People Before Profit blog

Reform or Revolution

Wed, 05 May 2010 08:51:00 +0000

Abraham Lincoln composed the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation for a cabinet meeting in July 1862. He believed, however, that a Union victory on the battlefield was necessary in order that the proclamation would appear both crediblee and strong. The Battle of Antietam, in which Union troops turned back a Confederate invasion of Maryland, and still the largest single day of casualties in our history, gave him the opportunity to issue a preliminary proclamation on September 22, 1862.

As the civil war progressed through 1862, over rivers of blood that astonished the world, the proclamation drafts became ever more firm, emancipating ever larger shares of the slave population. Following its official invocation, on Jan 1 1863, the emancipation erased from history and existence two social classes, two entire ways of life: slaves, and slaveholders. When they were gone, so too went an entire social order, and an entire system of practices, laws, religion, occupations, relations of production, land management, professions, institutions and beliefs. Those familiar with early US history know that this collision did not erupt overnight, but after "four score and seven years" of attempts at compromise. Kansas proved that the nation could not remain "half slave, and half free". The system of chattel slavery could not, and would not, be 'reformed' out of existence, and it could not coexist, even within a single state, with free labor, free soil, or industrial capitalism.

As Fredrick Douglass said:

"The Dreadful Calamity came not unbidden,
nor by Accident, nor was the truth from any hidden
Shun not the harvest of blood sown beam-deep

By acts of horror by God forbidden
Repeat not the mistakes of our Fathers known
Because God is not dead, by blood alone
must Slavery fierce and foul have been undone."

How can this not be called "revolutionary" change? Perhaps the largest armed mobilization in history (up to that time) alongside the suspension of habeas corpus (the right to review arbitrary detention and arrest) – both turned against a nation's own people – should dispose of any argument that the civil war was a "reform" movement. And yet, the entire rebellion and its complete suppression occurred within a constitutional framework. Powers employed by the president were granted by Congress, and upheld by the Supreme Court. This "constitutional" feature was hardly an unimportant aspect of American success in maintaining its union, and strengthening its democratic republic.

There is an interesting connection between the US civil war, and the Russian 1905 revolution that, in the end, failed to overthrow the Tsarist autocracy. In that revolution all forces, including those of the Tsar, agreed in words with the proposition that there should be a popular "constituent assembly." However, in reality, no democratic republic could succeed that did not abolish the ancient feudal classes of lords and peasants, and that did not free all those classes bound to "putrid and oppressive relations" (Vladimir Lenin's phrase).

Had not the first American revolution destroyed any chance of such relations overtaking our land from England's monarchy, we might still be colonies. In a sense, that Russian revolution in 1905 failed because it adopted a "reform" position on social and economic questions that would not wither away of their own accord. The "constituent assembly" founded in the rebellion thus was fatally compromised because it did not accomplish the task of actually constituting itself – which would have required, as did the abolition of slavery in the US, force of arms to resolve.

That failure led directly to the 1917 ultimate collapse of the Russian state in the midst of WWI. The Social Democrats, with a strong base in the industrial working class, and the armed forces, proved the only social group sufficiently coherent to get the job of abolishing feudalism done. But they were compelled to do so under the most adverse circumstances imaginable. No constitution, no democratic institutions, and a country starving, destitute and ruined by war. Unlike in the US, the emerging capitalist (business) classes could not be persuaded to drop their ties to the feudal system. The salvation of their country fell to Russian workers and peasants alone, a titanic task for which later history perhaps showed they were unprepared, but from which they did not shrink.

Now we are confronted with a question: Is the social and economic class of "finance capitalist" no longer compatible with a genuinely democratic republic? There is no question, in this writer's view, that they must become LESS powerful, LESS dominant, and a SMALLER component of both our economy and our political system. That's what "financial reform" is all about. I am currently of the opinion the REFORM is possible. I do NOT think the time has come to put this class out of business. But I am not sure we can wait "four score and seven" to find out for sure, given the stakes at hand. History gives contradictory answers.

As Carl Davidson says – we have to keep on keeping on – and the truth will be revealed. Reform, or revolution? Either way, we will make it!

Photo: First reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. (Francis Bicknell Carpenter, oil on canvans, 1864)

The Freeze and the Fire

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 16:37:00 +0000

President Obama has been rumored for weeks to be considering appeasements to the budget deficit critics. So he proposes to freeze discretionary spending everywhere but defense and so-called entitlement spending. Never mind that mass unemployment has not receded, that lending is not expanding, that signs in the Fall of upticks in growth have already been revised downward. Never mind that without health care reform, without a serious draw down in unemployment, or without cuts in military spending, real deficit reduction is a joke.

Paul Krugman quotes Jonathan Zasloff, who wrote that “‘the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon’ (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to ‘liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness.’)”

It's hard to imagine a more serious error in addressing economic recovery challenges arising out of the Great Recession. It's hard to imagine a worse conclusion to draw from the recent Massachusetts election. Its hard to imagine a more telling lesson in crisis politics for working people: we are our own protection. Nothing, not even a sympathetic president, can replace the role of the multitudes in motion when the government has been demonstrably captured by corporate interests.

And capture is the right word. If the recent Supreme Court decision wiping out all restrictions on corporate control of election campaigns were not enough, this political collapse by the president on the most burning question – government intervention to spur job creation – should be clear warning: the salvation of American democracy rests on the ability and willingness of the people to take to the streets.

Both the Court decision on elections, and Obama's retreat, if not reversed – will not be the end. In fact, such a blatant, undisguised assertion of corporate power has not happened since before the last great crisis in 1929 when closet Nazi-sympathizers like Andrew Mellon were spewing their venom openly. I doubt this step was taken lightly. This kind of capture of state cannot be sustained without further aggressive suppressions of popular access to democratic institutions and processes.

Some may say its a matter of presidential character – perhaps Roosevelt was a stronger president. I reject that. Any strength Roosevelt, in retrospect, displayed over Obama was only possible because the strength of the people's mobilizations overcame corporate arrogance. The same will be true now.

So far, on practically every initiative the President has taken (except Afghanistan) I have found myself joining his campaigns, phone banks, etc.

This time – I will be calling and organizing to defeat the Freeze, and turn up the Fire.

Peace Activists Turn Backs on Gen. Petraeus at GA Tech

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 16:34:00 +0000

Original source: The Atlanta Progressive News

(APN) ATLANTA -- On January 19, 2010, thirteen Atlanta activists from Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition (GPJC), and Atlanta Grandmothers for Peace stood in silence and turned their backs on US General David Petraeus before being removed from the 1,100-person Ferst Theater on the Georgia Tech campus.

The activists wore t-shirts with messages like War is Not the Answer, Money for Jobs Not War, No to Endless War and Occupation, Veterans for Peace, and End the War - Yes We Can!

The activists included Randy Aronov, Bernice Bass; Doris Benit; Mike Burke; Pamela Chubbuck; David Epstein; Reid Jenkins; Ann Mauney; Betsy Miklethun; Dot Shaw; George Sossenko; and the present writer--Gloria Tatum.

Mauney, of GPJC, contradicted Petraeus's public relations message that the US is winning in the occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan.

"There is no military solution to the Afghanistan conflict, and... Gen. Petraeus, as a chief strategist for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and occupations, carries responsibilities for bankrupt US war policies," Mauney said during the protest.

"General Petraeus, the man from CENTCOM at MacDill AFB in St. Petersburg, definitely had the glint of a fifth star in his eyes and he reinforced that by telling a giant whopper about how the invasion of Afghanistan was launched after 9/11 because that's where the terrorists were from," Burke, a veteran of the US Invasion of Vietnam, wrote in an email obtained by Atlanta Progressive News.

In fact, the US government's own investigation into 9/11 contradicts Petraeus's assertion by concluding that the majority of terrorists who attacked the US were from Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan.

Petraeus then began his question and answer session with the rows of clean-cut Tech students and academics who were far more interested in the economics of occupation than a pull-out date.

Outside the Ferst Center, other opponents of endless war and occupation held a press conference and anti-war rally.

"Ever since the escalation in Afghanistan was announced, there has been a sharp upsurge in terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US," Dianne Mathiowetz, International Action Center Atlanta, said in a statement.

"Isn't it obvious that these endless wars just create endless terrorism?" Mathiowetz asked. "Why is General Petraeus only taking questions from Tech students? Is he afraid of questions from spouses and other loved ones of those who are dying in these endless wars, or from taxpayers who are paying for the war?"

Bob Goodman of the GPJC--as well as an APN contributor--composed and passed out 500 flyers to people waiting in line at the Ferst Center, with the questions advocates would have asked General Petraeus if given the opportunity.

SEE ALSO: Video by Judy Conder of Artemis Productions

The Obama Challenge to the Banks

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 16:32:00 +0000

The Banks: First he proposes to tax them – they are going to the Supreme Court to stop him if they can. Then he demands they pay back all that they owe – after the public watched the bailed-out banks handing out big bonuses as they are standing in unemployment lines. The president has taken a decidedly more combative, populist tone, moving to re-mobilize and rekindle commitment from the broad based forces that elected him.

Its time. As the election in Massachusetts I think shows: those forces are are hunkered down, frustrated, and increasingly angry at immense inequities alongside a persistent official 10 percent unemployment figure. They are facing down loss of retirement for themselves, or their parents or grandparents, foreclosed or underwater homes, inability to use credit (which many are compelled to start using for food and rent!), and increasing violence (there are upticks since the recession has deepened).

The Obama health care legislative battle has been much harder, more complex. longer and more exhausting than expected. After the election of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to succeed Ted Kennedy, dark clouds are forming over the prospects of any heath care bill passing soon. Voters' frustration appears driven mostly by the bad economy – but they are clearly, in larger numbers than previously thought, confused by the health care debate. Decisive moves on expanding the stimulus also appear blocked as fear of deficits expands – also largely the result of Republican propaganda, but also fueled by the bank bailouts that may have forestalled collapse, but have not really restarted credit visible to the consumer. The re-commitment to two of Bush's wars, neither of which seem headed toward sustainable conclusions, has also sounded warnings for many Americans stunned by the costs, and by the damage to their fellow citizen-veterans and the shape they are in coming back from the Mid-east, Afghani and Pakistani war zones.

While the Republicans have also made noises over "bailouts for bankers", its clear they are just cats paws for the banking industry themselves. They completely stonewalled – would not even meet to discuss – Senator Durbin's attempt to pass a mortgage reform that would have actually protected many homeowners from losing their homes unless they were unable to make payments on the REAL secured value of their house, rather than inflated rates of the bubble. That was the only real financial reform that could have put some significant money and help in working people's pockets. Republican concern for the victims of the financial crisis is clearly bogus – but that has to be demonstrated and exposed.

So it's a good, in fact necessary, step that Obama is calling the right wing bluff on financial reform, and that he is planning on taking needed funds for a second stimulus directly from the banks. I hope that he is serious. It addresses the deficit issue, unemployment, and the populist anger at the bailouts – all at once. The populist outpouring against Wall Street must not end up serving Republican ends, or it can wreck his presidency, and all of us at the same time.

The bottom line consequence of the financial crisis is that finance capital, and national investment policy in general, needs a substantial restructuring that the banks are going to have to accept, but that no amount of talk will ever persuade them. They must be forced There is no other alternative. To start – they must pay a fair piece of the price of getting people back to work. Tying financial reform to jobs is the only way to pull the center back into the 'forward progress' coalition. And more than ever, its clear that time is of the essence and that this must mean government directly hiring the unemployed. Stimulus contracts will not get the job done in time to prevent a Democratic setback – direct employment will make an immediate, and visible difference.

Finally, on the policy of bipartisanship that Obama has tried to encourage, but which has yielded such meager results. It's been clear to many for a long time that the Reaganite tendency in the Republican party, a tendency made even more reactionary by Bush and the right-wing media and religious movements, has long prepared to block the progress of social democracy in the United States by any means necessary, on every front, and no matter the consequence for the country's ultimate progress or prosperity. Bipartisanship makes sense if there is universal good will about the national interest at some level. It makes sense to expose those who claim the national interest but cannot put it in front of even the most extreme anti-democratic sentiments. This faction has seized de facto control over the Republican Party apparatus, and through the filibuster has veto power over the entire agenda voted in last year. One way or another, these forces, and their real financial backers, must be brought completely into the light and marginalized! If not the pundits criticizing Haiti for its so-called "failed state" mentality, will be having their lines read back to them.

The United States of Corporate America: From Democracy to Plutocracy

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:08:00 +0000

    "The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
    Plato, ancient Greek philosopher

    ...“The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
    Alex Carey, Australian social scientist

    “The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.”
    Noam Chomsky, M.I.T. emeritus Professor of Linguistics

On Tuesday, January 19 (2010), the Obama administration got a kick in the pants from the Massachusetts voters when they filled former Senator Ted Kennedy's seat by electing a conservative Republican candidate. The essence of their message was: stop dithering and start governing; stop trying to satisfy the bankers and please the editors of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, and start caring for the ordinary people.

Two days later, President Barack Obama seemed to have understood the people's message when he announced a “Volcker rule” that will forbid large banks from owning hedge funds that make money by placing large bets against their own clients, using information that these same clients gave them. It was time. Such a policy should have been announced months ago, if not years ago.

On the same day, however, a nonelected body, the U.S. Supreme Court, threw a different challenge to the Obama administration. Indeed, on Thursday January 21 (2010), a Republican-appointed majority on the U.S. Supreme Court took it upon itself to profoundly change the U.S. Constitution and American democracy. Indeed, in what can be labeled a most reactionary decision, the Roberts U.S. Supreme Court, ruled that legal entities, such as corporations and labor unions, have the same purely personal rights to free speech as living individuals. Indeed, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.

The only problem with such a wide interpretation of the U.S. Bills of Rights (N.B.: The first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights) is that this runs contrary its letter and its spirit, since it clearly states later on that "the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people, and reserves all powers not granted to the federal government to the citizenry or States.” The words “people” and “citizenry” clearly refer here to living human beings, not to legal or artificial entities such as business corporations, labor unions, financial organizations or political lobbies.

Such entities, for example, cannot vote in an election. Indeed, laws governing voting rights in the United States clearly establish that only “Adult citizens of the United States who are residents of one of the 50 states have the right to participate fully in the political system of the United States”. No mention is made of corporations or other legal entities.

However, with its January 19 (2010) decision, the majority on the Roberts U.S. Supreme Court is saying in effect that even if artificial entities cannot vote in an election, they can spend as much money as they like to influence the outcome of an election. Money is speech for them, and the more a legal entity has of it, the more it has a right to become powerful politically and control the political agenda.

In fact, what Chief Justice Roberts and his conservative Supreme Court majority have done is to overcome a century-old democratic tradition in the United States in granting a constitutional right to business corporations and to banks, (because they are really the ones with a lot of money), to use their enormous resources to not only participate in debates about public issues, but also, and above all, to de facto dictate the election of candidates of their choice to public office.

That's plutocracy, not democracy!

Plutocracy is defined as a political system characterized by “the rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth.” Democracy, on the other hand, is defined as a political system where political power belongs to the people. This means “a political government either carried out directly by the people (direct democracy) or by means of elected representatives of the people (representative democracy). The terms "the power to the people" are derived from the words "people" and "power" in Greek.

This fundamental idea of democracy was well summarized by President Abraham Lincoln, in his 1863 Gettysburg Address, when he said that it is “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” This is a definition that is based on the basic democratic principle of equality among human beings.

But now, the Roberts Court's decision must have made President Lincoln turn in his grave, because that decision, in effect, transfers political power from the living “people” to artificial corporate entities, with tons of money to spend. If Congress does not act quickly to reverse this decision, legal entities will be able to spend freely in the media to support or oppose political candidates for president and Congress, and this, as far as the last moment of a political campaign. This is quite something!

By a stroke of the pen, the Roberts Court has thus abolished the laws governing American electoral financing and removed limits to how much special money interests can spend to have the elected officials they want. The government they want will largely be “a government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.” Truly amazing!

To reflect the new political philosophy of the five-member majority of the Roberts Court, the Preambule of the U.S. Constitution that says “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union...” should, maybe, more appropriately be changed for “We, the business corporations of America...”

It is that much more ironic that the word “corporation” appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or in the Bill of Rights. It is scarcely conceivable that the drafters of the Constitution had anything resembling corporate entities in mind when they drafted the Bill of Rights. But the Roberts Court majority does not seem to agree with Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Mason...etc. Because of their decision, the five conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court of today have become the new Fathers of the U.S. Constitution.

For nearly a century, it has been assumed that the U.S. Bill of Rights protected persons, not corporations. Even if sometimes the courts have extended the rights of the 14th Amendment banning the deprivation of property without due process or equal protection of the law to the property of corporations, it was never thought that the purely personal rights of the first Amendment of the Bill of Rights applied to corporate entities as well as to human beings. This is understandable. Business corporations are created through legislation that gives them potentially perpetual life and limited liability to enhance their efficiency as economic entities. While such characteristics can be beneficial in the economic sphere, they represent special dangers in the political sphere. That is the rationale for not extending constitutional rights to purely legal entities.

But now, the five-member majority of the Roberts Court have said that such legalized artificial entities have the same constitutionally protected rights to engage in political activities as living individuals.

This is clearly revolutionary or, more precisely, counter-revolutionary.

(Photo by Jacob Garcia, courtesy Wikimedia Commons, cc by 2.0)

Video: Communist Party Convention Kick-off, with Sam Webb

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:04:00 +0000

See the official convention documents here:

Main Convention Discussion Document: U.S. Politics at a Transition Point
International Issues and US Foreign Policy
The Party Program in a Period of Transition
New Opportunities to Grow the Communist Party

How the US Impoverished Haiti

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:02:00 +0000

Author’s update: The horrific disaster that has befallen Haiti is perhaps unprecedented in the Western Hemisphere. Estimates now say that perhaps hundreds of thousands have died as a result of the Jan. 12 earthquake. The media have constantly recited, as a mantra, that Haiti’s weak infrastructure and poor quality of construction account for the large number of deaths. The implication is that Haitians are unable to govern and build a reliable, sustainable society.

The truth of the matter is that, left to their own efforts, Haitians would have been more than able to build a reliable democracy with adequate infrastructure. But they have never been allowed to do so – not by Europe and certainly not by the United States.

The article below was written in 2003. It attempts to describe how Haiti has been by design maintained as the most impoverished nation in our hemisphere.

Contact your congressional representatives and urge them to move Congress to increase aid to Haiti. For more on direct aid and action, go to Haitiaction.net.

Like this earthquake victim, Haiti has been crushed under U.S. exploitation and debt for most of its existence.

Though the demand by Haiti for reparations from France is just, it obscures the role the United States played in the process to impoverish Haiti – a role that continues to this day.

Today Haiti is a severely indebted country whose debt-to-export ratio is nearly 300 percent, far above what is considered sustainable even by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Both institutions are dominated by the U.S.

In 1980 Haiti’s debt was $302 million. Since then it has more than tripled to $1.1 billion, approximately 40 percent of the nation’s gross national product. Last year Haiti paid more in debt service than it did on medical services for the people.

Haitian officials say nearly 80 percent of the current debt was accumulated by the regimes of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier, Papa Doc and Baby Doc. Both regimes operated under the benign gaze of the United States that has had a long and sordid history of keeping Haiti well within its sphere of economic and political influence.

It is now well known that the primary source of Haiti’s chronic impoverishment is the reparations it was forced to pay to the former plantation owners who left following the 1804 revolution. Some of the white descendants of the former plantation owners, who now live in New Orleans, still have the indemnity coupons issued by France. So in fact, at least part of the reparations paid by Haiti went toward the development of the United States.

In 1825 Haiti was forced to borrow 24 million francs from private French banks to begin paying off the crippling indemnity debt. Haiti only acknowledged this debt in exchange for French recognition of her independence, a principle that would continue to characterize Haiti’s international relationships.

These indemnity payments caused continual financial emergencies and political upheavals. In a 51-year period, Haiti had 16 different presidents – new presidents often coming to power at the head of a rebel army.

Nevertheless, Haiti always made the indemnity payments – and, following those, the bank loan payments – on time. The 1915 intervention by the Marines on behalf of U.S. financial interests changed all of that, however.

The prelude to the 1915 U.S. intervention began in 1910 when the National Bank of Haiti, founded in 1881 with French capital and entrusted from the start with the administration of the Haitian treasury, disappeared. It was replaced by the financial institution known as the National Bank of the Republic of Haiti.

Part of the capital of the new national bank was subscribed by the National City Bank of New York, signaling, for the first time, U.S. interest in the financial affairs of Haiti.

The motivation for the original U.S. financial interest in Haiti was the schemes of several U.S. corporations with ties to National City Bank to build a railroad system there. In order for these corporations – including the W.R. Grace Corp. – to protect their investments, they pressured President Woodrow Wilson and his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, to find ways to stabilize the Haitian economy, namely by taking a controlling interest in the Haitian custom houses, the main source of revenue for the government.

After Secretary of State Bryan was fully briefed on Haiti by his advisers, he exclaimed, “Dear me, think of it! Niggers speaking French.”

Ironically, however, Bryan, a longtime anti-imperialist, was against any exploitative relationship between the U.S. and Haiti or any other nation in the Western Hemisphere. In fact he had long called for canceling the debts of smaller nations as a means by which they could normally grow and develop. Not surprisingly, Bryan’s views were not well received in Washington or on Wall Street.

Due to the near total ignorance at the State Department and in Washington generally about Haiti, Bryan was forced to rely on anyone who had first hand information. That person turned out to be Roger L. Farnham, one of the few people thoroughly familiar with Haitian affairs.

Farnham was thoroughly familiar with Haitian affairs because he was vice-president of the National City Bank of New York and of the new National Bank of the Republic of Haiti and president of the National Railway of Haiti. In spite of the secretary of state’s hostility to Wall Street and Farnham’s obvious conflict of interest, Bryan leaned heavily on Farnham for information and advice.

As vice president of both National City Bank and the National Bank of the Republic of Haiti, Farnham played a cat and mouse game with the Haitian legislature and president. Alternately, he would threaten direct U.S. intervention or to withhold government funds if they did not turn over control of the Haitian custom houses to National City Bank. In defense of Haitian independence, lawmakers refused at every juncture.

Finally, in 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, Farnham was able to convince Washington that France and Germany posed direct threats to the U.S. by their presence in Haiti. Each had a small colony of business people there.

In December of 1914, Farnham arranged for the U.S. Marines to come ashore at Port Au Prince, march into the new National Bank of Haiti and steal two strongboxes containing $500,000 in Haitian currency and sail to New York, where the money was placed in New York City Bank. This made the Haitian government totally dependent on Farnham for finances with which to operate.

The final and immediate decision to intervene in Haiti came in July of 1915 with yet another overthrow of a Haitian president, this time the bloody demise of Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.

For the next 19 years, the U.S. Marine Corps wielded supreme authority throughout Haiti, often dispensing medicines and food as mild forms of pacification. Within several years, however, charges of massacres of Haitian peasants were made against the military as Haitians revolted against the road building programs that required forced labor.

In one such incident at Fort Reviere, the Marines killed 51 Haitians without sustaining any casualties themselves. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt awarded Major Smedley D. Butler the Congressional Medal of Honor. That’s not unlike the awarding of Medals of Honor to the “heroes” of the massacre at Wounded Knee, in which hundreds of Sioux Native Americans were slaughtered in 1890.

Reports of U.S. military abuses against the Haitians became so widespread that NAACP official James Weldon Johnson headed a delegation to investigate the charges, which they deemed to be true.

While the U.S. occupation was not without some successes – the health care system was improved and the currency was stabilized – it was in other economic spheres where the most damage was done. For the entire 19-year duration of the intervention, maximum attention was given to paying off Haiti’s U.S. creditors, with little to no attention given to developing the economy.

In 1922 former Marine Brigade Commander John Russell was named High Commissioner of Haiti, a post he held until the final days of the occupation. Under Russell’s influence, all political dissent was stifled and revenue from the custom houses was turned over, often months ahead of schedule, to Haiti’s U.S. bond creditors, who had assumed loans originally extended to Haiti to pay off the French plantation owners’ reparations!

By 1929, however, with the Western world’s economic depression and the lowering of living standards throughout Haiti, serious student strikes and worker revolts, combined with Wall Street’s inability to lure serious business investors there, Washington decided it was time to end the military occupation. When then President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Haiti in 1934 to announce the pullout, he was the first head of a foreign nation in Haiti’s history to extend a visit.

Despite the American military pullout, U.S. financial administrators continued to dominate the Haitian economy until the final debt on the earlier loans was retired in 1947.

Soon after the U.S. withdrew from Haiti, a Black consciousness movement of sorts took hold that was the precursor of the “negritude” movement popularized by Aimee Cesaire and Leopold Senghor. Francois Duvalier, an early believer in “negritude,” came to power in the late 1950s, popularizing ideas that resonated with a population that had withstood a white foreign occupation for many years.

By the time Duvalier grabbed the presidency of the world’s first Black republic established by formerly enslaved peoples, Haiti had experienced more than 150 years of chronic impoverishment and discriminatory lending policies by the world’s leading financial institutions and powers. The economic forecast for Haiti has not improved, even with the democratic election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, since he has been consistently demonized in the U.S. and world press.

Three Views of Financial Reform

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:58:00 +0000

In my view, the three prevailing schools of thought on financial reform are as follows, with many economists sharing one or more features of the three:

1. Make the banks that engage in higher risks – mainly investment banks – smaller. Smaller investment banking sector is the most reliable path to smaller risk. Do this by restoring some or all of Glass-Steagal, which put firmer separation between investment banking using commercial and community bank depositors money. It also restricted selling public shares by investment banks which were predominantly partnerships, and whose own incomes rose or fell with the fortunes of their clients, not through speculation with other peoples savings or bets. An additional argument in favor of the "make them smaller" school – maybe they will have less bargaining power over national industrial and infrastructure policy through their extremely powerful lobbies.

2. Don't focus on making banking smaller. Their may be big political consequences if financing of national debt moves more and more offshore due to scaling down US finance. Plus some argue that there is no sure path to risk reduction through breaking up Goldman, JP Morgan, or Bank of America, or AIG. This group favors national tax, insurance and regulatory policy to control the amount of leverage in the system. This group seems to ignore the essential "fox guarding the chicken coop" behavior and bias (resulting from the flow of professionals in finance between public and private sectors) of the bureaucratic institutions designed to supervise giant, private financial institutions.

3. The unintended side-effects any government intervention are just too awful to contemplate – do nothing and in the "long run," when JM Keynes says "in the long run we are all dead!", markets will reach a "new equilibrium" – only the alleged "invisible hand" knows at what wages or living or social conditions such 'new equilibrium' may bring – perhaps the Pinochet solution! So what? So say the third group, mainly Republicans and those heavily tainted with policies that encouraged the Wall Street Bubble mania in mortgage-backed securities.

While I tend to favor #1, and certainly oppose #3 as completely useless, there is going to be a real problem moving big numbers of ordinary people into action on any financial reform that does not a) restore their lost 401 K pensions; or, b) Give them back their foreclosed home.

The closest thing to that was the cram-down bill by Durbin that got killed early on. That alone speaks volumes about what AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka characterized as our servitude to Wall Street in so many aspects of economic life. No reform under contemplation by Congress at this time, whether from the "make them smaller" or "let them be big but legislate some way to de-leverage them" factions, will bring back lost retirement funds and homes.

But if we think about financial reform in a more fundamental sense as a struggle to implement a collective, social reallocation of investment capital from less productive to the most productive, most strategic applications – then the fight for jobs, which is of such over-riding immediate AND long-range urgency, and affect the overwhelming majority of working families (every other family has a member without work), must inevitably exert the biggest pressure for a stronger national industrial (investment) policy, and thus large public share of investment dollars, and thus a relatively smaller private financial sector.

In a way, perhaps the jobs fight is our best path to impacting financial reform. The jobs fight DEMANDS that government compel the employment of the unemployed AND a net RISING standard of living for all workers.

The level and degree of innovation coming out of the private and corporate sector is constrained in many cases by the stalled demands for more powerful, more broad-based and more efficient infrastructures in many sectors (transportation, housing, connectivity, etc). The excessive diversion into "financial infrastructure innovation" for its own sake, was a truly parasitic development, and appears to have done some serious damage to the private sector's current capacity to innovate, according to innovation expert Michael Mandel. Rapid job creation from that sector may not be able to contend with the still very high levels of risk (and shortage of credit) still plaguing the system.

Perhaps the most important decision of all is where, exactly, to place our collective "bets" on the mix of investments that will promise the best and soundest basis for the future? One must consider many little-knowns and not a few complete unknowns:

    * How much should be invested in primarily scientific and technical research;
    * How much in overall education? Broadbased education reform is, and must be, simultaneously, a) rising standards, values, knowledge and skills; and b) a direct battle against poverty and political or economic inequities by race, nationality, and gender.
    * How much of GDP for health care?
    * How the variables of globalization, and all its economic and security entanglements, including war and peace, will impact available resources.
    * How to mobilize the the people as they adapt to the social changes all the big "bets" will entail. What is the broadest, sustainable, level of democracy possible in making decisions of such magnitude and consequence?--the people, collectively, I believe, make a wiser decisions than merely the most powerful faction at a given time. Accurate information is important in assessing risks, but life experience is what determines the range of uncertainty that can be tolerated.

As long as jobs and the public investment demands of a renewed national industrial and employment strategy are satisfied – perhaps, exactly HOW private financial capital is reorganized and re-regulated are best decided through Darwin's "natural selection" algorithm.

Josh and Conor – Home from War in Iraq

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:57:00 +0000

    Stand up and repeat these words in marching cadence:
    “I went down to the market
    Where all the people shop
    I pulled out my machete
    And I began to chop

    I went down to the park
    Where all the children play
    I took out my machine gun
    And I began to spray”

This is a chant that our young are taught to march to in our military today, and this is how two young veterans of the Iraq War begin their presentations to groups across the country. Josh Stieber and Conor Curran spoke in San Francisco late last Fall to a gathering of Veterans For Peace and civilian peace activists, as part of their six months of walking and biking from the East Coast to the West to engage in dialogue about war and to become involved in community service along the way. Both young men are from small, American heartland towns, Josh from Maryland and Conor from Ohio. They did not know each other until after they got themselves out of the military. They spoke of their motivations for joining the Marines, their experiences in Iraq and the turning points that made them reject violence.

The two called their cross-country odyssey “The Contagious Love Experiment” - certainly a retro, ‘60s ‘Hippie Haight-Ashbury’ moniker to more mature ears. The tag is both innocent and naive, but on a deeper level, it is their counter-balance to the brutality and disillusionment they experienced – their story and reasoning is worth listening to.

Josh, a tall, blond, “all-American-type” in his early 20s, was in junior high school in Maryland when September 11th happened. His determination to, as he saw it, protect his country was initiated when his parents took him to see the damage at the Pentagon – so he joined the Marines straight out of high school. Raised as a devout Christian, he pushed aside doubts while in basic training and forced himself to answer ‘yes’ to the question put to him, “Will you kill a ‘hostile’ even if lots of civilians are around who will get hurt?”

Conor, thin and tall with black curly hair, also became a Marine, but spoke more of being alienated during and after high school, wanting to fit in and be accepted, using “lots of drugs,” getting into debt, and not having a skill or education to direct him. So at 20 years old, “The Few and The Proud” seemed to give him all the answers. At the time, he says, being in the Marines helped him to change his values and gave him a “mission accomplished” feeling. He became a good soldier. But Conor’s second tour was when “it got heavy.”

Josh spoke frequently of his Christian up-bringing that taught him principles that are in complete opposition to the killing, fear and hatred he learned in Iraq. (To say nothing of the disconnect of being told that America was “liberating Iraq and bringing Freedom and Democracy” and the “chop and spray” chant!) He said that fear of and hatred for the Iraqi people would build up in the troops to the point where ripping apart homes, wrecking gardens and property, and arresting and abusing prisoners became commonplace. On the street, going out of the way to run a truck through mud to spray old people, or, during house searches, taking the dolls of little girls, twisting their heads off then giving them back became acceptable behavior. “Why do we make the locals fear the US military more than the insurgents?” he wanted to know. “We out terrorized the terrorists!”

He vividly recalled pulling guard duty on a prisoner with another young American soldier right after coming straight from a church service. Josh thought of the moral and religious lessons he learned at home in Maryland: “blessed are the peace makers;” “turn the other cheek;” and “love thine enemy,” as his buddy talked of how he was going to brutalize the prisoner. “Jesus wouldn’t let himself get punked around,” was his friends reply when Josh objected on Christian principles.

The insanity of war gradually became apparent to Josh during his 14-month tour of duty, as when he and his squad detained a man with ample evidence that the Iraqi had been involved in attacks on American soldiers. This man turned out to be the mayor of the town, and regular “payments” from US military authorities of school supplies and cash ensured a halt, at least in that part of town, of attacks on Josh and his men. So much for “we will not negotiate with terrorists,” he thought.

These revelations led this idealistic youth into a “bleak” period, he said, with feelings of hopelessness, “always looking over my shoulder,” and the realization that he’d always let others tell him how to think and how to live up to their expectations.

Neither young man spoke of killing any one, and no one from the audience asked, but each spoke of turning points when they decided they could not continue as soldiers. For Josh this was a gradual process, but for Conor it came during his second tour while conducting random searches with his squad for weapons caches in Ramadi, without adequate intel. They set upon a home with an exceptionally beautiful garden and proceeded to tear it apart and dig it up. “Then the man of the house came out with a tray and served us all tea!” said Conor. “He spoke English and wanted to be our friend. He showed love to us and we were terrorizing him.” Thus the seed for “The Contagious Love Experiment” was planted.

Conor and Josh had many encounters along the roads of America since the Spring, but the one that stood out for them was meeting a Vietnam War veteran who told them, “Instead of uniting against a common enemy, we should unite for a common goal – peace.”

--For more information, see: www.contagiousloveexperiment.wordpress.com. Part Two will be an interview with Salam Talib, an Iraqi refugee and Pacifica journalist who hosted Josh Stieber and Conor Curran in his home.

A Marxist and a Gentleman

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:55:00 +0000

Original source: Himal South Asian

Jyoti Basu (1914-2010) slipped into the night. He was a lifelong Marxist and Communist, and was the Chief Minister of Bengal from 1977 to 2000. Basu's service to Communism and to Bengal was equivalent: he wavered from neither.

Indian Communism reached an impasse in the 1970s, with the moderate CPI afflicted by its too close an association with the Emergency, and the reckless Naxalites undone by their misreading of the historical moment. The CPM, which was formed in 1964 with Jyoti Basu as one of its original Politburo members (the last to die), assessed Indian democracy as important enough to take seriously, to use its institutions and its Constitutional commitments to the fullest, while offering a sustained critique of its limitations. Mass organizing to build a viable alternative to the class domination of the democratic institutions was essential, and it was to this end that Basu and others like him had committed their lives over the course of the middle years of the Twentieth Century (Basu began his Communist work with the railway men's union).

In 1977, after ten years of united front work, opportunity knocked. The Communists had built a wide coalition in Bengal thanks to the grassroots work among the workers and peasants. This bloc presented the CPM and its allies with the majority in the State government. Basu was elected to lead the government. He held that post for twenty-three years, leading the Left Front to several successful elections. Aided by his comrades Harekrishan Konar and Benoy Choudhury, Basu initiated the most successful campaign of Indian Communism: the land reform and tenancy registration campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s. It was here that Basu's Bengal was able to demonstrate the vitality of a state government, even with its limited state powers (as opposed to the central government's power). A Communist government genuinely committed to the well-being of the masses was capable of much more than a bourgeois government, even when restricted by bourgeois legalism. In 1978, Basu told a reporter, "Under the Indian constitution, we cannot make the kind of basic changes that are needed. If we assumed national power in Delhi, things would be very, very different. But for now we must be content to make whatever small improvements we can in the lives of the poor people, to make life more livable."

Additionally, Basu's Bengal proved that the Naxalite adventure was unnecessary to push forward both reformist policies and non-reformist reforms; the latter are those that push the system to its limits. Mass enthusiasm for the land reforms and the tenancy registration campaign helped raise the productivity of Bengal's agriculture. Between 1950 and 1960, the compound annual rate of growth in rice production was a measly 1.01%; between 1980 and 1995, the rate rose to 5.03%. As Amartya Sen put it in 1992, "West Bengal - with a growth rate of over 7 percent per annum in agricultural value added - more than two and a half times the national average - can be described as the agricultural success story of the 1980s." Neither the Soviet Russian example nor the Chinese Maoist one was to be the model for India; the Indian Communists had to find their own method, and in the slogan of "govern and mobilize," they were able to establish a sensible path.

Pramod Dasgupta, one of Basu's closest comrades in the 1970s, worked out the general direction of Left Front governance in an interview in 1978, "Only when the village people have become politically aware will they be able to discharge the important functions to be transferred to the panchayats. In bourgeois parliamentary democracy, the common man has no political role once he has cast his vote in the election. We are determined to give him a continuing role in rural development. When the common villager has realized this role, he will be able to acquire self-confidence, and take collective initiative to change the life of the rural poor and the middle class. If even with the limited power at our disposal, we can accomplish certain things in the villages, we should be able to bring about a mass awakening among the rural people. Collective consciousness and thinking will rekindle the life-flame of the village poor; those who have for centuries been victims of exploitation will learn to stand up for their rights." It is this vision (land reform, tenant registration, panchayati rule) brought into practice by Basu's government and the mass organizations of the Left that produced immense gains for West Bengal. It also brought Bengal to the threshold of another problem: once having sorted out agrarian democracy, how does a state government, with restricted powers, in a neoliberal context (post-1991) deal with questions of employment and industry? This is the question that Basu's government put on the table in the 1990s; the question remains unanswered.

For Bengal, the Communist rule from 1977 onward has been a remarkable break from what came before. The torrential period under the Congress government of Siddhartha Shankar Ray has been largely forgotten only because of the success of the Left Front in creating a modicum of political stability and civic life in the state. When Ray was Chief Minister, violence was the order of the day. Communal tension and police excesses became very familiar. The "law and order killings" of the 1970s (263 CPM members killed by the police between March 17, 1970 and April 24, 1971) were preceded by a long history of brutal repression of worker's ordinary civic rights (the lathi charge of 300,000 hunger marchers in 1959 is emblematic). Such instability reigned in Bengal that the Central Government had to take over governance in 1968, and 30,000 people were arrested to calm things down. Routine mass arrests, routine "encounter killings" came alongside the collapse of Bengal's economy (some of it brought down by the historical tragedy of anachronism: plastics put paid to jute, for instance). Turmoil was the order of the day.

The terror of the 1970s was not happenstance. The Left had gained in strength. It had to be stopped. Basu later reflected on the events of the period, "Everything was preplanned and the Congress did not stop from even using the Naxalites and the breakaway factions of the erstwhile United Front to try and annihilate the CPM. The Naxalites had become more and more disoriented after getting alienated from the people and were stooping to the level of attacking teachers and students in their desperation. The CPM fought back against this anarchy and mindless violence. Our enemies thus made us their main target and fueled the Naxalites in their activities. On the one hand, they labeled the Naxalites as 'well-intentioned, brave young men,' and on the other, pilloried us for attacking the Naxalites. All this, when the reality was quite the opposite." Much the same kind of assault is ongoing these days in Bengal, and much the same kind of media spin is given to the political genocide against the CPM since 2007 (over 200 CPM supporters have been brutally assassinated by the Maoists-TMC in the western districts of West Bengal, in an area where the CPM candidate won the Lok Sabha election in 2009).

The Left Front rule from 1977 has to be given credit for bringing some measure of political calm to Bengal. Police excesses are not as they were, and political demonstrations are less easily targeted than they once were. In Kolkata, days after the Babri Masjid had been destroyed by the Sangh Parivar, Basu and the CPM went into action - a hands-across-Bengal movement drew many of us into a pledge to prevent the virus of communalism from returning to the state. An elderly man who happened to be holding my hand near Hazra crossing recounting his experiences from the days of the partition riots in the city. He feared a return to that madness, but then felt that it could not be thanks to the fortitude and civilization of Basu's Left Front. Basu would later put it plainly, "Barbarians destroyed Babri Masjid. We stood dishonored before the whole world." But not Bengal. It held fast.

Jyoti Basu was the longest serving Communist head of government in the world. He was 95 when he died. He lived a million lives. His life of commitment will allow millions of others to live their lives with dignity and hope.

Health Reform: A Small Step Forward

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:53:00 +0000

So we didn’t win the Public Option. It has been replaced with a vaguely defined government regulated insurance exchange.

Additionally, labor leaders were not able to completely remove the tax on working people to generate money for that program. As of now, they were able to:

• delay the tax for those of us who are state/local government employees or who have collectively bargained agreements,

• to increase the thresholds for premiums taxed for women, seniors and those with high risk occupations—whose health insurance premiums tend to be higher, and

• to exclude dental and vision from the calculations for the tax (starting in 2015).

Nevertheless, the inclusion of any tax on working people instead of taxing the corporate interests that got us in this situation in the first place is a qualitative loss from what we started with.

This is not the bill we fought for.

Single-payer advocates and many others might argue that we did not demand enough in the first place. And there is definitely validity in the notion that organized labor should have done more to support the single-payer movement outside of the beltway, even if they were pushing the public option on Capital Hill.

In light of the recent negotiations, corporate interests will blame the Obama Administration and Democrats to giving in to “special interests”. And they will undoubtedly criticize unions for stereotypically defending their own interests against unorganized workers in the country.

Though I don’t typically gamble, I’d argue they would do this regardless of what health bill was proposed, weak or strong, because it is in their interest to keep things as they are. The Right in every country has a strong tradition of over-simplifying important issues to divide the working class.

But that doesn’t mean we have to take the bait.

Taking a step back from our various positions to appreciate this incredibly complex, offensive (as in attacking the current healthcare industry) battle over healthcare—I’m not convinced this is the worst case scenario. In fact, it could do more to mobilize the working class than to demoralize it.

This is not the bill we fought for, …but it is the bill we’ve got. It is important for us to see it as a small step forward, and not a giant leap backwards.

I’m embarrassed to say that it seems that the Republicans have recognized the threat more than we have. This compromise could set the stage for a more emboldened fight for workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain, some of which can be fought in the form of the Employee Free Choice Act.

(I know…seems like such a distant memory.)

If workers with a collectively bargained health care plan are exempt from the tax on health coverage, wouldn’t we expect workers without a union to try to form one to win their own contracts?

If I am right, it could also jumpstart motivation for workers in Right-to-Work-for-Less states and states with other backwards labor policies to struggle for the right to collectively bargain.

Does this mean that union leaders should only fight for their members and not the entire working class? Of course not! But in a toxic political climate, pre-midterm elections, when all else fails, should they continue to fight like hell for their actual members? You better believe it!

Ultimately we know that healthcare as a profitable industry is just wrong, and it should be replaced with not more insurance (private or public), but simply good care—a system where doctors, pharmacists, and hospital administrators are government employees. (Yes, government-run healthcare—the Republican nightmare)

But for now, under these circumstances, we have to struggle much harder to win much smaller gains. As satisfying as it may seem to threaten the Democrats during an election year, it would be an empty threat until our movement can get it together enough to build a truly independent political machine that can challenge the Democrats. Without one, our threat to kick Democrats out of office this November is merely a gateway back to Republican domination.

Chileans Seek Change: Interview with the Pres. of the Communist Party of Chile, Guillermo Teillier

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:49:00 +0000

Editor's note: On December 13, Chile held elections, with four candidates for President: billionaire center-right candidate Sebastian Pinera, (44 percent), Eduardo Frei (30 percent), from the center-left Concertacion, which has governed in Chile since the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Marco Enriquez Ominami, (19 percent), an independent who has attracted a large vote due to his criticism from the left of the failures of the Concertacion, and Jorge Arrate (six percent), the candidate of “Juntos Podemos,” a coalition that included the Communist Party.

Since no candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote, there will be a runoff election on January 17.

As notable was the historic election of three Communists to the Congress, for the first time since 1973. The three are Guillermo Teillier, the Party’s president, Lautaro Carmona, its general secretary, and Hugo Gutierrez.

In this interview, we asked Mr. Teillier about his own victory as well as how he sees the presidential contest.

The website of the Communist Party is Chile is wwww.pcchile. org.

The interview was conducted by Elena Mora, a featured writer for the People's World and a contributor to Political Affairs.

Elena Mora: How did you do it? What was different in this election, where you, the three Communist candidates, were able to win?

Guillermo Teillier: Well, what was different was that up to now, we relied on our own forces, or on a very small alliance of forces, allowing us to get something like five, or seven, or even eight percent of the vote. We could never get candidates elected because the “binomial” (two-party) electoral system did not allow it. Parties or coalitions that get less than 35 percent of the vote were not able to get candidates elected. Even though in some districts we got up to 28 percent of the vote, we were not able to be elected.

In this instance, we made a joint electoral pact with the “Concertación” governing coalition and that allowed us to be elected. Actually, in three districts it allowed us to win a majority on a ticket called “Concertación and ‘Together we can achieve more democracy’” This allowed us to get three Deputies elected.

EM: So you were joint candidates of the Concertación and of “Junto podemos?”

GT: Yes, our coalition was called “Junto podemos” [Together we can], and we had Jorge Arrate as our presidential candidate. In this situation we formed a pact between both coalitions and we formed a joint ticket, which was called “Concertación y Junto Podemos por Más Democracia” [Concertación and Together we can achieve more democracy]. The purpose was to be able to break into the political process, having three Deputies elected. The previous situation only ended up with our exclusion from the parliamentary process during these last twenty years of transition to democracy.

However, we need to change the “binomial” electoral system into a proportional system. Our proposals go further than that: changing the Constitution, totally changing the institutions that were established by Pinochet which have changed very little during these twenty years.

EM: Yes indeed—as you know, this “binominal” system [of two dominant parties] is, as you know, a problem here in the United States as well. But what were the most important questions for the Chilean people? What was your electoral program?

GT: Well, it’s the same electoral program that we put forth with Jorge Arrate. We drew up this program with popular meetings, with organizations and labor unions, where we discussed a left program. And these bases, these grassroots meetings of thousands or tens of thousands, we could say, culminated in a nationwide assembly of more than 2,500 grassroots delegates from all over the country. These are the ones who gave final approval to the program and decided on who would be the candidates of the Left.

This program draws upon the people’s feelings, and seeks institutional changes such as changing the Constitution, changing the electoral system, and returning to the State the powers that were taken away by the Pinochet dictatorship. We want a pluri-national state, recognizing the rights of the indigenous peoples. We also seek to restore the rights of the workers. In the last 20 years not a single right, of all those that were stolen by the dictatorship, has been restored to the workers.

These are institutional changes. But there are also other changes that we are seeking, related to the economy. For example, we propose to keep Chilean copper Chilean and resist privatization, because 70 percent of the copper is being mined by foreign companies. We need to either re-nationalize the copper industry, or at very least ensure that the majority of the profits stay in Chile, because these businesses have taken out 70 billion dollars in profits during the last five years, while paying only three million dollars in taxes.

There’s also the matter of the nationalization of water resources. Water in Chile is in the hands of private companies, but we propose that this ought to be public property, for public use, and that the State is the rightful owner of the water resources.

And speaking of human rights, we want the repeal of the Amnesty law [protecting those who committed crimes during the Pinochet dictatorship], because there is a risk of amnestying those who are guilty of crimes against humanity. One thing is sure: if Piñera, the candidate of the Right, would win, this would happen.

There are also the issues of education and health care, both of which affect all the population. State support needs to be strengthened, because what has happened in Chile is that both these systems have been privatized.

And there’s a program that has to do with the industrialization of the country, with state intervention. Article 9 of the Constitution prohibits the state from intervening in the private manufacturing sector. But this goes against Chile’s traditions, because the state has traditionally helped Chilean industries. But what happened is that since the dictatorship these have been turned over to transnational corporations or to domestic monopolies. But these have made no contribution to the industries. And the State is prohibited from establishing manufacturing industries.

We say that the State ought to provide the biggest impulse for industrialization, this without in any way putting down private enterprise, above all small and medium sized businesses.

But we need to address the problem of the enormous levels of unemployment that exist in Chile. Ten or eleven percent of the workers in Chile are unemployed, which means 800,000 workers who are jobless at this moment.

This is the basic part of the program. There are many other themes that are important, including the environment, protection for the people in relation to the abuses of the financial system. The system is heavily loaded down with debt, but nobody controls the financial system. So, we propose different types of controls on the financial system.

As to workers’ pension systems, we propose the return of a pension system under which the State as well as bosses and workers contribute to retirement funds, instead of only the workers contributing. At present, pension funds are being administered by three or four big transnationals, and in general, on retiring a worker gets one quarter or one fifth of his or her former salary, while these big pension administrators make fortunes every year. What is more, they invest workers’ contributions outside of the country, and due to the current crisis, they have lost more than 25 billion dollars in foreign stock markets. Nobody’s going to return this amount to the workers.

So, all this forms part of our program. This is how we are with the people, and it is basically why the people voted for us.

EM: Yes, all these themes are very similar to ours. But how did people react to the fact that Communists won seats in Congress?

GT: Well, for me, the best satisfaction that one can experience is to see the immense happiness that pervaded the country, from north to south. The parties, the celebrations, the happiness in the streets, everything was incredible. Thousands of people came out in different places in the country. It was happiness overflowing. In reality, we didn’t even think it was that much that we had accomplished. Emotions went way beyond just Communists or supporters of our electoral ticket. It was the ordinary people who were rejoicing, feeling that our victory was their own.

EM: Newspapers here were saying that young people did not vote in large numbers. How do you see this?

GT: Well, here, young people have a great lack of confidence in the political system, especially because of the persistence of Pinochet-era institutions, and there are 3 million eligible voters who have not registered. For this reason, young people between 18 and 25 years old only represent seven or eight percent of registered voters. In Chile, voter registration has stayed at about 8 million during recent elections, without much change, and young people are not registering to vote. This is understandable, because politics has involved lots of corruption at very high levels, election promises are never fulfilled.

So it’s not that young people are not interested in politics. It’s just that they don’t want to participate in this process, which they say is pointless. However, on this occasion, among the young people who did vote, we got the greatest majority. This may imply that a change is coming in young people’s thought-patterns, with a certain degree of hope in what we are proposing.

In Chile a system of automatic voter registration was recently approved, which means that everyone is automatically registered to vote if they qualify. Voting is voluntary. This is certainly going to affect future elections, and we will see if there will be increased consciousness or not. We will see how this affects the youth vote, as well as rest of the electorate. Given that voting is still voluntary, we will see if they will continue to vote at current levels, or whether they will continue to stay away from the polls or cast blank ballots. We shall see what happens.

EM: Did they change the law for THIS election, this about voter registration?

GT: No, the law was changed, but it did not come into effect in time for this most recent election. It will come into effect for the next election. This change in the law also has another consequence: Granting absentee voting to Chileans who are outside of the country. This will affect between 800.000 and 1,000,000 Chileans. The Right was fiercely opposed to granting the vote to Chileans outside of the country.

We fought for the right to vote for Chileans outside the country. We argued that if all Chileans were to be automatically registered to vote, Chileans in other countries would have to have the right to vote as well. The State would have to make arrangements for them to be able to vote. And this will continue to be a controversy, because the Right is still opposed to allowing Chileans living outside the country the right to vote.

EM: And the problem of the Right… How do you address this? For example, looking from the outside, it seemed to us to be a risk that the Right would win the next election. How do you see the road ahead and the danger of the Right in the next election? When is it? In January?

GT: January 17 is the runoff election. The panorama is contradictory; on the one hand we have the advance of the Left and the themes that the leftist coalition is proposing, and the candidacy of Marco Enríquez-Ominami, who was another presidential candidate who got 20 percent of the vote with a progressive, center-left platform with a few more progressive standpoints.

But why contradictory? Because there is the risk that the Right will win. In the first round of voting they got 44 percent of the votes. It’s true that 56 percent of Chileans did not vote for the Right, and don’t want a rightist government. But at the same time, they don’t want things to keep on exactly as they are now. They want change. So, what we have done is, we don’t want the Right to win, and we have not given them any openings. We know the implications that this has domestically and internationally, that in Chile there has been a rightist candidacy, supported by the most reactionary sectors.

Piñera is an intimate friend of US imperialism. He [Piñera] has been in Colombia, and is in favor of U.S. military bases in Colombia. So what we told leaders of the Eduardo Frei campaign is that they had to get closer to the people’s progressive and leftist feelings. So, he made a twelve-point proposal, adopting a big part of our platform. This is directed to that 26 percent of the electorate who did not vote for the Right but who did not want “business as usual.”

This is opening the way. We, as “Juntos podemos” and also as the Communist Party, have announced that we will vote for Eduardo Frei, and that we’re going to campaign based on those twelve points. Our role will be to demand the fulfillment of those twelve points.

That’s where we’re at up to this point. There are very few days left before the elections, and our purpose is to increase the Left’s possibilities of winning. We’re not going to participate in that government, but we are willing to come to a convergence around broad goals, not only political goals but also social goals, for some of the points that interest us, such as changes to the Constitution, workers’ rights, and other things that are in Eduardo Frei’s 12 points.

EM: Well, thanks a lot, comrade, and best of luck. We are all very interested in what is happening there in Chile with the election of Communist candidates, and also the struggle against the Right. Right now, Latin America is a very interesting place for the world progressive movement. We’re very happy about what has happened, and we wish you good luck in the January elections. Thanks for your time.

Obama Scores Points for Transparency

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:42:00 +0000

The Obama administration has scored high marks for curbing lobbyist influence and transparency, says a new report by a group of government watch dogs.

According to the report jointly authored by Common Cause, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters and US PIRG, "The cumulative effect of the administration's actions has been to adopt the strongest and most comprehensive lobbying, ethics and transparency rules and policies ever established by an administration to govern its own activities."

The report covered seven areas, of which the administration earned "A's" or "B's" in six.

First, the president changed the rules governing the ability of former administration officials to find jobs as lobbyists. The new rules, handed down on President Obama's first day in office by executive order, prohibit any person in the administration who might leave from "lobbying for compensation" as long as Obama is in office. In addition, the rule places other unprecedented restrictions on former administration officials who make official requests from the departments or agencies for whom they had worked.

The rule may seem minor, but as the report noted, "[p]ublic officials may be influenced in official actions by the implicit or explicit promise of a lucrative job in the private sector with an organization seeking to shape public policy on matters of economic importance to the organization or seeking a government contract or grant."

The new rule closes off potential influence-peddling, earning an "A" from the joint report.

The report also awarded an "A" to the administration for new transparency rules ordered by the president that make some White House documents a matter of public record, such as the visitor logs held in such secrecy by the Bush administration.

In addition, the report singled out new rules that prohibit federal agencies from hiring people registered as lobbyists. According to the report, the Bush administration "installed numerous top officials in regulatory agencies who were lobbyists or representatives of the industries they were appointed to oversee." J. Steven Griles, a coal industry lobbyist , and Philip Cooney, who worked for the American Petroleum Institute, were hired to help shape Bush's energy and climate change policies.

Essentially, with the help of these individuals, the coal and oil industries wrote Bush's policy of denying the impact of climate change and the need to invest in the renewable energy sector.

The comprehensive report further praised the president for his administration's ban on gifts from lobbyists, restrictions on their ability to seek Recovery Act funds, and their ability to sit on federal advisory boards and commissions.

The report gives the administration a "no grade," however, for its apparent slowness in imposing tougher restrictions on the persons or interests seeking access to TARP funds (for the Wall Street bailout) than had been put in place by the Bush administration. When the Bush administration created the program, it came under sharp criticism when it was revealed that banks simply filled out a one or two page request for funds, the details of which it could keep from public scrutiny. The new rules require all written requests for TARP funds to be publicly available.

Upon release of the report, Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform Norm Eisen, who advised the president on these reforms, commented that the president has ordered every federal agency to adopt open government policies, expanded public access to government documents through the Freedom of Information Act, and the creation of a "declassification" center to make secret documents publicly available more quickly.

"This work has represented the first important steps in making government more accessible and accountable," Eisen said.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told reporters that the president's actions on transparency and ethics is unprecedented. Greater transparency encourages more civic participation and faith in government, through ensuring accountability and honesty, he said. "We're very pleased that these reform groups recognized that in this first year report card," Pfeiffer remarked. "But it's only the first step of a process."

He added that the president is committed to further reforming campaign finance rules to reduce corporate influence.

Trumka: Political Courage Needed to Handle Jobs Crisis

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:41:00 +0000

Remarks by Richard L. Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, National Press Club, Washington, D.C.
January 11, 2010

Good morning and thank you, Donna (Lienwand). I am delighted to be here at the National Press Club. I want to thank the officers of the Press Club for the invitation to be with you today, especially President Lienwand and speakers’ committee member Bob Carden.

Ten days into the new decade, and one year into the Obama Administration, our nation remains poised between the failed policies of the past and our hopes for a better future. This is a moment that cries out for political courage – but it is not much in evidence.

I spent the first week of this year traveling on the west coast. In San Francisco, I was arrested with low-wage hotel workers fighting to protect their health care and pensions from leveraged buyouts gone bad. In Los Angeles and San Diego, I talked with working Americans moved to tears by foreclosure and unemployment, outsourcing and benefit cuts.

Everywhere I went, people asked me, why do so many of the people we elect seem to care only about Wall Street? Why is helping banks a matter of urgency, but unemployment is something we just have to live with? Why don’t we make anything in America anymore? And why is it so hard to pass a health care bill that guarantees Americans healthy lives instead of guaranteeing insurance companies healthy profits?

As I travelled from city to city, I heard a new sense of resignation from middle class Americans, people laid off for the first time in their lives asking, “What did I do wrong?”

I came away shaken by the sense that the very things that make America great are in danger. What makes us unique among nations is this: In America, working people are the middle class. We built our middle class in the 20th century through hard work, struggle and visionary political leadership. But a generation of destructive, greed-driven economic policies has eroded that progress and now threatens our very identity as a nation.

Today, on every coast and in between, working women and men are fighting to join the middle class and to protect and rebuild it. We crave political leadership ready to fight for the kind of America we want to leave to our children and against the forces of greed that brought us to this moment. But instead we hear a resurgence of complacency and political paralysis. Too many people in Washington seem to think that now that we have bailed out the banks, everything will be okay.

In 2010, our elected leaders must choose between continuing the policies of the past or striking out on a new economic course for America—a course that will reverse the damaging trend toward greater inequality that is crippling our nation.

At this moment, the voices of America’s working women and men must be heard in Washington – not the voices of bankers and speculators for whom it always seems to be the best of times, but the voices of those for whom the New Year brings pink slips and givebacks, hollowed-out health care, foreclosures and pension freezes – the roll call of an economy that long ago stopped working for most of us.

Today I want to talk to you about the labor movement’s vision for our nation.

Working people want an American economy that works for them – that creates good jobs, where wealth is fairly shared, and where the economic life of our nation is about solving problems like the threat of climate change rather than creating problems like the foreclosure crisis. We know that growing inequality undermines our ability to grow as a nation – by squandering the talents and the contributions of our people and consigning entire communities to stagnation and failure.

If we are going to make our vision real, we must challenge our political leaders, and we must also challenge ourselves and our movement.

Workers formed the labor movement as an expression of our lives – a chain of responsibility and solidarity, making millions of people here in America and around the world into agents of social change – able to accomplish much more together than as isolated individuals. That movement gives voice to the hopes, values and interests of working people every day. But despite our best efforts, we have endured a generation of stagnant wages and collapsing benefits – a generation where the labor movement has been much more about defense than about offense, where our horizons are shrinking rather than growing.

But the future of the labor movement depends on moving forward – on innovating and changing the way we work, on being open to all working people and giving voice to all workers, even when our laws and employers seek to divide us from each other. And that is something we are working on every day.

The AFL-CIO is building new ways for working people to organize themselves, and new models for collective bargaining. We have created Working America, a 3 million member community-based union growing in working class neighborhoods – that is one of the signal accomplishments of my predecessor John Sweeney, who I’m so happy is here today.

We are very proud of our alliance with the workers’ center movement that links the unions of the AFL-CIO with hundreds of grassroots organizations. We are also working with community allies to strengthen the voice and bargaining power of low-wage workers in Los Angeles’ car washes – some of the worst-paid and worst-treated workers in this country.

Next week, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker will lead the labor movement’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina – continuing the great work she has done over so many years on behalf of the most vulnerable in our society. Not far from Greensboro, we have been working with unemployed African American day laborers and their workers’ center, desperately trying to keep alive the dream launched in those sit-ins.

In San Diego last week, I visited a pre-apprenticeship program formed by the local labor movement to create career paths for at-risk youth. In Los Angeles, I saw a remarkable community-based labor-management training program created by the Electrical Workers that is focused on green jobs. These programs demonstrate the tremendous benefits that are possible when labor and business come together to solve problems jointly.

I met people who had been homeless who were about to become journeymen electricians. A young man named Nakayah said to me, “The union gave me a chance to go from no life to the hope for a middle-class life. It didn’t just teach me to get a job, it taught me how to be a man.”

As I talked to hotel workers – members of Unite Here, many of them immigrants – on strike to keep hotel jobs from falling back into poverty and to union members with PhD’s fighting to prevent California’s budget catastrophe from cratering not only their jobs but the education of their state’s children, I thought of my father on strike in the coal fields when I was a boy. And I was reminded of this basic truth: A job is a good job because workers fight to make it one – it doesn’t matter if the job is in a coal mine or a classroom or a car wash. And that is why unions are needed today, more than ever.

I grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania, and I was surrounded by the legacy of my parents and grandparents. My grandfather and my father and their fellow workers went into mines that were death traps, to work for wages that weren’t enough to buy food and clothes for their families. They and the union they built made those jobs into middle class jobs. When I went into the mine, it was a good job. A good job meant possibilities for me – possibilities that my mother moved heaven and earth to make real – that took me to Penn State and to law school and to this podium.

What is our legacy—the legacy of those of us who are shaping the world our children and grandchildren will inhabit? Is our government laying the foundations young people need? Do workplaces offer hope? Do they even offer work? Are we building a world we will be proud to hand over to our children? Are the voices of the young, of the future, being heard?

In September, I was elected President of the AFL-CIO together with Secretary Treasurer Liz Shuler and Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, both of whom are here today. Liz Shuler is the youngest principal officer of the AFL-CIO in our history, and I asked her to lead a program of outreach to young workers. As part of that effort, the AFL-CIO conducted a study of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34, comparing their economic standing, attitudes and hopes with those from a similar survey conducted 10 years ago. The findings are shocking. They reveal a lost decade for young workers in America. Lower wages. Education deferred. Things are so bad that one in three of these 18–34-year-olds is currently living at home with their parents.

The desperation I heard in this survey and in the voices of proud, hard-working Americans fills me with an enormous sense of urgency, an urgency that should be shared by every elected official here in Washington and across this country.

As a country and a movement, our challenge is to build a new economy that can restore working people’s expectations and hope. If you were laid off because of what Wall Street did to our economy, it’s not your fault. A dead end job with no benefits is not the best our country can do for its citizens.

What went wrong with our economy? You could say it is as simple as we built a low-wage, high consumption economy and tried to bridge the contradiction with debt. And there’s a lot of truth in that simplicity. But if we are going to understand what is wrong in a way that will help us understand how to fix it, we need a little more detail.

A generation ago, our nation’s policymakers embarked on a campaign of radical deregulation and corporate empowerment – one that celebrated private greed over public service.

The AFL-CIO warned of the dangers of that path – trade policies that rewarded and accelerated outsourcing, financial deregulation designed to promote speculation and the dismantling of our pension and health care systems. We warned that the middle class could not survive in such an economy, that growing inequality would inevitably shrink the American pie, that we were borrowing from the rest of the world at an unsustainable pace, that busts would follow bubbles and that our country would be worse off in the end.

These policies culminated in the worst economic decade in living memory – we suffered a net loss of jobs, the housing market collapsed, real wages fell and more children fell into poverty. And the enormous growth in inequality during that decade yielded mediocre growth overall. This is not a portrait of a cyclical recession, but of a nation with profound, unaddressed structural economic problems on a long-term, downward slide.

Our structural problems pre-date the crisis that hit in 2007 and they are not going to go away by themselves in 2010.

First, we have underinvested in the foundations of our economy – including the transportation and communications infrastructure that are essential to a middle-class society and a dynamic, competitive high-wage economy. But the most important foundation of our economy is education and training. We simply cannot continue to skimp on the quality of education we provide to all of our children and expect to lead in the global economy. Likewise, we need to provide opportunities for lifelong skills upgrading to workers – through both private and public sector initiatives.

Second, we have failed over a long period of time to create enough good jobs at home to maintain our middle class – and we have allowed corporate hacks to whittle away at workers’ bargaining power to undermine the quality of the remaining jobs.

Finally, the structural absence of good jobs means a shortage of sustainable demand to drive our economy.

We want an entirely different kind of economy. Let’s talk about what we need to do.

We must directly and immediately take on what is wrong – by creating millions of good jobs now, rebuilding our economic foundations and giving working people the freedom to form a union again and make all our jobs good jobs.

We must pass genuine health care reform and reregulate our financial system – so that finance is the servant of the real economy, and not its master; so that we have an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency; and so that we never again take the public’s money and use it to rescue bank executives and stockholders. I’d like to commend President Obama’s leadership in insisting on a viable, strong and independent consumer protection agency – which is crucial to real financial reform.

The AFL-CIO’s five-point program will create more than 4 million jobs – extending unemployment benefits, including COBRA; expanding federal infrastructure and green jobs investments; dramatically increasing federal aid to state and local governments facing fiscal disaster; direct job creation where feasible; and finally, direct lending of TARP money to small and medium sized businesses that can’t get credit because of the financial crisis.

And we need to adopt a tax on financial speculation so that we can fund the jobs effort as the economy recovers.

Some in Washington say when it comes to jobs: Go slow—take half steps. These voices are harming millions of unemployed Americans and their families – but they are also jeopardizing our economic recovery. It is responsible to have a plan for paying for job creation over time. But it is bad economics and suicidal politics not to aggressively address the job crisis at a time of double-digit unemployment. In fact, budget deficits over the medium and long term will be worse if we allow the economy to slide into long job stagnation – unemployed workers don’t pay taxes and they don’t go shopping; businesses without customers don’t hire workers, they don’t invest and they also don’t pay taxes.

Our economy does not work without good jobs, so we must take action now to restore workers’ voices in America. The systematic silencing of American workers by denying our right to form unions is at the heart of the disappearance of good jobs in America. We must pass the Employee Free Choice Act so that workers can have the chance to turn bad jobs into good jobs, and so we can reduce the inequality which is undermining our prospects for stable economic growth. And we must do it now – not next year, not even this summer. Now.

Each of these initiatives should be rooted in a crucial alliance of the middle class and the poor. But today, as I speak to you, something different is happening with health care.

On the one hand we have the House bill, which asks the small part of our country that has prospered in the last decade—the richest of the rich—to pay a little bit more in taxes so that most Americans can have health insurance. And the House bill reins in the power of health insurers and employers by having an employer mandate and a strong public option.

But thanks to the Senate rules, the appalling irresponsibility of the Senate Republicans and the power of the wealthy among some Democrats, the Senate bill instead drives a wedge between the middle class and the poor. The bill rightly seeks to ensure that most Americans have health insurance. But instead of taxing the rich, the Senate bill taxes the middle class by taxing workers’ health plans – not just union members’ health care; most of the 31 million insured employees who would be hit by the excise tax are not union members.

The tax on benefits in the Senate bill pits working Americans who need health care for their families against working Americans struggling to keep health care for their families. This is a policy designed to benefit elites – in this case, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible employers, at the expense of the broader public. It’s the same tragic pattern that got us where we are today, and I can assure you the labor movement is fighting with everything we’ve got to win health care reform that is worthy of the support of working men and women.

These great struggles over health care, good jobs, the freedom to organize and financial reform are just the first steps.

Beyond the short-term jobs crisis, we must have an agenda for restoring American manufacturing—a combination of fair trade and currency policies, worker training, infrastructure investment and regional development policies targeted to help economically distressed areas. We cannot be a prosperous middle class society in a dynamic global economy without a healthy manufacturing sector.

We must have an agenda to address the daily challenges workers face on the job – to ensure safe and healthy workplaces and family-friendly work rules.

We also need comprehensive reform of our immigration policy – based on shared prosperity and fairness, not cheap labor.

And we must take on the retirement crisis. Too many employers have replaced the system of pensions we used to have with underfunded savings accounts fully exposed to everything that is wrong with Wall Street. Today, the median balance in 401K accounts is only $27,000 – nowhere near enough to fund a secure retirement. We need to return to a policy of employers sharing responsibility for retirement security with employees, while also bolstering and strengthening Social Security.

President Obama campaigned on a platform of boldly taking on these challenges. He has spoken often about the need to refound our economy on doing real things, rather than dreaming of financial pots of gold. He has asked Vice President Biden to lead the effort to restore the middle class. For the first time I can recall, we have an Administration that sees manufacturing – making things here – as central to America’s future and that speaks clearly about the positive role for workers and their unions in that future. President Obama has laid out an aggressive agenda for structural change and has appointed people like Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis who believe in that vision.

Of course, President Obama inherited a terrible mess from his predecessor – a journey of stolen elections, ruinous tax cuts for the rich, dishonest wars, financial scandal, government-sponsored torture, flooded cities and finally, economic collapse.

President Obama’s administration began – out of necessity and vision – with an act of political courage – the enactment of a broad and substantial economic recovery program. Despite Republican opposition, the stimulus was big enough to make a real, positive impact on our economy, saving or creating more than a million jobs already.

But the jobs crisis has escalated, the foreclosure crisis continues and Wall Street appears to have returned to its old ways. This is Bonus Week on Wall Street – watch and see how much discipline they show, with the nation watching.

Now more than ever, we need the boldness and the clarity we saw in our president during the campaign in 2008, when he outlined the scope of the economic problems facing our nation -- unencumbered by the political cross-currents weighing us down today. One year into the Obama Administration and one year into a Congress with strong Democratic majorities, we need leadership action that matches the urgency that is felt so deeply by working people.

Too often Washington falls into the grip of ambivalence about the fundamental purpose of government. Is it to protect wealthy elites and gently encourage them to be more charitable? Or is it to look after the vast majority of the American people?

Government in the interests of the majority of Americans has produced our greatest achievements. The New Deal. The Great Society and the Civil Rights movement -- Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage and the forty-hour work week, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. This is what made the United States a beacon of hope in a confused and divided world.

But too many people now take for granted government’s role as protector of Wall Street and the privileged. They see middle-class Americans as overpaid and underworked. They see Social Security as a problem rather than the only piece of our retirement system that actually works. They feel sorry for homeless people, but fail to see the connections between downsizing, outsourcing, inequality and homelessness.

This world view has brought Democrats nothing but disaster. The Republican response is to offer the middle class the false hope of tax cuts. Tax cuts end up enriching the rich and devastating the middle class by destroying the institutions like public education and Social Security that make the middle class possible.

But no matter what I say or do, the reality is that when unemployment is 10 percent and rising, working people will not stand for tokenism. We will not vote for politicians who think they can push a few crumbs our way and then continue the failed economic policies of the last 30 years.

Let me be even blunter. In 1992, workers voted for Democrats who promised action on jobs, who talked about reining in corporate greed and who promised health care reform. Instead, we got NAFTA, an emboldened Wall Street – and not much more. We swallowed our disappointment and worked to preserve a Democratic majority in 1994 because we knew what the alternative was. But there was no way to persuade enough working Americans to go to the polls when they couldn’t tell the difference between the two parties. Politicians who think that working people have it too good – too much health care, too much Social Security and Medicare, too much power on the job – are inviting a repeat of 1994.

Our country cannot afford such a repeat.

President Obama said in his inaugural address, “The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act – not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” Now is the time to make good on these words – for Congress, for President Obama and for the American people.

These are big challenges. But it is long past time to take them on. And for those members of Congress who think maybe taking on big challenges is not their job, and who want to keep offering working people tokenism while they govern in the interests of the people who trashed our economy, I have a suggestion for how to spend your weekends.

Go sit with the unemployed. Talk to college students looking at tuition hikes, laid-off professors, and no jobs at graduation. Talk to workers whose jobs are being offshored. Ask what these Americans think about their future. Ask them what they think of Wall Street, of health insurance companies, of big banks. Ask them if they want a government that is in partnership with those folks, or a government that stands up for working people.

Then think about the great promise of America and the great legacy we have inherited. Our wealth as a nation and our energy as a people can deliver, in the words of my predecessor Samuel Gompers, “more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”

This is the American future the labor movement is working for. Our political leaders have a choice. They can work with us for a future where the middle class is secure and growing, where inequality is on the decline and where jobs provide ladders out of poverty. Or they can work for a future where the profits of insurance companies, speculators and outsourcers are secure. There is no middle ground. Working America is waiting for an answer. We are in a “show me” kind of mood, and time is running out.

Obama Admin. Announces Investments in Green Manufacturing

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:35:00 +0000

As new government data show the economy shed an additional 85,000 jobs in December, President Obama this week announced funding for tax credits to promote new job growth in the clean energy manufacturing sector.

Over 180 companies will receive about $2.3 billion in tax credits to directly create 17,000 jobs. These companies, about one-third of which are small businesses, senior administration officials stated, will be rewarded for innovative, domestic manufacturing of clean energy products like wind turbines and parts, solid state lighting, energy efficient building materials, solar panels and parts, long-term batteries, and equipment for manufacturing renewable fuels, for example.

The tax credits have been awarded to companies who have chosen to build manufacturing facilities in 43 states in the US. They are also designed to leverage more than $5 billion in private sector investments to create an additional 41,000 jobs, senior administration officials said.

"In order to make these jobs really work, [the U.S.] need[s] to be [a] global leader in high-growth industries," one senior administration official said. "Clearly, these clean energy industries are among the highest growth in the global economy today."

He added that the emergence of a sizeable clean energy manufacturing sector would boost US exports as well as expand job creation.

“Building a robust clean energy sector is how we will create the jobs of the future,” said President Obama in remarks at the White House. “The Recovery Act awards I am announcing today will help close the clean energy gap that has grown between America and other nations while creating good jobs, reducing our carbon emissions and increasing our energy security.”

“By investing in innovative clean energy manufacturing projects like these, we are not only creating good jobs now, but helping lay a new foundation to keep America competitive in the 21st century economy,” added Vice President Biden. “This is what the Recovery Act is all about.”

The White House recently called on Congress to double the size of the program to accelerate job creation in the U.S. clean energy manufacturing sector.

This round of tax credits is part of a larger multi-billion package of grants, investments, tax credits and loans from the federal government as part of the recovery act aimed at boosting and modernizing the "green economy."

Sierra Club President Carl Pope praised the announcement of the tax credits in a statement. "Clean energy jobs are already putting food on the table and paying the mortgage for tens of thousands of Americans across the country. The tax credits announced today will benefit tens of thousands more," he stated.

He urged Congress to take additional steps to pass comprehensive climate change and clean energy legislation to create more jobs.

Senior administration officials stated they are working with key figures in the Senate, such as Sens. John Kerry, D Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., to push forward comprehensive climate change and clean energy legislation.

Photo: White House

The Big Push: Final Passage of Health Reform

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:31:00 +0000

As Congress prepares its final push to pass health reform, a coalition of congressional progressives, the labor movement and health reform advocates are calling for some major tweaks to several key provisions in the finished product.

Most importantly, this coalition wants to see the final package include the House funding mechanism, which would raise taxes on the wealthiest people, in place of the Senate excise tax on the costliest health insurance plans.

The Senate excise tax generates revenue by taxing so-called Cadillac insurance plans. Supporters of the idea say it would help reduce the federal deficit by trillions over the next two decades.

Many critics of the idea counter by arguing that insurance companies would pass the cost of the new tax on to employers and individuals who purchase these plans.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich told reporters this week, "The notion that there are 'Cadillac' plans out there is a misnomer." He argued that most high-cost plans are based on age, region and occupation rather than on the value of their benefits. He further stated that the excise tax would likely fall disproportionately on small business and older Americans who already pay a premium on health coverage.

Government data shows that small business owners currently pay as much as 18 percent for health insurance than larger businesses do. This fact alone has forced many small business owners over the past decade to drop employment benefits. Some 14 million people without coverage work in small businesses, government statistics indicate.

"The Senate bill falsely assumes that high cost plans generate high value for beneficiaries," Secretary Reich added. "The Senate tax is too blunt an instrument."

Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., agreed and called for passage of the House tax on the wealthy. He cited polling data from various sources that indicated Americans oppose the Senate excise tax by about two-to-one.

Courtney further appealed to the fundamental fairness of the House plan, pointing to studies that show as many as 27 percent of family insurance plans will be taxed under the Senate plan.

"Both on policy grounds and on political grounds, I think the House approach is the right approach," Rep. Courtney explained.

Courtney has circulated a "Dear Colleague" letter to other members of the House urging passage of the House funding mechanism, which he says has garnered 189 signatures.

Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute argued that the Senate excise tax would raise revenue to reduce the deficit but only at the expense of middle class families and small businesses. In the end, many people and employers affected by the tax would simply give up higher cost insurance and look for less expansive plans with fewer benefits.

While the excise tax might reduce healthcare costs, it won't result in healthier people with better coverage, Mishel suggested.

In a press statement last month, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said, "The benefits of hard-working Americans cannot be taxed to pay for health care reform - that's no way to rein in insurance companies and it's the wrong way to pay for health care reform."

Since the Senate bill first appeared in committee, Democratic leaders have scaled back on some of the excise tax and created some exceptions by region and exclusions for some high risk occupations, such as for transit workers and longshore workers. Labor leaders have argued, however, that more needs to be done to exempt working-class people, such as teachers who have won good health benefits through union contracts.

Along with the AFL-CIO, the AARP, which has endorsed both health reform bills before Congress, stated that the final bill should also include a measure to close the Medicare prescription drug "donut hole" that forces middle income seniors to pay high out-of-pocket costs for drugs. The "donut hole" was created by Republicans and George W. Bush in 2003 when they sought to gut Medicare with privatization schemes.

The pro-health reform coalition has diverged, however, on some other key points in the reform package. Labor and many progressive advocacy groups are demanding the inclusion of a public insurance option in the final bill. Most House Democrats, however, have resigned themselves to demands from Senators, like Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who have threatened to join a Republican filibuster of the bill if a public insurance program is included.

Some media reports say that because of intransigence by Lieberman and a handful of other moderate Democrats, House progressives have reluctantly dropped the demand for a public option. Instead they want a larger expansion of Medicaid coverage and bigger subsidies for working-class families to buy insurance plans on the private market.

Other health reform advocates, such as Yale University Professor Jacob Hacker, expressed disappointment at the exclusion of a public option but praised other key reforms in the Senate bill.

Some media reports on the negotiations over the final bill indicate that the White House supports inclusion of some version of the House bill's affordability concepts.

The creation of exchanges will provide increased choices for individuals and small employers and should help control rising costs, wrote Hacker in an op-ed for Politico.com after the Senate passed its bill last month. In addition, important insurance industry regulations created by the Senate bill would guarantee a basic minimum of coverage for everyone who is able to get insurance, Hacker pointed out.

He further argued House provisions that expand Medicaid and provide subsidies to everyone up to 250 percent of poverty are important affordability provisions that need to be included in the final bill. The House bill's stronger employer mandate should also make final passage, Hacker added.

Both House and Senate Democrats also appear to favor the Senate bill's increase in the Medicare tax for the wealthiest individuals and households, according to recent media reports.

To gain speedier final passage, congressional Democrats appear to have opted to avoid the traditional conference committee process. Instead, both houses will pass amendments to their respective bills to bring them into line. The procedure would bypass Republican interference, but would still require 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster.

Republicans have complained about the procedure, but have failed to explain how they would make any contribution to its final passage during a conference committee, after refusing to vote for the bill and attempting to block its progress.

Both Republicans and Democrats have used this procedure in the past for final passage of key legislation.

Photo: White House

The Big Minus

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:11:00 +0000

    …Kind ladies and kind gentlemen...
    Once I was very prosperous
    There was nothing I did lack
    I had fourteen carat gold, in my mouth,
    and silver on my back

    But I did not trust my brother
    I carried him to blame
    Which led me to my fatal doom
    To wander off in shame.

    Bob Dylan, JWH, Lonesome Hobo 1967

I like Sam Webb's “lead with your mistakes” style of starting a conversation about the New Year ahead. So, here is my effort to build on an approach that would I am sure revolutionize many coalition efforts if self-criticism were in everyone's culture of courtesy. I scored big in my debates with some about "a big one" coming in the Spring and Summer of 2007 – although I based it mostly on the observations of a relative with long experience in the transportation industry....Ooops! But to tell the truth, the path since that time seems strewn with errors.

At various points, I have become distracted, by the Afghanistan question, by the banking reform and exec pay debates, by mountaintop removal issues in my state, and, as a consequence, not kept focus on the most important component of the reform agenda: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. The desperate need of our fellow workers and countrymen to relieve the crushing economic burdens of the recession must be placed before all other matters. There really is not a choice. Failing a rapid draw-down in unemployment numbers, Obama will be unlikely to resurrect the coalition he needs to address other important questions, never mind achieve victory in two very expensive, unsustainable, and in many respects untenable wars. However, I too have found myself distracted by excessively sectarian questions. From a working class point of view, it pays to evaluate the most important questions from as multi-sided perspective as possible, to learn as much as possible about the truth of the matter. But the most important aspect is, reliably, money. Who loses, and who gains. I fear that direct government employment is the only means of bringing down the numbers (and cushioning loss of income) fast enough to keep the coalition that elected Obama, and that he needs activated to enact his agenda, intact. This should have been clearer from the beginning.

Even the health care debate, vital and longstanding as it is, should perhaps have been put behind jobs in priorities. The latest Al Qaeda episode – it's like an avatar, or iconic signature, of the cauldron of inequality, economic wreckage, and the enlarged number of nearly failed states left by unregulated globalization gone amok since the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. We will not likely escape the blow-back from all the bad Karma accumulated from Korea through Vietnam, the Latin American, African and Asian dictatorships to protect corporate resources, or the Neo-con adventurism that led to the Bush wars on 'Terror' – an enemy with no fixed address. Security concerns can trump even economics for brief periods. But sobriety demands that even expenditures that may appear necessary for security must be placed second behind dropping unemployment, or they will be wasted if unemployment does not drop. 10 percent-plus unemployment is a prescription for tons of additional "security" problems beyond those presented by the young Nigerian captured in Detroit.

Regardless which version of Health care comes out of the House/Senate conference committees, it seems to me that the labor movement has a unique opportunity to offer important services to millions of workers trying to find the best, most affordable, health care solution. Every state and town are going to have unique, and complex choices to make, and would greatly benefit by an ally and representative, and by coordinated action to improve coverage AND reduce deductibles and co-pays to affordable levels. Perhaps a new class of member – representation only with health care "exchanges" – a cheaper, very competitive, dues rate could be charged too.

Paul Krugman called the last decade the Big Zero. I think 'Big Minus' is more accurate. Our wages and incomes have not been keeping pace with productivity since the 1970's. In fact real medium income only last year, before the “Great Recession” reached a level it last saw in 1975. The recession has wiped even that out. Median is a more accurate measure than average in capturing where workers are at economically. But even that does not capture the still advancing bifurcation of high and low skilled jobs, and the loss of mid-range, mostly manufacturing, jobs impacts on quality of life for working people. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, are all accelerating.

We need to focus on the money for 2010 – no matter whatever tsunami threatens us.