Obama in American history
Howard Zinn
Interview by Kaveh L Afrasiabi
American historian, political scientist, social critic, activist and playwright Howard Zinn is best known as author of the bestseller A People's History of the United States, a cartoon version of which is due out this month. He is currently Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Boston University.
Kaveh Afrasiabi: Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama is running on a platform for change and, yet, he does not seem decisive on important domestic or foreign policy issues. Do you agree?
Howard Zinn: I agree his proposals do not meet the need. On the war, where we need an immediate withdrawal of troops he asks only a partial withdrawal and seems to want to keep the private contractors there. Furthermore, his peace position on Iraq, if you can call it that, is countered by a "war position" on Afghanistan (he says, bring troops out of Iraq, send troops to Afghanistan!) and also on Iran ("keep our options open", which means military force must be an option). He has talked about not just opposing the Iraq war but the "mindset" that led us into the war.
He clearly has not changed his own mindset about the use of military force. His domestic agenda likewise does not go far enough, despite his rhetoric his "universal health care" plan is not universal. It still depends on individuals taking out insurance, working with insurance companies, instead of the government guaranteeing everyone free health care (the single-payer system, which other countries use successfully at half the cost of our inadequate system, and which both Obama and [Hillary] Clinton studiously avoid).
KA: What is your reaction to the criticism that Obama lacks the necessary experience to occupy the Oval Office?
HZ: The experience argument is ridiculous. No one has the experience of being president until he or she is president. Other experience - being a senator, being governor, are not compatible. We have had "experienced" presidents who have been disastrous ([Ronald] Reagan was a governor, [George H W] Bush senior had loads of experience in various posts) - the important thing is intelligence and values. Obama has the intelligence. Experience is not his problem. His problem is a rather superficial approach to both foreign and domestic policy.
KA: Obama's critics have attacked him for not being patriotic enough, but doesn't his premise of "change we can believe" also entail a new, more enlightened sense of American patriotism?
HZ: The patriotism argument is nonsensical, just a cheap way of drawing on the American culture of "patriotism" which is an inadequate approach to policy. Patriotism is defined in the traditional culture as obedience to government, which is an anti-democratic concept, indeed, totalitarian. It is also defined as favoring militarism and war, which is against the interests of the people, and patriotism should mean defending the interests of the people, not the government, not the wealthy elite. Obama should meet the charge head on and insist on his definition of patriotism commensurate with the 21st century realities rather than the archaic, conventional one.
KA: Should the left in America support Obama?
HZ: Obama will be better than the alternative, so we must support him at the polling booth. But before and after election day he should be subject to sharp, bold criticism to move him forward.
KA: Do you have any recommendations for the Obama camp?
HZ: Stop talking about Hillary, talk about [President George W] Bush and [John] McCain, and their continuation of the war and business as usual. Talk about changing this country from a war-making country to a peaceful one, talk about the need to discipline greedy corporate America, about true health security with a single-payer system, about learning from the policies of the New Deal - government-created jobs, etc, but going beyond that.
All of this will be welcomed by the electorate, who have declared their opposition to the war and will welcome the idea of immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Obama should talk about how American security comes through strength in our relations with the rest of the world, how he can heal the enormous wounds inflicted by Bush, by building bridges to other people when in comparison the Republican nominee perpetuates the discourse of fear and insecurity.
“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer
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Monday 7 April 2008
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Saving The American Left: The Case For A New Progressive Creed
By Bernard Chazelle
04 April, 2008
Countercurrents.org
The American left is in the throes of an existential crisis. Some say it's a failure of nerve, others a loss of belief. It is the latter. Neoliberalism has sucked the oxygen out of the left by deflating the political sphere to the economic one. The left must articulate a new creed around three principles: empowerment (the economic is ancillary to the political); social justice (the disadvantaged have an unconditional claim upon the collectivity); and decency (the state may not humiliate anyone). To make its case, the left must redefine that most exalted form of self-interest, patriotism, as pride in a society that grants all of its members the means to belong.
First, the mythology:
Democrats burst with Big Ideas. Unfortunately, ballots and Big Ideas don't mix and the timing is never quite right. But you watch. Once the Congress is theirs, once the White House curtains have been picked, the Dems will get crackin' on 'em Big Ideas—or on the reelection campaign, whichever comes first.
Big Ideas being what they are, big, squeezing them into words can be a challenge. Luckily, with academia's brightest bulbs lighting up the pup tent, liberals can articulate better than anyone why it is they can't articulate anything. So they'll pen earnest treatises on the need to call taxes “membership fees” and trial lawyers “public protection attorneys.” Like it or not, this has proven quite effective, and Howard Dean, for one, likes to credit Lakoff's framing theories for his victorious run for the White House.
Who cares if the Clintonistas and their merry band of DLC hangers-on spoiled the broth with their third-way brand of workfare centrism and smiley-face imperialism? Across the blogosphere, a nascent grassroots movement is afoot, blowing the winds of change against the Repub-lite sellout show. It's coming. This time, it's really coming!
Like all myths, these wishful fantasies contain a grain of truth: Democrats are diffident, tactical, and quick to concede the terms of the debate. The netroots channel genuine passion about liberal causes and the blogs are buzzing. There is palpable excitement out there on the left. A pity there is no there there. America has lefties but no left.
The verdict is brutal. By virtually any measure, the United States is the least progressive nation in the developed world.(1) It trails most of Western Europe in poverty rates, life expectancy, health care, child care, infant mortality, maternity leaves, paid vacations, public infrastructure, incarceration rates, and environmental laws. The wealth gap in the US has not been so wide since 1929. The Wal-Mart founders' family owns as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined.(2) Contrary to received opinion, there is now less social mobility in the US than in Canada, France, Germany, and most Scandinavian countries.(3,4) The European Union attracts more foreign students than the US, including twice as many from China. Its consensus-driven polity, studies indicate, has replaced the American version as the societal model to which the developing world aspires.(5)
And yet could America be a right-wing nation of closet lefties? A Zogby poll reveals overwhelming support for rehabilitation over incarceration for young offenders. In an NES survey, those who want “government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending” outnumber backers of spending cuts by 2 to 1. A Pew study cites the same ratio of people who consider corporate profits excessive. It also finds that a majority of Americans believe “government should help the needy even if it means greater debt.” (6)
Democratic leaders, bless their souls, believe no such nonsense. They'll warn you incessantly that any public policy leaning a nano-angstrom to the left is a suicide pact. They'll brush off any talk of raising the top marginal tax rate of 35% to anything approaching the 70% of the Nixon years.(7) Yes, the progressive Bill Clinton expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit and signed the Family and Medical Leave Act. He also increased extreme poverty despite high economic growth.(8) He extended the death penalty to non-homicides and oversaw the largest increase in incarceration rates in the 20th century (double what it was under Reagan).(9,10) He exacerbated inequalities, gave up on Kyoto, and, by his own Labor secretary's account, presided over “one of the most pro-business administrations in American history.” (2,11) His signature social policy, welfare reform, dismantled one of the pillars of the New Deal: the federal cash assistance program for 9 million poor children (AFDC).(12)
By contrast, the conservative Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, extended the Clean Air Act, introduced the Supplemental Security Income program (to assist the elderly and the disabled), launched the Minority Business Development Agency, signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and implemented the first federally-mandated affirmative action program.(13) Nixon was a “Southern strategist” and a right-wing crook: he was also to the left of Bill Clinton.
The senior Democratic senator from New York, the “ultra-liberal” Chuck Schumer, recently killed efforts to raise the tax rate of hedge fund managers to that of his cleaning lady: a nice government handout to overpaid bankers that is worth, annually, half of the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.(14,15) “I am not a populist,” said Schumer.(16) (Maybe just an opportunist.) During the 2008 presidential campaign, the New York Times gently mocked John Edwards's unauthorized concern for the poor as “raw populism.” (17) That word again. The other P-word, poverty, has acquired in the liberal mind the cosmic permanence of gravity. Much like in the Middle Ages, short of killing the poor, the thinking goes, one cannot kill poverty—even in the richest nation on earth. This capitulation to imaginary laws of economics marks the ascendancy of neoliberalism as the dominant dogma of the ruling class. This is a worldwide phenomenon but its origins are uniquely American. One may wonder: if it's worked against the interests of so many, how then did it happen?
Neoliberal Triumph
The success of neoliberalism is owed, like much else in American history, to race and inflation. The civil rights movement's heroic victories triggered a white backlash that, stirred up by the stagflation of the 70s, designated welfare as its whipping boy. While the left fell apart under the strain of its own failures and the pressure of the New Right, the Dems' axis of opportunism closed ranks with dyed-in-the-wool backlashers to excise the term “underclass” from the political discourse and replace it with the racial codeword “responsibility.” The collective benefit of pulling people out of poverty (more on this later) gave way to the moral hazard of unearned assistance to the poor. By this brilliant maneuver, the state was off the hook.
Thus shorn of social purpose, the sole objective of the economy was now to create the conditions for a bigger economy. This self-referential absurdity worked out well for some. At their prodding, politicians on both sides of the aisle wrapped the neolib agenda in cotton candy (“I feel your pain”) and sold it to the public as an inclusive doctrine (“rising tides lift all boats”). While the media peddled ad nauseum the seductive narrative that unfettered growth will cure all ills, the public intellectuals played their customary herding role as guardians of the norm. Lobby-driven campaign financing did the rest. Neoliberalism became the new dogma, the pensée unique.
The dogma tolerates social conflicts insofar as they remain orthogonal to the economic fault lines. Multiculturalism and identity politics are tolerable but class concerns are ruled out of order. Affirmative action and Roe v. Wade are fine but prenatal care and maternity leaves are “fiscally imprudent.” While globalized trade has benefited many countries, the ultra-rigid neoliberal policies pushed by the United States and the international institutions it controls have had nasty consequences: per-capita income for nearly half of the world's countries was lower in 2000 than it was a decade earlier.(18) Yet even a reasoned critique of the current economic order is seldom allowed into the dominant discourse. It's not censorship; it's gatekeeping. And it works. The withering scorn heaped upon a fine “European” centrist like Kucinich is indicative of the intolerance for any deviation from the orthodoxy.
Marxism died for all the right reasons, but regrettably so did with it the only systematic attempt in the history of political philosophy to put the underdog at the heart of the reflection. Sensing a vulnerability, opponents pounced with glee and festooned any leftish idea with the blood and tears of every Gulag victim. Soon sedated by the illusory success and soothing materialism of the Clinton years, progressives lost the means and the will to fight back.
The Great Sellout came at a price: electoral disaster. Yet, while busy mastering the fine art of the concession speech, Democrats swatted away all attempts at rebuilding a movement. To this day, their triangulating appetite for compromise remains voracious and they rarely flinch from flinching. Unless, that is, the cause is sensible but symbolic, like protesting the display of the Ten Commandments in a court of justice. Progressives need not prioritize because their moral world is flat. Why obsess over war and poverty when, instead, you can ventilate about courthouse furniture? Their creed, such as it is, is a recitation of platitudes: feel-good drivel about vibrant communities, boundless opportunities, growing prosperity, and other such controversial matters. They engage in vigorous policy debates but none of them is germane to the creed—would you expect a discussion of the Clear Skies bill to be informed by a belief in breathing?
Just as science should be falsifiable, ideologies should be disbelievable. A creed that can be rejected only by the enemies of motherhood and apple pie is useless because it denies one the means to make tough choices. But can such a thing ever be useful, let alone necessary?
Yes and yes. A creed serves two functions: to feed the soul and to guide hard decisions. Neoliberalism takes care of the decisions and the little that's left is fast food for the soul. To see why, consider the Revolutionary motto, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” A good measure of a left-wing belief system is how tightly it keeps the three threads together. Take away the last one and your creed is soulless; remove the first two and it is toothless. Fraternity (for lack of a less sexist term) arbitrates between liberty and equality: it speaks to the why and the how; they speak to the what. Neoliberalism gutted the motto and left progressives with the monumental task of turning ethics into policy without the normative mediation of a conceptual framework.
True, as a drive for free markets, globalization, deregulation, privatization, elimination of economic distortions, deunionization, and market-driven policymaking, neoliberalism is no more a theory of social justice than greed is a theory of property rights. It did not supplant the progressive creed so much as let it shrivel into a mere quest for decency—a noble pursuit to be sure, but one that is doomed without a set of principles to guide it. It's not enough to have your heart in the right place: your brain, and especially your will, must be there, too.
For what does it mean to seek a decent society if we won't say what we're willing to trade off for it? Let's take an example. Why should long prison sentences for violent offenders be shortened if, hypothetically, they could be shown to reduce crime? Excessive imprisonment and snatching old ladies' purses are both violations of common decency. Does one trump the other? Sentiment alone cannot answer that: only a higher set of beliefs can. Note that hard choices are nothing new. We tolerate obscene numbers of wife beatings and drunk-driving deaths just to make it legal to wash down our osso buco with Chianti. The Prohibition era made a different choice. Today's liberals assure us that such tradeoffs are passé. Surely one can eliminate poverty and maximize economic growth. The evidence suggests one cannot. A good society requires tough choices. The cost of denial is a chronically reactive stance toward social ills: a preference for remediation over prevention, incarceration over job training, charity over antipoverty programs, etc.
Fukuyama got it all wrong. It's not the End of History we're witnessing. It's the End of the Political: the denial of human agency in the regulation of economic forces. Thomas L. Friedman calls it the Golden Straitjacket. He explains its benefits: “Once your country puts it on, its political choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke.” (19) And if you try root beer, Somalia is next. Neoliberalism is just another word for nothing left to decide. The fall of the Berlin Wall buried Marxism but historical determinism lives on in Washington.
TINA, Thatcher shouted from the rooftops—There Is No Alternative. Let's test this claim. America is richer than Europe; yet, to quote Jared Diamond, “Western Europe's standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion [...]” (20) France is slightly more productive than the United States and its Human Development Index is higher; yet its GDP per head is 25% smaller.(21—23) Why? Because Americans choose to work longer hours. This was not always so: in 1970, the French worked 10% more than Americans; now they work 28% less.(24) Apparently, There Is An Alternative. Free markets have rules and constraints, but so does piano composition, and the range from Chopin to Monk is hardly suggestive of a straitjacket. Western Europe is living proof that mixed-economy welfare states can be prosperous. The point here is not which system is better: it is that both are possible. It's all a matter of choice. TINA is a sham.
A Progressive Creed
The perspective from the left is one of justice, not charity. Note how the direction is reversed. Charity is centrifugal: it proceeds from us toward the outer fringes of society. Justice is centripetal: it starts at the periphery and pulls back toward us. Society must care for the disadvantaged not because they are the Other but precisely because they are not. Charity is virtuous but ethically dodgy because of a double asymmetry: giving out of pity (or even compassion) humiliates the recipient, who cannot reciprocate, while enhancing the giver's self-esteem.(25) Donating old clothes to the Salvation Army proceeds on the assumption that a garment no longer good enough for me surely is good enough for somebody else. This is both right and repugnant. Welfare can be degrading, too. But, as Avishai Margalit has argued, entitled assistance is structurally less humiliating than benevolence.(25) In the spirit of his “decent society,” no state institution may cause loss of self-respect. In that regard, one must single out the American penal system, with its exposed face in Abu Ghraib, as the most egregious violator of that obligation in this country—no serious progressive agenda can omit prison reform.
The right to freedom from destitution may not be made contingent on good conduct. In other words, social citizenship must be unconditional. The disgrace of Clinton's welfare reform was to make it discretionary. As Tony Judt noted, it “return[ed] us to the spirit of England's New Poor Law of 1834,” by which assistance had to be earned.(2) Responsibility is a civic virtue that society should promote (Wall Street being a good place to start) but never require, especially of its most vulnerable members.
The creed hinders the autonomy of economic forces by placing their regulation in the hands of the polity: liberty trumps efficacy. Surely this is the sort of “luxury” that rich societies can afford—fixating on economic growth is easier to justify in poor countries where the stakes are malaria vaccines rather than plasma screen TVs. Poverty in America has many causes: insufficient national wealth is not one of them.
I summarize below the main features of a progressive creed.(26) It must articulate a purpose (what world to wish for) and a perspective (how to look at the world):
The purpose is a society that, first, preserve equal liberties; second, attends preferentially to the needs of the disadvantaged. All citizens are granted an unconditional claim upon the collectivity to be accorded the minimum resources necessary for a life of dignity and a genuine sense of belonging. Freedom from humiliation is never to be made contingent on any norm of conduct (such as law abidance). Equality of opportunity is sought as the fairest means of redistributing access to fundamental liberties.
The perspective affirms faith in the power of human agency to mediate between liberty and social justice. It posits the primacy of the political and the necessity of a wide public sphere. It favors public investments in shared goods (eg, health, education, infrastructure, and the environment). It asserts the regulatory function of the state and its role as ultimate guarantor of social provision. It regards economic growth as a means to an end and labor as an end in itself, not merely input into production. It views the concept of economic class as an indispensable measure of social stratification in policymaking. It is tolerant of economic distortions to the extent that they serve social justice or promote citizenship.
A philosophical digression. The creed's preferential clause can apply either directly (eg, welfare) or indirectly (eg, public schools, medical research), and the conditions of the disadvantaged may be economic (poverty), social (discrimination), functional (handicaps), etc. In an echo of Rawls's “difference principle,” the clause posits that, second only to preserving equal liberties, society must mitigate the misfortunes of its least well-off members. A just society favors the disadvantaged because that would be our most likely preference, regardless of ideology, were we to join that society with no prior knowledge of our social status. In other words, behind a “veil of ignorance,” we would choose an allocation of resources that would make the worst possible outcome for us the least disadvantageous. Targeting the worst outcome and not, say, the best (as in playing the lottery) serves an obvious egalitarian purpose. Up to a point. The preferential clause is not inconsistent with the view that rising tides lift all boats. In fact, it may accommodate arbitrarily large inequalities as long as the poor do not get poorer. This may have the adverse effect of undermining social cohesion while increasing overall wealth. In that regard, equality of opportunity serves as a necessary corrective—though social harmony is not its primary justification: fair access to liberties is.
A different take on the preferential clause holds that prioritizing according to need delivers the biggest bang for the public buck: one dollar spent on feeding a poor child has higher utility than one dollar spent on polishing the deck of a yacht. Progressive taxation can be similarly justified by the lower marginal costs of wealth acquisition for the rich. This utilitarian interpretation strips the clause of its preferentiality component and makes its application vastly more restrictive than a deontological approach does. Of course, one can do away with Kant, Mill, and Rawls altogether, and simply declare the creed fine because it feels fine. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, I intend to flesh out that very intuition below. End of philosophical digression.
A debate has been raging lately regarding the merits of the common good as the basis for a new liberal creed.(27) Not only is the notion central to any serious progressive perspective, but its rhetorical power is undeniable. It must be handled with care, however. First, left to its own devices, the common good is merely a regulative concept, like zoning, and not a goal in itself. Once bound to particulars, it can mean public infrastructure—a priority that should be high on any progressive agenda—but also wiretapping, torture, and the draft. Which war hasn't been fought for the “common good”? Second, there is nothing distinctively progressive about it: from Hoover to Reagan to GWB, it has long been a conservative mantra.
Third, the common good's attendant doctrine of civic republicanism often carries a heroic undertone of shared sacrifice and self-abnegation that is both a little quaint and a little weird. Progressives cannot claim that a 3-trillion dollar war in Iraq is no sacrifice but a war on poverty would be—hint: $3,000,000,000,000 would go a long way toward rebuilding our inner cities. Sadly for hero worshippers, none of the objectives of a progressive creed requires heroism (tough choices, yes; sacrifice, no). One should also be careful not to allow the kindness of strangers to substitute for the obligations of the state. The thousands of volunteers who filled in for “Heckuva job Brownie” proved that American society is both generous and broken.
Fourth, there is the putative liberal sin that common-good evangelists seek to redress: the rise of interest-group politics. Granted, single-issue advocacy has long demonstrated a suspicious fondness for circular firing squads: what did those anti-frankenfood crusaders on stilts think they were doing at antiwar demos in 2003? Again, that unfailing inability to prioritize. It is, however, more than a little churlish to put the blame on minority politics when it is the other kind of “minorities,” ie, the insurers, trial lawyers, doctors, and gun owners, whose lobbies keep a stranglehold on Congress. The grievances of victimized groups have no need for legitimation on common-good grounds. It is not incumbent upon a rape victim to explain why assisting her is of benefit to society. Social justice is, de jure, universal but, de facto, minoritarian. It favors the invisible. The failure of the left is not that it countenanced interest-group pluralism: it's that it left it up to each group to explain why redressing their grievances serves the common good, when it was the left's own responsibility to do so. The argumentation rests on a rewriting of a conservative canon, patriotic citizenship. This may explain the left's reluctance to make the case. So, while you watch me rush in where angels fear to tread, please keep an open mind.
Did You Say Patriotic?
What's missing from the progressive agenda is not the chameleon-like notion of the common good so much as the pursuit of collective mastery and the promotion of a shared sense of belonging. Abundance is the promised land of neoliberalism and shopping its highest purpose. To be a citizen is to be a consumer: “Consumo ergo sum.” Such cartoonish ontological moorings induce in many the despair of the void. America's vindictive penal system indeed suggests a nation riven by fear. For this, in my view, we have less bin Laden to blame than TINA and the materialistic vacuity that goes along with it. The first order of business is to allow the polity to regain control of its environment—moral, social, and physical. The progressive creed is, first and foremost, a quest for citizenship.
No citizenship, no social justice. It's hard enough to help the poor: go try and do it with a straitjacket on. But empowerment alone is not enough. I may well understand that my path to freedom lies through Town Hall and not Wal-Mart. But what's that got to do with justice? Perhaps that's why common-gooders ask us to clone ourselves into mini-Mother Teresas. Without prejudging the case about the goodness of our hearts, the weakness of a sainthood-based creed is simply too obvious to ignore. If everyone were a saint, we would not need a creed in the first place. The trick, therefore, is to create a society of saints none of whose members is one. That's where patriotism kicks in.
First, some clarification. “My country, right or wrong,” said Carl Schurz, echoing Decatur. After that fateful utterance, the word patriot was destined to join the select company of pedophile and macaca in the stink bomb arsenal of language. So it is with my nose firmly held that I vocally question the patriotism of those who care more about winning Fallujah than losing New Orleans. The most humiliating national shaming in recent American history, Katrina, registers barely a blip in a presidential campaign: a portrait of the patriot as an ostrich? Americans can love their country or they can turn a blind eye to poverty and segregation: they cannot do both. Patriotic citizenship is the commitment to a society that grants all of its members the means to belong. It is an affirmation of solidarity. Its motivation is the virtuous, idealized pride in an honorable society. It is also a sublimated form of self-interest: violent crime and poverty are, indeed, correlated. Most of all, it is the awareness that shame taints pride and that, despite their tenuous relation, (b) trumps or demeans (a):
(a) The US is the world's richest nation; (b) the US outranks only Mexico in child poverty among OECD countries.(28)
(a) America's GDP per capita is 11 times higher than Sri Lanka's; (b) life expectancy for African-American men is 3 years shorter than for males in Sri Lanka.(29,30)
(a) African-Americans have been the force behind this country's most influential musical genres; (b) one third of all black men will go to prison at some point in their lives.(31)
(a) The US scoops up more Nobel prizes in medicine than any nation on earth; (b) 18,000 Americans will die this year for lack of health insurance.(32)
“To make us love our country,” Burke said, “our country ought to be lovely.” The alternative is to avert one's eyes from the unlovely. It can be done. Progressive policies are never the default option. Patriotic citizenship rests on the mobilizing power of shame. But does shame mobilize? Patriotism is a wonderful fertilizer of delusion. And delusion works. Reagan speechified his way into the White House with chants of: “We're the Greatest Nation on God's Green Earth!” Am I suggesting “We Suck!” as a progressive alternative? Not quite. Americans should glow with pride at the mention of Citizen Kane, the Village Vanguard, and the Grand Canyon. But so should they at the thought that their society is fundamentally decent. Which it is fundamentally not.
I will leave the matter of a progressive foreign policy for another day, for I believe it requires a different treatment that cannot be inferred from the creed discussed above. But here is a point of direct relevance. The most consequential misreading of the fall of the Berlin Wall was that America had become the world's sole superpower. The irony is that it's precisely when it ceased to be one. Suddenly freed from the need for US protection, our allies realized they could ignore Washington's orders with impunity, and they did just that in 2003. In that sense, Bush did not kill US hegemony: he only supplied the death certificate. As the reality of a multipolar world sinks in, America has a golden opportunity to shed its exceptionalism and become a normal, decent society. Oddly for a technological wonderland, some of its beliefs hark back to Dickens and Kipling: the emulation factor of the wealth gap; the cleansing power of force; the euphoric arrogance of its mission civilisatrice (less euphoric after Iraq); the fixation on absolute sovereignty. These are all 19th-century values. The winds of geopolitical change will work to America's advantage if they help steer its foreign policy into the path to modernity.
Economic insecurity, a weak public sector, lack of social protection, fear of immigrants—where did we see that before? In Europe in the first half of the last century. Neoliberals like to forget that the continent was as globalized on the eve of World War I as it is today. Which is odd, because their credo that trading nations don't fight one another was proven entirely correct—plus or minus a few dozen million deaths. No, I am not suggesting that America's anxieties forebode an authoritarian future. The failure of a progressive alternative is more likely to produce a society that is increasingly unequal, unjust, hollow, and paranoid.
Some will invoke the recession as an excuse to do nothing. They have it exactly backwards. Economic distress has a way of rousing people from their political torpor—what else got the New Deal going? Fine, but Washington is too divided to get anything done. Just the opposite. Nothing gets done because politicians are too united—in taking orders from their corporate paymasters. The status quo is so beneficial to lobbies that campaign funds are roughly proportional to the number of times a candidate promises to look but not touch.
Assuming a progressive project gets underway, what challenges lie ahead? We know where to find the problems—racism, poverty, health, child care, public schools, the penal system, infrastructure, the environment, campaign financing, etc. We know where to find the expertise—the world's best social scientists live in our midst. We know where to find the resources—highest GDP and all that. We know where to find the words for the prose of our policies and the poetry of our vision. In the public mind, however, the right is about winning and the left about not losing. A bit of a downer perhaps. The pessimism of the intellect, Gramsci said, must be balanced by the optimism of the will. The hard part of a progressive project will be to summon the moral courage to prioritize the task at hand and fuel the effort with an unshakable belief in the justness of the cause. For that, we need a creed.
[1] I will be using the words liberal and progressive interchangeably to refer to the dominant group of people who attach these labels to themselves. I will blur the distinction between these words not because it is unimportant but because it is not relevant to this essay.
[2] The Wrecking Ball of Innovation by Tony Judt, The New York Review of Books 54 (19), December 6, 2007.
[3] Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well? by Isabel Sawhill and John E. Morton, Economic Mobility Project, The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2007.
[4] Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults? Lessons from a Cross Country Comparison of Generational Earnings Mobility by Miles Corak, Institute for the Study of Labor, March 2006.
[5] Waving Goodbye to Hegemony by Parag Khanna, The New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2008.
[6] Will the Progressive Majority Emerge? by Rick Perlstein, The Nation, July 9, 2007.
[7] US Individual Income Tax , IRS.
[8] How Much Credit Does Clinton Deserve for the Economy? by J. Bradford DeLong.
[9] Punishment: A Comparative Historical Perspective by Terance D. Miethe and Hong Lu, Cambridge University Press, page 103, 2004.
[10] Too Little Too Late: President Clinton's Prison Legacy by Lisa Feldman, Vincent Schiraldi, and Jason Ziedenberg, The Justice Policy Institute, Washington DC, 2001.
[11] Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert B. Reich, Knopf, 2007
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[12] The Fallout of Welfare Reform , Columbia University Record, 22 (3), September 20, 1996.
[13] Nixon, the Lefty by Mark Braund, The Guardian, July 6, 2006.
[14] Democrats Split Over Bill Affecting Backers by Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post, November 7, 2007.
[15] WIC Program , USDA, 2008.
[16] In Opposing Tax Plan, Schumer Breaks With Party by Raymond Hernandez and Stephen Labaton, The New York Times, July 30, 2007.
[17] Primary Choices: Hillary Clinton , Editorial, The New York Times, January 25, 2008.
[18] Development Geography , Wikipedia.
[19] The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999.
[20] What's Your Consumption Factor? by Jared Diamond, The New York Times, January 2, 2008.
[21] OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2006 , page 32.
[22] List of Countries by Human Development Index , Wikipedia.
[23] The World Factbook , CIA, 2008.
[24] No Work and No Play by James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, November 28, 2005.
[25] The Decent Society by Avishai Margalit, Harvard University Press, 1998.
[26] I will omit mention of fundamental liberties that are widely shared among political philosophies (eg, freedom of conscience, speech, association, movement) and which I consider self-evident.
[27] Party in Search of a Notion by Michael Tomasky, The American Prospect, April 18, 2006.
[28] Child Poverty in Rich Countries, 2005 , UNICEF, Report Card No.6, 2005.
[29] The World Factbook , CIA, 2008.
[30] The Third World Health Status of Black American Males by Sandra L. Gadson, June 1, 2006.
[31] The Sentencing Project , 2008.
[32] Unstoppable Obama by Barbara Ehrenreich, The Huffington Post, February 14, 2008.
04 April, 2008
Countercurrents.org
The American left is in the throes of an existential crisis. Some say it's a failure of nerve, others a loss of belief. It is the latter. Neoliberalism has sucked the oxygen out of the left by deflating the political sphere to the economic one. The left must articulate a new creed around three principles: empowerment (the economic is ancillary to the political); social justice (the disadvantaged have an unconditional claim upon the collectivity); and decency (the state may not humiliate anyone). To make its case, the left must redefine that most exalted form of self-interest, patriotism, as pride in a society that grants all of its members the means to belong.
First, the mythology:
Democrats burst with Big Ideas. Unfortunately, ballots and Big Ideas don't mix and the timing is never quite right. But you watch. Once the Congress is theirs, once the White House curtains have been picked, the Dems will get crackin' on 'em Big Ideas—or on the reelection campaign, whichever comes first.
Big Ideas being what they are, big, squeezing them into words can be a challenge. Luckily, with academia's brightest bulbs lighting up the pup tent, liberals can articulate better than anyone why it is they can't articulate anything. So they'll pen earnest treatises on the need to call taxes “membership fees” and trial lawyers “public protection attorneys.” Like it or not, this has proven quite effective, and Howard Dean, for one, likes to credit Lakoff's framing theories for his victorious run for the White House.
Who cares if the Clintonistas and their merry band of DLC hangers-on spoiled the broth with their third-way brand of workfare centrism and smiley-face imperialism? Across the blogosphere, a nascent grassroots movement is afoot, blowing the winds of change against the Repub-lite sellout show. It's coming. This time, it's really coming!
Like all myths, these wishful fantasies contain a grain of truth: Democrats are diffident, tactical, and quick to concede the terms of the debate. The netroots channel genuine passion about liberal causes and the blogs are buzzing. There is palpable excitement out there on the left. A pity there is no there there. America has lefties but no left.
The verdict is brutal. By virtually any measure, the United States is the least progressive nation in the developed world.(1) It trails most of Western Europe in poverty rates, life expectancy, health care, child care, infant mortality, maternity leaves, paid vacations, public infrastructure, incarceration rates, and environmental laws. The wealth gap in the US has not been so wide since 1929. The Wal-Mart founders' family owns as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined.(2) Contrary to received opinion, there is now less social mobility in the US than in Canada, France, Germany, and most Scandinavian countries.(3,4) The European Union attracts more foreign students than the US, including twice as many from China. Its consensus-driven polity, studies indicate, has replaced the American version as the societal model to which the developing world aspires.(5)
And yet could America be a right-wing nation of closet lefties? A Zogby poll reveals overwhelming support for rehabilitation over incarceration for young offenders. In an NES survey, those who want “government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending” outnumber backers of spending cuts by 2 to 1. A Pew study cites the same ratio of people who consider corporate profits excessive. It also finds that a majority of Americans believe “government should help the needy even if it means greater debt.” (6)
Democratic leaders, bless their souls, believe no such nonsense. They'll warn you incessantly that any public policy leaning a nano-angstrom to the left is a suicide pact. They'll brush off any talk of raising the top marginal tax rate of 35% to anything approaching the 70% of the Nixon years.(7) Yes, the progressive Bill Clinton expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit and signed the Family and Medical Leave Act. He also increased extreme poverty despite high economic growth.(8) He extended the death penalty to non-homicides and oversaw the largest increase in incarceration rates in the 20th century (double what it was under Reagan).(9,10) He exacerbated inequalities, gave up on Kyoto, and, by his own Labor secretary's account, presided over “one of the most pro-business administrations in American history.” (2,11) His signature social policy, welfare reform, dismantled one of the pillars of the New Deal: the federal cash assistance program for 9 million poor children (AFDC).(12)
By contrast, the conservative Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, extended the Clean Air Act, introduced the Supplemental Security Income program (to assist the elderly and the disabled), launched the Minority Business Development Agency, signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and implemented the first federally-mandated affirmative action program.(13) Nixon was a “Southern strategist” and a right-wing crook: he was also to the left of Bill Clinton.
The senior Democratic senator from New York, the “ultra-liberal” Chuck Schumer, recently killed efforts to raise the tax rate of hedge fund managers to that of his cleaning lady: a nice government handout to overpaid bankers that is worth, annually, half of the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.(14,15) “I am not a populist,” said Schumer.(16) (Maybe just an opportunist.) During the 2008 presidential campaign, the New York Times gently mocked John Edwards's unauthorized concern for the poor as “raw populism.” (17) That word again. The other P-word, poverty, has acquired in the liberal mind the cosmic permanence of gravity. Much like in the Middle Ages, short of killing the poor, the thinking goes, one cannot kill poverty—even in the richest nation on earth. This capitulation to imaginary laws of economics marks the ascendancy of neoliberalism as the dominant dogma of the ruling class. This is a worldwide phenomenon but its origins are uniquely American. One may wonder: if it's worked against the interests of so many, how then did it happen?
Neoliberal Triumph
The success of neoliberalism is owed, like much else in American history, to race and inflation. The civil rights movement's heroic victories triggered a white backlash that, stirred up by the stagflation of the 70s, designated welfare as its whipping boy. While the left fell apart under the strain of its own failures and the pressure of the New Right, the Dems' axis of opportunism closed ranks with dyed-in-the-wool backlashers to excise the term “underclass” from the political discourse and replace it with the racial codeword “responsibility.” The collective benefit of pulling people out of poverty (more on this later) gave way to the moral hazard of unearned assistance to the poor. By this brilliant maneuver, the state was off the hook.
Thus shorn of social purpose, the sole objective of the economy was now to create the conditions for a bigger economy. This self-referential absurdity worked out well for some. At their prodding, politicians on both sides of the aisle wrapped the neolib agenda in cotton candy (“I feel your pain”) and sold it to the public as an inclusive doctrine (“rising tides lift all boats”). While the media peddled ad nauseum the seductive narrative that unfettered growth will cure all ills, the public intellectuals played their customary herding role as guardians of the norm. Lobby-driven campaign financing did the rest. Neoliberalism became the new dogma, the pensée unique.
The dogma tolerates social conflicts insofar as they remain orthogonal to the economic fault lines. Multiculturalism and identity politics are tolerable but class concerns are ruled out of order. Affirmative action and Roe v. Wade are fine but prenatal care and maternity leaves are “fiscally imprudent.” While globalized trade has benefited many countries, the ultra-rigid neoliberal policies pushed by the United States and the international institutions it controls have had nasty consequences: per-capita income for nearly half of the world's countries was lower in 2000 than it was a decade earlier.(18) Yet even a reasoned critique of the current economic order is seldom allowed into the dominant discourse. It's not censorship; it's gatekeeping. And it works. The withering scorn heaped upon a fine “European” centrist like Kucinich is indicative of the intolerance for any deviation from the orthodoxy.
Marxism died for all the right reasons, but regrettably so did with it the only systematic attempt in the history of political philosophy to put the underdog at the heart of the reflection. Sensing a vulnerability, opponents pounced with glee and festooned any leftish idea with the blood and tears of every Gulag victim. Soon sedated by the illusory success and soothing materialism of the Clinton years, progressives lost the means and the will to fight back.
The Great Sellout came at a price: electoral disaster. Yet, while busy mastering the fine art of the concession speech, Democrats swatted away all attempts at rebuilding a movement. To this day, their triangulating appetite for compromise remains voracious and they rarely flinch from flinching. Unless, that is, the cause is sensible but symbolic, like protesting the display of the Ten Commandments in a court of justice. Progressives need not prioritize because their moral world is flat. Why obsess over war and poverty when, instead, you can ventilate about courthouse furniture? Their creed, such as it is, is a recitation of platitudes: feel-good drivel about vibrant communities, boundless opportunities, growing prosperity, and other such controversial matters. They engage in vigorous policy debates but none of them is germane to the creed—would you expect a discussion of the Clear Skies bill to be informed by a belief in breathing?
Just as science should be falsifiable, ideologies should be disbelievable. A creed that can be rejected only by the enemies of motherhood and apple pie is useless because it denies one the means to make tough choices. But can such a thing ever be useful, let alone necessary?
Yes and yes. A creed serves two functions: to feed the soul and to guide hard decisions. Neoliberalism takes care of the decisions and the little that's left is fast food for the soul. To see why, consider the Revolutionary motto, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” A good measure of a left-wing belief system is how tightly it keeps the three threads together. Take away the last one and your creed is soulless; remove the first two and it is toothless. Fraternity (for lack of a less sexist term) arbitrates between liberty and equality: it speaks to the why and the how; they speak to the what. Neoliberalism gutted the motto and left progressives with the monumental task of turning ethics into policy without the normative mediation of a conceptual framework.
True, as a drive for free markets, globalization, deregulation, privatization, elimination of economic distortions, deunionization, and market-driven policymaking, neoliberalism is no more a theory of social justice than greed is a theory of property rights. It did not supplant the progressive creed so much as let it shrivel into a mere quest for decency—a noble pursuit to be sure, but one that is doomed without a set of principles to guide it. It's not enough to have your heart in the right place: your brain, and especially your will, must be there, too.
For what does it mean to seek a decent society if we won't say what we're willing to trade off for it? Let's take an example. Why should long prison sentences for violent offenders be shortened if, hypothetically, they could be shown to reduce crime? Excessive imprisonment and snatching old ladies' purses are both violations of common decency. Does one trump the other? Sentiment alone cannot answer that: only a higher set of beliefs can. Note that hard choices are nothing new. We tolerate obscene numbers of wife beatings and drunk-driving deaths just to make it legal to wash down our osso buco with Chianti. The Prohibition era made a different choice. Today's liberals assure us that such tradeoffs are passé. Surely one can eliminate poverty and maximize economic growth. The evidence suggests one cannot. A good society requires tough choices. The cost of denial is a chronically reactive stance toward social ills: a preference for remediation over prevention, incarceration over job training, charity over antipoverty programs, etc.
Fukuyama got it all wrong. It's not the End of History we're witnessing. It's the End of the Political: the denial of human agency in the regulation of economic forces. Thomas L. Friedman calls it the Golden Straitjacket. He explains its benefits: “Once your country puts it on, its political choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke.” (19) And if you try root beer, Somalia is next. Neoliberalism is just another word for nothing left to decide. The fall of the Berlin Wall buried Marxism but historical determinism lives on in Washington.
TINA, Thatcher shouted from the rooftops—There Is No Alternative. Let's test this claim. America is richer than Europe; yet, to quote Jared Diamond, “Western Europe's standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion [...]” (20) France is slightly more productive than the United States and its Human Development Index is higher; yet its GDP per head is 25% smaller.(21—23) Why? Because Americans choose to work longer hours. This was not always so: in 1970, the French worked 10% more than Americans; now they work 28% less.(24) Apparently, There Is An Alternative. Free markets have rules and constraints, but so does piano composition, and the range from Chopin to Monk is hardly suggestive of a straitjacket. Western Europe is living proof that mixed-economy welfare states can be prosperous. The point here is not which system is better: it is that both are possible. It's all a matter of choice. TINA is a sham.
A Progressive Creed
The perspective from the left is one of justice, not charity. Note how the direction is reversed. Charity is centrifugal: it proceeds from us toward the outer fringes of society. Justice is centripetal: it starts at the periphery and pulls back toward us. Society must care for the disadvantaged not because they are the Other but precisely because they are not. Charity is virtuous but ethically dodgy because of a double asymmetry: giving out of pity (or even compassion) humiliates the recipient, who cannot reciprocate, while enhancing the giver's self-esteem.(25) Donating old clothes to the Salvation Army proceeds on the assumption that a garment no longer good enough for me surely is good enough for somebody else. This is both right and repugnant. Welfare can be degrading, too. But, as Avishai Margalit has argued, entitled assistance is structurally less humiliating than benevolence.(25) In the spirit of his “decent society,” no state institution may cause loss of self-respect. In that regard, one must single out the American penal system, with its exposed face in Abu Ghraib, as the most egregious violator of that obligation in this country—no serious progressive agenda can omit prison reform.
The right to freedom from destitution may not be made contingent on good conduct. In other words, social citizenship must be unconditional. The disgrace of Clinton's welfare reform was to make it discretionary. As Tony Judt noted, it “return[ed] us to the spirit of England's New Poor Law of 1834,” by which assistance had to be earned.(2) Responsibility is a civic virtue that society should promote (Wall Street being a good place to start) but never require, especially of its most vulnerable members.
The creed hinders the autonomy of economic forces by placing their regulation in the hands of the polity: liberty trumps efficacy. Surely this is the sort of “luxury” that rich societies can afford—fixating on economic growth is easier to justify in poor countries where the stakes are malaria vaccines rather than plasma screen TVs. Poverty in America has many causes: insufficient national wealth is not one of them.
I summarize below the main features of a progressive creed.(26) It must articulate a purpose (what world to wish for) and a perspective (how to look at the world):
The purpose is a society that, first, preserve equal liberties; second, attends preferentially to the needs of the disadvantaged. All citizens are granted an unconditional claim upon the collectivity to be accorded the minimum resources necessary for a life of dignity and a genuine sense of belonging. Freedom from humiliation is never to be made contingent on any norm of conduct (such as law abidance). Equality of opportunity is sought as the fairest means of redistributing access to fundamental liberties.
The perspective affirms faith in the power of human agency to mediate between liberty and social justice. It posits the primacy of the political and the necessity of a wide public sphere. It favors public investments in shared goods (eg, health, education, infrastructure, and the environment). It asserts the regulatory function of the state and its role as ultimate guarantor of social provision. It regards economic growth as a means to an end and labor as an end in itself, not merely input into production. It views the concept of economic class as an indispensable measure of social stratification in policymaking. It is tolerant of economic distortions to the extent that they serve social justice or promote citizenship.
A philosophical digression. The creed's preferential clause can apply either directly (eg, welfare) or indirectly (eg, public schools, medical research), and the conditions of the disadvantaged may be economic (poverty), social (discrimination), functional (handicaps), etc. In an echo of Rawls's “difference principle,” the clause posits that, second only to preserving equal liberties, society must mitigate the misfortunes of its least well-off members. A just society favors the disadvantaged because that would be our most likely preference, regardless of ideology, were we to join that society with no prior knowledge of our social status. In other words, behind a “veil of ignorance,” we would choose an allocation of resources that would make the worst possible outcome for us the least disadvantageous. Targeting the worst outcome and not, say, the best (as in playing the lottery) serves an obvious egalitarian purpose. Up to a point. The preferential clause is not inconsistent with the view that rising tides lift all boats. In fact, it may accommodate arbitrarily large inequalities as long as the poor do not get poorer. This may have the adverse effect of undermining social cohesion while increasing overall wealth. In that regard, equality of opportunity serves as a necessary corrective—though social harmony is not its primary justification: fair access to liberties is.
A different take on the preferential clause holds that prioritizing according to need delivers the biggest bang for the public buck: one dollar spent on feeding a poor child has higher utility than one dollar spent on polishing the deck of a yacht. Progressive taxation can be similarly justified by the lower marginal costs of wealth acquisition for the rich. This utilitarian interpretation strips the clause of its preferentiality component and makes its application vastly more restrictive than a deontological approach does. Of course, one can do away with Kant, Mill, and Rawls altogether, and simply declare the creed fine because it feels fine. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, I intend to flesh out that very intuition below. End of philosophical digression.
A debate has been raging lately regarding the merits of the common good as the basis for a new liberal creed.(27) Not only is the notion central to any serious progressive perspective, but its rhetorical power is undeniable. It must be handled with care, however. First, left to its own devices, the common good is merely a regulative concept, like zoning, and not a goal in itself. Once bound to particulars, it can mean public infrastructure—a priority that should be high on any progressive agenda—but also wiretapping, torture, and the draft. Which war hasn't been fought for the “common good”? Second, there is nothing distinctively progressive about it: from Hoover to Reagan to GWB, it has long been a conservative mantra.
Third, the common good's attendant doctrine of civic republicanism often carries a heroic undertone of shared sacrifice and self-abnegation that is both a little quaint and a little weird. Progressives cannot claim that a 3-trillion dollar war in Iraq is no sacrifice but a war on poverty would be—hint: $3,000,000,000,000 would go a long way toward rebuilding our inner cities. Sadly for hero worshippers, none of the objectives of a progressive creed requires heroism (tough choices, yes; sacrifice, no). One should also be careful not to allow the kindness of strangers to substitute for the obligations of the state. The thousands of volunteers who filled in for “Heckuva job Brownie” proved that American society is both generous and broken.
Fourth, there is the putative liberal sin that common-good evangelists seek to redress: the rise of interest-group politics. Granted, single-issue advocacy has long demonstrated a suspicious fondness for circular firing squads: what did those anti-frankenfood crusaders on stilts think they were doing at antiwar demos in 2003? Again, that unfailing inability to prioritize. It is, however, more than a little churlish to put the blame on minority politics when it is the other kind of “minorities,” ie, the insurers, trial lawyers, doctors, and gun owners, whose lobbies keep a stranglehold on Congress. The grievances of victimized groups have no need for legitimation on common-good grounds. It is not incumbent upon a rape victim to explain why assisting her is of benefit to society. Social justice is, de jure, universal but, de facto, minoritarian. It favors the invisible. The failure of the left is not that it countenanced interest-group pluralism: it's that it left it up to each group to explain why redressing their grievances serves the common good, when it was the left's own responsibility to do so. The argumentation rests on a rewriting of a conservative canon, patriotic citizenship. This may explain the left's reluctance to make the case. So, while you watch me rush in where angels fear to tread, please keep an open mind.
Did You Say Patriotic?
What's missing from the progressive agenda is not the chameleon-like notion of the common good so much as the pursuit of collective mastery and the promotion of a shared sense of belonging. Abundance is the promised land of neoliberalism and shopping its highest purpose. To be a citizen is to be a consumer: “Consumo ergo sum.” Such cartoonish ontological moorings induce in many the despair of the void. America's vindictive penal system indeed suggests a nation riven by fear. For this, in my view, we have less bin Laden to blame than TINA and the materialistic vacuity that goes along with it. The first order of business is to allow the polity to regain control of its environment—moral, social, and physical. The progressive creed is, first and foremost, a quest for citizenship.
No citizenship, no social justice. It's hard enough to help the poor: go try and do it with a straitjacket on. But empowerment alone is not enough. I may well understand that my path to freedom lies through Town Hall and not Wal-Mart. But what's that got to do with justice? Perhaps that's why common-gooders ask us to clone ourselves into mini-Mother Teresas. Without prejudging the case about the goodness of our hearts, the weakness of a sainthood-based creed is simply too obvious to ignore. If everyone were a saint, we would not need a creed in the first place. The trick, therefore, is to create a society of saints none of whose members is one. That's where patriotism kicks in.
First, some clarification. “My country, right or wrong,” said Carl Schurz, echoing Decatur. After that fateful utterance, the word patriot was destined to join the select company of pedophile and macaca in the stink bomb arsenal of language. So it is with my nose firmly held that I vocally question the patriotism of those who care more about winning Fallujah than losing New Orleans. The most humiliating national shaming in recent American history, Katrina, registers barely a blip in a presidential campaign: a portrait of the patriot as an ostrich? Americans can love their country or they can turn a blind eye to poverty and segregation: they cannot do both. Patriotic citizenship is the commitment to a society that grants all of its members the means to belong. It is an affirmation of solidarity. Its motivation is the virtuous, idealized pride in an honorable society. It is also a sublimated form of self-interest: violent crime and poverty are, indeed, correlated. Most of all, it is the awareness that shame taints pride and that, despite their tenuous relation, (b) trumps or demeans (a):
(a) The US is the world's richest nation; (b) the US outranks only Mexico in child poverty among OECD countries.(28)
(a) America's GDP per capita is 11 times higher than Sri Lanka's; (b) life expectancy for African-American men is 3 years shorter than for males in Sri Lanka.(29,30)
(a) African-Americans have been the force behind this country's most influential musical genres; (b) one third of all black men will go to prison at some point in their lives.(31)
(a) The US scoops up more Nobel prizes in medicine than any nation on earth; (b) 18,000 Americans will die this year for lack of health insurance.(32)
“To make us love our country,” Burke said, “our country ought to be lovely.” The alternative is to avert one's eyes from the unlovely. It can be done. Progressive policies are never the default option. Patriotic citizenship rests on the mobilizing power of shame. But does shame mobilize? Patriotism is a wonderful fertilizer of delusion. And delusion works. Reagan speechified his way into the White House with chants of: “We're the Greatest Nation on God's Green Earth!” Am I suggesting “We Suck!” as a progressive alternative? Not quite. Americans should glow with pride at the mention of Citizen Kane, the Village Vanguard, and the Grand Canyon. But so should they at the thought that their society is fundamentally decent. Which it is fundamentally not.
I will leave the matter of a progressive foreign policy for another day, for I believe it requires a different treatment that cannot be inferred from the creed discussed above. But here is a point of direct relevance. The most consequential misreading of the fall of the Berlin Wall was that America had become the world's sole superpower. The irony is that it's precisely when it ceased to be one. Suddenly freed from the need for US protection, our allies realized they could ignore Washington's orders with impunity, and they did just that in 2003. In that sense, Bush did not kill US hegemony: he only supplied the death certificate. As the reality of a multipolar world sinks in, America has a golden opportunity to shed its exceptionalism and become a normal, decent society. Oddly for a technological wonderland, some of its beliefs hark back to Dickens and Kipling: the emulation factor of the wealth gap; the cleansing power of force; the euphoric arrogance of its mission civilisatrice (less euphoric after Iraq); the fixation on absolute sovereignty. These are all 19th-century values. The winds of geopolitical change will work to America's advantage if they help steer its foreign policy into the path to modernity.
Economic insecurity, a weak public sector, lack of social protection, fear of immigrants—where did we see that before? In Europe in the first half of the last century. Neoliberals like to forget that the continent was as globalized on the eve of World War I as it is today. Which is odd, because their credo that trading nations don't fight one another was proven entirely correct—plus or minus a few dozen million deaths. No, I am not suggesting that America's anxieties forebode an authoritarian future. The failure of a progressive alternative is more likely to produce a society that is increasingly unequal, unjust, hollow, and paranoid.
Some will invoke the recession as an excuse to do nothing. They have it exactly backwards. Economic distress has a way of rousing people from their political torpor—what else got the New Deal going? Fine, but Washington is too divided to get anything done. Just the opposite. Nothing gets done because politicians are too united—in taking orders from their corporate paymasters. The status quo is so beneficial to lobbies that campaign funds are roughly proportional to the number of times a candidate promises to look but not touch.
Assuming a progressive project gets underway, what challenges lie ahead? We know where to find the problems—racism, poverty, health, child care, public schools, the penal system, infrastructure, the environment, campaign financing, etc. We know where to find the expertise—the world's best social scientists live in our midst. We know where to find the resources—highest GDP and all that. We know where to find the words for the prose of our policies and the poetry of our vision. In the public mind, however, the right is about winning and the left about not losing. A bit of a downer perhaps. The pessimism of the intellect, Gramsci said, must be balanced by the optimism of the will. The hard part of a progressive project will be to summon the moral courage to prioritize the task at hand and fuel the effort with an unshakable belief in the justness of the cause. For that, we need a creed.
[1] I will be using the words liberal and progressive interchangeably to refer to the dominant group of people who attach these labels to themselves. I will blur the distinction between these words not because it is unimportant but because it is not relevant to this essay.
[2] The Wrecking Ball of Innovation by Tony Judt, The New York Review of Books 54 (19), December 6, 2007.
[3] Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well? by Isabel Sawhill and John E. Morton, Economic Mobility Project, The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2007.
[4] Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults? Lessons from a Cross Country Comparison of Generational Earnings Mobility by Miles Corak, Institute for the Study of Labor, March 2006.
[5] Waving Goodbye to Hegemony by Parag Khanna, The New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2008.
[6] Will the Progressive Majority Emerge? by Rick Perlstein, The Nation, July 9, 2007.
[7] US Individual Income Tax , IRS.
[8] How Much Credit Does Clinton Deserve for the Economy? by J. Bradford DeLong.
[9] Punishment: A Comparative Historical Perspective by Terance D. Miethe and Hong Lu, Cambridge University Press, page 103, 2004.
[10] Too Little Too Late: President Clinton's Prison Legacy by Lisa Feldman, Vincent Schiraldi, and Jason Ziedenberg, The Justice Policy Institute, Washington DC, 2001.
[11] Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert B. Reich, Knopf, 2007
.
[12] The Fallout of Welfare Reform , Columbia University Record, 22 (3), September 20, 1996.
[13] Nixon, the Lefty by Mark Braund, The Guardian, July 6, 2006.
[14] Democrats Split Over Bill Affecting Backers by Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post, November 7, 2007.
[15] WIC Program , USDA, 2008.
[16] In Opposing Tax Plan, Schumer Breaks With Party by Raymond Hernandez and Stephen Labaton, The New York Times, July 30, 2007.
[17] Primary Choices: Hillary Clinton , Editorial, The New York Times, January 25, 2008.
[18] Development Geography , Wikipedia.
[19] The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999.
[20] What's Your Consumption Factor? by Jared Diamond, The New York Times, January 2, 2008.
[21] OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2006 , page 32.
[22] List of Countries by Human Development Index , Wikipedia.
[23] The World Factbook , CIA, 2008.
[24] No Work and No Play by James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, November 28, 2005.
[25] The Decent Society by Avishai Margalit, Harvard University Press, 1998.
[26] I will omit mention of fundamental liberties that are widely shared among political philosophies (eg, freedom of conscience, speech, association, movement) and which I consider self-evident.
[27] Party in Search of a Notion by Michael Tomasky, The American Prospect, April 18, 2006.
[28] Child Poverty in Rich Countries, 2005 , UNICEF, Report Card No.6, 2005.
[29] The World Factbook , CIA, 2008.
[30] The Third World Health Status of Black American Males by Sandra L. Gadson, June 1, 2006.
[31] The Sentencing Project , 2008.
[32] Unstoppable Obama by Barbara Ehrenreich, The Huffington Post, February 14, 2008.
Wednesday 2 April 2008
Empire Or Humanity?
By Howard Zinn
02 April, 2008
TomDispatch.comWith an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.
However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the "Good War," even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American "Empire."
I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called "The Age of Imperialism." It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire -- or period of "imperialism."
I recall the classroom map (labeled "Western Expansion") which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called "The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes -- what we now call "ethnic cleansing" -- so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging "civilization" and its brutal discontents.
Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy" in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about the "Trail of Tears," the deadly forced march of "the five civilized tribes" westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as "emancipation" was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln's administration.
That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled "Mexican Cession." This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that country's land, giving us California and the great Southwest. The term "Manifest Destiny," used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: "We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle."
The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba, appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn't the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the Philippines, halfway around the world. The word "imperialism" now seemed a fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war -- treated quickly and superficially in the history books -- gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was not something I learned in university either.
The "Sole Superpower" Comes into View
Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who participated in many of those interventions, wrote later: "I was an errand boy for Wall Street."
At the very time I was learning this history -- the years after World War II -- the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the world's leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more atomic tests.
In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams went home: "[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand tests in all.
When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone's Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the official justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were in power in China.
Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against the war.
When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country's motives as a quest for "tin, rubber, oil."
Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor the strong opposition to World War I -- indeed no antiwar movement in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.
Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower -- even after the fall of its powerful rival, the Soviet Union -- to establish its dominance everywhere. Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S. power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and the CIA's overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.
Justifying Empire
The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United States.
Since that date, with the initiation of a "war on terrorism," many more bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.
When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew -- what we had in common was that we both read books -- that he considered this "an imperialist war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.
In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.
The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for the United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit."
We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this "influence" is benign, that the "purposes" -- whether in Luce's formulation or more recent ones -- are noble, that this is an "imperialism lite." As George Bush said in his second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world… is the calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking for its idealism."
The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project -- Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army... as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here… will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."
For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes -- in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.
Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense -- that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization -- begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?
Howard Zinn is the author of A People's History of the United States and Voices of a People's History of the United States, now being filmed for a major television documentary. His newest book is A People's History of American Empire, the story of America in the world, told in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle in the American Empire Project book series. An animated video adapted from this essay with visuals from the comic book and voiceover by Viggo Mortensen, as well as a section of the book on Zinn's early life, can be viewed by clicking here. Zinn's website is HowardZinn.org.
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Monday 31 March 2008
The new Brahmins
By Chan Akya
Imagine if you fancied the roulette tables in Macau, but had a nasty habit of losing US$10,000 every time you landed there. Most sane people would get some kind of psychiatric treatment that prevented them from ever getting to Macau under those circumstances. Supposing though that a rich uncle compensated you for all your losses in Macau and also paid for your travel and hotel stay. Are you likely to return to Macau after losing a whopper this week, or not?
Sitting back and absorbing the sheer scale of fraud that was perpetuated on the global financial system last week in the name of a putative rescue of Bear Stearns, I wrote "When trust goes down the drain", which laid out the sound principles of central banking as enunciated by Walter Bagehot that have been serially violated in this crisis. Even as most left-leaning commentators brush off the concerns of the so-called "moral hazard" crowd of which this author is a card-carrying member, the fact of the matter is that we are now in the middle of a transformation.
Ruminating a bit more in the morass though, especially after the eager buyer upped his price fivefold this week, it became apparent that the Ben Bernanke Fed has merely emulated its alleged bete noire, namely the Bank of Japan, whose failed policies in the 1990s caused a lost decade of growth for the country and more importantly ensured that its demographic nightmare simply accelerated.
So "kudos" indeed to the Fed for achieving in a couple of months what the Soviet Union could not muster in its seven decades of existence - namely to destroy global market capitalism, chiefly through the demise of the Anglo-Saxon system.
In rescuing Bear Stearns, the Fed was in good company, following the Bank of England and the European Central Bank (ECB) in bailing out large financial institution using taxpayers' money that they strictly did not have to account for to anyone. Yes, the details are somewhat different, namely that shareholders got different outcomes in each case and the level of oversight responsibility was different, but the inescapable conclusion from all this is that Group of Seven (G7)central bankers are utterly corrupt besides being terrifyingly incompetent.
As I wrote in a previous article ("Euro-trash, Asia Times Online, March 11, 2008), the ECB sowed the seeds for its own policy inflexibility by blithely rescuing every bank that came begging on its knees. The fractured nature of the European economy, its lack of service and system integration and mind-numbing political details all allowed the mandarins of the ECB to quietly pass favors to their constituent banks.
While on the above-referenced article, a reader wrote in to complain that I had merely misunderstood the superiority of Europe, and invited me to Sweden, which is apparently the Mecca of something called market socialism. As it turns out, the region boasts the worst record of banking losses and subsequent taxpayer rescues, with an average of 18% of gross domestic product following the 1991-92 bust.
Since the government provided assistance without taking over equity capital, tax burdens needed to be higher for longer for these countries to pay for the mess. Thus, people's natural tendency to grow and become richer was sacrificed at the altar of this demon called market socialism. The net result is that Scandinavia boasts the highest incidence of suicides in the Western world - yes, I am sure to tell the Asia Times Online reader to expect me to begin living in this paradise soon enough.
To think that the original models for the Fed actions from the middle of last year were set in the Scandinavian and Japanese crises of the last decade only makes us more puzzled, rather than less. The aftermath of those crises was to stunt the economic growth of both regions (Scandinavia and Japan) once specific extraneous influences are removed from the picture - for example, the rise in oil prices that benefited Norway and the technology bubble that helped a part of the Japanese economy in the 1990s.
The Japanese merged a bunch of banks together but refused to take the necessary steps that could have made the combined banks more efficient in terms of utilizing scarce resources such as capital and good people. Scandinavian banks attempted to split the "good" and "bad" banks, but eventually put everything back together without any serious change in industrial structure.
Meanwhile, to absorb the costs of the rescues, the governments had to issue billions in new debt, which had to be bought by the rescued banks at artificially low yields because the governments would have themselves been bankrupted by higher charges.
As the system's decline was arrested with the strong government backing, banks found themselves in new problem areas - namely that they did not know what to do with the billions in deposits that were sitting in their books. In the case of Japan, this proved to be the main reason for a slew of misadventures ranging from copper trading to the current bout of CDO (collateralized debt obligations) investment losses.
Super-caste
For all the protests of the Fed and its lackeys on what was done last week, it seems unavoidable that banks will not emerge as protected species, a super-caste of companies, in the new economic environment. The Fed, along with other G7 central banks, has clearly demonstrated that it will not allow any financial company to go bust.
Having rescued a financial institution that was not even under its regulatory purview, it seems only a matter of time before global central banks start rescuing other frontiers of capitalism, namely finance companies, insurance firms and investment management outfits. Thus, everything in the financial world becomes superior to all else in the system, for the sake of national cohesion or any other communist-era slogan that you care to mumble.
The banks are in turn likely to take more risk with their capital going forward, not less, now that they know that the central banks can be counted on to write them checks in perpetuity. Indeed, as Bear was merged into a commercial bank, it stands to reason that the biggest risk-takers will feel emboldened to trade their way out of billions in losses by putting on exotic bets. Like the gambler in the first paragraph, today's banks know that central banks are too afraid to call their bluff.
This super-caste of bankers get to lord it over the rest of Western capitalism for the foreseeable future. Companies will have to accept higher borrowing costs, individuals will see their credit cards shredded, all in order for society to continue paying for the sins of bankers.
In ancient India, a bunch of people pulled off very nearly the same trick. While the Brahmins of today's India face wrenching socio-political changes that have helped to turn the clock back on their dominance and allowed greater opportunities to emerge for other groups, the very opposite event has taken place in G7 countries over the course of the past 12 months. Welcome then to the new caste system that appears set to take over the global economy, led by its new Brahmins - namely the bankers.
Trust goes down the drain
By Chan Akya
Conversation from 10 years ago: relating to John Meriwether of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) calling his friend at Bear Stearns:
Bear Stearns - How much are you down by, John?
John - Half.
Bear Stearns - You are finished.
John - But I have billions in cash, more fund raising to come, etc. Bear Stearns - John, when you are down by half, people figure you can go all the way. You are finished.
My article published on Friday (see Forget Spitzer, fire Bernanke, Asia Times Online, March 15, 2008) touched upon the unconventional rescue of a large securities firm by the Fed last Monday when it announced a new refinancing tool to help Wall Street. It appears that the firm in question was Bear Stearns, an ironic throwback to the advice given to LTCM that I quoted above.
Over the weekend, JPMorgan Chase agreed to buy Bear Stearns for US$2 per share, a fraction of the $30 or so that the company closed at on Friday, itself about 50% down for the day. The infamous rule of "down by half, finished" appears to have struck none other than the very firm that used it to measure its risk outstanding with other funds. Full credit for what happened over the weekend though must go to what the Fed did on Friday.
On Friday, the Fed announced a more direct rescue of Bear Stearns, by providing back-to-back financing through JPMorgan wherein the latter would hand over all eligible securities held by Bear Stearns to the Fed, and would pass along all Fed credit to the investment bank. Essentially, JPMorgan had the role of a middleman with the ultimate risk being held by the Fed as all financing to Bear Stearns was "without recourse" - a legal term that essentially means, once you make a loan against something, you are pretty much on your own, pal.
Glass Steagall
Following from the near collapse of the US financial system in the earlier part of the 20th century, authorities moved to separate normal banking activities from those of investment banks. The separation has become increasingly blurred in recent times, but in effect while the Fed is responsible for commercial banks, it does not have a direct role in the financing and operations of the investment banks. Each of the regional Fed banks (for example the Federal Reserve of New York, or NY Fed as its more commonly known) has responsibility for all commercial banks registered in New York, and so on. Thus, if any of these banks had a problem such as bank run, the NY Fed would step in to help that institution.
Bear Stearns, being an investment bank, did not have direct access to the Fed "window", leaving it at a competitive disadvantage to commercial banks such as Citigroup, JPMorgan and Bank of America when it came to the process of accessing liquidity. Therefore, on Monday as a first step the Fed made a concession to the very kind of collateral that investment banks were holding in large volumes, such as residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS). This kind of collateral is not a big problem for commercial banks to hold - indeed it can be argued that making mortgages to individuals is their main business - therefore there isn’t much of an issue keeping these securities on their books funded by cheap deposits left by increasingly scared individuals across the US.
Investment banks on the other hand saw their cost of funding more than triple since last year and more importantly, found that many tools for refinancing were completely shut. The process of selling mortgage-backed securities had already ground to a complete halt, even as defaults were rising on the underlying home loans - essentially a dual hit for the investment banks.
As I wrote in the above article, there was clearly a break in the system wherein many of these commercial banks refused to accept securities as collateral from investment banks even if the onward refinancing with the Fed was made available. This is potentially due to two concerns: 1. Firstly, some commercial banks would have exceeded their specific credit limits to various investment banks having provided them with ever increasing lines of credit against difficult-to-value collateral over the past 12 months. 2. Secondly, while these securities could be refinanced with the Fed, they were all "with recourse", ie if there was a problem with the quality of collateral for example through a ratings downgrade, the Fed could demand its money back from the commercial bank while the latter could possibly not hope to make a successful claim against a failing investment bank.
Matters seemed to have proceeded far faster than even I had expected since Wednesday last week when I wrote the above article. In effect, one or more commercial banks had refused to lend to the likes of Bear Stearns under "any circumstances", and even refused to accept a modicum of risk that exists in all market transactions such as buying and selling foreign exchange, settling interest rate contracts and credit derivative contracts.
Thus, on Friday, the Fed was forced to act directly to help Bear Stearns by providing it with unprecedented access to liquidity. The initial reaction to the announcement was a sharp jump in the share price of Bear Stearns in pre-market trading.
However, even equity investors are not that stupid these days. While they still can be accused of living in aerial castles with respect to the rest of the stock market, at least their view of the risks of holding stock in securities firms has matured over the past few months.
Last year at one point, Bear Stearns’ stock was trading close to $180. At the beginning of last week, it was trading around $60, falling from $80 at the beginning of March. On Friday, after first rising a few dollars, around 10% in pre-market, the stock opened more than 10% lower and continued to fall.
Even the most gullible equity investor could no longer be fooled about the turn of events. Bear Stearns needed a rescue because it was going bust, and that was all there was to the positive spin on the story from the NY Fed, and all discussions from the company about its real book value were hollow.
Financial institutions survive purely on the confidence of investors, who after all trust them to hold significantly more assets than their capital bases would allow. A typical investment bank with a market value of $10 billion would typically have assets of over $200 billion, to give you an idea of the kind of leverage we are talking about here. I would hate to analyze the figures of Bear Stearns on these counts because many of those assets were impaired, and partially that was already reflected in the reduced stock capitalization.
Going forward
Much like a financial game of whack-the-mole, the rescue of Bear Stearns puts in question the next potential victim. As I noted in the Friday article, other investment banks may be better off for the immediate future, but all have similar existential crises in front. Why should any investor trust them to manage assets far in excess of their capital bases?
Their financial results for the first quarter ended February, due over the course of this week, will inevitably raise issues of potential downside and worst-case scenarios. No bank prepares for all its depositors to turn up on the same day to demand their money back, and neither does any investment bank.
A few weeks back, I wrote Mr Paulson, Tear Down This Wall (Street) (Asia Times Online, February 16, 2008) purely because of a deeply held personal belief that a major investment bank would go bust in 2008. I certainly did not know that it would be Bear Stearns nor that it would happen by the first quarter itself. In any event, the reason for that article was to implore US authorities not to expand the circle of trouble by bailing out investment banks because that would only make problems worse for the entire global financial system.
It appears that US financial authorities have been overly influenced by their European counterparts and have chosen to effectively nationalize troubled companies. That process did not work in Japan where banks remain moribund more than a decade after these efforts began in earnest, nor in countries like France where banks seem to lurch from one crisis to the next. Thankfully, market circuit-breakers in the US still work wherein the firms being asked to buy troubled investment banks are exerting their own pressure on price - as JPMorgan showed by offering a price of $2 per share rather than the $30 closing price (or even the $20 that the weekend press indicated).
All commercial banks accepting to purchase investment banks would put their own existence in jeopardy, not the least because of the sheer size of these companies as well as their complexity. Accounting standards and regulations are vastly different between these companies due to many decades of Glass Steagall.
The acquisition of Bear by JPMorgan means that investors cannot trust the reported book value of US financial firms anymore. If they cannot trust investment banks, can the trust of commercial banks be really all that higher? The discount to book value should tell the Fed and all other central banks an important truth namely that the bailers themselves may need to be bailed out in time.
Imagine if you fancied the roulette tables in Macau, but had a nasty habit of losing US$10,000 every time you landed there. Most sane people would get some kind of psychiatric treatment that prevented them from ever getting to Macau under those circumstances. Supposing though that a rich uncle compensated you for all your losses in Macau and also paid for your travel and hotel stay. Are you likely to return to Macau after losing a whopper this week, or not?
Sitting back and absorbing the sheer scale of fraud that was perpetuated on the global financial system last week in the name of a putative rescue of Bear Stearns, I wrote "When trust goes down the drain", which laid out the sound principles of central banking as enunciated by Walter Bagehot that have been serially violated in this crisis. Even as most left-leaning commentators brush off the concerns of the so-called "moral hazard" crowd of which this author is a card-carrying member, the fact of the matter is that we are now in the middle of a transformation.
Ruminating a bit more in the morass though, especially after the eager buyer upped his price fivefold this week, it became apparent that the Ben Bernanke Fed has merely emulated its alleged bete noire, namely the Bank of Japan, whose failed policies in the 1990s caused a lost decade of growth for the country and more importantly ensured that its demographic nightmare simply accelerated.
So "kudos" indeed to the Fed for achieving in a couple of months what the Soviet Union could not muster in its seven decades of existence - namely to destroy global market capitalism, chiefly through the demise of the Anglo-Saxon system.
In rescuing Bear Stearns, the Fed was in good company, following the Bank of England and the European Central Bank (ECB) in bailing out large financial institution using taxpayers' money that they strictly did not have to account for to anyone. Yes, the details are somewhat different, namely that shareholders got different outcomes in each case and the level of oversight responsibility was different, but the inescapable conclusion from all this is that Group of Seven (G7)central bankers are utterly corrupt besides being terrifyingly incompetent.
As I wrote in a previous article ("Euro-trash, Asia Times Online, March 11, 2008), the ECB sowed the seeds for its own policy inflexibility by blithely rescuing every bank that came begging on its knees. The fractured nature of the European economy, its lack of service and system integration and mind-numbing political details all allowed the mandarins of the ECB to quietly pass favors to their constituent banks.
While on the above-referenced article, a reader wrote in to complain that I had merely misunderstood the superiority of Europe, and invited me to Sweden, which is apparently the Mecca of something called market socialism. As it turns out, the region boasts the worst record of banking losses and subsequent taxpayer rescues, with an average of 18% of gross domestic product following the 1991-92 bust.
Since the government provided assistance without taking over equity capital, tax burdens needed to be higher for longer for these countries to pay for the mess. Thus, people's natural tendency to grow and become richer was sacrificed at the altar of this demon called market socialism. The net result is that Scandinavia boasts the highest incidence of suicides in the Western world - yes, I am sure to tell the Asia Times Online reader to expect me to begin living in this paradise soon enough.
To think that the original models for the Fed actions from the middle of last year were set in the Scandinavian and Japanese crises of the last decade only makes us more puzzled, rather than less. The aftermath of those crises was to stunt the economic growth of both regions (Scandinavia and Japan) once specific extraneous influences are removed from the picture - for example, the rise in oil prices that benefited Norway and the technology bubble that helped a part of the Japanese economy in the 1990s.
The Japanese merged a bunch of banks together but refused to take the necessary steps that could have made the combined banks more efficient in terms of utilizing scarce resources such as capital and good people. Scandinavian banks attempted to split the "good" and "bad" banks, but eventually put everything back together without any serious change in industrial structure.
Meanwhile, to absorb the costs of the rescues, the governments had to issue billions in new debt, which had to be bought by the rescued banks at artificially low yields because the governments would have themselves been bankrupted by higher charges.
As the system's decline was arrested with the strong government backing, banks found themselves in new problem areas - namely that they did not know what to do with the billions in deposits that were sitting in their books. In the case of Japan, this proved to be the main reason for a slew of misadventures ranging from copper trading to the current bout of CDO (collateralized debt obligations) investment losses.
Super-caste
For all the protests of the Fed and its lackeys on what was done last week, it seems unavoidable that banks will not emerge as protected species, a super-caste of companies, in the new economic environment. The Fed, along with other G7 central banks, has clearly demonstrated that it will not allow any financial company to go bust.
Having rescued a financial institution that was not even under its regulatory purview, it seems only a matter of time before global central banks start rescuing other frontiers of capitalism, namely finance companies, insurance firms and investment management outfits. Thus, everything in the financial world becomes superior to all else in the system, for the sake of national cohesion or any other communist-era slogan that you care to mumble.
The banks are in turn likely to take more risk with their capital going forward, not less, now that they know that the central banks can be counted on to write them checks in perpetuity. Indeed, as Bear was merged into a commercial bank, it stands to reason that the biggest risk-takers will feel emboldened to trade their way out of billions in losses by putting on exotic bets. Like the gambler in the first paragraph, today's banks know that central banks are too afraid to call their bluff.
This super-caste of bankers get to lord it over the rest of Western capitalism for the foreseeable future. Companies will have to accept higher borrowing costs, individuals will see their credit cards shredded, all in order for society to continue paying for the sins of bankers.
In ancient India, a bunch of people pulled off very nearly the same trick. While the Brahmins of today's India face wrenching socio-political changes that have helped to turn the clock back on their dominance and allowed greater opportunities to emerge for other groups, the very opposite event has taken place in G7 countries over the course of the past 12 months. Welcome then to the new caste system that appears set to take over the global economy, led by its new Brahmins - namely the bankers.
Trust goes down the drain
By Chan Akya
Conversation from 10 years ago: relating to John Meriwether of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) calling his friend at Bear Stearns:
Bear Stearns - How much are you down by, John?
John - Half.
Bear Stearns - You are finished.
John - But I have billions in cash, more fund raising to come, etc. Bear Stearns - John, when you are down by half, people figure you can go all the way. You are finished.
My article published on Friday (see Forget Spitzer, fire Bernanke, Asia Times Online, March 15, 2008) touched upon the unconventional rescue of a large securities firm by the Fed last Monday when it announced a new refinancing tool to help Wall Street. It appears that the firm in question was Bear Stearns, an ironic throwback to the advice given to LTCM that I quoted above.
Over the weekend, JPMorgan Chase agreed to buy Bear Stearns for US$2 per share, a fraction of the $30 or so that the company closed at on Friday, itself about 50% down for the day. The infamous rule of "down by half, finished" appears to have struck none other than the very firm that used it to measure its risk outstanding with other funds. Full credit for what happened over the weekend though must go to what the Fed did on Friday.
On Friday, the Fed announced a more direct rescue of Bear Stearns, by providing back-to-back financing through JPMorgan wherein the latter would hand over all eligible securities held by Bear Stearns to the Fed, and would pass along all Fed credit to the investment bank. Essentially, JPMorgan had the role of a middleman with the ultimate risk being held by the Fed as all financing to Bear Stearns was "without recourse" - a legal term that essentially means, once you make a loan against something, you are pretty much on your own, pal.
Glass Steagall
Following from the near collapse of the US financial system in the earlier part of the 20th century, authorities moved to separate normal banking activities from those of investment banks. The separation has become increasingly blurred in recent times, but in effect while the Fed is responsible for commercial banks, it does not have a direct role in the financing and operations of the investment banks. Each of the regional Fed banks (for example the Federal Reserve of New York, or NY Fed as its more commonly known) has responsibility for all commercial banks registered in New York, and so on. Thus, if any of these banks had a problem such as bank run, the NY Fed would step in to help that institution.
Bear Stearns, being an investment bank, did not have direct access to the Fed "window", leaving it at a competitive disadvantage to commercial banks such as Citigroup, JPMorgan and Bank of America when it came to the process of accessing liquidity. Therefore, on Monday as a first step the Fed made a concession to the very kind of collateral that investment banks were holding in large volumes, such as residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS). This kind of collateral is not a big problem for commercial banks to hold - indeed it can be argued that making mortgages to individuals is their main business - therefore there isn’t much of an issue keeping these securities on their books funded by cheap deposits left by increasingly scared individuals across the US.
Investment banks on the other hand saw their cost of funding more than triple since last year and more importantly, found that many tools for refinancing were completely shut. The process of selling mortgage-backed securities had already ground to a complete halt, even as defaults were rising on the underlying home loans - essentially a dual hit for the investment banks.
As I wrote in the above article, there was clearly a break in the system wherein many of these commercial banks refused to accept securities as collateral from investment banks even if the onward refinancing with the Fed was made available. This is potentially due to two concerns: 1. Firstly, some commercial banks would have exceeded their specific credit limits to various investment banks having provided them with ever increasing lines of credit against difficult-to-value collateral over the past 12 months. 2. Secondly, while these securities could be refinanced with the Fed, they were all "with recourse", ie if there was a problem with the quality of collateral for example through a ratings downgrade, the Fed could demand its money back from the commercial bank while the latter could possibly not hope to make a successful claim against a failing investment bank.
Matters seemed to have proceeded far faster than even I had expected since Wednesday last week when I wrote the above article. In effect, one or more commercial banks had refused to lend to the likes of Bear Stearns under "any circumstances", and even refused to accept a modicum of risk that exists in all market transactions such as buying and selling foreign exchange, settling interest rate contracts and credit derivative contracts.
Thus, on Friday, the Fed was forced to act directly to help Bear Stearns by providing it with unprecedented access to liquidity. The initial reaction to the announcement was a sharp jump in the share price of Bear Stearns in pre-market trading.
However, even equity investors are not that stupid these days. While they still can be accused of living in aerial castles with respect to the rest of the stock market, at least their view of the risks of holding stock in securities firms has matured over the past few months.
Last year at one point, Bear Stearns’ stock was trading close to $180. At the beginning of last week, it was trading around $60, falling from $80 at the beginning of March. On Friday, after first rising a few dollars, around 10% in pre-market, the stock opened more than 10% lower and continued to fall.
Even the most gullible equity investor could no longer be fooled about the turn of events. Bear Stearns needed a rescue because it was going bust, and that was all there was to the positive spin on the story from the NY Fed, and all discussions from the company about its real book value were hollow.
Financial institutions survive purely on the confidence of investors, who after all trust them to hold significantly more assets than their capital bases would allow. A typical investment bank with a market value of $10 billion would typically have assets of over $200 billion, to give you an idea of the kind of leverage we are talking about here. I would hate to analyze the figures of Bear Stearns on these counts because many of those assets were impaired, and partially that was already reflected in the reduced stock capitalization.
Going forward
Much like a financial game of whack-the-mole, the rescue of Bear Stearns puts in question the next potential victim. As I noted in the Friday article, other investment banks may be better off for the immediate future, but all have similar existential crises in front. Why should any investor trust them to manage assets far in excess of their capital bases?
Their financial results for the first quarter ended February, due over the course of this week, will inevitably raise issues of potential downside and worst-case scenarios. No bank prepares for all its depositors to turn up on the same day to demand their money back, and neither does any investment bank.
A few weeks back, I wrote Mr Paulson, Tear Down This Wall (Street) (Asia Times Online, February 16, 2008) purely because of a deeply held personal belief that a major investment bank would go bust in 2008. I certainly did not know that it would be Bear Stearns nor that it would happen by the first quarter itself. In any event, the reason for that article was to implore US authorities not to expand the circle of trouble by bailing out investment banks because that would only make problems worse for the entire global financial system.
It appears that US financial authorities have been overly influenced by their European counterparts and have chosen to effectively nationalize troubled companies. That process did not work in Japan where banks remain moribund more than a decade after these efforts began in earnest, nor in countries like France where banks seem to lurch from one crisis to the next. Thankfully, market circuit-breakers in the US still work wherein the firms being asked to buy troubled investment banks are exerting their own pressure on price - as JPMorgan showed by offering a price of $2 per share rather than the $30 closing price (or even the $20 that the weekend press indicated).
All commercial banks accepting to purchase investment banks would put their own existence in jeopardy, not the least because of the sheer size of these companies as well as their complexity. Accounting standards and regulations are vastly different between these companies due to many decades of Glass Steagall.
The acquisition of Bear by JPMorgan means that investors cannot trust the reported book value of US financial firms anymore. If they cannot trust investment banks, can the trust of commercial banks be really all that higher? The discount to book value should tell the Fed and all other central banks an important truth namely that the bailers themselves may need to be bailed out in time.
Sunday 30 March 2008
In Booming India, Hunger Kills
In Booming India, Hunger Kills
6,000 Kids Daily
By Mridu Bhandari
29 March, 2008
CNN-IBN
Two million children in India die and turn into statistics every year. That's about 6,000 deaths everyday. A CNN-IBN Special Investigation travelled to the rural heartlands of UP to document deaths and cases of malnutrition for a special edition of 30 Minutes. Here's the first installment from UP's Varanasi and Lalitpur districts.
Jaharunnissah lost her only son to hunger about two months ago. Four-year-old Khusbuddin was emaciated and weighed a mere 6.5 kg at the time of his death.
"Woh kuposhan ka shikar tha usko main doodh dava poora nahin kar paati thi paise ke kaaran is vajay se uski maut ho gayi. (I could not fend for his food and medicine. He died of malnutrition)," she says.
Abandoned by her husband, Jaharunnissah is trying to piece her life together. But at the end of one day of toil embroidering sarees, she is paid a meager Rs 10 or Rs 15.
"Aaj agar mere bachhe ka ilaaj ho jaata to mera bachha bach jaata is baat ka mujhe dard rehta hain ki paise na hone ke kaaran aaj maine apne bachhe ko kho diya. (I wish I hadn't lost my son. The pain of losing a child because of lack of money to feed him is unbearable)," says an inconsolable Jaharunnissah.
A few kilometers away, in another village near Varanasi, six-year-old Shamim is also battling malnutrition. Unlike other kids his age, he is neither playful nor talkative. A severe deficiency of proteins and calories has given him a bloated belly and reduced his immunity.
Says his mother, Zohra, "Isko TB aur gurde mein kharabi hai. haath per fool jata hai, saas phul jata hai (He is suffering from TB and has kidney trouble too. His limbs swell up and he faces breathing difficulty).
Nearly 60 per cent children in Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh are malnourished. In the last 9 months, in Talbahat block alone, 183 cases were reported, out of which 116 were categorized as "severe".
Local doctors say the biggest challenge is convincing parents that their children are undernourished.
"Pata hi nai hai unko. Yahan aake unko samjhaya jata hai ki bachcha bahut hi zyada weak hai. apko yahan treatment dene ki zaroorat hai. admit kijiye, bahut convince karke unhen yahan admit karna padta hai (They don't even realise there's something wrong. We have to tell them their child is weak and needs treatment. It takes a lot of convincing for them to realise this),"says nutrition counsellor, Community Health Centre, Shilpi Sahariya.
Very often, there are no medical facilities. Primary health centres in many places are understaffed and almost non-functional.
Says Dr Sanjeev Kumar of Primary Health Centre (Hingora), "PHC mein rehne ke liye doctors ko staff milna chahiye, ward boy hona chahiye, sweeper hona chahiye, nurses honi chahiye kuch bhi nahin hain. final toh patient ko hi face karna hoga (We need doctors, sweepers, nurses and ward boys to run a PHC. There's nothing here. Ultimately the patient has to suffer.)"
Abject poverty, lack of basic health care facilities and poor health of rural women are all killing India's underpriviledged, malnourished children. The country has consistently has let down children like Shamim and today malnutrition rates in India are even worse than Sub Saharan Africa.
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Friday 28 March 2008
Where has all the rage gone?
March, 28 2008
By Tariq Ali
Source: The Guardian
A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the US against a poor south-east Asian country was seen every night on television. The cumulative impact of watching the bombs drop, villages on fire and a country being doused with napalm and Agent Orange triggered a wave of global revolts not seen on such a scale before or since.
Students hurling projectiles against the police on the Boulevard Saint Germain, Paris, May 6 1968. Photograph: Bruno Barbey/Magnum
If the Vietnamese were defeating the world's most powerful state, surely we, too, could defeat our own rulers: that was the dominant mood among the more radical of the 60s generation.
In February 1968, the Vietnamese communists launched their famous Tet offensive, attacking US troops in every major South Vietnamese city. The grand finale was the sight of Vietnamese guerrillas occupying the US embassy in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and raising their flag from its roof. It was undoubtedly a suicide mission, but incredibly courageous. The impact was immediate. For the first time a majority of US citizens realised that the war was unwinnable. The poorer among them brought Vietnam home that same summer in a revolt against poverty and discrimination as black ghettoes exploded in every major US city, with returned black GIs playing a prominent part.
The single spark set the world alight. In March 1968, students at Nanterre University in France came out on to the streets and the 22 March Movement was born, with two Daniels (Cohn-Bendit and Bensaid, Nanterre students then, and both still involved in green or leftist politics) challenging the French lion: Charles de Gaulle, the aloof, monarchical president of the Fifth Republic who, in a puerile outburst, would later describe as chie-en-lit - "shit in the bed" - the events in France that came close to toppling him. The students began by demanding university reforms and moved on to revolution.
That same month in London, a demonstration against the Vietnam war marched to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. It turned violent. Like the Vietnamese, we wanted to occupy the embassy, but mounted police were deployed to protect the citadel. Clashes occurred and the US senator Eugene McCarthy watching the images demanded an end to a war that had led, among other things, to "our embassy in Europe's friendliest capital" being constantly besieged. Compared with the ferment elsewhere, Britain was a sideshow ("...in sleepy London Town there's just no place for a street fighting man," Mick Jagger sang later that year): university occupations and riots in Grosvenor Square did not pose any real threat to the Labour government, which backed the US but refused to send troops to Vietnam.
In France, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was at the peak of his influence. Contrary to Stalinist apologists, he argued that there was no reason to prepare for happiness tomorrow at the price of injustice, oppression or misery today. What was required was improvement now.
By May, the Nanterre students' uprising had spread to Paris and to the trade unions. We were preparing the first issue of The Black Dwarf as the French capital erupted on May 10. Jean-Jacques Lebel, our teargassed Paris correspondent, was ringing in reports every few hours. He told us: "A well-known French football commentator is sent to the Latin Quarter to cover the night's events and reported, 'Now the CRS [riot police] are charging, they're storming the barricade - oh my God! There's a battle raging. The students are counter-attacking, you can hear the noise - the CRS are retreating. Now they're regrouping, getting ready to charge again. The inhabitants are throwing things from their windows at the CRS - oh! The police are retaliating, shooting grenades into the windows of apartments...' The producer interrupts: 'This can't be true, the CRS don't do things like that!'
" 'I'm telling you what I'm seeing...' His voice goes dead. They have cut him off."
The police failed to take back the Latin Quarter, now renamed the Heroic Vietnam Quarter. Three days later a million people occupied the streets of Paris, demanding an end to the rottenness of the state and plastering the walls with slogans: "Defend The Collective Imagination", "Beneath The Cobble- stones The Beach", "Commodities Are The Opium Of The People, Revolution Is The Ecstasy Of History".
Eric Hobsbawm wrote in The Black Dwarf: "What France proves is when someone demonstrates that people are not powerless, they may begin to act again."
I had been planning to head for Paris - it was something we had been discussing at the paper - but then I received a late-night phone call. A posh voice said, "You don't know who I am, but do not leave the country till your five years here are up. They won't let you back." In those days, citizenship for Commonwealth citizens was automatic after five years. I would not complete my five years until October 1968. Already Labour cabinet ministers had been discussing in public whether or not I could be deported. Friendly lawyers confirmed I should not leave the country. Clive Goodwin, the publisher of our mag, vetoed the trip and went off himself.
I went a year later to help Alain Krivine, one of the leaders of the May 1968 revolt, in his presidential campaign, standing for the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. As we touched down at Orly airport, returning from a rally in Toulouse, the French police surrounded the plane. "Hope it's you, not me," muttered Krivine. It was. I was served an order banning me from France which stayed in force until François Mitterand's election many years later.
The revolution did not happen, but France was shaken by the events. De Gaulle, with a sense of history, considered a coup d'état: in early June, he flew from a military base to Baden-Baden, where French troops were stationed, to ask whether they would support him if Paris fell to the revolutionaries. They agreed but demanded rehabilitation for the ultra-right generals whom De Gaulle had fired because they opposed pulling out of Algeria. The deal was done. Yet De Gaulle slapped down his interior minister for suggesting that Sartre be arrested: "You cannot imprison Voltaire," he ruled.
The French example did spread, worrying bureaucrats in Moscow as much as the ruling elites in the west. An unruly and undisciplined people had to be brought to heel. Robert Escarpit, a Le Monde correspondent, wrote on July 23 1968: "A Frenchman travelling abroad feels himself treated a bit like a convalescent from a pernicious fever. And how did the rash of barricades break out? What was the temperature at five o'clock in the evening of May 29? Is the Gaullist medicine really getting to the roots of the disease? Are there dangers of a relapse?... But there is one question that is hardly ever asked, perhaps because they are afraid to hear the answer. But at heart everyone would like to know, hopefully or fearfully, whether the sickness is infectious."
It was infectious. In Prague, communist reformers - many of them heroes of the anti-fascist resistance during the second world war - had that spring already proclaimed "socialism with a human face". The aim of Alexander Dubcek and his supporters was to democratise political life in Czechoslovakia. It was the first step towards a socialist democracy and was seen as such in Moscow and Washington. On August 21, the Russians sent in the tanks and crushed the reform movement.
In every west European capital there were protests. The tabloid press in Britain was constantly attacking leftists as "agents of Moscow" and was genuinely taken aback when we marched to the Soviet embassy, denouncing the invasion in strong language and burning effigies of the bloated Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Alexander Solzhenitsyn later remarked that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had been the last straw for him. Now he realised that the system could never be reformed from within but would have to be overthrown. He was not alone. The Moscow bureaucrats had sealed their own fate.
In Mexico, students took over their universities, demanding an end to oppression and one-party rule. The army was sent in to occupy the universities and did so for many months, making it the best-educated army in the world. On October 2 - with the eyes of the world on Mexico City 10 days before the Olympic games were due to begin there - thousands of students poured on to the streets to demonstrate. A massacre began at sunset. Troops opened fire on the crowd listening to speeches in one of the city's main squares - dozens were killed and hundreds more injured.
And then in November 1968 Pakistan erupted. Students took on the state apparatus of a corrupt and decaying military dictatorship backed by the US (sound familiar?). They were joined by workers, lawyers, white-collar employees, prostitutes, and other social layers, and despite the severe repression (hundreds were killed), the struggle increased in intensity and, the following year, toppled Field Marshal Ayub Khan.
When I arrived in February 1969, the mood of the country was joyous. Speaking at rallies all over the country with the poet Habib Jalib, we encountered a very different atmosphere from that in Europe. Here power did not seem so remote. The victory over Ayub Khan led to the first general election in the country's history. The Bengali nationalists in east Pakistan won a majority that the elite and key politicians refused to accept. Civil war led to Indian military intervention and that ended the old Pakistan. Bangladesh was the result of a bloody caesarean.
The glorious decade (1965-75), of which the year 1968 was only the high point, consisted of three concurrent narratives. Politics dominated, but there were two others that left a deeper imprint - sexual liberation and a hedonistic entrepreneurship from below. We had cause to be grateful for the latter. We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited The Black Dwarf in 1968-69. One day a guy in overalls walked into our Soho office and counted out 25 grubby £5 notes, thanked us for producing the paper and left. He would do this every fortnight. Finally, I asked who he was and if there was a particular reason for his generosity. It turned out he had a stall on Portobello Road and, as to why he wanted to help, it was simple. "Capitalism is so non-groovy, man." It's only too groovy now and far more vicious.
In some ways, the 60s were a reaction to the 50s, and the intensity of the cold war. In the US, the McCarthyite witch-hunts had created havoc in the 50s, but now blacklisted writers could work again; in Russia, hundreds of political prisoners were released, the gulags were closed down and the crimes of Stalin were denounced by Khruschev as eastern Europe trembled with excitement and hopes of rapid reform. They hoped in vain.
The spirit of renewal infected the realm of culture as well: Solzhenitsyn's first novel was serialised in the official literary magazine, Novy Mir, and a new cinema took over most of Europe. In Spain and Portugal, ruled at the time by Nato's favourite fascists, Franco and Salazar, censorship persisted, but in Britain DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, written in 1928, was published for the first time in 1960. The book, in its complete form, sold two million copies.
Following Simone de Beauvoir's pioneering work in The Second Sex (1949), Juliet Mitchell fired off a new salvo in December 1966. Her lengthy essay, Women: The Longest Revolution, appeared in the New Left Review and became an immediate point of reference, summarising the problems faced by women: "In advanced industrial society, women's work is only marginal to the total economy... women are offered a universe of their own: the family. Like woman herself, the family appears as a natural object, but it is actually a cultural creation... Both can be exalted paradoxically, as ideals. The 'true' woman and 'true' family are images of peace and plenty: in actuality they may both be sites of violence and despair."
In September 1968, US feminists disrupted the Miss World competition in Atlantic City, warning shots in a women's liberation movement that would change women's lives by demanding recognition, independence and an equal voice in a male-dominated world. The cover of the January 1969 issue of Black Dwarf dedicated the year to women. Inside, we published Sheila Rowbotham's spirited feminist call to arms. (As I write this, Professor Rowbotham, now a distinguished scholar, has her job under threat from the ghastly, grey accountants who run Manchester University. We are now in an epoch of production-line universities with celebrities paid fortunes to teach eight hours a week and genuine scholars dumped in the bin.)
And, yes, there was also the pleasure principle. That the 60s were hedonistic is indisputable, but they were different from the corporatised version of today. At the time they marked a break with the hypocritical puritanism of the 40s and 50s, when censors prohibited married couples being shown on screen sharing a bed and pyjamas were compulsory. Radical upheavals challenge all social restrictions. It was always thus.
In the prefigurative London of the 18th century, sexual experiments required the cover of break-away churches such as the Moravians and surreal Swedenborgians (for whom "love for the holy" was best expressed in the "projection of semen"): both preached the virtues of combining religious and sexual ecstasy. Sexual orgies were a regular feature of Moravian ritual, according to which penetration was akin to entering the wounds in Christ's side. William Blake and his circle were heavily involved in all of this and some of his paintings depicting this world were censored at the time. I hope this does not come as too much of a shock to my old friend Tony Benn and others who sing Jerusalem without realising the hidden meaning of:
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear!
Homosexuality in Britain was decriminalised only in 1967. Gay liberation movements erupted with activists demanding an end to all homophobic legislation and Gay Pride marches were launched, inspired by the Afro-American struggles for equal rights and black pride. All the movements learned from each other. The advances of the civil rights, women's and gay movements, now taken for granted, had to be fought for on the streets against enemies who were fighting the "war on horror".
History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away. In the autumn of 2004, when I was in the US on a lecture tour that coincided with Bush's re-election campaign, I noticed at a large antiwar meeting in Madison a very direct echo in a utopian bumper sticker: "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam." The sound engineer in the hall, a Mexican-American, whispered proudly in my ear that his son, a 25- year-old marine, had just returned from a tour of duty in the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, the scene of horrific massacres by US soldiers, and may show up at the meeting. He didn't, but joined us later with a couple of civilian friends. He could see the room was packed with antiwar, anti-Bush activists.
The young, crewcut marine, G, recounted tales of duty and valour. I asked why he had joined the marine corps. "There was no choice for people like me. If I'd stayed here, I'd have been killed on the streets or ended up in the penitentiary serving life. The marine corps saved my life. They trained me, looked after me and changed me completely. If I died in Iraq, at least it would be the enemy that killed me. In Fallujah, all I could think of was how to make sure that the men under my command were kept safe. That's all. Most of the kids demonstrating for peace have no problems here. They go to college, they demonstrate and soon they forget it all as they move into well-paid jobs. It's not so easy for people like me. I think there should be a draft. Why should poor kids be the only ones out there? Out of all the marines I work with, perhaps four or five percent are gung-ho flag-wavers. The rest of us are doing a job, we do it well and hope we get out without being KIA [killed in action] or wounded."
Later, G sat on a sofa between two older men - both former combatants. On his left was Will Williams, 60, born in Mississipi, who had enlisted in the army aged 17. He was sure that, had he not left Mississippi, the Klu Klux Klan or some other racist gang would have killed him. He, too, told me that the military "saved my life". Following a stint in Germany, he was sent to Vietnam. Wounded in action, he received a Purple Heart and two bronze stars; he also began to change following a rebellion by black troops at Camranh Bay protesting racism within the US army.
Following a difficult period readjusting, Williams read deeply in politics and history. Feeling that the country was being lied to again, he and Dot, his companion of over 43 years, joined the movement opposing the war in Iraq, bringing their Gospel choir voices to rallies and demonstrations.
On G's right was Clarence Kailin, 90 years old that summer and one of the few remaining survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. He, too, has been active in the movement against the war in Iraq. "Our trip was made in considerable secrecy - even from our families. I was a truck driver, then an infantry man and for a short time a stretcher-bearer. I saw the brutality of war up close. Of the five Wisconsinites who came to Spain with me, two were killed... later, there was Vietnam and this time kids from here died on the wrong side. Now we have Iraq. It's really bad, but I still believe there is an innate goodness in people, which is why so many can break with unworthy pasts."
In 2006, after another tour of duty, G could no longer accept any justification for the war. He was admiring of Cindy Sheehan and the Military Families Against the War, the most consistently active and effective antiwar group in the US.
A decade before the French Revolution, Voltaire remarked that "History is the lies we agree on". Afterwards there was little agreement on anything. The debate on 1968 was recently revived by Nicolas Sarkozy, who boasted that his victory in last year's presidential elections was the final nail in the '68 coffin. The philosopher Alain Badiou's tart response was to compare the new president of the republic to the Bourbons of 1815 and Marshal Pétain during the war. They, too, had talked about nails and coffins.
"May 1968 imposed intellectual and moral relaivism on us all," Sarkozy declared. "The heirs of May '68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. The heritage of May 1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics."
He even blamed the legacy of May '68 for greedy and seedy business practices. The May '68 attack on ethical standards helped to "weaken the morality of capitalism, to prepare the ground for the unscrupulous capitalism of golden parachutes for rogue bosses". So the 60s generation is held responsible for Enron, Conrad Black, the subprime mortgage crisis, Northern Rock, corrupt politicians, deregulation, the dictatorship of the "free market", a culture strangled by brazen opportunism.
The struggle against the Vietnam war lasted 10 years. In 2003 people came out again in Europe and America, in even larger numbers, to try to stop the Iraq war. The pre-emptive strike failed. The movement lacked the stamina and the resonance of its predecessors. Within 48 hours it had virtually disappeared, highlighting the changed times.
Were the dreams and hopes of 1968 all idle fantasies? Or did cruel history abort something new that was about to be born? Revolutionaries - utopian anarchists, Fidelistas, Trotskyist allsorts, Maoists of every stripe - wanted the whole forest. Liberals and social democrats were fixated on individual trees. The forest, they warned us, was a distraction, far too vast and impossible to define, whereas a tree was a piece of wood that could be identified, improved and crafted into a chair or a table. Now the tree, too, has gone.
"You're like fish that only see the bait, never the line," we would mock in return. For we believed - and still do - that people should not be measured by material possessions but by their ability to transform the lives of others - the poor and underprivileged; that the economy needed to be reorganised in the interests of the many, not the few; and that socialism without democracy could never work. Above all, we believed in freedom of speech.
Much of this seems utopian now and some, for whom 1968 wasn't radical enough at the time, have embraced the present and, like members of ancient sects who moved easily from ritual debauchery to chastity, now regard any form of socialism as the serpent that tempted Eve in paradise.
The collapse of "communism" in 1989 created the basis for a new social agreement, the Washington Consensus, whereby deregulation and the entry of private capital into hitherto hallowed domains of public provision would become the norm everywhere, making traditional social democracy redundant and threatening the democratic process itself.
Some, who once dreamed of a better future, have simply given up. Others espouse a bitter maxim: unless you relearn you won't earn. The French intelligentsia, which had from the Enlightenment onwards made Paris the political workshop of the world, today leads the way with retreats on every front. Renegades occupy posts in every west European government defending exploitation, wars, state terror and neocolonial occupations; others now retired from the academy specialise in producing reactionary dross on the blogosphere, displaying the same zeal with which they once excoriated factional rivals on the far left. This, too, is nothing new. Shelley's rebuke to Wordsworth who, after welcoming the French Revolution, retreated to a pastoral conservatism, expressed it well:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
By Tariq Ali
Source: The Guardian
A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the US against a poor south-east Asian country was seen every night on television. The cumulative impact of watching the bombs drop, villages on fire and a country being doused with napalm and Agent Orange triggered a wave of global revolts not seen on such a scale before or since.
Students hurling projectiles against the police on the Boulevard Saint Germain, Paris, May 6 1968. Photograph: Bruno Barbey/Magnum
If the Vietnamese were defeating the world's most powerful state, surely we, too, could defeat our own rulers: that was the dominant mood among the more radical of the 60s generation.
In February 1968, the Vietnamese communists launched their famous Tet offensive, attacking US troops in every major South Vietnamese city. The grand finale was the sight of Vietnamese guerrillas occupying the US embassy in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and raising their flag from its roof. It was undoubtedly a suicide mission, but incredibly courageous. The impact was immediate. For the first time a majority of US citizens realised that the war was unwinnable. The poorer among them brought Vietnam home that same summer in a revolt against poverty and discrimination as black ghettoes exploded in every major US city, with returned black GIs playing a prominent part.
The single spark set the world alight. In March 1968, students at Nanterre University in France came out on to the streets and the 22 March Movement was born, with two Daniels (Cohn-Bendit and Bensaid, Nanterre students then, and both still involved in green or leftist politics) challenging the French lion: Charles de Gaulle, the aloof, monarchical president of the Fifth Republic who, in a puerile outburst, would later describe as chie-en-lit - "shit in the bed" - the events in France that came close to toppling him. The students began by demanding university reforms and moved on to revolution.
That same month in London, a demonstration against the Vietnam war marched to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. It turned violent. Like the Vietnamese, we wanted to occupy the embassy, but mounted police were deployed to protect the citadel. Clashes occurred and the US senator Eugene McCarthy watching the images demanded an end to a war that had led, among other things, to "our embassy in Europe's friendliest capital" being constantly besieged. Compared with the ferment elsewhere, Britain was a sideshow ("...in sleepy London Town there's just no place for a street fighting man," Mick Jagger sang later that year): university occupations and riots in Grosvenor Square did not pose any real threat to the Labour government, which backed the US but refused to send troops to Vietnam.
In France, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was at the peak of his influence. Contrary to Stalinist apologists, he argued that there was no reason to prepare for happiness tomorrow at the price of injustice, oppression or misery today. What was required was improvement now.
By May, the Nanterre students' uprising had spread to Paris and to the trade unions. We were preparing the first issue of The Black Dwarf as the French capital erupted on May 10. Jean-Jacques Lebel, our teargassed Paris correspondent, was ringing in reports every few hours. He told us: "A well-known French football commentator is sent to the Latin Quarter to cover the night's events and reported, 'Now the CRS [riot police] are charging, they're storming the barricade - oh my God! There's a battle raging. The students are counter-attacking, you can hear the noise - the CRS are retreating. Now they're regrouping, getting ready to charge again. The inhabitants are throwing things from their windows at the CRS - oh! The police are retaliating, shooting grenades into the windows of apartments...' The producer interrupts: 'This can't be true, the CRS don't do things like that!'
" 'I'm telling you what I'm seeing...' His voice goes dead. They have cut him off."
The police failed to take back the Latin Quarter, now renamed the Heroic Vietnam Quarter. Three days later a million people occupied the streets of Paris, demanding an end to the rottenness of the state and plastering the walls with slogans: "Defend The Collective Imagination", "Beneath The Cobble- stones The Beach", "Commodities Are The Opium Of The People, Revolution Is The Ecstasy Of History".
Eric Hobsbawm wrote in The Black Dwarf: "What France proves is when someone demonstrates that people are not powerless, they may begin to act again."
I had been planning to head for Paris - it was something we had been discussing at the paper - but then I received a late-night phone call. A posh voice said, "You don't know who I am, but do not leave the country till your five years here are up. They won't let you back." In those days, citizenship for Commonwealth citizens was automatic after five years. I would not complete my five years until October 1968. Already Labour cabinet ministers had been discussing in public whether or not I could be deported. Friendly lawyers confirmed I should not leave the country. Clive Goodwin, the publisher of our mag, vetoed the trip and went off himself.
I went a year later to help Alain Krivine, one of the leaders of the May 1968 revolt, in his presidential campaign, standing for the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. As we touched down at Orly airport, returning from a rally in Toulouse, the French police surrounded the plane. "Hope it's you, not me," muttered Krivine. It was. I was served an order banning me from France which stayed in force until François Mitterand's election many years later.
The revolution did not happen, but France was shaken by the events. De Gaulle, with a sense of history, considered a coup d'état: in early June, he flew from a military base to Baden-Baden, where French troops were stationed, to ask whether they would support him if Paris fell to the revolutionaries. They agreed but demanded rehabilitation for the ultra-right generals whom De Gaulle had fired because they opposed pulling out of Algeria. The deal was done. Yet De Gaulle slapped down his interior minister for suggesting that Sartre be arrested: "You cannot imprison Voltaire," he ruled.
The French example did spread, worrying bureaucrats in Moscow as much as the ruling elites in the west. An unruly and undisciplined people had to be brought to heel. Robert Escarpit, a Le Monde correspondent, wrote on July 23 1968: "A Frenchman travelling abroad feels himself treated a bit like a convalescent from a pernicious fever. And how did the rash of barricades break out? What was the temperature at five o'clock in the evening of May 29? Is the Gaullist medicine really getting to the roots of the disease? Are there dangers of a relapse?... But there is one question that is hardly ever asked, perhaps because they are afraid to hear the answer. But at heart everyone would like to know, hopefully or fearfully, whether the sickness is infectious."
It was infectious. In Prague, communist reformers - many of them heroes of the anti-fascist resistance during the second world war - had that spring already proclaimed "socialism with a human face". The aim of Alexander Dubcek and his supporters was to democratise political life in Czechoslovakia. It was the first step towards a socialist democracy and was seen as such in Moscow and Washington. On August 21, the Russians sent in the tanks and crushed the reform movement.
In every west European capital there were protests. The tabloid press in Britain was constantly attacking leftists as "agents of Moscow" and was genuinely taken aback when we marched to the Soviet embassy, denouncing the invasion in strong language and burning effigies of the bloated Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Alexander Solzhenitsyn later remarked that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had been the last straw for him. Now he realised that the system could never be reformed from within but would have to be overthrown. He was not alone. The Moscow bureaucrats had sealed their own fate.
In Mexico, students took over their universities, demanding an end to oppression and one-party rule. The army was sent in to occupy the universities and did so for many months, making it the best-educated army in the world. On October 2 - with the eyes of the world on Mexico City 10 days before the Olympic games were due to begin there - thousands of students poured on to the streets to demonstrate. A massacre began at sunset. Troops opened fire on the crowd listening to speeches in one of the city's main squares - dozens were killed and hundreds more injured.
And then in November 1968 Pakistan erupted. Students took on the state apparatus of a corrupt and decaying military dictatorship backed by the US (sound familiar?). They were joined by workers, lawyers, white-collar employees, prostitutes, and other social layers, and despite the severe repression (hundreds were killed), the struggle increased in intensity and, the following year, toppled Field Marshal Ayub Khan.
When I arrived in February 1969, the mood of the country was joyous. Speaking at rallies all over the country with the poet Habib Jalib, we encountered a very different atmosphere from that in Europe. Here power did not seem so remote. The victory over Ayub Khan led to the first general election in the country's history. The Bengali nationalists in east Pakistan won a majority that the elite and key politicians refused to accept. Civil war led to Indian military intervention and that ended the old Pakistan. Bangladesh was the result of a bloody caesarean.
The glorious decade (1965-75), of which the year 1968 was only the high point, consisted of three concurrent narratives. Politics dominated, but there were two others that left a deeper imprint - sexual liberation and a hedonistic entrepreneurship from below. We had cause to be grateful for the latter. We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited The Black Dwarf in 1968-69. One day a guy in overalls walked into our Soho office and counted out 25 grubby £5 notes, thanked us for producing the paper and left. He would do this every fortnight. Finally, I asked who he was and if there was a particular reason for his generosity. It turned out he had a stall on Portobello Road and, as to why he wanted to help, it was simple. "Capitalism is so non-groovy, man." It's only too groovy now and far more vicious.
In some ways, the 60s were a reaction to the 50s, and the intensity of the cold war. In the US, the McCarthyite witch-hunts had created havoc in the 50s, but now blacklisted writers could work again; in Russia, hundreds of political prisoners were released, the gulags were closed down and the crimes of Stalin were denounced by Khruschev as eastern Europe trembled with excitement and hopes of rapid reform. They hoped in vain.
The spirit of renewal infected the realm of culture as well: Solzhenitsyn's first novel was serialised in the official literary magazine, Novy Mir, and a new cinema took over most of Europe. In Spain and Portugal, ruled at the time by Nato's favourite fascists, Franco and Salazar, censorship persisted, but in Britain DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, written in 1928, was published for the first time in 1960. The book, in its complete form, sold two million copies.
Following Simone de Beauvoir's pioneering work in The Second Sex (1949), Juliet Mitchell fired off a new salvo in December 1966. Her lengthy essay, Women: The Longest Revolution, appeared in the New Left Review and became an immediate point of reference, summarising the problems faced by women: "In advanced industrial society, women's work is only marginal to the total economy... women are offered a universe of their own: the family. Like woman herself, the family appears as a natural object, but it is actually a cultural creation... Both can be exalted paradoxically, as ideals. The 'true' woman and 'true' family are images of peace and plenty: in actuality they may both be sites of violence and despair."
In September 1968, US feminists disrupted the Miss World competition in Atlantic City, warning shots in a women's liberation movement that would change women's lives by demanding recognition, independence and an equal voice in a male-dominated world. The cover of the January 1969 issue of Black Dwarf dedicated the year to women. Inside, we published Sheila Rowbotham's spirited feminist call to arms. (As I write this, Professor Rowbotham, now a distinguished scholar, has her job under threat from the ghastly, grey accountants who run Manchester University. We are now in an epoch of production-line universities with celebrities paid fortunes to teach eight hours a week and genuine scholars dumped in the bin.)
And, yes, there was also the pleasure principle. That the 60s were hedonistic is indisputable, but they were different from the corporatised version of today. At the time they marked a break with the hypocritical puritanism of the 40s and 50s, when censors prohibited married couples being shown on screen sharing a bed and pyjamas were compulsory. Radical upheavals challenge all social restrictions. It was always thus.
In the prefigurative London of the 18th century, sexual experiments required the cover of break-away churches such as the Moravians and surreal Swedenborgians (for whom "love for the holy" was best expressed in the "projection of semen"): both preached the virtues of combining religious and sexual ecstasy. Sexual orgies were a regular feature of Moravian ritual, according to which penetration was akin to entering the wounds in Christ's side. William Blake and his circle were heavily involved in all of this and some of his paintings depicting this world were censored at the time. I hope this does not come as too much of a shock to my old friend Tony Benn and others who sing Jerusalem without realising the hidden meaning of:
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear!
Homosexuality in Britain was decriminalised only in 1967. Gay liberation movements erupted with activists demanding an end to all homophobic legislation and Gay Pride marches were launched, inspired by the Afro-American struggles for equal rights and black pride. All the movements learned from each other. The advances of the civil rights, women's and gay movements, now taken for granted, had to be fought for on the streets against enemies who were fighting the "war on horror".
History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away. In the autumn of 2004, when I was in the US on a lecture tour that coincided with Bush's re-election campaign, I noticed at a large antiwar meeting in Madison a very direct echo in a utopian bumper sticker: "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam." The sound engineer in the hall, a Mexican-American, whispered proudly in my ear that his son, a 25- year-old marine, had just returned from a tour of duty in the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, the scene of horrific massacres by US soldiers, and may show up at the meeting. He didn't, but joined us later with a couple of civilian friends. He could see the room was packed with antiwar, anti-Bush activists.
The young, crewcut marine, G, recounted tales of duty and valour. I asked why he had joined the marine corps. "There was no choice for people like me. If I'd stayed here, I'd have been killed on the streets or ended up in the penitentiary serving life. The marine corps saved my life. They trained me, looked after me and changed me completely. If I died in Iraq, at least it would be the enemy that killed me. In Fallujah, all I could think of was how to make sure that the men under my command were kept safe. That's all. Most of the kids demonstrating for peace have no problems here. They go to college, they demonstrate and soon they forget it all as they move into well-paid jobs. It's not so easy for people like me. I think there should be a draft. Why should poor kids be the only ones out there? Out of all the marines I work with, perhaps four or five percent are gung-ho flag-wavers. The rest of us are doing a job, we do it well and hope we get out without being KIA [killed in action] or wounded."
Later, G sat on a sofa between two older men - both former combatants. On his left was Will Williams, 60, born in Mississipi, who had enlisted in the army aged 17. He was sure that, had he not left Mississippi, the Klu Klux Klan or some other racist gang would have killed him. He, too, told me that the military "saved my life". Following a stint in Germany, he was sent to Vietnam. Wounded in action, he received a Purple Heart and two bronze stars; he also began to change following a rebellion by black troops at Camranh Bay protesting racism within the US army.
Following a difficult period readjusting, Williams read deeply in politics and history. Feeling that the country was being lied to again, he and Dot, his companion of over 43 years, joined the movement opposing the war in Iraq, bringing their Gospel choir voices to rallies and demonstrations.
On G's right was Clarence Kailin, 90 years old that summer and one of the few remaining survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. He, too, has been active in the movement against the war in Iraq. "Our trip was made in considerable secrecy - even from our families. I was a truck driver, then an infantry man and for a short time a stretcher-bearer. I saw the brutality of war up close. Of the five Wisconsinites who came to Spain with me, two were killed... later, there was Vietnam and this time kids from here died on the wrong side. Now we have Iraq. It's really bad, but I still believe there is an innate goodness in people, which is why so many can break with unworthy pasts."
In 2006, after another tour of duty, G could no longer accept any justification for the war. He was admiring of Cindy Sheehan and the Military Families Against the War, the most consistently active and effective antiwar group in the US.
A decade before the French Revolution, Voltaire remarked that "History is the lies we agree on". Afterwards there was little agreement on anything. The debate on 1968 was recently revived by Nicolas Sarkozy, who boasted that his victory in last year's presidential elections was the final nail in the '68 coffin. The philosopher Alain Badiou's tart response was to compare the new president of the republic to the Bourbons of 1815 and Marshal Pétain during the war. They, too, had talked about nails and coffins.
"May 1968 imposed intellectual and moral relaivism on us all," Sarkozy declared. "The heirs of May '68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. The heritage of May 1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics."
He even blamed the legacy of May '68 for greedy and seedy business practices. The May '68 attack on ethical standards helped to "weaken the morality of capitalism, to prepare the ground for the unscrupulous capitalism of golden parachutes for rogue bosses". So the 60s generation is held responsible for Enron, Conrad Black, the subprime mortgage crisis, Northern Rock, corrupt politicians, deregulation, the dictatorship of the "free market", a culture strangled by brazen opportunism.
The struggle against the Vietnam war lasted 10 years. In 2003 people came out again in Europe and America, in even larger numbers, to try to stop the Iraq war. The pre-emptive strike failed. The movement lacked the stamina and the resonance of its predecessors. Within 48 hours it had virtually disappeared, highlighting the changed times.
Were the dreams and hopes of 1968 all idle fantasies? Or did cruel history abort something new that was about to be born? Revolutionaries - utopian anarchists, Fidelistas, Trotskyist allsorts, Maoists of every stripe - wanted the whole forest. Liberals and social democrats were fixated on individual trees. The forest, they warned us, was a distraction, far too vast and impossible to define, whereas a tree was a piece of wood that could be identified, improved and crafted into a chair or a table. Now the tree, too, has gone.
"You're like fish that only see the bait, never the line," we would mock in return. For we believed - and still do - that people should not be measured by material possessions but by their ability to transform the lives of others - the poor and underprivileged; that the economy needed to be reorganised in the interests of the many, not the few; and that socialism without democracy could never work. Above all, we believed in freedom of speech.
Much of this seems utopian now and some, for whom 1968 wasn't radical enough at the time, have embraced the present and, like members of ancient sects who moved easily from ritual debauchery to chastity, now regard any form of socialism as the serpent that tempted Eve in paradise.
The collapse of "communism" in 1989 created the basis for a new social agreement, the Washington Consensus, whereby deregulation and the entry of private capital into hitherto hallowed domains of public provision would become the norm everywhere, making traditional social democracy redundant and threatening the democratic process itself.
Some, who once dreamed of a better future, have simply given up. Others espouse a bitter maxim: unless you relearn you won't earn. The French intelligentsia, which had from the Enlightenment onwards made Paris the political workshop of the world, today leads the way with retreats on every front. Renegades occupy posts in every west European government defending exploitation, wars, state terror and neocolonial occupations; others now retired from the academy specialise in producing reactionary dross on the blogosphere, displaying the same zeal with which they once excoriated factional rivals on the far left. This, too, is nothing new. Shelley's rebuke to Wordsworth who, after welcoming the French Revolution, retreated to a pastoral conservatism, expressed it well:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
Goodbye to rip-off Britain
With the crunch coming, the articial inflation in the economy will soon be exposed
Martin Samuel
28 March 2008
There is a guy, does business up town, doesn't use his car much, bit of a novice when it comes to scooting around London. Anyway, a few weeks back he has complications with late meetings so, for a couple of days, he drives in. First time, schoolboy error, he forgets to pay the congestion charge, incurs a £60 fine right there. His parking for the day comes to roughly £40 in an NCP. Next time, he remembers the congestion charge, but leaves his car on the street, doing the parking meter tango, feeding it, moving it, feeding it, moving it, £8 here, £6 there, until finally he gets really busy, overruns by five minutes and, bang, a £100 penalty. He reckons the whole experience, with petrol, of two days' motoring will have cost close to £300. He's a wealthy man, he can afford it; but suppose he was an ordinary working stiff from the sticks, bringing in the average wage? That could be his disposable income, after the mortgage, gone. For two innocent, pretty harmless, mistakes. This is why Gordon Brown is in trouble.
The economy is false. The economy is a lie. The economy is a fictional set of numbers cooked up during a boom period that is almost over, and six months from now nothing will add up. The cost of a parking ticket grew to be completely disproportionate in relation to the offence committed because everyone was sawing it off, so nobody cared. Some twerp slapped a sticker demanding one hundred notes for a minuscule oversight on your windscreen and you knew it was preposterous, but you could afford it. And now you can't. And now you are going to realise how overpriced and bogus the minutiae of British life are, and Gordon is panicking because there is no way he can make this sustainable; yet the artifice of commerce and government relies on your expanding wallet.
If, while waiting for the clampers to arrive, having paid your £100 release fee plus £60 fine plus VAT, you pop into Starbucks for a cup of coffee, you will be charged close on £2. For coffee. Think about it, because so few have. We read about sub-prime mortgage markets and global credit squeezes and receive the deep thoughts of financial experts that have caught a cold in every recession for the past 50 years, which is why the benefits from your endowment mortgage will just about cover a self-assembly greenhouse from Homebase, but nobody notices the details. Coffee, two quid. No rationalisation. No justification. In a recession, nobody can drop two quid for a hot drink three times a day, five days a week. Bottled water the same: £1.60 for 500ml to take away at Caffè Nero on Monday. And everyone has a sip. Our lives are full of inflated expenses that are propping up Brown's fairyland economy and, when the penny drops, this crash will be the mightiest ever. No wonder he looks scared.
For so long we have not given this stuff a thought. My favourite football club charges a £1.50 booking fee on each ticket, so if I take my three boys we pay an additional £6. These tickets will be placed in one envelope and sent to one address, so the charge cannot cover postage or packing. I am actually paying a ticket office extra to sell tickets. It would be like a greengrocer applying a levy for dispensing fruit and vegetables. Yet as this nonsense was introduced in high times, nobody quibbled.
When a booking fee is demanded, we should ask the person on the end of the line to send round a cheese sandwich instead. You know, do something that is not part of the job, because that would be worth a tip. Clean the windows? Yeah, I'll pay extra. But applying a surcharge so a ticket office can provide tickets? I'm not seeing the value.
Brown got away with murder because he was Chancellor in the days when chimps could make money. In May 1999, he sold half the country's gold reserves during a 20-year low in the market at an average price of $275 an ounce. Yesterday morning the price of gold was approximately $946 an ounce. Brown bought euros instead, which have done well, but even so the cost to the nation of this mistake is measured in billions; and the only reason it has not been immortalised as a catastrophe in the same way as, say, Black Wednesday is because the population has been too busy hiring personal trainers and eating fancy crisps (chardonnay wine vinegar flavour, firecracker lobster flavour, patatas bravas, have you people gone nuts?) to care.
It costs more to download music from the same supplier in the United Kingdom than it does in the United States. Consider that. No shipping, no additional overheads, no reason the cost of the service shouldn't be identical. We are so used to meeting inflated prices, it barely registers anymore. The top-of-the-range Lexus hybrid costs £83,000 in the United Kingdom and £54,145 in the United States. The wealth that keeps Brown's economy ticking over is a mirage; it cannot survive the recession. And neither can he.
Not long ago I made a reservation at my favourite Chinese restaurant in town. Bit pricey. A special occasion place, not your average local. They wanted credit card details in advance with the right to charge £35 per head in the event of any alteration to the booking. I refused. They would not reserve otherwise. I very politely asked it to be explained to the manager that there was a recession around the corner and the number of people looking to drop six figures on noodles could be about to change quite dramatically. He might want to keep those that do onside. The reservation was accepted, no credit card. He knew, you see. So does Gordon. That is why he looks worried.
Martin Samuel
28 March 2008
There is a guy, does business up town, doesn't use his car much, bit of a novice when it comes to scooting around London. Anyway, a few weeks back he has complications with late meetings so, for a couple of days, he drives in. First time, schoolboy error, he forgets to pay the congestion charge, incurs a £60 fine right there. His parking for the day comes to roughly £40 in an NCP. Next time, he remembers the congestion charge, but leaves his car on the street, doing the parking meter tango, feeding it, moving it, feeding it, moving it, £8 here, £6 there, until finally he gets really busy, overruns by five minutes and, bang, a £100 penalty. He reckons the whole experience, with petrol, of two days' motoring will have cost close to £300. He's a wealthy man, he can afford it; but suppose he was an ordinary working stiff from the sticks, bringing in the average wage? That could be his disposable income, after the mortgage, gone. For two innocent, pretty harmless, mistakes. This is why Gordon Brown is in trouble.
The economy is false. The economy is a lie. The economy is a fictional set of numbers cooked up during a boom period that is almost over, and six months from now nothing will add up. The cost of a parking ticket grew to be completely disproportionate in relation to the offence committed because everyone was sawing it off, so nobody cared. Some twerp slapped a sticker demanding one hundred notes for a minuscule oversight on your windscreen and you knew it was preposterous, but you could afford it. And now you can't. And now you are going to realise how overpriced and bogus the minutiae of British life are, and Gordon is panicking because there is no way he can make this sustainable; yet the artifice of commerce and government relies on your expanding wallet.
If, while waiting for the clampers to arrive, having paid your £100 release fee plus £60 fine plus VAT, you pop into Starbucks for a cup of coffee, you will be charged close on £2. For coffee. Think about it, because so few have. We read about sub-prime mortgage markets and global credit squeezes and receive the deep thoughts of financial experts that have caught a cold in every recession for the past 50 years, which is why the benefits from your endowment mortgage will just about cover a self-assembly greenhouse from Homebase, but nobody notices the details. Coffee, two quid. No rationalisation. No justification. In a recession, nobody can drop two quid for a hot drink three times a day, five days a week. Bottled water the same: £1.60 for 500ml to take away at Caffè Nero on Monday. And everyone has a sip. Our lives are full of inflated expenses that are propping up Brown's fairyland economy and, when the penny drops, this crash will be the mightiest ever. No wonder he looks scared.
For so long we have not given this stuff a thought. My favourite football club charges a £1.50 booking fee on each ticket, so if I take my three boys we pay an additional £6. These tickets will be placed in one envelope and sent to one address, so the charge cannot cover postage or packing. I am actually paying a ticket office extra to sell tickets. It would be like a greengrocer applying a levy for dispensing fruit and vegetables. Yet as this nonsense was introduced in high times, nobody quibbled.
When a booking fee is demanded, we should ask the person on the end of the line to send round a cheese sandwich instead. You know, do something that is not part of the job, because that would be worth a tip. Clean the windows? Yeah, I'll pay extra. But applying a surcharge so a ticket office can provide tickets? I'm not seeing the value.
Brown got away with murder because he was Chancellor in the days when chimps could make money. In May 1999, he sold half the country's gold reserves during a 20-year low in the market at an average price of $275 an ounce. Yesterday morning the price of gold was approximately $946 an ounce. Brown bought euros instead, which have done well, but even so the cost to the nation of this mistake is measured in billions; and the only reason it has not been immortalised as a catastrophe in the same way as, say, Black Wednesday is because the population has been too busy hiring personal trainers and eating fancy crisps (chardonnay wine vinegar flavour, firecracker lobster flavour, patatas bravas, have you people gone nuts?) to care.
It costs more to download music from the same supplier in the United Kingdom than it does in the United States. Consider that. No shipping, no additional overheads, no reason the cost of the service shouldn't be identical. We are so used to meeting inflated prices, it barely registers anymore. The top-of-the-range Lexus hybrid costs £83,000 in the United Kingdom and £54,145 in the United States. The wealth that keeps Brown's economy ticking over is a mirage; it cannot survive the recession. And neither can he.
Not long ago I made a reservation at my favourite Chinese restaurant in town. Bit pricey. A special occasion place, not your average local. They wanted credit card details in advance with the right to charge £35 per head in the event of any alteration to the booking. I refused. They would not reserve otherwise. I very politely asked it to be explained to the manager that there was a recession around the corner and the number of people looking to drop six figures on noodles could be about to change quite dramatically. He might want to keep those that do onside. The reservation was accepted, no credit card. He knew, you see. So does Gordon. That is why he looks worried.
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