The Largest Minority

November 6th, 2008 by Sam

One day after winning the presidency along with considerable gains in both chambers of congress, the Democratic leadership, namely Nancy Pelosi, seem already eager to begin conceding any semblance of a progressive left-wing mandate.  Pelosi admonishes Obama to “bring people together to reach consensus,” and observes that a “new president must govern from the middle.”

Suppose McCain somehow pulled it off last night instead of Obama.  Do you really believe the arch-conservative, plutocratic, proto-fascist Republican congressional leadership would advise a newly elected McCain administration to govern from the middle?  The American political spectrum is certainly skewed far to the right when compared with its economic and industrial rivals, not to mention its largely social democratic-leaning population, yet this has never swayed American reactionaries in the past.  So is there any reason to believe a reelected Republican regime would concede any ground on foreign policy, energy policy, economic policy, or any other?

The nation is in the midst of a catastrophic economic meltdown, a phenomenon that will likely prove to have been a (if not the) major catalyst that lead Obama to a relatively easy victory this year.   Though, as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair point out, when the financial meltdown hit several weeks ago,

Obama did not rise to the occasion. He actually got less inspiring as the weeks pass. On September 23, he stated on NBC that the crisis and prospect of a huge bailout required bipartisan action and meant he likely would have to delay expansive spending programs, outlined during his campaign for the White House. Thus did he surrender power even before he gained it. The next day, he told reporters in Clearwater, Florida, that “issues like bankruptcy reform, which are very important to Democrats, is probably something that we shouldn’t try to do in this piece of legislation.” In addition, he said that his proposed economic stimulus program “is not necessarily something that we should have in this package.” Then he worked the phone, hectoring recalcitrants in the Congressional Black Caucus to vote for the bailout, whose paramount importance was as a show of force, as dramatic as nineteenth-century cavalry cutting down demonstrators at Peterloo. As an instigator of beneficial change, the Clinton administration was over six months after election day 1992, when Clinton turned to Al Gore and said, “You mean my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and some fucking bond traders?” Gore nodded, and Clinton promptly abandoned his economic plan to follow the dictates of Wall Street tycoons like Robert Rubin, now a top advisor to Obama. Obama beat the speed of Bill Clinton’s 1993 collapse by almost seven months.

Despite the historical significance of Obama’s victory and the general euphoria justifiably elicited from this latest victory in the long struggle against racial bigotry and intolerance, this election in no way signifies any realignment by the Democratic party to a more left-wing position. With DLC-Centrist Rahm Emanuel and former Clinton Treasury Secretary and deregulation enthusiast Lawrence Summers appearing as the first potential names in an Obama cabinet, the Democratic leadership has thus far communicated no significant repudiation of Clintonista neo-liberalism, aside from the obvious need to reregulate financial markets, a position wholly supported by all sectors of the establishment, progressive through reactionary. Considering the enormous sums invested in the Obama candidacy by the same elite financial and corporate interests that have benefited from the economic upward redistribution of the last 30 years, we should not expect come January for the President-elect to tug too hard on the master’s leash.

November 3rd, 2008 by Ashley Sanders

I spoke yesterday at the University of Maryland. When I looked out into the crowd, I realized that one of my journalism heroes, Jim Ridgeway, was there. (Jim Ridgeway published Nader’s first pieces on the Corvair, and has been a writer for The New Republic, Mother Jones, and The Guardian. He is also in the Unreasonable Man documentary, and happens to represent all that is honest and rough in take-it-to-the-streets journalism.) When I finished, I went into the hall, where Ridgeway approached me and said my speech was excellent. He asked if he could interview me for The Guardian, and I said yes (surprise). After the interview, we talked about how I wanted to be a journalist, and I asked if he had any thoughts. “Yes,” he said, and pulled his card out of his wallet. “Call or email me with your ideas.” I was, um, how do you say, really happy.

Here is the interview. If you click on it and think, “Oh no, this couldn’t be it, this is obviously footage of an emotional refugee or someone who just broke up with her boyfriend and recently polished off a tub of double chocolate chip ice cream,” well then, I can only blame it on the lighting.

November 3rd, 2008 by Manila Ryce

Tomorrow I will go to a polling station in Princeton, N.J., and vote for Ralph Nader. I know the tired arguments against a Nader vote. He can’t win. A vote for Nader is a vote for McCain. He threw the election to George W. Bush in 2000. He is an egomaniac.

There is little disagreement among liberals and progressives about the Nader and Obama campaign issues. Nader would win among us in a landslide if this was based on issues. Sen. Barack Obama’s vote to renew the Patriot Act, his votes to continue to fund the Iraq war, his backing of the FISA Reform Act, his craven courting of the Israeli lobby, his support of the death penalty, his refusal to champion universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans, his call to increase troop levels and expand the war in Afghanistan, his failure to call for a reduction in the bloated and wasteful defense spending and his lobbying for the huge taxpayer swindle known as the bailout are repugnant to most of us on the left. Nader stands on the other side of all those issues.

So if the argument is not about issues what is it about?

Those on the left who back Obama, although they disagree with much of what he promotes, believe they are choosing the practical over the moral. They see themselves as political realists. They fear John McCain and the Republicans. They believe Obama is better for the country. They are right. Obama is better. He is not John McCain. There will be under Obama marginal improvements for some Americans although the corporate state, as Obama knows, will remain our shadow government and the working class will continue to descend into poverty. Democratic administrations have, at least until Bill Clinton, been more receptive to social programs that provide benefits, better working conditions and higher wages. An Obama presidency, however, will make no difference to those in the Middle East.

I can’t join the practical. I spent two decades of my life witnessing the suffering of those on the receiving end of American power. I have stood over the rows of bodies, including women and children, butchered by Ronald Reagan’s Contra forces in Nicaragua. I have inspected the mutilated corpses dumped in pits outside San Salvador by the death squads. I have crouched in a concrete hovel as American-made F-16 fighter jets, piloted by Israelis, dropped 500- and 1,000-pound iron-fragmentation bombs on Gaza City.

read the rest of this post here

November 2nd, 2008 by Manila Ryce

November 1st, 2008 by Allison Kilkenny

Real change in America won’t arrive on November 4 in a compact package, complete with a shiny, new president and congressional Democratic majority. Real change will begin November 5, and positive change will only occur if Progressives demand representation from their leadership, and begin to shape politics first locally, and then spread outward to create national reform. 

A fish rots from the head down, and so the American government has been rotting for decades, and we are finally seeing the effects on Wall Street and Main Street. The Progressives miscalculate and misallocate resources when they solely hunt for the presidency. It’s also important to snatch congressional seats and local offices in order to push the country left.

Many disheartened citizens feel they don’t have the right stuff to run for office. This assumption negates the wisdom found in Margaret Mead’s famous words: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Of course citizens can control the destiny of their government. After all, they fund the damn thing. They are government’s bosses. It’s about time they climbed in the saddle, took the reigns, and steered the country in a more desirable direction.

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November 1st, 2008 by Manila Ryce

A hopeful Obama supporter searches for Barack’s courage.

November 1st, 2008 by Manila Ryce

Another spectacular video from Mr Fleetwood of Operation Itch

November 1st, 2008 by Manila Ryce

This editorial appears in the November 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism has never had such a bad press as the last few months. Countless commentators have given more than a passing consideration to the question, will capitalism collapse? Whilst this hopeful question could be expected to emanate from excitable journalists, and from the rump of what remains of the left-wing throughout the world, it should be noted that the likes of Bill Gates and Nicolas Sarkozy have been asking similar questions.

The real challenge to capitalism however is not so much a challenge to its on-going operation – it will carry on in some shape or form regardless. The last few months are after all nothing other than a “market correction”, albeit a pretty big and widespread one. Rather, the challenge to capitalism is one that is of more interest to world socialists.

For us worthwhile social change cannot come about blindly in knee-jerk reaction to events, nor in the role of passive bystanders as events unfold around us. What has become crystal clear over the last few weeks is the extent to which the experts of capitalism, the self-styled “Masters of the Universe” were flying by the seat of their silk monogrammed pants, with little idea what they were actually buying and selling.

Genuine social change will require more than just restricting executives’ bonuses, or trying to improve regulation of the financial services sector, as many are calling for. Even when it is working right, even when it is booming, the market system fails miserably to do the one thing it claims as its unique selling point. Far from efficiently sending market signals between supply and demand, between producer and consumer, the market system sends confused, unreliable and skewed information.

And of course there are some areas of demand that the economic system is just not interested in even supplying – because of the low profit returns available. World hunger is one example illustrating how the market operates on the basis of profit, not human need. There can surely be few clearer signs of the priorities of capitalism than the contrast between the painfully slow progress made to address world hunger over the last few decades, and the haste with which politicians around the world have responded to the banking crisis. The sums of money hastily committed to increase banks’ liquidity and stabilise the sector would – if used to meet real human needs - ensure not one person need die of hunger for the next 23 years.

Capitalism won’t collapse of its own accord. But for many millions it has never functioned to start with. Instead the market system must be dismantled intellectually, ideologically and democratically. A genuine alternative society must be agreed before capitalism can start to be dismantled in reality, with alternative mechanisms emerging to replace both the market and the state.

If we want to get rid of capitalism we will need to work at it.