I know, it sounds crazy, but listen to my logic before you completely reject the idea. The indisputable fact of the matter is that there is a fairly miniscule ideological difference between the two pro-capitalist parties. Even Paul Krugman is now calling Barack Obama "what we used to call a liberal Republican."
I didn't vote in 2008 for Jacob Javits, the old Senate liberal Republican warhorse of the 60s and 70s. I voted for a man who claimed to embrace change and hope, but who has essentially embraced a very watered-down version of everything.
Obama promised to reform the health care system, but only gave us "reformed" but more expensive health care insurance. He didn't even dare to put a single-payer plan, similar to the national health care systems of those oh-so-soviet Canada and Britain, to a vote!
For years I have thought that democratic socialism, a la Michael Harrington, was the only viable, reformist route to bring about real change in the United States. But let's face it, in the last 40 years or so, we have witnessed things get worse and worse and worse.
Reagan began the work of destroying what is now recognizably the aberrant era of New Deal to Great Society reformism, with some unionism, some economic security (for whites), a cosmetic opening to women and people whose ancestors did not hail from northwestern Europe.
But Clinton was the real errand boy of capitalism, shipping jobs overseas by the bushel with NAFTA and what later became the WTC, while signing the end of the 1930s Glass-Steagall finance-banking-stockgambling firewall behind the smokescreen of Monica Lewinsky.
Then Dubya doubled down on Reagan, managing to double the debt Reagan had accumulated (which was already more than all the debt racked up by all previous presidents). Why increase the debt? Just look who holds the bonds.
Obama, we in the Left should now realize, was just a clever sop the people who really run things threw at a public irate by the Reagan-Squared misrule.
Obama was never intended to do anything real. The house is on fire? Hand the keys to the black man and let him clean up. His people have always been good janitors. I'm certain that was the thinking on Wall Street. Why else did they support him?
So, folks, what are we to do now? The answer seems clear.
The Republican Party is becoming increasingly rigid and ideological. It is buying into everything that, as anyone who ever read Marx knows, accentuates the self-destructive internal contradictions of capitalism. Look at Kansas. The policies don't work. Kansas' schools are being cut because no one pays enough taxes.
Let's cut all taxes. Let's lower everyone's salaries. Let's egg them on to slash and burn.
Let's send the consumer-spending-dependent system into the suicide it attempted in 2008 ... only this time, let's not save Wall Street and the big corporations. Let's instead follow strict Republican austerity until it cripples the United States economy as we know it beyond repair.
Then we'll have real change -- it's called revolution, and it needn't be physically violent -- starting from scratch.
Thursday, November 06, 2014
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
The True Meaning of Success
A bright intelligent professional of my acquaintance regrets not being a success. I suspect that to this person, success involves a sizable suburban house with a white picket fence, one or two European cars, a photogenic family, foreign travel and career recognition.
I plead guilty to hankering after some recognition for the work I do. I labor obscurely on an economic weekly dealing primarily with unemployment and poverty.
My dream was to be managing editor of The New York Times. I couldn't even get an op-ed piece published by the Gray Lady. Then again, last I heard the Nobel committee had bypassed me for the Peace Prize yet again.
But let's be clear. My dream of being the NYT managing editor wasn't because in that lofty position I would be able to afford Armani suits costing way more than I spend for food in a month.
Rather, I thought I would be able to steer the finest journalism in the world to even greater heights, performing a public service, unmasking wrongdoing, pointing out tragedies that are going unaddressed, holding the feet of government, business and so-called charities to the fire. Admittedly, Jill Abramson did that very nicely without me.
Similarly, I am proud of my progeny not for the money they make, but for the essentially principled lives they lead. They are successful in this.
This, I submit is the true meaning of success: living a life with a purpose that in some way, no matter how little noticed, attempts to serve the betterment of humanity.
I plead guilty to hankering after some recognition for the work I do. I labor obscurely on an economic weekly dealing primarily with unemployment and poverty.
My dream was to be managing editor of The New York Times. I couldn't even get an op-ed piece published by the Gray Lady. Then again, last I heard the Nobel committee had bypassed me for the Peace Prize yet again.
But let's be clear. My dream of being the NYT managing editor wasn't because in that lofty position I would be able to afford Armani suits costing way more than I spend for food in a month.
Rather, I thought I would be able to steer the finest journalism in the world to even greater heights, performing a public service, unmasking wrongdoing, pointing out tragedies that are going unaddressed, holding the feet of government, business and so-called charities to the fire. Admittedly, Jill Abramson did that very nicely without me.
Similarly, I am proud of my progeny not for the money they make, but for the essentially principled lives they lead. They are successful in this.
This, I submit is the true meaning of success: living a life with a purpose that in some way, no matter how little noticed, attempts to serve the betterment of humanity.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
RCC doesn't mean what it used to now that Francis and the Jesuits have gone off the deep end
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Monday, September 01, 2014
How our Labor Day has separated U.S. workers from the world's May Day celebrations
The U.S. Department of Labor's site omits it, but the timing of Labor Day as a federal holiday on the first Monday in September — today — was by design ideological and anti-socialist. The odd thing is that the origin of the May 1st Day of Labor, or
International Workers' Day if you prefer, is as American as apple pie.
May Day commemorates a pivotal event in U.S. labor history, the Haymarket Massacre, which occurred on May 4, 1886, in Chicago.
The incident took place during a peaceful demonstration in Chicago's Haymarket Square demanding the eight-hour workday, which is now an almost universal labor standard. The workers were mostly immigrants from Germany and what was then the Kingdom of Bohemia (now Czech Republic).
An unknown individual — believed to be an agent provocateur who he did it to give the police an excuse to anti-worker attacks — threw a dynamite bomb at police, which reacted vigorously to disperse the gathering. Between the bomb and shooting that followed seven policemen were killed and at least four civilians, with dozens of people injured.
In case you think the protesters were rebels without a cause, consider that they worked for $1.50 per day, 10 hours a day, six days a week. In 2014 dollars, would be $37.50 a day ($3.75 an hour), or $ 11,700 annually — just $ 300 in excess of the U.S. poverty level for a single-person household
In brief, protesters worked 10 hours a day for sums insufficient to support a family — and those days women were not supposed to work (although children did). Moreover, they had taken to the streets in response to the shooting of several workers by police the day before.
The May 4 protest had a history.
In October 1884, a convention held by the Federation of Organized Trades and Unions unanimously set on May 1, 1886, as a target date for the adoption of and eight-hour work day. As the date approached without policy measures by the government, unions prepared for a general strike.
On Saturday, May 1st, 1886, an estimated 300,000 to a half-million workers participated in the strike in major cities nationwide, and paraded in the streets chanting "Eight-hour day, with no cut in pay."
After the riot in Chicago three days later, many lawmakers in Congress expressed shock and the need to commemorate Labor Day. Most labor organizations, many affiliated to the First International, preferred May 1st to commemorate the broad-based 1886 protest strike that had led to the Haymarket Affair, as some called it.
President Grover Cleveland, however, believed a holiday on May 1st would incite workers to disorder while also strengthening the nascent and broad-based socialist movement. Cleveland belonged to pro-business wing of Democratic Party, at the time dubbed "Bourbon Democrats."
The alternative date we have today stems from a parade held on September 5, 1882 in New York by the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, a Catholic-inspired anti-socialist union. the Knights repeated the event in 1884 and decided to do so henceforth every first Monday in September. Naturally, they endorsed their parade date as Labor Day. In 1887 Cleveland endorsed the position of the Knights and its date.
The story doesn't end there. It had at least two sequels.
First, the popular pressure for the eight-hour day continued. At the 1888 convention of the FOTU (that year renamed American Federation of Labor, it was decided that yet another push for the eight-hour workday was needed and settled on May 1, 1890, for other general strike.
The International Workers Association (or Second International), meeting in Paris in 1889, endorsed the AFL's date for international demonstrations in solidarity, thus starting the international workers' tradition of May Day.
But the struggle for the eight-hour workday was long. It was won first in the U.S.A. by the miners' union in 1898, then construction workers in San Francisco's won it in 1900, the printers in 1905. In 1914 the Ford Company doubled pay to $ 5 a day and reduced the workday from nine to eight hours.
Yet it was not until 1916, with wartime protests looming, that the federal government established the eight-hour day as a national standard. Under the later legislation and litigation, a broad swath of salaried workers are exempt from overtime pay rules and effectively from the eight-hour workday.
A second consequence of the Haymarket Massacre was the hoary Chicago trial of eight anarchist workers were accused of conspiring to incite violence. Five were sentenced to death (one committed suicide before his execution) and three were sentenced to prison. The labor movement called them the Martyrs of Chicago.
The trial, which lasted until 1893, was universally described as illegitimate and deliberately malicious. The new governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the accused and joined those who criticized the prosecution of the case in the courts.
Altgeld, one of the founders of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, could have been a candidate for president, as many at the time said they wanted, if he had not been born a fellow citizen of the German immigrants who fought for their rights in Haymarket Square.
Happy Labor Day and remember: no rights have been acquired without considerable struggle and those who say so are likely trying to deprive you of some.
May Day commemorates a pivotal event in U.S. labor history, the Haymarket Massacre, which occurred on May 4, 1886, in Chicago.
The incident took place during a peaceful demonstration in Chicago's Haymarket Square demanding the eight-hour workday, which is now an almost universal labor standard. The workers were mostly immigrants from Germany and what was then the Kingdom of Bohemia (now Czech Republic).
An unknown individual — believed to be an agent provocateur who he did it to give the police an excuse to anti-worker attacks — threw a dynamite bomb at police, which reacted vigorously to disperse the gathering. Between the bomb and shooting that followed seven policemen were killed and at least four civilians, with dozens of people injured.
In case you think the protesters were rebels without a cause, consider that they worked for $1.50 per day, 10 hours a day, six days a week. In 2014 dollars, would be $37.50 a day ($3.75 an hour), or $ 11,700 annually — just $ 300 in excess of the U.S. poverty level for a single-person household
In brief, protesters worked 10 hours a day for sums insufficient to support a family — and those days women were not supposed to work (although children did). Moreover, they had taken to the streets in response to the shooting of several workers by police the day before.
The May 4 protest had a history.
In October 1884, a convention held by the Federation of Organized Trades and Unions unanimously set on May 1, 1886, as a target date for the adoption of and eight-hour work day. As the date approached without policy measures by the government, unions prepared for a general strike.
On Saturday, May 1st, 1886, an estimated 300,000 to a half-million workers participated in the strike in major cities nationwide, and paraded in the streets chanting "Eight-hour day, with no cut in pay."
After the riot in Chicago three days later, many lawmakers in Congress expressed shock and the need to commemorate Labor Day. Most labor organizations, many affiliated to the First International, preferred May 1st to commemorate the broad-based 1886 protest strike that had led to the Haymarket Affair, as some called it.
President Grover Cleveland, however, believed a holiday on May 1st would incite workers to disorder while also strengthening the nascent and broad-based socialist movement. Cleveland belonged to pro-business wing of Democratic Party, at the time dubbed "Bourbon Democrats."
The alternative date we have today stems from a parade held on September 5, 1882 in New York by the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, a Catholic-inspired anti-socialist union. the Knights repeated the event in 1884 and decided to do so henceforth every first Monday in September. Naturally, they endorsed their parade date as Labor Day. In 1887 Cleveland endorsed the position of the Knights and its date.
The story doesn't end there. It had at least two sequels.
First, the popular pressure for the eight-hour day continued. At the 1888 convention of the FOTU (that year renamed American Federation of Labor, it was decided that yet another push for the eight-hour workday was needed and settled on May 1, 1890, for other general strike.
The International Workers Association (or Second International), meeting in Paris in 1889, endorsed the AFL's date for international demonstrations in solidarity, thus starting the international workers' tradition of May Day.
But the struggle for the eight-hour workday was long. It was won first in the U.S.A. by the miners' union in 1898, then construction workers in San Francisco's won it in 1900, the printers in 1905. In 1914 the Ford Company doubled pay to $ 5 a day and reduced the workday from nine to eight hours.
Yet it was not until 1916, with wartime protests looming, that the federal government established the eight-hour day as a national standard. Under the later legislation and litigation, a broad swath of salaried workers are exempt from overtime pay rules and effectively from the eight-hour workday.
A second consequence of the Haymarket Massacre was the hoary Chicago trial of eight anarchist workers were accused of conspiring to incite violence. Five were sentenced to death (one committed suicide before his execution) and three were sentenced to prison. The labor movement called them the Martyrs of Chicago.
The trial, which lasted until 1893, was universally described as illegitimate and deliberately malicious. The new governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the accused and joined those who criticized the prosecution of the case in the courts.
Altgeld, one of the founders of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, could have been a candidate for president, as many at the time said they wanted, if he had not been born a fellow citizen of the German immigrants who fought for their rights in Haymarket Square.
Happy Labor Day and remember: no rights have been acquired without considerable struggle and those who say so are likely trying to deprive you of some.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
To Return, Perchance To Stay
"To return ... with a withered face, the snows of time have turned silver my templea ..." I'm not tango devotee, nor a fan of Carlos Gardel, but there are lyrics that say it all and this one, upon returning from a trip to South America (and cybernetically reconnecting with former school classmates as a result of the emergency of one), feels appropriate.
No, I don't long to return. That's only the paradox Thomas Wolfe (not the modern Tom Wolfe) proposed in his novel You Can't Go Home Again, which is, ultimately, a version of the rejection of Jesus in his childhood Nazareth. We can't go back. Or as they sang after World War I, "How ya gonna keep'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"
I "returned" to São Paulo, where I never lived but had visited before. I have relatives in Brazil, as I have in many other countries. To that was added a brief stop in Bogotá. Furthermore, I "returned" once already via the cyberworld while remaining on the terra firma of the good ol' U.S. of A., after hearing via email of a temporary health crisis (the reader is welcome to thank the god of choice) of a former classmate.
Sometimes distance from the daily occurrences of even people and places we know let us discern differences that have happened to them over time. Call it the Rip Van Winkle Outsider Effect, if you will.
Bogotá, for example, no longer has those packs of street urchins engaged in begging or street vending. Or perhaps they hide them better today from the tourists. You do see in their place some grungy old and obviously very poor men. Are they the children of yesteryear grown old? At least their descendants don't seem to lead similar lives.
São Paulo has always been a thriving hub of commerce. I was amazed that its newyorkization (all Latin American cities aspire, in my view foolishly, to have New York skyscrapers) is not absurdly functional. Instead of the square, sterile and high blocks, the Paulistas have been concerned to build modern art objects.
Sure, being in the country of architectural genius Oscar Niemeyer gives them some incentive to avoid modernizing without rhyme or reason. But I can declare: modern Paulista buildings have a grace that is not found even in the big cities of the First World. Really!
While the consensus among those with whom I spoke is that the economic miracle of Lula is fading (and the efforts of Dilma to build stadiums for the World Cup has been an inexcusable waste), it is still remarkable that Brazil's poverty fell from 22% in 2002 to 9% in 2012 As a point of comparison, in the United States, the rate is 15%, having never dropped below 11%.
These rapid declines are slowing. Perhaps it's like dieting.
Of course, the Third World poverty based on poor or unevenly accessed infrastructure persists. You see people in the 21st century still without electricity, power, fresh drinking water and weather-worthy housing. That's not to mention the social problems that are of a more First World type, such as education, work and opportunity.
And there is the kind of return.
I got a mass email from my secondary school "litter" announcing that a former classmate was in intensive care and suddenly saw names that had never been in my inbox before. They were people whose names evoke a variety of experiences in my youth.
Other names, of course, yield nothing. ("This guy attended school with me?")
Then there's the fact that at a certain age, the numbers begin to diminish. Five of my fiftysomething classmates have died. Any day now, I is listed among them.
We are not intimates, except for two or three who kept up a friendship through the years. There's at least one who is not in the list and I don't want to see even if it is only an email address. Yet for better or worse, all of us are part of each other's youth.
In my case they are men (I went to a boys' school, where the existence of beings called "girls" was mostly theoretical) who are intelligent, vigorous that have managed to stay afloat despite everything that has happened to Argentina since 1968.
(Yes, I know, some readers were not alive then. You are forgiven.)
It occurs to me that many of my concerns will be echoed in theirs. The values that were instilled in us are the same. The intellectual reference points are, in essence, the same.
We will have had failures. You can't reach a certain age without failing; the absence of failure yields no success. I would have liked to say that my former colleagues and I made the world better, as we once expected. But no.
All these things make returning to people and place in the past desirable and undesirable at the same time, leaving a bittersweet taste. Nostalgia has pulled us back to a reality that somehow did not welcome us or serve us well enough to keep us there.
No, I don't long to return. That's only the paradox Thomas Wolfe (not the modern Tom Wolfe) proposed in his novel You Can't Go Home Again, which is, ultimately, a version of the rejection of Jesus in his childhood Nazareth. We can't go back. Or as they sang after World War I, "How ya gonna keep'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"
I "returned" to São Paulo, where I never lived but had visited before. I have relatives in Brazil, as I have in many other countries. To that was added a brief stop in Bogotá. Furthermore, I "returned" once already via the cyberworld while remaining on the terra firma of the good ol' U.S. of A., after hearing via email of a temporary health crisis (the reader is welcome to thank the god of choice) of a former classmate.
Sometimes distance from the daily occurrences of even people and places we know let us discern differences that have happened to them over time. Call it the Rip Van Winkle Outsider Effect, if you will.
Bogotá, for example, no longer has those packs of street urchins engaged in begging or street vending. Or perhaps they hide them better today from the tourists. You do see in their place some grungy old and obviously very poor men. Are they the children of yesteryear grown old? At least their descendants don't seem to lead similar lives.
São Paulo has always been a thriving hub of commerce. I was amazed that its newyorkization (all Latin American cities aspire, in my view foolishly, to have New York skyscrapers) is not absurdly functional. Instead of the square, sterile and high blocks, the Paulistas have been concerned to build modern art objects.
Sure, being in the country of architectural genius Oscar Niemeyer gives them some incentive to avoid modernizing without rhyme or reason. But I can declare: modern Paulista buildings have a grace that is not found even in the big cities of the First World. Really!
While the consensus among those with whom I spoke is that the economic miracle of Lula is fading (and the efforts of Dilma to build stadiums for the World Cup has been an inexcusable waste), it is still remarkable that Brazil's poverty fell from 22% in 2002 to 9% in 2012 As a point of comparison, in the United States, the rate is 15%, having never dropped below 11%.
These rapid declines are slowing. Perhaps it's like dieting.
Of course, the Third World poverty based on poor or unevenly accessed infrastructure persists. You see people in the 21st century still without electricity, power, fresh drinking water and weather-worthy housing. That's not to mention the social problems that are of a more First World type, such as education, work and opportunity.
And there is the kind of return.
I got a mass email from my secondary school "litter" announcing that a former classmate was in intensive care and suddenly saw names that had never been in my inbox before. They were people whose names evoke a variety of experiences in my youth.
Other names, of course, yield nothing. ("This guy attended school with me?")
Then there's the fact that at a certain age, the numbers begin to diminish. Five of my fiftysomething classmates have died. Any day now, I is listed among them.
We are not intimates, except for two or three who kept up a friendship through the years. There's at least one who is not in the list and I don't want to see even if it is only an email address. Yet for better or worse, all of us are part of each other's youth.
In my case they are men (I went to a boys' school, where the existence of beings called "girls" was mostly theoretical) who are intelligent, vigorous that have managed to stay afloat despite everything that has happened to Argentina since 1968.
(Yes, I know, some readers were not alive then. You are forgiven.)
It occurs to me that many of my concerns will be echoed in theirs. The values that were instilled in us are the same. The intellectual reference points are, in essence, the same.
We will have had failures. You can't reach a certain age without failing; the absence of failure yields no success. I would have liked to say that my former colleagues and I made the world better, as we once expected. But no.
All these things make returning to people and place in the past desirable and undesirable at the same time, leaving a bittersweet taste. Nostalgia has pulled us back to a reality that somehow did not welcome us or serve us well enough to keep us there.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Why "innocent"? The Malaysia Air passengers had no foibles like anyone else?
It riles me no end to read and hear the drumbeat of "innocent" passengers killed in the Malaysia Air plane over the Ukraine. Without any disrespect intended to the dead (although, why not, since we don't particular honor the living?), I am sure that these people all had their moral failures; including the children.
This happens with annoying regularity. Yet what makes people killed randomly innocent?
Gazans and Israelis do not cheat on taxes or their mates? Boston Marathon bombing victims had never cheated in school or failed to come to a full stop at a stop sign? And don't get me started on the scummy bond traders who died in 9/11!
The same applies to children who, any truthful parent or teacher will testify, are selfishly wilfull.
All right, you might say that these people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were innocent with respect to the conflicts that caused their deaths. But were they?
Conflicts in the Middle East and the Chechnya did not occur in isolation to everything else. Certainly, also, the largest economy in the world, the United States, is in some respect dependent on almost every corner of the planet.
For example, when something grievous has happened in the Middle East, we have to think of our oil interests. Surely some oil company has profited and its employees have purchased something that has spurred economic activity that in some way has splashed upon us directly or indirectly.
As Dick Gregory once told a Canadian who claimed to be uninvolved in Vietnam, "Did you pay sales tax on those socks you're wearing?" When the young man admitted he had, Gregory went on to show in a complicated train of events I have long forgotten how those taxes freed resources for war.
We are all much more interconnected today than we were in the 1970s, when Gregory's remark was made. No one is entirely unconnected to what happens in Gaza, the Ukraine and elsewhere. We all in some way continue to thrive in the global human system that makes these events happen.
There are no innocents. Indeed, long ago one Augustine of Hippo proposed the theory of "original sin" (or original concupiscence) as an explanation of the reality that, even at birth, we are all culpable. The rich baby effectively exploits the poor baby born the same second, taking a greater share of resources than, strictly speaking, are his or her due.
None of us is an island. We are all in some way responsible for everything and have the duty to stop the bad and increase the good. To the extent we fail at either, we are guilty of moral failure.
There were no innocents on the Malaysia Air flight as there will not be in the next tragedy that occurs.
This happens with annoying regularity. Yet what makes people killed randomly innocent?
Gazans and Israelis do not cheat on taxes or their mates? Boston Marathon bombing victims had never cheated in school or failed to come to a full stop at a stop sign? And don't get me started on the scummy bond traders who died in 9/11!
The same applies to children who, any truthful parent or teacher will testify, are selfishly wilfull.
All right, you might say that these people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were innocent with respect to the conflicts that caused their deaths. But were they?
Conflicts in the Middle East and the Chechnya did not occur in isolation to everything else. Certainly, also, the largest economy in the world, the United States, is in some respect dependent on almost every corner of the planet.
For example, when something grievous has happened in the Middle East, we have to think of our oil interests. Surely some oil company has profited and its employees have purchased something that has spurred economic activity that in some way has splashed upon us directly or indirectly.
As Dick Gregory once told a Canadian who claimed to be uninvolved in Vietnam, "Did you pay sales tax on those socks you're wearing?" When the young man admitted he had, Gregory went on to show in a complicated train of events I have long forgotten how those taxes freed resources for war.
We are all much more interconnected today than we were in the 1970s, when Gregory's remark was made. No one is entirely unconnected to what happens in Gaza, the Ukraine and elsewhere. We all in some way continue to thrive in the global human system that makes these events happen.
There are no innocents. Indeed, long ago one Augustine of Hippo proposed the theory of "original sin" (or original concupiscence) as an explanation of the reality that, even at birth, we are all culpable. The rich baby effectively exploits the poor baby born the same second, taking a greater share of resources than, strictly speaking, are his or her due.
None of us is an island. We are all in some way responsible for everything and have the duty to stop the bad and increase the good. To the extent we fail at either, we are guilty of moral failure.
There were no innocents on the Malaysia Air flight as there will not be in the next tragedy that occurs.
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