy. And what do we have to show for it? The question answers itself. The geopolitical intelligence analysts at Stratfor clearly and frankly described Obama’s policies: “Presidents -- all presidents -- run on a platform that will win. If they are good presidents, they will leave behind these promises to govern as they must. This is what Obama has done. He ran for president as the antithesis of Bush. He has conducted his foreign policy as if he were Bush. This is because Bush’s foreign policy was shaped by necessity, and Obama’s foreign policy is shaped by the same necessity.” That “necessity” is the defense of the interests of Big Business at home and abroad. In other words, the vast majority of Americans have yet to see any real change whatsoever. Obama was swept into power on a wave of enthusiasm and hope, but it’s crystal clear whose side he’s on despite all the pretty sounding words. No wonder a majority of Americans are now against the war in Afghanistan and his approval rating has fallen 12% since April. Long gone are lofty speeches implying the promise of fundamental change. Also quickly fading are people’s sincere illusions that change could come from yet another big business politician.
The battle over health care is a perfect example. It has simmered beneath the surface for decades as literally millions have suffered illness and death in the richest country on earth for lack of basic health care. Most union contract struggles in recent years have revolved around the question of heath benefits. 7 in 10 personal bankruptcies in recent years have been the result of astronomical medical expenses. Now that Obama has attempted even the most modest of reforms, all the pent up contradictions are bursting on to the surface. On the one hand is the hysteria against Obama’s “socialism,” on the other are millions of bewildered but increasingly frustrated Americans who want a real solution now. Violence has broken out at Town Hall meetings as the growing polarization of society is expressed in an often confused manner. As has been the case for nearly a century, socialized health care advocates are being red-baited, intimidated and even assaulted. Obama is no socialist and his health care proposal has nothing to do with single payer. But if fighting for genuine universal health care, getting rid of the HMOs and the medical and pharmaceutical industries whose profits are squeezed from the health of working people and the poor is “socialism,” then what is the problem with socialism?
The problem is that it would take control over our health out of the hands of a tiny minority and put it into the hands of the majority. There are big bucks at stake. According to Harper’s Index, the percentage change since 2002 in average premiums paid to large US health-insurance companies was +87%. The percentage change in the profits of the top ten insurance companies was +428%. No wonder the health care industry is spending nearly two million dollars a day lobbying Congress against single payer or anything remotely like it! The universal health care in Europe and other countries around the world did not fall from the sky. The right to medical care was fought for in mass struggles by the workers of these countries. Just as the right to the eight-hour day had to be fought for tooth and nail, so too the right to live a healthy life had to be wrenched from the ruling class. The right to benefit from the marvelous medical knowledge and technology humanity has developed over the last few centuries is a class issue. The rich and their politicians all have excellent heath care coverage. The 47-plus million Americans without coverage are the workers and poor. Millions of others who do have coverage are a job loss or even just a single premium payment away from total economic disaster should there be a medical emergency.
The record is clear: the health care crisis cannot be solved within the limits of the profit system. The debate over health care in Congress has been bogged down and restricted to the narrowest possible limits. But there is a way out of this impasse. Despite the attacks and setbacks of the last few decades, the over 15 million-strong US Labour Movement remains a powerful force in society. If just these workers were to go on strike, hardly a truck, airplane or train would move, not to mention public school, universities, and city, county, municipal, state, and federal services. That, combined with massive mobilizations on the streets, would put real pressure to bear on Washington! Richard Trumka, the former United Mine Workers’ leader and heir apparent to the leadership to the AFL-CIO has come out in favour of single payer. Now is the time to put these words into action. Organized labour spent millions and mobilized the rank and file to elect Obama. We believe this money and energy would have been better used building a mass party of labor and running labor candidates. The AFL-CIO national convention will be held in September, presenting a tremendous opportunity to change course. The leadership should mobilize the millions of rank and file organized workers and reach out to the unorganized and unemployed to fight for a national health care system for all.
The Democrats have had their chance. They have no more excuses now that they control the White House and have a large majority in Congress. And yet they couldn’t even pass a basic reform like EFCA. It’s high time the Labour Movement broke with them and took up the question of a mass labour party, a party of, by and for working people. If the AFL-CIO leadership showed the way, breaking with the policy of “partnership” with the bosses, and their political parties it would open the floodgates for working class organization and mobilization on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The capitalists’ response to the crisis is to carry out a vicious wave of layoffs, cuts and closures. Living standards are being driven ever lower for the majority, while the rich literally get richer and the poor get poorer. The Labour Movement needs its own response: organization, mobilization, factory occupations under workers’ control to prevent closures, and a clean break from the pro-Big Business parties. There indications that some aspects of the economy are stabilizing. But we have to ask ourselves: who will benefit from the recovery? Will it be another “jobless” recovery? How long will the recovery last before the inevitable next recession? Why do we have to live in fear of losing our homes, jobs, and health care even during the “good times?” The capitalist system operates on a boom bust cycle, and the workers are exploited whether there is a boom or a recession -- things just get even worse during a downturn.
Although the majority opposed the Iraq War, Bush continued it. Although the majority now oppose the war in Afghanistan, Obama is expanding it. The majority want universal health care, and yet single payer is not even “on the table.” Why is this? If this is truly a democracy, then the majority should have genuine decision-making power. This is why we believe that socialism, in which the majority will democratically determine economic and government policies, is the only way forward for humanity. Just one year ago, in the midst of the meltdown on Wall Street, millions of Americans, many of whom had never voted before, came out for Barack Obama, energized by his message of hope and change. His victory marked a turning point in U.S. politics, a clear rejection of Bush’s blatantly anti-worker and imperialist policies. The streets overflowed with joy and the promise of a new era. Around the world, cries of “yes we can!” could be heard as a collective sigh of relief swept the planet. The Bush years were over! Surely things would now get better! But what is the reality? The fact is, things are actually worse than they were under Bush. Despite a much ballyhooed 3.5% growth in GDP in the third quarter of 2009, the economic picture is grim for working people. The unemployment rate has now surpassed 10 percent for the first time since 1983, and is likely to rise further. In some states, such as foreclosure-battered Ohio and Michigan, it is already substantially higher. If those working part time or no longer looking for work were included, the real rate would be closer to 17.5%.
So sure, the recession is “over” according to the official figures, but can it last? And what kind of recovery is it when nearly 16 million people can’t find work? In October alone, 61,000 manufacturing and 62,000 construction jobs evaporated. Jobs have now been lost for 22 months in a row, a steeper fall than during the Great Depression. Also in October, the average work week remained at just 33 hours, giving employers plenty of room to extend existing employee’s hours, not to mention to expand usage of existing industrial capacity before adding new workers or building new factories. Those unable to find work for six months or longer rose to 5.6 million, or 35.6%, a new record. For workers, the so-called “jobless recovery” is no recovery at all. But how can this be? How can the GDP rebound when there are 7.3 million fewer jobs than there were less than two years ago? The answer is simple: the capitalists are making fewer workers do more work for less pay. Hence, profits are up for many companies such as Ford. According to the Department of Labor, productivity — the amount produced per worker per hour — rose by an incredible 9.5% in the 3rd quarter, after rising 6.9% in the 2nd. In other words, they are squeezing more out of us than ever, all while lining their pockets with federal bailout money. A very convenient situation for them, but not so appealing for the rest of us!
Workers are willing to take this for the time being. They hope that the worst is indeed over, that they have made it through the storm to relative shelter. They are willing to “wait and see,” and hope for real change from Obama. But this has its limits; the worst is far from over. The immediate shock of last year’s crisis may have subsided, but now the reality is gradually creeping in: Americans are going to be forced to accept a new, lower standard of living, and there will be no rapid bounceback of jobs. Millions of the jobs lost are gone forever, to be replaced by fewer jobs offering lower wages, no benefits, and no union protections. As for Obama’s foreign policy, although he won the Nobel Prize simply for the “hope” he has generated internationally, the year since his election has provided many harsh realities for those who expected something new under the sun. The coup in Honduras against the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya has in effect been legitimated by Obama’s State Department — with the help of U.S.-trained officers and the brutal use of U.S. made weapons. U.S. troops are to remain in Iraq for years to come, and the war in Afghanistan has been expanded by tens of thousands of troops and extended into Pakistan. In short, Bush’s wars continue despite the “changing of the guard.” The reason for this is also easily explained: like Bush, Obama defends the fundamental interests of the capitalists and imperialists, and “political realism.” Like Bush before him, his policies flow from this reality.
His expansion of the military budget to $680 billion — an amount only dreamed of by Reagan and the Bushes — speaks for itself. “Defense” spending now consumes 35-42% of estimated tax revenues. Add to that the billions handed out without any accountability whatsoever to the already-absurdly rich, and it’s no wonder there is “not enough” money for job creation, schools or health care. Obama has boasted that his stimulus package will create or save 650,000 jobs; but it’s not even enough to make up for the jobs lost in a single month earlier this year. The new leadership of the AFL-CIO is an indication of the slowly changing mood in the Labor Movement. At least in words, Trumka is a reflection of the growing pressure from the rank and file, which is tired of cuts and concessions. The off-year election results were another indication of what is to come. Most incumbents were thrown out, and those who remained, did so at tremendous financial expense. Upcoming electoral contests will be interesting to say the least, as American voters reject the “status quo” in their own distorted way and look for a way out. In the final analysis, only the creation of a mass party of labor based on the unions can lay the basis for addressing the workers’ problems. Before then, however, more life experience will be necessary.
There are no direct historical parallels, and comparisons between epochs must of necessity take into account the many changes and differences that have taken place in the intervening decades. It is useful, however, to keep in mind that between the Crash of 1929 and the first mass stirrings of the working class in the mid-1930s, some five years or more elapsed. In the interim, even the large, well-established left-wing parties such as the SP and CP did not experience an immediate surge in growth. Today, as then, mass consciousness has not yet caught up with objective reality. But it will catch up, and with a bang. It would be a mistake to mistake today’s apparent passivity in the face of such an unprecedented crisis for “the end of history.” In fact, the real history of humanity is only just beginning. We must not be caught unawares or unprepared! For those of us who can see the correctness of our perspectives confirmed and the potential for the socialist transformation of society all around us, it can be frustrating to watch the molasses-like development of events in the U.S. and internationally. However, the Marxists and labor activists must not succumb to moods of impatience or spend time searching for panacaeas or shortcuts: there are none. Patience, hard work, discussion, theoretical clarity and dedication are the only way forward. History is on our side. We must have confidence in the working class, in the ideas of revolutionary Marxism as a guide to action, and in our perspectives for a socialist future.
By 2020 the national debt will equal three-quarters of the entire US economy. And what do we have to show for it? The question answers itself. The geopolitical intelligence analysts at Stratfor clearly and frankly described Obama’s policies: “Presidents -- all presidents -- run on a platform that will win. If they are good presidents, they will leave behind these promises to govern as they must. This is what Obama has done. He ran for president as the antithesis of Bush. He has conducted his foreign policy as if he were Bush. This is because Bush’s foreign policy was shaped by necessity, and Obama’s foreign policy is shaped by the same necessity.” That “necessity” is the defense of the interests of Big Business at home and abroad. In other words, the vast majority of Americans have yet to see any real change whatsoever. Obama was swept into power on a wave of enthusiasm and hope, but it’s crystal clear whose side he’s on despite all the pretty sounding words. No wonder a majority of Americans are now against the war in Afghanistan and his approval rating has fallen 12% since April. Long gone are lofty speeches implying the promise of fundamental change. Also quickly fading are people’s sincere illusions that change could come from yet another big business politician.
The battle over health care is a perfect example. It has simmered beneath the surface for decades as literally millions have suffered illness and death in the richest country on earth for lack of basic health care. Most union contract struggles in recent years have revolved around the question of heath benefits. 7 in 10 personal bankruptcies in recent years have been the result of astronomical medical expenses. Now that Obama has attempted even the most modest of reforms, all the pent up contradictions are bursting on to the surface. On the one hand is the hysteria against Obama’s “socialism,” on the other are millions of bewildered but increasingly frustrated Americans who want a real solution now. Violence has broken out at Town Hall meetings as the growing polarization of society is expressed in an often confused manner. As has been the case for nearly a century, socialized health care advocates are being red-baited, intimidated and even assaulted. Obama is no socialist and his health care proposal has nothing to do with single payer. But if fighting for genuine universal health care, getting rid of the HMOs and the medical and pharmaceutical industries whose profits are squeezed from the health of working people and the poor is “socialism,” then what is the problem with socialism?
The problem is that it would take control over our health out of the hands of a tiny minority and put it into the hands of the majority. There are big bucks at stake. According to Harper’s Index, the percentage change since 2002 in average premiums paid to large US health-insurance companies was +87%. The percentage change in the profits of the top ten insurance companies was +428%. No wonder the health care industry is spending nearly two million dollars a day lobbying Congress against single payer or anything remotely like it! The universal health care in Europe and other countries around the world did not fall from the sky. The right to medical care was fought for in mass struggles by the workers of these countries. Just as the right to the eight-hour day had to be fought for tooth and nail, so too the right to live a healthy life had to be wrenched from the ruling class. The right to benefit from the marvelous medical knowledge and technology humanity has developed over the last few centuries is a class issue. The rich and their politicians all have excellent heath care coverage. The 47-plus million Americans without coverage are the workers and poor. Millions of others who do have coverage are a job loss or even just a single premium payment away from total economic disaster should there be a medical emergency.
The record is clear: the health care crisis cannot be solved within the limits of the profit system. The debate over health care in Congress has been bogged down and restricted to the narrowest possible limits. But there is a way out of this impasse. Despite the attacks and setbacks of the last few decades, the over 15 million-strong US Labour Movement remains a powerful force in society. If just these workers were to go on strike, hardly a truck, airplane or train would move, not to mention public school, universities, and city, county, municipal, state, and federal services. That, combined with massive mobilizations on the streets, would put real pressure to bear on Washington! Richard Trumka, the former United Mine Workers’ leader and heir apparent to the leadership to the AFL-CIO has come out in favour of single payer. Now is the time to put these words into action. Organized labour spent millions and mobilized the rank and file to elect Obama. We believe this money and energy would have been better used building a mass party of labor and running labor candidates. The AFL-CIO national convention will be held in September, presenting a tremendous opportunity to change course. The leadership should mobilize the millions of rank and file organized workers and reach out to the unorganized and unemployed to fight for a national health care system for all.
The Democrats have had their chance. They have no more excuses now that they control the White House and have a large majority in Congress. And yet they couldn’t even pass a basic reform like EFCA. It’s high time the Labour Movement broke with them and took up the question of a mass labour party, a party of, by and for working people. If the AFL-CIO leadership showed the way, breaking with the policy of “partnership” with the bosses, and their political parties it would open the floodgates for working class organization and mobilization on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The capitalists’ response to the crisis is to carry out a vicious wave of layoffs, cuts and closures. Living standards are being driven ever lower for the majority, while the rich literally get richer and the poor get poorer. The Labour Movement needs its own response: organization, mobilization, factory occupations under workers’ control to prevent closures, and a clean break from the pro-Big Business parties. There indications that some aspects of the economy are stabilizing. But we have to ask ourselves: who will benefit from the recovery? Will it be another “jobless” recovery? How long will the recovery last before the inevitable next recession? Why do we have to live in fear of losing our homes, jobs, and health care even during the “good times?” The capitalist system operates on a boom bust cycle, and the workers are exploited whether there is a boom or a recession -- things just get even worse during a downturn.
Although the majority opposed the Iraq War, Bush continued it. Although the majority now oppose the war in Afghanistan, Obama is expanding it. The majority want universal health care, and yet single payer is not even “on the table.” Why is this? If this is truly a democracy, then the majority should have genuine decision-making power. This is why we believe that socialism, in which the majority will democratically determine economic and government policies, is the only way forward for humanity. Just one year ago, in the midst of the meltdown on Wall Street, millions of Americans, many of whom had never voted before, came out for Barack Obama, energized by his message of hope and change. His victory marked a turning point in U.S. politics, a clear rejection of Bush’s blatantly anti-worker and imperialist policies. The streets overflowed with joy and the promise of a new era. Around the world, cries of “yes we can!” could be heard as a collective sigh of relief swept the planet. The Bush years were over! Surely things would now get better! But what is the reality? The fact is, things are actually worse than they were under Bush. Despite a much ballyhooed 3.5% growth in GDP in the third quarter of 2009, the economic picture is grim for working people. The unemployment rate has now surpassed 10 percent for the first time since 1983, and is likely to rise further. In some states, such as foreclosure-battered Ohio and Michigan, it is already substantially higher. If those working part time or no longer looking for work were included, the real rate would be closer to 17.5%.
So sure, the recession is “over” according to the official figures, but can it last? And what kind of recovery is it when nearly 16 million people can’t find work? In October alone, 61,000 manufacturing and 62,000 construction jobs evaporated. Jobs have now been lost for 22 months in a row, a steeper fall than during the Great Depression. Also in October, the average work week remained at just 33 hours, giving employers plenty of room to extend existing employee’s hours, not to mention to expand usage of existing industrial capacity before adding new workers or building new factories. Those unable to find work for six months or longer rose to 5.6 million, or 35.6%, a new record. For workers, the so-called “jobless recovery” is no recovery at all. But how can this be? How can the GDP rebound when there are 7.3 million fewer jobs than there were less than two years ago? The answer is simple: the capitalists are making fewer workers do more work for less pay. Hence, profits are up for many companies such as Ford. According to the Department of Labor, productivity — the amount produced per worker per hour — rose by an incredible 9.5% in the 3rd quarter, after rising 6.9% in the 2nd. In other words, they are squeezing more out of us than ever, all while lining their pockets with federal bailout money. A very convenient situation for them, but not so appealing for the rest of us!
Workers are willing to take this for the time being. They hope that the worst is indeed over, that they have made it through the storm to relative shelter. They are willing to “wait and see,” and hope for real change from Obama. But this has its limits; the worst is far from over. The immediate shock of last year’s crisis may have subsided, but now the reality is gradually creeping in: Americans are going to be forced to accept a new, lower standard of living, and there will be no rapid bounceback of jobs. Millions of the jobs lost are gone forever, to be replaced by fewer jobs offering lower wages, no benefits, and no union protections. As for Obama’s foreign policy, although he won the Nobel Prize simply for the “hope” he has generated internationally, the year since his election has provided many harsh realities for those who expected something new under the sun. The coup in Honduras against the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya has in effect been legitimated by Obama’s State Department — with the help of U.S.-trained officers and the brutal use of U.S. made weapons. U.S. troops are to remain in Iraq for years to come, and the war in Afghanistan has been expanded by tens of thousands of troops and extended into Pakistan. In short, Bush’s wars continue despite the “changing of the guard.” The reason for this is also easily explained: like Bush, Obama defends the fundamental interests of the capitalists and imperialists, and “political realism.” Like Bush before him, his policies flow from this reality.
His expansion of the military budget to $680 billion — an amount only dreamed of by Reagan and the Bushes — speaks for itself. “Defense” spending now consumes 35-42% of estimated tax revenues. Add to that the billions handed out without any accountability whatsoever to the already-absurdly rich, and it’s no wonder there is “not enough” money for job creation, schools or health care. Obama has boasted that his stimulus package will create or save 650,000 jobs; but it’s not even enough to make up for the jobs lost in a single month earlier this year. The new leadership of the AFL-CIO is an indication of the slowly changing mood in the Labor Movement. At least in words, Trumka is a reflection of the growing pressure from the rank and file, which is tired of cuts and concessions. The off-year election results were another indication of what is to come. Most incumbents were thrown out, and those who remained, did so at tremendous financial expense. Upcoming electoral contests will be interesting to say the least, as American voters reject the “status quo” in their own distorted way and look for a way out. In the final analysis, only the creation of a mass party of labor based on the unions can lay the basis for addressing the workers’ problems. Before then, however, more life experience will be necessary.
There are no direct historical parallels, and comparisons between epochs must of necessity take into account the many changes and differences that have taken place in the intervening decades. It is useful, however, to keep in mind that between the Crash of 1929 and the first mass stirrings of the working class in the mid-1930s, some five years or more elapsed. In the interim, even the large, well-established left-wing parties such as the SP and CP did not experience an immediate surge in growth. Today, as then, mass consciousness has not yet caught up with objective reality. But it will catch up, and with a bang. It would be a mistake to mistake today’s apparent passivity in the face of such an unprecedented crisis for “the end of history.” In fact, the real history of humanity is only just beginning. We must not be caught unawares or unprepared! For those of us who can see the correctness of our perspectives confirmed and the potential for the socialist transformation of society all around us, it can be frustrating to watch the molasses-like development of events in the U.S. and internationally. However, the Marxists and labor activists must not succumb to moods of impatience or spend time searching for panacaeas or shortcuts: there are none. Patience, hard work, discussion, theoretical clarity and dedication are the only way forward. History is on our side. We must have confidence in the working class, in the ideas of revolutionary Marxism as a guide to action, and in our perspectives for a socialist future.
Friday, 1 January 2010
Afghanistan: Obama’s war
"I WOULD say this about defining success in Afghanistan and Pakistan… We’ll know it when we see it", said Richard Holbrooke, US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jim McGovern, Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts put it another way: "I have this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that we’re getting sucked into an endless war here". Whatever way you put it the eight-year war in Afghanistan is a nightmare. The death toll of Afghani people has already topped 1,000 last year. Forty-four US soldiers died in July, 45 in August – more than any other months in the war to date – while 79 British troops have died in 2009 up to 16 September. What are these people dying for? That is the question being asked with ever greater urgency. US president, Barack Obama, seemed sure during his election campaign. In contrast to George W Bush’s needless "war of choice" in Iraq, he said, Afghanistan is "a necessary war": to destroy al-Qaeda, make the US safe, bring democracy, fight against corruption, promote women’s rights and stamp out opium production. He promised to increase troop numbers to 68,000 this year – all but 4,000 are in place. There are now 100,000 US and Nato troops there – 9,000 from Britain.
What was called a presidential election took place on 20 August. The extent of the rigging and violence was breathtaking. In president Hamid Karzai’s home province, Kandahar, where his younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, chairs the provincial council, over 350,000 votes were recorded. Western officials estimate that only 25,000 people actually voted. Around 800 fake polling stations were set up by supporters of Karzai, who also took over a further 800 legitimate polling centres to stuff the boxes with votes. For what it’s worth, the preliminary totals gave Karzai just over three million votes (54.6%), with second placed Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, on 1.6 million (27.8%). Just after the election, Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan hailed the vote as "a bad day for the Taliban and a good day for the people of Afghanistan". Obama called it the most important event in Afghanistan this year. He may be right, of course, but not for the reasons he meant. The massive vote rigging and growing public scepticism have compelled the UN-sponsored Electoral Complaints Commission, which has to ratify the result, to order a recount of 10% of the vote. If a recount brings Karzai’s total down to 50% or below this would trigger a run-off between him and Abdullah. Phillippe Morillon, head of the EU observer team, said that 1.5 million votes (27%) were suspect – 1.1 million for Karzai, 300,000 for Abdullah, the rest for other candidates.
Recounting could months; with winter settled, a second round could be delayed until April 2010, leaving the prospect of months of increased political volatility and uncertainty. It would further undermine the case made by the Obama, Brown, Merkel and Sarkozy administrations for the military intervention. Effectively, the election authorities have a month to sort something out: call a destabilising, divisive (and rigged) run-off, stitch up a deal between Karzai and Abdullah, or announce that Karzai won after all. Whatever happens will be dirty politics, with the western powers up to their necks in the filth. Karzai was installed as president by the US in 2001. He won the inaugural presidential election in 2004 and was feted the world over. He now resides in a palatial fortress in the centre of Kabul, presiding over what The Economist calls the "spread of narco-corruption". He keeps some scary company. General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord, arrived back in Afghanistan a week before the election to back Karzai. It is said that he was responsible for killing 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war in 2001 and executed people by crushing them under bulldozers.
Karzai did deals with Marshal Mohammad Fahim, a Tajik warlord heavily implicated in drug trafficking, and Abdul Karim Khalili and Mohammad Mohaqeq, two Haraza warlords. Ironically, Karzai’s campaign adviser was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Islamist who welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996! The election has exposed the Afghan political system as completely rotten. What none of the heads of states with troops in Afghanistan are prepared to admit – from their comfortable offices and homes – is that the presence of foreign armies is the main source of tension and conflict. The systematic use of air power to minimise Nato casualties exacerbates this because it causes massive Afghani civilian deaths. US and Nato supremo, General Stanley McChrystal, says this strategy has changed. A few days after making that claim, however, a US air raid against two fuel tankers taken by the Taliban – called in by German forces – led to 125 deaths, the majority of them civilians. A UN official asked the pointed question: "One day you are building a bridge and the next day you call in an airstrike that kills civilians. What kind of message does that send?"
The political establishment and mass media deal in simplistic caricatures. The right-wing commentator, Nicholas Kristof, is basically correct when he points out: "Some Taliban are hardcore ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because it’s a way to earn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land – particularly because the foreigners haven’t brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated". In other words, it is not the simple good-versus-evil formula rammed down our throats. In contrast to the rampant corruption of the regime, Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, even wrote that, despite its brutality, the Taliban "allow people to file formal complaints against local Talib leaders". Time is running out for Obama with 61% saying the conflict is going badly and 51% that the war is not worth fighting – up to 70% among Democrats. Increasingly, Obama has to rely on backing from the Republicans, dangerous when he faces such strong opposition over his healthcare plans and economic policy.
In Britain, Eric Joyce resigned as parliamentary private secretary to Bob Ainsworth, defence secretary, on 3 September, saying that he could no longer justify the growing casualties by saying the war helps prevent terrorism. Even this staunch New Labour loyalist could stomach the lie no longer. There is mounting anger at the rising death toll of young soldiers, at the neglect of injured soldiers and their struggle for financial assistance, as well as the substandard equipment they are sent into battle with. And for what? To prop up a completely corrupt regime. As for the people of Afghanistan, they are caught between the Nato occupation, Taliban insurgents, warlords and drug-trafficking gangsters, in one of the world’s poorest countries, almost two-thirds of which is too dangerous for aid agencies to reach. It would be naïve to believe that the withdrawal of troops would immediately bring peace to Afghanistan. But they have to be pulled out. They are foreign fighters in occupation. The more troops that are sent in – the logic of Obama’s position and the demand of McChrystal – the greater the resistance. By all the criteria set by Obama, Afghanistan is a failure. Al-Qaeda has not been destroyed. It has moved to Pakistan, a potentially greater source of instability in the region. Corruption and drug trafficking is endemic, funding the Taliban as well as many in and around Karzai’s palace. Women’s rights are crushed by all the warlords, Islamists and insurgent forces.
Afghanistan has been ripped apart by 30 years of war and intervention by major world powers. US-backed mujaheddin fighting against Russian forces became the Taliban regime. Today, we are eight years into the Nato occupation. Given that terrible legacy, developing a free, united country is a long-term goal, a dream even. Tragically, the people of Afghanistan – and the troops sent there, too – are living in a nightmare conjured up by capitalism. We must do all we can to hasten the withdrawal of troops and make links with the workers and poor of Afghanistan, struggling in socialist solidarity to rid the region of imperialist intervention.
What was called a presidential election took place on 20 August. The extent of the rigging and violence was breathtaking. In president Hamid Karzai’s home province, Kandahar, where his younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, chairs the provincial council, over 350,000 votes were recorded. Western officials estimate that only 25,000 people actually voted. Around 800 fake polling stations were set up by supporters of Karzai, who also took over a further 800 legitimate polling centres to stuff the boxes with votes. For what it’s worth, the preliminary totals gave Karzai just over three million votes (54.6%), with second placed Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, on 1.6 million (27.8%). Just after the election, Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan hailed the vote as "a bad day for the Taliban and a good day for the people of Afghanistan". Obama called it the most important event in Afghanistan this year. He may be right, of course, but not for the reasons he meant. The massive vote rigging and growing public scepticism have compelled the UN-sponsored Electoral Complaints Commission, which has to ratify the result, to order a recount of 10% of the vote. If a recount brings Karzai’s total down to 50% or below this would trigger a run-off between him and Abdullah. Phillippe Morillon, head of the EU observer team, said that 1.5 million votes (27%) were suspect – 1.1 million for Karzai, 300,000 for Abdullah, the rest for other candidates.
Recounting could months; with winter settled, a second round could be delayed until April 2010, leaving the prospect of months of increased political volatility and uncertainty. It would further undermine the case made by the Obama, Brown, Merkel and Sarkozy administrations for the military intervention. Effectively, the election authorities have a month to sort something out: call a destabilising, divisive (and rigged) run-off, stitch up a deal between Karzai and Abdullah, or announce that Karzai won after all. Whatever happens will be dirty politics, with the western powers up to their necks in the filth. Karzai was installed as president by the US in 2001. He won the inaugural presidential election in 2004 and was feted the world over. He now resides in a palatial fortress in the centre of Kabul, presiding over what The Economist calls the "spread of narco-corruption". He keeps some scary company. General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord, arrived back in Afghanistan a week before the election to back Karzai. It is said that he was responsible for killing 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war in 2001 and executed people by crushing them under bulldozers.
Karzai did deals with Marshal Mohammad Fahim, a Tajik warlord heavily implicated in drug trafficking, and Abdul Karim Khalili and Mohammad Mohaqeq, two Haraza warlords. Ironically, Karzai’s campaign adviser was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Islamist who welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996! The election has exposed the Afghan political system as completely rotten. What none of the heads of states with troops in Afghanistan are prepared to admit – from their comfortable offices and homes – is that the presence of foreign armies is the main source of tension and conflict. The systematic use of air power to minimise Nato casualties exacerbates this because it causes massive Afghani civilian deaths. US and Nato supremo, General Stanley McChrystal, says this strategy has changed. A few days after making that claim, however, a US air raid against two fuel tankers taken by the Taliban – called in by German forces – led to 125 deaths, the majority of them civilians. A UN official asked the pointed question: "One day you are building a bridge and the next day you call in an airstrike that kills civilians. What kind of message does that send?"
The political establishment and mass media deal in simplistic caricatures. The right-wing commentator, Nicholas Kristof, is basically correct when he points out: "Some Taliban are hardcore ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because it’s a way to earn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land – particularly because the foreigners haven’t brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated". In other words, it is not the simple good-versus-evil formula rammed down our throats. In contrast to the rampant corruption of the regime, Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, even wrote that, despite its brutality, the Taliban "allow people to file formal complaints against local Talib leaders". Time is running out for Obama with 61% saying the conflict is going badly and 51% that the war is not worth fighting – up to 70% among Democrats. Increasingly, Obama has to rely on backing from the Republicans, dangerous when he faces such strong opposition over his healthcare plans and economic policy.
In Britain, Eric Joyce resigned as parliamentary private secretary to Bob Ainsworth, defence secretary, on 3 September, saying that he could no longer justify the growing casualties by saying the war helps prevent terrorism. Even this staunch New Labour loyalist could stomach the lie no longer. There is mounting anger at the rising death toll of young soldiers, at the neglect of injured soldiers and their struggle for financial assistance, as well as the substandard equipment they are sent into battle with. And for what? To prop up a completely corrupt regime. As for the people of Afghanistan, they are caught between the Nato occupation, Taliban insurgents, warlords and drug-trafficking gangsters, in one of the world’s poorest countries, almost two-thirds of which is too dangerous for aid agencies to reach. It would be naïve to believe that the withdrawal of troops would immediately bring peace to Afghanistan. But they have to be pulled out. They are foreign fighters in occupation. The more troops that are sent in – the logic of Obama’s position and the demand of McChrystal – the greater the resistance. By all the criteria set by Obama, Afghanistan is a failure. Al-Qaeda has not been destroyed. It has moved to Pakistan, a potentially greater source of instability in the region. Corruption and drug trafficking is endemic, funding the Taliban as well as many in and around Karzai’s palace. Women’s rights are crushed by all the warlords, Islamists and insurgent forces.
Afghanistan has been ripped apart by 30 years of war and intervention by major world powers. US-backed mujaheddin fighting against Russian forces became the Taliban regime. Today, we are eight years into the Nato occupation. Given that terrible legacy, developing a free, united country is a long-term goal, a dream even. Tragically, the people of Afghanistan – and the troops sent there, too – are living in a nightmare conjured up by capitalism. We must do all we can to hasten the withdrawal of troops and make links with the workers and poor of Afghanistan, struggling in socialist solidarity to rid the region of imperialist intervention.
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
US Afghan surge shows the deepening crisis
Barack Obama’s new troop surge to Afghanistan is a desperate attempt to get out of the crisis Nato troops are in. Obama is to announce that around 30,000 more troops will be sent to Afghanistan, starting with the deployment of 9,000 marines to Helmand next month. Hopes that the president might represent a break from George Bush’s aggressive imperialist policies lie in tatters. Troop numbers committed to Afghanistan have doubled under Obama—the total with the new commitment will stand at over 100,000. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs recently revealed the spiralling financial costs of the war: “It’s a million dollars a troop for a year. That’s in addition to what we already spend in Afghanistan and Pakistan... It’s very, very, very expensive.”
But what are Nato’s aims? Gordon Brown has talked a lot about training the Afghan military and police to take over from occupying troops. And Obama says that the troop surge is part of a district-by-district handover plan. Everyone seems keen to avoid direct mention of “exit strategy”. But the reality of the situation should be staring the US, Britain and their military commanders in the face. The more troops that have been ploughed into the Afghan conflict, the more bloody and violent it has become. Tens of thousands of Afghans have been killed or displaced since the war began. And 99 British soldiers and 299 US troops have died this year alone. Not only has little been achieved in territorial gains, but the initial, much-vaunted aim of finding Osama Bin Laden was quietly dropped. Brown has now put Bin Laden back on the agenda with his attacks on Pakistan’s government.
Brown said last week, “We’ve got to ask ourselves why, eight years after September 11, nobody has been able to spot or detain or get close to Osama Bin Laden, nobody’s been able to get close to Zawahiri, the number two in Al Qaida.” Brown has, of course, been part of the expansion of war in Afghanistan that has pushed the conflict over the border and created massive instability in Pakistan. Yet he had the cheek to say, “We will want to see more evidence of Pakistan action, not just troops in South Waziristan but the whole of the government machine taking action.” But the problem with Nato’s strategy is not just a military one. A political crisis in Afghanistan, and the damage done to Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s reputation after the election scandal earlier this year, has made the pretence of progress and stability harder for leaders to sell.
The US is now considering creating a “high representative” in Kabul that can go over Karzai’s head and will entrench US control - and Brown and Obama have said that aid packages will bypass Karzai’s central government and instead be channeled at a local level to avoid corruption. The crisis and splits at the top of the US and British political and military establishments are proof of the disaster of the Afghan war. Some countries such as Germany and France are refusing to commit more troops, and Canada and others are already following withdrawal plans. The US and Britain look ever more isolated in a war which is unwinnable. And instead of a confident move by world leaders, this latest troop surge has a distinct whiff of desperation.
But what are Nato’s aims? Gordon Brown has talked a lot about training the Afghan military and police to take over from occupying troops. And Obama says that the troop surge is part of a district-by-district handover plan. Everyone seems keen to avoid direct mention of “exit strategy”. But the reality of the situation should be staring the US, Britain and their military commanders in the face. The more troops that have been ploughed into the Afghan conflict, the more bloody and violent it has become. Tens of thousands of Afghans have been killed or displaced since the war began. And 99 British soldiers and 299 US troops have died this year alone. Not only has little been achieved in territorial gains, but the initial, much-vaunted aim of finding Osama Bin Laden was quietly dropped. Brown has now put Bin Laden back on the agenda with his attacks on Pakistan’s government.
Brown said last week, “We’ve got to ask ourselves why, eight years after September 11, nobody has been able to spot or detain or get close to Osama Bin Laden, nobody’s been able to get close to Zawahiri, the number two in Al Qaida.” Brown has, of course, been part of the expansion of war in Afghanistan that has pushed the conflict over the border and created massive instability in Pakistan. Yet he had the cheek to say, “We will want to see more evidence of Pakistan action, not just troops in South Waziristan but the whole of the government machine taking action.” But the problem with Nato’s strategy is not just a military one. A political crisis in Afghanistan, and the damage done to Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s reputation after the election scandal earlier this year, has made the pretence of progress and stability harder for leaders to sell.
The US is now considering creating a “high representative” in Kabul that can go over Karzai’s head and will entrench US control - and Brown and Obama have said that aid packages will bypass Karzai’s central government and instead be channeled at a local level to avoid corruption. The crisis and splits at the top of the US and British political and military establishments are proof of the disaster of the Afghan war. Some countries such as Germany and France are refusing to commit more troops, and Canada and others are already following withdrawal plans. The US and Britain look ever more isolated in a war which is unwinnable. And instead of a confident move by world leaders, this latest troop surge has a distinct whiff of desperation.
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Health Reform Makes America Stronger
In a nationally televised news conference dominated by the health care issue, Obama delivered lengthy statements in response to Republican attacks on proposals he favors. He also attempted to ease the concerns of people left confused by the fierce debate in Washington. He repeatedly emphasized that the spiraling costs of the current system would bankrupt the nation while denying coverage to millions more Americans. Asked directly if he could guarantee that an overhauled health care system won't change how people receive treatment, Obama said no. "The whole point of this is to try to encourage what works," Obama said, addressing concerns that reform would take away the ability of people to choose their doctors and treatment. "The government is already making some of these decisions," Obama said. "Insurance companies are making some of these decisions."
The reform proposals he backs would have experts make decisions based on the best medical treatment, not accountants attempting to save money or doctors prescribing treatments that bring the highest fees, Obama said. "This will require patients ... to be more discriminating consumers," he said. "I think that's a good thing. Ultimately ... we just can't afford what's happening right now." Republican opponents of Democratic bills in the House and Senate said earlier that most Americans like the current system, which they said must be made less expensive and more accessible. Republican opponents of Democratic bills in the House and Senate said earlier that most Americans like the current system, which they said must be made less expensive and more accessible. Obama and Democratic leaders say the problems are deeper and systemic, and the president spent all of his seven-minute opening statement at the 52-minute news conference outlining the challenges and his proposed solutions. "Even as we rescue this economy from a full-blown crisis, we must rebuild it stronger than before -- and health insurance reform is central to that effort," Obama said. "If we do not control these costs, we will not be able to control our deficit. If we do not reform health care, your premiums and out-of-pocket costs will continue to skyrocket."
As he laid out the list of benefits that health care reform offers, he dropped a direct reference to a government-funded public health insurance option. Until now, Obama has consistently touted the government-funded public option as competition for private insurers in expanding access to health coverage.
It was unclear if Obama changed the wording to avoid a label opposed by Republican supporters, or if he was signaling a policy shift toward a compromise being negotiated by the Senate Finance Committee to have health insurance cooperatives rather than a government-funded public option. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa claimed on Wednesday that the Finance Committee was not considering a public option. Later in the news conference, Obama responded to a question about the public option by saying it was intended to "keep the insurance companies honest." He noted that some insurance companies recently reported record profits, and said offering a competing government-funded health plan would require private insurers to offer less-expensive coverage. Speaking about the benefits of his plan, he said it would offer "security" and "stability" to sick and healthy Americans. "It will prevent insurance companies from dropping your coverage if you get too sick. It will give you the security of knowing that if you lose your job, move, or change your job, you will still be able to have coverage. It will limit the amount your insurance company can force you to pay for your medical costs out of your own pocket. And it will cover preventive care like check-ups and mammograms that save lives and money," he said.
He also said his program would not add to the deficit over the next decade, addressing concerns from Republican opponents and fiscally conservative Democrats over the costs of the program. "Already, we have estimated that two-thirds of the cost of reform can be paid for by reallocating money that is simply being wasted in federal health care programs. This includes over $100 billion in unwarranted subsidies that go to insurance companies as part of Medicare -- subsidies that do nothing to improve care for our seniors," he said. Obama also chided opponents of his health care reform push for making the issue purely political. "I've heard that one Republican strategist told his party that even though they may want to compromise, it's better politics to 'go for the kill.' Another Republican senator said that defeating health reform is about 'breaking' me," he said. "Let me be clear: This isn't about me," Obama said, noting that he and every member of Congress -- including those trying to scuttle health care reform legislation -- "have great health insurance." Instead, he said, the debate is about people lacking health insurance because they can't afford rising costs, get denied due to a pre-existing condition, or lose their jobs. "This debate is not a game for these Americans, and they cannot afford to wait for reform any longer."
Obama also confirmed an agreement with fiscally conservative Democrats to create an independent group of doctors and medical experts empowered to eliminate waste and inefficiency in Medicare. Obama said he backed adding such a panel to health care reform legislation. Such a panel could both save money and "ensure the long-term financial health of Medicare," Obama said. So-called "Blue Dog" Democrats questioning the costs of initial health care bills said Obama gave a "verbal agreement" Tuesday to including the independent panel in health care reform legislation.Earlier Wednesday, Obama worked the phones, urging lawmakers to embrace health care reform, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said Wednesday. It follows the president's Tuesday meeting with Democrats at the White House, dubbed a "serious working session" where "major progress" was made, Dunn said. Officials said Obama will be taking a more hands-on approach with members of Congress in the days and weeks to come regarding the health care debate.
White House aides say the administration is concerned about three centers of serious opposition from House Democrats: the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats who are worried about the cost of a public health care plan; the freshmen and other Democrats from high-income districts who are concerned about taxes for high-income Democrats, and the anti-abortion Democrats who are concerned about federal funding going for abortion services, and whether health care providers can opt out of certain procedures. One official said the administration is aware that "if any of these three groups abandon the effort the bill would be impossible to get out of committee, much less pass."Aides say the president and lawmakers also discussed the public option versus a co-op option.
Conservatives may scoff at the outlined plans and accuse Obama yet again of attempting to build a "socialist utopia" but they know deep in their hearts that their fear and loathing for modern politics has lost them their dignity. The faith has gone in right-wing Republicans who hate abortion yet adore the death penalty; the types who are strongly against this egalitarian institution because all they wish to do is look out for themselves and big business. If Barack Obama keeps doing his job right whilst irritating the regressive Republicans, he gets my backing for life.
The reform proposals he backs would have experts make decisions based on the best medical treatment, not accountants attempting to save money or doctors prescribing treatments that bring the highest fees, Obama said. "This will require patients ... to be more discriminating consumers," he said. "I think that's a good thing. Ultimately ... we just can't afford what's happening right now." Republican opponents of Democratic bills in the House and Senate said earlier that most Americans like the current system, which they said must be made less expensive and more accessible. Republican opponents of Democratic bills in the House and Senate said earlier that most Americans like the current system, which they said must be made less expensive and more accessible. Obama and Democratic leaders say the problems are deeper and systemic, and the president spent all of his seven-minute opening statement at the 52-minute news conference outlining the challenges and his proposed solutions. "Even as we rescue this economy from a full-blown crisis, we must rebuild it stronger than before -- and health insurance reform is central to that effort," Obama said. "If we do not control these costs, we will not be able to control our deficit. If we do not reform health care, your premiums and out-of-pocket costs will continue to skyrocket."
As he laid out the list of benefits that health care reform offers, he dropped a direct reference to a government-funded public health insurance option. Until now, Obama has consistently touted the government-funded public option as competition for private insurers in expanding access to health coverage.
It was unclear if Obama changed the wording to avoid a label opposed by Republican supporters, or if he was signaling a policy shift toward a compromise being negotiated by the Senate Finance Committee to have health insurance cooperatives rather than a government-funded public option. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa claimed on Wednesday that the Finance Committee was not considering a public option. Later in the news conference, Obama responded to a question about the public option by saying it was intended to "keep the insurance companies honest." He noted that some insurance companies recently reported record profits, and said offering a competing government-funded health plan would require private insurers to offer less-expensive coverage. Speaking about the benefits of his plan, he said it would offer "security" and "stability" to sick and healthy Americans. "It will prevent insurance companies from dropping your coverage if you get too sick. It will give you the security of knowing that if you lose your job, move, or change your job, you will still be able to have coverage. It will limit the amount your insurance company can force you to pay for your medical costs out of your own pocket. And it will cover preventive care like check-ups and mammograms that save lives and money," he said.
He also said his program would not add to the deficit over the next decade, addressing concerns from Republican opponents and fiscally conservative Democrats over the costs of the program. "Already, we have estimated that two-thirds of the cost of reform can be paid for by reallocating money that is simply being wasted in federal health care programs. This includes over $100 billion in unwarranted subsidies that go to insurance companies as part of Medicare -- subsidies that do nothing to improve care for our seniors," he said. Obama also chided opponents of his health care reform push for making the issue purely political. "I've heard that one Republican strategist told his party that even though they may want to compromise, it's better politics to 'go for the kill.' Another Republican senator said that defeating health reform is about 'breaking' me," he said. "Let me be clear: This isn't about me," Obama said, noting that he and every member of Congress -- including those trying to scuttle health care reform legislation -- "have great health insurance." Instead, he said, the debate is about people lacking health insurance because they can't afford rising costs, get denied due to a pre-existing condition, or lose their jobs. "This debate is not a game for these Americans, and they cannot afford to wait for reform any longer."
Obama also confirmed an agreement with fiscally conservative Democrats to create an independent group of doctors and medical experts empowered to eliminate waste and inefficiency in Medicare. Obama said he backed adding such a panel to health care reform legislation. Such a panel could both save money and "ensure the long-term financial health of Medicare," Obama said. So-called "Blue Dog" Democrats questioning the costs of initial health care bills said Obama gave a "verbal agreement" Tuesday to including the independent panel in health care reform legislation.Earlier Wednesday, Obama worked the phones, urging lawmakers to embrace health care reform, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said Wednesday. It follows the president's Tuesday meeting with Democrats at the White House, dubbed a "serious working session" where "major progress" was made, Dunn said. Officials said Obama will be taking a more hands-on approach with members of Congress in the days and weeks to come regarding the health care debate.
White House aides say the administration is concerned about three centers of serious opposition from House Democrats: the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats who are worried about the cost of a public health care plan; the freshmen and other Democrats from high-income districts who are concerned about taxes for high-income Democrats, and the anti-abortion Democrats who are concerned about federal funding going for abortion services, and whether health care providers can opt out of certain procedures. One official said the administration is aware that "if any of these three groups abandon the effort the bill would be impossible to get out of committee, much less pass."Aides say the president and lawmakers also discussed the public option versus a co-op option.
Conservatives may scoff at the outlined plans and accuse Obama yet again of attempting to build a "socialist utopia" but they know deep in their hearts that their fear and loathing for modern politics has lost them their dignity. The faith has gone in right-wing Republicans who hate abortion yet adore the death penalty; the types who are strongly against this egalitarian institution because all they wish to do is look out for themselves and big business. If Barack Obama keeps doing his job right whilst irritating the regressive Republicans, he gets my backing for life.
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