Labor Takes Independent Path to Public Program for Health

Labor Asserts Its Solidarity; Public Programs Move UP; Markets Down

byPhil E. Benjamin

Robert Pear, the NY Times health columnist who seems to have the trust of those most concerned with achieving a universal health program wrote in today's [March 7, '09] NY Times, "In Divide Over Health Care Overhaul, 2 Major Unions Withdraw From A Coalition."

Well, it just wasn't two major unions, it was two major unions who represented the two major labor federations: Gerry McEntee, President of the Americana Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, chairs the Health Committee of the AFL-CIO; and, Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees Union which leads the Change to Win federation. That is all of organized labor.

And, their withdrawal from the "strange bed Coalition" with health industry corporate interests, is a major break with the collaborationist policies that could not yield a universal health program with a public program mandate.

They broke from the Health Reform Dialogue, which is headed by the American Hospital Association; but either directly or indirectly that group also contains the commercial health insurance industry and drug cartels. For example, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America or PHARMA. This is the most backward and anti universal health care program in our country. But, it also contained the Chamber of Commerce, Blue Cross and Shield, and the very backward America's Health Insurance Plans. They were all part of that group.

The name of that collaboration has changed many times since it first was put together in the mid-1990s after the Clinton health plan was busted by the Health Industrial Complex.

Organized labor is now shorn of organizational commitments that held it back from taking a more progressive position, i.e., a public program that truly begins to solve the problems of health access and quality.

A lot of conjecture will be taking place over the next period of time; but, be sure that the Administration's two major Summits had a lot to do with this major policy shift: 1} Financial Responsibility [formerly known as the "Entitlement" Summit] held in February; and 2} Thursday's "Health Summit." The interaction between all the progressives in the Summit's or outside the room clearly has pushed those demanding that Social Security and Medicare be not just left alone but made stronger; and, those demanding a full public program for health to take stonger positions. Both Summits allowed people to speak their minds. And, the sum total of those minds was quite clear.

Insurance carriers are crying that a public program would drive them out of the market; they don't say that it is their policies that have drive 47 million plus people out of health coverage. Market solutions, the center piece of Reaganomics of the 1980s is now on the ropes. It needs to be put away for good.

UN COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN; WFTU ASKED TO SPEAK

United Nations: Commission on Status of Women
Annual Update of Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action

WFTU Asked to Give Report

by Mike Tolochko

In 1995, the Beijing Declaration sounded from Beijing, China; it was a Declaration heard around the world. Along with that Declaration came its Platform for Action. Since that year, and for each succeeding year, the UN has held a special session around its annual celebration of International Women's Day.

This two-week session was the best attended to date. The opening session on Monday morning had to be expanded from Conference Room 1 to CR 2. Conveners said that this was highly unusual.

This year, on March 5th, H.E. Mr. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations led off the International Women's Day celebration. For his portion of the two-day meet, the Secretary-General addressed the topic of that day, "Men and Women United to End Violence Against Women and Girls." He made it clear that as Secretary-General he would continue previous mandates to keep these issues on the forefront of his agenda. Also, opening the session were: Mrs. Aja Isatou Njie Saidy, of the Republic of Gambia; Ms. Maria del Ricio Garcia GAytan of Mexico; and Ms. Tanya Plibersek of Australia.

In the panel that followed Radhika Coomarswamy as UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict talked about attention to girls and women during armed conflict. Also on that panel, William Lucy, Int'l Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees [AFSCME] union spoke about, "Violence Against Women in the Workplace."

Gender Equality and Financial Crisis

Clearly, the main topic of this year's Conference, "Gender Equality and the Equal Sharing of Responsibilities" was established well before the world financial crisis. However, many of the participants used their time to put the fight for women's rights within he context of the world financial crisis.

Lorena Jaime Bueno, Special Representative from the World Federation of Trade Unions, was asked, as an NGO to deliver the remarks. In this Session most if not all of the participants are from official government representatives. About 400 NGOs submitted comments, but only two were selected to present their views. The WFTU was one of those two. Here are her prepared comments:

Subject: Equal sharing of responsibilities between women and men, including care giving in the context of HIV/AIDS
Organization: World Federation of Trade Unions
Speaker: Ms. Lorena Jaime Bueno
E-mail: info@wftucentral.org

Dear colleagues
Today, in all capitalist countries, the working woman is the object of harsh exploitation. She works mainly in part-time, uninsured, and temporary jobs. She is being paid less than what men are paid. She has a smaller pension. She is the first to become unemployed. In many countries violence against women is on the rise, prostitution is spreading, economic migration is separating many mothers from their children and deprives them of the right to education, to cultural activity, to free time. All these are consequences of the so-called globalization, that is, of the renewed and expanded aggression of the monopolies and transnationals against the peoples.
According to the European Union statistical data (Eurostat), today 1.2 billion of the world's 2.9 billion workers are women (40%). Women are 60 % of the world's working poor people. More women than ever before are unemployed and they are mostly stuck in low productivity jobs such as agriculture, the field of services and the informal sector. Part Time Work is the most popular solution to work-family conflicts used all over the world. However such solution is not fully suitable because part time work usually has less job security, poor social protection and low earnings. These workers tend to be less organized and therefore have low bargaining power.
The two-thirds of the 800 million illiterate people globally today are women. Among the children that do not attend school, 3 out of 5 are girls. The data also reveal that around one million people annually fall victim to sex trafficking, 900 thousand of whom are women and girls.

HIV/AIDS has created a global health crisis on a scale, which has no parallel in the modern world. Globally, an estimated 33 million people are living with HIV, with nearly 7500 new infections each day. 50% are women.
The HIV/AIDS pandemic has mixed the care responsibilities of women and girls. Unequal sharing of responsibilities between women and men limits women's participation in the labor market, and can lead to increased responsibilities for women when they are employed. Girls and young women are expected to manage both educational and domestic responsibilities, often resulting in poor scholastic performance and early drop-out from the educational system.
Care work, especially in the context of HIV/AIDS remains strongly feminized and for the most part undervalued: it is unpaid and takes place in households; always on voluntary basis. But this voluntary care work needs to be more equally shared between women and men within households and communities because it limits the women access to paid work, the family income and their social rights.
Even though some men have become involved in the provision of home-based care, women, particularly older women and young girls, continued to bear the greatest responsibility for care of relatives infected by HIV/AIDS.
Responsibility for care also needs to be more equitably shared between households and society. Care workers (whatever women or men) need to be organized in groups and communities such as trade unions and human rights organizations to call for better regulations of their working conditions and earnings. Societies and policy- makers have to stop considering it as un-skilled work.

Dear Comrades
The attention and the interest of the W.F.T.U. for the issues of working women is interpreted in concrete actions such as the constitution of a permanent Working Committee composed of members representing different regions, development of trade union skills and training programs on gender equality at the workplaces, strengthening the capacity of class-oriented trade unions so as to include gender issues in their collective bargaining, to inform working women about their legitimate rights and help them assure those rights, including legal assistance when presenting claims on violations of the working women's rights and in the supervision of ILO Conventions, to promote the ratification and implementation of labor standards relevant to gender equality, particularly the No. 100 on equal remuneration, No.111 on non discrimination in employment and occupation, No.156 on workers with family responsibilities, No.183 on maternity protection, to promote the occupational, health and safety measures for the women workers, to struggle for increase of women's participation in trade unions, and also their elections as trade union leaders, to fight again sexual harassment or violence against women and other.
The W.F.T.U. dedicates this year's Women's Day to the women of Palestine, to the mothers of Gaza, to the girls in Ramalha who are facing today new barbarian attacks from the Israeli army.

Thank you

15th Year Evaluation in 2010

The year 2010 will be a special year for the Beijing Declaration and its Platform of Action. It will be in its 15th year. In that year, the world financial crisis will be in full swing and will receive the special attention. This will be crucial to the plight of women and girls.

Most of the government speakers pointed to that 15th anniversary year as also crucial as the UN moves toward the year 2015 the 15th anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs] point of evaluation.

NOTE: For those interested, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action along other important documents are available on the WEB. The MDGs are also there.

ANNUAL NGO MEETING, THIS YEAR, IN MEXICO CITY, MEXICO
9-11 SEPTEMBER 2009.

THE MAIN THEME IS "DISARMAMENT" WITH AN UNDER THEME OF THE "WORLD FINANCIAL CRISIS"

April 1st Day of Action: Day of Struggle – WFTU

WFTU Calls for April 1st Day of Struggle

by Mike Tolochko

On December 15 and 16, 2008 trade union affiliates to the World Federation of Trade Unions met in Lisbon Portugal to discuss the world financial crisis. At that meeting a set of demands was put forward. The assembled WFTU affiliates then set Wednesday, April 1, 2009 as an international date for workplace and community actions and demonstrations.

Jose M. Oliveira of the SNTSF, the national railway workers union Portugal, hosted the meeting. Also, Jose Dinis FEVICCOM, the Ceramic and Glass Workers; and, Augusto Praca of FESHAT, the Federation of Agricultural, Food, Beverage Hotels and Tourism of Portugal.

The ILO also sent representatives to the meeting. The World Peace Council and the World Federation of Democratic Women also participated. Forty international delegates representing 25 countries and international organizations attended this Lisbon meeting.

George Mavrikos, head of WFTU, stated that, "This very large meeting is another piece of evidence that workers across the world are resisting and creating the conditions for massive struggles. The opponents of workers are not invincible. Invincible are the people who know how to fight for their rights."

The set of demands are as follows:

"International Mobilization of workers and progressive forces of the world, demanding the crisis to be paid by those who generated it and not by workers or peoples who are victims of Neoliberalism." That is the general, main demand.

The unions who met on those two days then set out a set of demands that cover the whole general crisis:

"The working class and peoples of the world, victims of anti-labor polices, demand deep changes; to build, consolidate and defend the political, economic and social alternatives to the capitalism and the neoliberal model of globalization;

"Only the united action of workers and the progressive forces under the class-oriented principles may prevent further exploitation and precarious work;

"For the distribution of wealth; for better wages;

"Against child labor;

"No more layoffs of workers; defense of social and labor rights;

"Reduction of working hours without reducing wages; strengthening of trade unions;

"We fight all forms of discrimination against women, youth, immigrants etc.; for equal opportunities;

"Nationalization of banks and other strategic sectors such as energy; food sovereignty under social control;

"Wars to stop now, no more funds to NATO and military weapons. The resulting money to be invested in the production sector for the creation of jobs and the development of the peoples'
"No more repression and murders of trade union leaders and social activists;

"For the immediate stop of military occupation and unconditional withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq, Palestine and other Arab territories and Afghanistan;

"For the full respect for sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples."

The Day of Action, April 1st, it is suggested that workplace activities and any other kind of activity that makes these basic demands.

FINALLY LENIN WAS RIGHT: SCIENTISTS SAY REALITY IS REAL

Physics and philosophy
I'm not looking, honest!
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The good news is reality exists. The bad is it’s even stranger than people thought

“HOW wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” So said Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Since its birth in the 1920s, physicists and philosophers have grappled with the bizarre consequences that his theory has for reality, including the fundamental truth that it is impossible to know everything about the world and, in fact, whether it really exists at all when it is not being observed. Now two groups of physicists, working independently, have demonstrated that nature is indeed real when unobserved. When no one is peeking, however, it acts in a really odd way.

In the 1990s a physicist called Lucien Hardy proposed a thought experiment that makes nonsense of the famous interaction between matter and antimatter—that when a particle meets its antiparticle, the pair always annihilate one another in a burst of energy. Dr Hardy’s scheme left open the possibility that in some cases when their interaction is not observed a particle and an antiparticle could interact with one another and survive. Of course, since the interaction has to remain unseen, no one should ever notice this happening, which is why the result is known as Hardy’s paradox.

This week Kazuhiro Yokota of Osaka University in Japan and his colleagues demonstrated that Hardy’s paradox is, in fact, correct. They report their work in the New Journal of Physics. The experiment represents independent confirmation of a similar demonstration by Jeff Lundeen and Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto, which was published seven weeks ago in Physical Review Letters.

The two teams used the same technique in their experiments. They managed to do what had previously been thought impossible: they probed reality without disturbing it. Not disturbing it is the quantum-mechanical equivalent of not really looking. So they were able to show that the universe does indeed exist when it is not being observed.

The reality in question—admittedly rather a small part of the universe—was the polarisation of pairs of photons, the particles of which light is made. The state of one of these photons was inextricably linked with that of the other through a process known as quantum entanglement.

The polarised photons were able to take the place of the particle and the antiparticle in Dr Hardy’s thought experiment because they obey the same quantum-mechanical rules. Dr Yokota (and also Drs Lundeen and Steinberg) managed to observe them without looking, as it were, by not gathering enough information from any one interaction to draw a conclusion, and then pooling these partial results so that the total became meaningful.

What the several researchers found was that there were more photons in some places than there should have been and fewer in others. The stunning result, though, was that in some places the number of photons was actually less than zero. Fewer than zero particles being present usually means that you have antiparticles instead. But there is no such thing as an antiphoton (photons are their own antiparticles, and are pure energy in any case), so that cannot apply here.

The only mathematically consistent explanation known for this result is therefore Hardy’s. The weird things he predicted are real and they can, indeed, only be seen by people who are not looking. Dr Yokota and his colleagues went so far as to call their results “preposterous”. Niels Bohr, no doubt, would have been delighted.

Sam Webb easily handles Glenn Beck's 9-year old mind

From Crooks and Liars:

Glenn Beck's getting increasingly strident and desperate in his attempt to portray the Obama White House as a den of Communism. Yesterday he opened up with yet another "Comrade Update" that actually depicted visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a totalitarian simply for having extolled "cooperation."

By that standard, I guess, Sesame Street is a Commie Indoctrination Program. And at this point, I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find out the Beck indeed believes that to be the case.

In any event, he followed this smear by immediately having on Sam Webb of the Communist Party USA, claiming that Webb had declared Barack Obama a Communist ally:

Read the whole story here...

Speak up: This is out of control

From ColorofChange.org:

The country is in real trouble right now, with unemployment spiraling out of control. President Obama's stimulus plan provides money to expand unemployment assistance. But a group of Republican governors, led by Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, is trying to score political points by blocking that assistance from reaching the people who need it. It's cynical and disgusting.

These governors are playing with people's lives. They're trying to further their political ambitions while showing they could care less about the fate of everyday folks--even in their own state.

Please join me in calling them out and forcing the media spotlight on them. I just signed ColorOfChange.org's open letter demanding they do the right thing. Together, we can help make sure that in times of hardship folks get the assistance they need. It only takes a moment:

http://www.colorofchange.org/govs/?id=2066-232333

It's incredible. President Obama's stimulus package provides money for states to extend unemployment benefits for people in dire need of help, but a handful of Republican governors--Bob Riley of Alabama, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Rick Perry of Texas, Sarah Palin of Alaska, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana--are putting politics over people.

All six governors have threatened to turn down these funds. Four are 2012 presidential contenders, and they all have a vested interest in seeing Obama fail.

Private insurers confess that gov't could provide better health care coverage

During the White House summit on health care reform today a couple of spokespersons for the private insurance industry more or less admitted that government could provide health care coverage than their industry does.

Both Scott Serota, who runs Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) described a "public option" for health care as "unfair competition" for the private market.

Hello. What happened to the idea that the private market is always better – both morally and practically? They seemed almost concerned that a public plan would be so attractive to people that private insurers would go out of business. And they're right.

I think President Obama's assertion that a public option would keep the private market honest is a good. It is the private market that is responsible for the inflation of premiums that have outpaced the rise in wages. Private insurance corporations have to explain why their bloated corporate bureaucracies and the drive to profit from illness and disease have driven up the cost of care. Private insurers have to explain why the US has a declining life expectancy rate and the most expensive and least effective system in the world.

A Time to Start Thinking About Widespread Nationalization of Industry and Finance

by Norman Markowitz

The Obama administration is pursuing a Center-Left Keynesian policy. using massive public investments in both infrastructure and crisis ridden social services (which in the U.S. are largely organized and funded at the state and local level) along with huge direct subsidies to the banks and the auto industry. Will this be enough?

We are just at the beginning of a fast moving crisis and there is no clear answer. The stock market is continuing to drop, which Republicans are pointing to, even though President Obama's intelligent comment that the stock market is like tracking polls, shifting rapidly and not in itself the best indicator of what is happening in the economy, is certainly true, as any stock broker could inform the Republicans.

Unemployment is a much more important indicator and it is certainly rising, but (and this is my analysis) not anywhere near as fast as it would be had right-wing Republican policies continued (in the aftermath of the 1929 crash for example, official unemployment rose from about 500,000 before crash t o four million about six months after, a comparable time period in which the Hoover administration intensified the very credit and trade policies that had helped to bring about the crash while doing nothing about regulation and more importantly nothing beyond official good wishes to aid the unemployed and those who were beginning to lose their savings in the collapsing banks and their farms and homes through foreclosures.)

But the news and some trends today are generally not good. Auditors see General Motors', the largest U.S. automaker, survival in "substantial doubt." Retail sales are off significantly in February (although not as bad as January or what had been expected) except for the anti-labor discount store chain, Wal-Mart, which was, as of a few years ago the largest private employer in the U.S., with over one million employees.

Wal-Mart sells a wide variety of goods ranging from groceries to electronics to clothing and hardware, mostly made abroad with cheap labor. Those who shop there are overwhelmingly moderate and low income people. Its workers are cheap service labor. It has been seen for years as part of the U.S. economic problem, not any solution. GM, which was for a long time the leading industrial corporation in the World (it was that when CPUSA members led autoworkers to victory in the Flint GM strike of 1937, the breakthrough strike for industrial unionism in the U.S.) lived off military contracts and high profit gas guzzlers in the decades immediately following WWII. It then exported capital with the same enthusiasm that Wal-Mart imported goods, using union givebacks to help subsidize its de-industrialization policies.

The ripple effect of a GM collapse to the economy would be devastating, undermining president Obama's strategy to increase domestic demand through social spending. Perhaps it is time to turn GM into a public corporation, to nationalize it and develop policies to finance the sale of its cars to Americans and also the production of large numbers of public transportation vehicles. Such nationalization connected to infrastructure development might both revive and also hugely improve the quality and social utility of U.S. auto production, while increasing employment and mass purchasing power. This may be necessary for other threatened industries. While this is not socialism, in the sense that it is not an economy in which public ownership and planning for use while be the norm, selected nationalization of industry as a way to both bring about recovery in an economy and protect existing jobs and consumer purchasing power was a characteristic of social democratic led governments in many parts of the world, particularly in the post WWII period. It may very well be vital part of the answer to the present crisis.

The purchasing power of consumers is directly related to their wages and salaries as workers. Government support for trade union organization and a high wage economy was a staple of left Keynesian theory in the 1930s and 1940s as a _central _mechanism to both sustain and increase mass purchasing power. Unionizing Wal-Mart's million workers and tens of millions of others through comprehensive federal labor legislation (repealing Taft-Hartley, Landrum-Griffin and all over federal level anti-labor legislation and drafting new legislation that would negate state anti-labor laws) can and should be seen as an essential feature of a national economic policy that will protect the people from depression, not just an advance of trade union or even workers rights.

In the twelve years of the New Deal, the number of workers in unions increased by about five times, from under three million to nearly fifteen million. Comprehensive labor and social legislation was enacted where none had really existed before. There was also one remarkable and successful experiment in public ownership of energy production, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Corporate capitalist expansion during WWII and the political consequences of the cold war would first contain and eventually reverse much of this, but it remains, as millions of Americans understand, the only serious model that we have to confront this crisis at this moment, a crisis which is taking place in an economy which is far more interdependent, one characterized by much larger concentrations of capital and rapid flows of capital, than was true seventy years ago. We can't repeat the past or look at it narrowly as a guide to action. But we can learn from it to act in the present and to prepare for the necessary next steps to defend the interests of working people. Nationalization as public ownership and control (and that is my meaning of nationalization of key industries and of course finance and the government-labor cooperation in the drafting of comprehensive new labor laws and policies to multiply the number of workers in trade unions should be steps that we begin to contemplate today.

The Weather Makers (7)

THE WEATHER MAKERS: HOW MAN IS CHANGING THE CLIMATE AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR LIFE ON EARTH by Tim Flannery

Reviewed by Thomas Riggins

Part 7 [Conclusion]

One of the biggest problems facing the Obama administration is that of global warming and what to do about it. The Bush administration rejected the only international agreement to try and remedy the problem (the Kyoto agreement) and a new international agreement must be reached. Kyoto is not, as it stands, adequate to do the job that must be done. Flannery writes, "If we are to stabilize our climate, Kyoto's target [a CO2 emissions cut of 5.2%] needs to be strengthened twelve times over: Cuts of 70 percent by 2050 are required to keep atmospheric CO2 at double the pre industrial level."

In order to save the planet, as we know it, environmentalists will have to fight powerful international cartels that profit from the use of fossil fuels. The energy lobby in the U.S. worked full time with the Bush Administration to lie about, and distort the scientific. evidence of, global warming

These forces, and the politicians that front for them, have known for 30 years that their activities were killing the planet but the profits they were making were more important to them than the future existence life on Earth!

Flannery points out that ever since 1977 when the New York Times ran a story ["Scientists Fear Heavy Use of Coal May Bring Adverse Shift in Climate"] there has been a battle plan in effect to suppress as much as possible the scientific evidence of global warming.

The eight years of the Bush administration was a kind of culmination of these antiscientific doings. The Bushites suppressed or actually changed the wording and conclusions of scientific reports from NASA, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency [read Destruction Agency under Bush], and the National Academy of Sciences, among others. Even lobbyists for the energy companies were amazed by the zeal of the Bushites to further their interests at the expense of the planet, one of whom remarked that it may be a long time before the energy sector has another President Bush "or Atilla the Hun."

You know something is wrong when your allies think of you as Atilla the Hun. The truth is that Bush, and the Republicans generally spent their time in office (with the connivance of conservative Democrats) in acting in ways detrimental to 99% of the people of the earth and to enrich the upper 1%. But that 1% will suffer too if the atmosphere gives out.

So, what is to be done? We have to hurry, and Flannery sees the two great problems as 1) how to decarbonize the transportation system, and 2) how to decarbonize the electricity grid. We should concentrate our efforts first on the electricity grid (to get rid of coal) and then tackle the transportation system to get rid of oil and gas. It may seem that we will never get rid of these three fuels but we must or we will literally be committing suicide. Our civilization is analogous to those people who smoke three packs a day-- they know what is going to happen to their lungs and would be simply insane not to quit.

Flannery discusses several ways the power grid can be weaned from carbon. We can produce power by nuclear, hydrothermal, hydrogen, wind, solar (and also tidal action) methods and thus eliminate the need for coal, oil and natural gas. The risks of nuclear power make it the least desirable. I don't think we should be playing with it-- we don't know what to do with radioactive waste and when I read that the EPA plans to monitor waste dumps for 10,000 years, and will makes rule changes after that period to cover the dumps for 1,000,000 years I think: Let's get real!The EPA is not going to be around for 10,000 years!

One thing Flannery points out is that wind and solar energy can be produced locally and even by individuals and their families thus making for a decentralized system. If we go for nuclear or hydrogen power cells then "the big power corporations" will likely be in charge and survive. I think they should, if they survive, be placed under state control and treated as public utilities which should not be privately held for profit making.

After dealing with the power grid, Flannery turns his attention to the transportation system. We will naturally have to develop alternatives to carbon based fuel-- and ethanol is not the answer. It is not cost effective, takes up too much land, and damages the food supply by taking food crops out of production in order to grow the crops to make ethanol. Rather we will have have to use electric calls, hybrids, mincats [CAT stands for compressed air technology], hydrogen based fuel cells, and other non polluting methods to apply to transportation, as well as beef up out systems of public transportation.

One thing we can be sure of is that time is running out. I think anyone interested in the problems of climate change and global warming should read Flannery's book. It was written before the global collapse of monopoly capitalism and how this crash will affect out ability to save the planet remains to be seen.

Out soon: Check out this new book

Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement

"Another Side of the Story"

Edited by Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang
Palgrave MacMillan, April 2009.

Debating violence

By Gary Tedman

Joel, I was very impressed by the depth of your essay on violence and had some thoughts that I wanted to debate.

In some cases I think what you might seem to be arguing for is to rip up the capitalist railway lines (tactics of war) and put down communist railway lines (tactics of war), yet both are likely to have a lot of things in common (metal tracks, sleepers). Military science, strategy, was something Engels excelled at and researched deeply (are you wanting to eject Engels?). But if there is an alternative that could work in the face of imperialist fascism, can Dr. King's noble example be it, except in rare cases (Gaza for example)?

"It is a grievous error to reduce the entire Marxist tradition to violent social revolution"

As you rightly say; but what you say of Marx later, that he held

"theoretically abstract legitimations for the destruction of people and cultures" and had an "apparent philosophical indifference" to violence" that undermined his own 'intense personal (personal!) humanism' is, I think, not true or is as you say only 'apparent'. That Marx held the most sympathy for the oppressed and the downtrodden in any culture and context is the truth, and he was rightly cynical about those who always called for peace yet in doing so turned their backs on suffering that they might have been able to prevent or combat.

(Pasted from http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/7163/1/345/)

In one sense, I think it is impossible to avoid violence (or force). We know capitalism is full of the most abstract violence imaginable: people die as a result of economic decisions made thousands of miles away in boardrooms by people they have never met and who have never 'committed a violent act'. Compared to this acts of revolutionary violence are small fry and are far more accountable. Violence is a norm of capitalism, but it is usually a hidden violence, an abstract violence.

To understand this capitalist mechanism, Marx must be unafraid of it, so he often seems cool headed, true, but in the chapter 'Genesis of Capital' in Vol 1 of Capital there is obvious condemnation, and sorrow, of the very deepest kind, for the plight of its victims. Also, no Marxist would endorse vigilantism, which is what you say King seems to be most against (individual acts), it is something of a straw man here.

How can one 'effect' political transformation without effecting it? The word 'effect' means to make happen, to act, to do something materially. It implies a degree of force, at least. Even to get out of bed in the morning requires force. We must always wish to be peaceful, but realise at the same time what horrors the capitalist class will stoop to in order to protect their position if they feel it slipping, and we must not succumb to this force, which often means 'pushing back'. Marxism has every respect for pacifism, but it is not a pacifism. This does not rule out forms of non-violent struggle, of course: these strategies are not mutually exclusive. It also means that people like yourself take up a pen and argue the case for change, this is an act and in some senses could be considered 'forceful' because it 'engages the enemy' in the sphere of thought.

In fact, drawing the line between violence and non-violence is very difficult, non-violence almost seems at its extreme to be a withdrawal (or apparent withdrawal) from the world, from engagement, yet our very inaction can cause as much action sometimes as not. In struggle many of us find comrades and friends even amongst those we battle against. A non-violent position by seemingly opting-out can imply there is a 'higher force' and a superior moral plane, itself sometimes a tactical liberal move to gain the high ground, a position from which a greater 'righteous' violence may often be unleashed, and is.

Of course: every end is also a means, and every means is an end in itself, this is simple dialectical thinking which rids us of the ends versus means problem. As Walter Benjamin I think says: there is no point using means that destroy the thing you aim for.

Democracy and the class system

by Gary Tedman

One of the major problems with democracy is that as soon as a leader (or a party) is elected, no matter what social background they come from, he or she or it becomes a leader and so a de facto member (albeit possibly new) of the ruling class: an elite. What this elite tends, then, to do is club together with the other elites rather than with the electorate, who are by definition excluded and thus subordinate.

This is a problem of representation in a class system: the class system exists before the vote, before any representation actually takes place, and so determines and (almost always) limits the possibilities of its outcome. This is an unavoidable problem of democracy: force (i.e. class struggle) always comes before it and so sets its overriding agenda.

What does this mean? The grand (humanist philosophical) myth of bourgeois democracy is that it can and does transcend this problem; its kind of representation is thought as universally just, and the 'best of all possible systems' (in an 'imperfect world' populated by 'imperfect people', or 'sinners' perhaps). Its (standard, shall we say) two party system usually plays this role to perfection.

But in the present crisis cracks begin to show in the façade of this myth. So obvious and so enormous has become the 'rewards for failure' of the now crisis ridden financial system, with its billions in bail-outs for banks and its leaders for example, paid for by 'the taxpayer', or in other words the working people and poor, that the bourgeois class has been arguing amongst itself over the responsibility for it. That it is grossly unjust has become widely recognised.

This recognition is not isolated to one or two advanced capitalist nations but is apparent in all of them, due to the fact that the global economic system is, indeed, globally highly interconnected and so is its problems. We cannot currently help but marvel a bit at the irony of the 'newly capitalist and democratic' east European countries which have apparently 'thrown off' the 'yoke' of communism (in the myth that it was ever communist) and now have almost immediately been thrown into the deepest of capitalist economic mire. What is the state of ideology in those countries? How is it possible to think this crisis there without gross contradiction, I wonder?

The only solution that holds some hope for saving the economy in a capitalist decline to depression is a socialist one, but this has of course been ruled out in advance by every bourgeois politician. In a process that is for them mostly 'unthinkable', the politicians begin to seem increasingly out of touch with reality. Should we not worry that President Obama's (relatively progressive perhaps) budget seems too vague (maybe playing it by ear a bit) but also overly optimistic about the 'recovery' it expects in 2010, when all the indicators seem to say that this is unlikely?

Alongside the socialistic measures that have already been adopted in a mealy-mouthed way out of sheer necessity and even while saying that they need to, as soon as possible, be ditched in favor of private enterprise (again) because apparently they are 'not ideal' (not as ideal as the free market is or can be, as we see proved by current experience!), there is also the beginning of arguments that suggest a conspiracy exists on the part of communists and progressives to engineer and/or exploit this crisis in order for the state to take over everything, and so to introduce socialism by stealth. It would be a sad fait accompli if in order to avoid socialism, pseudo national socialist measures were instead adopted: such as protectionism and state controlled and defended private ownership, which really would be the rich maintaining their privileges not just by quasi-lawful massive bail outs but with open force.

It is a worrying feature that this depression appears to be following, give or take, the path of the last one and nothing has been learned. Are we heading therefore towards more wars, bigger wars? The first depression was tragedy, perhaps this one will be farce.

AFL-CIO to Support Nationalizing Banks

From the New York Time
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: March 3, 2009

MIAMI BEACH — The A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s executive council will call on the Obama administration on Wednesday to speed the nationalization of problem banks to stimulate lending and lift the sagging economy.

The labor federation, a lobbying powerhouse that represents 10 million workers, will thus become one of the first groups — and certainly the most powerful — to call for moving more aggressively on nationalization, both to counter Republican and business cries against it and to press the Obama administration not to vacillate over such a move.

A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials asserted that the administration’s practice of giving billions of dollars in dribs and drabs to distressed banks had failed to restore their solvency, leaving them as zombie banks that largely refrain from lending, thereby contributing to the economy’s decline.

Read the whole story here...

NIHIL UNBOUND: A REVIEW [WITH SUPER ADDED COMMENTS]

Articles > Volume 122 Issue 6 November/December 2007 >

BOOK REVIEW [WITH ADDED COMMENTS FROM A MARXIST POINT OF VIEW by Thomas Riggins] FROM "THE NEW HUMANIST"

Nihil Unbound by Ray Brassier
Daniel Miller gets to grips with nihilism
BY Daniel Miller

Today, the power of faith – or what George Bush calls his gut – is a force in the world. Many rationalists have tried to confront this situation, and have mainly pursued two different strategies. Some have tried to fight faith directly, pitching scientific beliefs against religious ones. Others have worked for a compromise, arguing that reason and faith are two equal partners in a combined search for meaning. So far, neither of these strategies has met with much success. [I THINK MARXISTS WOULD SUPPORT THE FIRST POINT OF VIEW-- SCIENTIFIC VIEWS ARE MORE REALITY BASED THAN THOSE OF SUPERNATURALISM]

This suggests that a new approach is required, and this book proposes one. According to Ray Brassier, the full coruscating radicalism of the Enlightenment legacy must be upheld at all costs, against apartheid appeasements, and especially against attempts to defend it on the wrong grounds. [CERTAINLY MARXISTS WOULD AGREE-- MARXISM IS A PRODUCT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT]

But pitching the case for reason in the terms of a somehow superior set of beliefs is regressive. “Philosophy,” he writes, “should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem.” In Brassier’s view, enlightenment is not an accomplished moral achievement for which we can pat ourselves on the back, but rather an “invigorating vector of intellectual discovery” that, as intellectual creatures, we are obliged to pursue right through to its end.

Brassier has a particular end in mind. This is the inexorable fact of extinction, the polemical pivot of this book. “[T]he earth will be incinerated by the sun 4 billion years hence; all the stars in the universe will stop shining in 100 trillion years; and eventually, one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, all matter in the cosmos will disintegrate.” [THIS IS JUST AS BAD AS RELIGIOUS DOGMA. INDIVIDUAL HUMANS COME AND GO BUT SCIENCE HAS NOT MADE ANY FINAL DETERMINATION SUCH AS BRASSIER CONCLUDES. SCIENTISTS STILL ARGUE WHETHER WE LIVE IN A UNIVERSE OR A MULTI-VERSE, OR IF THE BIG BANG LEADS TO THE BIG CRUNCH AND EVERYTHING STARTS OVER AGAIN. NO ONE EVEN KNOWS WHAT TRILLIONS OF YEARS MEANS.]

For Brassier, these facts are of central philosophical import. In his view, because extinction is the inevitable fate of existence, in logical time it has already occurred. “The subject of philosophy is already dead,” Brassier writes, “and ... philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction.”[THIS DOES NOT MAKE SENSE. IF ONE OF THE JOBS OF PHILOSOPHY IS TO DEAL WITH HUMAN PROBLEMS AND WHAT KIND OF JUST SOCIETY WE CAN LIVE IN (BEFORE WE BECOME EXTINCT THAT IS) THEN TO SAY THE SUBJECT OF PHILOSOPHY IS ALREADY EXTINCT IS PREMATURE].

Brassier’s basic claim is epistemological. In his understanding, humanity ultimately has no intrinsic value, and it is the duty of rational thought to embrace this fact. “[E]xistence is worthless,” he writes, “and nihilism is ... the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality which ... is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.” [THIS IS OLD HAT (SARTRE). YOU STILL HAVE TO FEED THE CHILDREN. MARXISTS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THIS AND STILL THINK FIGHTING FOR THE WORKING CLASS IS WORTHWHILE. THIS IS JUST PETTY BOURGEOIS DEFEATISM ON BRASSIER'S PART.]

By “nihilism” Brassier means a reality shorn of sentimental opiates. For him, healthy philosophy must confront the fact of an oblivious universe without blinking. This steely summons represents the point of departure for this book as a whole. [YES, AND SO?]

The bulk of Nihil Unbound is composed of a series of readings of weighty philosophical texts. The principal players here are the American brain scientist Paul Churchland and the French triad of Quentin Meillasoux, Alain Badiou and François Laruelle. This is an idiosyncratic assembly, united more by a shared radicalism then by any shared interests. Brassier does not pretend otherwise. The stance he adopts towards them is that of a scavenger, not a mediator.

Armed with his all-nullifying event of extinction, Brassier wields it like a kind of scalpel, operating to cut the last soft flesh away from the clean white bones of these figures. The idea is to assemble a sturdy conceptual architecture, able to stand on its own without supernatural support. [AN ANTI-SUPERNATURAL PHILOSOPHY IS NOTHING NEW.]

For each of these figures, the basic line is the same: “One more effort, philosophers, if you would be realists!” The only exception to this pattern is the elusive and obscure François Laruelle, the philosopher who developed a branch of philosophy he calls “non-philosophy”. Brassier is possibly the only man in the world to have read Laruelle, and his take on him is wholly positive. As he understands it: “Laruelle provides the key to understanding the diachrony inherent in what Meillasoux calls ‘absolute time’ and allows us to appreciate that ‘it is no longer thought that determines the object, whether through representation or intuition, but rather the object that seizes thought, and forces it to think it ... according to it.’”[MARX, ENGELS AND LENIN ARRIVED AT THIS POINT LONG AGO!]

Let me confess at this point that I have only a dim inkling, at best, of what this might mean. Written in an extraordinary form of technical prose, Nihil Unbound is intended for a specialised audience, and shows it. Throughout this book, one is never quite sure whether it is the ideas that are difficult, or the style. [IT MUST BE THE STYLE.] This is a particular shame since at several points in this book Brassier reveals a brilliantly dramatic touch that he could easily have used more often.

Ultimately, this book is a stepping-stone to potentially greater things. It does not really accomplish what it sets out to achieve, but rather only sets the stage for it. What it works towards is a revitalised theory that would permit a truly rational stance on reality. If this were to be gained, the faithful could be permitted to scrabble around in the basement looking for the light switch as much as they liked, because rationalists would hold in their hands the map to the entire house. [NOT A VERY WELL FINANCED HOUSE I'M AFRAID. THE FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF MARXISM WILL HAVE TO FORECLOSE ON IT.]

Nihil Unbound is published by Palgrave

Bringing on Armageddon ... maybe even Europe

From SEIU:

Financial Crisis: Causes and Cures

Political Affairs #94 - Financial Crisis: Causes and Cures

On this episode we will play an editorial comment by Political Affairs publisher Joe Sims on race and the economic crisis. It is based on a presentation he made in Chicago in February for an African American history month event sponsored by the People's Weekly World. Also check out Sims' article on this subject in the latest online issue at PoliticalAffairs.net.

Origins of Morality

Psychologists Shed Light On Origins Of Morality
Science Daily 3-2-2009

New scientific evidence from the University of Toronto that shows a link between moral disgust and more primitive forms of disgust related to poison and disease.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2009) — In everyday language, people sometimes say that immoral behaviours “leave a bad taste in your mouth”. But this may be more than a metaphor according to new scientific evidence from the University of Toronto that shows a link between moral disgust and more primitive forms of disgust related to poison and disease.

“Morality is often pointed to as the pinnacle of human evolution and development,” says lead author Hanah Chapman, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology. “However, disgust is an ancient and rather primitive emotion which played a key evolutionary role in survival. Our research shows the involvement of disgust in morality, suggesting that moral judgment may depend as much on simple emotional processes as on complex thought.”

The research is being published in Science on February 27, 2009.

In the study, the scientists examined facial movements when participants tasted unpleasant liquids and looked at photographs of disgusting objects such as dirty toilets or injuries. They compared these to their facial movements when they were subjected to unfair treatment in a laboratory game. The U of T team found that people make similar facial movements in response to both primitive forms of disgust and moral disgust.

The research employed electromyography, a technique that uses small electrodes placed on the face to detect electrical activation that occurs when the facial muscles contract. In particular, they focused on movement of the levator labii muscle, which acts to raise the upper lip and wrinkle the nose, movements that are thought to be characteristic of the facial expression of disgust.

“We found that people show activation of this muscle region in all three situations – when tasting something bad, looking at something disgusting and experiencing unfairness,” says Chapman.

“These results shed new light on the origins of morality, suggesting that not only do complex thoughts guide our moral compass, but also more primitive instincts related to avoiding potential toxins,” says Adam Anderson, principal investigator on the project and the Canada Research Chair in Affective Neuroscience. “Surprisingly, our sophisticated moral sense of what is right and wrong may develop from a newborn’s innate preference for what tastes good and bad, what is potentially nutritious versus poisonous.”

The research was supported by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canada Research Chairs program. In addition to Anderson and Chapman, the U of T team included David Kim and Joshua Susskind.

Journal reference:

1. H.A. Chapman, D.A. Kim, J.M. Susskind, and A.K. Anderson. In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust. Science, 2009; 323 (5918): 1222 DOI: 10.1126/science.1165565

Adapted from materials provided by University of Toronto.

Those Gallup people are sharp

by Joel Wendland

A recent Gallup poll astutely found that language and framing play a huge role in constructing and reflecting public opinion. Focusing on the financial crisis late last month, Gallup asked people two questions: 1) "Do you favor or oppose the federal government temporarily taking over major U.S. banks in danger of failing in an attempt to stabilize them?" 2) "Do you favor or oppose the federal government nationalizing major U.S. banks in danger of failing in an attempt to stabilize them?"

54% of respondents to question 1 said yes. Only 37% of respondents to question 2 said yes.

Gallup's conclusion is that public support for the issue depends on what you call. Astute.

But Gallup's own method might be inherently flawed. Four additional questions, at least should have been asked in order to get at the truth of public opinion on this question: 1) Should major banks in danger of failing be allowed to fail? 2) Do you favor permanently taking over major US banks in an attempt to keep them from failing? 3) Do you favor permanently nationalization major banks in an attempt to keep them from failing? 4) Do you favor creating a permanent national bank to compete with private banks?

I might be inclined to say yes to all of these.

What's most amusing about the survey's results is the extent of support for "taking over" banks. Suggests may be that the new GOP mantra that President Obama is a socialist might not have much in the way of legs.

Nationalization, Socialism, and the U.S. Banks

By Jim Genova

Associate Professor of History

The Ohio State University-Marion



In the midst of the unfolding global economic crisis politicians, pundits, and bankers have engaged in much hyperbolic discussion about the prospect that major banks in the U.S. may be “nationalized.” On 27 February the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it was converting its “preferred shares” in Citibank into “common shares” giving it a 36% ownership in one of the world’s largest financial institutions. This and other actions taken on the part of the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department since the crisis began to accelerate last Autumn has led hardened neo-liberal ideologues to exclaim that this is “creeping socialism.” The proclamations of many anchors across the business channels, Conservatives gathered in Washington on 28 February, and Republicans in Congress during the debate over the stimulus bill have elevated to the level of mainstream discourse a conversation over the meaning of the terms “nationalization” and “socialism,” even if the purpose of such right-wing defenders of unbridled global capitalism is to induce ideological confusion and a sense of panic.


On 25 February, members of the House Financial Services Committee asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to explain what he understood to be the definition of “nationalization.” In response, he said it is when “the government ‘seizes’ a company, ‘zeroes out the shareholders and begins to manage and run the bank.” He reassured the anxious Congressmen that “we don’t plan anything like that.”[1] Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner seconded Bernanke’s comments, describing nationalization as “the wrong strategy for the country and I don’t think it’s a necessary strategy.”[2] Sen. Charles Schumer, member of the Senate Banking Committee, also tried to reassure a nervous investor class stating that a “federal takeover of the banks should be avoided at all costs. No one intends, ever, to have the government running these banks or insurance companies for a long period of time.” His goal, somewhat more ambitious than that proposed by either Bernanke or Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, is to have the government “come in, clean them out, take out the bad assets, put in new management.”[3] Despite such reassurances from those at the center of power, howls from the right and from brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago Mercantile Exchange continue to charge that the U.S. beginning under the Bush Administration and continuing at an accelerated pace is heading down the road to “socialism.”



None of the half-measures, abrupt shifts in policy, or tenuous interventions in the financial sector over the past year at least (Bear Stearns went under on 17 March 2008) have been effective at stemming the ever deepening global financial crisis. Banks continue to fail, large monopolistic financial institutions are reeling around the world, and the global economy is spiraling into perhaps its worst crisis ever. Events, as the recent contorted interventions to rescue Citibank have shown, are forcing the leaders of U.S. capitalism to make very difficult and, to them, unpalatable decisions. Neither former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (a supposed expert on the Great Depression of the 1930s) nor current Treasury head Tim Geithner (Governor of the New York Fed when Lehman Brothers went down in September 2008) appear to have to will to carry off what is historically necessary – the outright seizure of the major financial institutions of this country. This should not surprise us as they are “true believers” in the neo-liberal capitalist world order. For them, the current crisis is perplexing since it should not be happening at all. At the very least, the market should have shown the way out by now. This led former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to recently acknowledge before Congress that the theory to which he (along with Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner) ascribed was “deeply flawed.” No such statement of contrition has as of yet come forth from Bernanke and Geithner.


Ultimately, many analysts believe that the U.S. government will have no choice but to nationalize some of the largest financial firms, including Citibank, Bank of America, and some large regional banks.[4] Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz recently echoed calls from leading economists Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb to nationalize the U.S. banks telling German television network Deutsche Welle “the banks have failed. Nationalization is the only answer.”[5] Stiglitz has much experience at the center of global finance having served as a member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors (1993-1997) and as Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank (1997-2000). During those terms he witnessed the LTCM and East Asia currency crises (1996-1998) that some economists like Paul Krugman warned was a prelude to a global economic depression.[6] What has happened in the meantime is that trillions of dollars have been thrown down the bottomless chute of fundamentally insolvent institutions beyond hope of rescue.[7] Moreover, for all of this public money used to prop up badly run speculative private institutions not once has the government forced the management to resign (the recent move at Citibank showed the first signs of the Treasury making demands about the composition of corporate boards) nor has it called for any “claw back” provisions of the bonuses and extravagant pay for executives who ran their enterprises into the ground. Instead, public wealth is being transferred on a rapidly moving conveyor belt into the hands of unscrupulous and failed bankers. This is becoming one of the greatest thefts in world history. As Stiglitz told Deutche Welle, “separation of ownership from control is a recipe for disaster.”[8]


What is called for is an emergency solution not unlike that confronting Russia in the summer of 1917 when the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin wrote The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It. In that pamphlet, Lenin described an unfolding crisis where the wheels of the Russian economy were grinding to a halt. Banks had ceased lending, railroads were shutting down, food supplies were dwindling, and unemployment was mounting. Lenin also noted that there was much public discussion among politicians and leaders of industry that something dramatic had to be done to salvage the situation. “Everybody says that. Everybody recognizes that. Everybody has agreed to that. And nothing is being done.”[9] Even more recently, Sweden’s experience in the early 1990s has been held up as analogous to the broad parameters of the current U.S. situation. There a housing boom in the late 1980s led to speculation on mortgage-backed debt that eventually ended badly leading to the government taking effective control of the largest banks. Sweden then forced the banks to create two institutions under one roof – a good bank and a bad bank. All of the “toxic assets” were concentrated in the bad banks, which gradually (over four years) sold them off.[10] The problem with using Sweden’s banking crisis as a model for understanding our own is that not only is Sweden’s economy a fraction of the size of that in the U.S. but its institutions are not at the epicenter of the global capitalist system. Institutions like CitiGroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and others are global monopolistic enterprises with branches, partners, and subsidiaries throughout the world. Moreover, they are the vehicles through which the leaders of U.S. government pass on their way to political power. Consequently, there is an incestuous relationship between the “too big to fail” banks and the officials in charge of their oversight. There was nothing analogous in Sweden’s case. Finally, the U.S. crisis does not stem entirely from a decline in home prices (the much vaunted bursting of the housing bubble). Rather, for decades there has been a mounting structural weakness in the U.S. economy and by extension global capitalism. That is the overwhelming dependence for the survival and expansion of the system on debt of all kinds – credit cards, mortgages, auto financing, leveraged stock trading, and greatly expanded issuing of public debt of many varieties. Since the early 1970s there has been a widening disconnect between the real wages of workers in the industrialized world and the accumulation of public and private debt.[11]


We are at a crossroads in the current crisis. Every leading politician, pundit, and financial analyst acknowledges that the situation requires urgent action. On financial, ethical, and political grounds it is imperative that the U.S. government nationalize the major financial institutions, place them under federal control, unify them into one central bank to provide for more efficient management, and completely dispatch the executive management of those firms that have been seized. Only through that device can the process of daily pumping billions upon billions into dead institutions be stopped. Only through such bold moves can the government gain the leverage it needs to control the credit markets, make interest rates meaningful, and aggressively restructure mortgages. Only through the decisive action of seizing, controlling, and re-directing the functioning of the banks to serve the immediate and long-term needs of the people can the rate of decline be slowed and some stability be restored to the financial sector of the economy.[12]


This should not be confused with socialism. Such labeling is an effort on the part of those ideologues still committed to the failed neo-liberal policies of the Washington Consensus dating to Reagan and Thatcher years of the early 1980s to derail any meaningful assistance to those workers, farmers, and middle class people who are suffering because of the greed of the capitalist elite. Moreover, it is the same callousness that those practitioners of gung-ho capitalism displayed in guiding IMF and World Bank policies on a path to crippling and impoverishing developing countries around the world through “Structural Adjustment Programs.” Lenin clearly delineated the difference between “state monopoly capitalism” and socialism, but argued that it was imperative in the period of impending catastrophe that responsible officials of any government take the decisive measures necessary to save people from mass unemployment, famine, and deep social dislocation. That the global economic crisis portends widespread political upheaval has been attested to by analysts and researchers who work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.[13] In describing the 1917 crisis in Russia, Lenin wrote that nationalizing the banks would improve “the accessibility and the easy terms of credit, particularly for small owners [and] for the peasantry.” Further, the state would “be in a position to survey all the main monetary operations without concealing them, then to control them, then to regulate economic life, and finally to obtain millions and billions for large state operations.”[14] This addresses many of the most salient aspects of the crisis in the financial sector: transparency, accountability, assistance for those who actually need it, saving funds that will be needed for further stimulus, and it resolves the fatal disconnect Stiglitz identified in the current approach between having ownership without control. Beyond the current crisis, though, since the capitalist ideologues have raised the specter of socialism in the U.S., it is an opportunity for progressive forces to intervene in the public conversation and offer a real understanding of what socialism is while also highlighting the ultimate flaws of capitalism that can never be overcome or resolved from inside the system. This is an historic opportunity for the government to act on behalf of the people to mitigate the effects of a dying system and for progressives to make the case for socialism. The fate of millions of people around the world depends on the abilities of both to do what is historically necessary.




[1] Craig Torres and Bradley Keoun, “Bernanke Rejects ‘Anything Like’ Bank Nationalization,” Bloomberg.com 25 February 2009.
[2] Robert Schmidt, “Geithner Calls Nationalizing Banks ‘Wrong Strategy’ for Economy,” Bloomberg.com, 25 February 2009.
[3] Torres and Keoun, “Bernanke Rejects ‘Anything Like’ Bank Nationalization.”
[4] Matthew Richardson, “The Case for and against Bank Nationalisation,” VoxEU.org, 26 February 2009.
[5] Michael Knigge, “Stiglitz: Nationalized Banks are ‘Only Answer’,” Deutche Welle, 16 February 2009. Reprinted in the People’s Weekly World.
[6] Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and The Crisis of 2008, New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
[7] On 27 February Bloomberg Financial Group provided an assessment of the entire contribution made by the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department to prop up the financial system since the beginnings of the crisis in August 2007. Its conclusion was that to date $11.6 trillion has been either spent or taken on as liabilities in the process. This includes cash injections into the trading markets, the TARP and other emergency programs, loans to banks facilitating their takeover of other even worse off financial institutions, the seizures of AIG, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae, loans to the Auto Industry, and the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet to facilitate the commercial paper market that seized in September and October 2008.
[8] Knigge, “Stiglitz: Nationalized Banks are ‘Only Answer.””
[9] V. I. Lenin, The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It, New York; International Publishers, 1932, p. 5. The essay was written 23-27 September 1917.
[10] Edward Harrison, “Did Sweden Really Nationalize Its Banks?” online blog post, 25 February 2009.
[11] Federal Reserve Table 100.B Data for 1945-2005, published by AutoDogmatic.com.
[12] Binyamin Appelbaum, “What Is Nationalization? Depends Who You Ask,” Washington Post, 25 February 2009. See also Robert Griffiths, “Why Nationalization Isn’t Socialism,” Politicalaffairs.net, 3 November 2008, reproduced from the Morning Star.
[13] Nelson D. Schwartz, “Job Losses Pose a threat to Stability Worldwide,” New York Times, 15 February 2009.
[14] Lenin, The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It. Italics in the original.

What are they thinking?

Stop LIVE animal skinning in China - sign the petition
Global
Basic Info
Type:
Common Interest - Pets & Animals
Description:
Please this will only take 30 seconds of your time..

This is a call for signatures to a petition to help stop the LIVE skinning of cats & dogs. Yes that's right, LIVE... Imagine someone going up to your dog or cat and skinning it live. This is happening today in 2008 in China and it is DISGUSTING.


1) Head to http://animalsaviors.org
2) Watch the video to see it for yourself (see warning)
3) Sign the petition

WARNING: The video on that site is EXTREMELY graphic and definitely not for the faint hearted. If you are not the type who appreciates blood & gore, I recommend that you stick to the words on the site.

Please invite all you know to this group....
Contact Info
Website:
http://animalsaviors.org[ click on the title "What are they thinking"]

COAL KILLS

Coal Kills -- Time for People Power to Protect the Climate

By Ecological Internet's Climate Ark project
http://www.climateark.org/
March 1, 2009

TAKE ACTION HERE NOW:
CLICK ON THE RED PRINT TITLE COAL KILLS ABOVE

The use of coal must end if we are to maintain an
operable atmosphere, human civilization and all the
Earth's complex life

BRIEF BACKGROUND:
The growing and powerful climate movement has, based upon
climate science, already shown conclusively that climate
change is real and deadly. Now we must urge politicians,
industry and individuals to immediately act and transform
themselves if we are to survive. Finally, a mass protest
against coal -- whose plants are "factories of death" --
is to occur in America, reflecting the urgency and depth
of the one most important, sufficient climate response
through non-violent civil disobedience.

Coal generates the highest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
per unit of energy obtained, and large reserves remain
that must not be burned if we are to survive. Continued
reliance upon coal, without immediate phasing-out of
plants that emit into the atmosphere, is incompatible
with any scenario to reduce atmospheric GHGs to a safe
level in time to avert irreversible and catastrophic
climate change.

Ecological Internet wholeheartedly endorses the Capitol
Climate Action -- the largest mass civil disobedience for
the climate in U.S. history. On March 2, you are urged to
join thousands of people in protesting at the Capitol
Power Plant in Washington DC, a plant that powers the
U.S. Congress with dirty energy. We encourage you to
consider marching and getting arrested to make the point
that the age of coal is over, and/or to show your support
for the brave protestors and the end of coal by sending
the message below.

TAKE ACTION NOW:
http://www.climateark.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=coal_kills

Music Review: Van Morrison and Astral Weeks; You Can Go Hom e Again

by Eric Green

Forty years ago, a very young Irish singer wrote and sang his songs on a new record album, it was vinyl, then, and it was called "Astral Weeks."

The singer and composer was and is Van Morrison.

The album didn't make much of a splash in the rock and roll world. His most famous song, "Brown Eyed Girl," was released as a single in 1967, started his rise. In 1968 Astral Weeks was produced with little recognition. The "Moondance" album came out in 1969 and that started his meteoric rise. Nowadays, Morrison refers to "Brown Eyed Girl, as a throw away; meaning, he is not very proud of their creativity.

But, for years, Van Morrison fans, and there are a growing intergenerational millions of such fans, still call "Astral Weeks" his very best album. He doesn't disagree with that assessment.

When he refers to that album he makes it clear that he was broke and looking for some recognition. And, the band members were not of his choosing, but players who were available.

In 1971 he released "Tupelo Honey" and in 1972 "Saint Dominic Preview."

In 1973, Morrison girl friend was tying of tuberculosis and he created the great album, "T.B. Sheets." In a rare event, Morrison performed "T.B. Sheets" at his Astral Weeks Live concert.

Forty Years Later

Now, after a career of singing Irish Folk songs with the Chieftains in 1988; Jazz with British jazz musician George Fame on an album of his work in 1995 and, the "Songs of Mose Allison," in 1996.

In 1995 Morrison released, "Days Like This" with his daughter, Shana, singing on the album.

In the year 2000 Morrison created an interesting "Folk " album with Belfast musicians in "The Skiffle Sessions," and in the same year released a duet album with Jerry Lee Lewis' daughter called, ""You Win Again." In 2006, Morrison released a very creative country and western album called, "Pay the Devil."

Morrison is clearly a creative artist always looking for a new way to create his music. He himself says that he gets tired with the present and is looking for new things to do.

By doing a complete reversal of this looking for something new, and returning to his beginning, Morrison shows he really is the flexible person he wants to remain being.

Starting at the Hollywood Bowl, in Los Angeles, "Astral Weeks Live" was started in late 2008; and, now, he performed the historical album at the Madison Square Garden Performance Space [still called Wa-Mu] and will be doing it again at the newly renovated Beacon Theatre. [PS The Beacon seats are NOT sold out, maybe a testament to the economic crisis….the seats are very expensive.] He then travels to London for a performance.

The Performance

At the Garden, Morrison warmed up the sold out performance with some of his major hits, including "Gloria." In that song, a song he rarely sings, he even encouraged, as much as he ever encourages audience reaction, to sing along.

He performed "T.B. Sheets" for the first time in anyone's memory.

He then, in this warm up session, had a change pace, as he called it, with a great rendition of "St. James Infirmary," an appropriate song for this Mardi Gras time period.

In this performance and continuing in the second half of the evening, Astral Weeks, Morrison assembly a great orchestra including, violin, and two cellos; another fiddle and a couple of guitar players. Piano player. And a great sax player who played the soprano, baritone, tenor sax. There were also, three back up singers. For some solo artists this size of orchestra might overwhelm, but not for Morrison.

This ensemble was scaled backed up when Morrison performed the Astral Weeks segment. He did keep the violins, cellos and horns and saxes.

Morrison's voice is extremely strong and all consuming. The acoustics of the Garden were perfect.

Astral Weeks

He started the main segment with "Astral Weeks/I Believe I've Transcended" which was only appropriate. It was performed almost flawlessly. The audience followed every word. There was totally silence with every word and musical chord.

This was following two other hit songs from that album: "Cyprus Avenue" and "Madam George." [He had some problems with his guitar on the "Cypus Avenue" song.]

It is a great and somewhat risky feat for an artist to take an album done in 1968 with unknown artists that yielded such a historic success, a cult following; and, with musicians picked for just that session, and do it again. But, the did. Nothing seems to threaten Morrison in the world he lives in.

Listing to the 1968 version along side the 2009 version and you come away satisfaction for both creations.

In a recent interview, Morrison said in response to why it took so long to do what he is going with this tour, he said that he didn't even own the record, which would have made such a reincarnation possible earlier.

Classifying Morris Music

In an interview recently the questioner, Scott Foundas, an English music critic, asked the following question:

"SF: I have all your records on CDs, but because I was traveling recently, I did load
them all into my computer, which I'm a real novice with; it's not my bag at all. But I
thought it was curious that when they came up in the iTunes player, every one was
classified as something different. One album would be called "pop," one would
be called "rock," one would be called "world." Common One for some
reason was called "world." The computer doesn't seem to know what to call your
music.

VM: I'd call it soul."

On the other hand, in the same interview, when Foundas quizzed Morrison in regard to the Astral Weeks live shows he asked about the music backgrounds of the orchestra player:

"SF: A lot of these musicians had a background in jazz:
VM: Which was more appealing, because that's the way I was singing the songs. It was
Jazz, as opposed to rock."

So his music is soul and jazz. A great combination.

But, I am sure had the critic asked him about his music slot after working with the Chieftains, he may have included those that genre.

You get the distinct impression that Morrison, while perfectly comfortable with being interviewed; he likes to give often-contradictory responses.

Any review of the Astral Weeks Live Show, [These are the artists listed in the CD and probably the same ones present at the Garden.] must include the his jazz-based orchestra. Starting Morrison who plays piano, guitars, sax, and harmonica; Jay Berliner on lead guitar; Richie Buckley on Sax; David Hayes on acoustic bass; Robbie Ruggerio; with Nancy Ellis, Terry Adams and Michael Graham on the violins and cellos.

Jay Berliner, a Brooklyn born guitarist, is the only musician, beside Morrison himself that performed on the original album in 1968 and also on the 2009 release. He also performed in the live sets.

For this performance, Roger Kellaway is the orchestra leader and pianist. Sixty Nine year old Kellaway has music history. Morrison is in his 63 year, August 31st is his birthdate.

But, the artist who clearly as center stage and sang and played closest to Morris is the Irish saxophonist, Richie Buckley. Here is some information about Buckley from his "My Space" web site: [worth the read]

"With his unique style and virtuoso technique, Richie Buckley, a self-taught saxophone player, is internationally recognized as one of Ireland's leading jazz performers. He has been described as "extraordinary" (Irish Times, 2001), "something of a genius…[with] a world reputation amongst saxophonists" (Irish Times, 1999) and a musician whose "playing manages to be simultaneously passionate and gentle, romantic and elegiac." (Sunday Independent, 2001) Musicians with whom he has collaborated include Van Morrison, Freddie Hubbard, Dave McKenna, Harry Allen, Lew Soloff, Guy Barker, Jiggs Wigham, Bob Dylan, Georgie Fame, Jon Hendricks, Carlos Santana, Barry Manilow, and Elvis Costello. Recording credits include Van Morrison, James Williams, Barry Manilow, Riverdance, Lord of the Dance and Elmer Bernstein. He has also recorded and performed with major Irish artists including The Cranberries, Christy Moore, Sharon Shannon, Sinead O'Connor, Paul Brady and Bill Whelan. His critically acclaimed album 'Your Love is Here', featuring his own compositions and guest artists Lew Soloff and the Robin Aspland Trio, was recorded in September 2000. Richie has scored three documentary films – 'Luke' (Luke Kelly, directed by Sinead O'Brien), 'Friel' (Brian Friel), 'Lee Marvin' (directed by John Boorman) and the film 'The General' (directed by John Boorman)."

It is unsung great musicians who often make things possible. Morrison is clearly able to gather the best and he certainly did this time.

The original album was not a long one: a little over 45 minutes. The live version is also not must longer. The actual performance at the Garden was about an hour. It was the second half of the show.

Final Thoughts: Cut-throat Music Business

The British critic Foundas asked Morrison about the music business and Morrison unloaded is feelings on that.

"It's not so much about the business. It's about the kind of people that the business
and fame sometimes attract. It's more about that. Because the business is just business,
and at the end of the day it is just cut-throat. These people are not my friends. I don't
know them. We don't hang out. I mean, it's not like the old days when you had guys who
were called A&R men and they had actual producers at record companies; there were more people that actually did know something about music. Now it's pretty clear-cut. You can bet 99.5% of the record business knows nothing about music. You can bet on that now, where you couldn't 30 years ago, because there were more people who did know music in the record business, right? It basically comes down to maths. So now, if you're doing what I do, you need to carry a calculator with you, because it all just comes down to maths, as far as dealing with record companies. That's what it is, because that's all it is for them, so that's what it's got to be for you. It's certainly not what it used to be. The beginning of the end was when a lot of those guys sold out, like Atlantic Records. That was the beginning of the end. It's now the end. We've probably gone past the end of the actual record business as it was, or what it was supposed to be. We've probably gone
beyond that. We're on the other side of that now. It's minus."

Maybe the international financial crisis will root out the anti-music executives from the music industry and a new rebirth can take place; sort of a "born again" period that Morrison wrote about in Astral Weeks.