The opinions, views, thoughts, and ramblings of editors of PoliticalAffairs.net – and other stuff worth reading or viewing.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
NY Times Struggles With Socialism
It seems that whatever President Obama talks about — whether it’s overhauling health care, or regulating Wall Street, or telling schoolchildren to study hard — his opponents have called him a socialist. “Socialism” was an epithet on many placards at protests in Washington over the weekend. What does the word mean today, nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall? What role has the label played in American political history?
Read more...
Monday, September 14, 2009
Some Economic sanity and Some Suggestions for Reform With Regulation
President Obama has spoken on the question of economic regulation today and the first press response is "Wall Street Takes in Obama's speech and meanders on."
After all, Obama's forceful rhetoric about "reckless behavior and unchecked excess" means very little to those who have received hundreds of billions in public funds with little control over what they are to do with those funds. Obama's comment that "those on Wall Street cannot resume taking risks without regard for the consequences and expect that next time American taxpayers will be there to break there fall" will inevitably fall on deaf ears, since that is exactly what they have come to expect over the last three decades and will continue to expect unless the administration, this time, moves to establish new regulatory legislation, policy and act to gain public control over the hundreds of billion already spent as bailout money As more and more information is brought forward about the banking crisis a number of things become apparent. the first is that the large banks engaged in their own version of a "ponzi scheme," or more appropriately, a game of hot potato. "predatory lenders" aka de facto thieves were given winks and financial incentives to make bad loans which were then sold and resold and resold for the profit of the respectable institutions until the bags of bad paper burst, leading to the present crisis, with millions facing foreclosure and hundreds of billions of public funds invested to "save the financial system--at example as one New York Times reporter aptly put it, of "privatizing gains and socializing losses", or a textbook version of how state capitalism works, if the book were a Marxist one of course.
The second point is that the regulators to a great extent knew this was happening while it was happening and ignored, denied, bureaucratically sat on the information that they were gathering. In part this is a direct result of the anti-regulatory approach of the Bush administration and its predecessors, who since Reagan have made "deregulation" into a a foundation of economic policy. This has led to "regulation" that begins with the premise that its first responsibility is to protect those being regulated, not the public. As in other areas of government (the Pentagon being the best example) SEC and Federal Reserve regulators, like forward to leaving government to get lucrative jobs with the businesses which they are doing business with. Given more regulatory power to these officials, whose present and future is tied to the banks and brokerage houses that they are supposedly regulating is no real solution, even if the higher agency administrators seek to establish policies of regulation in the public interest (unfortunately, one of the great truisms in the history of bureaucracy is that lower echelons are quite adept at implementing or failing to implement policies in ways that protect their parochial interests).
As an historian, I think immediately of the New Deal model. There new legislation and new agencies and new people (many independent progressives who were deeply opposed to the Coolidge-Hoover policies of the 1920s) helped to create meaningful progressive reform. So far, if the press is to be believed, that is not happening in the Obama administration, but it still can happen. Significant numbers of positions in the federal government remain unfilled, in part because of the guerrilla war that the Republicans are fighting against nominees for those positions. A new Federal Reserve Act and a New SEC act are in effect long overdue (it is important to note that the even without the destructive deregulation of the last 30 years, the SEC and the present Federal Reserve is rooted in legislation enacted in 1934-1935, legislation more than seventy years old, legislation in terms of the internationalization of capital, new forms of capital formation ("hedge funds," etc) and new technologies to do business and transfer capital that is about as modern as old tube filled black and white TV sets are to contemporary television.
Increasing regulatory powers under the present legislation with the present personnel is not "change we can believe in." New regulatory legislation for finance and new people to implement the legislation through restructured regulatory agencies is – people who don't come from or wish to move up to the banks and brokerage houses, people who have been on the outside of the system rightly called "casino capitalism," those who have been exposing the abuses and offering alternatives to the policies which have led to the present crisis for a long time, even though no one in power was listening.
The administration might also begin to adopt an important new study which a Commission of leading economists, including Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stieglitz and Amaryta Sen, both leading progressives have just presented to the President of France. The report states what Marxists and non Marxist scholars and intellectuals have been proclaiming through the world since the early cold war era, that increases in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or its predecessor Gross National Product(GNP) do not measure the economic well being of people in society. "What we measure affects what we do," the report concludes. "If our measurements are flawed, decisions may be distorted. Policies should be aimed at increasing societal welfare, not GDP."
Amen brother, although for those for "economic growth" has become a religion, this is heresy. The Commission mentions most significantly that the U.S., which has by far the biggest GDP in the world ranks 15th among nations using the UN's human development index, in which GDP is counted along with employment, health care, housing, and other in dices of real life.
Although Sarkozy, the rightwing President of France, is praising the study and claiming that France will put it forward in international meetings "that have for an objective the creation of a new international order" I strongly doubt that he will use the report for anything more than domestic and international PR. But the Obama administration has the capacity to use it as a rationale for national economic policy which highlights employment, housing, health care, education, social mobility, higher levels of income equality, as the basis for government study and policy.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Bush recession, 2007-2009: Poverty grows, health insurance coverage
Bertrand Russell on Bolshevism (9)
Part Two of Bertrand Russell's "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism" comprises seven chapters under the heading 'Bolshevik Theory'. Briefly the main points of each chapter:
5. "Mechanism and the Individual"
In this section Russell asks if there is any alternative to the Bolshevik theory of violent revolution available for overcoming the negative social effects of capitalism? The Third International in its reply to the ILP said: "It is possible to think that the working class in England can secure Government power even without a revolution by means of Parliamentary election victories." But it also thought that the British ruling class would not permit a peaceful transition. This is still an open question in my opinion.
What does Russell suggest is the real problem with capitalism?
Russell makes at least two major statements in this chapter that Marxists would have difficulty accepting. First he says, "With a very moderate improvement in methods of production, it would be easy to ensure that everybody should have enough, even under capitalism, if wars and preparations for wars were abolished."
But it is not the methods of production but the relations of production, which leads to the private appropriation of socially created wealth, which is responsible for poverty. Because capitalists compete for market share the system inevitably leads to crises in overproduction, unemployment, poverty and wars resulting from attempts by the national bourgeoisie of various countries to control foreign markets. The idea of everybody having a enough under capitalism IF "wars were abolished" is not a realistic idea for a system whose internal logic leads to conflicts as a way to maintain itself and control markets.
Russell thinks the real problem of capitalism is the "uneven distribution of power." The capitalists have concentrated all the social power in their hands and ordinary people are forced to work for them "much harder and more monotonously than they ought to work...."
Since Russell rejects the labor theory of value he thinks the evils of capitalism do not arise as a result of the exploitation of labor to create surplus value and hence capitalist profits, but by the subjection of workers to the tyranny of the machine by over powerful capitalists. "It is," he writes, "this sacrifice of the individual to the machine that is the fundamental evil of the modern world."
This is the evil that Russell thinks must be addressed. He rejects Bolshevism because it one-sidedly thinks, according to him, the main evil is "inequality of wealth." But this is not what the Bolsheviks believed at all. Income inequality was a consequence of a more fundamental problem and that is the private ownership of the means of production by the capitalist class.
The problem is, for Bolshevism, how to abolish the capitalist class and institute social ownership of the means of production. Russell's belief that the evils of the modern world could be solved under capitalism, in appropriate conditions, is a fantasy from the Marxist point of view.
6. "Why Russian Communism Has Failed"
This is a premature chapter title for 1920 although it is an appropriate topic today. Russell believes that "the civilized" world will eventually adopt socialism but thinks the Russian model has failed. The reasons are the collapse of industry and a shortage of food. Because of these two factors the Communists have become unpopular and have to rule by force over a hostile population. This type of repressive government cannot institute the type of ideal socialist order that has been envisioned in Marxist theory.
Russell may have exaggerated the unpopularity of the Soviet regime while at the same time providing an explanation of some of the harsher features of the Russia of the 1930s. Russia did successfully industrialize and was able to beat back the Nazis in WW II-- but all this lay in the future. What is most interesting in this chapter is Russell's comparison of Soviet Russia with British India.
First, Soviet Russia resembles the British government in India because "it stands for civilization, for education, sanitation, and Western ideas of progress." Were the Indians dirty, uneducated and uncivilized before the British arrived? The difference seems to be that the Soviets wanted to uplift the working people of Russia and bring them into the 20th Century while the British were content to subject the Indians to colonial exploitation.
Second, the Soviet and British Indian governments were "composed in the main of honest and hardworking men, who despise those whom they govern, but believe themselves possessed of something valuable which they must communicate to the population, however little it may be desired." I agree that the British despised the Indians, there was a great deal of racism in the British attitudes towards their subject peoples, but the Bolsheviks did not "despise" the "toiling masses "they governed, only the social and economic conditions that had been forced upon them. The Bolsheviks aimed to make the Russian masses masters of their own fate while the British sought to deny the Indian masses that very mastery.
Third, both governments "represent an alien philosophy of life ." This was true of the British but not the Soviets. Even at the end of the Soviet era when an election was held regarding the future of the USSR the majority voted to maintain the Union but the majority will was brushed aside.
What does Russell think is the "ultimate source" of the "evils" he found in Russia? By having a revolution to free Russia from feudalism and to get out of W.W.I the Bolsheviks "provoked the hostility of the outside world" and then that of the peasants, and then that of the "urban and industrial population." [Yet they were popular enough to win the Civil War and to go on in 1922 to found the USSR.] But the reason for all this is "the Bolshevik outlook on life." Which is a "dogmatism of hatred" and a belief "that human nature can be completely transformed by force." These two assertions are purely products of Russell's imagination and find no support in the philosophy of the Third International or in its response to the questions of the ILP.
The Bolsheviks have arrived at this mythical outlook, Russell says, by the "cruelty of the Tsarist regime" and the "ferocity" of "the Great War." He might have added Western intervention, support of the Whites in the Civil War, and the blockade. Socialism cannot be established by people whose "mentality" is the result of these conditions. Socialism needs a mentality of "hope" not "despair." But it could be argued that it was precisely hope, hope that a better world was possible, and not despair, that has always driven the socialist movement, Bolsheviks included.
Coming up the 10th and final installment: Russell's chapter on the "Conditions for the Success of Socialism."
Click here for part one of this series
part two
part three
part four
part five
part six
part seven
part eight
Transit System in Mexico D.F.
by Mike Tolochko To travel on the el Metro, the Subway, in Mexico D.F. the ticket price is just 2 pesos each ride. Given the current rate so 13 pesos for 1 U.S. dollar, the cost is very low. For bus travel the ride could be 2,3, or 4 pesos. These are fare prices that the working class can handle. And, the 20 or so million people living in Mexico D.F. practically all use the public transit system.
el Metro
The Metro dates from 1962. Each train has 9 cars and each are painted a brilliant red/orange. There is almost no graffiti. All the lines, and the system is very big, run on rubber wheels with the exception on one line that is steel while on steel track. The trains are very fast.
Platforms are all straight. There are no conductors o the trains. Women and men share the title of Train Operator.
Ventilation needs to be improved in general, but particularly during rush hours.
All stations are modern and kep quite clean.
Buses
There is practically every form of bus.
In the City, regular looks buses are used. The BRT, Bus Rapid Transit lines, not sure what they are called here, are kept clear for buses and the system works. There are articulated buses as well as rather small, half the size of a regular bus, that move around the out areas of the City.
City buses in the city are mostly modern, while the smaller buses, like jitneys, are rather old.
There are electrically drive buses inthe BRT lanes.
Moving millions of workers, daily, around Mexico D.F. isnt easy, but they seem to be doing a very good job. There is a lot to learn.
Oh Yes, the workers are unionized.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Closing Ceremonies at UN/NGO Mexico Meeting
"All Gains are Lost Without Disarmament"
The closing ceremonies at this years annual meeting of Non Governmental Organizations who work on United Nations issues sent a clear message: Withouit Disarmement all social, economic and political gains will mean nothing. The era of ultra right wing Bush Administration policy and military arms manufacturers has been halted. This the moment to act. Every speaker from Ban Ki-Moon to Jody Williams said it loud and clear: THIS IS THE MOMENT.
Sergio Duarte the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs said that from his UN perspective the last period of time can be put behind us, we we all mobilize.
But, the main call ot action was form Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba the Mayor of Hiroshima. He said he was speaking for the Mayor of Nagasaki by saying the nuclear war must never happen again.
He said that the goal of the year 2020 to fully disarm is within our reach. But, he learned that diplomats cannot do it alone. It will take the power of the people to achieve that goal.
On his part, as head of the International Mayors for Peace, he is trying to sign up every mayor in the world.
He said the the Mayor of Mexico D.F. just signed on. There are no 3,105 cities belonging the Mayor´s for Peace organization.
He sait the a giant peace march in NYC for March, 2010 is going to happen. And, that the Security Council´s meeting of September 24th our first goal.
Children are our Future
In Hiroshima 40% of the population was killed. The bombings of Tokyo a city of 3 million took 150,000 lives. He also cited Dresden where civilian poplations were bombed.
He cited Jody Williams powerful speech during his talk.
WMD - A NEW MEANING
REMEMBER THE WMD, WELL MAYOR AKIBA RENAMED THAT
WE MUST DISARM
FINAL DOCUMENT OF CONFERENCE
The assembled delegates, totally 1,300 from 50 countries approved a comprehensive document from the conference.
This will be posted on the DPI/NGO website.
NEXT YEAR´S MEETING WILL PROBABLY BE IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA