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Good News, Bad News Dept: Growing Numbers Favoring Socialism

Editors — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 12:58:22 +0000

[Note from CarlD: Of course, Fox News notwithstanding, we socialists know very well that the current measures from the top have little to do with a workable socialism for the 21st century, or even a full-throated social democracy, and are more in tune with the cartoon below. Still, it's heartening to know, even with the limitations of this kind of polling, that the outer limits of those open to our militant minority is 30 percent, and even higher in key demographics. For those who are interested in studying what could be a 21st century socialism, I highly recommend David Schweickart's 'After Capitalism,' not to be confused with his longer and more technical 'Against Capitalism.' If you just want to see and hear him speak on the topic, just search on his name in YouTube. There's some older debates, plus a new 10-part series from a long talk by him given in Sweden, but in English.]

Seven in ten Americans think US transition

from capitalism to socialism bad move

2010-08-01 - About 7 in 10 American voters (69 percent) think that a transition from capitalism to socialism in United States would be a bad thing, according to a Fox News/ Opinion Dynamics Corporation poll.

Eighty-eight percent Republicans with household incomes of 100,000 dollars or more and 70 percent of those aged 55 and over are among those most likely to think it would be a bad move.

Smaller majorities of those living in lower-income households (59 percent), young people (57 percent), as well as just under half of Democrats (49 percent) agree.

34-56 percent voters think that the country is currently moving away from capitalism to socialism. Far fewer voters, however, approve.

Less than one in five voters (18 percent) think that it would be a good thing for the country to move away from capitalism and toward socialism.

Twenty eight percent of voters whose household incomes are under 30,000 dollars favour this option. Thirty one percent of them who are under thirty years and 32 percent Democrats approve this change. (ANI)

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Elections as farce and as protest

Carol Pagaduan-Araullo — Mon, 21 May 2007 06:00:57 +0000

by Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, Phillipines After the May 14 elections, are we any closer to the democratic society that our grade school textbooks proudly proclaim the Philippines to be? Unfortunately, the general picture emerging from the stories and the images that have so far dominated the tri-media and ordinary peopleâ€™s accounts is that of a nightmarish elections and post-elections situation that has confirmed our worse fears. The farcical nature of the electoral process in this country has been laid bare, much worse than even our most dire predictions. There was widespread disenfranchisement, vote buying, â€œflying votersâ€ and innumerable delays, disruption and even failure of elections due to outright grabbing of election paraphernalia, bombing of polling places and terrorizing of poll officials and the voters themselves. The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) has been flagrantly pro-administration. This is proven by the deliberate foot dragging and confusing pronouncements it issued on the case of senatorial candidate, Allan Peter Cayetano, (also known as the First Gentlemanâ€™s pet peeve and nemesis) who is currently in danger of losing because his votes are being waylaid by an administration-fielded nuisance candidate, Joselito Cayetano. Now there are attempts by the COMELEC to discredit and muffle media reporting of partial results that tend to show opposition victories in the senatorial race as well as in some local electoral contests. We witnessed government attempts to reduce, if not eliminate, opposition from party list groups by (1) creating pro-administration party list groups and fully supporting these with government resources; (2) by the military's crude attempt to "neutralize" Bayan Muna, Anakpawis and Gabriela Womenâ€™s Party through terror and psywar tactics targeted at actual and potential supporters in rural and urban poor communities and (3) by the filing of trumped-up rebellion and other criminal charges against the standard bearers of these party lists together with moves to disaccredit them and completely bar them from participating in the electoral arena. The chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) has been engaged in a determined effort to malign and campaign against a senatorial candidate, Navy Lieutenant Antonio Trillanes, who the government has jailed and is prosecuting on the basis of weak rebellion charges. His strong showing at the polls threatens to develop into a political slap in the face for AFP Chief Esperon and add fuel to the simmering unrest within the young officer corps and military rank and file. The military has also been caught red-handed campaigning for Malacanangâ€™s senatorial line-up as well as for its congressional candidates foremost of who are the two sons of Mrs. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. However, the patent unpopularity of the GMA regime is clearly reflected in the early and strong lead of the candidates of the Genuine Opposition (GO) in the senatorial race, a result that can reasonably be interpreted as some kind of a protest vote. In the Visayas provinces, touted by administration rah-rah boys as delivering a much ballyhooed 12-0 Team Unity (TU) win, several GO senatorial candidates are still exhibiting a strong showing. It is only in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao or ARMM, notoriously known as â€œcheating countryâ€ for the administration candidates, where the TU is claimed to have been able to muster a landslide win. In effect, the Arroyo regime has been able to â€œcommandâ€ the people to vote for its candidates by utilizing feudal cultural, political, economic and plain coercive means on top of good old-fashioned fraud and violence. While the regime has been able to thwart attempts to impeach and oust GMA by a combination of muzzling media, neutralizing an Opposition-dominated Senate, the cynical use of presidential largesse to wield a pro-administration Congress, state terrorism in the guise of counter-insurgency, fascist measures against protest mass actions, legal dirty tricks against the opposition and dissidents, and not the least, continued US blessings, it is turning out that the political backlash has grown too big for Mrs. Arroyo and her clique to cheat their way out of the peopleâ€™s rejection in these elections. Mrs. Arroyo cannot even claim any kind of moral or political high ground in terms of presiding over fairly credible elections. Statements from Malacanang, the COMELEC and the police extolling the â€œgood, clean and orderlyâ€ elections is an unmitigated lie that hardly anyone believes. Mrs. Arroyo is directly to blame for the disgraceful conduct and outcome of the recent polls in contrast to her boastful promises that clean and honest elections would be her lasting legacy as president. The elections as a democratic exercise, i.e. ensuring the consent of the governed, have been completely undermined in the latest exercise to the point of being a farce. But the resilient peopleâ€™s democratic movement and, in particular, the broad-based Oust GMA Movement, has been able to achieve Mrs. Arroyoâ€™s most dreaded scenario: mid-term elections that are fast developing into a stinging rebuke of the Arroyo regimeâ€™s misrule, crimes against the people and against humanity, and its lust for money and power. More than that, the aftermath of the elections could become a build-up to another massive, popular outpouring of discontent that could finally force Mrs. Arroyo from power. Definitely, there will be more sleepless nights ahead for Mrs. Arroyo. The adage -- uneasy sits the crown on an unjust and oppressive ruler -- easily comes to mind.

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Global Notes #26

Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net — Tue, 01 May 2007 06:00:53 +0000

by Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net .US hegemony rapidly disappearing US economic and political hegemony has degraded further in the rapidly globalizing world. At the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz has lost control through his own corrupt crony capitalism. But his problems stem as much from Iraq as his current missteps. Globalists who fill the bureaucracy at the World Bank never were comfortable with the US unilateralist coming to their home and Wolfowitz opened the door for their attacks. That the US can no longer control the internal politics at the World Bank is a good indicator of how far its political influence has fallen. Furthermore, for those who continue to argue that the US dollar insures US economic hegemony they need to look at the growing strength of the Euro, the Pound and of course the reserves sitting in Japan and China. As Jim Paulsen, chief investment officer at Wells Capital Management recently pointed out; â€œItâ€™s no longer a dollar-denominated world and this is the start of a long-term trend.â€ (FT, 4-21-07) .Atlantic Council seeks globalist hegemony The Atlantic Council, a major voice for Euro/US economic interests are telling the West to give-up on multi-lateral agreements. The WTO has been stuck on the Doha trade round for years because third world countries have stuck together to demand major changes in subsidies handed out in the US and Europe to their farm producers. The Atlantic Council now argues the best road forward is to walk away and create a free-trade coalition of the willing. They still suggest that â€œfree-tradersâ€ go by WTO rules and dispute settlement mechanism, but exclude non-participants who donâ€™t want to play the way the big boys want. According to the Atlantic Council the US and Europe should restructure the entire Bretton Woods international economic architecture giving more representation to China, Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa and South Korea. Of course the Council failed to consult any of these countries about their new plans, but their transparent hope is to split the newly emerging economies from the rest of the third world. Thus the transnational capitalist class can expand while keeping poor countries in their traditional subservient role. .Stats on US/foreign asset values The total value of household assets in the US is $64 trillion and $32 trillion in non-financial business assets. Foreign investors have $2,800B in direct investments in the US, plus owning 43.9% of Treasury debt ($2,600B); 33.6% of corporate debt ($2,070B); 17% of the equity market ($2,600B); and 17.7% of agency debt ($1,130B). At 17% of the US equity market foreign ownership is below other industrial countries. Foreign investors own 42% of British equities, 30% of the Japanese equity market and average between 40 to 50% of equity markets in developing countries. Pension funds of the G7 now place at least 20-30% of their assets in foreign markets. The gross value of global capital flows is now equal to 16% of GDP compared with just 3-6% in the mid-1990s. Financial markets in the US are still the largest with an aggregate value of $47,600B compared with $26,500B for the euro zone; $17,300B for the yen zone; and $6,700B for the sterling zone. (FT, David Hale, 4/20/07)

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Structure Vs. Conjuncture

Robert Brenner — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 06:00:36 +0000

The 2006 Elections and the Rightward Shift by Robert Brenner How should the Democratsâ€™ 2006 recapture of Congress be interpreted in the context of the broader trends in American politics over the last decades? In what follows, I will examine the development of the two parties against the background of underlying shifts in the balance of class forces in America, to read the conjuncture of 2006 against the deeper structural movements of the American polityâ€”from the labour struggles of the 1930s and construction of the New Deal Democrats, through the Great Society reforms of the postwar boom, to the political paradigms of the capitalist offensive with the onset of the long downturn. Within this framework, I will argue that the rise of the Republican right, building from bases in an expanding, non-unionized South, has introduced a new dynamic into us politics that aims to push the pro-corporate agenda beyond anything even Reagan had contemplated. I. THE DEMOCRATS' VICTORY The results themselves have already received much scrutiny. Broadly speaking, the basis for the Democratsâ€™ victory in the 2006 mid-terms lay in swings of 4â€“6 per cent in their favour among nearly every category of the electorate, plus a highly significant 14 per cent swing among Latinos. [1] This enabled the Democrats to increase their House delegation from 201 to 233 seats, with the Republicans dropping from 232 to 202. In the Senate, the dp won six new seats, to move from 45 to 51 (including two independents), while gop seats fell from 55 to 49. Though some have hailed a new thrust toward social reform, [2] it is generally acknowledged that the vote represented a repudiation of the Bush Administrationâ€™s record rather than a surge of positive support for the Democrats. Throughout October 2006, American tv screens were dominated by images of increasing mayhem and communal strife in Mesopotamia, with sixteen intelligence agencies reporting that the war was fuelling terrorism, not reducing it. In addition, corruption exposÃ©s and sex scandals laid bare the hypocrisy of the Republican-fundamentalist charade; Katrina remained a running sore; â€˜homeland securityâ€™, like Iraq reconstruction, was sold to the highest bidderâ€”against a background of poor jobs performance, real-wage stagnation, and dwindling pensions and health insurance. But it is of course Americaâ€™s failure in Iraq that has made this such an exceptional electoral conjuncture. [3] Since 9/11, Karl Roveâ€™s strategy has been to portray first Afghanistan and then Iraq as the central arenas in the â€˜war on terrorâ€™, in order to win the popular support the Bush Administration needed for the implementation of its pro-business agenda, which could not have prevailed electorally on its own. Rove was successful in 2002 and 2004, when worry about national security outweighed mounting opposition to the war. The swing votes of married women with children, the so-called â€˜security momsâ€™, had favoured the Republicans by, respectively, 53 and 56 per cent. But by 2006, the moms were supporting the Democrats by a 12-point margin, 50 per cent to 38 per cent. Fifty-seven per cent of Americans (against 35 per cent) now felt that the Iraq war had failed to make the country more secure. Herein lies the nub of the 2006 election. [4] Nevertheless, the Republicans have held their own to a remarkable extent. Their base turned out in force, with white evangelicals increasing their share of the total vote from 23 to 24 per cent, while the figure for those attending church at least once a week rose from 41 to 45 per cent, albeit on a significantly smaller overall turnout. [5] In their southern heartland the Republicans retained all their House seats save for two in the Miami areaâ€”which in socio-political terms barely counts as the Southâ€”and one in North Carolina, where former pro-football star Heath Shuler ousted John Taylor. [6] More serious was the narrow defeat of Virginia Senator George Allen, a party leader and standard-bearer of the right, by a Reagan-era Navy Secretary, James Webb; but since the seat was lost by such a slender margin, following an unusually gaffe-prone campaign, the broader significance for the Republicans is moot. Overall, Rove must be comforted by the degree to which the Republicans retained their popular following, despite the debacle of Iraq and with the Administration having forced through a raft of blatantly pro-business legislation. [7] In 2000 Bush ran as a â€˜compassionate conservativeâ€™, and the Republicans won 48 per cent of the House total popular vote. By 2006, compassion had been entirely abandoned, yet the Republicans still garnered 46 per cent. In 2000, 36 per cent of those voting had described themselves as Republicans; in 2006, 35 per cent still did. [8] Passive beneficiaries of the fallout from Iraq, the Democrats had run a national campaign without a discernible programmeâ€”and this entirely by design. [9] Their strategy, under the direction of Rahm Emanuel, head of the partyâ€™s Congressional Campaign Committee, was to field hand-picked centrist and conservative candidates in the most marginal districts, focusing entirely on the Bush Administrationâ€™s failings. [10] As a result, their newly elected members of Congress will largely serve to strengthen the right wing of the party, which longs for nothing more than a return to the glory years of Bill Clinton, when balanced budgets and neoliberalism were the order of the day, Lincolnâ€™s Bedroom was always occupied and triangulation was the highest principle. As much as anyone, Emanuel exemplifies todayâ€™s Democratic Party and is likely to be among those setting its future direction. A top political operative under Clinton, he has played a leading role in the â€˜modernizingâ€™ Democratic Leadership Council, formed in 1984 to adapt the Party to the Reagan era. The dlc-New Democratsâ€™ aim is to expand their access to business, to the white vote and to the Southâ€”the assumption being that traditional black and working-class Democrat constituencies will have nowhere else to go. This means support for stepped-up military spending and us imperial ventures, advocacy of tax breaks and other pro-business policies, and the termination of any remaining socially redistributive commitments to the labour movement and black organizations. The dlc now have sixty representatives in the House, over a quarter of the Democratsâ€™ total roll. In addition, the Partyâ€™s ultra-conservative Blue Dog caucus now has 44 representatives, up by seven since 2004. Formed in 1994 by right-wing congressional Democrats, particularlyâ€”but not solelyâ€”from the South, to counter what they saw as a left-wing Party majority, the group lean to conservatism not just on â€˜social issuesâ€™ like abortion and gun control, but also on economic policy. â€˜Pro-growthâ€™ and committed to â€˜fiscal responsibilityâ€™, many Blue Dogs voted in favour of the Bush Administrationâ€™s most socially regressive measures. On the eight major pieces of legislation that divided the Democrat and Republican majorities in the 2004â€“5 session of Congress, 45 per cent of Blue Dog votes backed the Republicans. [11] In the wake of the 2006 mid-terms, the victorious dp conservatives have been flexing their muscles. As Arkansas representative Mike Ross announced: â€˜Republicans lost their seats not to liberals but to Blue Dog Democrats . . . Weâ€™ll have a lot to say about what passes and what doesnâ€™t.â€™ Tennessee representative John Tanner has stated: â€˜We increased our market share by going where the market was, to moderate, even Republican, districts . . . If weâ€™re going to hold and consolidate that, we have to understand the reality that the face of the Democratic Caucus has changed from where it was in the late 80s and early 90s.â€™ Naturally this is welcome news to the House Republican leadership. [12] II. THE RIGHTWARD TRAJECTORY The Democratsâ€™ electoral-legislative strategy and likely future trajectory make manifest the transformation of the American polity over the past half-century. From the hegemony of liberalism, in which the Democrats made the running and to which the Republicans had to adapt, this has shifted to an ascendancy of the right, in which the Republicans have been the driving force, and with respect to which the Democrats have been obliged to remake themselves. This shift was itself the expression of an underlying evolution in the balance of class forces and the pattern of capital accumulation. This had been shaped, first, by an unprecedented explosion of working-class power in the 1930s, followed by a quarter-century of prosperity accompanied by the decline of labour. The onset of profitability problems from the 1960s then made for long-term economic stagnation, paralleled by an unending offensive of capital that led ultimately to Clintonomics, and then to the hard-right Bush Administration. To this progression I now turn. Rise, persistence and collapse of liberalism, 1932â€“80 Against the background of the Great Depression and Hooverâ€™s initial calamitous response, it was the great upsurge of industrial militancy across manufacturing in the mid-30s that created the transformations in working-class political consciousness and organization that were the basis for the rise and reproduction of American liberal reformism. [13] It was this explosion of mass direct action outside the electoral-legislative arena that constituted the indispensable precondition for the popular gains of the New Deal. Industrial unions were established in the face of determined employer resistance, and under conditions of increasing political radicalization. Thus the newly-established United Auto Workers initially refused to support the Democratic ticket and, at their founding convention in 1936, called for the formation of independent farmerâ€“labour parties. During this period, such parties flourished at local and state level across the country. In 1934, the Democratsâ€™ congressional landslide in the mid-term elections had already been understood as the expression of an ascending left. Working-class militancy now made for sufficient pressure to oblige the Roosevelt Administration, which had been dragging its feet, to pass its centrepiece reform legislation: the 1935 Social Security Act and Wagner Act, recognizing trade union rights. But having â€˜trusted in Rooseveltâ€™, the cio unions experienced a devastating defeat at Little Steel in May 1937, and then a further demoralization during the â€˜second great depressionâ€™ of 1937â€“38. A new layer of full-time cio leaders also played a significant part in the domestication of worker militancy, helping to repress the wave of wildcat and sit-down strikes that broke out across industry in the winter and spring of 1937, and failing to press home a potential victory against the Chrysler corporation. The Communist Party, which had played a decisive role in organizing the mid-30s cio upsurge, now followed Moscowâ€™s line in committing itself to a Popular Front that included not only John Lewisâ€™s cio and the Democratic Party, but also the Roosevelt Administration. Meanwhile, increasingly separated from the daily activity of the shop floor and dependent on the union itself for their livelihood, an emergent cio officialdom reacted to the fall-off in mass struggles by turning to the institutionalization of unionâ€“employer relations, through state-sanctioned collective bargaining and regulation. This entailed a full commitment to the electoral road and to the Democratic Party, as a vehicle through which to win further reforms via the legislative process. [14] The support of organized labour brought not only a huge increase in the Democratsâ€™ electoral base but a huge fillip to their electioneering efforts, as the cio unions provided funds and foot soldiers for elections, as well as lobbying pressure. But it also set in motion a longer-term process that undermined not only the power of the unions but also the potential of the Party as a vehicle for social redistribution. By failing to enhance their own strength, independent of the dp, through standing up to the corporations, the trade unions increasingly forfeited their leverage over the Party, yet were still left to rely upon it to produce the goods for their members. Consequently, Democrat leaders could count on the unionsâ€™ support while delivering ever less in return. With labourâ€™s backing taken for granted, the dp leadership was free to manoeuvre with the forces on their right, notably the Partyâ€™s Southern wing; this would set inevitable limits on any reform programme. In doing so Democrat leaders, like trade union officials, served only to further the disintegration of organized labourâ€”their most powerful social base. A comparable process would be repeated with the black, womenâ€™s and Latino movements, all of which originated in independent direct action in the streets and workplaces, throwing up militant new organizations; but whose emergent middle-class leaderships ultimately came to rest, alongside labour officialdom, inside the dp cocoon. World War ii brought big gains in membership for the trade unions, at the price of further emasculation and bureaucratization. Government patronage, in return for a no-strike pledge, raised the prestige of labourâ€™s â€˜new men of powerâ€™ to hitherto inconceivable heightsâ€”but in the context of a triumphant politico-economic revival of the corporations, based on record-breaking profits, and the subordination of labour to government and business in the tripartite administration of the war effort. A powerful postwar strike wave in 1946 won minimal gains, dashing union hopes for a price-control system that would allow the labour movement to offer a form of social-democratic leadership to the working class as a whole. The resulting demoralization was expressed in a sharp drop in working-class turnout for the 1946 mid-term elections, which issued in a swing to the Republicans. The red-baiting assault on labour that followed would culminate in the 1947 Taftâ€“Hartley Act, placing decisive curbs on union power. [15] More damaging in the long term was the failure to unionize the South through Operation Dixie. For this campaign to have succeeded, the labour leadership would have had to unleash mass social struggles, comparable to those of the 1930s, against the entrenched southern elite; but they had no intention of risking this sort of confrontation. This failure would later permit this low-wage, low-tax region to become the setting for the first wave of us corporate globalization, undermining the strength of labour in the rest of the economy. The labour movement would see a brief revival during the Korean War and after. But by the end of the 1950s, feeling the first pangs of international competition from emerging European and Japanese industry, the corporations dealt the unions a series of devastating blows in autos, electrical-goods and steel. The rate of private-sector unionization peaked in 1953 at 36 per cent; but this fell to 31 per cent in 1963, 27 per cent in 1973 and would decline continuously thereafter. [16] Paradoxically it was at this point, from the early 1960s, with the trade-union movement greatly weakened, that the extension of the postwar boom brought a new lease of life to projects for (mild, state-managed) social redistribution, and to the â€˜political liberalismâ€™ of the Democratic Party in general. The expanding us economy allowed corporate profits, take-home pay and social spending to rise together. Within this context, labour and other social-reform-minded forces within the Party moved to outline the â€˜Great Societyâ€™ programmeâ€”which the Republicans, too, would find themselves obliged to support. Even during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, these forces had played an important role in making social-security benefits broadly available, albeit financed by an ultra-regressive payroll tax on workers. The Democratsâ€™ reform aspirations were always limited by the priority they gave to capitalist profits, both in terms of ensuring the general process of capital accumulation, and in attracting business funding for themselves. This entailed a programme of encouraging foreign direct investment in Europe and elsewhere, pushing for free trade, and patronizing the newly emerging Euromarkets as a base for mobile capitalâ€”all of which would further weaken American labourâ€™s leverage. It also meant retaining the Taftâ€“Hartley Act, despite ever-larger Democratic congressional majorities won in 1958 and 1964, based on increasing urban and working-class populations. It required the rise of the black civil rights movement, and especially its extension to the North, to induce the Democrats to turn once more towards serious social reform. The demand for jobs was central in the 1963 March on Washington. Black rebellions in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles in 1964â€“65 extended the movementâ€™s goals beyond political equality to economic well-being. Against the backdrop of Vietnam, and expanding Third World struggles, the Johnson Administration launched not only landmark civil-rights and voter legislation but also, very consciously, the greatest expansion of the welfare state since Roosevelt. The panoply of â€˜Great Societyâ€™ reforms included Medicaid, Medicare, the Food Stamp programme, Supplemental Security Income, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and Head Start. So hegemonic was this programme in the early 70s that for Nixonâ€”in the context of Black Power and mass anti-war movementsâ€”it was electoral common sense to step it up. A substantial increase in social security benefits, expanding unionization for federal government workers, a proposed Guaranteed Annual Wage (rejected by the Democrats), creation of the Legal Services Corporation (Legal Aid), the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and (under Gerald Ford) initiation of the Earned Income Tax Credit scheme, were the results. Apparently permanent prosperity, assured by federal deficits, made for what seemed to be an open-ended programme of social reform, whichever party was in power. As Nixon put it, â€˜Weâ€™re all Keynesians now.â€™ Onset of the downturn But this high tide of social reform was very brief. From the mid-60s the rate of return on capital began to fall, and continued to do so over the next decade and a half, reducing the pre-tax rate of return for non-financial corporations by 35 per cent between 1965 and 1979; and introducing, from 1973, an extended epoch of stagnation and crisis of even greater length than the postwar boom. In response, employers unleashed an intensifying assault on labour organization and working-class living standards that has not abated to this day. The â€˜Great Societyâ€™ increases in social spending and business regulation had been premised upon a regime of high profits, economic expansion, and the taming of working-class and other social rebellions. The profitability crisis and employersâ€™ offensive left dp liberals politically disarmed, obliged by their own principles to subordinate all else to the recovery of the rate of return. The collapse of the social reform project was the inevitable outcome. In the early 1960s trade-union leaders had stood passively by as American industry, increasingly challenged by rivals in Germany and Japan, sought to revive competitiveness by pushing through what was then termed â€˜a new hard lineâ€™. The growth of manufacturing wages for the period 1960â€“69 was half that of 1948â€“59, despite the continued economic expansion. Under rising pressure from their members, labour leaders did organize a series of strikes later in the 60s; but they made a more systematicâ€”and successfulâ€”effort to crush the series of rank-and-file revolts that broke out in trucking, auto, telephones, mining and elsewhere. Union officials now had to face the wrath of corporations determined to intensify work rates and reduce wage growth, whatever the risk of strike action, so as to counter falling profits and increasing international competition. Between 1973 and 1979, days lost in strike action fell by about a quarter, and private-sector unionization rates dropped to 22 per cent. Real wages in the private sector had ceased to rise by 1972; they would now fall for the remainder of the 1970s and 80s, and much of the 90s. In the wake of Watergateâ€”and in the midst of a recession that would turn out to be the worst since the 1930sâ€”the Democrats picked up 49 seats in the 1974 mid-term elections, to secure their biggest House majority since the New Deal. In 1976 Carter won the Presidency, by a narrow margin. But in the space of barely half a decade, the meaning of Democratic control of government had been completely transformed and the prospects for further â€˜Great Societyâ€™ reform extinguished. In part, this was because the new congressional intake was of a different political stripe to its predecessors, who had first won office in the halcyon days of boom-era liberalism. The incoming 1970s â€˜moderatesâ€™ had won their seats due to the revulsion against Nixon in relatively affluent suburbs, hitherto Republican; their highest priority was to hold down spending so as to reduce taxation. But the underlying reason for the Democratsâ€™ precipitous retreat from a reform agenda was that, with the economy gone sour, the corporations on a rampage, and the unions wilting under fire, they found themselves operating in a transformed socio-political environment. The American exception The 1970s crisis of profitability was, of course, virtually universal across the advanced capitalist economies, as was the commitment of all mainstream political partiesâ€”from Social Democracy and left Liberals to Christian Democrats and Toriesâ€”to a revival of capital accumulation, premised on a recovery of capitalist profits. Over the course of the 1970s, wage and social-spending growth slowed almost everywhere. But adaptations to the downturn took place in the context of distinctive balances of class forces across the capitalist north, and this made for a significant variation in politico-economic outcomes. In contrast to the declining rate of unionization in the us private sector, most of the advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe witnessed the opposite trendâ€”an increase in union density not just during the 1950s and 1960s, but throughout the 1970s and, in places, the 1980s. Even by the later 1990s, unionization rates in several European countries remained far above the us peak of the 1950s, and few had experienced substantial fall-offs. [17] West European labour was not sufficiently strong or united to prevent a negative shift in the balance of class power, resist the global trend to austerity, or prevent a decline in its own strength within industry and on the shop floor. But in many instances it was able to secure a certain political stasis. With the exception of the uk, nowhere in Western Europe was there the perpetual and accelerating slide to the right to be found in the us during the 1980s and 1990s. This divergence in political trajectories between the Anglo-Saxon and continental capitalist economies was registered in the latterâ€™s ability not only to maintain welfare states which, by 1980, were distinctly more generous than Americaâ€™s, but to achieve a significant increase in social spending. This rose from 22.6 to 26 per cent of gdp in northern Europe between 1980 and 2000, but from 13.3 to 14.2 per cent in the us. By the end of the century, the population in poverty in the us, at 17 per cent, was at least twice as high as that of Western Europe. [18] In the us, it was the disintegration of the labour movement, and of working-class power more generally, that was the central factor in opening the way for the reconfiguration of politics under the onslaught of the corporations. Even during their â€˜golden ageâ€™ of reform, between 1948 and 1973, the Democratsâ€™ efforts to extend the Rooseveltian settlement had a certain paradoxical and tentative character. This is because they were accompanied by the steady decline of what had been the major agent of reform, and the Democratsâ€™ key electoral baseâ€”organized labour. It was, as we have seen, the postwar boom that allowed social spending to expand without cost to profits, significant redistribution of income, or undue pressure on working-class wages; and with relatively little pressure from social movements. The more or less continuous fall of profitability between 1965 and 1979, issuing into a long epoch of slowed growth, deprived the reform thrust of its fundamental enabling condition. [19] Symptomatically, it was the Carter Administrationâ€”not that of Reaganâ€”which launched the first assault on reform-era American liberalism, pushing for de-regulation so as to undercut union power in such major industries as trucking and airlines. As a precondition to bailing out the Chrysler corporation in 1980, Carter insisted on extracting major concessions from the United Auto Workersâ€”prefiguring Reaganâ€™s attack on patco. The Democratic Congress followed suit, rejecting progressive legislation on consumer protection, election-day registration and labour-law reform. In a telling sequence, the Carter Administration was obliged to approve a law cutting the tax rate on capital gains, after having initially forwarded to Congress a bill aiming at more progressive taxation. When Keynesian policies not only proved ineffective in restoring profitability but gave rise to runaway inflation, â€˜growth liberalismâ€™ was effectively dead. Shift to the right With the onset of the long downturn, and the political vacuum left by liberalismâ€™s collapse, American corporations became the driving force that would shift the polity to the right. But the growing success of the business agenda within the halls of government is inexplicable purely in terms of corporate mobilization. Its scope depended on the ability of the Republicans to develop a new hegemonic project that would replace â€˜Great Societyâ€™ liberalism and offer an alternative model to significant sections of the working class. The process seems to have taken place in three overlapping phases: first, Nixonâ€™s â€˜southern strategyâ€™ in the 1960s; second, through the â€˜tax revoltâ€™ of the 1970s; and third, in response to a new Republican far right, rooted especially in the South. Between 1932 and 1964, the Democrats had a vast preponderance among the white working-class electorate and, on this basis, dominated the political arena. In 1948 they took more than 75 per cent of white working-class votes; though dropping to 58 per cent in 1960, the figure rose again to 75 per cent in 1964, when Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater ran on a hard-right programme of smashing the unions, demolishing the welfare state and implementing an aggressive Cold War foreign policyâ€”and met with resounding defeat. But when the Democrats took up the civil rights agenda, pushing through court-enforced integration of schools, housing and jobs, as well as social-spending programmes that primarily benefited poor blacksâ€”at a time of black urban rebellion, as well as womenâ€™s liberation and the anti-war movementâ€”the Democratsâ€™ share of the white working-class vote plunged to 45 per cent in 1968, and to 38 per cent when McGovern ran in 1972. [20] During these years, Nixonâ€™s â€˜southern strategyâ€™ was able to detach a significant section of the white working class from the Democrats by making a fairly explicit appeal to racism, blaming the government and congressional Democrats for the costs the state was imposing on white workers to fund â€˜hand-outsâ€™ for blacks. Yet a qualification must be entered: Nixon was able to succeed electorally in this period only by deepening his identification with â€˜Great Societyâ€™ liberal reform. Indeed, had the postwar boom continued, the longer-run electoral implication of Nixonâ€™s victories might have looked rather different. Even in 1970, the Democratsâ€™ control over Congress was still as strong as it had been in 1962; in 1976 Carter secured over 50 per cent of the white working-class vote, and the Democrats won their greatest congressional majorities of the postwar epoch. It took the deepening economic crisis of the 1970s to create the conditions for the second stage of the Republicansâ€™ project: to win over white working-class voters on a straightforwardly right-wing basis. Between 1972 and 1980, real weekly wages fell by 7 per cent. At the same time, due to â€˜bracket creepâ€™, a rising proportion of the working class became liable to higher tax rates. By 1976, a median-income family was taxed at nearly 23 per cent, compared to under 12 per cent in 1953. The highly regressive social-security tax bore ever more heavily, with the maximum liability growing from $144 in 1960 to $825 in 1975â€”a sum equally payable by a family earning $14,100 a year and one earning $75,000. [21] Workers unable to defend their economic position through a much-weakened and demoralized labour movement were more open to doing so by â€˜joining the tax revoltâ€™â€”responding to an ideological appeal that was, in effect, a cross-class alliance with business. The success of Proposition 13 in California in 1978 constituted a turning point, finding a significant echo across the country. Its proponents appealed to an anti-statist individualism, given a racist twist by pointing to the Carter Administration and congressional Democratsâ€™ ostensible favouritism to inner-city blacks and associated â€˜softnessâ€™ on crime, welfare, prisoners and so forth. Reaganâ€™s ability to consolidate support for this message across much of the white working-class electorate was his major domestic contribution to the rightward shift. His de facto prohibition on raising taxes constituted a crucial step forward for the Republicans in naturalizing the business agenda. Rise of the new right But by this time the South was beginning to provide both a template and an electoral base for the rise of a new Republican right. The Democratic Partyâ€™s 1960s turn to civil rights, while winning it overwhelming support among the black electorate, had freed the white conservative South, and especially its emerging business layer, to forge a new alliance with an already pro-business Republican Party, providing the latter with the potential for a historic increase in its national power. This was not because the South represented a backward, retrograde region; on the contrary. The ascent of the Republican far right in the South was tied to the rise of a dynamic industrial capitalism across this region over the second half of the twentieth century. As the North declined industrially, the South rose. Between 1955 and 1975, the share of the thirteen southern states in the national manufacturing labour force leapt by 50 per cent, making the South the home of 30 per cent of manufacturing labour. By the 1990s, the South was as industrialized and urbanized as the North and matched it in virtually every indicator of capitalist advanceâ€”except, not accidentally, levels of real wages, taxation, social spending and trade unionization. In other words, it provided the template for the political economy that the Republican right wished to impose on the us as a whole, as well as the first port of call for an unending process of American globalization. The right was thus able to construct its new power base in an already favourable political environment. The Southâ€™s reactionary capitalists were among the main forces in the far-right mobilization that ultimately issued in the Goldwater campaign. Its so-called middle-class layers, meaning those from the relatively well-off suburbs, were already extremely conservative and implacably opposed to all aspects of the Great Society settlement, especially welfare â€˜hand-outsâ€™. Southern workers were politically atomized, individualized in the extreme, and therefore unusually openâ€”not to say historically preparedâ€”to embrace non-class forms of solidarity: race, the patriarchal family, nationalism-cum-militarism, and Protestant fundamentalism, now linked to Zionist expansionism. The rightâ€™s electoral rise in the Southâ€”the third phase in the process that would ultimately make possible both the foreign and domestic policy departures of the post-2001 Bush Administrationsâ€”took place relatively slowly, especially below the presidential level. Thanks to the Goldwater campaignâ€™s repudiation of the civil-rights movement, the Republicans gained an initial bridgehead in the five Deep South states in 1964. Republican success in presidential elections soon followed, especially as blacks did not constitute a large enough majority in any state to stand in the way. But after the Republicans had won an initial quotient of seats during the second half of the 1960s, the struggle for control of southern congressional delegations proved much more difficult. This was, in part, because blacks did make up large proportions of the electorate at district level; in part, because Democrats had plenty of room to adapt on a local basis to racial and political conservatism. Republican advance actually ceased following Watergate. But it gained a major political and ideological impetus during Reaganâ€™s rhetorically, if not necessarily substantively, far-right administration, which, by appearing to enhance Republican hopes for national power, gave southerners a reason to break long-standing ties with Democrats. It was during the Reagan era that the new southern-based Republican congressional leadershipâ€”from Newt Gingrich to Tom DeLayâ€”first gained office and began to organize. The new Republican right had made its point of departure a dynamic, modernizing South that was already the most right-wing region of the country, possessed of the weakest trade unions and welfare infrastructures. To this core base, it sought to add an analogously right-wing Mountain region, shorn of its once radical miners; suburbs and ex-urbs across the country that had become the new redoubts of white working-class families, in flight from both black or Latino inner cities and increasingly expensive older suburbs. It aimed to appeal especially to white working-class men, suffering long-term economic decline compounded by new threats to patriarchal authority. With these forces, combined with its traditional backers in what remained of small-town America, the Republican right appeared to have the electoral potential to break beyond Americaâ€™s anaemic version of welfare statism and to launch a new imperial project. In other words, it could hope to amass sufficient white working-class support to realize its straightforwardly anti-working class projectâ€”and thus to overcome the problem that had bedevilled the American right since Goldwater: how to win electoral support for a domestic programme that was transparently against the economic interests of the great mass of the population, and a foreign policy that appeared both reckless and redundant? The answer, as we have seen, was to look to the South, both as model and as electoral base, to construct an anti-statist individualist ideology founded on white supremacy, defence of the patriarchal family and Protestant fundamentalism. It was the Republican rightâ€™s success in constructing this ideological formula, and in identifying the liberal state as a central threat to the racial status quo and â€˜traditional family valuesâ€™, that provided it with the wherewithal to contend for power on a brazenly pro-business programme. Its targets were the key aspects of the New Dealâ€“Great Society settlement that no administration, Democrat or Republican, had so far dared to touch: Social Security, progressive taxation and (a good part of) the business regulatory regime, including the epa and osha. The Reagan Revolution had been pulled up short by the deep recession of 1981â€“82, which allowed the Democrats to recover lost ground in the House and limited the Republicansâ€™ momentum. Reagan was obliged to rescind a good part of his tax relief to the rich and restore a significant share of social spending. To transcend this stalemate was the project of the Republican right. The Democratsâ€™ response Just as the corporations and the Republicans had been obliged to adapt to a context defined by the liberalism of the Democratsâ€™ New Dealâ€“Great Society project and the residual power of the labour movement during the postwar boom era, so from the mid-70s the Democrats, in a period defined by economic stagnation and the ever-increasing power of business, would accommodate to the Republican-driven push to the right. In Congress, the Democratsâ€™ initial response to the rightward shift of the 1970s was defensive and conservative. Above all, they sought to milk their long-term House majority for all it was worth, blocking Republican initiatives while at the same time impressing upon corporate contributors the need to pay the elected pipers. If American business had always preferred the Republicans, during the postwar boom it saw little alternative but to provide material support to a Democratic Party that, throughout most of the period, maintained an overwhelming grip on Congress (and always put corporate profits first). By the late 70s, just as the Democrats had abandoned their social-reform project, the giant corporations undertook an accelerated process of political organizationâ€”amassing funds, systematizing their lobbying procedures, and nurturing new think-tanks to flesh out an ambitious pro-business agenda. The recently established Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce were central to this mobilization. In 1974 labour was still raising more in political funding than the corporate and trade association Political Action Committees. By 1984 the latter were raising two and half times as much as labour; probably three times as much, if hard-right pacs were taken into account. Over this period, total pac contributions increased from $45 million to $175 million. The carrot-and-stick of corporate money was already playing an often decisive role in tipping legislative outcomes toward business under Carter, especially on labour law, taxation and business regulation. Its influence reached an initial peak in the first years of the Reagan presidency, rewarded by the administrationâ€™s massive pro-business tax cuts, and would grow continuously thereafter. By 1992, corporate and trade association pacs were contributing $150 million, compared to $44 million from labour. While corporate pacs allotted 60â€“65 per cent of their Senate campaign contributions to Republicans, the Democrats successfully exploited their incumbency in the House to secure 50 per cent of corporate monies there. (Non-incumbent Republicans received 10 per cent, compared to 5 per cent for non-incumbent Democrats.) The pattern of contributions from trade association pacs was even more favourable to the Democrats. [22] Meanwhile, the Democrats used their control of state legislatures to engage in widespread redistrictingâ€”i.e. gerrymanderingâ€”to allot themselves an estimated 25 extra seats beyond those merited by their vote. Finally, few congressional Democrats hesitated to adapt, chameleon-like, to the ideological colouring of their districts, or to demonstrate their understanding of the corporate agenda; their attempt to outbid the Republicans by inserting further breaks for business into Reaganâ€™s 1981 tax bill constituted only the most salient example. In this the Democrats were assured that any campaign monies they lost in bending to the right would be more than compensated by the corporations. These tactics were not without risk. Over the longer term, the ultimate preference of the business community for the Republicans, combined with the Democratsâ€™ absence of a discernible political identity and their refusal to mobilize a base of working-class and poor voters, could leave the dp vulnerable, especially if the Republicans themselves found a better way forward. But as late as 1992 Democratic control of the House appeared unassailable; their majority in that year was just the same as in 1962, if below its peaks of 1964 and the mid-70s. Of course, the agenda represented by this advantage had shifted far to the right. From 1992, the Clinton Administration attempted to construct a systematic programme for a longer-term Democratic majority under conditions of increasingly untrammelled capitalist preponderance. This involved a commitment to permanent austerity, consecrated in the ostentatious adoption of the balanced budget and pay-go spending rule. At stake was a decisive turn to neoliberal market opening, as the centrepiece of a pro-business agenda oriented increasingly towards the financial community, and steadfastly opposed to any concessions on free-trade protection or labour-law reform. The black and working-class base was counted on to support the Democrats, come what may. 1994 and after The turning-point for the Republicans came in 1994 when, with the first Clinton Presidency floundering, they succeeded in capturing both houses of Congress. In a historic swing the Republicans gained 54 new seats, of which they retained 51 in 1996; 30 of these were from the South, representing a gain of over 50 per cent in the region. [23] In contrast to their Democratic predecessors of 1974 (and successors of 2006), the Republicans arrived with a radical programme for an assault on the New Dealâ€“Great Society settlement. As well as the famous pledges to clean up congressional corruption, Newt Gingrichâ€™s â€˜Contract with Americaâ€™ called for cuts in welfare spending, â€˜fiscal responsibilityâ€™ and tax limitations, capital gains cuts, repeal of tax hikes on Social Security benefits and increased defence funding, to â€˜maintain our credibility around the worldâ€™â€”â€˜no us troops under un commandâ€™. Crucially, control of Congress opened the floodgates of corporate funding for the Republicans. Hitherto, the Democratsâ€™ lock on Congress had allowed them to compete for business money on a fairly equal footing, as we have seen. But between 1994 and 2006, Republicans moved from virtual parity with the Democrats in corporate funding to overwhelming advantage: from a ratio of 1.14 : 1 to 1.6 : 1, or from 14 to 60 per cent. [24] Republican control of Congress from 1994 shifted American politics significantly to the right. It enabled the gopâ€™s militant cadre to push a reactionary domestic agenda and a hyper-imperialist international perspective in a way hitherto impossible, intensifying the rightward â€˜triangulationâ€™ of Clintonâ€™s politics. His administration caved in to the Republicans on â€˜workfareâ€™ in 1996 and on the Taxpayers Relief Act of 1997. Defence spending was increased, and in 1998 Clinton signed on to regime change in Iraq and unleashed Operation Desert Fox. At the same time, far-reaching changes were taking place in the real economy. There had always been a divergence between the aspirations of American capital, bent on internationalizing through foreign direct investment and overseas lending, and the needs of the industrial working class; as early as the 1950s, Democrats and Republicans alike had refused to protect a us steel industry under competitive assault from the Germans and Japanese. But during the boom era, the combination of American skill and wage levels enabled the us-based producers to defend the home market. Even as late as 1973, the manufacturing labour force was only slightly smaller than it had been in 1948â€”33.6 per cent compared to 35.7 per centâ€”as a proportion of the total private-sector labour force, measured in hours. With the onset of chronic over-capacity in world manufacturing from the later 1960s, made worse by intensifying international competition, the domestic manufacturing labour force came under increasing pressure. Neither Republicans nor Democrats could contemplate with equanimity the collapse of the domestic manufacturing sector, however. During the subsequent two decades they sought to defend it through a combination of import limitation and, for most of the period, a low exchange rate. Between 1985 and 1995â€”thanks to the pressure exerted by Reagan, Bush and the first Clinton Administration on Americaâ€™s leading trading partners and rivalsâ€”a super-low dollar raised us manufacturing competitiveness and export growth rates to levels not seen since the 1950s, offering industrial workers a brief Indian summer in which the loss of manufacturing jobs was staunched. But by the mid-90s the postwar economic order had given rise to new opportunities. Advanced technologies were creating international production chains that could select the highest-skilled, lowest-paid workers for each link in the process; China and Eastern Europe were opening up to highly profitable foreign direct investment; financial markets were increasingly deregulated; the us labour movement was a spent force. In these conditions, American multinational corporations and finance capital were poised for a remarkable acceleration of globalized production and investment. In short order, the Clinton Administration approved the nafta, mfa for China and the wto, while waving through the Telecommunications Act on behalf of its backers in Hollywood, the mass media and high tech. Most decisive, however, for the shape of the American political economy was Treasury Secretary Robert Rubinâ€™s shift to the high dollar in 1995, quickly followed at the Federal Reserve by Greenspanâ€™s turn to asset-price Keynesianism to drive the economy. This was supplemented by the repeal of the Glassâ€“Steagall Act, to permit combined operations across investment banking, commercial banking and insurance by financial giants like Citicorp. These measures served to blow up a historic equity-price bubble, quickly followed by an explosion of corporate finance through debt and stock issue. Foreign money poured into us assets. But meanwhile an ascending wave of imports, rendered cheaper by the high dollar and more plentiful by the Asian financial crisis, put intolerable pressure on American manufacturing. Between 1995â€“2005, beneath the glitzy surface of the â€˜new economyâ€™ and the later distractions of the â€˜war on terrorâ€™, the manufacturing labour force was reduced by a fifth, while the financial sector expanded from about 25 per cent to 40 per cent of total corporate profits. American workers were left to sink or swim, with neither party offering a political solution. September breakthrough Nevertheless, the shift to the right in the us remained limited in certain fundamental respectsâ€”a consequence of the electoral weight of the working class, however passive and disorganized it might be. Even as the corporations laid waste to workersâ€™ living standards and job conditions, the overriding concern of every president, from Nixon through Clinton, was to attract the votes of the white working classâ€”especially its better-off, more conservative fraction, the so-called Reagan Democrats. Both parties had always assumed that the precondition for winning this pivotal layer was to retain the core New Deal programmesâ€”Social Security, progressive taxation, and so forth. The Republicans had long aimed to break beyond this consensus. The 1994 capture of Congress had marked an important political advance for them. Ultimately, however, the Republicans had been stymied between 1994 and 2000 in fully realizing either their domestic or their foreign-policy goals. Remarkably, as of 2000, neither the share of social expenditure in national income nor the effective rate of taxation on the top 5, 10 or 20 per cent of the population had been reduced, compared to 1980. [25] As a consequence, these years constituted an era of growing frustration for the Republican right, even in the face of its undeniable political successes. It had not been able to break beyond the neoliberal consensus that had been consolidated under Bush Senior and Clinton. This was all the more galling in view of the deepening problems of profitability for large sections of the capitalist class, outside the financial sectorâ€”manifested in the continuation of corporate bankruptcy rates at near postwar highs, the steep decline of the non-financial corporate rate of profit after 1997, and the sharp recession of 2000â€“01. The underlying political problem was that the electorate remained so evenly divided. The popular vote for the House broke 49 to 49 per cent in 1996, 49 per cent Republican to 48 per cent Democrat in 1998, and 48 to 48 per cent in 2000. That year, Bush Junior was only able to squeeze into office with the help of the Supreme Courtâ€”and by concealing his agenda under the banner of â€˜compassionate conservatismâ€™. With the defection of Senator Jeffords in 2001, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. In late summer 2001, Bush was looking like a one-term president. But 9/11 appeared to solve the Republican rightâ€™s domestic and foreign-policy problems at one blow. For five years, the â€˜war on terrorâ€™ rallied Americans behind an aggressive militarist interventionism in the Middle East and distracted them from growing economic instability and inequality at home. In 2002, by focusing their campaign for Congress entirely on â€˜terrorâ€™, the Republicans increased their plurality of the popular vote for the House to 51 per cent, compared to 46 per cent for the Democrats; it remained at 50 to 47 per cent in 2004. Again, the (white) Southern vote was crucial here. [26] With firm control of both the Presidency and both Houses of Congress for the first time since the days of Eisenhower, the Republicans could unleash the pro-business agenda discussed aboveâ€”one which had, only a few years before, seemed a political impossibility. For the time being at least, the Bush Administration had broken beyond the establishment consensus that had made for the de facto retention of the welfare-state core, progressive taxation and business regulation following the collapse of liberalism at the end of the 1970s. In this sense, todayâ€™s Republican right has also represented a break beyond postwar Republicanism, up to and including Reagan, in a double senseâ€”its focus on directly attacking the New Dealâ€“Great Society settlement, and its insistence on pushing for stepped-up military aggression, under conditions in which American geopolitical hegemony was already at a historic peak and the payoff for military interventionism on an extended scale appeared marginal. In terms of its programme and its central social base it has brought the agenda of Barry Goldwater, considered extremist in its time, into the us mainstream. Towards 2008 What are the prospects for this programme in the light of the Democratsâ€™ recapture of Congress in 2006, and improved prospects for the Presidency in 2008? As we have seen, the Republicans retain a large, stableâ€”if not quite majoritarianâ€”electoral base; a substantial advantage in corporate funding; and, whatever the tactical differences over immediate moves in Iraq, a relative unity around a clearly defined pro-business agenda. The swing to the Democrats has largely registered a protest vote, and perhaps an abstention by Republican loyalists unable to stomach the sex and sleaze scandals of 2006. In the run-up to 2008 the Republicans, unlike the Democrats, may find it harder to modify their programme in search of votes, especially in view of Bushâ€™s intransigeance on Iraq; an inflexibility that may leave them particularly vulnerable. Yet the fact remains that in 2006 the Republicans survived what one gop pollster called â€˜the worst political environment for Republican candidates since Watergateâ€™, and have some reason to hope for a significant rebound. [27] Seen against the background of the rise of the Republican rightâ€”and in view of the enhanced position of the dlc and Blue Dog caucuses within their new congressional majorityâ€”it seems likely that the Democrats will only accelerate their electoral strategy of moving right to secure uncommitted votes and further corporate funding, while banking on their black, labour and anti-war base to support them at any cost against the Republicans. This will mean further triangulation in domestic and foreign policy, but in a context significantly redefined to the right since the 1990s. On Iraq, 29 of the Democrat candidates in the most fiercely contested congressional districts opposed setting a date for withdrawing us troops. [28] This was, of course, in line with the overall strategy of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Rahm Emanuel in particular. [29] Their aim is to attempt to capitalize on anti-war sentiment by doing the minimum necessary to differentiate themselves from the Republicans, while still appearing sufficiently hard-line on â€˜national securityâ€™. In line with this scientific opportunism, Carl Levin, Democrat chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, put down a motion immediately after the election demanding that Bush begin redeploying troops at some unspecified date in the not too distant future, but neglecting to specify when, if ever, withdrawal should be completed. Leaving no doubt about their determination to tergiversate, House Democrats rejected Speaker Nancy Pelosiâ€™s candidate for House majority leader, the pro-withdrawal John Murtha, in favour of the declaredly anti-withdrawal Steny Hoyer. [30] The rebuke to Murthaâ€“Pelosi will set the tone for the dpâ€™s approach to Iraq; this was underscored when Sylvestre Reyes, Pelosiâ€™s supposedly anti-war chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on the morrow of his appointment, allowed that he could see the point in a â€˜surgeâ€™ in troop levels in Iraq. Moreover, if the Cheney forces, and probably Israel, were to press for an assault on Iran before the end of Bushâ€™s term, the Democratsâ€”not only the â€˜anti-warâ€™ Pelosi but proto-candidate Hillary Clintonâ€”could find themselves to the right of the more cautious among Republicans. With their substantial House majority, the Democrats possess the potential to bring about a major improvement in domestic policy, simply by not being Republicans; but what is the actual likelihood of this? Many congressional Democrats are already familiar with the rewards that can accrue from corporations if they play along with Bush. Since 2004, Democrat representatives have chalked up 34 votes for the Republicansâ€™ Energy Policy Act; 41 for their Estate Tax Relief Act; 50 for their Class Action Fairness Act; and 73 for their Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. Even before the 2004 election the Democrats had voted to renewa number of Bushâ€™s tax cuts for big business, avowedly in exchange for the extension of â€˜middle-classâ€™ tax cuts. [31] There is no telling, therefore, what will happen when Bush pushes ahead with his plan to make the tax cuts permanent. While there has been much talk of a new populism in the wake of the Democratsâ€™ victoryâ€”with reason, since the electorate registered 53 per cent dissatisfaction with the socio-economic status quoâ€”the possibility of any major new programmes on healthcare, education, public infrastructure or the impoverished cities has already been ruled out by the Democratsâ€™ commitment to the pay-go rule for government spending. Meanwhile the Democrats have stepped up efforts to compete with the Republicans on corporate funding. In both 2004 and 2006, corporate money constituted more than half that raised by the dp, far surpassing any other source, and more than five times labourâ€™s contribution. Though lagging behind in other sectors, the Democrats do outdraw the Republicans in telecommunications, and far exceed them in the entertainment industry and high tech. Perhaps most impressive, they are competitive with the Republicans in raising money from the fire sector, the biggest corporate source of campaign finance, netting only 20â€“25 per cent less from this source than the Republicans in 2006. New House Majority leader Steny Hoyer has initiated his own K Street Project, his spokesperson declaring: â€˜Weâ€™re not ceding ground to Republicans in the business community.â€™ The new Senate Majority leader Harry Reid meets every two weeks with â€˜Democratic leaningâ€™ business lobbyists. The inevitable result is still greater pressure on the party to move towards the corporations and the right. The new majority in Congress is likely to disown, at least in part, the free-trade agenda. But here the horse has already left the barn, thanks mainly to the efforts of the Clinton Administration, from nafta on. In July 2005, Bush succeeded in pushing through the Central America Free Trade Agreement, thanks to an indispensable 15 Democratic defections, which made it possible for the Administration to neutralize 27 Republican no votes and eke out a narrow 217â€“215 victory in the House. On the other hand, the Doha Round, the major outstanding neoliberal initiative, is already dead in the water. Otherwise, the Democrats can be expected to complain loudly about Chinaâ€™s undervalued exchange rate and its soaring trade surplus with the us. But once Congress has had a chance to think about the inevitable consequences of the yuan revaluation that they are calling forâ€”namely, the reduction of Chinese purchases of us Treasury bonds and the entailed increase in us interest ratesâ€”they may temper their demands. The Democrats will no doubt evince a bit more sound, if not much fury in the run-up to the next election. But even if they go on to win in 2008, what we are surely in for, in the absence of a major revitalization of mass movements, is Clinton Reduxâ€”conceivably under Clinton ii. In other words, a continuation of the long-term slide to the right, at perhaps a slightly slower pace than under the Republicans. A political opening? The fact that the Democrats have remained contenders essentially by playing the Republicansâ€™ game raises the ultimate political conundrum. Between 2001 and 2006, real wages have been flat. Between 2000 and 2004â€”the last available dataâ€”median family income actually fell by between 2 and 3 per cent. Employment growth has been the slowest since World War II. There has been a big drop-off in employersâ€™ willingness to continue to pay for health-care insurance or to honour pensions, along with exacerbated inequalities in the distribution of wealth. In other words, the gap between the material aspirations of the population and what the bipartisan merry-go-round is prepared to provide has reached historic proportions for the post-World War II epoch. Why has the widely bruited new populism failed to become more pronounced? Part of the answer is perhaps to be found in the bizarre operation of the economy that has emerged under Clinton and Bush, and the cushioning effects that this has offered, however temporary. For a long period, ever-increasing female participation in the labour force countered declining male median real wages. After 1995, rising stock prices enabled corporations both to borrow with unprecedented ease and to issue shares at hugely inflated prices, allowing them to accelerate investment and unemployment. This created a hyper-boom that, however temporary and ill-fated, raised real wages dramatically over the four years between 1997â€“2001. That expansion proved illusory, issuing in a sharp if brief recession and a severe shortfall of demand. The next round of stimulus, provided by an epoch-making run-up in housing prices, made possible the greatest orgy of household-debt creation in us history, and, on that basis, a remarkable expansion of large-scale spending by wide swathes of the American consumerate. Will the deflation of the housing bubble now in process finally make for a different outcome? There is not yet much on the horizon indicative of the sort of popular mobilization that is, as always, the precondition for any real progressive shift in us politics. But were the widely expected recession actually to materialize, things might get more interesting. The growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, in combination with seriously worsening living conditions, would make for a combustible mix. Politics conducted without regard for the population would become a lot more difficult to sustain. [1] By comparison to the House elections of 2004, the Democrats won a swing of 6 per cent of the white male vote, 4 per cent of the white female vote, 5 per cent of 18â€“29 year olds, 4 per cent of those making less than $50,000, and 6 per cent of those making over $50,000, while maintaining 89 per cent of the Black vote. Democrats made strong inroads in the Midwest, Northeast, South and West, giving a Democratic plurality of 4.4m votes, compared to a Republican plurality of 3.6m in 2002. With respect to 2002, the 2006 mid-terms witnessed a 5.5 per cent shift from Republicans to Democrats. [2] See, for example, Michael Tomasky, â€˜Dems put the â€œbig tentâ€ back togetherâ€™, Los Angeles Times, 12 November 2006; John Nichols, â€˜Power Shifts in the Statesâ€™, Nation, 4 December 2006. [3] Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, â€˜Iraq Looms Large in Nationalized Electionâ€™, 5 October 2006, p. 7. [4] Jim VandeHei, â€˜Republicans Losing the â€œSecurity Momsâ€â€™, Washington Post, 18 August 2006; cnn Exit Polls for the House of Representatives, 2004 and 2006. [5] White evangelicals voted 70 per cent gop, 28 per cent dp; those attending church at least once a week voted 55 per cent gop, 43 per cent dp. Though 3â€“4 per cent fewer voters in these categories went Republican than in 2004, given the overall swing toward the Democrats of 4â€“5 per cent these small declines cannot be taken as indicative of the longer-run trend. [6] The Republicans had previously attempted to recruit Shuler, a conservative anti-abortionist, for their own ticket, but he was persuaded to run as a Democrat by Rahm Emanuel. [7] Most salient are the Class Action Fairness Act, reducing the effectiveness of class action suits; the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, reducing protection for the countryâ€™s indebted working class. In addition, the Energy Policy Act, Medicare Prescription Drug Act and Estate Tax Relief Act constituted huge giveaways to oil, pharmaceuticals and the ultra-rich. Republican tax cuts, skewed toward top income brackets, have produced an annual deficit equivalent to 2 per cent of gdp, with obvious implications for social spending. [8] cnn Exit Polls for the House of Representatives, 2006. [9] In the words of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, â€˜This was a campaign that was run explicitly to be devoid of issues. They never had to outline their own positions . . . which makes it very hard to know exactly where these folks are coming fromâ€™. â€˜Five Myths About the Midterm Electionsâ€™, Time, 16 November 2006. [10] On the morrow of the vote, some 65 per cent thought that the result was due to dissatisfaction with the Republicans; only 27 per cent believed the Democrats had won by virtue of having better candidates. Democrats won 57 per cent of self-identified â€˜independentâ€™ voters in 2006, compared to 49 per cent in 2004, and 61 per cent of self-styled â€˜moderatesâ€™, compared to 56 per cent in 2004. See Marcus Mabry, â€˜Newsweek Poll: Bush Hits New Lowâ€™, msnbc.com, 11 November 2006; cnn National Exit Polls, 2004 and 2006; â€˜Centrists Deliver for Democratsâ€™, Pew Research Center, 8 November 2006. [11] Chris Bowers, â€˜Congressional Loyalty Scorecards, Part Four: Blue Dog Democratsâ€™, Mydd.com. [12] Jonathan Weissman, â€˜Democrats Find Lessons in gop Reignâ€™, Washington Post, 12 November 2006. For Blue Dog Democrats see the website of Congressman Tanner, a founding member: www.house.gov/tanner/blue.htm. [13] Worker militancy reached its zenith in the Great Textile strike of 1934, the successful general strikes in Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis of the same year, and the sit-down strikes at General Motors in 1936â€“37. [14] See especially Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, London 1986. [15] The Act outlawed secondary boycotts, undercut the union shop, sanctioned state-level strike-breaking legislation (â€˜right to workâ€™ laws), and targeted Communist unions and leaders. [16] On the mid-century decline of the unions, see Michael Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States, Chicago 1987; Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union. A Century of American Labor, Princeton 2002. [17] â€˜Labor History Symposiumâ€™, Labor History, vol. 47, no. 4, p. 573, citing Gerald Friedman, Reigniting the Labor Movement, London, forthcoming. [18] Donatella Gatti and Andrew Glyn, â€˜Welfare States in Hard Timesâ€™, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 22, 2006, especially pp. 307â€“8; oecd Social Expenditures Data Base, 2004. I wish to thank Andrew Glyn for forwarding this dataset to me. [19] In the following sections I am much indebted to Thomas Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality, New York 1984; Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction. The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics, New York 1991; and Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn, New York 1986. [20] Paul Abramson, John Aldrich and David Rohde, â€˜Social Forces and the Voteâ€™, Change and Continuity in the 2000 and 2002 Elections, Washington, dc 2003, p. 112. [21] Edsall, New Politics of Inequality, pp. 211ff; Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction, pp. 105â€“6. [22] Gary Jacobson, â€˜Congressional campaignsâ€™, in Jacobson, The Politics of Congressional Elections, 6th edition, New York 2003, p. 65, Figure 4â€“2. [23] Between 1960 and 1996, the number of Republican representatives from the South increased from 10 to 82 seats, or from 6 to 36 per cent of their total House delegation. [24] Sector by sector, the ratio of Republican to Democratic corporate campaign contributions between 1994 and 2006 increased as follows: agribusiness, from 1.5 : 1 to 2.5 : 1; construction, from 1.5 : 1 to 2.5 : 1; defence, from 0.7 : 1 to 1.7 : 1; energy, from 1.3 : 1 to 3.2 : 1; health, from 1 : 1 to 1.8 : 1; transportation, from 1.3 : 1 to 2.6 : 1. The only sector in which the Democrats outdrew the Republicans was telecommunications, although in fire the Republican increase was relatively weak, rising only from 0.9 : 1 to 1.3 : 1, after peaking at 1.5 : 1 in 1996. See Center for Responsive Politics, www.opensecrets.org. [25] Source: Congressional Budget Office. [26] Of the Republicansâ€™ eleven gains in House seats between 2000 and 2004, ten came from the South. In 1996, when Clinton defeated Dole, the white vote in the South for Dole exceeded that in the North by 7.5 per cent, 14.7 per cent and 17.2 per cent among white voters making less than $30,000 per year, $30,000â€“$70,000 per year and above $70,000 per year, respectively. But by 2004, when Bush defeated Kerry, the white vote in the South had gone a decisive distance further in a Republican direction, exceeding that in the North by 13 per cent, 17.5 per cent, and 19.7 per cent, respectively, for the same three income categories. I am indebted to Rachel Cohen for assembling these results from exit poll data and for her help in interpreting them. [27] â€˜gop Glum as it Struggles to Hold Congressâ€™, New York Times, 5 November 2006. [28] Jim VandeHei and Zachary Goldfarb, â€˜Democrats Split Over Timetable for Troopsâ€™, Washington Post, 27 August 2006. [29] See John Walsh, â€˜Election 2006: How Rahm Emanuel Has Rigged a Pro-War Congressâ€™, CounterPunch, 14â€“15 October 2006. [30] The Washington Post describes Hoyer as â€˜business-friendly . . . a free-trader and a balanced-budget proponent, with strong ties to lobbyistsâ€™. Shailagh Murray, â€˜Political Pragmatism Carried Hoyer to the Topâ€™, Washington Post, 17 November 2006. [31] Jonathan Weisman, â€˜Congress Votes to Extend Tax Cutsâ€™, Washington Post, 24 September 2004. Published in New Left Review January-February 2007

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Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Carol Pagaduan-Araullo — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 06:00:28 +0000

by Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, Philippines How ironic that while the rest of the world, including the people of the USA, are waking up to the Bush administrationâ€™s big fat lies about the â€œwar on terrorâ€, Filipinos continue to be fed with the same sort of lies by the Arroyo regime. In fact the latter is in the process of completing the railroading of a so-called Anti-Terrorism Bill (ATB) that is the result of high-profile lobbying as well as arm-twisting by high officials of the Bush government. A two-day special session of the Lower House of Congress has been called by Mrs. Arroyo to ratify the bill so that she can quickly sign it into law. The Bush administration, bent on establishing unchallenged US economic, political and military domination over the world, seized the horrific events of 9/11 to generate mass paranoia about â€œterrorismâ€ (or what it labeled as â€œterrorismâ€) and blind support for what it trumpets is a â€œwar on terrorâ€ but which is in fact an imperialist war of terror. In the process it has funneled hundreds of billions to favored contractors in the military-industrial complex, let loose the dogs of war in the unjust invasion, occupation and destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, enacted repressive laws such as the US PATRIOT ACT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and caused the unprecedented flouting of international human rights and humanitarian law standards by allowing the use of torture and inhumane treatment on prisoners accused of â€œterrorismâ€ and denying them basic legal rights to defend themselves in a court of law. Imposing a black or white, â€œeither you are with us or against usâ€ kind of politico-military alignment, the US has hoodwinked, inveigled and pretty much threatened the rest of the world to join or support its wars of aggression and intervention in the guise of fighting a borderless, indeterminate war against â€œterrorismâ€. It is in this true context that we are witnessing the enactment in our country of the â€œHuman Security Act of 2007â€ or â€œAn Act to Secure the State and Protect the People from Terrorismâ€ that is meant to mislead and camouflage the inhuman character and object of the bill. While earlier versions of the bill were undisguised pieces of fascist legislation that were clearly an affront on the peopleâ€™s civil, political and human rights, and thus could not stand muster in a senate that has a predominantly oppositionist make-up (not to mention a smattering of senators posturing as human rights defenders) this final bicameral bill is said to have been â€œdefangedâ€ to the point of being harmless. We vehemently disagree. The Anti-Terrorism Bill that House Speaker de Venecia is itching to pass under his leadership and Mrs. Arroyo is aching to sign (as she herself announced) is a wolf in sheepâ€™s clothing. Simply put, the proposed bill lays the legal basis for an undeclared martial rule or the return to a fascist dictatorship disguised as merely being part and parcel of the US-led â€œwar on terrorâ€. The claimed â€œsafety netsâ€ against abuse that erstwhile opponents have introduced are ineffectual and a sham. The US-backed Arroyo regime and its military and police minions can still use the ATB to outlaw and suppress all legal dissent and opposition by unilaterally declaring these as â€œterroristâ€ on the basis of manufactured intelligence reports and the claims of false witnesses. They also have the law to back them up when they interchangeably label â€œrebelsâ€ as â€œterroristsâ€. In one fell stroke they will have demonized the former and reduced a revolutionary armed movement with the undisputed history of fighting the Marcos fascist dictatorship and struggling for fundamental reforms into nothing but a bunch of heartless, despicable criminals. The bill pays lip service to "uphold(ing) the basic and fundamental rights of the people..." then proceeds to enumerate the ways in which those rights are to be undermined and attacked. Concretely, â€œterrorismâ€ suspects will be denied due process and the presumption of innocence. A person can be deprived of his liberty, the right to travel and the right to communicate (even by means of a telephone) on the mere suspicion of terrorism and even where â€œevidence of guilt is not strongâ€. For example, Sec. 26 states: â€œIn cases where evidence of guilt is not strong, and the person charged is â€¦granted... bail, the court shall â€¦limit the right of travel of the accused to within the municipality or city where he resides. He or she may also be placed under house arrest by order of the courtâ€¦ While under house arrest, he or she may not use telephones, cell phones, emails, computers, the internet or other means of communications with people outside his residence until otherwise ordered by the court.â€ Under Sec. 19, in the event of alleged â€œactual or imminent terrorist attackâ€, suspects may be detained for 48 hours without warrant. Municipal, city, provincial or regional human rights commission officials are authorized to order the detention of suspected terrorists beyond 48 hours. This is a clear violation of the Sec. 18, Article VII of the Constitution which provides that â€œDuring the suspension of the privilege of the writ, any person thus arrested or detained shall be judicially charged within three days, otherwise he shall be released.â€ With the evidence for an â€œimminentâ€ terrorist attack easily concocted by the military or police, who have the nasty habit of giving false warnings about New Peopleâ€™s Army and/or Muslim rebels infiltrating rallies and demonstrations to sow terror, any person suspected of rebellion or insurrection, which are, by the way, considered terrorist acts under Sec. 3 of the Bill, may now be detained indefinitely upon orders of a municipal officer. Thus will the ATB be used additionally to the current jurisprudence on warrantless arrests of suspected rebels that has been abused for the longest time as in the celebrated case of Anakpawis representative Crispin Beltran. Human rights lawyers and civil libertarians have all pointed to many more reprehensible provisions of the anti-terror law including the dangerously vague and broad definition of â€œterrorismâ€ virtually wiping out legitimate protest and demolishing the peace processes with the communist and Muslim separatist revolutionary movements; the illegalization of organizations declared as â€œterroristâ€ by an Anti-Terrorism Council headed by Mrs. Arroyo and packed by the most hard-line militarist and fascists in her Cabinet; an intensified and indiscriminate wiretapping that will do away with constitutional guarantees to privacy and will render government critics and opponents vulnerable to unfair prosecution and political persecution. Why all the rush to pass the bill before the elections? Apart from being a feather in the cap for the Arroyo-de Venecia clique, both eager to please their US backers as they face a problematic mid-term elections, we believe this fascist legislation is being readied for the expected backlash against the anticipated systematic and wholesale cheating by the Arroyo administration in the coming May polls.# *Published in Business World 16-17 February 2007

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Americaâ€™s Holy Warriors

Chris Hedges — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 06:00:29 +0000

by Chris Hedges The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement. This effort signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign by the radical Christian right to dismantle Americaâ€™s open society and build a theocratic state. A successful politicization of the military would signal the end of our democracy. During the past two years I traveled across the country to research and write the book â€œAmerican Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.â€ I repeatedly listened to radical preachers attack as corrupt and godless most American institutions, from federal agencies that provide housing and social welfare to public schools and the media. But there were two institutions that never came under attackâ€”the military and law enforcement. While these preachers had no interest in communicating with local leaders of other faiths, or those in the community who did not subscribe to their call for a radical Christian state, they assiduously courted and flattered the military and police. They held special services and appreciation days for all four branches of the armed services and for various law enforcement agencies. They encouraged their young men and women to enlist or to join the police or state troopers. They sought out sympathetic military and police officials to attend church events where these officials were lauded and feted for their Christian probity and patriotism. They painted the war in Iraq not as an occupation but as an apocalyptic battle by Christians against Islam, a religion they regularly branded as â€œsatanic.â€ All this befits a movement whose final aesthetic is violence. It also befits a movement that, in the end, would need the military and police forces to seize power in American society. One of the arguments used to assuage our fears that the mass movement being built by the Christian right is fascist at its core is that it has not yet created a Praetorian Guard, referring to the paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse and eventually plunged ancient Rome into tyranny and despotism. A paramilitary force that operates outside the law, one that sows fear among potential opponents and is capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors, is a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law. And yet we may be further down this road than we care to admit. Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves. â€œContracting out security to groups like Blackwater undermines our constitutional democracy,â€ said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. â€œTheir actions may not be subject to constitutional limitations that apply to both federal and state officials and employeesâ€”including First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights to be free from illegal searches and seizures. Unlike police officers they are not trained in protecting constitutional rights and unlike police officers or the military they have no system of accountability whether within their organization or outside it. These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights." The politicization of the military, the fostering of the belief that violence must be used to further a peculiar ideology rather than defend a democracy, was on display recently when Air Force and Army generals and colonels, filmed in uniform at the Pentagon, appeared in a promotional video distributed by the Christian Embassy, a radical Washington-based organization dedicated to building a â€œChristian America.â€ The video, first written about by Jeff Sharlet in the December issue of Harperâ€™s Magazine and filmed shortly after 9/11, has led the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to raise a legal protest against the Christian Embassyâ€™s proselytizing within the Department of Defense. The video was hastily pulled from the Christian Embassy website and was removed from YouTube a few days ago under threats of copyright enforcement. Dan Cooper, an undersecretary of veterans affairs, says in the video that his weekly prayer sessions are â€œmore important than doing the job.â€ Maj. Gen. Jack Catton says that his being an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a â€œwonderful opportunityâ€ to evangelize men and women setting defense policy. â€œMy first priority is my faith,â€ he says. â€œI think itâ€™s a huge impact.... You have many men and women who are seeking Godâ€™s counsel and wisdom as they advise the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] and the secretary of defense.â€ Col. Ralph Benson, a Pentagon chaplain, says in the video: â€œChristian Embassy is a blessing to the Washington area, a blessing to our capital; itâ€™s a blessing to our country. They are interceding on behalf of people all over the United States, talking to ambassadors, talking to people in the Congress, in the Senate, talking to people in the Pentagon, and being able to share the message of Jesus Christ in a very, very important time in our world is winning a worldwide war on terrorism. What more do we need than Christian people leading us and guiding us, so, theyâ€™re needed in this hour.â€ The group has burrowed deep inside the Pentagon. It hosts weekly Bible sessions with senior officers, by its own count some 40 generals, and weekly prayer breakfasts each Wednesday from 7 to 7:50 a.m. in the executive dining room as well as numerous outreach events to, in the words of the organization, â€œshare and sharpen one another in their quest to bridge the gap between faith and work.â€ If the United States falls into a period of instability caused by another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or a series of environmental disasters, these paramilitary forces, protected and assisted by fellow ideologues in the police and military, could swiftly abolish what is left of our eroding democracy. War, with the huge profits it hands to businesses and right-wing interests that often help bankroll the Christian right, could become a permanent condition. And the thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses who appeared on street corners in Baghdad and New Orleans could appear on streets across the U.S. Such a presence could paralyze us with fear, leaving us unable to question or protest the closed system and secrecy of an emergent totalitarian state and unable to voice dissent. â€œThe Bush administration has already come close to painting our current wars as wars against Islamâ€”many in the Christian right apparently have this belief,â€ Ratner said. â€œIf these wars, bad enough as imperial wars, are fought as religious wars, we are facing a very dark age that could go on for a hundred years and that will be very bloody.â€ View original on Truth Dig, posted December 31, 2006

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Italy Launches the First Integrated “Bio-Plastics” Network

Jean-Jacques Bozonnet — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 05:00:10 +0000

A low-profile industrial revolution based on corn and sunflower seeds is being born in Terni, a middle-sized Umbrian city, situated some 100 kilometers north of Rome. On Friday 13 October, in this once-prosperous steel and chemical industry cluster, the Italian company Novamont, pioneer in the sector of biodegradable products, inaugurated the "first green bio-refinery in the world, able to produce bio-polyesters based on vegetable oil." European leader in bio-plastics based on starch thanks to its star product, Master-Bi, 35,000 tons of which already are turned out by the Terni site, the firm is raising its production capacity to 60,000 tons, or about 60% of the global market. Compared to 40 million tons of petroleum-based plastics consumed in Europe, this is only a first step. Moreover, the interest in bio-plastics is still dwarfed by the present craze for bio-carburants. Nonetheless, everyday objects manufactured on the basis of agricultural products are no longer a utopia. Bio-plastics like Master-Bi combine many environmental properties. They are renewable, recyclable, reusable, biodegradable, and "compostable." They are used to make bags, packaging, mulching films for agriculture, disposable diapers, throw-away glasses and cutlery, soluble cotton swabs, etc. The applications are infinite: Novamont has, notably, collaborated with the American outfitter Goodyear to develop an "environmental" tire that reduces road resistance by 40%. Born from a Montedison laboratory in 1989, Novamont is above all a company of researchers that continues to devote 30% of its resources to research. The company holds 56 patents that it is developing. Today, the addition of vegetable oils (sunflower, castor-bean, rapeseed) to the traditional starch allows it to reduce the share of fossil products used still further. Above all, that makes the manufacturing process more energy efficient and reduces its environmental impact. The initial project of inventing "a living chemistry in service to quality of life" has become an industrial challenge. On its site, Novamont has invested 100 million Euros since launching production in 1996. With 120 employees and a turnover of 50 million Euros, the Italian producer has a small business dimension, but multi-national ambitions. France, which has the most developed legislative framework in Europe in these matters (biodegradable store shopping bags will be obligatory as of 2010), attracts the company: it has just created a subsidiary there, the first milestone toward the opening of a factory, most likely in the Rhone-Alps region. The main brake on the expansion of bio-plastics remains their cost of production. "We must begin to consider not only the raw material costs, but those of the whole channel of production and distribution, which include hidden environmental and social costs such as those of transportation. Hence the necessity of creating small units close to their destined markets rather than big manufacturing centers," explains Catia Bastioli, Novamont General Director. Simultaneous with the announcement of its ultra-modern bio-refinery, Novamont made public the creation of a joint venture with the main Italian agricultural organization, Coldiretti. "It's an even more important event because it marks a change in perspective," exults Catia Bastioli. "It's the first economic model of integrated vertical organization around planned sustainable development. We've found a great openness of mind among the farmers and an approach very close to ours, since they are seeking an economic model that gives value to their land, brings added-value to their specialized crops, and integrates them with an industrial process." In concrete terms, several hundreds of sunflower producers from the Terni province have constituted themselves into a cooperative which is becoming Novamont's partner in a new 50-50 entity that is supposed to be operational in 2008. The perspectives for this kind of network are significant without, all the same, impinging on the space devoted to agriculture for food purposes. The greatest optimists have already calculated that by exploiting the 800,000 hectares for crops in Italy that are presently frozen by the European Union, an effective bio-industrial network could obtain over 1.5 million tons of bio-plastics. And Catia Bastioli even dreams of an analogous cooperation with French agricultural organizations in the near future. References Production. Novamont has a line of 15 different varieties of Master-Bi. It supplies 60% of the world production of bio-plastics. Virtually all production takes place in Terni (Umbria); the rest under license in the United States. Thirty-five thousand tons of Master-Bi are already produced by the Italian Terni site. That capacity will soon rise to 60,000 tons. Competitors. American multinational chemical companies Cargill and Dow Chemical have associated to develop PLA, obtained by fermenting starch, the only alternative at present to Master-Bi. Master-Bi does not use GMO. France is the largest European producer of starch, with 60% of the European market. Cost. A bio-degradable check-out bag costs 8-9 Euro cents vs. 5 cents for a traditional bag (15 billion/year in France). Bio-plastic is completely reabsorbed in three to eight weeks versus 100 to 400 years for traditional plastics, which burn easily, but emit toxic fumes. Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher. View original at Le Monde

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Global Notes #5

Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 05:04:12 +0000

. Middle East investments soar Flooded with money from soaring oil prices there has been an explosion of investment banks, private equity funds and venture capital coming out of the Middle East. But unlike the 1970s and 1990s when both governments and investors relied on international banks to handle their wealth local transnational capitalists are now guiding their own funds. That means petrodollars aren't being recycled through New York and London but through such firms as Dubai's Istithmar and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Funds are expect to hit $10B by 2007. David Jackson, chief executive officer at Istithmar says, "In 2003, people hardly understood what private equity and alternative investments really were; now every other day we get wind of another fund." Says another banker, "In the past, they would just give the money and put it in the US. Now they want to do their own dealsâ€¦" . Neo-liberals advocate pay-raise for Chinese Transnational capitalists are trying to help China spend the billions of dollars sitting in State coffers. But their surprising advice is a consumption-led boost for growth. Concerned that too much investment is pouring into industry and real estate creating overcapacity and non-performing loans Martin Wolf, finance editor for the Financial Times, argues that Government spending on health, education, welfare and pensions has been "far too timid." Afterall, to pursue such policies you don't have to be a Communist, just a mild social-democrat will do nicely. In addition, Wolf says China needs "greater reliance on consumption," and one way to achieve that is raising the minimum wage in all state owned industry. His views are backed up by a recent report from the Institute for International Economics by Nicholas Lardy titled "China: Towards a Consumption-Driven Path." Joining the discussion from the Yale School of Management Jeffrey Garten calls for a Chinese Marshall Plan supporting the UN's Millennium Development goals to "reduce extreme poverty, improving health and education and ensuring environmental sustainability." Garten wants China to take $100B of its $1,000B in foreign exchange reserves and establish a fund for the Third World. This could be done by giving money to the WTO, Rockefeller Foundation and working with GE and BP for alternative energy. It might come as a surprise that such organizations need money. But of course Western capitalists can always find ways for Third World countries to manage their finances. After devastating social services and creating more poverty neo-liberals now turn to China to help solve their problems. An interesting turn of events, but as hypocritical as the calls may be, the ideas retain their merit.

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‘Iraq Study Group’ Taking Charge

Editors — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 15:35:03 +0000

US Foreign Policy Set To Change Dramatically

Analysis by Jim Lobe Inter Press Service News Agency WASHINGTON, Nov 9 (IPS) - The abrupt replacement of Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld, by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Robert Gates, combined with the Democratic sweep in Tuesday's mid-term elections, appears to signal major changes in United States foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. A career CIA analyst until his retirement in the early 1990s, Gates, a favorite of both former president George H.W. Bush and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, has shared their â€˜realistic' approach to U.S. foreign policy and shown little patience with the neo-conservatives and aggressive nationalists, like Vice-President Dick Cheney. Or with Rumsfeld, who dominated the younger Bush's first term after the Sept.11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon and led the march to war in Iraq. As recently as two years ago, for example, Gates co-chaired a task force sponsored by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) with Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, which called for a policy of diplomatic and economic engagement with Iran, a policy that was denounced as â€˜appeasement' by a number of prominent neo-conservatives. Indeed, in the aftermath of Tuesday's electoral landslide, in which the Democrats gained at least 29 seats to win a secure majority in the House of Representatives and appear poised to win a narrower majority in the Senate as well, and Rumsfeld's departure, both Cheney and his neo-conservative supporters, now appear more marginalised than ever. "If the trend in the Bush second term is viewed as what a friend of mine once called â€˜an imperceptible 180-degree turn' from neo-con ideology to political realism, then this would be a crowning achievement," says Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University who worked with Gates in the National Security Council under former president Jimmy Carter. "Viewed from my own knowledge and perspective, I think this is one of the most significant U.S, policy shifts in the past six years," he said, adding that, among other things, Rumsfeld's departure and Gates' ascension would, at the very least, give Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- like Gates, a Soviet specialist from the realist school -- more diplomatic maneuvering room than in the past when she had to contend with both a hostile vice-president and a secretary of defense. Although apparently discussed for some time, Rumsfeld's resignation on the heels of the election was no doubt designed at least in part as a sacrificial offering to victorious Democrats whose performance at the polls appears to have lived up to their greatest hopes. The quagmire in Iraq for which Rumsfeld was, of course, one of the most visible faces was, according to both the pre-election and exit polls, probably the single-most important factor in what Bush himself called a Republican "thumping". "At a minimum, Rumsfeld's departure buys the President time to adjust Iraq and other policies without the newly empowered Democrats screaming for blood," opines Chris Nelson, editor of the private insider newsletter â€˜The Nelson Report'. "But they will start to do that pretty soon, if nothing coherent seems to be happening." In his first post-election statement, Bush vowed to find "common ground" with the Democrats on Iraq, as well as other issues -- a promise that seemed inconceivable just a month ago when he and Cheney were accusing the opposition party of wanting to "cut and run" from Iraq and handing the "terrorists" there a great victory. For their part, the new Democratic leadership -- the House Speaker-to-be Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the likely new majority leader Sen. Harry Reid -- called for a national summit on Iraq policy. While the Democrats are united on Iraq, many, if not most, including Pelosi, believe that Washington should begin "redeploying" the 140,000-plus troops from Iraq and setting timetables for an eventual withdrawal over the next one to two years in order to reduce the mounting costs in blood and treasure of the U.S. intervention, extricate Washington from what appears to be a growing sectarian civil war, and put pressure on the Iraqi government and its various factions to prevent one. Both parties are likely now to defer to the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a bipartisan, Congressionally-appointed task force co-chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Lee Hamilton, which is supposed to release its report between now and early next year. Significantly, Gates is a Republican member of the ISG which, under Baker's guidance, met in September with senior representatives of Iran and Syria, governments that have been boycotted diplomatically by the Bush administration. Those meetings prompted strong speculation that the ISG is almost certain to recommend engaging both Tehran and Damascus as well as Iraq's other neighbours, as part of a strategy to facilitate a U.S. withdrawal and prevent the sectarian conflict from spreading beyond Iraq's borders. Such an approach has been anathema to Rumsfeld, Cheney and the neo-conservatives who successfully vetoed Rice's suggestion during last summer's Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon that Washington communicate at least indirectly with Damascus and earlier efforts by her to persuade Bush to be prepared to offer Tehran security guarantees as part of any package that would emerge from successful negotiations between the EU-3 and Iran on freezing its nuclear programme. But both approaches are likely to be advocated by Gates, and therein lies the possibility of a major overhaul of U.S. policy, particularly in the Middle East but also with respect to Asia, particularly China, where tension with Rumsfeld's Pentagon has been the main irritant in an otherwise relatively constructive relationship under Bush. Nelson points out that Gates is currently a leading member of the Baker policy advisory group. Indeed, some right-wing commentators see Rumsfeld's replacement by Gates as a virtual coup d'etat by the old, realist crowd around Bush's father against the remnants of the hawkish coalition of aggressive nationalists, neo-conservatives, and the Christian right which seized control of Middle East policy, in particular, after 9/11. "Bottom line, the Gates' nomination has Jim Baker's finger prints all over it," said J. William Lauderback, executive vice-president of the American Conservative Union. That analysis will likely be echoed in the coming days by a host of neo-conservatives howling about a realist takeover. In fairness to the neo-conservatives, many of them have been calling for Rumsfeld's ouster, some even as early as the Iraq invasion when they determined that he was unprepared to devote the kind of resources and manpower "in ground forces and security" into the kind of "model" they had envisioned for the rest of the Arab world. In recent months, even neo-conservatives who have stood by Rumsfeld have publicly criticised him for botching the occupation. They had urged Bush to choose Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat with strong neo-conservative views on the Middle East, to replace Rumsfeld. Lieberman, who was defeated two months ago in the Democratic primary election by a virtually unknown anti-war candidate, Ned Lamont, was reelected with Republican votes and money to the Senate as an independent in one of the few pieces of good news that the hawks have received over the past 48 hours. But Lieberman's reelection could not overcome the tide of bad news for the neo-conservatives and their main sponsor and protector within the administration, Cheney, who, now deprived of both his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby (indicted for lying to a federal grand jury in October 2005), and Rumsfeld, now lies isolated and exposed. "Rumsfeld is his guy," Woodward told the TV public-affairs program â€˜60 Minutes' in October. "And Cheney confided to an aide that if Rumsfeld goes, next they'll be after Cheney."

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Taking on the Global Warming Crisis

Editors — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:56:56 +0000

A Green 'High Road' for Venture Capitalists

By Andrew K. Burger EcommerceTimes.com (Nov. 8, 2006) When it comes to alternative, renewable energy, European companies and countries have been leading the charge. "We see several trends concerning financial investments into solar energy," said Edwin Koot, the founder and principal of Solar Plaza. Making the Case for Enterprise Mobility: Wireless Management and Spend Control. Find out how AT&T was able to reduce spiraling enterprise mobility costs and boost the efficient use of assets. Venture capital (VC) and private and public investments in alternative energy continue to grow at their highest rates since the OPEC crisis of the 1970s. Around the world, the persistence of much higher fossil fuel prices, heightened power demands -- particularly in the fast-developing economies of China and India -- national employment trends, security concerns, and growing evidence of sharp climate changes are contributing to what amounts to a clean technology boom. "The level of investment is accelerating, and I do not see any reason why it will moderate. You can debate around oil pricing and how much that is driving [investment], but there are other factors here at play -- energy security and independence, environmental concerns, focus on sustainability, etc.," Jeff Lipton, managing director of investment banking at Jefferies & Co., told TechNewsWorld. Jefferies hosted its first European Alternative Energy and CleanTech Conference in London late last month. Vast Market, Many Subsectors "Investor interest remains very strong, though people continue to work to understand the drivers and dynamics [and] interplay between various subsectors and where the investment opportunities will be," explained Lipton. "Interest is broad-based -- that is, not just solar or biodiesel. People are looking at fuel cells, wind, batteries, energy infrastructure. People see an enormous market with multiple interesting and viable subsectors," he said. "The U.S. investment community continued to support the clean tech sector, investing more money in public and private clean tech companies during the first half of 2006 than all of 2005. Investors committed capital in larger amounts to more sectors, including advanced batteries, biofuel, fuel cells, geothermal, hydrogen, power electronics, solar and wind," states Jefferies in its first-half 2006 review of alternative energy and clean tech markets. VC investment in the sector is also growing. "Venture-capital investment in clean tech is expanding, with annual dollar volume expected to hit approximately US$2 billion in 2006, compared with just $730 million in 2001," the firm points out. "In addition, more companies are receiving VC funding every quarter, with the average deal size at approximately $6.6 million in 2005, compared with $6.0 million in 2002." European Vanguard When it comes to alternative, renewable energy, European companies and countries have been leading the charge. "We see several trends concerning financial investments into solar energy," said Edwin Koot, the founder and principal of Solar Plaza. A growing number of solar energy (PV, for photovoltaics) companies are listed on the stock market, Koot claimed. Most of them are German-run, although American and Chinese companies are up and coming. "Looking at VC involvements, the focus within the U.S. is clearly on completely new solar cell and module technologies, [whereas] in Germany the companies are more involved in the traditional crystalline silicon technology. Most of these German companies are vertically integrated, meaning they have interests in several parts of the supply chain," Koot said. The Spanish market is attracting increasing amounts of capital. "Concerning the private investments, the Spanish market is definitely the most attractive at the moment," said Koot. "Many Spanish and foreign people [and] companies have invested large amounts of money in solar farm projects, in which people own a PV system producing electricity that is sold back to the utility for a very attractive and guaranteed price. Financial yields of more than 8 percent for 25 years can be achieved." In the wind power sector, Europe's largest onshore wind energy farm is being constructed -- and debated -- in Scotland at the Whitelee Windfarm, located south of Glasgow, where some 140 turbines will crank out enough electricity to power approximately 200,000 Scottish homes, including much of Glasgow. Scotland is also home to the world's largest offshore wind farm project to date. Two hundred state-of-the-art wind turbines are to be installed in deep water off Scotland's east coast, not far from Whitelee. Renewable sources, such as wind energy, now generate 16 percent of the country's electricity -- four times that for the UK as a whole -- and the government has set a goal to produce 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. In Sweden, 47 percent of the country's electricity is currently supplied by hydroelectric plants, up from 36 percent just three years ago. Another 45 percent is generated by nuclear power. Turning to biofuels, the European biodiesel market is expected to more than double in value by 2010, to around 8 billion euros (US$10.2 billion), according to investment bank Goldman Sachs. Concerns about global climate change and the security of oil supplies will result in biodiesel production increasing 35 percent by 2010; companies will invest up to 3 billion euros (US$3.81 billion) in production facilities. Bioethanol, which Brazil has used successfully to shift away from using imported fossil fuels, is expected to grow 13 percent by 2010. Capital Boosts Potential Energy These efforts require capital and a growing number of VCs, private and public groups, and individuals are willing to provide it. "While solar energy firms dominated public and private financings in 2005, capital raising by biofuel companies has increased in size and number in response to both President Bush's State of the Union address and rising gasoline prices, which surpassed the $3.00 per gallon threshold in the U.S.," Lipton notes in Jefferies' first-half 2006 report. "VC firms, hedge funds and private equity firms -- including DFJ Element, Impax Group, Kleiner Perkins and RockPort Capital Partners -- closed new funds that were specifically focused on the broad clean tech sector. Through May 2006, over $600 million in venture capital and $2 billion in private equity was invested in the clean tech sector," according to the report. In fact, VC companies have realized extraordinary returns upon exiting from a number of clean tech investments, leading some to think that company valuations might be overinflated. European firms accounted for seven out of the top 10 companies that jumped from private to public financial markets during the past 18 months. Also included was Norway's Renewable Energy Corp., which had an exit valuation of around $7.5 billion on an initial investment of $44.2 million. India's Suzlon's IPO (initial public offering) placed a US$3.3 billion value on the company; earlier, pre-IPO investors had put up $21.5 million, according to information presented by New Energy Finance at the recent European Energy Venture Fair. "The solar PV industry is growing enormously, mostly upscaling production capacities," commented Solar Plaza's Koot. "This will bring down cost and market prices, and will ultimately bring [about] a sustainable market. Within 10 years, a sustainable market without financial government support could well be within reach, making it possible for solar energy to really take off as a major energy source." The Third Wave of Silicon Travis Bradford is a former private equity and hedge fund executive who used his own capital and efforts to build Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit organization set up as an e-commerce trading and information clearinghouse for solar energy and technology. As solar energy is already economically viable "on a cash-on-cash basis, there is a positive feedback loop developing in the solar and alternative energy industries similar to that which has fueled tremendous growth and advances in radical and disruptive information technology and telecommunications," said Bradford, author of the upcoming book, Solar Revolution, to be published later this year by MIT Press. Technological advancements, as well as market and external forces, are driving investments into the solar and alternative energy sectors, Bradford explains. Companies can produce more and further increase efficiency, bringing down costs and bringing power and fuel from distributed, renewable sources to larger numbers of people while stimulating demand. This, in turn, attracts additional capital to these areas, starting the cycle again from a higher base. "It's the third wave of something we've seen twice already," says Bradford, borrowing a term from futurist Alvin Toffler. "The 'Third Wave of Silicon': computers, telecommunications and, now, energy. It's all happened due to the specific technological and economic characteristics of silicon-based semiconductors. Those were radical, disruptive technologies that changed everything about the way we see and do things in the world. [That said], we didn't abandon existing technologies completely -- we have a hybrid system."

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