Capital Goes On Strike

For the first time in history, the creditworthiness of the United States Treasury was downgraded yesterday. Standard & Poor's dropped its AAA rating of US debt down a notch, to AA+.

During the last few weeks' arguments over negotiating a deal to increase the debt limit, both the Obama administration and members of Congress warned that a bill needed to be passed before hitting the debt ceiling on August 2 in order to avoid a credit downgrade. Well, they got a deal, it was signed into law on August 2, but our credit has been downgraded anyway.

Far from being an unprecedented or unexplainable move by a jittery rating agency, this instead seems to be part of a pattern of actions by finance capital to sabotage the US economy.

Corporations have large amounts of cash reserves - nearly $2 trillion, according to some estimates - but rather than using that cash to hire more employees, they're either using it to buy back their own stock (to pump up the price) or just sitting on it. Similarly, banks have nearly $1 trillion in cash, but they're reluctant to actually lend it to potential home buyers or startup businesses.

Just as workers use the withholding of their labor (a labor strike) to change unfavorable conditions, the financial industry is withholding its capital to change what they perceive as unfavorable conditions. We appear to be in the grip of a capital strike.

U.S. corporations have engaged in this sort of behavior before, sometimes with the cooperation of the U.S. government, to undermine social democratic governments in other countries. During the 1970s, Chile under President Salvador Allende and Jamaica under Prime Minister Michael Manley were both victims of capital strikes by U.S. companies as well as local businesses. Allende was overthrown in 1973 by a U.S.-backed military coup, while Manley's party was merely voted out of office in 1980, but in both cases capital began to flow freely once again under new conservative governments.

Not that President Barack Obama should be mistaken for a social democrat; Obama's policies pale in comparison to the wide-ranging reforms of Allende and Manley. Moreover, Obama did nothing to stop the overthrow of elected President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, where business interests welcomed the coup. Nevertheless, it appears that even the possibility of an occasional finger-wagging or public shaming from a Democratic President is more than our financial industry is willing to tolerate.

President Obama needs to stop worrying about being accused of "fomenting class warfare" if he targets wealthy individuals or corporations. The class war is already underway, instigated by the wealthy against the rest of us; yesterday's credit downgrade should be seen as a declaration of war. It's time for President Obama to be clear about what's happening, and stop trying to appease the markets, because that's clearly not working.

The United States can either return to the democratic rule of one person, one vote, or we can continue on the current path towards an oligarchy of one dollar, one vote.

Which side are you on?

"Battle In Seattle" Governor Approved As Ambassador To China

The nightly news has given us the impression that Congress has been unable to accomplish anything for weeks as they argue over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling before August 2. But yesterday, July 27, the Senate confirmed Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to be the next U.S. Ambassador to China.

Gary Locke, a Democrat, was Governor of Washington when Seattle hosted the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) conference, which famously drew tens of thousands of protesters opposed to the WTO's corporate agenda. As dramatized in the 2007 film Battle In Seattle, Governor Locke called out the National Guard to help the Seattle police clear protesters off the streets of Seattle so as not to tarnish his pro-business image.

It's bad enough that President Obama picked Locke to be his Secretary of Commerce, but now he's being sent to represent U.S. interests in China. Presumably his responsibilities will include keeping the shelves of our Wal-Mart stores stocked with products made by Chinese sweatshop labor, as well as convincing the Chinese government to continue funding our federal debt - assuming, of course, that Congress agrees to authorize more of that debt.

In honor of Locke's promotion, here's the classic 10cc song "Rubber Bullets" from 1973, set to video of protests at a G20 meeting. Hey, maybe Ambassador Locke can advise the Chinese government on crowd control methods!

Republicans To US: If You Don't Cut Social Security & Medicare, We'll Kill This Dog

Well, actually, what they're threatening to do is refuse to increase the debt ceiling, essentially forcing the federal government to shut down, which is about as insane as shooting a dog (thanks to National Lampoon for this classic magazine cover).

I'm not really a government economist, and I don't play one on TV, but let me see if I understand the sequence of events that has led us to the brink of this abyss.

By the end of the administration of President Bill Clinton (D), the federal budget actually had a surplus. Then President George W. Bush (R) took over, and federal budgets started running deficits again. First came tax cuts for the rich, which reduced the amount of money coming in. Then came invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, resulting in increased spending. The Medicare prescription drug plan, which obligates the federal government to pay whatever prices are set by pharmaceutical companies for seniors' prescriptions, has also increased spending.

Now, however, that there's a Democratic President, the Republicans in Congress have suddenly declared that deficit spending must be stopped immediately. The logical approach would be to undo the Bush-era policies that contributed to the national debt, right? Raise tax rates on wealthy individuals and corporations to where they were ten years ago, bring the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, and allow Medicare to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs as is done in most other countries. That would be the logical approach.

Logic, however, seems to be in short supply in DC these days. Instead, Republicans in Congress are demanding deep cuts, or even a dismantling, of Social Security and Medicare. Somehow, they want us to pay for ten years of corporate tax breaks, military operations, and subsidies to for-profit drug companies by cutting back on our parents' and grandparents' income and making it more expensive for them to go to the doctor or hospital.

Never mind killing the dog in the above photo; the Republicans are trying to kill Grandma.

Bobby Kennedy's Inspiring Vision

Last summer, during a vacation drive through New England, I convinced my family to make a stop at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. While browsing through the museum shop, I came across a pile of paperback copies of a fascinating book by JFK's brother Bobby. These were not newly published versions of the book, but leftover copies printed during his 1968 Presidential campaign (in fact, the library's website still has copies available for sale). I bought a copy, initially as a collector's item, but having now read it several times, I'm impressed by its high-minded vision as well as its continuing relevance today.

"To Seek A Newer World" was not intended to be a campaign book. When it was first published in November 1967, Bobby Kennedy was not a Presidential contender, only a United States Senator from New York, where I lived at the time. The book is essentially a series of essays and excerpts from speeches covering his Senate term, to which he had been elected in 1964. Although some of his positions, particularly on the U.S. war in Vietnam, put him at odds with President Lyndon Johnson, everyone expected Johnson to seek re-election in 1968, and Bobby was at first unwilling to challenge his fellow Democrat in the primaries. It took another Democratic Senator, Gene McCarthy of Minnesota, to mount a campaign and demonstrate Johnson's vulnerability in the early primaries. By March of 1968, Bobby changed his mind and declared his own candidacy for the Presidency. On March 31, President Johnson announced on TV that he was dropping out of the election, suddenly making it a very real possibility that Senator Kennedy might be the Democratic candidate in the November general election. "To Seek A Newer World" was quickly updated with some more recent Kennedy statements on Vietnam, as well as the text of his campaign announcement, and rushed out as a "Special Campaign Edition" discount paperback. Sadly, that campaign was cut short less than three months after it began. On June 4, 1968 (43 years ago today), Kennedy won the California and South Dakota Democratic primaries. Moments after finishing his victory speech in Los Angeles, he was hit by gunfire, fell into a coma, and died on June 6. Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic candidate at the party's August convention, but his earlier reputation as a champion of civil rights and desegregation had by then been irreparably tarnished by his unquestioning support of Johnson's Vietnam War policies, and he was defeated in November by Republican Richard Nixon.

Reading "To Seek A Newer World" today provides some insight into how the course of history, and of the world, might have been different had Bobby lived to contest the election with Nixon.

The chapter on America's cities contains some frank discussion of past mistakes in the areas of public housing and urban renewal. "We rarely asked", wrote Kennedy, "those whose homes we leveled whether they liked the plan, and we thought too little about what would become of them after their homes were gone." Kennedy pointed to his own efforts in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, NYC as an alternative approach, where residents of the community held seats on the boards of the organizations making development decisions.

Bobby also devoted a chapter to the Alliance for Progress, the comprehensive program for Latin America that was a high point of his brother John's Presidency. After JFK's 1963 assassination, his successor Johnson did not give the Alliance a high priority, and Johnson's covert support of the Brazilian military's overthrow of the democratically elected Goulart administration in 1964, as well as the overt invasion by the U.S. Marines of the Dominican Republic in 1965, seemed to run counter to the Alliance's aims. RFK, however, displayed admirable insight into the root causes of the region's situation. Kennedy wrote empathetically of Latin Americans' "feeling with regard to foreign owners in the extractive industries - oil, minerals, metals - which are also criticized as depleting resources essential to their future. Few Latin Americans can fail to be sensitive to their history, to the centuries in which their mineral wealth was taken by a small privileged minority, to be sent abroad to the coffers of Spanish kings and then to the banks of Europe." This is precisely the theme of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, the book which Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave to U.S. President Barack Obama in April 2009 in order to help Obama understand the region. Galeano first published his book in 1971, yet here was a U.S. Senator making some of the same points three years earlier.

Kennedy also stressed that the Alliance for Progress had always been underfunded. In a footnote, he pointed out that even if the current annual Alliance spending for all of Latin America were to be doubled, that total amount of money would be equal to the cost of what the U.S. was then spending for only two weeks' worth of the Vietnam war. Think about that - an amount of money that could have been spent for constructive purposes for all of Latin America for a year was instead being squandered in only two weeks for bombing, burning, and strafing a single country in Southeast Asia. Even when writing about Latin America, Bobby couldn't help bringing the subject back to the disastrous war being waged in Vietnam.

At several points in this book, Bobby complained about stubbornness and a lack of leadership: "there is no courage or discipline involved in following failure down the road to disaster"; "the courage to admit a mistake and retreat is not a universal characteristic of national leaders". He probably had then-President Johnson in mind when he wrote these words, but they could equally be applied to many of our Presidents since then.

Kennedy even reached back to a Shakespeare play to point out that governments frequently use wars to distract the people from problems at home. He quotes a line from Henry IV in which the king advises his son to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels". Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya seem to be doing a great job of "busying giddy minds" these days, leaving less time for serious debate about our domestic economy.

The book ends with a more hopeful and upbeat Postscript, containing perhaps one of Bobby's most quoted lines: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Bullets may have stopped Senator Kennedy's quest for the Presidency, as well as his too-short life, but they could not stop the "ripples of hope" he set into motion. Go back, as I did, and revisit Robert F. Kennedy's remarkable writings; you'll find yourself inspired by his vision of hope for the future, and moved by his ripples.

The Bin Laden Trial That Wasn't

I realize this probably puts me in the minority, but I am not rejoicing over the May 1 death of Osama bin Laden. President Obama claimed that "justice has been done" with the execution of bin Laden by special forces, but I'm not so sure. I think that justice would have been better served by capturing bin Laden alive and putting him on trial.

It's not as if apprehending an evil mass murderer and putting him on trial would have been unprecedented, with all sorts of insurmountable logistical problems. It's actually been done before. For example, 50 years ago, the entire world watched as former SS officer Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel for his role in organizing mass deportations of Jews to death camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II.

After Israeli intelligence found Eichmann living under an assumed identity in Argentina, agents from Mossad and Shin Bet kidnapped him and brought him back to Israel. The trial began in April 1961, with Eichmann in a booth made of bulletproof glass to protect him from possible attacks. The trial was broadcast live, so that people around the world could hear the prosecution's case as well as the former high-ranking Nazi's efforts to defend himself. The three-judge panel found Eichmann guilty on all counts, and sentenced him to death; Eichmann was hanged in 1962.

Wasn't that a better way to bring this murderer to "justice" than if the Mossad agents had just executed Eichmann on the spot in Argentina?

Another effort to bring a mass murderer to trial ultimately failed, to the disappointment of many, when Augusto Pinochet died of natural causes in 2006. Pinochet led a military overthrow of the democratically-elected government of his native Chile in 1973. On September 11 of that year (the same date on which New York and Washington would later be attacked in 2001), the Chilean military bombed and strafed La Moneda, their equivalent of the White House, as part of their coup. Thousands of citizens were rounded up, tortured, and killed, as was vividly portrayed in Costa-Gavras' 1982 film Missing. When Pinochet finally yielded power in 1990, he ensured that an amnesty law was in place to shield him from future prosecution, but the Chilean justice system was in the process of removing that amnesty and bringing Pinochet to trial for his crimes when he died. The families of his victims felt robbed of their chance to see the man who ordered the deaths of their loved ones brought to justice.

Sadly, the families of the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks have also been robbed of a chance to see Osama bin Laden brought to trial. Instead, we have the United States setting an example that vigilante justice and extrajudicial killings are acceptable.

I'm deeply disappointed that President Obama, a former lecturer in constitutional law, doesn't see this difference.

I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night

My wife and I went to see a one-night-only showing of a new documentary about the 1960s folk singer Phil Ochs called "There But For Fortune" (www.philochsthemovie.com). The DVD is scheduled for a July 19 release, and I highly recommend purchasing this film.

Phil Ochs wrote topical songs, often using news articles from The New York Times or Newsweek for inspiration. The title of his first album, "All The News That's Fit To Sing", was a pun on the Times' debatable claim to contain "all the news that's fit to print". In some ways, Ochs was a musical version of Mort Sahl, who used newspaper articles as his jumping-off point for standup comedy routines (or, to update the analogy, think of Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show"). He was also an active participant in the movements to educate the public about those events, including the civil rights movement and U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. He performed at the street demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and became angered and disillusioned by the violent reaction against those protests by the police, ordered by Democratic Mayor Richard Daley and endorsed by Democratic Presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey. Phil's next album cover featured a tombstone giving his place and date of death as Chicago, 1968.

The movie offers a wealth of Phil's musical performances, taken from TV shows as well as film from rallies, protests, and marches. Also featured are interviews with Joan Baez and other musicians. Tom Hayden, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society and one of the "Chicago Eight" indicted by the Nixon administration for "conspiracy to riot" at the 1968 Democratic convention, puts Phil's politics in perspective with the times. Billy Bragg, the British singer/songwriter who wrote new lyrics for the tune "Joe Hill" as "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night", is also interviewed in the film.

The film is an inspiring tribute to an overlooked artist who needs to be remembered, because his lyrics, sense of irony, and commitment to making this country live up to its claimed ideals are sadly needed as much today as they were during the turbulent decade of the 1960s.

Here's the official trailer for the movie:

May Day Greetings 2011

May 1, or May Day, is recognized by many around the world as Labor Day, in honor of the large demonstrations held by workers in Chicago in May 1886 for the 8-hour day. Many symbols of the labor movement, including the May Day holiday and songs such as "The Internationale", were hijacked by the Soviet Union and other countries whose forms of government were more correctly described as "bureaucratic collectivist" than "worker-controlled".

British musician Billy Bragg updated the lyrics to "The Internationale" in 1990; here's a video with his recording set to images of workers' struggles throughout the years. Happy May Day!