People Before Profit blog

June 2004 (print edition)

Sat, 29 May 2004 22:30:00 +0000

Inside... Wal-Mart Workers of the World Unite! Economic Unorthodoxy: An Interview with Doug Henwood Axis of Progress Talking Regime Change with Rahul Mahajan Book Review - The Enemy of Nature, By Joel Kovel

In the print edition...

Cuba Subverts Bush Imperialism Richard Grassl

Defending the Rights of No One Sankara Saranam

In Battle For Peace: The Life of Meir Vilner Sidney Resnick

Clear the Air By Joshua Cohen

Plus more book reviews, more commentary, a marxist quiz, letters, poetry, art and so much more...

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Empire of Oil

Sat, 29 May 2004 22:23:00 +0000

Most of the gang of adventurers who hold strategic positions in the Bush II administration honed their Machiavellian skills in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. Some such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld go back to the Ford administration in the mid-1970s. In their political exile during the Clinton terms many of them found employment in an incestuous network of right-wing think tanks and quasi-academic institutions plotting their return to power while advancing an imperial agenda. These outfits include the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the Center of Strategic and International Studies, the Baker Institute for Public Policy, and the Olin Institute of Strategic Studies.

Financial support for this network is partially coordinated by the Philanthropy Roundtable, a collection of over 650 right- wing foundations and individual donors. William Simon, former treasury secretary in the Nixon/Ford administrations, is credited with institutionalizing the practice of targeted, strategic “philanthropy.” The Roundtable is run by a board of directors that includes the heads of the notoriously conservative Olin, Bradley and Scaife foundations.

The Council on National Policy is the other major clearinghouse for funds used to mobilize right-wing Christian networks to get behind an “apocalyptic” agenda. The recent appointment of Lt. General William G. Boykin to the new position of deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence represents a tangible thank you to the religious right for their invaluable support of the “war against terrorism.” This past June General Boykin delivered a sermon at the Good Shepherd Community Church in Sandy, Oregon, displaying slides of Osama bin Laden and North Korea’s Kim Jung II. Boykin asked rhetorically, “Why do they hate us?” “[B]ecause we’re a Christian nation. We are hated because we are a nation of believers.” Continuing, Boykin said our “spiritual enemy will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.” Serving up such rhetoric insures that the Council on National Policy will receive more donations to support Christian media and their broadcast of war propaganda.

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On the Global Road

Sat, 29 May 2004 22:19:00 +0000

People around the world are looking to make a living. The migration of people from country to country is as old as the world itself. In the past, these movements were caused by natural calamities such as extended drought. But in today’s world, migration is driven by the expanding nature of capitalism and imperialism. The bottom line: immigrants are driven by the search for living-wage jobs.

One thing is for sure: capitalism does not export freedom and democracy. It does export extreme poverty and oppression. Whether it is done by invasion as in Iraq, by blockade as with Cuba or by low-intensity warfare as in Nicaragua or El Salvador, the result is the same. For several decades the US government has followed the general concept that it is responsible for making the world safe for corporate investment anywhere in the world. This almost always means low-wage jobs and few worker protections, causing massive waves of immigrants to migrate to the US or other industrial countries where wages are higher.

The typical response to migration by the industrial countries is to pass new or revised legislation designed to strengthen immigration controls. At the same time, those efforts reflect and bring out the contradictions of the competing interests of different sectors of the economy. Thus, in Congress, efforts are made to accommodate these competing and contradictory sets of circumstances.

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Book Review - The Enemy of Nature, by Joel Kovel

Sat, 29 May 2004 22:12:00 +0000

The choice Joel Kovel offers in the title is stark. He clearly lays out the indicting evidence against capitalism. It was never intended to be a steady-state system. Corporations are established for one purpose – to make money for shareholders by converting nature and labor into capital. Corporate managers are legally required to maximize profit for the investors. If they place the interests of workers, community, or environment ahead of the profit interests of shareholders, they can (and probably will) be sued for breach of fiduciary duty. Trying to graft environmental ethics onto capitalism is like trying to mix oil and water: it takes considerable agitation and then doesn’t hold together very long.

Kovel makes the case that capitalism exhibits a compulsive, unrelenting, grow-or-die expansion and over-consumption of resources at non-sustainable rates. Growth so conceived means the destabilization and destruction of the natural foundation of society. Corporations have major incentives to ‘externalize’ their costs – to dump toxic materials into our air and water, to take inadequate steps to promote the health and dignity of workers and to oppose regulation and policy that enhances social justice or protects the environment, but might interfere with profits. Attempting to halt and repair damage to nature without addressing the ongoing root cause is a no-win situation. Try as we might to work for ecological sanity, the logic of capitalism brings about a deadly set of interlocking assaults on the life-sustaining natural processes and resources all of us depend upon. Depletion of non-renewable resources, disruption of natural cycles, waste and pollution aren’t accidents. They are the result of business as usual under capitalism. Wetlands, for example, provide essential services in flood control and wildlife habitat, yet are filled in to make way for shopping malls and housing developments. Prime agricultural land is paved over by urban sprawl. The logic of growth under capitalism translates into increased wealth for the few, but increasing stress and misery for the majority and mounting violence to the planet. If an individual behaved like a corporation, he would soon be arrested, put on trial, found guilty of crimes against humanity and either locked up or committed to an institution for the criminally insane. Kovel asks, where, in the face of all this mounting evidence, is the rational discussion of this systemic assault on nature? Where is the discussion to address the underlying causes of so much damage and lay out a policy to remedy them? “Each capitalist must constantly search to expand markets and profits,” Kovel says, “or lose his position in the hierarchy. Under such a regime, nature is continually devalued.”

Kovel feels that we need a new system. He challenges the commonly held notion that there is no realistic alternative. If capitalism is inevitable and innate in human nature, he asks, then why has it only occupied the last couple hundred years out of a human history that goes back for hundreds of thousands of years? “Why did it have to be imposed through violence wherever it set down its rule? And most importantly, why does it have to be continually maintained through violence, and continuously re-imposed on each generation through an enormous apparatus of indoctrination?” Kovel feels that ecosocialism offers a superior analysis: A society that is: Socialist, in that the working class is reunited with (takes control of) the means of production in a robust flowering of democracy, and Ecological, in that the limits to growth are finally respected, and nature is recognized as having intrinsic value and not simply cared for, but allowed to resume its inherently formative path. Kovel emphasizes the crucial importance of overcoming the triple alienation people suffer under capitalism – alienation from nature, alienation from the means and processes of production, and alienation of people from each other – if we are to survive. The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that “We can have a democratic society, or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” Kovel’s book inspired me to update this axiom: “We can have an ecologically sustainable society, or we can have labor and natural resources treated as commodities. We cannot have both.”

The End of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? By Joel Kovel Halifax, Fernwood Publishing, 2002.

Talking Regime Change with Rahul Mahajan

Sat, 29 May 2004 21:56:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: Rahul Mahajan is a founding member of the NoWar Collective and serves on the National Board of Peace Action, National Committee of the National Network to End the War against Iraq and the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice. He publishes a daily political analysis on his weblog and has written two books: Full Spectrum Dominance: US Power in Iraq and Beyond and The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism. His articles have appeared in Z Magazine, and .

PA: Your recent book is called Full Spectrum Dominance: US Power in Iraq and Beyond. Can you explain the term “full spectrum dominance”?

RM: The phrase comes from a military planning document called Global Vision 2020. It lays out the military’s plans for the year 2020 in which they are supposed to achieve dominance over the full spectrum of military operations – land, sea, air, space and information. Those are considered the range of military areas and, of course, the achievement of full dominance over those is part of the achievement of full political dominance of the United States. So that was the thought in my mind when I was writing the book. But when you look at Bush administration policy even over a wider spectrum, you could characterize their entire domestic agenda, their entire way of looking at electoral politics, in addition to their approach to international affairs and institutions as basically a ploy for full spectrum dominance by a newly emergent, newly resurgent radical right wing.

PA: Can you give examples of how Bush’s domestic agenda relates to the concept of full spectrum dominance?

RM: Let’s take, for example, the idea of compassionate conservatism. That is to say taking away the social functions of welfare and whatever safety net there is from the government and put it in the hands of religious institutions and eventually radical right-wing religious institutions. Take the way they have assaulted the basic infrastructure of democracy, which is the vote and the counting of the vote on the one hand through the massive disfranchisement of people they don’t want to vote, which they did both in 2000 and 2002 in Florida, and through the replacement of the ballots with electronic voting machines which are mostly owned by a small number of right-wing corporations. Amazingly enough there is no way to check the vote counting algorithm because many of those corporations say that their algorithms are proprietary and thus the government doesn’t have the right to check to make sure that citizens’ votes are accurately counted.

Those are just two examples. There is also the dominance over the media, which I think has been much talked about as well.

PA: Bush based the justification for war primarily on the presence of WMD in Iraq and the threat that Iraq posed. Now that they haven’t found any, he is back tracking and even blaming others for intelligence failures. Can you comment on that?

RM: It’s not just Bush. John Kerry’s brilliant reaction to this development was to call for George Tenet to be fired, which is like saying, as some people are saying in Britain, that when Tony Blair lies about weapons of mass destruction, the head of the BBC should be fired. There has always been a number of justifications for the war, shifting and evolving according to the immediate political exigencies. There was the fact that Iraq has to be attacked because they’re plotting with Al Qaeda to destroy us. When there was no evidence of that forthcoming, it shifted to weapons of mass destruction and the so-called enforcement of UN resolutions even though the UN resolution 1441 was being enforced when the US decided to terminate that and start the war. Through it all, and not made explicitly by the administration for a long time, but one that is easy to fall back on is this idea that this was the liberation of Iraq, that Saddam Hussein obviously is an evil dictator and therefore this war would be better for the people of Iraq. This argument was the one that Richard Perle and some of the other neo-conservatives wanted to lead with only. They didn’t want to talk about WMD largely because they didn’t want to talk about the UN at all. They didn’t want to give any color of sanctity to any international law. Instead they wanted to say that there are evildoers in the world and that the US is the only power with the beneficence and the power to protect people from those evildoers. Of course, all of those justifications fall apart when you look at the facts. Although, sad to say, very few people are looking at the so-called liberation in a serious way. PA: People in the peace movement were saying all along that there was no evidence of a connection to Al Qaeda and there is little to suggest WMD, etc. We had some experts to back us up on that, but we have no CIA. Yet, we were correct. Why is it important that we were correct, and what does it say about our voice and ability to be heard?

RM: I should add also that many people in the peace movement said that even if by some chance Iraq has small quantities of WMD – and it was clear if it did it was in small quantities – that said nothing about the question of any threat from Iraq. The idea that Iraq was going to attack the US was ludicrous. It never has obviously, and it never manifested the slightest intention of doing so. It would know very clearly what the results of such an attack would be. Even Richard Perle and David Frum, in their recent book, An End to Evil, do admit that no country including Iraq would engage in an assault on the US. Even if they’d given WMD to some terrorist group, then they would have known that retribution would come down on them because war on Iraq was all the talk for a year or so.

These things were pointed out. Some of them were simply common sense: the kind of argument that anyone should have understood, and probably would have if things weren’t drowned in a ceaseless barrage of rhetoric from the administration. A lot of it was yes most of us who are not close to the levers of power do not have independent sources of information about who was doing what on the ground in Iraq at any time. But a lot of this information was open source and available to the public.

By far the best sources on Iraq’s WMD program were the UN weapons inspectors. They not only did their investigations, they wrote reports. Even after they were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998, there was the so-called Report. If you read that document carefully you would see immediately that most of what the administration has been saying ever since is a bunch of lies. Yes, they did admit that there were some discrepancies in accounting, but they also said clearly that there was no evidence of any real weapons programs and it was pretty much certain that there was no nuclear program. A lot of that stuff was available out in the public domain and peace activists were putting it together and reporting on it. So now it’s very clear: we were absolutely right and they were wrong. And the simple reason for it was not that we had access to superior intelligence or analysis, but that we were interested in finding out the truth and they were interested in lying about it to conceal their real motives for going to war with Iraq.

PA: One of the slogans that came up during the struggle to oppose the war was “Regime Change Begins at Home.” How is the Iraq issue going to play in presidential politics in the next few months?

RM: Certainly. Let me start by saying that although “Regime Change Begins at Home” is a great slogan, too many people are just taking it to mean that you need to vote, and you need to vote against Bush. Although getting Bush out of office would be a huge achievement, it’s very far from being regime change. We are bearing now the fruits of Iraq policy of the last 13 years. The Clinton administration’s policy in Iraq was regime change as well. Of course, in the larger scope of US imperial domination of the world it was very much there in past administrations as well. So I wouldn’t want to say that getting Bush out amounts to regime change.

But anyway, about the election, one has to understand that in most states, you have voters ranking issues in this order of importance: first comes healthcare, second comes jobs, third comes Iraq. Iraq is third, which is a huge leap for a foreign policy issue. But even so, I think that Iraq is the defining issue of this campaign. When Kerry was in the ascendancy and Dean seemed to be on his way out, the conventional wisdom was that this proved that Iraq isn’t really the issue and that in fact jobs and healthcare and, of course, electability – whatever that means – are the real issues. People missed the fact that this was a campaign between Democratic candidates. The election campaign will be against George Bush who has amassed a huge war chest and who, according to Karl Rove, plans to campaign fully on his war on terrorism, on the war on Iraq and on his new imperialist foreign policy. So the Democratic candidate has to be able to stand up to that and not just oppose Bush’s foreign policy but give concrete, intelligent and important reasons and go beyond saying, “Oh we should have the French sharing the burden, because we can’t afford to pay for the occupation of Iraq” or nonsensical things like that. Of course, reversing just a small portion of the tax cuts would enable us to easily pay for the war on Iraq. They have to go beyond that to a more substantive analysis. Any candidate who can’t do that, or doesn’t want to do that is going to be eaten alive by this barrage of propaganda, by the mobilization of a huge electoral machine and by a plan that has been in the works now for years to make sure this election is a totally polarizing one in which Bush goes for the brass ring.

PA: If the candidate isn’t able to distinguish himself, people will say what’s the difference?

RM: Yes. It should be said that under the whip of Dean’s early criticisms, which were mild and fudged, but still stood out because few people were willing to say that in those days before the war, some of the other candidates have moved a bit. John Edwards seemed to have nothing to say about the war. But Kerry started to stress his own foreign policy record in opposition to Reagan’s illegal wars in Central America and in a sort of muted that there’s a connection between being a Vietnam veteran and being part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. He was doing it probably to capture more of Dean’s voters to win the primaries and he’ll very likely swing back to a more mainstream Democratic approach in the election. If he does, he will certainly not be rewarded by the voters for appearing just like George Bush on the central issue of the day.

PA: Do you think that Dean’s fall from the top spot was an indication of a reaction by the Democratic leadership or was it just a bad public image?

RM: The Democratic leadership has been through a few phases. Early on they reacted virulently against Dean because of that. They wanted to continue with the horribly failed strategies of 2000 and 2002. Technically, the strategy of 2000 was a victory, but really Al Gore should have beaten George Bush by several points if he had gone even marginally more toward the left. Of course 2002 was a huge victory for the Republicans. The Democrats wanted to continue with those failed strategies, but along the way, Dean was building up an organization that has more reach than the Democratic Party leadership. You have to understand that the Democratic Party as an organization is kind of a hollow shell. It’s been gutted just as the Republican Party has been creating a huge massive energized grassroots base. So there was some hint of their coming to an accommodation with Dean. Then suddenly, in the space of a few weeks, starting with the capture of Saddam, all hell broke loose. Once again you had the coalescence of the mainstream, not just in the Party but also in large parts of the media, which went on a furious jag of attacking Dean.

PA: After all of the analysis, the big question is what do we do? What role can the peace movement play in influencing the outcome of this election?

RM: Very simply, I think that the peace movement, the whole issue of the war and the occupation has been really battered by all the focus on the election. To try to swim against all of that tide is not going to work. The peace movement has to make use of it. We’ve finally come to a time when issues like US imperialism, like the ongoing occupation of Iraq can be taken door to door. You couldn’t do this in the late 1990s when I started working against the sanctions. So I think the peace movement has to gear up for a massive public outreach campaign which focuses on how US imperialism and the occupation of Iraq tie in with people’s immediate concerns. The war is – it’s not an actual reason for cutting social spending – but it is being used as a rhetorical justification for it and it’s part of a unified political ideology put forward by this administration.

We have to try to make the details of the occupation – nobody is talking about what is really happening in Iraq. In all of Baghdad, a city of six million people, one-fourth of the population of Iraq, there is no reconstruction going on. Hospitals in Baghdad and many other parts of Iraq are worse off now and get fewer materials than they did under sanctions, according to doctors that work there. The sanctions weren’t lifted or removed, they were in every way intensified and made worse. These are things that the American people have no idea about. These are things that none of the political leaders are talking about. These are things that the anti-war movement has to get out to the public.

Economic Unorthodoxy: An Interview with Doug Henwood

Sat, 29 May 2004 07:31:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: Doug Henwood is the editor of Left Business Observer and a contributing editor for The Nation. He hosts a radio program on WBAI in New York. He has also written three books: The State of the USA, Wall Street and After the New Economy. Here he discusses the term globalization, its uses and abuses, current trends and developments in the US economy, Martha Stewart and the role of economic questions in the 2004 elections. Joel Wendland conducted the interview.

PA: In After the New Economy you argue that globalization has always been a feature of capitalism.
DH: There is a fantasy among some people who don’t like present economic conditions that there’s been an innovation they call globalization that has been responsible for economic life taking an unpleasant turn. Capitalism from its onset has been indifferent to borders. It broke out of its regional origins, helped to create national economies and then spread well beyond that. Go back 500 years to European conquest of the Western hemisphere and later with 19th century European conquests of Africa and Latin America – these had a lot to do with the evolution of capitalism. People tend to forget that. They forget that in the late 19th century there were extensive trade relations, cross-border capital flows and gold was a kind of stateless international money that could move around without any sort of passport. There was a sort of de-globalization of capital in the World War I crisis – they tried to put it back together after the war but it didn’t work too well. Then we had a period of depression in the 1930s and war in the 1940s. But as soon as the war was over, the US was busy trying to reconstruct a global economy under its leadership and in its image and interest. All of this talk of globalization masks that history.

Of course there are always differences. The politically dominant role of the US now is not like earlier epochs with great rivalry among the European colonial powers. Now multinational corporations operate in various places around the world, though they aren’t exactly without precedent either. So there are innovations, and it does seem that things move a lot faster than they used to. I just want people to think more carefully about the long history of capitalism’s internationalizing tendencies that gets occluded by a word like globalization.

PA: You’ve also argued that globalization is not much different from old-fashioned imperialism. What are some strategies for opposing world imperialism and winning victories for the working class?

DH: There is something different now as I alluded to earlier: US domination of the global system is much more intense than British domination of the 19th century system. Everything is fairly well integrated and the major interests, at least with the second tier powers, pretty much agree with each other – we see some disagreements among them around things like the Iraq war, but that was an extraordinary moment. For the most part the Western Europeans and the Japanese yield, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes happily, to American domination.

Resisting it is very difficult. Certainly the kinds of mass mobilizations around the world to protest the imminent war in Iraq were very inspiring and had great potential, but unfortunately once the war happened that movement seems to have fizzled out. It seems a lot more difficult to organize against a concept or a structure like US imperialism or more broadly global imperialism or “empire” if you want to use the Hardt and Negri terminology. It seems a lot more difficult to organize against something that nebulous, precisely because it is so pervasive, than it is to organize against a specific event like the imminent invasion of Iraq. You can do what you can: the popular struggles resisting the IMF in the Third World, resisting pressures for austerity and cutbacks of welfare states in places like Canada and Western Europe. But those are topical struggles, and it is very hard to get people to think about the whole all together.

PA: The US been running a current account deficit of about $500 billion annually (mostly from its trade imbalance). To sustain this, a large part of the world’s savings has to be invested here. What are the implications of this for the world’s major capitalist powers on the one hand and for the world’s working class on the other?

DH: Clinton’s former economic adviser Laura Tyson put it succinctly a few months ago: “Asia lends and America spends.” This is pretty much the model that has kept the world economy going for the last several years. The US runs gigantic current account deficits, stimulates exports in many countries, but predominantly in East Asia especially China. Then they take their accumulated surpluses and buy US Treasury Bills. It doesn’t look like a sustainable model. The US can’t keep running current account deficits of 5 percent of GDP and running up large foreign debts.

The big question is how it comes to an end. One can imagine two versions of how it comes to an end. One, which mainstream people like to think when they think about it at all, is some kind of gentle adjustment: a slower rate of growth in the US maybe more rapid rates of growth abroad; the gradual movement of the US current accounts into something like a balance. The other extreme is some sort of financial crisis, a dollar crisis, a panic, a global financial crash. George Soros has argued in favor of the latter. Though he has political interest in getting George Bush out of the White House, he’s also a pretty clever reader of markets. So the fact that he’s saying that should give the position some credibility.

The global authorities have been clever at managing crises over the last 20 to 25 years. It looked like the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s could have brought the system down, but actually they used the IMF and debt restructuring to turn the crisis to their advantage, prompting neoliberal restructuring of scores of economies around the world.

But now the question is how the imperial colossus itself goes through some kind of structural readjustment. In some ways, the US looks like Mexico in 1994 and Thailand in 1997 a country that has chronic imbalances and is cruisin’ for a bruisin’. But the United States is not a little country like Thailand or Mexico. It is not likely to have to have the IMF to come in and restructure its economy.

So I don’t know how it comes to end, but I don’t think anybody wants to provoke the crisis. Certainly it is not in the interest of the Chinese at this point to dump US Treasury paper and provoke some kind of financial crisis. That’s where all their export demand is coming from.

PA: Does Wall Street think that the worst has already happened?

DH: Most people on Wall Street think that the worst of the bear market is over, the economy is recovering and “happy days are here again” – maybe not as happy as the late 1990s but there’s a great deal of optimism and complacency among financial people right now which is a bit scary. Greenspan said recently that interest rates can’t stay low forever. At some point they’re going to go up, which is obvious enough. It’s the first time he’s said anything like that recently. It seems like he’s preparing the markets for some kind of change in policy, which isn’t imminent, but it is eventually going to happen. But I wonder how the financial markets or the real economy can handle any kind of serious increase in interest rates. We’ve gotten addicted to low interest rates and endless amounts of borrowing especially against home equity value. I don’t know how that endless line of credit gets cut off, but it has to be cut off somehow.

PA: Greenspan also indicated that we ought to prepare for austerity as well by saying that Social Security and domestic programs have to be cut in order to balance the budget. Is that related? The focus on offshoring or outsourcing as the major source of our job woes is really misleading. The number of jobs that have been offshored by most estimates is in the low six figures, and we are now some eight million jobs below where we would be in a normal economic expansion or recovery. The outsourcing thing explains about 1/20th of our jobs weakness. What’s really going on is the hangover form the bubble years. We’re in an economic period like what Japan went through in the 1990s of extended stagnation and failure to recover briskly. People are misleading themselves into thinking that it is just an ordinary business cycle. The persistent failure of the job market to recover is much more deeply structural than just this matter of offshoring, but as with this globalization thing it is sometimes easier to blame foreigners as the source of our woes than some of our own domestic economic structures.

PA: How big of a role in the election will these economic issues play?

DH: It depends. Democrats just focus on the offshoring stuff. All we need is several months of good job growth and that may disappear as an issue. There are some really long-term structural considerations that nobody’s talking about: the incredible anti-labor bias of our legal system, the weakness in the unemployment insurance system, the lack of any kind of job placement, job training or public job creation, the lack of anything resembling a civilized welfare state (whether we’re talking about childcare or public health insurance) and the tremendous polarization of incomes, the huge chasm between rich and poor, which is about the widest of any first world country. These things are hard to bring up as issues. So if the Democrats just focus on some of the short-term cyclical things and don’t really take on some of these longer-term issues, they run the risk of looking silly if the job market finally does recover in the next three or four months. But if the job market stays weak, and I really think it is likely to – we aren’t going to see anything like a collapse, but I don’t think we’re going to see anything like vigorous job growth in the next several months either – that may keep it alive as an issue, but I wish they had more nerve to bring it up as a serious issue.

The Democratic Party suffers a major identity confusion. It is essentially a party of capital that nonetheless has to pretend it’s the people’s party. So they are constantly bringing important issues of class up but its very muffled or dulled or distorted in imperfect ways. It’s not so much because they are cowardly or weak, but it’s because they are in this structural position of having to serve two masters: their electoral base and the people who fund them.

PA: You wrote a piece on the class nature of the elections titled, “Perils of Third Party Voting” for Left Business Observer. What are the perils? DH: People look at the situation in the Democratic Party and see one disappointment after another. I find myself urging people to vote for a Democrat in November more intensely than I ever have before, because I find the Bush administration so frightening and so alarming. I do so fully aware that whatever they do is going to be disappointing. A lot of the permanent policies of imperialism will continue with minor modifications if a Democrat wins. But people look at this chronically disappointing situation and look to a third party to deliver them from it. I can certainly support the idea of organizing third, fourth, fifth, sixth parties, but the obstacles are so enormous.

There’s this kind of habitual tendency on the American left not to think in terms of long-term organizational or ideological terms, but to just take stabs. Every four years there’s some hero or other who is supposed to deliver us from this conundrum. This was Nader’s role in 1996 and 2000, and he’s trying to repeat it this year. In the earlier races there was at least some pretense that Nader was doing this as part of an effort to build a Green Party alternative to the boss’ two parties, but he’s not doing it this time. He’s running as an independent.

There is also this tendency on the left, even within Green politics, to be very afraid of compromise, of getting too dirty with confrontation with power. There’s a sense that all you need is the right message and the right degree of moral purity in politics. There’s no strategy for achieving power or for what happens when you do take power.

Power is a very, very conservatizing force. We can see this repeatedly: all the hopes that people had when the ANC took power in South Africa or when Lula took power in Brazil. Political and social movements don’t come much more honorable than the ANC and the Workers’ Party in Brazil. These are long-term movements of serious political radicals. Even so, once they got into office, their behavior has been disappointing. There is a tendency among Americans who take this purist, moralizing or personalized approach to politics to think it is a matter of “selling out.” There are tremendous constraints once in power, whether it’s just the simple practical constraints of governing, of having to keep the water flowing and the electricity running, or, and this is especially true for the smaller countries, under the constraints of the international capital markets. If they don’t like you and they withdraw their capital then your economy is screwed. Then you have to worry about your own domestic capitalists who might take their capital out of the country, as they did in the case of South Africa. That powerful trend of holding state power to lead toward compromise is what people perceive as “selling out.” The only way you can resist that is to have a deeply organized social movement behind you that is willing to act around or beyond the electoral arena. Even in the case of South Africa or Brazil where you do have these large and honorable social movements, there’s still been a great deal of compromise and “sell out.”

So if you look at home where we don’t have anything like that, and all these people, well, not that many people, but enough to matter, are placing some kind of chimerical hope that Nader is going to be the magic agent of deliverance from all of these problems with no institutional or organizational backing behind him, it is even more dangerous than when you see better organized and better institutionalized radical forces taking power. Here it is just nothing but a personality.

PA: Can you talk about Left Business Observer?

DH: LBO is a newsletter on economics and politics. We talk about fiscal policy, business practices or labor markets or what’s going on with the stock market, the federal reserve or any other central banks. People often find economics incomprehensible, and that’s the way elites want to keep it. They want to keep it as this sort of mystified region that is best left to their experts. So I try to demystify the dismal science and put it into popular accessible language and even making a few jokes along the way. I started the newsletter in 1986 because left writing in economics was not really engaged with the issues of the moment. It was either theoretical or historical, but not deeply engaged with developments within capitalism.

Axis of Progress

Sat, 29 May 2004 07:04:00 +0000

Hatred for US capitalism is nothing new. In 1962, the following excerpt appeared in an article in the New York Times with the headline: “Leftists in Bogotá Hurl Eggs at US Official.” “Teodoro Moscoso, administrator of the United States Alliance for Progress program, was the target of a barrage of stones, tomatoes and eggs today while touring a housing development being built with Alliance funds.” “The culprits,” says the Times, were “left-wing extremists,” who were “captured quickly by the police.”

The Alliance for Progress was the creation of President John Kennedy and his brain trust. The plan, revealed by Kennedy at a meeting of the Organization of the American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in 1961, sought to counter the appeal of revolutionary policies, such as those adopted in Cuba under the leadership of Fidel Castro. The plan was simple. Pump money into highly visible reform projects all over Latin America and advertise unrealistic and unworkable objectives, such as a 2.5 percent increase in per capita income, in exchange for compliance with US economic and political goals.

Other objectives included the establishment of “democratic” governments, more equitable income distribution and land reform. Attractive though these goals seemed to a few liberal leaders in Latin America, such as Alberto Lleras Camargo of Colombia and President Juscelino Kubitzchek of Brazil, most discerned a more sinister objective in Kennedy’s plan. Although the original charter of the Alliance downplayed the role of the US military, the Alliance promised US military and police assistance to counter Communist subversion.

Indeed, Kennedy had reason for concern. As Secretary of State Robert McNamara said countries undergoing development were “seething cauldrons of change,” and that nations in the Southern Hemisphere were “pregnant with violence.”

Che Guevara, present at the Punta del Este meeting, saw through the humanitarian veneer of the Alliance immediately when he noted: Even in the remote event of the $20 billion promise being kept, the “Alliance for Progress” would use this amount to finance a number of imperialist enterprises so they can develop their activities throughout Latin America, whether acting directly as foreign enterprises or as joint ventures, in this way continuing to take in fabulous profits. Guevara was right, of course. The initial funds went to construction companies with deep ties to the US, hence the hostile response of the radical students in Bogotá.

By 1962, the ugly side of the Alliance was already evident in Guatemala. When demonstrators took to the streets in March 1962 to protest the US-led economic policies of General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, US and US-trained military police suppressed the protests and set about retraining the Guatemalan army to handle future uprisings. By the end of 1962, the United States had a fully stocked military base operated by US Special Forces (Green Berets) recruited from Puerto Rico and Mexico to make the operation less Norteamericano in appearance.

When Ydigoras proved less than fully compliant with US counterinsurgency goals, a US-backed coup deposed him in March 1963. The message was clear. Latin Americans must play by US rules or suffer dire consequences.

Elsewhere, Alliance housing projects and schools failed to bring promised surges in literacy, better health facilities and general prosperity. When confronted about the apparent failure of several Alliance programs, Robert McNamara blamed Latin Americans, suggesting that lagging progress owed to the 3 percent per year growth in the Latin American population. The result was a stipulation making population control a condition for continued Alliance aid. Said Uruguayan poet and journalist Eduardo Galeano, “in Latin America it is more hygienic and effective to kill guerrilleros in the womb than in the mountains or the streets.”

The Alliance continued under President Lyndon Johnson, but changed its character. Concerned more with Communists in Vietnam than in Latin America, Johnson backed away from Alliance humanitarian goals and increased the use of military force in suppressing perceived revolutionary movements.

Thomas Mann was Johnson’s henchman for Latin American Affairs. Mann suggested that right-wing military regimes be tolerated, even encouraged, if they followed a counterrevolutionary line. His doctrine accepted murderous pro-US regimes as essential in the fight against true revolution. His philosophy was simple: “I know my Latinos. They understand only two things, a buck in the pocket and a kick in the ass.”

With the eyes of the American public turned to Vietnam, the Johnson administration sanctioned the training of more special forces, complete with bombs, napalm and modified P-51 fighter planes, to find and destroy guerrilla bases in Latin America. Called “free fire zones” in Vietnam, these “zonas libres” became playgrounds for US-trained death squads.

In 1973, the Organization of American States permanently dissolved the committee that created and administered the Alliance for Progress. US economic “aid” would take other forms in the future. However, the US military presence in Latin America remains a permanent feature of the aid program, which, despite idealistic aims, damaged Latin America.

The Alliance promoted the accumulation of foreign (US) capital, increasing rather than relieving poverty in the areas where Alliance aid was most prevalent. It neglected the interests of working people and peasants, and decreased living standards across the board. The percent of the population living below the poverty level increased from 25 percent in 1964 to 50 percent in 1973. Nevertheless, the US military presence and hold on the Latin American economy grew by leaps and bounds.

What did US policy makers learn from the Alliance for Progress? Not much, apparently. The hostile reception to US “aid” in Iraq and other parts of the world sounds all too familiar. The US war on progress continues.

--Anna Bates teaches college history in Michigan.

Wal-Mart Workers of the World Unite

Sat, 29 May 2004 06:40:00 +0000

If a company can single-handedly spur on international labor unity, Wal-Mart’s it. This and similar corporations – Target, Nike, France’s Carrefour, etc. – feed off misery, inequality and competition among workers worldwide. But their anti-social behavior is also breeding global resistance. Effective resistance requires highly coordinated initiatives and leadership by workers’ parties and trade unions worldwide.
Wal-Martization is one face of capitalist “globalization.” Wal-Mart cannot be understood except in the context of capitalism’s global problems with “overproduction” and the corresponding mass unemployment. Of particular interest is the attempted Wal-Martization of China, the work of Chinese unions to resist and the potential of developments there in ending Wal-Mart’s practices.

Nature of Crisis The rise of Wal-Mart is closely related to the cycle of crisis inherent in capitalism. For an economy to avoid crisis, a broad balance must be maintained between production and the demand of both producers and consumers. Capitalism cannot prevent the inevitable small imbalances in any economy from ballooning into big ones. Crises ensue. Marx and Engels termed these “crises of overproduction.”

“Overproduction” really refers to imbalances that result from more being produced than can be sold profitably, not more than can meet human needs. Hunger repeatedly accompanies food “overproduction.” Since the capitalists produce only to enrich themselves, they perceive an inability to sell their commodities profitably as “overproduction.” Losses ensue, along with wage-cuts, factory closings and unemployment. Since the end of World War II, the years 1973-75, 1980-82, 1989-92, 1997-98 and 2001 all marked measurable turns for the worse in world capitalism’s economic imbalances.

Growth in technology and monopolization has the effect of magnifying, not correcting, imbalances under capitalism. Wal-Mart is a child of monopolization, “overproduction” and the associated unemployment and poverty. Wal-Mart in turn is breeding even greater imbalances, poverty and unemployment.

Wall Street Origins How can Wal-Mart be a child of monopoly? After all, half a century ago, Wal-Mart did not even exist. Retailing was already largely monopolized by giants such as Sears and A&P. Today, Wal-Mart dwarfs Sears, while A&P fights irrelevance. Isn’t Wal-Mart a triumph of competition, a tribute to US economic vitality? No. Beneath Wal-Mart lies Wall Street – monopoly capital.

To understand how, let’s look at Japanese industry’s “miraculous” post-war rebirth. In the decades after World War II, Wall Street arranged for the transfer of technology to Japan, and quietly invested both directly and through massive loans into rebuilding that industry. Its immediate interest was to ward off the advance of socialism in Asia.

A crucial piece of the puzzle was Japanese industry could not have survived without access to the US market. For all the talk of “free trade,” the US market was and remains tightly guarded through quotas, tariffs, sanctions and innumerable other measures. But the US market was in fact selectively opened to Japan’s industries. After all, Wall Street had profits to make – from royalties on the transferred technology, direct ownership interests and interest payments on the loans.

But in addition, the “Asian imports” ripped the ground under the United Steel Workers, United Auto Workers and other US unions. Labor here was weakened and cheapened. And the financiers stoked racism and national chauvinism in the bargain.

Of course Wal-Mart arose under different historical circumstances. “Overproduction’s” threat to profits is not as decisive as a socialist revolution’s. But Wall Street’s prints are all over Wal-Mart. Today, Wal-Mart is eroding the ground under the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Teamsters and several other unions and even challenges the huge All-China Federation of Trade Unions and the Chinese state itself.

Sam Walton opened the first Wal-Mart in 1962, in tiny Rogers, Arkansas, paying its mainly women staffers 60 cents an hour when minimum wage was $1.15. Well into the 1960s, it was a regional retailer, with a dozen stores in small towns. Sales were less than one percent those of Sears or Kmart. Histories of the company are consistent in depicting a Walton desperate for capital to expand. He found it, first in the form of loans from Republic National Bank of Dallas, whose “correspondent” ties subordinated it to Wall Street banks. More significantly, in 1969 Massachusetts Mutual Insurance and in particular White, Weld & Co. invested in Wal-Mart. Wall Street had sunk its teeth into Walton’s baby.

In Empire of High Finance (1957), Victor Perlo identifies White, Weld as one of the top five US investment banking houses of the early 1950s, part of “a group of companies [with] important ties with the First Boston Corp. and its associated banks, notably the Rockefellers.” White, Weld subsequently became a subsidiary of Merrill Lynch, now in the Rockefeller orbit.

In addition to its investment activities, White, Weld had a history of promoting ruling-class initiatives against labor at home and in favor of imperialist expansion abroad. According to Thomas Reifer, a University of California scholar, White, Weld helped finance what were called the Plattsburgh military training camps favoring US entry into World War I. Francis Weld was a member of the American Citizens Committee in London, linked to the National Security League, which worked to check the power of labor domestically and ensure US participation in the war and overseas expansion.

It should come as no surprise that union-busting Wal-Mart today maintains a working association with the Pentagon, with ominous implications for the dozens of countries where it operates.

So Wall Street was on the Wal-Mart bandwagon nearly from birth. To be sure, Wall Street was also invested in every other significant retailing venture in the US. But Sam Walton was doggedly proving his skills at keeping distribution costs down. That was in 1992. But Wal-Mart had not changed its policy. In January 2004, an electronic cart crushed a nightshift worker’s ankle. The New York Times reported that the policy is still in force “in about 10 percent of its stores...“ “The multinational corporation says locking the doors increases productivity, controls ‘shrinkage’ (theft) and ‘protects employees in (so-called) high-crime neighborhoods,” according to the People’s Weekly World.

Perhaps no single practice is more vile than the reliance here and worldwide on night work, which is extraordinarily damaging to health and the social fabric. A damning 2004 report on “Wal-Martization” by Oxfam (maketradefair.com>) reveals worldwide use of night work – and overnight locking – until “team” quotas or production deadlines are met.

Bob Ortega relates that in a December 1992 interview of Wal-Mart president David Glass, NBC’s Brian Ross documented use of child labor locked overnight at the Saraka garment factory in Bangladesh. Ross showed Glass “black-and-white photographs of the bodies of 25 children who’d died, locked in during a fire at the factory two years earlier, less than a year before Wal-Mart moved production there.” Glass responded blandly, “Yeah, there are tragic things that happen all over the world.”

As for child labor: In January 2004, the New York Times reported on an internal Wal-Mart audit which found ‘extensive violations of [US] child-labor laws and state regulations requiring time for breaks and meals.’ One week of time records from 25,000 employees in July 2000 found 1,371 instances of minors working too late, during school hours, or for too many hours in a day. There were 60,767 missed breaks and 15,705 lost meal times, according to California Representative George Miller’s February 2004 report on Wal-Mart’s practices. Note that those thousands of violations were recorded in one week among a small fraction of Wal-Mart’s US employees. Oxfam documents repeated violations of child-labor laws and rights to breaks worldwide.

Congressman Miller estimates that “one 200-person Wal-Mart store may cost federal taxpayers $420,000 per year” in healthcare, housing assistance, food-stamp and other costs because so many Wal-Mart workers’ wages fall below the poverty line. With the average store employing 350, the $420,000 is likely an underestimate. Those pushed-off costs alone would account for over 15 percent of Wal-Mart’s 2002 profits. “Externalization” of social costs is practically official Wal-Mart policy worldwide.

Miller and others have pointed out that despite all the propaganda, Wal-Mart’s prices are not consistently the lowest. But even if the price of a box of detergent is 10 percent lower, hasn’t Wal-Mart effectively raised its price if it helped cut wages 20 percent? Miller points out that since the 2001 recession, the US has seen a dramatic shift from high-paying to low-paying jobs. For instance, in New Hampshire, which still has not recovered the number of jobs it lost in the recession, new jobs pay 35 percent lower wages than lost jobs. In Delaware, those wages are 43 percent lower... “Wal-Martization” parallels worldwide continue: systematic discrimination against women; forced unpaid work; illegal overtime and no pay for overtime; sharp restrictions on bathroom breaks; massive “churning” of the labor force; the use of immigrant labor, sometimes effectively enslaved.

Oxfam reports that “In the past six years, there have been five federal prosecutions for slavery in Florida’s agricultural sector.” Fortune last year documented industry use of enslaved immigrant workers in capitalist Asia, producing faceplates for Motorola cellphones, among other commodities.

And everywhere “Wal-Martization” spells opposition to organizing efforts by workers, extending to blacklists and sometimes even use of death squads.

Ironically, Wall Street’s backing of Wal-Mart has contributed to massive “overproduction” of retail stores and supermarkets in the US and the world. In the past four years, Kmart, Ames, Bradlees and Caldor’s have all declared bankruptcy, leaving huge bad debts and mass layoffs. Over 10,000 supermarkets have shut down in the US. Wal-Mart offers an illustration in the link between “overproduction,” losses and unemployment, and how capitalism’s “solutions” end up exacerbating the problem.

Wal-Mart’s negative impact on labor in the US is large indeed. Its impact in China is also large, through both its growing number of stores and use of suppliers and subcontractors. But Wal-Mart could meet its match in China.

Unlike technology companies that bring know-how to China, there is little evidence that Wal-Mart contributes much if anything to China. On the contrary, the evidence points to Wal-Mart plundering China’s workers and the Chinese state.

Hourly wages in China are now more than double those prevailing in Indonesia, Bangladesh and several countries in Africa. Yet over 80 percent of Wal-Mart’s 6,000 supplying factories worldwide are in China. Why? One reason is that China’s workers, from engineers to assembly workers, are better educated. And they were not educated at Wal-Mart’s expense, but at China’s. Furthermore, the Chinese state, which is a product of a socialist revolution, has built a remarkable infrastructure, from highways and seaports to electric grids. This infrastructure greatly reduces Wal-Mart’s effective costs. Social accounting of the real cost to China of Wal-Mart’s $15-billion-plus annual purchases – more than one percent of China’s GDP – points to plunder.

A US condition for China’s admission to the World Trade Organization was that it open its market to Wal-Mart and similar retailers. This too is directed against labor. Why?

Because the expansion of Wal-Mart stores could rapidly devastate the relatively primitive distribution network in China, from the millions of Mom-and-Pop stores to the department stores with roots in the nationalized economy. It could thus contribute to greater unemployment and instability in the country, and to weakening labor and the Chinese state itself.

But this outcome is by no means inevitable. Labor law in China mandates union representation in workplaces with 25 or more employees. All Wal-Mart stores, and probably a majority of its suppliers and subcontractors, are violating this law. In fact, Wal-Mart’s subcontractors are notorious for sweatshop conditions, violations of labor standards and laws, even physical abuse of workers and evasion of payment of wages. An investigation by Business Week documented several such violations in China in 2000 – and placed the blame squarely on Wal-Mart as the party ultimately responsible for them.

The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) developed into its present form largely as the result of the 1949 socialist revolution. The revolution nationalized industry and instituted a planned economy. But important questions of economic development were not resolved. Great concessions have been made to capitalism in an effort to resolve them. For the ACFTU, this has meant difficult, even wrenching changes. One of the most difficult is that, unlike the situation at state-owned enterprises, the fundamental interests of managers of private enterprises are opposed to workers.

The ACFTU – China’s equivalent of the AFL-CIO – is facing the challenge. Led by Wang Zhaoguo, its new chairman, the 14th National ACFTU Congress last fall amended its constitution to stipulate that defense of workers’ rights was its fundamental task, period. Previously, this was one of several non-binding social functions, together with building the economy, cultural development of workers, etc. This important change may set the stage for a “division of labor” within China, where greater ACFTU independence and defensive capacity strengthens the Chinese state and labor’s power.

And the ACFTU has been calling to unionize Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart management’s response has been to reject the demand and ignore the ACFTU. Its defiance and the practices of its suppliers and subcontractors are setting the stage for cooperation between the ACFTU and unions in various countries where Wal-Mart operates, including the US.

Zhang Hongzun, chairman of China’s 22-million-member Educational Workers’ Union, told Roberta Wood of the People’s Weekly World at last summer’s conference of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, “If we can organize Wal-Mart in Beijing, it would be a way to show support for the American labor movement… We’d like to join hand-in-hand to make common efforts for workers’ rights.”

China is where Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world, could meet its match. By addressing workers’ common interests and concerns across borders, labor will bring an end to the miserable practices of Wal-Mart and its classmates. Those interests range from good jobs, decent housing, childcare and education for all, to avoiding the havoc caused by night work. In 1871, the Paris Commune called for banning all unnecessary night work. Tomorrow’s victories will necessarily arise on the shoulders of the 1949 socialist revolution in China, and 1917 and 1871 before it, on the way to even greater struggles and victories. With Communist and union initiatives, the world’s largest corporate outlaw will yet spur on increased international labor unity.

--Wadi'h Halabi is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.