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The End is at Hand (to Leftist Conspiracy Theories)

Friday, October 31st, 2008

By Dave Lindorff

With the polls continuing to show Barack Obama holding a steady or even growing lead heading into Election Day, especially in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia, and with Democratic challengers looking strong in at least 10 Senate races and dozens of open-seat or Republican-held House races, it’s looking like this will be a big win for Democrats, both in the presidential and the Congressional races.

Hopefully one thing such an across-the-boards win will lead to would be a withering away of the self-destructive conspiracy-theory paranoia that has gripped much of the Left over the last eight years.

Once largely emblematic of the far Right, which saw black helicopters of the dreaded United Nations behind every mountain, Jews running everything, Communists working nefariously under every bed, fluoridation plots, an immigrant assault on the Anglo-Saxon gene pool, and a liberal cabal out to steal their assault hunting rifles, now the Left is awash in the same kind of fevered thinking.

Chief among the leftist conspiracy theories are that the Bush/Cheney administration was behind the 9-11 attacks, that the current administration has plans to cancel or annul the November 4 election and institute martial law, that there are plans for a “false flag” attack on American forces which will be used to justify an all-out war against Iran, that there is a false-flag terror attack planned inside the US set for before the election, designed to throw the vote towards John McCain, that the Wall Street meltdown and subsequent bail-out are a deliberate scheme to steal the nation’s assets and funnel them into Republican pockets, and that Republican operatives have the technological capability, and plan to steal the current election by manipulating the results on the electronic voting machines used by many election districts. In a variant of the Right’s anti-Semitic ravings, the Left attributes god-like powers to the Israel lobby and its formal lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

Never mind that some of these conspiracies are mutually exclusive (if Bush and Cheney are going to declare martial law, they should have no need to steal the election), or that it’s getting pretty late in the game for others to actually happen. The common thread running through these conspiracies is that “they” (the Republicans, AIPAC or the ruling corporate elite, as the case may be), have superhuman powers beyond our wildest imaginations, as well as flawless execution, and are going to achieve their evil ends no matter what we do.

Following this line of thinking (if it can be called that), there’s no point in voting, because “they” are going to steal the election anyhow (and that, of course, is if the election is even held next week!). There’s no point in going to rallies or marches in Washington DC, because “they” are going to attack Iran and start World War III anyhow. Public protest is also dangerous, because “they” are going to declare martial law, and then all of us who go out and publicly oppose the government will end up locked away in detention camps in the Mojavi desert.

I confess, as a journalist, to having unwittingly aided and abetted some of this conspiracy thinking, for example with my reporting on the evidence that all four of the so-called “black boxes” from the two planes that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 were recovered, and that the FBI actually has them, despite its testimony to the contrary before the 9-11 Commission. I make no apology for, and still stand by that report, which was based upon reliable sources at the National Transportation Safety Administration and in the New York Police Department, but I want to stress that such a report does not justify going beyond asking the logical question, “What is the government hiding here?” to making the wild speculation that it means the government planned and carried out those attacks.

I also reported on solid evidence in 2006 that the Bush/Cheney administration was moving several aircraft carrier battle groups into position in the Persian Gulf in advance of Congressional off-year elections in what appeared to be possible plans for an attack on Iran. I still believe that may have been the administration’s game plan, but that it was derailed by senior Republican leaders who prevailed on James Baker, chair of the Iraq War Study Group, to release his team’s bi-partisan study three months early, which called for negotiations with Iran and Syria in order to bring peace and stability to the Iraq region. I would add that this is a far cry from imagining that the administration was planning to fake an Iranian attack on American forces.

I am not saying that governments don’t engage in treacherous conspiracies. Certainly the faked tale of a Gulf of Tonkin incident was a conspiracy designed to allow the Johnson administration to begin an all-out war against the Vietnamese. And certainly there was a conspiracy in the Bush/Cheney administration during 2002 and early 2003 to mislead and lie to the Congress and the American people about Saddam Hussein’s alleged links to 9-11 and to global terrorists. But those relatively simple conspiracies actually prove my point—both have been clearly exposed thanks to leaks, turncoats, and good investigative reporting.

What I am saying is that the grander conspiracies being concocted in the more fevered brains of some people on the Left do not hold up under careful and critical inspection. The biggest failings they share are two: first of all, conspiracies as grand as multi-state election thefts via electronic fraud, and the carrying out of a two-front, high-casualty mass terrorist act on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, require the cooperation of such large numbers of people that leaks, turncoats, informants and simple screw-ups are inevitable; and secondly, this administration in particular has shown itself to be phenomenally inept, intellectually stunted, and tactically clueless. The War in Iraq, which was supposed to be a “cakewalk,” has been an unmitigated disaster for Republicans. The War in Afghanistan is a fiasco. The War on Terror, while a success in terms of helping Republicans win seats in Congress in 2002, and Bush to win re-election in 2004, has been a bust longer term. Management of the US economy has been a model of incompetence. So has the grand plan to crush Democrats and create a dominant Republican Party for the next century. The Rovian campaign strategy of lies, smears and dirty tricks, while initially successful, appears to have worn out its effectiveness in just three two-year national election cycles.

None of this would matter except that I think the Left’s embrace of conspiracy-theories has become profoundly damaging to the whole progressive movement. Conspiracy thinking produces a deep cynicism towards positive action and towards the kind of long-term organizing upon which real social and political change depends. When people think that the fix is in, they are not inclined to put time and energy into the hard work of organizing unions, working to get local candidates elected to office, running for positions on party committees, etc. Conspiracy thinking also leads people on the left to completely write off the Democratic Party as a vehicle for progressive change, as the notion that “they” run everything is broadened to include in the term “they” the elected Democrats in the White House and Congress. Democrats may be weenies, but such a conflation of Republicans and Democrats is also self-defeating nonsense, as is the notion that Obama is “just another tool” of the corporate/imperialist power structure. Democrats are not just Republicans by another name, and Obama is not just McCain or Bush with a better tan.

The reality is that if Obama is elected president, and if Democrats end up gaining solid control of Congress, it will be critically important for progressives to organize powerfully to press this new government to do the right things—promptly ending the two wars in the Middle East, taking strong and far-reaching action to tackle global warming, restoring some basic equity to the economic and tax system, making health care affordable and available to all, restoring the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, demanding punishment for those in the current administration who have committed crimes, and so on.

We cannot expect Obama, or the Democrats in Congress who have proven themselves to be such gutless compromisers, to take significant progressive actions on their own. They must be driven by force of public action to do the right thing.

Maybe when this election goes right and isn’t stolen, making Obama the president, and debunking the vote-theft fear-mongers, and when Obama goes on to be inaugurated in January, without being blocked by a military coup, these paranoid conspiracy theories will fade away and people on the Left will start working to make change happen instead of imagining reasons why it can’t or just moaning that “they” are going to destroy us all.

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Documents Show Tobacco Industry Conspired Against Airline Smoking Ban

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

PR Watch | An analysis of tobacco industry documents published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) tells how the German cigarette industry worked to stop Lufthansa, the flagship airline of Germany, from banning smoking on its domestic flights in the early 1990s.

Documents also reveal that German tobacco companies worked to keep cigarette vending machines accessible to children, stop higher taxes on cigarettes, block a ban on tobacco advertising and recruit doctors and scientists to serve as “expert witnesses” to testify against the health dangers of tobacco.

One of the paper’s authors, Martina Pötschke-Langer, who heads the World Health Organization’s Collaboration Centre for Tobacco Control at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, said “The campaign against Lufthansa’s non-smoking flights appears to be especially vicious, since pressure was applied to the government as well as to public opinion via the mass media.” Lufthansa started working to ban smoking on German domestic flights in 1989, but wasn’t successful until 1996.

See British Medical Journal (sub req’d), October 1, 2008

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DARPA Contract Description Hints at Advanced Video Spying

Monday, October 20th, 2008

By Walter Pincus |

Real-time streaming video of Iraqi and Afghan battle areas taken from thousands of feet in the air can follow actions of people on the ground as they dig, shake hands, exchange objects and kiss each other goodbye.

The video is sent from unmanned and manned aircraft to intelligence analysts at ground stations in the United States and abroad. They watch video in real time of people getting in and out of cars, loading trunks, dropping things or picking them up. They can even see vehicles accelerate, slow down, move together or make U-turns.

“The dynamics of an urban insurgency have resulted in a rapid increase in the number of activities visible in the video field of view,” according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Although the exploits of the Predator, the Global Hawk and other airborne collectors of information have been widely publicized, there are few authoritative descriptions of what they can see on the ground.

But some insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.

“The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems,” according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month.

Last month, Kitware, a small software company with offices in New York and North Carolina, teamed up with 19 other companies and universities and won the $6.7 million first phase of the DARPA contract, which is not expected to be completed before 2011.

During the Cold War, satellites and aircraft took still pictures that intelligence analysts reviewed one frame at a time to identify the locations of missile silos, airplane hangars, submarine pens and factories, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an expert in space and intelligence matters.

“Now with new full-motion video intelligence techniques, we are looking at people and their behavior in public,” he said.

The resolution capability of the video systems ranges from four inches to a foot, depending on the collector and environmental conditions at the time, according to the DARPA paper. The video itself is also shaped by the angle to the ground from which it is shot, although there are 3-D capabilities that allow viewers on the ground to manipulate videos of objects so they can see them from different vantage points.

Systems also exist that allow tracking, moving-target detection of objects under forest or other cover and determination of exact geographic location. Development is underway of systems that allow recognition of faces and gait — in other words, human identification.

Currently, because there are so many activities or objects to be watched for hints of suspicious behavior, “more analysts . . . watch the same, real-time video stream simultaneously,” according to DARPA. “If any of the given activities or objects are spotted, the analyst issues an alert to the proper authorities.”

Future collection systems are expected to provide even more imagery, cover areas greater than 16 square miles and make it more difficult “for a limited number of analysts to effectively monitor and scrutinize all potential activities within the streaming field of view,” DARPA wrote.

Today’s volume of intelligence data, beyond just streaming video, already “makes it very difficult to detect specific events in real time and too time intensive to search archived video,” the DARPA paper said. The effort underway is designed to find a way to index similar activity, then search and retrieve it from archives. The proposed new system should be able to analyze real-time streaming video as it is received in a ground station and match it on command to archived video from more than one video library.

One notion, described by DARPA, would be that an analyst with a standing alert to watch for U-turning cars could employ the new system to quickly match a real-time event with archived clips of cars making such turns before an attack.

National security and intelligence reporter Walter Pincus pores over the speeches, reports, transcripts and other documents that flood Washington and every week uncovers the fine print that rarely makes headlines — but should. If you have any items that fit the bill, please send them to fineprint@washpost.com.

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No More Investment Banks

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

Turn Them Into Public Utilities   

 

By Mike Whitney  
 

“If you made it past the credit crisis, you are not making it past the economic carnage.” Meredith A. Whitney, market analyst at Oppenheimer & Company 

Information Clearinghouse“ | It worked. So far. The credit markets have begun to thaw. Overnight Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) dropped 27 basis points to 1.67 percent, the lowest level since September 2004. Three month Libor shed 40 basis points this week to 4.42 percent. The Libor-OIS spread and TED spread are edging downward, too. The VIX, the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index—also known as the “fear index”–has skyrocketed to 80, a new record. But that is to be expected; after all, Wall Street is in a panic. The truth is, interbank lending is beginning to ease and the financial system has begun to function a bit more like it should.  
 
  That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods by a long shot. The stock market will probably lose another 15 to 20 percent, unemployment will soar, real estate will continue to crash, and consumer spending will dry up.  That’s all part of the hard landing ahead. But at the end of the day, some part of the credit-distribution system will still continue to function. That wasn’t always a certainty. Before the EU finance ministers announced their plan to recapitalize the banking system, by injecting capital and guaranteeing deposits and interbank lending, the world was on its way to a complete financial meltdown. The EU, led by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, pulled the world back from the brink of annihilation. It may be the greatest story of our generation, and very few people even know what really happened. The system was completely frozen in place. Interbank lending had stopped, major corporations were unable to meet payroll because they couldn’t roll over their short term debt. Cargo ships were stuck in ports around the world because buyers couldn’t get Letters of Credit. As analyst John Mauldin said, “Just as the business world is dependent upon commercial paper as its life blood, the world of global trade depends on letters of credit (LOC). If you are a manufacturer of a product and want to sell to someone outside your borders, you typically require a letter of credit from the buyer before you load any cargo at a port. A letter of credit from a prime bank is considered to be proof of your ability to pay….There are buyer’s and seller’s agents who make sure these things happen seamlessly, and world commerce had grown because of it…. If you think the problems stemming from a meltdown with the commercial paper markets are threatening to the world economy, they are small potatoes when compared to a seizure in the letter of credit markets.”
 
The European initiative forced Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson to do the right thing. It is 100 percent certain now that his plan to use the $700 billion bailout to buy-back the non-performing loans and bad mortgage-backed securities from the banks would have failed and led to disaster. Paulson stuck by his wacko plan even though more than 200 economists opposed him and the stock market tumbled 8 straight days in a row losing more than 15 percent of its value. The EU had to put a gun to his head to force him to do the right thing. Paulson’s Wall Street bias is so great that he would have driven the country off the cliff just to reward his dodgy friends with lavish cash giveaways from the US taxpayer. 
 
In fact, right after the European plan was announced, Paulson convened a meeting of the country’s largest banks so he could hand out $125 billion of freshly-minted, taxpayer-generated loot to shore up their flimsy balance sheets.  Citigroup got $25 Billion, as did JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley both netted $10 Billion each. None of these banks had to submit to any type of regulatory investigation to see how much of their asset-base was held in worthless mortgage-backed slop or other structured garbage. Paulson never even tried to find out if they are even solvent! On top of that, taxpayer gets no voting rights, no position on the board of directors, and no limits on executive compensation for the $125 billion contribution to Wall Street’s biggest white-collar criminals. On Thursday, all of the aforementioned banks reported horrendous quarterly losses, multi-billion dollar write-downs, and more grim warnings on future profits. It’s clear that Paulson wanted to deliver the bailout money before the public discovered the extent of the carnage. 
 
  There are no assurances that the newly-capitalized banks will use their windfall to increase lending to consumers and businesses as Paulson hopes. The banks know that they’ll be facing some stiff  headwinds in the near-future as the the economy contracts and as deleveraging continues. It is just as likely that they will hoard their reserves or buy distressed hard-assets rather than expand their dreary loan portfolio. That means credit will continue to tighten and the widely anticipated slowdown will only get worse.
 
Currently, the nation is in the grips of a deflationary downturn. Oil and gold have fallen precipitously as have the other commodities which are being dumped on the market in one massive firesale. The hedge funds are liquidating at an unprecedented pace which is causing steady price erosion while strengthening the dollar. This giant institutional margin call is what is at the heart of the recent wild gyrations in the stock market. Investors are withdrawing their money which is forcing the hedgies to sell their liquid assets to reinforce their balance sheets. It’s all about “demand destruction”.  
 
Adding to the turmoil, is the fact that many of the hedge fund managers are “moving to cash” to avoid the equities crash ahead. In Susan Pullim’s article in the Wall Street Journal, “Smart Money stays on the Sides”, she says:
 
   “Some hedge-fund titans have yanked most of their money out of the stock market, a bearish sign amid Monday’s euphoria and an indication of how the hedge-fund business is changing amid chaos.
In recent days, Steven Cohen, the hedge-fund manager who runs the $14 billion SAC Capital Advisors, moved about half his funds, or about $7 billion, into money-market and other short-term securities, eliminating much of his fund’s exposure to the stock market, says a person close to the fund. Mr. Cohen plans on sitting on the sidelines for the rest of the year — trading a small portfolio himself but keeping shuttered most of the stock portfolios of his other managers.
 
Meanwhile, John Paulson, manager of $35 billion Paulson & Co. — who made a spectacularly successful bet against the housing market last year — has much of his fund in cash equivalents.
The retrenchment by Wall Street’s “smart money” crowd is part of a larger effort by hedge funds that have put a total of as much as $400 billion into cash equivalents recently, according to David Kostin, an analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.” (Wall Street Journal)
 
The vultures are collecting on the telephone wires waiting for the first bloodied antelope to plop to the ground. As the stock market rout continues, they shouldn’t have to wait too long. Many pundits are predicting the greatest slump since the 1930s. Already, manufacturing has slowed faster than anytime in the last 20 years, jobless claims jumped 461,000 to 3.7 million, housing starts are at a 17 year low, and consumer confidence fell through the floor. Even worse, Paulson’s bailout does nothing to stop the hemorrhaging of foreclosures which is the source of the disequilibrium in the financial markets. Congress needs to pass emergency legislation to write down the face-value of distressed mortgages (and provide low interest “fixed rate” loans for the first 25 percent of the revised value) to create an incentive for homeowners to stay put. This massive relief effort will have the added benefit of stabilizing the financial markets by putting a floor under housing prices.  Struggling homeowners should be given a helping-hand before the banks.  
 
As the former chairman of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson’s motives have been suspect from the very beginning of this fiasco. He made sure that the US taxpayer got a shellacking on the purchase of preferred shares in the banks. And, he even faked like he was forcing the banks to take the capital they needed to stay afloat. (”Please, don’t make me take that $25 billion Mr. Secretary”. What a complete farce!)  These are his best buddies and he treats them well. He hasn’t demanded that they bring their off-book operations back onto their balance sheets, or limit their derivatives exposure, or reduce their leverage to 12 to 1, or come clean with the amount they are holding in Level 3 assets (illiquid, complex mortgage-backed securities) Wall Street veteran Pam Marten summed it up like this:    
 
  “What most Americans do not understand, because mainstream media rarely explains it, is the incestuous relationship between the U.S. Treasury and this small band of financial marauders who busted the entire financial system with insane levels of leveraged derivative bets.” Amen.
 
Author F. William Engdahl sees a more nefarious motive behind Paulson’s maneuvering and he lays it out in his article, “Behind the Panic: Financial Warfare and the Future of Global Bank Power”: 
 
  “It now would appear that the Paulson strategy was to use a crisis… to panic the more conservative European Union governments into rushing to the rescue of US toxic waste assets.
Were that to have happened, it would in the process destroy what was left of sound EU banking and financial institutions, bringing the world one step closer to a global money market controlled by Paulson’s cronies—US-style Crony Capitalism. Crony Capitalism is certainly appropriate here. Paulson’s predecessor at both Goldman Sachs and at Treasury, Robert Rubin, liked to accuse the Asian bankers of Thailand, Indonesia and other lands hit with the speculative attacks of US-financed hedge funds in 1997 of ‘crony capitalism,’ leaving the impression the crisis was home grown in Asia and not the result of a deliberate executed attack by US-financed financial institutions to eliminate the Asia Tiger model among other goals, and turn Asia into the funder of US debt.
 
Interesting to note is that Rubin is now a Director of Citigroup, obviously one of Paulson’s crony bank ‘survivors,’ and the bank which to date has had to write off the largest sum in toxic waste securitized assets.
 
The Paulson plan is now clearly part of a project to create three colossal global financial giants—Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and, of course, Paulson’s own Goldman Sachs, now conveniently enough a bank. Having successfully used fear and panic to wrestle a $700 billion bailout from the US taxpayers, now the big three will try to use their unprecedented muscle to ravage European banks in the years ahead. So long as the world’s largest financial credit rating agencies—Moody’s and Standard & Poors—are untouched by the scandals and Congressional hearings, the reorganized US financial power of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase could potentially regroup and advance their global agenda over the coming several years, walking over the ashes of a bankrupt American economy made bankrupt by their follies…. This is a fight for the survival of the American Century which has been built since 1939 on the twin pillars of American financial dominance and American military dominance—Full Spectrum, Dominance.” (F. William Engdahl, “Behind the Panic: Financial Warfare and the Future of Global Bank Power” Global Research) 

 Engdahl may be on to something here. Not only will the present crisis lead to further consolidation in the US by crushing local and regional banks which do not have an umbilical chord connecting them directly to the vault at the US Treasury; it could also throw the European financial system into an “every man for himself” frenzy ultimately leading to the breakup of the EU  (a prospect that is now widely considered) which would allow the US banking cartel to extend its tentacles to the continent as it has with its equities markets.
 
  The damage that the investment banks and their non-bank counterparts (Hedge funds, broker dealers, SIVs etc) have done to the broader economy and the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world is incalculable. Still, the remedy is simple and straightforward. The banks in question should be forced to establish their solvency according to “mark to market” evaluations (Triple A MBS=$.22 on the dollar) and if they cannot meet minimal capital standards; they should be taken into receivership, their equity shareholders wiped out, their leading executives removed, and they should be transformed into public utilities under the supervision of the Congress of the United States. Once the banks are entrusted to our elected officials, we can move on to the Federal Reserve. The “price fixing” and manipulation of interest rates by privately-owned banks is a failed experiment. It’s time to move on. Abolish the Fed.

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System Failure and the Need for Revolution

Friday, October 17th, 2008

by Raymond Lotta |

The most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression shows no sign of letting up. The financial edifice of U.S. imperialism is in danger of crumbling. The U.S. ruling class is confronting what Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke describes as a crisis of “historic proportions”—and is hurriedly cobbling together desperate measures to prevent wholesale collapse. Three of the largest independent investment banks on Wall Street have ceased to exist since April. The government had to assume a major stake in the American International Group (AIG), the world’s largest insurer, to prevent it from collapsing. Now the U.S. Treasury is considering taking ownership positions in major U.S. banks.

This crisis is amplifying internationally. Western Europe is facing large bank failures and governments are engineering their own bailouts. The Russian stock market has intermittently suspended operations. Financial markets in Asia have nose-dived. Mexico’s economy is wobbling, as its exports shrink.

Two things stand out about this crisis. First, there is the ferocity of its global shocks and the speed with which it has spread. Second, unlike the debt and financial crises of the last 30 years, which were largely centered in the Third World, this crisis initially exploded in the U.S., the world’s leading capitalist economy, and is focused in the financial centers of world capitalism.

U.S.-led finance, which plays a dominant and shaping role in the global capitalist order, has taken a huge body blow. This will have enormous repercussions, not just for the stability of the world capitalist system but for power shifts and rivalries within it.

Many progressive commentators have put the blame for this crisis on fraud and greed, or on lax regulation. All of which are certainly in play. But these explanations do not get to the essence of what is happening, to the cause of the problem. This crisis is the outcome of the fundamental workings of the capitalist system.

The analysis that follows is framed by these core points:

1. There is an essential relationship between the vast enlargement of the financial sector in the U.S., and the general phenomenon of financialization, and the deepening globalization of capitalist production of the last 15 years. And central to this dynamic has been the relationship between U.S. imperialism and China.
2. Through the course of this growth and expansion, severe imbalances have built up between the financial system—and its expectation of future profits—and the accumulation of capital, that is, the structures and actual production and reinvestment of profit based on the exploitation of wage-labor.
3. A “dirty little secret” of this crisis is the enormous weight of militarization of the U.S. economy.
4. This crisis is a concentrated expression of the anarchy of capitalist production—the fact that production is not carried out according to any conscious, rational plan at the society-wide level, much less at the international level.

Background to Crisis

In the early 2000s, in the aftermath of the collapse of high-tech stocks, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank sought to stimulate lending and growth. It lowered interest rates and pumped funds into the banking system. Banks had access to cheap and plentiful credit. And through deceit and aggressive marketing, they pushed mortgages on people. The Federal Reserve continued to inject low-cost funds into the banking system—helping to prop up loans and to fuel a long-term speculative housing bubble.

Banks sold these mortgages to investment banks. The investment banks in turn bundled these loans together with other loans, created complex financial products, and sold them to large investors—in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, especially Western Europe. These mortgage-backed securities, as they are called, circulated in financial markets and became the basis for other loans. The ultimate collateral for this chain of borrowing and lending was the original mortgage loans. So when housing prices fell, and as growing numbers of mortgage holders found themselves unable to pay back housing loans, much of this original collateral became nearly worthless.

This whole process is an obscene example of how under this capitalist system something as basic as human shelter becomes a financial instrument and object of speculation. This has led to a situation today where 1 in 6 U.S. homeowners owe more on a mortgage than their home is worth; where 1 in every 65 households in California is in some phase of foreclosure; and where a disproportionate number of Black and Latino families who have been victimized by predatory lending have experienced incredible losses of what little wealth they had.¹

AIG had made enormous profits internationally by selling insurance to investors who held many of these mortgage-backed securities. These investors would be repaid by AIG, in the event that the loans that were bundled into these financial packages they had purchased were defaulted on—could not be paid back. But by mid-September, AIG could neither cover massive loan damage nor borrow sufficient funds on the financial markets to keep itself afloat. AIG was so interconnected with other major financial players that if the company went under, it would likely have taken others down.

In the face of mounting financial crisis, the imperialist state intervened. It acted as the representative of capital and as the guardian of the interests of capital. The U.S. ruling class was faced with a two-fold danger: mounting losses and bankruptcies in the financial sector; and the choking up of lending channels, which could send the economy into a rapid downward spiral.

The government basically took over AIG. And on September 19, the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced a $700 billion bailout. The essence of the rescue package was that the government would buy the troubled mortgage-backed securities sloshing about in the financial system and through this get lending going again. But the announced bailout did not unblock credit markets or calm stock markets. Nor has it restored international confidence in the U.S. economy.

Taking a Step Back

This crisis broke out in the banking system. Its more immediate trigger was the popping of a speculative real estate bubble, cascading losses in the financial sector, and the inability of stricken financial institutions to raise capital and the unwillingness of others to lend capital.

At a deeper level, this crisis is the outcome of a particular trajectory of world capitalist growth.

There has been a massive new wave of globalization. One of the most significant features of world growth and expansion of the last 15 years has been the deepening integration of the world capitalist economy. This is happening both on the level of production and trade—like the parts that go into a computer being manufactured in different parts of the world; and in the case of an iPod being totally manufactured in China. And it is happening on the level of finance—where banks operate globally and are more tightly interlinked with one another through chains of borrowing and lending and even, as in the case of AIG, insuring risks of lending.

This new wave of globalization has involved direct productive and financial investments abroad. It has involved the expansion of outsourcing and subcontracting. And central to all of this has been the fuller integration of export producing countries of the Third World into the world capitalist market—and the forging of a globally-integrated, cheap-labor manufacturing economy.²

40 percent of the imports coming into the U.S. are accounted for by U.S. transnational corporations—and this does not even include the subcontracting done by companies like Walmart. 30 percent of U.S. corporate profits are generated overseas. China, which has evolved into the high-profit workshop/sweatshop for international capitalism, has been at the epicenter of this recent surge of globalization.³

From the standpoint of the needs of profitable globalization, various elements of deregulation—for instance, the lifting of barriers to rapid shifts and transfers of capital—were functional. This is why both Republicans and Democrats have promoted deregulation. Indeed, the Clinton administration in the 1990s played a decisive deregulating role. It negotiated so-called free-trade agreements with Third World countries and helped to loosen strictures on U.S. banking and telecommunications.

The trajectory of capitalist growth of the last 15 years has also involved heightened financialization. On this platform of more globalized production and exploitation, the financial services sector in the advanced capitalist countries mushroomed.

On a turbo-charged global playing field of ever-more mobile and massive flows of investment capital—where the stakes of winning and losing are enormous—capital requires all kinds of risk management. Investment banks and other financial institutions provide such financial services to “hedge” against interest rate variations, currency fluctuations, and other sources of volatility and loss. At the same time, financial activities became a greater source of short-term and speculative profits. In an intensely competitive atmosphere for financial market share, investment banks were creating ever-more complex and exotic financial products. Global financial assets increased from $12 trillion in 1980 to nearly $200 trillion in 2007, far outstripping the growth of world output or the expansion of trade.⁴

Growth in the advanced capitalist countries over the last 15 years became increasingly finance-led and credit-driven. The U.S. has been at the epicenter of this process of heightened financialization. By 2005, the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy had fallen to 12 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (the production of goods and services), while the financial services sector made up of finance, insurance, and real estate had grown to 20 percent. In 1982, the financial sector’s share of total corporate profits was just over 5 percent; in 2007, the financial share of corporate profits had skyrocketed to 40 percent!⁵

Contradictions of Development

These interrelated processes of globalization and financialization ultimately led to unsustainable imbalances and instabilities. The dynamics that fueled growth have generated new barriers to profitable accumulation of capital. Strengths have turned into vulnerabilities.

These include:

• Bloating of the financial sector relative to the productive base.
• Huge run-up of debt and U.S. trade and government deficits in the U.S. necessitating massive and uninterrupted inflows of capital from around the world, with the central banks of Japan and increasingly China holding huge amounts of U.S. Treasury debt.
• Billions upon billions of dollars of paper assets that cannot be transformed into real, productive and material, assets.
• U.S. consumption and borrowing stimulating China’s growth but China’s breakneck manufacturing growth further fueling U.S. trade deficits and intensifying competitive pressures throughout the world economy.
• The expansion of credit spurring growth but heightening global financial fragility.

We are seeing things turn into their opposites. Financial institutions attempted to reduce risk and to profit from risk by dispersing more varied financial instruments over a wider field of investors internationally. But this process has drawn investors, these very institutions, and now governments into a vortex of vulnerability and crisis. The heightened globalization of production and markets, the closer intertwining of economies, has created conditions for faster and even more extensive ripple effects of crisis throughout the world.

A Knot of Contradictions

A strategic concern of the U.S. ruling class is the international strength of the dollar. The dollar is the world’s leading currency for settling transactions, clearing debts, and holding foreign exchange reserves (trade and investment earnings that become part of the reserves of foreign central banks). The dollar has been a linchpin of U.S. global supremacy and of the whole current global economic order.

The dollar is also an investible commodity—major currencies are bought and sold and traded on international currency markets. The value of the dollar rises and falls in relation to other currencies, and in response to international political and economic trends and developments. If foreign central banks and investors were to significantly shift away from dollar holdings, this could set off a global monetary crisis and/or strengthen the position of rival currencies (like the euro) and rival powers.

These are uncharted waters for U.S. policymakers: in the scale and complexity of the crisis…in the magnitude of the rescue operations required to prevent financial breakdown…and in the rapidity with which this crisis is unfolding. A Harvard research economist put it this way: “like the sorcerer’s apprentice, we have created things we do not understand and cannot easily control.”⁶

U.S. imperialism has limited maneuvering room. The U.S. is already the largest debtor country in the world. It is waging costly wars for greater empire in Iraq and Afghanistan. And both John McCain and Barack Obama are committed to America’s global “war on terror”—the umbrella under which the U.S. is waging these wars for empire.

U.S. imperialism has attempted to parlay its superior military strength into a new world order and to lock in its global supremacy for decades to come. Defense and defense-related spending totaled more than $1 trillion in fiscal 2008.⁷ And military-related production and research have long been deeply embedded in the U.S. economy. The whole imperialist system rests on the domination of vast swaths of the globe through savage force, with the U.S. military colossus playing a special role. The costs of forcibly preserving and extending the U.S. empire is one of the dirty little secrets of the dynamics of this crisis that scarcely gets talked about.

Here an important dialectic comes into play. “U.S. military dominance,” writes Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, “has been one of the linchpins of the dollar.”⁸ But this military dominance and the wars the U.S. is waging have increasingly come to depend on the steady inflow of foreign capital into the U.S. (to the tune of $3 billion a day). For this to continue requires that the U.S. economy and dollar remain stable. This is a major contradiction for U.S. imperialism.

U.S. imperialism is facing new competitive challenges and the emergence of potential rival constellations of imperial and big powers—vying for market shares, control over energy resources, and geopolitical position.

Emergency Capitalism

People are losing their homes. Retirement savings plans since the middle of 2007 have lost 20 percent of their value with the stock market sinking. Funding for vitally needed social programs and services at state and local levels is being pinched by the financial crisis and economic slowdown. In much of the Third World, food prices soared over the last year, this is partly related to financial speculation, and hunger has spread.⁹

While the futures of millions are in jeopardy, what is the paramount concern of those at the top of the pyramid of economic and political power? It is the protection of a financial system that sits atop a global system of exploitation; it is the rescue of the owners and investor beneficiaries of that system.

This is not “socialism for the rich” or a bailout for the people. It’s emergency capitalism for the capitalist class: injections of funds and guarantees, government takeovers, cost-cutting, selective liquidations, restructuring of regulations; and it’s more brutal capitalism for everyone else: austerity, more intense international exploitation, and more misery for people throughout the world.

The official story line is that this crisis issues from particular flaws and malpractices that can be corrected: “excessive greed,” “Wall Street irresponsibility,” “outdated” or “ unenforced regulations.”

The truth is that this crisis has deep structural causes in the very nature of the system—in the quest for profit, not the satisfaction of human need, and in the anarchic workings of world capitalism.

We are seeing how the means through which capitalism expands and “innovates” have led to new barriers and to gales of “creative destruction”—with trillions of dollars of asset values destroyed in the market turmoil. Through these convulsions, the imperialists seek to wrench new freedom, promoting further consolidation and monopolization. Bank of America absorbs the giant investment bank Merrill Lynch. Lehman Brothers is forced into liquidation.

Whoever wins the presidential election will be inheriting a battered financial system and huge government deficits. This will not be an era of expanded social spending, but one of more direct government intervention in financial markets and cutbacks in social spending.

A Status Report

This rolling and intensifying financial crisis serves as a profile and status report on capitalism in the 21st century:

A once-thriving subprime mortgage market…had been linked to the ability of U.S. financial institutions to market securities to European banks and of the U.S. Treasury to draw in export earnings from China…earnings generated in sweatshops…tied into subcontracting networks of Western corporations….

Real estate markets tank…. The “smart money” looks for “safe places” to shift its capital…. Some of it heads for commodity futures like rice…. So food prices spiral upward in response to the investment stratagems of people who know and care nothing about food needs and food production…. In countries like Haiti, women who can no longer afford basic staples are feeding their children mud-cakes….

A French bank, with its assets plunging in value, and the chain of global capitalist finance snapping all over, now finds itself with “non-performing loans”…. It must “improve its balance sheet” and faces pressures to reduce or eliminate trade credits to a country in Africa that depends on imports for food, and where people already spend 50 percent of their incomes for food.

Despite staggering advances in technology and human knowledge, despite the fact that the development of human society has brought humanity to a historic threshold where it is now possible not only to overcome scarcity and exploitation but also to forge social arrangements where human beings can truly flourish—despite all of this potential, social and economic life are under painful duress and the ecosystems of the planet gravely threatened. It is not for lack of resources or knowledge.

All of what has been described in this article is the result of the relations and domination of capital, the result of the workings of a system driven by vicious competition and the blind accumulation of profit based on exploitation—and backed by massive military force.

In the heartland of capitalism, there is financial meltdown. In the Third World, millions are already suffering the ravages of a global food crisis. This system is a horror and a failure. Is it necessary for humanity to live this way?

The October 10 edition of The Washington Post carried an article with the title and question “The End to American Capitalism?” In forums and in the media, leading bourgeois policymakers and analysts have discussed whether this crisis, careening beyond control and threatening greater economic calamity, suggests that there is something fundamentally amiss about capitalism. And the emphatic answer given is the same: “the system may not be working optimally, but there is no alternative, only gradations and variations of capitalism.”

But there is another way. It is possible to take hold of the productive resources of society and to develop and deploy them in a rational, planned, and society-wide way to meet human need and to safeguard the planet. It is possible to establish a radically different kind of state power and to create a society and institutions that unleash people’s creativity and that promote initiative and diversity in an atmosphere that brings out human community.

The question of socialism, of communism, of revolution could not be more relevant…and more urgent.

To be clear, revolution is not a catchword for lots of new things or lots of change. Revolution has very specific meaning: the people getting rid of the system; depriving the old ruling class of their political-economic-military power; and creating a new power with new aims and objectives and the means to enforce those aims and objectives.

As serious as this crisis is, with all the havoc it is wreaking, the system will not automatically collapse of its own weight and disorder. Absent revolution, capitalism will put itself back together—in its own image and at unimaginable social cost.

And for all the agony that crisis inflicts, this will not automatically and spontaneously translate into progressive, radical, and revolutionary sentiment and consciousness. Other forces are in the field doing ideological and political work: reactionary populists like Lou Dobbs (“blame the foreigners and illegal immigrants”) and Sarah Palin whipping up a social base for religio-fascism. The Obama candidacy is channeling disenchantment and the thirst for change right back into the political system’s suffocating embrace (“change we can believe in” is nothing other than change acceptable to the powers that be).

This is a highly fraught situation. Things can change very quickly. The system is revealing much about its basic nature. Bigger jolts may come and outrage may suddenly grow and give rise to resistance from all kinds of quarters. We have to grasp the potential of the situation. We have to be out there bringing forward understanding and bringing forward a vision of a liberatory world. We have to rise to new political and ideological challenges in the belly of the beast.

 

ENDNOTES

1. Data from James R. Hagerty and Ruth Simon, “Housing Pain Gauge: Nearly 1 in 6 Owners ‘Under Water,’” Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2008; RealtyTrac, “Foreclosure Activity Up 14 Percent in Second Quarter,” Realtytrac.com, July 25, 2008. A study published earlier this year estimates the total loss of wealth suffered by Black, Latino, and other minority households on account of bank subprime-lending of the last eight years to be the greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history (United for a Fair Economy, Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008). [back]

2. Among informative studies of the origins and development of a globally integrated cheap labor manufacturing economy, see Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Quebec: Center for Research on Globalization, 2003); and on globalized manufacturing in relation to financialization, see William Millberg, “Shifting Sources and Uses of Profits: Sustaining US Financialization with Global Value Chains,” Economy and Society, Vol. 37, No. 3 (August 2008), pp. 420-451. [back]

3. Data from Milberg, “Shifting Value Chains…” [back]

4. Jeffrey Garten, “We Need a New Global Monetary Authority,” Financial Times, September 25, 2008. On financialization as a means also to contain financial disorder and to impose profit maximizing discipline on capital, see Christopher Rude, “The Role of Financial Discipline in Imperial Strategy,” in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds., Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded, London: Merlin Press, 2004. [back]

5. Kevin Phillips, Bad Money (New York: Viking, 2008), p. 5; Robert Wade, “The First-World Debt Crisis of 2007-2010 in Global Perspective,” Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs, July-August 2008, p. 33. [back]

6. David Dapice, “Bad Spell on Wall Street,” Policyinnovations.org, January 24, 2008. [back]

7. Leaving out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. See Chalmers Johnson, “Why the US has really gone broke,” mondediplo.com (English edition), February 5, 2008. [back]

8. Kenneth Rogoff, “America Will Need a $1,000bn Bail-Out,” Financial Times, September 17, 2008. [back]

9. On the global food crisis, see “The Global Food Crisis and the Ravenous System of Capitalism,” Revolution #128, May 1, 2008. [back]

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Pilger’s law: ‘If it’s been officially denied, then it’s probably true’

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

John Pilger, scourge of injustice, is still battling after half a century of campaigns. He’s even gunning for Tony Blair.

By Ian Burrell

Cross the threshold of John Pilger’s south London home and the deep pile carpet gently gives way beneath the feet. Soothing strains of classical guitar waft through the air and, over mugs of tea, the great polemicist examines the impact of his career, his sentences punctuated by the mewling of a ginger cat.

This scene of domestic calm is not one Pilger’s many political opponents, or the millions who follow his work, would associate with the cage-rattling campaigner who has set himself against authority figures from Washington DC to the killing fields of Cambodia.

It is half a century since Pilger started out as a copy boy on the Sydney Sun and he turned 69 last Thursday. But he remains agitated by injustices which he sees at every turn in Britain and abroad. Forty years after he began working for Granada’s World in Action, he has been commissioned to make a new film examining the media’s portrayal of Britain at war. And in the New Statesman he calls the political establishment to account, most recently railing at the failure of the main parties to debate the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts at their conferences.

Yet he has also set himself a fresh challenge, one that appears to have filled him with a sense of self-doubt. “I’ve started…,” he announces with a splutter of disbelief, “to write what I hope is my first fiction.” The author of a dozen books of journalism, he has yet to offer a sample of this “collection of short stories” to his publisher. “The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that you are released from the tyranny of facts, of having to get everything right, of sourcing everything that matters. Your imagination is released. But you know,” he adds, starting to laugh, “there is a bit of clash going on here and I’m not sure that it’s a good idea.”

After five decades as a crusader for truth, making stuff up doesn’t come easily, despite what some of his right-wing critics might claim. “It’s a real struggle. I’m constantly drawn back to non fiction because it is so much more interesting and vivid,” he says.

If the book does get finished, don’t expect to find Pilger wrestling with his emotions – “I’m not interested in navel gazing” – but developing characters he has observed on a journey that has taken him to war zones in Vietnam, East Timor, Palestine and beyond, always examining the roles of western governments in the conflicts.

More than anything now, he wants to conduct a sit-down televised interview with Tony Blair, if only he can persuade the former prime minister to go on camera. “ITV would take that – Blair is somebody I don’t believe has ever been interviewed properly,” he says. “I’ve approached the people you are meant to approach and the silence is ear-splitting. No surprise there.”

Later this month sees the release of a 16-disc DVD box-set of Pilger’s work, spanning 37 years of film-making and 52 documentaries. Though the documentary films were made for ITV, it is a series made for Channel 4 in 1983 he draws attention to. The Outsiders was a series of conversations between Pilger and maverick individuals he admired, many of them journalistic heroes such as Wilfred Burchett of the Daily Express, whom he reveres for having landed “the scoop of the century” in exposing the effects of the atomic attack on Hiroshima.

“I have his wonderful front page,” he says, leading the way up to his office via a staircase decorated with framed photographs of his journalistic adventures, family and friends. And there it is, Wilfred Burchett’s scoop from 5 September 1945 with the headline “The Atomic Plague”, the intro, “I write this as a warning to the world…” and the byline “by Peter Burchett”. “The sub got his name wrong. Wilfred forgave him,” observes Pilger. “The entire press corps of Japan were embedded and on the day he set out on this perilous journey to Hiroshima, Japan had just been defeated and foreign journalists were being shepherded to see General MacArthur receive a ritualistic sword of defeat. Burchett said, ‘To hell with that, that’s not the real story,’ and headed the other way.”

Burchett was demonised for his revelation that deaths at Hiroshima were caused by more than a bomb blast. The New York Times ran a “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima” piece and Burchett was branded a crazy leftie. The treatment echoes that meted out to Pilger following his 1970 film The Quiet Mutiny, which revealed rebellion in US military ranks during the Vietnam War.

That documentary, stemming from articles Pilger had produced for Hugh Cudlipp’s Daily Mirror, was denounced by the American government, which complained to the broadcasting authorities. “I had no experience of anything like this, everything seemed to fall down around my shoulders and it was disturbing. But the story that film told became the received wisdom all over the world within a year.”

To some in the modern media, Pilger is a figure from a bygone age, his name eliciting the sort of sighs of exasperation that until recently accompanied the notion of nationalisation. But he is convinced that there remains an appetite for left-wing journalism. “The influence of The Independent and Guardian are much greater than you would think. I don’t believe the majority of people in Britain have the so-called values of The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail and certainly not The Sun.”

In the morning, he logs on to the Information Clearing House, a US-based website that provides a digest of left-of-centre journalism, highlighting the work of Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk and Pilger himself. Such sites ensure a large readership. “The internet has changed so much. In America alone, my New Statesman column reaches millions on the web.”

He returned briefly to the Mirror after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when Piers Morgan (who he appears to respect) was editing the paper. “It was a very rewarding 18 months,” he says. “I was happy to keep on writing for the Mirror, but Piers was under pressure from the management and American shareholders who objected to the kind of journalism that he was publishing, often written by me. It was a myth that the readers didn’t want a serious approach to journalism in a popular newspaper.”

When he speaks to journalism students, he is convinced “many start with the same passion I started with” and implores them to “keep your principles as you navigate the system”. His watchword remains, ‘Never believe anything until it’s officially denied,’ a favourite expression of reporter Claud Cockburn, father of Independent journalist Patrick Cockburn.

Pilger hopes that his last documentary, The War on Democracy, and his forthcoming one, will encourage colleagues to take a more critical view. “If journalists can look behind the press-release version of events, or push back the screen of what is often propaganda but rarely recognised as such,” he says, “then we will produce true journalism, not a form of PR. We ought to be the agents of people, not power.”

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Riot police use violence to break up student demonstration

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Harare - Riot police broke up a student demonstration in Harare, injuring at least four people and arresting three Tuesday, in the first such incident of police violence since the signing of a power-sharing agreement by Zimbabwe’s political protagonists a month ago.

The attack on the peaceful demonstration took place just as former South African president Thabo Mbeki began mediating to try and rescue the agreement from collapse after President Robert Mugabe at the

weekend unilaterally allocated to his ZANU(PF) party the most important posts in the proposed power-sharing government.

Privilege Mutanga, a member of the national executive of the Zimbabwe National Students Union, said about 200 students had marched to Zimbabwe’s parliament to present a petition protesting over the failure since August of nearly all the country’s universities to open for the new academic year.

About 30 riot police, with batons, dogs and firearms, stopped them and told them to send two representatives with the petition to the parliament doors.

‘As soon as we did, they arrested them,’ she said. ‘Then they charged us, and we scattered. I tried to hide inside a shop doorway, but they saw that I was wearing a ZINASU T-shirt, so they pulled me out and beat me with baton sticks and kicked me.’

She was treated for bruising and swelling about her body and face. She said another student had suffered a fractured skull. Clever Bere, the president of ZINASU, was in police custody.

Police appeared to have suspended their outright ban on all public demonstrations following the signing of the agreement on September 15, and allowed several peaceful demonstrations to proceed without interruption.

Until then, any demonstrations, except by President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU(PF) party, have been met with force, with sometimes hundreds being savagely beaten - including, last year, Morgan Tsvangirai, who is prime minister-designate under the power-sharing deal - and people being detained in filthy police cells for weeks on end.

Observers say the attack on the demonstration is an indication that Mugabe’s regime is resuming its hard-line strategy against the octogenarian dictator’s regime as hopes for change falter.

 

 

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Solutions for a Sustainable World

Monday, October 13th, 2008

TNI | The Schumacher lectures are traditionally held in Bristol but have now branched out so that Schumacher North, based in Leeds, also organises the series. They occupy a day, with three people delivering lectures and a final panel. My companions for this day were Anne Pettifor, well known for her leadership of the Jubilee 2000 Debt campaign and Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation. My contribution was written in mid-September 2008; the continuation of the financial crisis makes it, I think, all the more pertinent.

Please first let me congratulate the organisers of Schumacher North for their initiative in bringing this lecture series and other activities of the Schumacher Society to Leeds. It’s an honour to be here and especially to share the platform with two brilliant people whom I greatly admire. I also want to thank the organisers for the privilege of honouring the memory of Dr Schumacher, a man far ahead of his time who bequeathed to us a lasting legacy. It’s a challenge to be worthy of that heritage in a lecture bearing his name.

But I intend to try. My talk today will concern the stage I’ve arrived at in a kind of reflexion in progress—I don’t mean a book, although it may well become that as well—but an effort to make sense of the fast moving events in our battered world and an attempt to think about them in a more unified way.

Philosophically speaking, the thing-in-itself, the isolated object whether it’s an electron, a human cell, an organism, a single word —even a human being—makes sense only in the context of its relationships, its place in its physical, linguistic or social environment . Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “There is no such thing as society”. She thus perfectly embodied the foundations of the neo-liberal ideological programme which should, ideally, prevent us from even thinking about ourselves and others in our natural and social context. We must be taught to believe that we are not citizens or members of a social body but discrete, individual consumers. We are entirely responsible for our own destinies and if we fall by the wayside for whatever reason—illness, job loss, accident, failure, whatever—it’s our own fault. We should have foreseen the case and planned for it. We have no responsibility for other people either. Solidarity is a banished word. Nor are we accountable for the state of the planet—homo sapiens is the only important species and humans are isolated if not immune from natural, physical laws. That’s the essence of the neo-liberal spirit: “You’re on your own” as Barack Obama has been saying to Americans to encapsulate the philosophy of his opponents.

If you are well-schooled in neo-liberalism, you will never join a social movement, never engage in a struggle against an unjust action of the government, never contribute to an effort to protect the natural world because not only will you make a fool of yourself, not only will your effort fail, but even if successful it will lead eventually to oppression, even totalitarianism, as Thatcher’s mentor Professor Friedrich von Hayek argued. And, as he also taught, economic freedom is superior to every other kind of freedom, whether political, religious or intellectual.

I believe to the contrary that our only hope lies in understanding everything we confront today as a link in an ever-more-complex chain, as an element in a system. The danger with this approach of course is to become lost and frustrated in the syndrome of “Everything is connected to everything”. That’s true, everything is connected to everything, but we still have an enormous task ahead in trying to identify the priority connections, to understand how they work together and what we can do to change them, because they definitely do need changing. I will argue that the present connections are dysfunctional, they have become perverse: they form a system that worsens the human condition and irrevocably damages the planet. But there is hope, because what has been constructed by humans can also be dismantled by them.

All this may sound rather vague so let’s get down to specifics. To make matters more concrete, I’d like to talk now about the most obvious crises we face collectively today, why they are all linked and why the solutions to them must be linked as well.

 

The first of these crises is social—the crisis of mass poverty and growing inequality within individual countries and between the rich and poor countries. The second is the financial crisis that Wall Street, the City and the public authorities refused to see coming because they were living in bubble-land. It began with the subprime affair in the United States but has spread inexorably like a lava flow in the US and elsewhere, threatening to plunge the global economy into a prolonged period of stagnation as severe as the Great Depression. Every day while I was writing this lecture at home, a new financial institution went down the drain or on the block and the end is not yet in sight. The third crisis, most ominous of all, is that of climate change and species destruction. It is accelerating faster than most scientists, much less governments, thought possible, causing many to ask if we have not already entered the era of the runaway greenhouse effect.

Each of these crises—social, financial, environmental—is negatively linked to the others, they intensify each other with negative feedback; they lead to worst-case scenarios. Let us take just a few examples of these perverse interactions.

The poverty-inequality crisis is a good place to start. This crisis is well documented; no one seriously denies the numbers. The World Bank recently recognised that it had grossly underestimated—by about 400 million—the numbers of the very poor, and even then its figures stop at the year 2005 and don’t include recent upheavals in food and energy costs that have swelled the ranks of the impoverished. Even more important, however, is the fact that for the first time in human history, there is no excuse for mass poverty and deprivation. Taking this assertion seriously already helps to point us towards a solution.

Most scholars and institutions concerned with such issues focus on poverty per se but I think it’s more useful and enlightening to focus on wealth. It may not be obvious to everyone that the world is actually awash in money. Most of it is still in North America and Europe but the numbers of the seriously rich on other continents are catching up fast. Those who have the money know very well how to keep it and, with their hired help, the battalions of lawyers, accountants and lobbyists, they are busy salting away their profits in tax havens, finding loopholes and protected investments, lobbying fiercely in parliaments and ministries against regulations on banks and financial markets. As you can see, I began by talking about poverty but I am already touching on the links with the financial crisis.

How many of you knew that ten million people, according to the latest Merrill-Lynch World Wealth Report, together boast investable, liquid funds of more than $40 trillion? That’s 40.000 billion or 40 followed by 12 zeroes. This wealth is above and beyond the value of their houses, cars, yachts, wine or art collections and so on and it is equivalent to about three times the GDP of either the United States or Europe. You might like another simple calculation. Assume that you have one billion dollars, which is the cut-off point for the latest Forbes magazine list of 1125 truly rich individuals in the world. If despite your billion you are such a dim-witted investor that you get only a five percent return on your fortune, you will still have to spend $137.000 every day of the year in sheer consumption or you will automatically become richer. My point is that cash is abundant and there’s no shortage of available wealth.

We also know a great deal about inequality. The UN World Institute for Development Economic Research, WIDER, estimates total world household assets at about $125 trillion. This is about three times world GDP and unsurprisingly, the top two percent of the world captures more than half of that wealth. The top 10 percent, which certainly includes many of us here, hold 85 percent, while the bottom half of humanity is obliged to stumble along with barely 1 percent. All you need to be classed in the top half of humanity is a meagre $2200 in total assets—that includes your house, your land or items like your car or your refrigerator—hardly a princely sum. If all household assets were divided equally—impossible and probably not even desirable to achieve—everyone on earth could have a share of $26.000. So again, money as such isn’t the problem.

 

In all the countries where 90 percent of the world’s population lives, inequalities have increased especially since the 1980s. At this point in the argument, the neo-liberals usually jump in to remind us that rising tides lifting all boats. They admit that inequalities have grown, but still argue that the poor are better off than they were. It seems almost rude to remind them in turn that falling tides have the opposite effect, they swamp and strand the more fragile boats and that is where the tide of the financial crisis is now taking us.

The real point, however, is not the absolute numbers but the fact that inequality makes the economy and also the natural environment worse for everyone, rich or poor. Two experienced academics, Tony Addison and Giovanni Andrea Cornia, put it this way: “Inequality has risen in many countries over the last two decades [and] little progress can be made in poverty reduction when inequality is high and rising….Contrary to earlier theories of development, high inequality tends to reduce economic growth and therefore poverty reduction through growth.”

Although it’s true that economic growth has reduced poverty, particularly in China, one must also ask “At what cost?” China has now overtaken the United States in greenhouse gas emissions and frighteningly has hardly even begun its transition to the automobile society. China also requires at least 10 times as much energy as the more mature industrial societies to produce a unit of GDP.

Growth certainly isn’t the answer ecologically, but even economically it fails the test because the benefits accrue almost entirely to the top of society. That is Cornia and Addison’s main point.

We have also learned in the past few months that it is entirely possible to push tens of millions of poor people off the ledge where they had just gained a foothold and send them back into the depths of poverty. Food riots, most of them urban, in at least thirty different countries have revealed another scary new phenomenon: the worldwide food crisis. Until now, food shortages and famines tended to be local, but so many societies have accepted neo-liberal trade mantras and become dependent on world markets for their basic daily staples that today a sudden spurt in prices is felt from Haiti to Egypt to Bangladesh.

The neo-liberal institutions like the World Bank, the WTO and the European Commission continue to pretend that poverty reduction will result from more growth and more trade. They fail to mention that both growth and trade will reinforce the environmental crisis. The food and energy crises have in turn strong links to the financial crisis, since speculation has been an important factor in both. Food and energy are also intimately linked to the climate crisis as one can see instantly when one thinks of carbon-loaded fossil fuels or of agro-fuels taking vast amounts of land away from food production.

 

At this point in the discussion, especially when one is speaking to concerned, engaged, decent people like those likely to be found at a Schumacher lecture, someone will raise two highly pertinent questions. The first is this: “ Isn’t there a point where people with huge fortunes say ‘enough is enough’ and start sharing?” Some do—Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are oft- cited examples. But as a class, I’m sorry to say that the answer is no. We know a lot about poverty lines but there is no such thing as a wealth line and the word “ enough “ is not part of the vocabulary of this class. You needn’t believe me. Listen to the expert who said “All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems in every age of the world to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” That was not Karl Marx but Adam Smith, in his classic 1776 treatise on capitalism, the Wealth of Nations. Little has changed since then.

The second question is “But why don’t the neo-liberal institutions, like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the European Commission and the US government recognise that their policies have failed? Why do they keep on pushing them wherever and whenever they can?” The answer is not just that institutions are always loath to admit their mistakes, especially when these have killed and ruined so many millions. It is also that these policies have not failed.

To the contrary, they have produced exactly the results they were intended to produce. They have made a tiny fraction of international society rich beyond imagining, they have kept many dependent countries dependent in a new, less visible sort of colonial relationship and they have made so-called free trade, privatisation and unfettered capitalism the rule in countries that previously wanted little or nothing to do with them. Furthermore, they have imposed their policies with relatively little organised protest because their ideology has been expertly produced, packaged and delivered. Ideology can alas have a far stronger influence than facts. This is why we must fight on the practical front, of course, but also — I happen to believe primarily — fight the battle of ideas.

In any event, the massive funds belonging to rich people who already have most of the material goods they need or want are generally devoted to more or less speculative investments. Hedge funds, for example, are estimated to be sitting on about three trillion dollars, even today when so many investments have suffered melt-down. The financial institutions have been frantically innovating, particularly over the last decade. The entire incentive structure of the banking and finance industry has become perverse: the large institutions know perfectly well that they are “too big to fail”, consequently they also know that no matter how risky their actions, they will be bailed out by the public purse and has become all too plain. Beforehand, top management takes the money and runs.

Between the years 2000 and 2006, average annual profits of the financial sector in Great Britain averaged 20 percent—that is, two or three times the profit rate of other sectors of the economy. Huge bonuses, especially in the US and the UK, went to a handful of people, intensifying inequalities, whereas millions further down the ladder have lost their jobs and often their homes. Such profits were themselves clearly not sustainable because at some point, financial gain must be based not just on speculation but on the real economy.

Now that the bailouts are coming thick and fast, we have before us a singular example of socialism for the rich, the well-connected and Wall Street, in which the profits are grabbed by the usual suspects and the losses, tremendous losses, are billed to taxpayers. The United States has in effect nationalised these institutions and their debts—without getting anything from the financial industry in exchange.

 

As the sub-prime crisis has continued to ooze like a giant oil spill over the whole economy, speculators have searched for alternative profitable areas and created the food-price bubble trouble in which we now find ourselves. What happens then? The resource-poor, the world’s hungry, grab whatever they can, they chop down trees, kill animals and overexploit what little land they may have. Poverty is bad news for nature. But so is wealth. Even though there are far fewer of them, the rich cause much greater environmental damage with their dinosaurian ecological footprints. People who use the population argument to explain the multiple crises and who see in population control the solution are missing a crucial point—it’s not so much the number of people, although numbers are important, as their relative weight.

Furthermore, as we have repeatedly witnessed, the frequency and the fury of storms provoked by global warming hit the poor and the poorer regions of the globe hardest. There is worse to come. We have not even begun to comprehend the perils of climate change, including vastly increased numbers of environmental refugees who will crowd the planet due to droughts, flooding and crop failures. The Pentagon is already working on how to stem this tide by countering by whatever means necessary the refugees frantic efforts to reach more favourable lands. Government planning for this perfectly predictable phenomenon is limited to increased surveillance and security responses, not attempts to make outmigration less necessary. And yet the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] which is probably the most respected scientific body in the world, has already warned us that in Africa, the yields of rain-fed agriculture are likely to be reduced by 50 percent, deserts will gain ground, species destruction has already reached such proportions that we are in the midst of the sixth geological extinction of the planet’s four and a half billion-year history. The fifth extinction was the one that put paid to the dinosaurs.

I could go on drawing out relationships between the poverty, financial and ecological crises but I’m sure you need no more. The question is what we can do about all this and by “we” , I mean people everywhere who understand that the triple crisis is real and urgent.

Knowing that I will doubtless offend a great many people here, let me say straight away that there is an exit strategy, a genuine solution exists, but it is not in my view the one that many well-meaning environmentalists have long advocated. I’m sorry, but the time has passed for telling people to change their behaviour and their lightbulbs; that if enough people do this, then together “we” can save the planet. I’m sorry, but “we” can’t. Obviously I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t change their behaviour and their lightbulbs—but even if the entire population of Europe does so—a most unlikely scenario—it’s not going to be enough. I agree as well with proposals for localisation and scaling down, but we have also got to scale up.

We need large-scale solutions, sophisticated, industrial solutions and huge involvement of governments in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions drastically enough to save our future. In other words, we must have the courage to challenge not just our political leadership but the entire neo-liberal, unregulated, privatised, capitalist economic system in place in order to provoke and promote a quantitative and qualitative leap in the scale of environmental action. Dare I say it here? Sometimes big can be beautiful and right now is one of those times.

Since I believe that individual and local solutions are necessary but tragically insufficient to address the seriousness and the urgency of the ecological crisis, I will use the rest of my time to discuss the twin problems of how to deal with governments and with the capitalist corporate production and financial system. The dilemma I wrestle with is this: Can we save the planet while international capitalism remains the dominant system, with its focus on profit, share-holder value, predatory resource capture and with no-holds-barred finance capital making more and more decisions? Can we rescue our natural home when confronted with a powerful caste that does not know the meaning of “enough” and is allergic to the kind of fundamental change a New Ecological Economic Order requires? Can we move forward when governments basically work for the interests of that class?

 

On bad days I reply No: We can’t save the planet. It’s impossible to reverse the climate crisis under capitalism. But that is a despairing answer and if true, it means there is virtually no hope. No hope, because I do not see how even the most convinced, most determined people could replace, much less overthrow capitalism fast enough to carry out the necessary systemic change before a runaway climate effect takes hold—always assuming it hasn’t done so already. First of all, there are not that many convinced and determined people prepared to act against the dominant economic system and there is nothing that resembles in the smallest degree an avant-garde revolutionary party that might lead them even if they existed. There is no one-size-fits-all replacement solution for capitalism. Considering the historical record and role of such parties and such solutions, I consider this an unmistakably good thing.

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But there are other obstacles to once-for-all revolutionary change. Nobody knows, figuratively speaking, who the Tsar is that we would have to overthrow today and nobody has a clue where to find the Winter Palace we would have to storm. We know the Winter Palace isn’t on Wall Street which was up and running again a few days after 11 September and is now taking full advantage of the bailouts. The US is only one of many world capitalist centres. Even if we were to win in one place, the nomadic money-moguls would simply mount their camels and head for another. The worlds of 1917 and of 2007 are utterly different, so we must try to move beyond this revolutionary impasse, this dead-end and find a new synthesis.

The question we face is not so much what to do — I think that is reasonably clear and I’m about to spell it out—but whether we will have the intelligence and the strength to seize the great opportunity with which we are now presented. Perhaps the words “great opportunity” strike you as wildly optimistic considering the long and dire preamble you’ve just listened to. However, I am now going to argue that not only are individual solutions insufficient but that the remedies offered by Kyoto, Bali, Bonn or whatever timid future agreements may be negotiated are tragically inadequate, Once more—I cannot stress this enough—the scale is crucial. And the great opportunity is to be found in the financial crisis itself. Properly targeted and used, it could open the door to the quantitative and qualitative leap we must make.

Some progressive people will reject the solution I propose, but I would then ask them what alternative they offer. The ecological crisis is of a different nature from the financial and poverty crises in the sense that once climate change is underway, as it is now, it is irreversible and we haven’t time for theoretically perfect solutions. With politics you can sometimes turn back and start over, but not where nature is concerned. So you can accuse me if you like of suggesting a way to give capitalism a new lease on life and I will plead guilty.

Let’s take first the slightly easier question “How can we deal with governments?” at least in the more or less democratic countries. China is another matter. People are generally way ahead of their governments in recognising the emergency. The political issue is not simply to “throw the rascals out” because they would be replaced by other rascals just as bad, just as beholden to the corporations, their lobbies and the financial markets. The trick is to convince politicians that ecological transformation and environmental practices can pay off politically.

 

This means that citizens, activists and experts, whether they like it or not, have got to work with local, regional and national politicians and governments; help them to find like-minded partners and formulate ambitious projects they can undertake on the broadest possible scale. Citizens, activists and experts must furthermore help these politicians and governments to become shining ecological examples with the electorate by publicising their efforts and their successes. Could the Schumacher Society become a kind of nexus for an ongoing forum of best-standards/best practice, bringing together political decision makers at every level with citizens groups and experts to discuss and carry out the best public-sector initiatives? Politicians must be convinced that these policies will not just work but also be highly popular with their constituencies.

Now let’s take the more difficult question of confronting the economic system as a whole. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond examines several historical cases of social extinction due to over-exploitation of the environment. He identifies several common characteristics. One of these is the isolation of the elites, giving them the capacity to keep on consuming way above ecologically sustainable limits long after the crisis has already struck the poorer, more vulnerable members of society. That is where we are now globally, not just in isolated places like Easter Island or Greenland.

So how can we realistically combat the ecological footprints of our dinosaur elites, recognising that we don’t have the option of shouting “Off with their heads” in some imagined, world-wide revolution. Nor can we force them to change both themselves and the system that serves them so well, whereas we know that we must change that system because it is raping the planet and its inherent logic is to keep on doing so.

I can see only one way out: the coming together of people, business and government in a new incarnation of the Keynesian war economy strategy. I was born in the United States in 1934 and I remember well when the US switched massively to a war economy, converting all the rubber plants in my native city [Akron, Ohio] to production not for private cars and trucks but for the military. There was huge citizen involvement and support. Thousands of factories, research labs, housing projects, military bases, day care centres, and schools were built or expanded during the war. Public transport was improved and worked overtime to move millions of men and women to Army bases or new defence jobs.

Yes, there were still worker-management conflicts and yes, big corporations rather than small business got most of the government contracts but on the whole the workers were well paid, African-Americans and women began making a few modest gains and the whole war effort finally pulled the United States out of the Depression—it was Keynesianism on a huge scale. There was also an elite group of businessmen called “Dollar-a-Year Men” on loan from their companies to the government, who were charged with making sure that military production and quality targets were met. They had enormous prestige—my godfather was one and I was doubtless insufferable bragging to my little school friends about him.

 

Why am I going back over this ancient history? Because I think we have a similar opportunity today. The US and the world economy are heading downhill fast and the fallout for ordinary people in terms of jobs, housing, consumption and future welfare is going to be grave. If this diagnosis is right, then some new economic tools will have to be used to combat recession and stagnation, simply because the old ones have already been pushed to their limits and have little or nothing left to give.

The way Central Banks and Treasuries usually try to solve financial recession or depression is through standard remedies like interest rate cuts, currency devaluations or incurring new debt—but the United States has reached the end of its leash on that score. Interest rates are already extremely low—although not in Europe, where the European Central Bank and its hidebound president are ideologically committed to the same sorts of monetary policies that prolonged the Great Depression in the 1930s. The dollar is already weak, which makes US exports cheaper, but it can’t be devalued much further without risk. Deficit spending is already beyond belief. With the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve in effect took on their bad debt and added hugely to the liabilities of the United States Treasury. It risks doing so again. Households too are over-indebted and are losing more equity every day as the value of their dwellings deteriorates.

Since the traditional tools are worn out, the only new tool I can think of to pull the world out economic ruin and social chaos is a new Keynesianism, not military this time, but environmental; a push for massive investment in energy conversion, eco-friendly industry, new materials, efficient public transport; the green construction industry and so on.

Stringent standards for new buildings must become the norm; older ones can be “retro-fitted” on easy financial terms; families and commercial property-owners can receive financial incentives for installing green roofs and solar panels and sell excess energy to the grid. Research and development can be oriented towards alternative energies and strong, ultra-light materials for airplanes and vehicles. Technically speaking, we already know how to do such things, although some clean solutions are still more costly than dirty ones. Mass-produced, they would become less so.

All these new, eco-friendly industries, products and processes would have huge export value and could quickly become the world standard. I am trying to describe a scenario that can be sold to the elites because I don’t think they will embrace genuine environmental values and conversion if there’s nothing in it for them. But this approach is not merely a cynical attempt to get the elites to move in their own interests. There are also plenty of advantages in such an economy for working people. A huge ecological conversion is a job for a high-tech, high-skills, high-productivity, high-employment society. It would be supported, I believe, by the entire population because it would mean not just a better, cleaner, healthier, more climate-friendly environment, but also full employment, better wages, and new skills, as well as a humanitarian purpose and an ethical justification—just like World War II.

How could one finance such a huge effort? It would have to involve targeted government spending in the traditional Keynesian sense and governments are bound to complain that they haven’t the means to carry out such a policy.

The financial crisis provides the ideal opportunity both to finance the conversion and to get the runaway global financial system under control.

At present, taxes almost always stop at national borders. The secret is to take taxes up to the European level and to the international one through currency and other financial transaction taxes. People who oppose such schemes pretend they are not feasible because one would need to obtain the consent of every national jurisdiction in the world, but that is not correct. In fact, currency and other transaction taxes would require nothing more than political determination, the cooperation of the Central Bank and a few lines of software. For the currency transaction tax first proposed by James Tobin in the 1970s and now considerably refined, the tax base is the currency itself, not the place it’s traded. Thus the European Central Bank could easily collect the taxes on any transactions involving euros, the Bank of England the same for the pound, the Fed for the dollar and so on. Since currency trades now amount to $3.2 trillion dollars every day, a tax of one basis point, that is, a levy of one per thousand could raise a tidy sum for ecological conversion and poverty reduction. Britain already imposes a tax on stock market transactions but other European countries do not and should imitate Britain.

Carbon taxes are another much mooted and equally feasible idea. So is a unitary profits tax on transnational corporations, which would require knowing the total sales of the company, the total taxes paid, the sales realised in each jurisdiction and the tax paid in each jurisdiction. If, for example, a TNC reported that in country X, a particularly low-tax jurisdiction, it made 5 percent of its sales yet paid 50 percent of its taxes, the authorities would find it a bit fishy. I’m presenting an extremely crude summary here but believe me, there are experts—bankers, corporate lawyers, fiscal experts and accountants—who know exactly how to do such things. Perhaps to encourage more local consumption, one could also think about taxing the miles travelled by the food we eat and the clothes we wear.

We would not forget the poor countries of the South which are the major terrain of the poverty crisis. Debt cancellation for poor countries that the G-8 has been promising for a decade must finally happen but against the requirement that these countries also contribute to the planetary environmental effort through re-forestation, soil conservation, species protection and the like. They would also be required to involve their own people in democratic decision-making and the funds would be carefully monitored by independent auditors.

Tax havens that allow affluent individuals and corporations to avoid paying their fair share of the conversion should be shut down: it would be cheaper to pay the inhabitants of the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein and the rest a living wage for twenty years. Plenty of cash would remain for eco-investments, job-creation and poverty relief.

In exchange for their bailouts, the banks and investment houses have to accept regulation—not just regulations to insure transparency and eliminate the incentives for stupid behaviour but also more stringent ones forcing them to participate in the ecological offensive. They should be obliged to devote X percent of their loan portfolios to eco-projects at below market interest rates—which they could make up by charging much higher rates on loans to dirty or otherwise anti-ecological projects. Low or no-cost financing for home conversion projects should be another compulsory priority for banks. This could give a huge spurt to the construction industry.

 

Nobody is asking for the moon here. Banks would still make loans, finance investments and earn a fair return for their services. Taxes on currency transactions at one basis point are not going to ruin anyone. Unitary profits taxes on large corporations would simply return us to the era when the companies paid their taxes because they couldn’t avoid them. The point is that a Keynesian taxation and redistribution system would be invested, nationally and internationally, both ecologically and socially, in education, health care, clean, green energy, efficient water distribution, communications technology, public transport, and various other things the world needs and that we already know how to do. These measures would, in turn go a very long way to creating opportunities for far more people to participate in the new green economy through jobs, life-long education, more social protection and reduced inequality. Getting the present financial crisis-producing, free-flowing, unregulated financial system under public and citizen control is the prerequisite for solving both the environmental and the poverty crises.

In other words, it’s a Public Relations dream. Whichever political parties understand this can win on such a programme without anyone having to bring down the entire capitalist system as a prior condition for saving the planet.

A Keynesian ecological programme would furthermore bring many constituencies together in a common cause. As matters now stand, politically speaking, no single interest group can solve the problem that concerns it most. By this I mean that, by themselves, ecologists can’t save the environment; farmers alone can’t save family farms; trade unions alone can’t save well-paid jobs in industry and so on. Broad alliances are the only way to go, the only strategy that pays. The Global Justice Movement, as international social activists call it, has begun to have some success in working democratically and making alliances with partners who come from different constituencies but are basically on the same wavelength.

Now we must go beyond this stage and attempt something more difficult: to forge alliances also with people we don’t necessarily agree with on quite major questions—for example, with business. This can only be accomplished by recognising that disagreements, even conflicts, can be fruitful and positive so long as the areas where it is possible to agree are sought out, identified and built upon. We must find where the circles of our concerns overlap. At least one of those overlaps ought to be saving our common home. I don’t see any other way of generating citizen enthusiasm, involvement and the qualitative and quantitative leap in scale that is now required.

I haven’t time to elaborate on all the technical details concerning the content and the financing of necessary environmental investments. What I can do is guarantee you that the conversion to a green economy is technically feasible. The schemes for new taxes have been thought through; the industrial prototypes already exist; the machinery is ready to hum into action the moment people can make their politicians accept the challenge. Getting the financial system under control and taxing international capital at quite ridiculously low rates in order to redistribute it institutionally and internationally would be enormously popular. We could seriously attack climate change and eliminate the worst of world poverty within a decade. We are talking politics, not technical aspects here and trying to figure out a way to tame the raging beast, the crisis-producing, free-flowing, unregulated financial system and putting it under public and citizen control.

Capitalism is not sane in the sense that most people understand sanity. We humans normally think about our future, that of our children and the future of our countries and the world. The market, on the contrary, operates in the eternal present which, by definition, cannot even entertain the notion of the future and therefore excludes safeguards against future, looming destruction unless these safeguards are imposed upon it by law.

 

We need law, for sure, and political forces with the backbone to propose and to vote the law into existence, but we also need to think about human motivation. Remember the prestigious Dollar-a-Year Men of the 1940s and imagine what might happen if we could transpose them into the world of 21st century capitalism. A significant number of contemporary captains of capitalism, all of them with bloated, unimaginable salaries, might be brought to believe that money is all very well, but is there nothing more? Why not found an extremely exclusive Order of the Earth Defenders, or the Environmental Knights or the Carbon Conquerors who alone, in recognition of their special contributions to the national and international environmental conversion effort. They would have the right to display a highly visible emblem on a banner in front of their homes; a fanion on their cars, a green and gold rosette in their buttonholes like the French Legion d’Honneur or a Congressional Medal of Ecological Honour. They would belong to the small assembly of the anointed; those who provide the means and have the honour of saving the earth. Becoming a member ought to appeal to their competitive spirit.

In conclusion, let me say that myth has always been the driving force of every great human achievement, from Greek democracy to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions. So must it be in the coming age of Ecological Stewardship. To save the planet, we must change, quickly and profoundly, the way the majority thinks and feels and acts, and we must start with the social forces we have right here and right now, and no others. It’s no use wishing they were different ones or stronger, or wiser. We must play the hand history deals us.

For such a change, we will need six “Ms”, starting with Money, Management and Media. But even more important than these three “Ms”, we must try to create a new sense of Mission and Motivation and Myth at the noblest level. “Myth” in this sense has nothing to do with story-telling or lies. It is the grand narrative that empowers us to believe that we can accomplish what we must accomplish. It speaks to the deepest motivations of human consciousness and inspires the desire for honour and for a life’s work which transcends death. The elites already have Money, Management, Media. On our side, we have Mission, Motivation and Myth. If we can bring together all these, the future will take care of itself.

And wouldn’t that be nicer than having another war?

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Bush To Provide $6.4 Billion In Arms To Taiwan

Monday, October 6th, 2008

BigNewsNetwork | The U.S. government is to sell $6.4 billion of weapons to Taiwan, the State Department announced on Friday.

State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood said Congressional approval was required, but believes this will come quickly. A submission went to Congress on Friday afternoon.

The sales involve a range of U.S.-made weapons systems, including Patriot III anti-missile missiles, Apache attack helicopters, Harpoon missiles, and Javelin anti-tank missiles.

The State Department has sponsored the sale through its appointment earlier this year of former Under-Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz to the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board. Wolfowitz is also Chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council, which includes a number of U.S. military contractors as members.

Wood said the deal had been in the works for ‘a few months.’ He said the decision, ‘is consistent with U.S. policy of providing arms for defense of Taiwan and consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act.’

‘This arms deal is a key factor in bringing security and stability across the Taiwan Strait,’ he added. The deal also provides Taiwan upgrades for it’s E-2T aircraft, and spare parts for its air force.

The Bush administration appeared keen to get the sales approved prior to the end of the Bush presidency. Many analysts were surprised at the rush, and the lack of debate. The sales are likely to strain relations with China. Wood however said China had been ‘briefed’ on the negotiations.

In an editorial published Saturday the Taipei Times said, ‘The reasons for the reversal are unclear at this time, though pressure had been building on the State Department over the status of the arms for an extensive period — pressure from Taiwan lobbyists in the Congress, from military sources, from Paul Wolfowitz in his capacity as chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council and as a foreign policy hawk and, ironically enough, from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government after years of blocking the deal in opposition.’

‘In recent months it became clearer that moves were under way behind the scenes to get this problem fixed before US President George W. Bush ends his presidency,’ the Taipei Times editorial said. ‘Wolfowitz, for one, was oddly optimistic in a speech in Taipei in July, linking passage of the deal to Bush’s personal honor. Wolfowitz might have known something that most others did not; even think-tank identities with extensive connections in the US political and military spheres had grown awfully pessimistic as time wore on,’ the Taiwanese newspaper editorial said.

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Investigating ‘Africa’s Guantanamo’

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

Salim Awadh is talking to me from inside a cell somewhere in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

By Robert Walker | There are seven other prisoners kept in the same small, dark room, he starts to tell me.

Then he suddenly stops speaking. I can hear frantic whispering in the background. Then he says it is safe to carry on.

“The conditions are really bad: we don’t have enough food, we don’t have enough access to medicine. The cell is wet,” he says.

“We sleep on the floor rather than the sodden mattresses. One of the other prisoners was beaten so badly he’s had his leg broken.”

Salim is able to speak to me because he has bribed a guard and got access to a mobile phone.

For weeks I have been trying to find out information about him and other detainees in what has been called “Africa’s Guantanamo”. It is a story the governments involved do not want to talk about: The first mass rendition of terrorist suspects in Africa.

In January 2007, Ethiopian troops had taken control of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, ousting the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), an Islamist movement which had controlled much of southern Somalia for the previous six months.

Members of the UIC, militia fighters and civilians were all fleeing towards Kenya. Among them were Salim Awadh, a Kenyan, and his Tanzanian wife, Fatma Chande. Both of them were arrested as they crossed the border.

“I was kept in a cell with other women. Then the Kenyan anti-terrorist police questioned me - they asked me why we went to Somalia,” Fatma says.

I meet Fatma in her small two-room house in Moshi, northern Tanzania. She is quietly spoken and her voice falters as she explains what happened next.

“I told them my husband got a job repairing mobile phones in Somalia. But they tried to force me to admit that my husband was a terrorist. They said I had to tell them the truth or they would strangle me.”

Border worries

Kenya’s government - and its Western allies - had long seen Somalia as a haven for terrorists linked to al-Qaeda, including those responsible for 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

With the UIC in retreat, they feared that extremists might try to slip across the border.

In the first weeks of early 2007, news began to filter out that several hundred people - including children - had been arrested trying to enter Kenya.

Al Amin Kimathi, the head of Kenya’s Muslim Human Rights Forum, sent volunteers to police stations across the capital, Nairobi, trying to collect information.

“Some very frustrated senior police officers told us point blank: it’s not our operation, go and ask the Americans, just call the American embassy. We even saw the Americans bring in detainees and take them out of certain police stations in Nairobi,” he said.

Before Kenyan lawyers’ applications for their release could be considered, the authorities took an extraordinary step.

“It was a Saturday, the police called us in the middle of the night. We were taken to the airport. My husband was made to kneel down on the tarmac,” says Fatima.

“We had our hands tied behind our backs with plastic cuffs. There were men, women, children. We were blindfolded. People were crying. The police were telling them to keep quiet.”

Two hours later, Fatma and Salim found themselves on the tarmac of Mogadishu airport.

The Kenyan government sent two other planeloads of prisoners to Somalia. According to the passenger manifests at least 85 prisoners were on board. Most of them were soon picked from Somali prison cells and taken to Ethiopia.

“A week after we arrived we were interrogated by whites - Americans, British, I was interrogated for weeks,” Salim says.

“They had a file which was said to implicate me in the Kenyan bombings. So I was taken away and was placed in isolation for two months - both my hands and legs were shackled.

“The interrogations went on for five months. Always the same questions about the Nairobi bombings.”

Threats

Former detainees have also told the BBC they were questioned by US agents. One said he was beaten by Americans.

Two others said they were threatened and told that if they did not co-operate they could face ill treatment at the hands of Ethiopian guards.

All said they believed it was the Americans and not the Ethiopians controlling their detention and interrogation.

Human rights groups in the region say this was a new form of extraordinary rendition.

The US did not play an overt role in the transportation or detention of suspects as it has in the rendition of other suspected terrorists, but it nevertheless controlled their interrogation and treatment.

Al Amin Kimathi believes Ethiopia was seen as the ideal destination.

“It was the most natural place to take anyone looking for a site to go and torture and to extract confessions. Ethiopia allows torture of detainees. And that is the modus operandi in renditions.”

In April last year, Ethiopia acknowledged that it was holding 41 people from 17 countries, describing them as “suspected terrorists”.

Most of the detainees were released after a few months, among them Fatma Chande, apparently as their interrogations were completed or under pressure from their home governments.

The Ethiopian government acknowledges up to 10 foreign suspects are still being detained.

“I’m not sure whether they have appeared before a court. The investigation continues,” Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Tekede Alemu told the BBC.

“These are people who were engaged in causing harm to the national interest, the security interest… These are not innocent people.”

The minister rejected claims the detainees have been mistreated. He also denied US agents had been allowed to control the interrogations of foreign prisoners.

More than a year and a half after the renditions, the US government still refuses to respond to questions on the alleged US role.

“I have no knowledge of it nor as official policy can I comment on such matters,” US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer told the BBC.

The Kenyan police say no Kenyans were amongs those flown by the Kenyan government to Somalia.

Meanwhile Fatma is still waiting anxiously for news of her husband.

After Salim got access to a mobile phone, he was able to speak to her from his cell for the first time in more than a year.

Now the phone has stopped working, Salim has disappeared once again.

 

Have Your Say: Investigating ‘Africa’s Guantanamo’
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No “Bailout” for the World’s Poorest

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

By Thalif Deen | As a spreading financial crisis threatens to deepen the economic recession in the United States, the news of an unprecedented 700-billion-dollar bailout package reverberated through the corridors of the United Nations last week as over 100 world leaders gathered in New York for the annual talk-fest: the 63rd session of the General Assembly.

At a time when the United Nations is seeking increased financial assistance from rich nations to help developing countries meet the faltering Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including a 50-percent reduction on extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, the current U.S. economic crisis and its predictably negative fallout overseas is expected to be a major setback.

Addressing delegates last week, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that the current gloomy outlook threatens the well-being of billions of people, “none more so than the poorest of the poor.”

“This only compounds the damage [already] being caused by much higher prices for food and fuel”, he added.

Ban has called for 72 billion dollars per year in additional external financing to achieve the MDGs by 2015.

As one Asian delegate put it: “The 72 billion is peanuts compared to the 700 billion the White House wants to dish out to save some of the Wall Street firms from going belly up.”

“And the urgent needs of developing nations will now be the least of the priorities of the United States and other Western donors,” he predicted.

Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockman of Nicaragua, the newly-elected president of the General Assembly, warned that the current financial crisis will have “very serious consequences” that will impede the significant progress, “if indeed any progress is made”, towards the targets established by the MDGs, “which are themselves insufficient”.

“It is always the poor who pay the price for the unbridled greed and irresponsibility of the powerful,” he said, taking a passing shot at the staggering 700-billion-dollar bailout proposed by the administration of President George W. Bush to save the high-stakes investment banks of New York from bankruptcy and collapse.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates that “money doesn’t seem to be a problem, when the problem is money”.

“Let us look for a moment at what is happening on Wall Street and in financial markets around the world. There, unsound investment threatens the homes and jobs of the middle class,” he added.

There is something fundamentally wrong, he argued, “when money seems to be abundant, but funds for investment in people seem so short in supply”.

Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding told the General Assembly that the crisis currently rocking the world’s financial markets reflects the inadequacy of the regulatory structures that are essential to the effective functioning of any market.

But it is more than that. It represents the failure on the part of the international financial system to facilitate the flow of resources into areas where they can produce real wealth — not paper wealth, he added.

Golding said the world is not short of capital: “What it lacks are the mechanisms to ensure the efficient utilisation of that capital.”

As the economic meltdown in the United States continues, the casualties are piling up both among commercial and investment banks: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual (allowed to collapse with no government bailout); American International Group, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (allowed to survive with emergency financial assistance, including some from the government); Merrill Lynch has been folded into Bank of America and Citigroup has taken over Wachovia Bank.

The outrage against Wall Street, described as the world’s financial capital, is also directed at the high salaried chief executive officers and the middle rung bosses who make multi-million-dollar salaries, with stock options and perks that set them up in a privileged class by themselves.

According to one report, the lowest salary on Wall Street was around 280,000 dollars a year in a country where the average low or middle class employee would go home with a pay packet of 50,000 or 75,000 dollars per year.

In 2007, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, was paid 68.7 million dollars — described as “the most ever for a Wall Street CEO.”

As the entire U.S. economic edifice is in danger of collapsing, the White House has been called upon to save some of the biggest financial institutions in the country and, at the same time, redress the excesses of Wall Street business tycoons who earned multi-million-dollar salaries and extravagant bonuses.

The greed factor in the crisis is that these same tycoons, who are responsible for mismanaging their companies, still insist on continuing with their same lavish lifestyles and lofty salaries even after the massive taxpayer-funded bailout.

But these salaries and bonuses are likely to be curbed as part a return for the bailout package.

Addressing the 192-member General Assembly last week, the President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the economy of any country is “too serious an undertaking to be left in the hands of speculators”.

Ethics must also apply to the economy, he said. But, unfortunately, in the race for profits, the ethical factor has ceased to exist.

The president quoted the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado who once said: “We must not allow speculators’ profits always to be privatised, while their losses are invariably socialised.”

And as a postscript, the Brazilian president added: “We must not allow the burden of the boundless greed of a few to be shouldered by all.”

In the 1987 Hollywood movie ‘Wall Street,’ Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas plays the role of a ruthless corporate raider, Gordon Gekko, who forsakes all business ethics to climb to the highest echelons of the business world.

His speech to a meeting of stock traders is still considered a classic on Wall Street: “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works.”

“Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

Douglas, who is the U.N.’s goodwill ambassador for disarmament and a “messenger for peace”, was at the United Nations last week to participate in the International Day of Peace.

Responding to a reporter who asked him: “Are you saying, Gordon, that greed is not good?,” a visibly annoyed Douglas shot back: “”I am not saying that. And my name is not Gordon. He’s a character I played 20 years ago.”

Have Your Say: No “Bailout” for the World’s Poorest
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The Oppression of Black People, the Crimes of this System, and the Revolution We Need

Monday, September 29th, 2008

http://revcom.us/a/144/BNQ-en.html | “The young man was shot 41 times while reaching for his wallet”…“the 13-year-old was shot dead in mid-afternoon when police mistook his toy gun for a pistol”… “the unarmed young man, shot by police 50 times, died on the morning of his wedding day”… “the young woman, unconscious from having suffered a seizure, was shot 12 times by police standing around her locked car”… “the victim, arrested for disorderly conduct, was tortured and raped with a stick in the back of the station-house by the arresting officers.”

Does it surprise you to know that in each of the above cases the victim was Black?¹

If you live in the USA, it almost certainly doesn’t.

Think what that means: that without even being told, you knew these victims of police murder and brutality were Black. Those cases—and the thousands more like them that have occurred just in the past few decades—add rivers of tears to an ocean of pain.  And they are symptoms of a larger, still deeper problem.

But some today claim that America is a “post-racial society.” They say the “barriers to Black advancement” have been largely overcome. Many go so far as to put the main blame for the severe problems faced by Black people today on…Black people themselves. Others claim that better education, or more traditional families, or religion, or elections will solve things.

So the questions must be sharply posed: what really IS the problem? What is the source of it? And what is the solution?

This special issue of Revolution newspaper will answer those questions. We’ll show how the oppression of Black people has been at the very heart of the fabric and functioning of this country, since its beginning and up to the present time, and what has actually caused these centuries of suffering. We’ll analyze the massive struggles waged against this oppression, showing why, even when they’ve won concessions, their powerful call for justice has been betrayed by the system each time—and what lessons can be drawn for a revolutionary struggle that actually could win liberation. We’ll get into how a revolution could deal with and overcome that oppression, bringing in an entirely different, and far better, system as part of getting to a whole new, emancipated world. We’ll analyze other programs and show how anything short of revolution is a false path and a dead end. And we’ll point to why such a revolution is possible—yes, even in the U.S.—and what must be done to actually prepare for and carry out such a revolution.

I. The Real Situation

Conventional wisdom says that while some disparities remain, things have generally advanced for Black people in America and today they are advancing still. People like Obama and Oprah are held up as proof of this. But have things really moved forward? Is this society actually becoming “post-racial”?

The answer to that question can be found in every corner of U.S. society.

Take employment: Black people remain crowded into the lowest rungs of the ladder…that is, if they can find work at all. While many of the basic industries that once employed Black people have closed down, study after study shows employers to be more likely to hire a white person with a criminal record than a Black person without one, and 50% more likely to follow up on a resume with a “white-sounding” name than an identical resume with a “Black-sounding”² name. In New York City, the rate of unemployment for Black men is fully 48%.³

Or housing: Black people face the highest levels of racial residential segregation in the world—shunted into neglected neighborhoods lacking decent parks and grocery stores and often with no hospitals at all. Black people, as well as Latinos, who had achieved home-ownership had their roofs snatched from them. They were the ones hit hardest by the subprime mortgage crisis after having been targeted disproportionately by predatory lenders—resulting in the greatest loss of wealth to people of color in modern U.S. history.⁴

Or healthcare: Black infants face mortality rates comparable to those in the Third World country of Malaysia, and African-Americans generally are infected by HIV at rates that rival those in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall the disparities in healthcare are so great that one former U.S. Surgeon General recently wrote, “If we had eliminated disparities in health in the last century, there would have been 85,000 fewer black deaths overall in 2000.”⁵

Or education: Today the schools are more segregated than they have been since the 1960s⁶ with urban, predominantly Black and Latino schools receiving fewer resources and set up to fail. These schools more and more resemble prisons with metal detectors and kids getting stopped and frisked on their way to class by uniformed police who patrol their halls. Often these schools spend around half as much per pupil as those in the well-to-do suburbs. ⁷

Or take imprisonment: The Black population in prison is 900,000⁸—a tenfold increase since 1954!—and the proportion of Black prisoners incarcerated relative to whites has more than doubled in that same period. A recent study pointed out that “a young Black male without a high school degree has a 59 percent chance of being imprisoned before his thirty-fifth birthday.”⁹

On top of all that, and reinforcing it, is an endlessly spouting sewer of racism in the media, culture and politics of this society—racism that takes deadly aim at the dreams and spirit of every African-American child. And who can forget the wave of nooses that sprung up around the country, south and north, in the wake of the 2007 struggle in Jena, Louisiana against the prosecution (and persecution) of six Black youth who had fought back against a noose being hung to intimidate them from sitting under a “whites only” tree at school?

All this lay beneath the criminal government response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For reasons directly related to the oppression of Black people throughout the history of this country, and continuing today, African-Americans were disproportionately the ones without the resources to get out of the way of that storm, as well as the ones concentrated in the neighborhoods whose levees had gone unrepaired for years. Far from “mere” incompetence, the government responded with a combination of gun-in-your-face repression and wanton, murderous neglect. People were stuck on rooftops in 100-degree heat for days on end, with nothing to eat or drink. Prisoners were left locked in cells as waters rose to their necks. The protection of private property and social control was placed above human life. The governor of the state ordered cops and soldiers to shoot on sight “looters”—that is, people trying to survive and to help others. On at least one occasion, people trying to escape the worst-hit areas were stopped by police at gunpoint from crossing over to a safer area. When evacuations finally were carried out, they were done with the heartlessness of a cruel plantation owner. Families were separated, with children ripped away from parents. Tens of thousands were scattered all over the country with one-way tickets, sometimes not even told their destinations. Back home, bodies were left floating in water, or lying on sidewalks, underneath debris, decomposing and mangled, for months.

Through it all, politicians and commentators spewed out unrelenting racism. Who can forget Barbara Bush herself, the president’s mother, and her remark in a shelter for refugees from Katrina—some separated from their families and having lost everything, including dear ones—that “[S]o many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”¹⁰ A 10-term Congressman took the prize for declaring, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”¹¹

Since then, the first…the second…the third anniversary of Katrina passed with many parts of New Orleans still uninhabitable ghost towns. In the mostly Black 9th Ward, blocks of devastated houses have been razed—a vast wasteland now dotted with occasional concrete steps going nowhere. When Black people have fought to stay in the projects which are still habitable, they have been driven out—and when they have protested at City Council, they have been pepper-sprayed and beaten.¹² Oil rigs and tourist areas are long since back up and humming, while rebuilding schools, hospitals, and childcare centers are pushed off the list. Through it all, cops and national guards continue to occupy poor neighborhoods like enemy territory.

Does all this look like a “post-racial” society to you?

The answer is clear. And while more Black people than ever before have been allowed to “make it” into the middle class, two things must be said.

First, even for these people their situation is still tenuous. To take one stark example: In opposition to the widespread notions of the “American dream,” where each successive generation “does better” than the previous one, the majority of the children of middle-class Black families have been cast, by the workings of this system, onto a downwardly mobile path.¹³ And every Black person—no matter how high they rise—still faces the insults and the dangers concentrated in the all-too-familiar experience of being stopped for “driving while Black.” As Malcolm X said over 40 years ago, and as is still true today: What do they call somebody Black with a Ph.D.? A “nigger.”

Second, and even more profoundly, for millions and millions of Black people things have gotten WORSE.

It will not help—in fact it will do real harm—to believe in this “post-racial” fantasy, or even the “less ambitious” lie of steady improvement. The cold truth of the oppression of African-American people must be squarely confronted and deeply understood, if it is ever to be transformed.

II. Shining a Light on the Past to Understand the Present—and Transform the Future

If you go to the doctor with a painful condition, she’ll ask you to describe the symptoms. If she’s any good, she won’t just prescribe a few pills and send you on your way—she’ll try to figure out the cause of your problem, where it came from. She’ll order some tests, and then she’ll do more. She’ll ask you when the symptoms arose. She’ll take your family history, asking about your parents, and even your grandparents. And that’s what we’re going to do—go through the history of America to discover the source of the profound problems we have sketched out here.

The Rise of Capital—on a Foundation of Slavery and Genocide

This country was founded on the twin crimes of the genocidal dispossession of its Native American (Indian) inhabitants, and the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans. But this essential and undeniable truth is constantly suppressed, blurred over, distorted and excused—all too often treated as “ancient history,” if admitted at all. But let’s look at its implications.

Modern capitalism arose in Europe, when the merchant class in the cities—the newly arising capitalists, or bourgeoisie—began to set up workshops in which they exploited peasants who had been driven off their land, as well as others who could not make a living any longer other than by working for, and being exploited by, these capitalists. This was the embryo of the modern proletariat—a class of people who have no means to live except to work for someone else, and that works for wages in processes that require a collectivity of people working together. The early capitalists, like their descendants, would take possession of and sell the goods thus produced, paying the proletarians only enough to live on, and thereby accumulating profit. They did this in competition with other capitalists, and those who could not sell cheaper were driven under; this generated a drive to gain any possible advantage, either through lowering wages and more thoroughly exploiting the proletariat, or through investing in more productive machinery, or both. This twin dynamic of exploitation and competition drove forward the accumulation of capital in a relentless and ever-widening cycle.

But this was not some linear or self-contained process. In fact, capitalism in Europe “took off” with the development of the world market, and that in turn was fed and driven forward by the slave trade. Ships would sail from London and Liverpool, in England, filled with the goods sold by the capitalists. They would unload these goods for sale or trade in the coastal cities of Africa, and fill their holds with human beings who had been captured in raids in the African countryside. They would then take this human cargo to the Americas and the Caribbean, to be sold as slaves. Then the ships would take the sugar, cotton, rice and other goods produced by the slaves in these colonies back to Europe, to be sold for use as raw materials or food. And so on, every day, year in, year out—for centuries. This slave trade and the slave economy that went with it—along with the extermination of the Native peoples of the Americas (the Indians) through deliberate slaughter, disease, and working them to death in silver mines—formed what Karl Marx called the “rosy dawn of the primitive accumulation of capital.”

The crime was enormous. Between 9.4 and 12 million Africans were kidnapped, sold and sent to the Americas as slaves. Over two million more died in the voyage from Africa, and enormous numbers perished in Africa itself, through the slave-taking raids and wars, followed by forced marches in chains to the coastal African cities to feed this market. At least 800,000 more died in the port cities of Africa, locked down in prison (the barracoons) awaiting shipment. Once in the Americas, slaves were sent to “seasoning camps” to “break” them—where an estimated 1/3 of the Africans died in that first hellish year.¹⁴

Take a few seconds to think about the reality behind those numbers. THOSE WERE HUMAN BEINGS! Numbers alone cannot hope to capture the agony and suffering all this meant for over three centuries; the best these numbers can do is give a sense of the sheer scale and scope of the barbarity. But even today this is very little known, and what went into the foundation of American history is barely taught, if at all, in the schools, or recognized in the media and culture.

Those Africans who survived this hell were then forced to toil as slaves, doing the work to “tame” the Americas—to develop the agriculture that would form the basis for the new European colonies. A respected historian put it this way: “Much of the New World, then, came to resemble the death furnace of the ancient god Moloch—consuming African slaves so increasing numbers of Europeans (and later, white Americans) could consume sugar, coffee, rice, and tobacco.”¹⁵ Within Africa itself, the slave trade caused tremendous distortions in the development of Africa and gave rise to the major African slave-trading states in west Africa, as these states traded slaves to the Europeans for commodities that included guns.

Slavery existed in every part of the world and many societies before the transatlantic slave trade that began in the 1500s—but it had never before been carried out on this scale and with this nearly industrial-style inhumanity. That was the product not of uniquely evil men—but of men who became monsters by serving the demands of a monstrous new system whose only commandment was “Expand or Die.” This slave trade was so integral to the rise of capitalism that the sugar and tea produced by slaves not only turned huge profits, but also served as a very cheap way to feed empty calories and stimulants to severely exploited proletarians in Europe. And the labor organization of the sugar cane fields of Jamaica was adapted to the factory floors of London.¹⁶

To justify this, the capitalists and slave owners drew on the Bible—which yes, does in fact justify slavery, in both old testament and new—and then later on pseudo-scientific ideologies of racism that claimed that Africans and Native Americans (Indians) were a “lower species,” inherently inferior. The fact that Africans had been kidnaped, tortured, enslaved, killed if they tried to educate themselves, forced to watch as their children or spouses were sold off to other parts of the country, and generally kept in an inferior position—this CRIME by the rulers was pointed to as “proof” that Blacks were inferior. Incredibly enough, these slaves were denounced as “lazy” by the parasitical slave masters whose great wealth the slaves created through their back-breaking labor!   These lies served both to “justify” the horrors of slavery and formed a crucial element in the “social glue” that held society together. This pattern, and this lie and its social use, have continued in different forms up to today.

The fact that these supposedly “inherently inferior” people had played a crucial part in building up highly developed societies and cultures in both Africa and the Americas, long before Europeans came to dominate these places, was an “inconvenient truth” written out of the official histories and textbooks.  And the fact that all human beings are all one species, with only relatively superficial differences in some characteristics, was also written out, with spurious racist pseudo-science substituted instead—lies that also come up in new forms today.

There was nothing inherent in Europeans that led to capitalism taking root there first—there were a number of areas in the world where capitalism might have taken off slightly earlier or slightly later if things had come together a little differently. But Europe is where capitalism did take off, and the dominance of the capitalist nations of Europe and then the U.S. (and Japan, which developed in a different set of circumstances) over the past five centuries is inconceivable without slavery.

“There Would Be No United States as We Now Know It Today Without Slavery”

Slavery fueled the foundation and rise of not just capitalism in general, but the U.S. in particular. This is not just a “stain” that can eventually be washed, or even scrubbed, away within the confines of this system; it is embedded in the very fabric of this society—indeed, the U.S. Constitution itself legally institutionalized slavery and deemed African-Americans to count as only 3/5 of a white person for census purposes.

In the recently published work, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, Bob Avakian wrote:

There is a semi-official narrative about the history and the “greatness” of America, which says that this greatness of America lies in the freedom and ingenuity of its people, and above all in a system that gives encouragement and reward to these qualities. Now, in opposition to this semi-official narrative about the greatness of America, the reality is that—to return to one fundamental aspect of all this—slavery has been an indispensable part of the foundation for the “freedom and prosperity” of the USA. The combination of freedom and prosperity is, as we know, still today, and in some ways today more than ever, proclaimed as the unique quality and the special destiny and mission of the United States and its role in the world. And this stands in stark contradiction to the fact that without slavery, none of this—not even the bourgeois-democratic freedoms, let alone the prosperity—would have been possible, not only in the southern United States but in the North as well, in the country as a whole and in its development and emergence as a world economic and military power.

Obviously, the way in which agriculture in the South developed was directly related to, indeed founded on, the system of slavery. But, beyond that, the way in which the U.S. related to the world market, and built up its prosperity and economic base in that way, was to a very large degree dependent on slave-based production. The interchange between the development of manufacture in the North and the development of agriculture in the South, for example—even when, before the Civil War, that interchange went to a large degree through the world market and through England in particular, where for example cotton would be sold to the textile mills in England and other products would be sold from England to the northern manufacturers in the U.S. —even that would not have happened in the way it did, on the kind of scale it did and with the prosperity that it led to, without slavery. Of course, this process—where, for example, cotton from the southern U.S. was to a large degree sold to England, rather than to New England—contributed over time to sharpening the contradiction between the slave system in the South and the developing capitalist system in the North of the U.S. But the point to emphasize here is that, in an overall and fundamental sense, the slave-grown products of the southern U.S. constituted a major factor in the development of the U.S. economy, in the North as well as the South. And the development of that economy, in turn, has been the essential underlying basis for the massive military machinery which is the ultimate enforcer of the role of the U.S. as a major world power.

In short: There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.¹⁷

Avakian then goes on to discuss and analyze the importance of slavery to the mind-set and outlook of American society, and its political life in particular. To justify slavery and the theft of native lands, the lies and myths we described above were used to deem Black people and Indians as less than human, as social pariahs, or outcasts, not deserving of the “natural rights” due to all white men. The masses of white people of all classes, including the most exploited among them, were appealed to on the basis that by virtue of not being slaves they were in fact part of the master class (whether they actually owned slaves or not).

This poisonous master-class mentality did not die with the abolition of slavery—it continued, in new forms. In particular, each wave of immigrants that came over from Europe had to “fit itself into” the dominant relations of American society—they had to find an “economic niche” (usually toward the bottom rungs of the working class, at least at first) and they had to work out a relation to the dominant political and cultural superstructure of society. In doing so, these white immigrants often tried to distinguish themselves from Black people—and this often exploded into the open antagonism of white mobs rampaging against Black people and even lynching them—yes, in the northern cities as well as the South, as these immigrant communities defined themselves as “full-blooded” white Americans in violent opposition to Black people. This system reinforced the master-class mentality among northern whites with petty, but not insignificant, privileges in jobs and housing. And this became a major double-barreled shotgun for the capitalist ruling class: it blinded these white people and immigrants to their most fundamental interests as members of the proletariat, turning their anger away from the system that actually exploited and oppressed them, and turning it against the most oppressed and exploited people in society. And it gave them an “identity” as white Americans, with a set of expectations and entitlements to go with it—and to defend. A minority of whites opposed this madness, and took up revolutionary or radical or even just decently humane positions; but while very important—and we’ll return to its significance later—this sort of stand was far too uncommon. (A secondary, but important, effect of this master-class mentality among whites of all classes was to partly obscure the class character of the oppression of the masses of Black people—their position and role as viciously exploited proletarians, within the overall working class of the U.S.—and the many and close links between this class exploitation of large numbers of Black people, as part of the proletariat, and the national oppression of Black people as a people.)

To return again to the period of slavery, it is important to be clear on an essential truth: the slaves fiercely resisted this. In the U.S. alone there were over 200 slave revolts, and the slaves of Haiti stunned the world when they successfully waged a 15-year revolution against first their colonial masters, then the British, and finally Napoleon’s armies. Even with these heroic revolts, it was only with the Civil War that the resistance finally bore fruit in the U.S., and the emancipation of Black people from outright slavery was achieved. Here too the masses of Black people—both runaway slaves and “freedmen”—played a crucial role. When finally allowed to join the Union Army, they died at twice the rate of white soldiers (while being paid lower wages for most of the Civil War)!

The Civil War

As pointed to in the passage cited from Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, the Civil War itself came about because of the clash between two different economic and social systems: slavery, based on plantation farming in the South; and capitalism, based on factory and other wage-labor centered in the North. The slave owners needed more land because their plantation system of farming used up the land so fast, while the northern capitalists wanted to control the country as a whole, both for resources and to further develop their control of the national market.  By the time of the Civil War, these two forces—these two social systems—were clashing on virtually every major question of economics. For example, factory production was just getting going in the North, and these northern capitalists wanted to erect high tariffs (in effect, taxes on imported goods) to secure the U.S. national market and “protect” their industries against the English capitalists, who could produce things much more cheaply; but the slave-holders insisted on low tariffs to enable them to easily trade with those same English manufacturers. And these basic economic conflicts found expression in politics, culture, and even religion—the Baptist and Methodist churches, among others, split into northern and southern branches over the “godliness” (or “ungodliness”) of slavery!

Why? Simply because people in the North had become enlightened? No. While there was a surge of more radical thinking in the North in the decades prior to the Civil War, and militant opponents of slavery such as Frederick Douglass and John Brown began to get a hearing and gain a following, this was ultimately an expression of more fundamental changes going on in the economic base of society—that is, the relations that people enter into to carry out production—and the intensifying contradictions within that economic base, and between that economic base and the political structure which had arisen on top of it.

In short, slavery had changed from being the stimulus that it was in the early days of capitalism into a fetter on the development of capitalism. The constitution that served the economic base of 1789—a constitution which legalized and institutionalized slavery—could no longer contain the intensified contradictions of 1860. Abraham Lincoln himself, the president of the United States during the time of the Civil War, was the political representative of the bourgeoisie—the factory-owners, railroad-owners, and other capitalists centered in the North—and he fought the war in their interests. In the view of Lincoln, the power of the slave states had to be at minimum sharply curtailed; and it was only when he was convinced that there was no other way forward that he went to war. Similarly, Lincoln delayed emancipating the slaves and then delayed allowing the slaves to enlist in the Union army until he was convinced that there was no other way to carry out his basic aim of “saving the Union.” Lincoln himself said:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.¹⁸

The First Betrayal, After Slavery

The aftermath of the Civil War presented the now predominant capitalist class with an opportunity to truly integrate the freed slaves into the larger society. The slaves had poured generations of labor into the foundation of the society and then died way out of proportion to their numbers in the Civil War. Northern generals during the war had promised the freed slaves “40 acres and a mule.” As a matter of simple, basic justice it would have been right to divide the land that they had worked for generations among the former slaves, as well as the non-slaveholding whites; and as a matter of having a basis for political freedom, doing this was imperative. And it was imperative as well that these former slaves have the full political rights they had fought and died for—including the right to suppress the bitter, unrepentant ex-Confederate soldiers who, already in the waning days of the Civil War, were forming into secret paramilitary societies to violently attack the freed slaves and “preserve the southern way of life.”

But this was not done. Indeed, the true interests of the northern capitalists came out with their betrayal of Reconstruction. During this all too brief period of Reconstruction, in the 10 years or so after the end of the Civil War, the U.S. government had kept some of its promises and stationed troops in the South. These troops were there to prevent wholesale slaughters of Black people, and poor whites, who were striving to gain land and exercise political rights promised to them. But the capitalist class which now dominated the national government did this in large part in order to fully subordinate the former plantation owners; and when the ex-slaves and their allies fought “too hard” for their rights these same troops would be used against them.

Above all the northern capitalists wanted order and stability to carry out the further consolidation of their rule, as well as further expansion on the North American continent and internationally. The ferment and upheaval that would have gone along with everything that would have been involved in the former slaves playing a significant role in the political process or even exercising basic rights might have “sent the wrong message” to other oppressed people within the U.S.; and in fact, when in 1877 the U.S. troops were pulled out of the South, signaling the end of Reconstruction, they were immediately sent west—to fully crush the resistance of the Indians—and into the cities of the North—to violently suppress revolts of immigrant workers. Further, real freedom for the former slaves would have enabled them to resist the severe exploitation that was visited upon them, and thus would have made the re-integration of the southern economy into the larger society much less profitable for the ruling capitalists. So the Ku Klux Klan was unleashed in full force and played a brutal role in defeating and subjugating the freed slaves and progressive whites, often in bloody battles. Then the Supreme Court “made it all legal,” with the Cruikshank decision—which upheld the state of Louisiana’s decision to not prosecute the white perpetrators of the massacre of over 100 Black and white supporters of Reconstruction in Colfax, Louisiana—and Plessy v. Ferguson, which enabled states to legally segregate Black people.

In short, when the opportunity for integration on an equal footing into this society arose in the period after the Civil War, the “demands” of the economic base of the capitalist system, and the political superstructure that arises on and serves that base, overrode that opportunity…and the answer was NO. Equality was denied—and this denial was enforced through the most bloodthirsty means.

The new social order that came with the betrayal of Reconstruction forced most Black people into the position of working the land for white plantation owners in relations that were barely better than slavery. And some forms of the actual, literal enslavement of Black people continued, particularly in the South, long after slavery had been legally abolished. The masses of Black people were kept chained to the land by debt, by legal discrimination…and by violence. Through all this, rather than being integrated on an equal basis into U.S. life, Black people were forged into an oppressed nation within the Black Belt South during this period—denied all democratic rights, including the right to self-determination as a nation. (For further discussion of the right of self-determination, see box.)

Shortly after the Civil War, the capitalist system made a leap to a new stage—to a worldwide system of imperialism, which divided up the entire globe among a handful of powers. The retrenchment of white supremacy in a new form, after the Civil War, formed an important element in the U.S.’s rise to major power status among these imperialists. The cotton and tobacco produced by the bitterly exploited Black sharecroppers were the top cash crops of the U.S. from 1850 to 1890, and Black men who were arrested by southern sheriffs on the flimsiest of charges and literally sold as slave labor built the industrial infrastructure of the South. (Recently, Douglas A. Blackmon, in Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, documented the use of over 100,000 Black people in slave labor industrial projects, and the actual number is undoubtedly far higher than the 100,000 he has been able to document. Conditions in these camps, including widespread disease, systematic degradation, torture, including “waterboarding,” and a high death rate, call to mind the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.)¹⁹At the same time, the reinforcement of the master-class mentality among large sections of whites strengthened their identification with the ruling class. And the reintegration of the southern ruling class elements into the larger capitalist class—with the southerners getting particular power in the Congress and being a major force in the military—reinforced the ruling class as a whole in its cohesiveness.

The Rise of the Lynch Mob

The white American tradition of lynching—where mobs of people drag someone out of their homes, or even out of jail, and hang them for some real or, more often, imagined crime without benefit of a trial—played a very important role in all this. Nearly 5,000 people were lynched between 1882 and 1964, with over 70% of them Black.²⁰ Sometimes these lynchings were carried out under cover of darkness—but often these were “community affairs,” attended by thousands of whites, in a carnival atmosphere, who would then have pictures taken of themselves posing with the often burnt and mutilated body of the victim, sometimes making these photographs into postcards to send to friends. The Cruikshank decision, mentioned earlier, gave a legal green light to this kind of barbaric terror; and for decades the U.S. Senate refused to pass laws calling for federal action against lynching. In short, the ruling class backed these lynchings to the hilt.

Usually, the victims were poorer Blacks—but often the lynchers went after the small minority of Blacks who owned land. In 1916, Anthony Crawford of Abbeville, S.C., a Black cotton farmer who owned 427 acres of prime land and had started a Black school in the area and a union for Black people, was lynched after a dispute with a white man over the price of Crawford’s cotton crop. He was hanged from a pine tree and shot over 200 times, and whites drove his family from the area and divided up his land. In fact, a few years ago the Associated Press documented over 57 violent land-takings by whites.²¹

But the hellish social function served by lynchings was larger than sheer greed, larger than reinforcing racist feelings (and intimidating any who might resist) through grisly barbaric rituals. It was to enforce a social system in which Blacks were to be chained to the land through terror—and, as shown by the lynching of Anthony Crawford, one part of that was to crush any Blacks who might form the makings of a “national bourgeoisie” among Black people which might not be as pliant as the Booker T. Washingtons of the era and which might, therefore, upset the established order of things by demanding the rights associated with being a nation. (Booker T. Washington was the founder and head of the Black college Tuskegee Institute, and preached that while there were “problems” in the South, Blacks should advance by learning trades and working hard, while submitting to oppression, and in THAT way they could improve their position within the system in this country; he was promoted by the ruling class as the spokesman for Black people and became the prototype of the “responsible Negro leader,” and echoes of his line can be heard today in Bill Cosby—and Barack Obama.)²²

It is a bitter irony that many of the whites who today cling to the “grand narrative” criticized by Bob Avakian above—that people in America, or rather white people, have made it due to their ingenuity and hard work, taking advantage of the “freedom” offered by this society—and who complain about things like affirmative action—conveniently forget that at the very time that most Black people were being forced onto the land as sharecroppers (essentially a form of semi-slavery), with those who did own property often having it violently ripped from them, including through murder…at that very time, the ancestors of these whites were being given land that had been forcibly stolen from the Native Americans, and these whites were sending their children to “land grant” colleges set up by the government to teach them advanced farming techniques, or else getting help from “agricultural agents” also sent out by the government. This opportunity to get a farm, and to get government support in getting that farm up and running, not only served as a “steam valve” for the discontent of many exploited white people, it also further fed into the master-class mind-set and assumptions prevalent among white people about “what it means to be an American.”

The “Promised Land”—
And Rising Expectations

It was only with World War 2—nearly 100 years after the Civil War—that a major change began to be brought about in the situation of Black people in the U.S. Around the time of World War 1, there was a big demand for workers in the defense plants and other factories, at the same time as the war cut off the flow of immigrant labor from Europe. Capital needed workers—and so some Black people were drawn from the South and allowed in—on the bottom floor. This flow was delayed by the economic depression of the 1930s, but with the outbreak of World War 2 there was once again a huge demand for labor. Then, on top of that, the years directly after World War 2 brought the mechanization of agriculture in the South—so now Black people were not only being drawn to the northern factories, they were being driven off the land that they had farmed for generations under conditions of extreme exploitation.

The forms of oppression differed in the North, but the fact of oppression remained the same. African-American workers were brought into the workforce, but on the basis of their oppression as a people they were put into the dirtiest, most dangerous and lowest-paying jobs. They were “last hired and first fired.” Black people were refused the subsidies that white people received to buy houses, and even when Blacks had the money they were prevented, either by unspoken agreements, government policy, or straight-up violence by white mobs and/or vigilantes (usually assisted by the police), from buying homes in “white” neighborhoods. Instead they were shunted—by government policy—into poorly built highrise housing projects in the inner cities. African-Americans faced segregation and discrimination everywhere they turned, North and South.

But the changes in the South, in the context of major political changes internationally, had given rise to a civil rights movement. Black people were marching, demanding very basic and fundamental rights—the right to vote, to equal education, to not be humiliated when they tried to use public facilities. They were met with police dogs, bombs and Ku Klux Klan terror. Indeed, over 25 civil rights workers were murdered in the South.²³

This time, however, a different dynamic came into play: once things reached a certain point, the more that the power structure came at them, the more the masses fought back. And this interacted with the international challenges facing the U.S. ruling class at the time. The oppressed nations and colonies were rising up and fighting for national liberation in the “Third World” of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Revolutionary China, under the leadership of Mao Tsetung, was exerting a galvanic pole of attraction within that situation, powerfully reviving the goal and ideology of communism and inspiring people all over the world to seek out the ways to make revolution—against an imperialist order headed by the U.S. The U.S. rulers were also contending with the formerly socialist Soviet Union (which had become imperialist but had not yet dropped its socialist cover) and old-line colonial powers, particularly Britain and France, for influence in the Third World. In the face of all this, the struggle against the continuing barbarity of the oppression of the Black people in the South—and the way that struggle kept forcing this question onto the world’s front pages—was compelling the American ruling class to scramble, and to make adjustments in how it dealt with Black people.

So all this—the indomitable growth of the southern-based civil rights movement in the 1950s and early ’60s and the ways in which it was becoming not just a nationwide but a worldwide “force of attraction,” along with the migrations to the “promised land” of the North, raised expectations. But the reality of this system once again dashed these heightened hopes. African-Americans in the North continued to be subject to blatant oppression and discrimination. And the southern lynch mobs found their cowardly counterpart in northern mobs that would burn out Black people who would dare to buy houses in “white neighborhoods,” or would attack Black children who dared to go to “white schools.”

“What happens to a dream deferred?” asked Langston Hughes in a famous poem.²⁴

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

The Black Liberation Struggle: What Really Happened Off the ’60s —And What Did Not

The masses answered this question, unmistakably. People rebelled in hundreds of American cities,²⁵ and the revolutionary stance of leaders like Malcolm X and forces like the Black Panther Party resonated with millions in the streets and campuses of the U.S. Many things fed into this—including, again, the international situation which, as pointed out earlier, was marked by a great upsurge in national liberation struggles and the influence of a socialist China under the leadership of Mao.

With this powerful upsurge hammering the walls of the social order, some barriers to Black people did fall. Some African-Americans were given opportunities to enter college and professional careers, and social programs like welfare, community clinics, and early education programs were expanded. Government spending for training and jobs that would employ Black people increased. Some discrimination was lifted in credit for housing and small businesses. Most of this was in the form of small concessions—not only did this not begin to touch the real scars of hundreds of years of terrible oppression, but discrimination continued in all of these arenas. Nonetheless, these advances were hardly insignificant.

Even more important than these particular concessions, in some ways, were the “intangibles.” The consciousness of not just African-Americans but other minorities, and many millions of white people as well, radically changed. People sharply challenged the lies that for decades had been taught in American schools and had been driven home in American culture through works like Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation. The REAL history of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the whole period of the 20th century began to be unearthed and brought forward.

The ’60s showed that a movement that had Black people as its most solid base of support and the struggle for their emancipation as its leading edge, and that drew connections to other outrages of the system and other struggles against that system, could also inspire and draw forward people of other oppressed nationalities within the U.S., students of all nationalities, and then spread as well to women, to white proletarians (“poor whites”), soldiers and beyond. All kinds of people began to look at everything about this society with fresh eyes—and with the blinders suddenly taken off, they didn’t like what they saw and decided to question it and fight it!

To put it another way, the ’60s showed that when masses rose up in rebellion against the powers-that-be, and when that was coupled with a political stance that called out the system as the problem, and when a growing section of that movement linked itself to and learned from the revolutionary movement worldwide…well, when all that happened, you could radically change the political polarization in society. What could hardly be imagined yesterday suddenly became a real possibility for tomorrow, which demanded action today. (Some of these same phenomena, in microcosm, also occurred in the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992, over the acquittal of the police who had beaten Rodney King. While the initial spark came from the Black masses, significant numbers of Latinos and whites, especially the youth, either joined in or politically supported it, and many, many people were at least temporarily drawn into political life and some to a much more radical and even revolutionary political outlook.)

The ’60s also dramatically showed that the rulers of this system, for all their power and viciousness, are not all-powerful—not when the people whom they rule over rise up and rebel in their hundreds of thousands and then millions.  Seriously challenged and battered by the Vietnam war and the struggle “at home,” these rulers actually fell into serious disarray, and sharp battles broke out within their ranks, which provided further “oxygen” for upsurge from below. In many respects, the ruling class was put on the political defensive, and even lost its “legitimacy” in the eyes of millions. This whole upsurge within the U.S. also had a tremendous effect internationally—both exposing America’s lying pretensions about its “free society” and giving inspiration to the masses in countries all over the world.

But while this tremendous struggle brought down some barriers to formal equality, and while the rulers were challenged and the system shaken to its foundations, the people were not able to make revolution.  And here we have to make an important point: revolution is not just a cool word that means “lots of change”; revolution has a very specific meaning. It means that the people overthrow the system and deprive its rulers of their political power and, as the essence of that power, the ability to wield armies and police against the people. Revolution further means that a new power is then established, with new aims and objectives and the means to enforce those aims and objectives. There WAS a revolutionary movement in the ’60s—and that is something of monumental significance. But there was NOT a revolution—and that too has monumental significance, in understanding what did happen…what didn’t happen…and what must yet happen.

The elimination of some formal discrimination, the expansion of a middle stratum of Black people, and the emergence of a few “Black faces in high places” did not and could not tear up the deep roots of white supremacy (nor still less bring about the broader emancipation that was needed). And the elimination of formal discrimination also could not deal with the class position of the masses of Black people—as members of the proletariat, the propertyless class that is either directly exploited by capitalists or kept as part of the desperately impoverished “reserve army of the unemployed” which can be more readily and ruthlessly exploited when it serves the capitalists’ purposes, and which the capitalists seek to use to depress the conditions and fighting spirit of the proletariat overall. The struggle of the African-American people for liberation is tied by a thousand threads to the struggle of the proletariat for the full emancipation of all humanity. There is no brick wall between these forms of oppression—they are constantly intertwining and interpenetrating, as was seen in Hurricane Katrina. Indeed, there is a common enemy at the root of both these forms of oppression—the capitalist-imperialist system. There is a common solution to both—communist revolution—and the proletariat, as a class, has no interest in maintaining any form of oppression and every interest in wiping out all forms of oppression.

Aftermath of the ’60s: The Second Betrayal

Because there was no revolution in the U.S. in the 1960s and, along with that, because the revolutionary struggle internationally ultimately suffered serious setbacks, the decades since have been a nightmare. The power of the ruling class had been shaken, but not overthrown; and they came back with a vengeance.

Major transformations went on in the international political and economic structure of imperialism during these past decades. Here we can only indicate, in basic terms, some of the main aspects of all this, which include:²⁶

• the strategic rivalry, up through the 1980s, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (which contained the real danger of nuclear war);
• the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and the heightening globalization of capital that followed in its wake. Among other things, this accelerated the uprooting of hundreds of millions of peasants, who were driven into the cities of the Third World, as well as the imperialist countries, as sources of low-wage labor;
• the U.S.’s strategic decision to launch the “war on terror”—which is in fact a war to construct an unchallenged and unchallengeable empire, and which also draws on and unleashes the most backward and reactionary forces in this society as its base of support.

All these developments have been decisive in setting the context in which the ruling class of this country has moved to deal with the still unresolved role of Black people within U.S. society, in the aftermath of the great upsurge of the 1960s, which, as we have spoken to here, shook this system and its ruling class to their foundations but which was not able to bring about a fundamental change through an actual revolution.

As the ’60s ended, concessions had barely been given before, in every sphere, they began to be snatched away. The ruling class brought in Nixon as president, and he pursued dual tactics. On the one hand, he declared himself in favor of “Black power” and built up some Black businesses in an effort to pacify a section of the middle class. But his overwhelmingly principal edge was repression. The sharpest blade of this was brought down against the Black Panther Party: hundreds of its members—including key leaders—were framed up and imprisoned, and over 20 of its members—again, including key leaders like Fred Hampton and George Jackson—were assassinated.  The Nixon regime also brutally repressed other rebellious sections of society—as seen in the murders of antiwar students at Kent State and the all-Black Jackson State in Mississippi.

Nixon also developed the “southern strategy” of the Republican Party, which nakedly appealed to the racism of unrepentant reactionary southern whites and gave these, and other reactionary forces, political legitimacy and initiative. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party made moves to bring a whole section of Black activists from the ’60s into the arena of bourgeois electoral politics. Both parties worked to develop “fronters”—“Black faces in high places” who purported to act as brokers between the masses and the powers, but in actual fact weighed down the people’s ability to resist through misleadership and lies.

The upheaval of the ’60s had once again powerfully presented a clear challenge to the ruling class to eliminate white supremacy and integrate Black people into society on an equal footing. Once again, this was NOT done. The promise of equality was once more betrayed—as it had been after the Civil War.  And once again, two things were at work: the needs of capital, which continued to gain advantage from racist discrimination and ghetto-ization of millions of African-Americans; and the necessity of the capitalists to not disrupt—and in fact to reassert and reinforce with a vengeance—the social glue of white supremacy—the ways in which the lie of the “master class” were so integral to so many people’s understanding of “being American.” This was important for the ruling class, particularly going into a volatile period when the U.S. was both coming off defeat in Vietnam and facing potentially far greater challenges abroad.

Meanwhile, major changes were developing in the ways in which Black people were “inserted into” the economic relations of society. The search for the highest possible profit, along with the increasing ability to invest capital all over the globe, resulted in the disappearance of many industrial jobs in the inner cities of the U.S. Some were shifted to the suburbs—where capitalists moved their facilities, in part to keep African-Americans out of their work force, since they considered them too rebellious—and some overseas. Between 1967 and 1987, the four cities of Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Detroit together lost over one million factory jobs—and this trend has only accelerated in the decades since!²⁷ At the same time, the radical transformations and plundering of the economies of the Third World drove new workers to the U.S. (and other imperialist countries)—with today an estimated 12 million of these workers in the U.S. lacking any legal papers, and hence living at the mercy of the capitalist ruling class.²⁸ Black people had, ever since the 1950s, made up a disproportionate section of the reserve army of the unemployed, in and out of work, often having to hustle to get by; today this has expanded and intensified to a whole other level.

The “War on Drugs,” the Gutting of Welfare and the Buildup of Religion

In 1969, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s top assistant, wrote in his diary that “[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” Thus was born the “war on drugs.”²⁹

Launched by Nixon, this “war on drugs” was taken to a whole other level by Reagan, who became president in 1980. It marked a strategic decision by the ruling class to maintain inner-city Black youth in desolate hyper-segregated neighborhoods which lacked jobs, and where education and health care resources had been severely cut. Even with the jobs that remained, discrimination was stepped up, as employers sought to avoid the “defiance” of Black youth who, in the words of Bob Avakian, were “not so pliant for capitalist exploitation.” Instead of providing better education and the promise of new opportunities for these youth, drugs would be allowed to flood the inner city (including with the connivance of the CIA), and many inner-city youth would be funneled into the drug trade—where they would then be vulnerable to constant harassment, arrest, imprisonment and social isolation. The rate of imprisonment exploded drastically³⁰ to the point where shuttling between the hard hustle of the streets and the harder times in prison became the dominant mode of life in many oppressed inner-city communities—a lifetime of lockdowns. Beginning at that time and continuing and intensifying up through today, whenever jobs open up in a major city, people will line up for blocks to even get a chance to apply. But for most of the time—and, in some areas, for most of the people—there is little choice other than the illegal economy.

On that basis, the “code of the streets” took significantly deeper root: that is, the rules of survival borne of the shark-like competition of the illegal economy set terms for inner-city youth more broadly, with the resulting horrific “Black-on-Black” violence and violence between Black and Latino youth that the mainstream, bourgeois commentators deplore, or pretend to deplore. And the bourgeoisie launched an incredible campaign of demonization of Black youth in particular, right down to inventing a category of “feral super-predators” to justify the massive wave of criminalization.

During this same period, the bourgeoisie launched a truly vicious campaign of demonization and humiliation against Black women on welfare. No insult was out of bounds for these racist bullies. By 1996 the “liberal” Bill Clinton had signed a bill that denied welfare to millions of people, especially women, and thrust millions of women into the labor market working for the bare minimum, often in health care or the very low-paying retail trade, and forcing many into various hustles and desperate acts, including prostitution, in order to survive and feed their children.^[31] By any measure, this was a massive social change—one which has been extremely underreported and underestimated.

Even the section of African-American people who made it out of the ghetto and into better-paying jobs during these last few decades face a life fraught with uncertainty and danger. Discrimination in every arena—credit, health care, education, and so on—continues, as do the cases of better-off Black people either being killed by the police for “driving while Black” or brought continually into serious danger of meeting that fate.

Going along with all this—and very consciously built up as part of this reactionary counter-offensive by the ruling class—has been the revival of the Black church and religious feeling among Black people. The influence of religion had in fact greatly ebbed during the latter part of the ’60s, when people raised their heads to fight for revolution and, as part of doing so, struggled to rationally figure out how the world really worked and how to change it. But with the ebb of the revolutionary struggle at the end of that decade, feelings of disorientation and despair arose among many.

Religious forces raced to fill that void with all kinds of erroneous, objectively harmful, and in some cases outright reactionary and deadly ideas: blaming yourself for being oppressed by this system; seeing capitalism as the way out of a madness that was caused by capitalism; strengthening male domination over women; substituting Bible stories and mythology for the actual truths of science (including evolution) and generally pushing the idea that people can’t really understand the world, and therefore can’t really go about changing it radically, and so must “leave it to the lord.” Whether these ideas were being run by Creflo Dollar, T.D. Jakes, or Louis Farrakhan (whose militant posing conceals a profoundly conservative—and in many ways outright reactionary—brand of nationalism), they all seriously confused, misled and demoralized people.

Today, as they did in slavery times, the capitalist ruling class builds up the church as the MAIN institution in the Black community. Government money that once went to public education and community arts is now channeled through preachers who align themselves with the government and with the Christian fascist movement that has been built up by Bush. Nowhere is this sharper than in the prisons. The struggle of the ’60s spurred among prisoners a thirst for knowledge and truth, and they fought for and won the right to take college courses and have access to literature even though they were locked up; today that is increasingly suppressed and flushed away while reactionary fundamentalist “prison ministries” are given total access to the minds of the literally millions of Black youth whom the system shuttles through these hellholes, with large numbers at any given time serving long sentences in degrading prison conditions.

While many religious people and clergy oppose, and can be united in struggle against, the outrages and crimes of this system, and important aspects of the oppression of Black people and others, there must be struggle and debate over the real character of the problem and solution, and the worldview and method that is necessary to win complete emancipation, and the real role of religion in relation to all that. Religion—both in general and particularly in the more recent period—plays the role of turning people away from seeking a real understanding of the actual causes and dynamics of things, as they really are, and the possibility of changing things in this real world. Even when more “progressive” versions of religion may encourage people to resist oppression (or particular aspects of oppression), it still promotes the idea that, when all is said and done, people themselves cannot change things by consciously seeking out and coming to an understanding of what is the problem—what is the actual cause of people’s situation and where oppression actually comes from—and waging a determined struggle on the basis of that understanding, but instead they must ultimately put things “in the hands of god” and rely on this non-existent god to give them the courage and strength to persevere. And things are worse, on a whole other level, with the reactionary religious viewpoints that openly uphold this system and the key pillars of its oppressive relations.

***

“Post-racial”? Please. We had better, all of us, face very squarely what has really gone down these past few decades. The hope and optimism of the ’60s, founded on the real potential that can be seen when people rise up, fight back and begin to seek out a radical alternative to this monstrous system…this hope has turned to despair in the face of decades of betrayal and brutal repression meted out by these rulers, decades of needless suffering and unforgivable squandering of human potential. Today the situation is even more dangerous. To take one stark example: there is the distinct possibility, and there are already definite trends and developments toward, a whole new era of “neo-slavery,” where a predominantly Black prison population is put to work for pennies a day, either to turn profits for capitalists or bring down costs for the state. And there are those in the ruling class making “policy suggestions” with genocidal implications—people like the prominent Republican (and fundamentalist Christian fascist) Pat Robertson who has advocated executing not only people convicted of murder, but any people who commit crimes that “put a stain” on society.

There is, in other words, a question, and a prospect, of betrayal yet again—on an even more horrific scale!

III. Pointing Forward: Revolution Is the Solution

We began by discussing the need to confront the full scope of the problem and to pinpoint the actual cause of it. We have shown that this oppression arose from and has developed intertwined with the workings of capital, as it consumes millions and millions of lives in blind expansion, and the conscious policies—economic, political and social—of the capitalists themselves. We have outlined the titanic struggles against national oppression (the oppression of Black people and other peoples who are discriminated against and held down, as nations, or national minorities) that this country has witnessed, and we have drawn the most essential lessons from those struggles—including that this system, even when given a chance to reform, has time and again betrayed Black people and demonstrated that, because of its very nature and essential dynamics, it cannot reform or be reformed. We have shown that far from being “post-racial” or even “improving,” the oppression of Black people continues in many horrendous forms and has been reinforced and intensified over the past period—with real prospects of even worse horror now posing themselves.

Which leads us now to the one solution to this horror, the one way out of this madness: revolution.

We discussed earlier the experience of the 1960s, and how it showed the potential for a revolutionary movement to arise and win tremendous support right here in the U.S. Today the world-weary “been there done that” types like to say, “Revolution? We tried that and it didn’t work.” These people have it upside down. The most amazing thing about the ’60s is that if a few things had broken a little differently…and if there had been a revolutionary leadership, a vanguard party, with both deep ties among the masses and a clearer idea of the goals of the revolution and a correct strategy for making one…well, who is to say that there couldn’t have been a revolution, or at least a serious attempt at one, right here “in the belly of the beast”? The most important thing about the ’60s is not that “it didn’t work” but that it went as far as it did—it left valuable lessons to analyze and absorb, and a standard to surpass in the struggle ahead.

But that gets to an even more important point: the revolution won’t be a simple revival of the movement back then. For one thing, while many things are the same—including the oppression of Black people as a central fact of American life and how that would be reflected in any revolutionary movement—many things, including some of the particular forms in which Black people are oppressed, have changed significantly in the four decades since the ‘60s. For another thing, the movement of that time had real limitations. Even the most radical forces in that movement—including Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party—were not clear on what the aims of a revolution should be, and on how really deeply seated in the capitalist system are the oppression of Black people and the other forms of oppression that people were rising up against.

For Malcolm, and to a large extent even the Panthers, the horizons of the struggle did not go beyond the liberation of Black people as a people, there was not a completely clear and correct understanding of how that liberation could actually be achieved, and there was at least a trend of “forcing America to keep its promises.” But there is a reason that America has continually betrayed “its promises”: the oppression of the African-American people forms an essential part of the fabric and functioning of U.S. society, and any attempt to uproot it would tear up the whole fabric of this society as it now exists. Further, the emancipation of the African-American people—who not only make up an oppressed nation within the larger society but also are, in very large numbers, members of the U.S. proletariat—is bound up with the revolution led by the proletariat for the full emancipation of all humanity, and in the current era can only be achieved as part of that revolution.

There was confusion when some of the formal legal barriers to advancement were removed, and a small section of the oppressed were able to move up, even if in limited ways, while the majority of the masses were ground into even worse conditions. The notions that were brought forward to explain this—that the movement failed or, worse yet, that the people failed to take advantage of “their new opportunities”—are wrong and extremely damaging.

The movement did not fail; it did not go far enough. And not only were the “doors to opportunity” never really or fully opened, even more fundamentally there were still thousands of steel threads, some visible and some hidden, that were deeply embedded in society and holding the masses of Black people down. Something more radical, more thoroughgoing, was and is needed. As we’ll get into shortly, a revolutionary power could quickly begin tearing up these threads, and set about mobilizing people to construct a society based on and heading toward true emancipation; and, as we have emphasized, the reason that the movement of the 1960s did not succeed in doing this was essentially because it did not reach the point of actually being able to overthrow the power of the capitalist-imperialist ruling class.

Beyond that, even to the extent that people were clear on the need for revolution and its goals, the revolutionary movement of the 1960s confronted big and complex problems. How to overcome the gap between the conditions faced by the deeply oppressed and those of the “soft middle” of American society, many of whom need to be won over in the course of revolutionary struggle? How to wage a revolutionary struggle, and bring into being a new society, that does not compromise with, but is determined to fully abolish and uproot, white supremacy and the subjugation of Black people and other oppressed peoples within the U.S., while on that basis and with those objectives winning and uniting in this revolution masses of people of all different nationalities, including large numbers of white people? How to actually keep the movement oriented toward making revolution, rather than getting sucked into just accepting reforms, in a period when the movement cannot yet go directly for revolution? How to go up against, and actually defeat, everything that the U.S. ruling class could and would throw against a revolutionary people?

Before these questions could be fully joined, let alone answered, the powers-that-be came at the movement with ferocious repression.  As noted earlier, over 20 members and leaders of the Black Panther Party were outright killed, and hundreds more were imprisoned, some for years and even decades. And while they did this, the powers also brought forward Black politicians who pushed the line that the oppression of Black people, along with the other running sores of this society, could be handled through reform. Last but not least—setting the larger framework for all this—the international situation changed from one where revolution was the main trend in the world into one in which the international communist revolution had suffered a serious, world-historic setback with the reversal of revolutionary rule in China in 1976, when Mao died and his followers were arrested and in many cases executed. This last blow caused tremendous confusion and demoralization, and coupled with the ideological attacks by the powers-that-be on the whole experience in China under Mao’s leadership and on revolution and communism in general, led many to—wrongly—give up on the possibility of revolution.

So the movement of the ’60s ebbed. But the essential lesson from that time must not be lost: it showed that revolution was not only necessary but also possible in the U.S., and it gave a sense of the key forces in that revolution and the main problems that would have to be solved in order to make that revolution.

Moreover, something extremely important did come out of that whole period. The most important thing, in fact, from a strategic standpoint. And that is a party that has actually developed and is continuing to develop the understanding to lead a successful revolution in this country—a party with a clear understanding of the goal of such a revolution, with a scientific understanding of the dynamics in society that could lead to a revolutionary situation and the forces that could be united to actively take up and in different ways support it, and with the leadership to see it through to victory.

This party—the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA—is led by Bob Avakian, a veteran of the ’60s who, as a matter of fact, first got turned toward revolution by working closely with the Black Panther Party. Avakian has gone on since the 1960s to both lead the revolutionary movement in practice over these past decades, and to guide that practice by taking on and answering the biggest questions before the whole revolutionary communist movement. These have involved major questions of science and philosophy, of knowing and changing the world; the meaning and great importance of proletarian, revolutionary internationalism; the whole history of the communist movement and the experience of the socialist revolutions, summing up and firmly upholding their achievements as well as going deeply into their shortcomings, and pointing the way forward to a conception of socialist society that breaks new ground and provides guidance for a whole new stage of communist revolution; and strategic questions involved in actually successfully making revolution in a country like this. A major element in Avakian’s work during this whole period has been a deep analysis of the history and situation of Black people in the U.S., drawing on and synthesizing the serious work and research of scholars on this crucial question, as well as continually returning to the ideas of the revolutionary leaders of the ’60s, grappling with both their insights as well as their limitations and drawing lessons deeply from that whole period.³²

With the leadership of Bob Avakian, this party has developed the understanding of the kind of revolution that would be needed in a country like this…the kinds of forces that would have to be united, and how that could be done—including the ways to bridge the great gulfs between the people in this current society…the kinds of political struggle and activity that would have to be undertaken by the revolutionaries to move the opportunity for revolution closer…and the ways that a revolutionary force would have to take on the imperialists so that they would have a real chance to win. These crucial questions are, of course, extremely complex and we can only touch on them here—but we urge everyone who is grappling with those questions to take up and get deeply into the pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation.

A Communist Revolution

One of the questions gone deeply into in that pamphlet is this: the goal of this revolution must be the emancipation of all of humanity.

Many will come into the revolution because they’ve been denied the ability to fulfill their potential, and have had their hopes and their spirits held down, mocked by the slamming doors of this system. Some will be drawn toward the revolution out of feelings of revenge and a lashing out against the wrongs that have been done to them and their people. That anger can propel people toward revolution—and outrage at oppression must and will be a key part of any revolution—but this must be led, channeled and transformed into a determination to fight against and uproot all oppressive and degrading relations among people, and all forms of exploitation of one part of society by another.

Some will come into the revolution wanting liberation for Black people, or an end to the brutal oppression and degradation of women, or an end to the oppression of immigrants and to the domination of the countries they come from by American imperialism. Some will come to revolution because of desperate concern for the destruction of the planet wrecked by capitalism’s wars and savaging of the earth’s resources. All these—and many more outrages—are fuel for the revolution. But each of these crimes—as towering as each is in its own right, and as central as solving each is to the revolution—is an expression of something deeper still. Solving any of these requires attacking the problem at its roots—that is, getting at and getting rid of the capitalist system as a whole. And, by looking deeply into the roots of this problem, the solution also emerges.

This same system that arose with and nourished itself on human slavery, and that has continued the legacy of that crime down to today, is a worldwide system that constantly generates brutal wars for the expansion of empire, that consumes and destroys the lives of countless children worldwide, that subjugates women, one half of humanity…and all to satisfy the dictates of a system whose overriding concern is the endless drive to accumulate ever more profit, and whose only commandment is “expand or die.” Look at the towering crimes that are carried out over and over again—from the brutal invasions and wars of aggression and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan today, to Vietnam a generation ago, and who knows where tomorrow. This system of worldwide plunder and enforced needless misery must be brought to an end.

But the rise of capitalism brought forward something else as well: the means to end that system of pitiless exploitation and mass murder. For as capitalism developed, so too did the mode of production—that is, the means through which people come together to produce the material requirements of life such as food, shelter, and the ability to raise the next generation. Under capitalism, the means of carrying out this production become socialized: instead of being worked by individuals, the means of production (technology, land and raw materials, etc.) can now only be utilized by employing vast collectivities of people to work them, in networks that stretch out over the entire planet. With that, capitalism has also generated the emergence of a new class—the proletariat—the class that collectively works those vast means of production.

For this reason, the proletarian revolution is not about getting a better life for particular individuals, or giving individual proletarians a chance to “get more”—which must inevitably come at the expense of others. The proletariat, as a class, cannot achieve its emancipation by somehow dividing up the means of production among individuals, or even individuals grouped collectively into some apparently autonomous units—for, if this were done, there would once again emerge a situation in which people or groups are thrown into competition and some get ahead at the expense of others, leading, over not so long a time, to new oppressive divisions among the people, and new sets of exploiters and exploited. Instead, the means of production that the proletariat collectively works must become the collective property of all of society.

The tasks of this revolution are many and complex. The revolution must transform society’s underlying and foundational class and production relations (that is, who owns the means of production, how do people relate to each other in carrying out production, and how is the product distributed). The revolution must be carried forward to make the means of production the common property of the people, and this must happen ultimately on a world scale. The revolution must uproot and transform all the institutions that defend and reinforce class distinctions—the armies and police and the ways in which the government is administered, as well as the media and culture. This whole revolutionary process will have to be one in which people increasingly take up the all-round tasks of running society and in which they radically transform their ways of thinking and morality, to rupture with the old capitalist outlooks of “looking out for number one,” “waiting for saviors,” “our nation first,” etc. This revolution has to overcome the distinctions between mental and manual labor and the oppressive character of that division, as well as the oppressive domination of women by men—institutions and relations that arose thousands of years ago, along with the development of class society itself—the division between exploiters and exploited and the rule of the exploiters over the exploited.

This underscores why, while the revolution must address and heal the many scars of the past, it must aim higher than “the first shall be last and the last shall be first,” or higher even than “equality”—it must aim to get past the conditions where there is a “first” and a “last” and where people measure their situation against that of other people. This revolution’s aim must be a truly communist society in which a guiding principle would be “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—a society in which, as our Party’s Constitution puts it:

[P]eople would still have to work together to produce the necessities of life and deal with nature and our obligations to each other. But it would mean that people will be free to do that in a way that does NOT divide us into hostile competing forces…free of the enforced ignorance that is so integral to today’s world…and free, finally, to continually develop a true world society of human beings who increasingly flourish, not only as individuals but most fundamentally in their mutual relations and interactions with each other.³³

This will truly be a global human community, without borders and national divisions but full of human diversity and greatly unleashed creativity and initiative, within an overall cooperative framework.

If the revolution does not set its sights to these goals and these heights, then things will turn back to one form of exploitation or another, and the outmoded and oppressive institutions that go with exploitation will regenerate.  The nightmare will continue.

This understanding of its goals has to be at the heart and core of the revolutionary movement. This is the communist revolution. Its first step must be the overthrow of the state machinery of the capitalist-imperialists, once a revolutionary situation has emerged. This overthrow of the old, oppressive system must lead immediately to the establishment of a new state power that serves the revolutionary interests of the proletariat in emancipating all of humanity.

Imagine: The New Revolutionary State Power
and the Abolition of the Oppression of Black People

What could this new revolutionary power do? And how in particular would it move in relation to the oppression of Black people?

This new power would from the very beginning introduce and back up a whole different set of economic relations—based on moving forward to eliminating class divisions and other oppressive relations, and the institutions and ideas that flow from and reinforce them. This revolutionary state would take over the major means of production (the factories, land and mines, machinery and other technology, etc.) that were produced by the masses but have been appropriated—owned and controlled—by the imperialists as their private source of wealth and power. It would convert these into socialist state property and use them to meet the needs of the people and to transform the social relations (the relations not only among individuals but among different groupings of people) in line with the goal of communism set out above. This new power would end the domination and parasitic plunder of other nations by the U.S., and would instead support revolution around the world.

The revolutionary power would lead and unleash the people to wipe out the age-old subjugation of women—moving immediately to prevent rape (with the fundamental aim of finally ending this inhuman outrage altogether), and to end the suppression and stigmatizing of abortion, to challenge and uproot the whole notion of women as the subordinates, or virtual slaves, of men and breeders of their children, and all the abuse and degradation of women, in forms traditional and “modern,” that the capitalist system, and all systems of exploitation, embody and that exploiting classes encourage or allow to run rampant. Breaking the chains of the insane profit-driven logic of capitalist “development,” this new power would promote an appreciation of and would act to preserve the wonderful diversity of nature—rather than destroying it. It would foster—in the media, in the educational system, and through encouraging all sorts of initiatives from the masses themselves in the arts, etc.—an understanding of the different histories of the oppressed peoples in this country and throughout the world and respect for the diverse cultures, while also continually exposing and shining a penetrating light on the common enemy that they have shared and pointing the way forward to a world community of peoples—a world community that encompasses and draws sustenance from great and dynamic cultural diversity.

This new state power would NOT deploy armies of sneering, brutalizing, murdering police in the neighborhoods—police who delight in humiliating people and breaking their spirit, constantly reminding them of their subjugated status. Those police forces would be broken up and the biggest criminals and abusers among them punished for their crimes against the people or otherwise dealt with by the new legal system reflecting and serving the new society. Instead, this new state power would be able to remove the main causes of crime and antagonism between the people, and it would create new security forces that would exist to safeguard the rights and interests of the masses of people and to help resolve contradictions among the people in a non-antagonistic way, without violent and destructive conflicts.

This new power would not be like a machine that you turn on and then passively sit back while “it does its stuff.” This new power would instead depend on, and increasingly draw forward, the active and conscious participation of the people themselves. It would work to break down the distinctions between mental and manual labor, drawing into intellectual life those who had in capitalist society been “locked out of” working with ideas, while also encouraging intellectuals and artists to pursue their work. While the new socialist power would suppress the former capitalist-imperialists and not allow them to organize for their return, and while there would be clear leadership with a clear program, this new power would at the same time unleash an unprecedented diversity of initiatives and views, of dissent and ferment, even of opposition to socialism itself. At times, the new power would risk going to the brink of being “drawn and quartered” by all the dissent and the many different kinds of initiative and activity. But, led correctly, this ferment will not only give people a sense that they have “air to breathe”—it would ultimately strengthen the revolutionary power—as a revolutionary power. This is because only with such vigorous social ferment and dissent can the masses, and their leadership, come to learn all that they will need to know about the underlying forces in society and in nature, and the most correct way to go forward. And only through this process can the revolutionary power itself undergo constant and necessary transformation. Only dissent and diversity of initiatives on this unprecedented scale, given leadership by the vanguard party, could give the necessary “richness” to the process of the masses themselves coming to understand and more and more consciously transform the whole world, in the direction of a whole different level and kind of human freedom.

Let’s imagine what this new power could do about some of the most agonizing problems that can NOT be solved by the present system. Let’s take the glaring contradiction of the inner-city streets where the crying need for decent housing, schools, health care, and cultural and recreation facilities exists side-by-side with young people who haunt those same street corners, and can find no other employment but the drug trade. Under capitalism nothing can be done unless it serves the further accumulation of capital and the political interests of the capitalist ruling class, and this requirement stands as a barrier between the work that society needs and the masses who could do it. So either these neighborhoods are left to rot, or they are transformed by capital into “high-end” housing which is more profitable—and which ends up driving the basic proletarian masses out.

The new state power would change all that overnight. The new state power would channel resources into these neighborhoods. But this would not be a top-down favor, or political patronage. This would be a process in which the masses themselves had not just the resources but the power to debate and discuss and help determine the kinds of housing and other facilities that were needed and should be built. It would involve proletarians working with architects and builders and people with other skills—even as people from among the masses were also learning these skills. The youth would not only have jobs, but meaningful jobs that would make a difference in the lives of the community and the society overall, and that would draw on, and further develop, the ingenuity, daring and leadership that is now either suppressed or channeled into destructiveness of the “thug life.” And it would do all this in alliance with and involving people from other strata of society who also have a desire to do something meaningful and skills to share, in a process full of learning on all sides, as well as comradely struggle.

What difference would state power make? Think back again, to the example of Hurricane Katrina and how this system not only left people to die but then used the army and police to threaten, arrest, shoot and even kill those who risked their lives in toxic floodwaters to get children out of the situation, to help people in dire need, to help others get to safe ground, etc. When natural disasters like Katrina happen after the revolution, the new state power would not only immediately marshal the resources of government to deal with such natural disasters, it would call forward, build on, and give leadership to—and learn from—the initiative that ordinary people from all walks of life want to take when such things happen.

Or take another literally killing contradiction of this current system: the sharp conflict between Black and Latino masses. The driving compulsions of capitalist accumulation uprooted Africans and brought them in chains to America as slaves, and then put them through 350 years of hell.  The same relations of capital drove the conquistadors from Europe to Mexico and South America to colonize and subjugate the native inhabitants (the ones that they did not wipe out altogether); and those same compulsions resulted in the later subjugation by the United States of Mexico and other parts of Latin America, the plunder of those countries, and the eventual driving of millions of people from those countries into the U.S., desperately seeking any work they could get.

The spontaneous workings of these same capitalist relations, coupled with the conscious decisions of the capitalists themselves, have pitted these peoples against each other. Immigrants are put to work in terrible jobs and at the same time subjected to fascist-like repression just for living—and as this is done, they are told that Black people are too lazy to take those jobs and should be scorned, and are further told that if they work hard and keep their heads down and suck up to this country’s rulers, proving that they believe in the “American dream,” they will get ahead. Meanwhile, Black people in many parts of the country are largely thrown to the side by this same capitalist class that pumped out their labor for so many years, generation after generation, and are told that “the Mexicans are taking your jobs,” and that Black people should quit being so defiant and instead stand up for their status as “true Americans.” All the while the education system and media reinforce these divisions—on the one hand, hiding from the different peoples how they have, in many ways, shared a similar fate, brought about by oppression at the hands of a common enemy; and on the other, constantly framing things in such a way so as to aggravate the divisions caused by the capitalist system, and how it sets people against each other, including through competition for jobs and resources. While important strides can and must be made in changing this, in developing unity among exploited and oppressed people of all different nationalities in building the revolutionary movement, these divisions cannot be fully overcome without finally getting rid of capitalism and bringing a radically different world into being.

But let’s imagine a state power in which the economic system provides jobs for everyone able to work, enabling them to take part in providing the tremendous needs of society and supporting revolutionary transformation around the world. Let’s imagine a state power which fosters exchanges of experience and ideas among the masses. Let’s imagine a state power which upholds and gives increasingly flowering expression to cultural diversity in the media and arts and educational system, all in an atmosphere that brings out human community and commonality. Let’s imagine a state power that provides forms of self-government and autonomy for the formerly oppressed nationalities, and provides resources that enable those autonomous areas to flourish, with vibrant educational and cultural institutions and real self-government in other spheres…but which does not require people of those nationalities to live in such areas, and which promotes integration broadly throughout society. Let’s imagine a state power that gives initiative to and backs up the people combating the racist, white supremacist ideas and ways of relating that will have been handed down from the old system, a state power that fosters the breaking down of barriers and exposing the false and hurtful myths that people have been taught about each other, and a state power that—as opposed to today, when racist poison spews out on the airwaves—uses the media and schools to set a whole different atmosphere.

Let’s imagine this—and let’s do more than just imagine. Let’s understand that such things have been done where communist revolutions have taken place and the formerly exploited proletariat has wielded state power, or that we have learned more fully, through that experience, the need and importance of making these kinds of radical changes. And let’s begin working to prepare for that revolution, which will finally take state power out of the hands of the oppressors, and create a new state power, in the hands of the masses, led by their vanguard party.

In all this, the existence of a revolutionary-communist solid core that comes at everything as “emancipators of humanity” will be crucial. This solid core will need to anchor and guide the whole revolutionary process, firmly drawing the links between every stage of struggle and the goal of all-the-way communist emancipation. Of course, this solid core is not a once-and-for-all, never-changing thing; it would be constantly developing and going through changes at each stage of the revolutionary process. This core must begin to be forged today, through the process of hastening and preparing for a revolutionary situation, and then developed further—in a whole different context—in the situation where millions of people are rising up to seize power, and then further still and in a far greater way in the context of the new revolutionary society, in which it will be a guiding principle, and something actively encouraged, that everyone who yearns for emancipation should take up and concern themselves with the problems of the revolution and the radical transformation of society as a whole. A crucial part of carrying out this transformation is grasping clearly the centrality of abolishing all forms of national oppression as a cornerstone of achieving a communist world; and also crucial in all this is that all those motivated by wanting to see an end, at long last, to the brutal and seemingly unending forms of oppression of Black people and other oppressed peoples, must increasingly grasp how this can only be achieved in the context of emancipating all of humanity and moving human society to a whole new era.

How Could Such a Revolution Develop?
What Would It Look Like?

This is a huge question, one demanding a serious and scientific answer. Again, we can only touch on this here and urge people to get into Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation. But we can and will say a few essential things:

A revolution in a country like the U.S. would require a major qualitative change in the nature of the objective situation. Such a revolution could only take place once society as a whole were in the grip of a profound crisis, owing fundamentally to the nature and workings of the system itself. Such a revolution also requires the emergence of a revolutionary people, numbering in the millions and millions and conscious of the need for revolutionary change and determined to fight for it. As an important statement of the RCP has put it: “In this struggle for revolutionary change, the revolutionary people and those who lead them will be confronted by the violent repressive force of the machinery of the state which embodies and enforces the existing system of exploitation and oppression; and in order for the revolutionary struggle to succeed, it will need to meet and defeat that violent repressive force of the old exploitative, and oppressive order.”³⁴

Trying to jump off a revolution before those conditions exist—trying to initiate, or advocate, isolated acts of violence by individuals or small groups, divorced from the masses of people and attempting to substitute for a revolutionary movement of masses of people—is very wrong and extremely harmful. As the Party also pointed out in the statement just cited, “It will aid the extremely repressive forces of the existing system in their moves to isolate, attack and crush those, both revolutionary forces and broader forces of political opposition, who are working to build mass political resistance and to achieve significant, and even profound, social change through the politically-conscious activity and initiative of the masses of people.”³⁵

But that does NOT mean that the movement should just busy itself in fighting for reforms while it waits for a better situation to develop. This too has proven deadly to the hopes of the people. Instead, the movement must “hasten while awaiting” the development of the opportunity for revolution. This “hastening while awaiting” involves a whole range of activity that raises the ideological and political consciousness of people and builds massive political resistance to the most essential outrages of the system, keeping the people “tense” to seize on any opening; in short, preparing minds and organizing forces for revolution. 

In thinking about this big question, it’s important to recall the points we made about the ’60s. These include:

• the ways in which millions of people, from many different parts of society, were drawn forward to mass militant resistance and to favoring revolution;
• the ways in which that struggle, reacting back and forth with things that were happening internationally, to a significant extent threw open the question of the “legitimacy” of the rulers of this system and put them on the defensive, revealing weaknesses that are not apparent in “normal times”;
• and the fact out of those times a party arose which, with the leadership of its Chairman, Bob Avakian, has gone on to confront the questions that stymied the movement back then and set a basic framework for answering those questions.

The social make-up today poses many different challenges than it did in the ‘60s. Let’s take one big difference—the far greater predominance of the illegal economy in the inner cities today, and the corresponding dominance of the “code of the streets” and the “gangsta” thing. The kinds of hopes of the movement that inspired people in the 1960s seem distant to many of the youth of today—again, both because hopes for revolution and a radically different and better world were temporarily dashed and because even those hopes that were realized (the removal of some legal barriers, etc.) proved unable to deal with the larger problems caused by the system.

On one level, that makes it harder to mobilize many youth today in struggle against the system. But this also points to the need to go much deeper than any struggles of the past, no matter how inspiring, and to go far beyond their horizons and demands. As shown earlier in regard to Katrina and the contradictions between African-Americans and Latinos, the proletarian revolution and the revolutionary state power this will bring into being can deal with these problems, relatively quickly; the reality of this fact has to be brought out for masses of people in powerful and vivid ways, repeatedly, boldly and from many different angles—with examples that point to the killing contradictions that people face every day and that show, in a living way, how these contradictions can and will be dealt with in a radically different way, in accordance with the common interests of the masses of people, once the revolution has established a new state power that embodies and furthers those interests.

On another level, this makes it all the more important to struggle sharply with youth, and others, to get into the revolution and draw out the aspirations for freedom which exist, but have been stomped on and nearly buried by this system. The challenge has to be made: get out of trying to make it in “the game” which the system has given you to play and in which you’ll never be more than a pawn, used against the very people you come from; get into something that can finally bring an end to the long dark night brought down on people by that system. Rupture with the kill or be killed mentality and the mind-set that comes with “the game”—and unleash what “the game” has suppressed: the aspirations for freedom and emancipation for all people that have been buried but not killed…and the deep desire to turn your anger and daring where, and against whom, it should and must be turned to realize those aspirations. Get out of seeking to get over on and even killing people just like you—and get into fighting the power today, as part of getting ready for this revolution, and as part of transforming the people to make that revolution.

There were glimpses of this potential in Hurricane Katrina, when people in “the life” sometimes risked all to save someone from a different “set,” and in some of what happened in the 1992 L.A. Rebellion, when gang antagonisms were temporarily put to the side. There was more than a glimpse in the ’60s, when people like George Jackson broke out of the criminal life and into the revolutionary movement. And there must be much more of that in the revolutionary movement today—brought forward by the vanguard party of revolution, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and all who come to deeply understand that a radically different future is possible, with this becoming in turn a tremendous force of inspiration for millions more…not in some scheme to “stop the violence” that cannot work in this system, and not in a gang truce that can never be more than a truce…but in a revolutionary movement aiming to change everything.

Yes, there are difficult challenges in building a revolutionary movement today. But to think that one can emancipate humanity without confronting challenges this tough and far tougher is to turn away from reality. And that we cannot do, and do not need to do. We have the tools to scientifically understand the world and society, to figure out why things happen and how to change them, and to bring out of that a new world; we have to join together and use them.

To be very clear: none of this will come easy. It will entail tremendous struggle and sacrifice, and it will only come about amidst great upheaval and even destruction—brought about largely by the forces seeking to keep in effect the old order of oppression and exploitation—which will of necessity be part of finally overthrowing and doing away with this system. But this struggle and sacrifice can, at long last, serve to completely sweep away the chains of oppression that have bound so many for so long, and bring about a true emancipation. Such a revolution would be greeted with joy in every corner of the world and inspire hundreds of millions, throughout the globe, to take up this cause.

IV. The Challenge We Must Meet

Summing up:

1) The USA arose on the foundation of the genocidal theft of Native American (Indian) lands, and the enslavement of African people. Since that time, the oppression of Black people has been essential to the functioning of this system, changing as that system has changed, but always deeply woven into the very fabric of society. White supremacy and capitalism have proven to be so closely intertwined that, even when millions have risen up, time and again, to fight the oppression of African-American people, the system has in the end responded by retrenching and reinforcing, even if modifying the forms of, that oppression. Today’s situation is extreme and dire; and any solution that leaves capitalism intact is no solution at all and, indeed, a damaging dead end.

2) There can be a revolution in this country and this revolution can finally uproot and put an end to the long nightmare of oppression and degradation that has been the lot of Black people in particular, along with many, many others, in this country, throughout its history. During the 1960s, a movement that arose from the struggle of African-American people for freedom ended up spreading throughout society and bringing every pillar of this oppressive capitalist-imperialist system into question and under fire; it seriously shook the foundations of imperialist rule. That it did not go far enough must not obscure what it DID accomplish and powerfully demonstrate; and today a party and a leader which locates its roots in that era but which has developed the theory to meet the challenges of this time not only exists, but is actively working to bring forward a new revolutionary movement.

3) This Party has a deep understanding of what kind of revolution must be made, of how the new state power can back up the masses in transforming every sphere of society and in finally overcoming the wounds and scars of capitalism and all forms of enslavement and degradation—including the oppression of Black people—and how all that can and must be linked to the largest goal of all: the emancipation of all humanity from the chains of class society and all the oppressive divisions, all the institutions and ways of thinking that are bound up with and reinforce those chains.

We are determined to do everything we can to hasten the day when such a revolution can finally be made, and fundamental change can begin for real. The challenge now is posed to you who read this.

Having taken this journey so far, will you now shut your eyes and turn away?

Or will you join with us in deeply grappling with how to bring this about, taking up with us the urgent questions of closing the gap between what could, and must, be brought into being and the obstacles we face today, and uniting in common struggle to overturn this monstrosity and take a giant leap for humanity’s emancipation?

 

ENDNOTES

1. Amadou Diallo: “New York: The Cold Blooded Police Murder of Amadou Diallo—41 bullets end the life of an African immigrant,” Revolutionary Worker #994, February 14, 1999

Nicholas Heyward Jr.: “Interview with Nicholas Heyward Sr. on Oct. 22: ‘There’s So Many Innocent People Being Killed by the Police,’” Revolution #66, October 22, 2006

Sean Bell:: “Cops Fire Over 50 Shots, Protests Planned—NYPD Guns Down Sean Bell on his Wedding Day,” Revolution #71, December 3, 2006

Tyisha Miller: “Riverside, California: The Police Execution of Tyisha Miller,” “Revolutionary Worker #989, January 10, 1999

Abner Louima: “The System in Effect: The Police Torture of Abner Louima,” Revolutionary Worker #925, September 28, 1997 [back]

2. See Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume 108, Number 5, March 2003, pp. 937-75. Interviews with white managers are in When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson, Knopf, New York, 1996. See also “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2003. [http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf] [back]

3. See Community Service Society of New York press release, February 23, 2004. [http://www.cssny.org/news/releases/2004_0223.html] [back]

4. See Douglas Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2007 and Amaad Rivera, Brenda Cotto-Escalera, Anisha Desai, Jeannette Huezo, and Dedrick Muhammad (Institute for Policy Studies), “State of the Dream 2008: Foreclosed.” United for a Fair Economy, January 15, 2008. [http://www.faireconomy.org/files/StateOfDream_01_16_08_Web.pdf] [back]

5. Tavis Smiley, editor, The Covenant with Black America, Third World Press, Chicago, 2006, as cited from David Satcher’s essay at the book’s website covenantwithblackamerica.com. [http://www.covenantwithblackamerica.com/covenant/health_wellbeing/] [back]

6. Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, “Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation, and the Need for New Integration Strategies,” Civil Rights Project, UCLA, August 2007. [http://www.civilrights.org/assets/pdfs/aug-2007-desegregation-report.pdf] [back]

7. “The present per-pupil spending level in the New York City schools is $11,700, which may be compared with a per-pupil spending level in excess of $22,000 in the well-to-do suburban district of Manhasset, Long Island.” Jonathan Kozol, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid,” Harper’s, September 2005. [back]

8. “Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006”, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin. [http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pjim06.pdf] [back]

9. Massey, Categorically Unequal [back]

10. September 5, 2005, Barbara Bush told NPR’s MarketPlace program, “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2005/09/05/PM200509051.html][back]

11. Charles Babington, “Some GOP Legislators Hit Jarring Notes in Addressing Katrina,” Washington Post, September 10, 2005. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-yn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090901930.html] [back]

12. William H. Frey, Audrey Singer, and David Park, “Resettling New Orleans: The First Full Picture from the Census.” The Brookings Institution, September 12, 2007. [http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2007/07katrinafreysinger.aspx] [back]

13. Julia B. Isaacs, “Economic Mobility of Black and White Families,” The Brookings Institution, November 2007.[http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2007/11_blackwhite_isaacs.aspx][back]

14. Milton Meltzer, Slavery: A World History. Da Capo Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993. [back]

15. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, Oxford University Press US, New York and Research Triangle, North Carolina, 2006, p. 99. [back]

16. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Penguin, Viking, New York, 1985. [back]

17. Bob Avakian, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, RCP Publications, Chicago, 2008, pp. 16-17. [http://revcom.us/Comm_JeffDem/Jeffersonian_Democracy.html] [back]

18. Abraham Lincoln’s Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862. [http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm] [back]

19. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name, The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Doubleday, New York, 2008. [back]

20. Between 1882 and 1964 the Tuskegee Institute kept records of 4,742 people being lynched, 3,445 were Black. Statistics from the Tuskegee Institute Archives, posted at University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law’s website. [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html] [back]

21. Dolores Barclay and Allen G. Breed, “Torn from the Land: Landownership made blacks target of violence and murder,” an Associated Press investigation, December 3, 2001.
[http://www.theauthenticvoice.org/Torn_From_The_LandII.html][back]

22. See Bob Avakian’s searing account of lynching and its effects in the “Postcards of the Hanging” section (Disk 1, Session 1) of the DVD Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, Three Q Productions, Chicago, 2004. [http://threeqvideo.com/] Also see Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, andBarclay and Breed, “Torn From the Land: Black Americans’ Farmland Taken Through Cheating, Intimidation, Even Murder,” Associated Press, December 2, 2001, [http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1202-03.htm] and Sheryl Gay Stolberg. “Senate Issues Apology Over Failure on Lynching Law,” New York Times, June 14, 2005. [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/politics/14lynch.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22senate%20issues%20apology%20over%20failure%20on%20lynching%20law%22&st=cse&oref=slogin] [back]

23. See “40 Lives for Freedom” at the Southern Policy Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center’s website. [http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/static/40lives.pdf][back]

24. “Harlem (2),” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. [back]

25. “Between 1964 and 1971, civil disturbances (as many as 700, by one count) resulted in large numbers of injuries, deaths, and arrests, as well as considerable property damage, concentrated in predominantly black areas.” See “How the 1960s’ Riots Hurt African-Americans,” National Bureau of Economic Research. [http://www.nber.org/digest/sep04/w10243.html] [back]

26. See Notes on Political Economy: Our Analysis of the 1980s, Issues of Methodology, and The Current World Situation, by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, RCP Publications, Chicago, 2000, and Raymond Lotta with Frank Shannon, America in Decline, Banner Press, Chicago, 1984.[back]

27. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears, Knopf, New York, 1997; pp. 111-146, Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1996, p. 95; Mike Davis, City of Quartz, Knopf, New York, 1992. Cited in “Black Youth and the Criminalization of a Generation Part 2: The Political Economy of Racism and Criminalization,” Revolutionary Worker #972, September 6, 1998.[back]

28. Jeffrey S. Passel, “Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S: Estimates Based on the March 2005 Current Population Survey” Pew Hispanic Center, March 7, 2006 [http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=61][back]

29. “Haldeman Diary Shows Nixon Was Wary of Blacks and Jews,” New York Times, May 18, 1994. [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CE2DA1438F93BA25756C0A962958260][back]

30. “Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population.” The JFA Institute, November 2007. [ http://www.jfa-associates.com/publications/srs/UnlockingAmerica.pdf][back]

31. It is difficult to find a unified estimate of how many people these “reforms” forced into the workforce. The website Almanac of Policy Issues says that in 1994 5 million families were on welfare and after the new welfare law passed the number dropped to 2.6 million families—this was taken from a website called Almanac of Policy Issues. [www.policyalmanac.org/social_welfare/welfare.shtml] The right-wing Manhattan Institute wrote: “The decline in welfare dependency since then has exceeded even the most optimistic forecasts. Between August 1996 and December 2001, caseloads plummeted. The number of families on welfare declined by 52%. Among families headed by a single mother—the predominant category of recipients—the change was truly extraordinary. Between 1988 and 1993, the welfare participation rate of this group ranged between 30 and 35%. By 2000, it had fallen to 13%; and in 2001, despite the weakened economy, it declined to 10%.” “Gaining Ground, Moving Up: the Change in the Economic Status of Single Mothers under Welfare Reform,” June O’Neill and M. Anne Hill, Center for Civic Innovation, Manhattan Institute, March 2003. By any estimation, this was a massive social change—one which has been extremely under-reported and under-appreciated.[back]

32. Bob Avakian, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, Insight Press, Chicago, 2005. For more writings and downloadable talks by Bob Avakian, go to bobavakian.net. [http://bobavakian.net/]. See also “The Crossroads We Face, The Leadership We Need” in Revolution, #84, April 8, 2007. [http://revcom.us/avakian/crossroads][back]

33. Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, RCP Publications, Chicago, 2008, p. 4. [http://revcom.us/Constitution/constitution.html][back]

34. “Some Crucial Points of Revolutionary Orientation – in Opposition to Infantile Posturing and Distortions of Revolution,” in Revolution and Communism: A Foundation And Strategic Orientation, a Revolution pamphlet, May 1, 2008, p. 91. [http://revcom.us/a/102/crucial-points-en.html][back]

35. Ibid., p. 91.[back]

Have Your Say: The Oppression of Black People, the Crimes of this System, and the Revolution We Need
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Lies, Crimes and Cover-ups - Human Rights Watch in Venezuela

Monday, September 29th, 2008

By James Petras | Human Rights Watch, a US-based group claiming to be a non-governmental organization, but which is in fact funded by government-linked quasi-private foundations and a Congressional funded political propaganda organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, has issued a report “A Decade Under Chavez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela” (9/21/2008 hrw.org). The publication of the “Report” directed by Jose Miguel Vivanco and sub-director Daniel Walkinson led to their expulsion from Venezuela for repeated political-partisan intervention in the internal affairs of the country.

A close reading of the “Report” reveals an astonishing number of blatant falsifications and outright fabrications, glaring deletions of essential facts, deliberate omissions of key contextual and comparative considerations and especially a cover-up of systematic long-term, large-scale security threats to Venezuelan democracy posed by Washington.

We will proceed by providing some key background facts about HRW and Vivanco in order to highlight their role and relations to US imperial power. We will then comment on their methods, data collection and exposition. We will analyze each of HRW charges and finally proceed to evaluate their truth and propaganda value.

Background on Vivanco and HRW

Jose Miguel Vivanco served as a diplomatic functionary under the bloody Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet between 1986-1989, serving no less as the butcher’s rabid apologist before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. His behavior was particularly egregious during the regime’s brutal repression of a mass popular uprising in the squatter settlements of Santiago in 1986-1987. With the return of electoral politics (democracy) in Chile, Vivanco took off to Washington where he set up his own NGO, the Center for Justice and International Law, disguising his right-wing affinities and passing himself off as a ‘human rights’ advocate. In 1994 he was recruited by former US federal prosecutor, Kenneth Roth, to head up the ‘Americas Division’ of Human Rights Watch. HRW demonstrated a real capacity to provide a ‘human rights’ gloss to President Clinton’s policy of ‘humanitarian imperialism’. Roth promoted and supported Clinton’s two-month bombing, destruction and dismemberment of Yugoslavia. HRW covered up the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Kosovo by the notorious Albanian terrorists and gangsters of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the unprecedented brutal transfer of over 200,000 ethnic Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia. HRW backed Clinton’s sanctions against Iraq leading to the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children. Nowhere did the word ‘genocide’ ever appear in reference to the US Administrations massive destruction of Iraq causing hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.

HRW supported the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan where Kenneth Roth advised the US generals on how to secure the colonial occupation by avoiding massive civilian deaths. In words and deeds, HRW has played an insidious role as backer and adviser of US imperial intervention, providing the humanitarian ideological cover while issuing harmless and inconsequential reports criticizing ‘ineffective’ excesses, which ‘undermine’ imperial dominance.

HRW most notorious intervention was its claim that Israel’s murderous destruction of the Palestinian city of Jenin was ‘not genocidal’ and thus provided the key argument for the US and Israeli blocking of a UN humanitarian mission and investigative report. As in all of its ‘research’ their report was deeply colored by selective interviews and observations which understated the brutality and killings of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli state – even while the fanatics who run the major pro-Israel organizations accused HRW of bias for even mentioning a single murdered Palestinian.

Method

HRW currently makes a big play of its widespread interviews of a broad cross section of Venezuelan political and civic society government and opposition groups, as well as its consultation of most available documents. Yet the Report on Venezuela does not reflect anything of the sort. There is no careful, straightforward presentation of the government’s elaboration and justification for its actions, no academic critiques of the anti-democratic actions of anti-Chavez mass media; no discussion of the numerous journalists’ accounts which expose systematic US intervention. The Report simply records and reproduces uncritically the claims, arguments and charges of the principle publicists of the opposition while dismissing out of hand any documented counter-claims. In other words, Vivanco and company act as lawyers for the opposition rather than as serious and objective investigators pursuing a balanced and convincing evaluation of the status of democracy in Venezuela.

The political propaganda intent of Vivanco-HRW is evident in the timing of their ‘investigations’ and the publication of their propaganda screeds. Each and every previous HRW hostile ‘report’ has been publicized just prior to major conflicts threatening Venezuelan democratic institutions. In February 2002, barely two months before the US backed military coup against Chavez, HRW joined the chorus of coup planners in condemning the Chavez regimes for undermining the ‘separation of powers’ and calling for the intervention of the Organization of American States. After the coup was defeated through the actions of millions of Venezuelan citizens and loyalists military officers, HRW moved quickly to cover its tracks by denouncing the coup – but subsequently defended the media moguls, trade union bureaucrats and business elites who promoted the coup from prosecution, claiming the coup promoters were merely exercising their ‘human rights’. HRW provides a novel meaning to ‘human rights’ when it includes the right to violently overthrow a democratic government by a military coup d’etat.

Following the military coup in 2002 and the bosses’ lockout of 2003, HRW published a report condemning efforts to impose constitutional constraints on the mass media’s direct involvement in promoting violent actions by opposition groups or terrorists. President Chavez’ “Law for Social Responsibility in Radio and Television” provided greater constitutional guarantee for freedom of speech than most Western European capitalist democracies and was far less restrictive than the measures approved and implemented in Bush’s US Patriot Act, which HRW has never challenged, let alone mounted any campaign against.

Just prior to the political referenda in 2004 and 2007, HRW issued further propaganda broadsides which were almost identical in wording to the opposition (in fact HRW ‘Reports’ were widely published and circulated by all the leading opposition mass media). HRW defended the ‘right’ of the US National Endowment for Democracy to pour millions of dollars to fund opposition ‘NGO’s’, such as SUMATE, accusing the Chavez government of undermining ‘civil society’ organizations. Needless to say, similar activity in the US by an NGO on behalf of any foreign government (with the unique exception of Israel) would require the NGO to register as a foreign agent under very strict US Federal laws; failure to do so would lead to federal prosecution and a jail term of up to 5 years. Apparently, HRW’s self-promoted ‘credibility’ as an international ‘humanitarian’ organization protects it from being invidiously compared to an agent of imperialist propaganda.

HRW: Five Dimensional Propaganda

The HRW Report on Venezuela focuses on five areas of politics and society to make its case that democracy in Venezuela is being undermined by the Presidency of Hugo Chavez: political discrimination, the courts, the media, organized labor and civil society.

1.Political Discrimination

- The Report charges that the government has fired and blacklisted political opponents from some state agencies and from the national oil company.

- Citizen access to social programs is denied based on their political opinions.

- There is discrimination against media outlets, labor unions and civil society in response to legitimate criticism or political activity.

Between December 2002 and 2003, following the failure of the military coup of the previous April, the major business organizations, senior executives of the state oil company and sectors of the trade union bureaucracy organized a political lockout shutting down the oil industry, paralyzing production through sabotage of its computer-run operations and distribution outlets in a publicly stated effort to deny government revenues (80% of which come from oil exports) and overthrow the democratically elected government. After 3 months and over $20 billion dollars in lost revenues and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to machinery, with the aid of the majority of production workers and technicians, the bosses ‘lockout’ was defeated. Those officials and employees engaged in the political lockout and destruction of equipment and computers were fired. The government followed normal procedures backed by the majority of oil workers, who opposed the lockout, and dismissed the executives and their supporters in order to defend the national patrimony and social and investment programs from the self-declared enemies of an elected government. No sane, competent, constitutional lawyer, international human rights lawyer, UN commissioner or the International Court official considered the action of the Venezuelan government in this matter to constitute ‘political discrimination’. Even the US State Department, at that time, did not object to the firing of their allies engaged in economic sabotage. HRW, on the other hand, is more Pope than the Pope.

Nothing captures the ludicrous extremism of the HRW than its charge that citizens are denied access to social programs. Every international organization involved in assessing and developing large social programs, including UNESCO, the World Health Organization and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, have praised the extent and quality of the coverage of the social programs instituted by the Chavez government covering 60% of the population and almost 100% of the poor. Since approximately between 20-30% of the poor still vote for the opposition, it is clear that needy citizens critical of the government have equal access to social programs, including food subsidies, free health care and education. This social safety net is more inclusive than ever before in the history of Venezuela. In fact some of the poor suburbs of Caracas, like Catia, which voted down the 2007 referendum, are major recipients of large-scale, long-term social assistance programs.

Only scoundrels or the ill informed could be convinced of the HRW charge of discrimination against mass media outlets, labor unions and civil society groups. The opposition controls 95% of the newspapers, a majority of the television and radio outlets and frequencies, with the widest national circulation. The government has ‘broken’ the ruling class monopoly on information by funding two major TV stations and a growing number of community based radio stations.

There are more trade union members and greater trade union participation in enterprises, internal debates and free elections than ever before under previous regimes. Rival lists and intense competition for office between pro and anti-government lists are common in the trade unions confederation (UNT). The entire HRW ‘Report’ is based on complaints from the authoritarian CTV(Confederation of Venezuelan Workers/Confederacion de Trabajadores de Venezuela) bureaucrats who have lost most of their supporters and are discredited because of their role in supporting the bloody April 2002 coup. They are universally disdained; militant workers have not forgotten their corruption and gangster tactics when they collaborated with previous rightwing regimes and employers.

2. The Courts

HWR claims that President Chavez has “effectively neutralized the judiciary as an independent branch of government”. The claim that the judiciary was ‘independent’ is a new argument for HRW – because a decade earlier when Chavez’ 1999 constitution was approved by referendum, HRW decried the ‘venality, corruption and bias of the entire judicial system’. After years of releasing the leaders of the 2002 coup, postponing rulings and undermining positive legislation by elected legislative bodies and after revelations of high and lower court bribe taking, the Government finally implemented a series of democratically approved reforms, expanding and renewing the judicial system. The fact that the new court appointees do not follow the past practices of the opposition-appointed judges has evoked hysterical cries by HRW that the new reformed courts ‘threaten fundamental rights’. The most bizarre claim by HRM is that the Supreme Court did not ‘counter’ a 2007 constitutional reform package. In fact the Supreme Court approved the placing of constitutional reforms to a popular referendum in which the Chavez government was narrowly defeated. The Venezuelan Supreme Court subsequently respected the popular verdict – unlike US Supreme Court, which overturned the popular vote in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, a constitutional crime against the popular will, which Kenneth Roth, Vivanco and the rest of HRW have yet to condemn.

3. The Media

Every outside media specialist has been highly critical of the advocacy of violent action (leading up to the coup) and gross falsifications and libelous ‘reports’ (including racist epithets against Hugo Chavez) propagated by the ruling class-dominated mass media. A single opposition television network just had one of its many outlets suspended for openly backing the opposition military seizure of power, an action that any Western capitalist democracy would have taken in the wake of a violent uprising. HRW did not, has not and will not condemn the arrest of dozens of US and international journalists, some brutally beaten, covering the Republican and Democratic Presidential Conventions. Nothing even remotely resembling the extraordinary powers of ‘preventive detention’ of journalists by the US Homeland Security/local and state police forces exists in Venezuela. The wanton destruction of journalists’ cameras and tape recorders by the police at the US Republican Party Convention would be un-imaginable in Venezuela today. In contrast the only offense prosecuted in Venezuela against the media is the act of supporting and advocating violence aimed at overthrowing democratic institutions. Like all countries, Venezuela has laws dealing with libel and slander; these are far weaker than any comparable statutes in the countries upholding the tradition of the Magna Carta. HRW blatantly falsifies reality by claiming state control of the print media: All one needs to do is peruse any newsstand in Venezuela to see a multiplicity of lurid anti-government headlines, or tune into the radio or television stations and view news accounts that compete for the worst anti-Chavez propaganda found in the US Fox News or CNN.

4. Organized Labor

HRW claims that the Venezuelan government has violated ‘basic principles of freedom of association’ because it requires state oversight and certification of union elections and that by denying the right to bargain collectively to non-certified unions, it undermines workers’ rights to freely join the union of their choosing and to strike. Practically every government in the West has rules and regulations regarding oversight and certification of union elections, none more onerous than the US starting with the Taft-Hartley Act of the 1940’s and the ‘Right to Work’ Laws current in many states, which have reduced the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector to less than 3%. In contrast, during the Chavez Presidency, the number of unionized workers has more than doubled, in large part because new labor legislation and labor officials have reduced employer prerogatives to arbitrarily fire unionized workers. The only union officials who have been ‘decertified’ are those who were involved in the violent coup of April 2002 and the employers lockout intended to overthrow the government, suspend the constitution and undermine the very existence of free unions. Former Pinochet official Jose Miguel Vivanco delicately overlooks the gangsterism, thuggery and fraudulent election procedures, which ran rampant under the previous rightwing Venezuelan labor confederation, CTV. It was precisely to democratize voting procedures and to break the stranglehold of the old-guard trade union bosses that the government monitors oversaw union elections, many of which had multi-tendency candidates, unfettered debates and free voting for the first time.

I attended union meetings and interviewed high level CTV trade unions officials in 1970, 1976 and 1978 and found high levels of open vote buying, government and employer interference and co-optation, collaboration with the CIA-funded American Institute of Free Labor Development and large-scale pilfering of union pension funds, none of which was denounced by HRW. I attended the founding of the new Venezuelan union confederation, Union Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT) in 2003 and a subsequent national congress. I have witness a totally different unionism, a shift from government-run ‘corporate’ business unionism to independent social movement unionism with a decidedly class oriented approach. The UNT is a multi-tendency confederation in which diverse currents compete, with varying degrees of support and opposition to the Chavez Government. There are few impediments to strikes and there is a high degree of independent political action with no inhibition to workers resorting to strikes in order to demand the ouster of pro-employer labor officials.

For example, this year, steel workers in the Argentine-owned firm SIDOR, went on strike several times protesting private sector firings (HRW, of course never discussed private sector violations of workers rights). Because the Venezuelan Labor Minister tended to take the side of the employers, the steelworkers marched into a meeting where Chavez was speaking and demanded the dismissal of his Minister. After conferring with the workers’ leaders, Chavez fired the Labor Minister, expropriated the steel plant and accepted workers demands for trade union co-management. Never in Venezuelan labor history have workers exercised this degree of labor influence in nationalized plants. There is no doubt that there are government officials who would like to ‘integrate’ labor unions closer to the state; the new unionists do spend too much time in internal debates and internecine struggles instead of organizing the informal and temporary worker sectors. But one fact stands out: Unionized and non-unionized Venezuelan workers have experienced greater social welfare payments, rising living standards, greater job protection and greater free choice in union affiliation than any previous period in their history. It is ironic that Vivanco, who never raised a word against Pinochet’s anti-labor policies, an uncritical apologist of the AFL-CIO (the declining and least effective labor confederation in the industrialized West), should launch a full-scale attack on the fastest growing, independent and militant trade union movement in the Western hemisphere. Needless to say, Vivanco avoids any comparative analysis, least of all between Venezuelan and US labor over the spread of union organizing, internal democracy and labor representation in industry, social benefits and influence over government policy. Nor does HRW refer to the positive assessment by independent international labor organizations regarding union and labor advances under the Chavez Presidency.

5. Civil Society and HRW: The Mother of All Perversities

Jose Miguel Vivanco, who kept quiet during his years as a state functionary serving the Chilean dictator Pinochet, while thousands of protestors were beaten, jailed and even tortured and killed and courageous human rights groups were routinely assaulted, shamelessly claims that President Chavez has adopted “an aggressively adversarial approach to local rights advocates and civil society organization.”

President Chavez has actively promoted a multitude of independent, democratically elected community councils with over 3 million affiliated members, mostly from the poorest half of the population. He has devolved decision-making power to the councils, bypassing the party-dominated municipal and state officials, unlike previous regimes and US AID programs, which channeled funds through loyal local bosses and clients. Never has Venezuela witnessed more intense sustained organization, mobilization and activity of civil society movements. This cuts across the political spectrum, from pro-Chavez to pro-oligarch neighborhood, civic, working class and upper class groups. Nowhere in the world are US-funded groups, engaged in overt extra-parliamentary and even violent confrontations with elected officials, tolerated to the degree that they enjoy freedom of action as in Venezuela. In the US, foreign-funded organizations (with the exception of Israeli-funded groups) are required to register and refrain from engaging in electoral campaigning, let alone in efforts to destabilize legitimately constitutional government agencies. In contrast, Venezuela asked the minimum of foreign government-funded self-styled NGOs in requiring them to register their source of funding and comply with the rules of their constitution, that is, to stay out of virulent partisan political action. Today, as yesterday, all the ‘civil society’ organizations, including these funded by the US, which routinely attack the Chavez government, can operate freely, publish, assemble and demonstrate unimpeded. Their fundamental complaint, echoed by HRW, is that the Chavez government and its supporters criticize them: According to the new HRW definition of civil society freedom,the opposition has the right to attack the government - but not the other way around; some countries can register foreign-funded organizations - but not Venezuela; and some government can jail terrorists and coup-makers and identify and criticize their accomplices – but not Venezuela. The grotesque double-standard, practiced by Human Rights Watch, reveals their political allegiances: Blind to the vices of the US as it descends into a police state and equally blind to the virtues of a growing participatory democracy in Venezuela.

The ‘Report’ contains egregious omissions. It fails to mention that Venezuela, under President Chavez, has experienced twelve internationally supervised and approved elections, including several presidential, congressional and municipal elections, referenda and recall elections. These have been the cleanest elections in Venezuelan history and certainly with more honest vote counting than one would find in the US presidential contests.

The ‘Report’ fails to report on the serious security threats including the recording of phone conversations of active and retired high military officials planning to violently seize power and assassinate President Chavez. Under the extraordinary degree of tolerance in Venezuela, not a single constitutional right has been suspended. In the US, similar terrorist actions and plans would have led to a state of emergency and the probable pre-emptive mass incarceration of thousands of government critics and activists. HRW ignores and downplays security threats to Venezuelan democracy – whether it involves armed incursions from Colombian paramilitary groups allied with the pro-US Venezuelan opposition, the assassination of the chief federal prosecutor Danilo Anderson who was investigating the role of the opposition in the bloody coup of April 2002, the US-backed secessionist movement in the state of Zulia, the collusion of the mass media with violent student mobs in assaulting Chavez supporters on campus or the economic sabotage and panic caused by the private sector’s hoarding of essential food and other commodities in the lead-up to the 2007 referendum.

One of Vivanco’s most glaring omissions is the contrast between Venezuela’s open society approach to the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrant workers from Colombia and the US authoritarian practice of criminalizing its undocumented laborers. While the US Homeland Security and Immigration police have implemented arbitrary mass arrests, assaults and deportation of working heads of immigrant families – leaving their wives and children vulnerable to destitution, Chavez has awarded over a million undocumented Colombian immigrant workers and family members with residency papers and the opportunity for citizenship.

HRW has yet to protest Washington’s brutal denial of human rights to its Latin American and Asian immigrant workers in recent months. HRW did not issue a single protest when US-backed local oligarch politicians, local government officials and racist gangs in Bolivia went on a rampage and slaughtered three dozen unarmed Indian peasant workers. Vivanco’s squalid selective slandering of Venezuela is only exceeded by his systematic silence when there are abuses involving US collaboraters!

Conclusion

The Human Rights Watch Report on Venezuela is a crude propaganda document that, even in its own terms, lacks the minimum veneer of ‘balance’, which the more sophisticated ‘humanitarian’ imperialists have put out in the past. The omissions are monumental: No mention of President Chavez’ programs which have reduced poverty over the past decade from more than 60% to less than 30%; no recognition of the universal health system which has provided health care to 16 million Venezuelan citizens and residents who were previously denied even minimal access; and no acknowledgment of the subsidized state-run grocery stores which supply the needs of 60% of the population who can now purchase food at 40% of the private retail price.

HRW’s systematic failure to mention the advances experienced by the majority of Venezuelan citizens, while peddling outright lies about civic repression , is characteristic of this mouthpiece of Empire. Its gross distortion about labor rights makes this report a model for any high school or college class on political propaganda.

The widespread coverage and uncritical promotion and citation of the ‘Report’ (and the expulsion of its US-based authors for gross intervention on behalf of the opposition) by all the major newspapers from the New York Times, to Le Monde in France, the London Times, La Stampa in Italy and El Pais in Spain gives substance to the charge that the Report was meant to bolster the US effort to isolate Venezuela rather than pursue legitimate humanitarian goals in Venezuela.

The major purpose of the HRW ‘Report’ was to intervene in the forthcoming November municipal and state elections on the side of the far-right opposition. The ‘Report’ echoes verbatim the unfounded charges and hysterical claims of the candidates supported by the far right and the Bush Administration. HRW always manages to pick the right time to issue their propaganda bromides. Their reports mysteriously coincide with US intervention in electoral processes and destabilization campaigns. In Venezuela today the Report has become one of the most widely promoted propaganda documents of the leading rightist anti-Chavez candidates.

For the partisans of democracy, human rights and self-determination, every effort should be made to expose the insidious role of HRW and its Pinochetista propagandist, Vivanco, for what they are – publicists and promoters of US-backed clients who have given ‘human rights’ a dirty name.

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Rights groups demonstrate outside UN

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

Amnesty International and human rights activists are expected to send a message to United Nations Security Council at a rally on Thursday evening urging the body to reject efforts to block indictment of Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir by International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide in war torn Darfur region.

ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo has accused Sudan’s president of masterminding a campaign of rape, murder and deportation in volatile Darfur region.

A demonstration by activists will call on UN member states to stop delaying and keep promises they have made for more than a year to send 26,000 peacekeepers to protect civilians in Darfur.

Activists demand that 15 countries on UN Security Council not turn a blind eye to justice and accountability in Darfur crisis.

Amnesty International Executive Director Larry Cox said nobody should be protected from prosecution for most serious crimes committed in Darfur under international law.

Amnesty International also wants peacekeepers deployed without delay in Darfur region. “Delays in deployment are putting millions of lives at further risk in a region where hundreds of thousands of individuals have died in more than five years of unrelenting, horrific violence,” said Mr Cox.

“If attempts to block the ICC’s investigation of President Al Bashir succeed, it would set a dangerous precedent for others to try to undermine international law,” he said, stating that it would send a message that international community is not serious about ending impunity for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Earlier this week, Sudanese officials were reported to have begun lobbying at United Nations to block ICC’s indictment on country’s longtime president.

Sudanese government is calling on UN Security Council to defer ICC proceedings using power granted to the council in ICC’s statute. African Union and League of Arab States have also joined in this effort.

Vienna Colucci, Director, International Justice, Amnesty International USA said deferral of investigations would undermine work established to curb human rights abuses.

United States, a permanent member of Security Council said it is unwilling to circumvent pursuit of justice and accountability in Darfur and has indicated support for ICC investigation.

Amnesty International has called on Zalmay Khalilzad, American ambassador to United Nations, to use his influence to prevent Security Council from obstructing the investigation.

Activists representing 15 organisations will erect 15 eight-foot-high silhouette figures blindfolded and carrying scales of justice.

© afrol News

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Will International Law Reach Bush?

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

By Peter Dyer |

Q: What do Radovan Karadzic, former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, and George W. Bush have in common? A: Each lives under the slowly growing shadow of a body of international criminal law.

This law is evolving towards the ultimate goal of holding even the most powerful leaders personally accountable for crimes committed by the State.

It is manifested in international agreements and statutes such as the Geneva Conventions, case law, two ad hoc war crimes tribunals (Yugoslavia and Rwanda), and a permanent International Criminal Court.

Radovan Karadzic, former Bosnian Serb President, has been arrested and now awaits trial in The Hague before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (I.C.T.Y.) on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Dominique de Villepin is one of 33 French military and political leaders who have recently been accused in a report released by the Rwandan government of arming and advising Hutu leaders in the genocide and crimes against humanity of 1994.

 
(At the time Rwanda was a French client state and de Villepin was chief aide to French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe. The 500-page report, based on a two-year investigation, accuses both men of crimes including enabling the genocide by violating a United Nations Security Council Arms Embargo against Rwanda.)

George W. Bush in March 2003 ordered “Operation Shock and Awe” (though officially dubbed “Operation: Iraqi Freedom”) – the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq – presenting the world with a clear prima facie case of aggression.

Aggression, in the words of the judgment delivered at the first Nuremberg Trial, is “the supreme international crime” because it unleashes all the other devastation and inhumanity of war.
 
Personal accountability by state leaders for the crime of aggression – initiating an unprovoked war – is the most profound as well as the most difficult goal of the continuing evolution of international criminal law.

For this reason, and because President Bush is head of the world’s most powerful state, clearly the shadow of the law is at present less ominous to him than to Karadzic or perhaps to de Villepin.

But there is no statute of limitations for any of these crimes. Things change over time, often unpredictably. And the international community has been working steadily towards this difficult goal for decades.
 
No doubt the work will continue.

Nuremberg Precedent

Although the effort to hold leaders personally responsible for crimes of state goes back to the late 19th century, the first significant watershed was the 1946 judgment of the first Nuremberg trial.

A panel of judges from the U.S., U.K., France and the Soviet Union held German leaders personally responsible and punished them for crimes of state, including aggression.

The roots of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals are largely in Nuremberg as are those of the International Criminal Court, although neither ad hoc tribunal charter included aggression.

One of the most significant achievements of the Yugoslavia Tribunal was the first ever indictment of an acting head of state, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, for crimes committed while still in office.

According to the I.C.T.Y. Web site, “the question is no longer whether leaders should be held accountable, but rather how can they be called to account.”

A major problem with the two courts was that they were each temporary responses to a specific set of separate circumstances which had considerable legal overlap.

The ad hoc approach was clearly limited by issues of logistics, expenses and repetition, many of which could have been more effectively addressed by a permanent court.

The achievements of the two tribunals as well as their limitations gave new impetus to the decades-old effort to establish a permanent International Criminal Court.

On July 17, 1998, the great majority of countries of the world voted in Rome, 120 to 7 with 21 abstentions, to establish the International Criminal Court. With the signature and ratification of 60 states the International Criminal Court came into being on July 1, 2002.

Six years later, as of last June 1, 106 countries have ratified the Rome Statute. Written into the Statute is a provision for member states to meet seven years after the entry into force (2009) to consider amendments.

Because the Statute is the result of decades of evolution and five weeks of intense negotiations between 148 countries, it is full of compromises. Even so, it is remarkable.

Never before has the world community united to create an institution invested with legal authority to write, adjudicate and enforce international criminal law. And, despite compromises, it is remarkable for the degree to which so many were able to agree on some basics.

Most important among these is a set of “core crimes” over which the Court has jurisdiction. These are: 1) genocide, 2) crimes against humanity, 3) war crimes and 4) aggression (the waging of aggressive war).

Conflict over Definition

Unfortunately, the Rome conference was unable to agree on a definition of aggression.

Unwilling to leave out “the supreme international crime” containing within itself the “accumulated evil of the whole,” the conference compromised, including aggression among the ”core crimes” but leaving it undefined in anticipation of a future amendment defining the crime and setting out conditions for jurisdiction.
 
One of the weaker aspects of the Statute is, of course, enforcement. As American Professor Leila Nadya Sadat, a delegate to the Rome conference wrote: “Here classic paradigms of sovereignty in which each state is master of its territory prevail. …The I.C.C.’s ability to effectively enforce international criminal law remains an open question.”

Unfortunately, a major obstacle to the I.C.C., enforcement and otherwise, has been the United States. The U.S. was one of seven countries which voted against the Statute — part of a list which included Iraq, Libya, Israel, Qatar and Yemen. Despite the vote, President Clinton signed the Statute on Dec. 31, 2000.

Less than two years later President George W. Bush “unsigned it.”
 
Other countries such as Russia and Egypt have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute. Still others such as China and India remain opposed.

If major countries such as Russia, China, India and especially the U.S. ever do decide to join and throw their considerable weight behind the I.C.C. here are a few examples of what the organization may eventually be capable of:

–”Treaty crimes” such as hijacking and narcotics trafficking, while not yet covered by the Statute, are slated to be discussed and possibly defined and amended into the Rome Statue as early as 2009. There would be an international institution with the legal power to apprehend, try and punish future Osama Bin Ladens without the catastrophic destruction and waste of war.

–The genocide visited by Saddam Hussein upon the Iraqi Kurds (1984-1991) perhaps could have been stopped, or at least punished upon authorization by the Security Council.

–There will be a venue for resolving murky situations such as the recent violence in Georgia, where a court of law could be the only place to finally decide if and when aggression and/or other crimes occurred and who was responsible.

–Assuming that aggression is eventually defined and fully included in the Rome Statute, those who initiate wars of aggression, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, will do so knowing there is at least the legal possibility of arrest, trial and prison.

Ironically the United States led the way in establishing the precedent for this when the Allies at Nuremberg tried and punished Germans for aggression and other crimes.

At the moment, the prospect of an American president sitting in the dock of the International Criminal Court seems remote.

It should be remembered, however, that in 1973, nobody would have believed that 33 years later General Augusto Pinochet would die under house arrest in Chile, facing trial on charges of human rights abuses, including kidnapping and murder, committed during the dark days of Chile’s military government.

A lot can happen in three decades. Leaders come and go. Power ebbs and flows. National and international perspectives and relationships change.

Imagine the chilling effect the real prospect of arrest, trial and prison for starting a war would have on a head of state considering aggression. Such a simple and powerful deterrent could move humanity significantly closer to realizing the original vision of the United Nations: a world without war.

There simply can be no lasting peace without justice.

To quote Professor Sadat, “As humanity struggles to overcome its darkest impulses in this new millennium, impulses that led not only to the slaughter of hundreds of millions during the 20th century, but threaten our very survival, the creation of effective international institutions and regimes is essential … to transform the prohibitions on the commission of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and aggression into real tools to deter the cruel and powerful.”

Next year in New York, the I.C.C. Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression is scheduled to conclude their work on a definition of aggression for inclusion as an amendment to the Rome Statute.

A review conference of the full I.C.C. Assembly will convene in 2010 to consider this and other amendments.

The work continues.

Peter Dyer is a freelance journalist who moved with his wife from California to New Zealand in 2004. He can be reached at p.dyer@inspire.net.nz .

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