U.S. politics

“Capitalism is on trial. And you have an organic, grassroots, sort of spontaneous revolt against the elite - which is actually what we’re hearing with this rage at CEOs, and bonuses and government collusion with the elites. Rage is an opportunity. The rage is there, and the country is seething, the world is seething with rage. The question is, where is it going to be directed? I feel there’s a moral responsibility for the Left and for progressives to provide an alternative in this moment that is moral, that is principled, that is just, that is hopeful, because if we don’t, then that anger is so easily directed at ‘those damn Mexican immigrants,’ at ‘the first African American president.’ So I feel a tremendous sense of urgency. It’s not just, ‘Hey, our time has come.’ It’s, ‘We’d better get our act together because this anger is going somewhere.’”

By Joshua Holland
AlterNet.org

Explosive anger is spilling out onto the streets of Europe. The meltdown of the global economy is igniting massive social unrest in a region that has long been a symbol of political stability and social cohesion. It’s not a new trend: A wave of upheaval is spreading from the poorer countries on the periphery of the global economy to the prosperous core. Over the past few years, a series of riots spread across what is patronizingly known as the Third World. Furious mobs have raged against skyrocketing food and energy prices, stagnating wages and unemployment in India, Senegal, Yemen, Indonesia, Morocco, Cameroon, Brazil, Panama, the Philippines, Egypt, Mexico and elsewhere. For the most part, those living in wealthier countries took little notice. But now, with the global economy crashing down around us, people in even the wealthiest nations are mad as hell and reacting violently to what they view as an inadequate response to their tumbling economies.

The Telegraph (UK) warned last month that protests over governments’ handling of the crisis “are widespread and gathering pace,” and “may spark a new revolution”: A depression triggered in America is being played out in Europe with increasing violence, and other forms of social unrest are spreading. In Iceland, a government has fallen. Workers have marched in Zaragoza, as Spanish unemployment heads towards 20 percent. There have been riots and bloodshed in Greece, protests in Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Bulgaria. The police have suppressed public discontent in Russia and will be challenged again at large gatherings this weekend. Consider a snapshot of a single week of unrest, courtesy of the Guardian:

Greece: “There are many wellsprings of the serial protests rolling across Europe. In Athens, it was students and young people who suddenly mobilized to turn parts of the city into no-go areas. They were sick of the lack of jobs and prospects, the failings of the education system and seized with pessimism over their future. “This week it was the farmers’ turn, rolling their tractors out to block the motorways, main road and border crossings across the Balkans to try to obtain better procurement prices for their produce.”

Latvia: “The old Baltic trading city had seen nothing like it since the happy days of kicking out the Russians and overthrowing communism two decades ago. More than 10,000 people converged on the 13th century cathedral to show the Latvian government what they thought of its efforts at containing the economic crisis. The peaceful protest morphed into a late-night rampage as a minority headed for the parliament, battled with riot police and trashed parts of the old city. The following day, there were similar scenes in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital next door.”

France: “Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows and more than a million striking workers. The scenes from France are familiar, but not so familiar to President Nicolas Sarkozy, confronting the first big wave of industrial unrest of his time in the Elysée Palace. “France, meanwhile, is moving into recession, and unemployment is going up. The latest jobless figures were to have been released yesterday, but were held back, apparently for fear of inflaming the protests.”

Iceland: “Proud of its status as one of the world’s most developed, most productive and most equal societies, Iceland is in the throes of what is, by its staid standards, a revolution. “Riot police in Reykjavik, the coolest of capitals. Building bonfires in front of the world’s oldest parliament. The yogurt flying at the free market men who have run the country for decades and brought it to its knees.”

Britain (via the Times of London): “Wildcat strikes flared at more than 19 sites across the country in response to claims that British tradesmen were being barred from construction jobs by contractors using cheaper foreign workers.”

Russia (via Al-Jazeera): “Thousands of protesters have rallied across Russia to criticize the government’s economic policies and its response to the global financial crisis. “Russian police forcefully broke up many of the anti-government protests on Saturday, arresting dozens of demonstrators.”

At least in Western Europe, cries of “burn the shit down!” are being heard in countries with some of the highest standards of living in the world — states with adequate social safety nets; countries where all citizens have access to decent health care and heavily subsidized educations. Places where minimum wages are also living wages, and a dignified retirement is in large part guaranteed.The far ends of the ideological spectrum appear to be gaining currency as the crisis develops, and people grow increasingly hostile toward the politics of the status quo. The Financial Times quotes Olivier Besancenot, a young leader of “France’s extreme left,” promising “to reinvent and re-establish the anti-capitalist project.” “We want the established powers to be blown apart,” Besancenot said. Europe’s far right is gaining momentum, too, using the economy and populist outrage over immigration to gain a legitimacy it hasn’t enjoyed in some time.

Notably absent from the list of countries where the economic crunch is rending the social fabric is the good ole US of A, a state with the greatest level of economic inequality in the wealthy world. Outside of a few scattered and quickly contained protests, the citizens of the U.S. — a country born of revolution, but with an elite that’s been terrified of that legacy since immediately after its founding — have been calm, despite opinion polls showing that Americans are more dissatisfied with the direction in which the country has been headed since they began measuring such things. It’s a baffling disconnect, considering that real wages for all but the top 10 percent of the economic pile haven’t increased in 35 years. It’s more bizarre still when you consider that while European governments have handled their own bailouts relatively transparently, the U.S. government has doled out close to $10 trillion in bailouts, loan guarantees and fiscal stimulus — if there were a million-dollar bill, that would be a stack of 10 million of them — with a stunning lack of oversight or accountability.

Even the congressional commission charged with overseeing key parts of the banking bailout can’t get answers to basic questions like “who’s getting what?” Americans are rightfully angry about that state of affairs, but with a few small exceptions, quietly so. Why? It depends on whom you ask. In a 2006 interview with Harper’s, Barack Obama shared a subtle, but rather fundamental observation about America’s political culture: “Since the founding,” he said, “the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary.” If there is to be positive change, Obama has argued, it must be gradual; “brick by brick,” as he put it in one of his final campaign speeches. Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion — From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond, argues that Americans have been beaten down to a degree that they’re now a pacified population, largely willing to accept any economic outrage its elites impose on them. In a 2005 interview with AlterNet, Ames said the “slave mentality” is stronger in the U.S. than elsewhere, “in part because no other country on earth has so successfully crushed every internal rebellion.”

Slaves in the Caribbean for example rebelled a lot more because their oppressors weren’t as good at oppressing as Americans were. America has put down every rebellion, brutally, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Confederate rebellion to the proletarian rebellions, Black Panthers, white militias … you name it. This creates a powerful slave mentality, a sense that it’s pointless to rebel. Anyone who has witnessed the brutal police riots that have become so common since the infamous “Battle in Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 can tell you there’s some merit to the argument. It’s also the case that European societies tend to be more homogenous than the mishmash of tribes we call the United States. Whereas Americans are divided by religion, region, ethnicity, urban-rural tensions and all the other trappings of the “culture wars,” the primary split in most European countries is class. Thomas Frank argued eloquently in What’s the Matter With Kansas that those wedge social issues that the American right nurtures with such care obscure the fundamental differences between the rich and poor, the powerful and the disenfranchised.

Indeed, any hint of discussion of economic inequality in the U.S. is shot down with cries of “class warfare” — exactly what is playing out in the streets of much of the world today. As the crisis deepens, as virtually every analyst predicts it will, that may well change. As The Nation’s Bill Greider told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, “you can’t do this to people year after year — that is, upturn their lives, take away what they thought they had earned, and so forth and so on, without provoking rather intense political reactions. … We’re just, just beginning to see a few bubbles like that around this country. I don’t say we’re going to have riots, but I think … people, out of their own distress and anger, will organize their own politics, and they will make themselves seen and heard around this country.” Stay tuned.

1. Jeremy Scahill’s Alternet article: This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House.

2. Scahill and Mother Jones’ s David Corn on Democracy Now: Agents of Change or Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons? A Discussion about Barack Obama’s Advisers and Transition Team

“I think . . . this is the precise moment when this kind of journalism matters, when we have to remind people of the history and the previous policies implemented by the people that are at the center of Obama’s foreign policy team right now, because we’re going to be living with these people for the next four years running the show. And I think it’s incredibly important to be all over this right now, before they’re named.”

Like gallows humour, only darker. Parental discretion is advised.

Watch video.

Get your war on. More episodes here.

Rebecca Solnit on the election of Barack Obama:

I thought we were entering an era where we would do without heroes, but we have been given a hero, which is a bit like being given a chainsaw or a credit card: you have to be careful how you use it.

This moment of joy will subside, and those who expected Obama to be flawless or to keep inspiring them forever and a day may be disappointed. Still, his strength is that he speaks the language of community organizers, of “si, se puede,” and that, at least for a while, he may spread rather than consolidate power.

When you come down to it though, that’s our responsibility, not his. His responsibility is to preside over a nation that must shrink from empire, on economic as well as moral grounds, from the mad consumptive prosperity of the postwar era, and from the profligate environmental destruction that went with it. Perhaps he will be our Gorbachev, a man with the boldness to yield and reduce.

Here are three by financial economist and historian Michael Hudson to help guide you through the economic meltdown currently underway. Best taken with a stiff drink.

1. “The new road to serfdom: An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse.” Harper’s Magazine, May 2006.

2.  Michael Hudson and Nomi Prins on the AIG bailout. Democracy Now, Sept. 17, 2008.

The bailout is “the worst possible move, and it puts the class war back in business with a vengeance. Wall Street has been preparing for this for years, because every financial analyst knows that the debts can’t be paid. And the question that Wall Street has, if you’re going to take a gamble on bad debts that can’t be paid, how are you going to come out a winner? And there’s only one way of coming out a winner, and that’s to make the government bail you out.”

3.”The insanity of the $700 billion give-away.” CounterPunch, Sept. 29, 2008.

“No economy can keep up with the burden of debts growing at exponential rates faster than the economy itself is growing. No economy can grow at steady exponential rates; only debts can multiply in this way. That is why Mr. Paulson’s $700 billion giveaway to his Wall Street colleagues cannot work.

“What it can do is provide a one-time transfer of wealth to insiders who already have been playing the debt-credit system and siphoning off its predatory financial proceeds to themselves.”

The gist: today’s failed bail-out bill was a really, really bad idea that wouldn’t have worked anyway. The biggest danger now? That they’ll come up with something even worse.

The only workable solution is to write-down or forgive the bad debts and let the banks and investors eat it. That’s the only way “Main Street” is going to recover. But don’t hold your breath for Paulson to propose that.

Two takes on the state of the union to our south:

1. The Extreme Reality Makeover Show

Symbolic to our era like a sledgehammer to drywall, the biggest house that ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” ever made over — a sprawling, four-bedroom starter castle, a three-car garage mahal with a turret and all — has gone into foreclosure, in the ‘burbs south of Atlanta.

2. It’s a Class War, Stupid
Election season will be packed with distractions, but the real issue is becoming a matter of life and death

By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
Jul 15, 2008

I am a single mother with a 9-year-old boy. To stay warm at night my son and I would pull off all the pillows from the couch and pile them on the kitchen floor. I’d hang a blanket from the kitchen doorway and we’d sleep right there on the floor. By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother’s dining room furniture. I have no oil for hot water. We boil our water on the stove and pour it in the tub. I’d like to order one of your flags and hang it upside down at the capital building… we are certainly a country in distress.

— Letter from a single mother in a Vermont city, to Senator Bernie Sanders

Why Iraq won’t be South Korea
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
June 20, 2008

The United States invasion of Iraq then takes on an even broader meaning. Not only does it constitute an attempt to control the global oil spigot and hence the global economy though domination over the Middle East. It also constitutes a powerful US military bridgehead on the Eurasian land mass which … yields it a powerful geostrategic position in Eurasia with at least the potentiality to disrupt any consolidation of an Eurasian power that could indeed be the next step in that endless accumulation of political power that must always accompany the equally endless accumulation of capital.
- David Harvey, The New Imperialism, 2003

WASHINGTON - Everyone remembers the George W Bush “Mission Accomplished” victory speech on board of an aircraft carrier off the San Diego coast in the spring of 2003. Over five years - and a trillion dollars - later, Bush’s last stand is to force a neo-colonial Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) under Iraqi throats by the end of July, acquire the right to go on “war on terror” mode in Iraq forever, declare victory and thus win - finally - his war, now opposed by a striking majority of Americans.

Call it “occupation forever”. But there’s one glitch: Iraqis are not falling for it.

I need your oil so bad
Flash back to September 2001. The neo-conservatives wanted their “new Pearl Harbor” really bad - something they had virtually implored for via the Project for a New American Century. They got it on September 11, 2001. Then the short anti-Taliban war in Afghanistan turned out to be a sort of test drive for Iraq. Echoing astute past observations by Hannah Arendt, US nationalism and imperialism was coupled with racism (towards Arabs and Islam).

And the invasion of Iraq was finally conceptualized as a “demonstration project” - the push to create in the Mesopotamian sands a US-style, wealthy consumer society, a demilitarized client state under benign US protection. Better yet, a 21st century version of the South Korean “tiger” miracle - engineered by US military-technological power.

But it all went way beyond Iraq as a new South Korea. David Harvey, the brilliant Oxford-educated American geographer who proposes, in his own words, long-term geopolitical analysis based on “historical-geographical materialism”, wrote in 2003 that the invasion of Iraq offered “a vital strategic bridgehead … on the Eurasian land mass that just happens to be the center of production of the oil that currently fuels (and will continue to fuel for at least the next 50 years) not only the global economy but also every large military machine that dares to oppose that of the United States.”

An empire of military bases and control of oil fields. These two crucial “benchmarks”, applied to Iraq, are what’s left of that alliance between the neo-cons and the Christian Right which took over the US government with an imperial project of military rule over global oil resources. Now it’s twilight time; and no wonder the Bush administration has come out with all guns blazing. Without a new, US Big Oil-friendly Iraqi oil law, and without a SOFA, US$3 trillion - according to Joseph Stiglitz’s and Linda Bilmes’ book - will have been spent for nothing.

However, on Thursday, the New York Times reported that Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP were in the final stages of negotiations on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization by Saddam Hussein.

They are reportedly in negotiations with the Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields. Should the deals go through, they would lay the foundation for the first commercial work for major Western companies in Iraq since the American invasion in 2003. It is expected that Iraq’s output could increase to about 3 million barrels a day from its current 2.5 million.

Initially, the Bush administration wanted no less than 58 permanent US bases in Iraq. There are already 30 in place. It doesn’t matter that on April 8, US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had said the US “will not establish permanent bases in Iraq and we anticipate that it will expressly foreswear them”.

The Bush administration’s ploy essentially amounts to turning over legal control of US bases to a client regime. Heavy pressure is the name of the game. To convince the Iraqis, the Bush administration is holding no less than $50 billion of Iraqi money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Other “subtle” forms of pressure also apply. The Iraqis wanted to sell oil in euros as well as in dollars. The Bush administration issued its fatwa - and it’s a “no”.

This shady deal the Bush administration wants so badly is a SOFA only in theory. In fact, it’s a smokescreen. Under US law, it would have to be submitted to the senate. The Bush administration wants to totally bypass the senate.

And the deal is not about Iraq either. It’s essentially about Iran - as in the neo-con 2003 mantra “real men go to Tehran”. That’s the meaning of the Bush administration demand, according to Iraqi lawmakers, of “the right … to strike, from within Iraqi territory, any country it considers a threat to its national security.”

The Bush administration wants to totally control Iraqi airspace. The Bush administration wants to employ US firepower without approval from the “sovereign” Iraqi government. The Bush administration wants immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts for all American troops and even dozens of thousands of contractors - most of them Blackwater-style mercenaries. The US Army simply cannot function properly without these privatized warriors.

Were a deal to be reached under the current terms - the deadline remains July 31 - nothing would be easier for the Bush administration than to accuse Iran of interfering in Iraq - as it is already doing non stop - and then attack Iran under the “legal” cover of this SOFA.

The Bush administration also would have a hard time getting the US Congress to explicitly approve an attack on Iran. So why not use the Iraqi Parliament instead? No wonder scores of Iraqi parliamentarians, Sunni and Shi’ite alike, fear the deal is basically a cover to use Iraq as a base to attack Iran. Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, went to Tehran and solemnly promised that Iraq would not be used as a US base for an attack on Iran.

Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Maliki that Iraqis have to “think of a solution to free” themselves from US power. Not surprisingly, Khamenei advised Maliki not to sign the deal. Maliki, for his part, reassured the Iranians in no uncertain terms Iraq is not an arena for a deadly US-Iran Armageddon.

FULL ARTICLE

The slice-of-life radio documentary show This American Life has just put out a show on the U.S. housing/credit crisis. TIL does an excellent job of teasing out the complex causes and devastating consequences of the subprime disaster.