The End of “Chaotic Capitalism” – What Comes Next?
By Al Giordano
Back on September 17 - almost six months ago, as the financial system had begun its meltdown - then presidential candidate Barack Obama used the C-word:
"This crisis serves as a stark reminder of the failures of crony capitalism and an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary. It's a philosophy that lets Washington lobbyists shred consumer protections and distort our economy so it works for the special interests instead of working people; a philosophy that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to the rest."
In case anybody soon forgets, we've just lived through decades in which the word "capitalism" simply was not used to criticize the economic system in the major US news media. It was an unspoken rule at the New York Times and in the rest of the corporate media (which after all had, and still has, the profit motive as it's reason to exist) that expressions of anti-capitalist thought were verboten. And those that did use the word critically were routinely ignored, mocked or reviled just as much by "liberal" news organizations as by Fox News.
In September, Obama's use of the term "crony capitalism" marked a calculated risk. It was the first time in our lifetimes that a major party presidential nominee had dared to use the C-word in that way. And yet he was onto something big: he accurately viewed that the American public had become sick of (and sick from) the economic system as it was.
President Obama's speech to Congress on Tuesday night began the process of showing everybody what he meant and in doing so changed the context of history, and now the pundits and columnists are racing to catch up.
Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal's free-marketeer editorial page, laments:
...the economic crisis, as it did for Franklin D. Roosevelt, will serve as a stepping stone to a radical shift in the relationship between the people and their government. It will bind Americans to their government in ways not experienced since the New Deal. This tectonic shift, if successful, will be equal to the forces of public authority set in motion by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The Obama presidency is going to be a radical presidency.
Barack Obama is proposing that the U.S. alter the relationship between the national government and private sector that was put in place by Ronald Reagan and largely continued by the presidencies of Bill Clinton and the Bushes. Then, the private sector led the economy. Now Washington will chart its course...
It's becoming clear that the private sector is going to be demoted into a secondary role in the U.S. system. This isn't socialism, but it is not the system we've had since the early 1980s.
Mark Schmitt writes in today's American Prospect:
Fortunately for Obama, both the old politics and the old capitalism lie in ruins; their assumptions cannot be salvaged. He has already come some way in changing the culture of politics, including acting with respect toward those whose party was defeated in the last election. Though Obama has frustrated some progressive Democrats who see him as caving to the enemy, this is his attempt to defuse the winner-take-all culture of Karl Rove-era politics. To do the same in the economy, he'll have to create an alternative to this particular form of capitalist culture. Obama will have to build institutions that foster a new culture, one still driven by the quest for growth, innovation, and profit but where the returns are more broadly shared and where stewardship and sustainability are valued more than today's share price. And if this time it is politics that reshapes capitalism, then the new culture that emerges will be one where even the winners in the economy appreciate that their wealth was made possible by a collective enterprise, government.
E.J. Dionne, in today's Washington Post, goes there:
President Obama's message to the nation Tuesday night was plain and unequivocal: The era of bashing government is over. So, too, is the folklore of a marketplace capable of producing abundance without regulation, government oversight or public intervention. Addressing the deepest crisis of confidence in the market system since the Great Depression, Obama argued that the economic downturn, far from being an excuse for backing away from his ambitious plans, makes his proposals in health care, energy and education imperative.
Yesterday, when nominating former Washington Governor Gary Locke as Commerce Secretary, the President used the C-word again:
"The choice we face is not between some oppressive government-run economy or a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism."
From September's reference to "crony capitalism" to yesterday's "chaotic and unforgiving capitalism" the howls from the vestigial simpletons of Cold War mythology (they swallowed the lie that there are only two items on the economic menu: "capitalism or communism") will continue to scream bloody socialism... and the vast majority of Americans will continue to yawn and tune them out.
Something new is being born: a different kind of economic system. I think it will be a matter of a few years before it has an agreed-upon name, but in the meantime let's dissect what has happened and where it will lead. (And please excuse me if I'm rambling a bit, but such is the nature of "think pieces" that ask a lot of questions rather than pronounce hard and firm "solutions.")
Earlier this week, maverick financier George Soros made a similar observation:
Billionaire investor George Soros said the current economic upheaval has its roots in the financial deregulation of the 1980s and signals the end of a free-market model that has since dominated capitalist countries...
"We're in a crisis, I think, that's really the most serious since the 1930s and is different from all the other crises we have experienced in our lifetime," Soros said...
Here's a very interesting video from Fox News yesterday afternoon, in which the batshit crazy conservative talk show host Glenn Beck played the clip of Soros' statement last Friday at Columbia University. It clearly freaked him out that Soros said:
"The serious of the crisis cannot be exaggerated. The closest comparison that I can think of is actually the collapse of the Soviet system."
Beck noted that the Soviet comparison "scares me" and then appealled to US Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) to explain what is happening.
As you can see and hear in the video, Paul utterly failed at offering any kind of coherent explanation. "They want to control capital," he railed, and then schizophrenically argued both against the vast power of some unnamed and undisclosed international "they" while also repeating his free market dogma. Paul argues for "nationalism" but also for dismantling the US government's ability to regulate the corporate sector: yet without government there can be no defense from any "they" that may threaten the US Constitution that Paul and his ‘tards wave as a prop. And here you can see a major fault line on the right that is severely cracked and soon will blow open: Beck literally pleaded with Paul, the leading self-described "libertarian" ideologue in US politics, to come up with a formula to stop what both frame as a loss of US sovereignty... and Paul came up empty.
The irony is that President Obama, especially in recent days, has offered the more coherent and compelling answers to Beck's questions - that government should no longer be the neutered lap dog of the corporate sector - while the intellectual leaders of free market capitalism to whom Beck and other conservatives look to for talking points offer absolutely nothing except ideological gibberish on behalf of maintaining a system that most people recognize has failed.
If Soros is correct that the failure of the globalized version of capitalism that has dominated in recent decades is as extreme as the fall of the Soviet system (and Soros has been prescient many times before), then the question is what next? What comes after the fall of Capital's wall?
It's really not rocket science. This is something any citizen who pays close attention to history and current events can figure out. To craft a new economic system that avoids the errors of the old, simply make a list of the shared problems that plagued both free market capitalism and the Soviet model of communism. That's how to know what exactly must be avoided in constructing a new path. Those are:
- Centralization: the concentration of power outside of the local and regional levels - whether in government or in corporations - always creates institutions too big to remain standing for long. The institutions always crash with a gigantic thud that wrecks millions of people's lives (and, increasingly, the natural environment).
- Militarism: In this, the Soviet and the multinational capitalist corporations were mirrors of each other; identical twins in different colored uniforms. In one case, the State engaged in imperial conquest of other lands based on its own desire to control their resources, human and natural. In the other, the private sector used State Power - particularly of the United States government, military, law enforcement (notably in the drug war) and intelligence apparatuses (along with quasi governmental entities like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) in their imperial conquest of other lands, their human and natural resources. (It amazes me to this day how little commentary is made about how the massive US investment in the Iraq War was the real trigger - even more so than the mortgage crisis - for last September's economic collapse.)
- Invasion of personal liberty: Both the left and the right have been terribly guilty when it comes to the attack on the rights of the individual. The free marketers in the US made an unholy alliance in the Reagan era with religious fundamentalists, and while preaching "freedom" (translation: freedom for those with property to loot and abuse those without) they criminalized or sought to meddle in everyday people's sexual, chemical and religious preferences (anti-abortion, anti-gay and the drug war escalations are particular examples). The Soviet, like the Chinese system and others that so bastardized communal philosophy with centralized and militarized states, likewise meddled in everyday people's sexual, chemical and religious preferences. And on some of this stuff (repeat: prohibitionist drug policy) the two allegedly competing systems collaborated together in an orgy of globalized repression.
It's in the third point that I think some of the more interesting domestic battles will emerge during Obama's first term. Matters like the authoritarian left's demand for "mandates" on health insurance (an attempt to force every citizen to contract with, and hand over personal data to, an insurance company) and whether the administration will tackle the inherent injustices in the US criminal justice system (particularly along the racial fault lines of drug and immigration policy) in the ways that Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. People don't talk about those things much yet, but they will determine whether the Obama coalition holds together in the 2010 and 2012 elections, because so many "swing voters" and "independents" - together with the youths and minorities that although they won't vote for the Republicans, had until 2008 stayed away from the polls altogether - are conscious of the limits of lockstep Democratic "progressive" dogma when it tramples upon individual liberties.
The fault lines on the right are visible to all right now, while much of the left is arguing over semantic ones (partisanship v. bipartisanship and the size of government spending without enough regard to the details of how the money is spent) that conceal the real fissures on the left regarding individual liberty.
You can take the entire right-wing philosophy that corporations should enjoy the rights of humans under law and throw it in the trash. Stick a fork in it. It's obsolete, harmful and almost done. Good riddance to it.
But the "progressive center" that now governs the United States had better take care not to repeat its frequent historic errors of tossing individual (unincorporated human) rights out with them. In order to construct a successful new economic system (and I don't stay up nights worrying about what name or title it will come to be known by; this is a bit early in the historic process for that) there is a strain of conservative libertarian critique (even as its partisans have been selective and hypocritical in its application) against centralized state power - that which meddles in people's daily lives, or empowers the private sector to do so - that remains absolutely vital and alive.
In fact, it wasn't the free-market "libertarians" that first made this critique of the Soviet system. Their tendency did not even exist by that name until a few decades ago.
There was only one philosophical tendency in the Twentieth Century that was correct from the start in its critique of both capitalism and Soviet communism: That of those who called themselves "libertarian communists," also known as anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists. They fought those battles valiantly (the book cover above, with the image of the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno, offers one terrific example), and were persecuted and crushed in both hemispheres for doing so. That alone merits our investigation into those anarcho-tendencies and philosophies to help guide how we push the formation of the new economic system that is emerging.
The early Twentieth Century, like the early Twenty-first, was a time when the actual economic system had failed a majority of the residents of earth and they had come to recognize it. From that there emerged many conflicting tendencies and ideologies seeking to construct new systems to replace it. Many laboratories - good, bad and ugly - emerged in the last century, often with diametric and conflicting models, three major ones which collided during World War II, and two that sustained a mutually-self-destructive Cold War after it.
It was during the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt that the US itself created a kind of hybrid system that sought to borrow from both poles of economic thought and solution. It was great while it lasted, but that ship hit the very same icebergs we just mentioned: centralization, militarism and invasion of personal liberty.
In the United States, the Civil Rights and anti-war and related movements of the fifties and sixties emerged and might have, had things gone differently, saved the Republic. The former succeeded at many of its goals - not just with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but also by spurring the Great Society economic safety net - whereas the latter did not (and there are many views as to why the anti-Vietnam war movement failed but I think the most severe reason was that it shrunk from the challenge of constructing a multi-racial, multi-demographic movement; its leading voices chose the easy path of identity politics over the hard work of cross-demographic community organizing).
Then came, in the post-sixties hangover, a kind of crash of ideologies and what emerged, teeth bared, was a retro and fundamentalist "free market" ideology's leveraged buy-out of a retro and fundamentalist group of religious philosophies that, beginning with Reagan, dismantled the New Deal and the Great Society both.
Twenty years ago, as the beginnings of today's economic disaster was happening all around us, I sat around a table with a group of colleagues who have since then been the authentic pioneers of dismantling the drug war (and have made much progress on that front since then, in some policies and in changing public opinion). We gathered informally one night after attending a drug policy conference in Washington DC. We had just sat through a day's worth of sessions with a bunch of free market libertarians who shared our anti-prohibitionist perspective, but not much else. Milton Friedman had been the keynote speaker that night.
We, around that little table, just couldn't swallow his and his followers' quasi-religious belief in "the market" as the solution to all that ails society (and we sure have been vindicated on that point since). We lamented that there really wasn't a widely accepted term to describe our philosophy that sought a State that both protects liberty while also ensuring economic and social justice. It was Harry Levine then who coined the term "Social Justice Libertarians" and I think it's a pretty useful one to this day.
That perspective, truth be told, doesn't have many friends among either Democrats or Republicans in Congress, but early signs suggest that the new occupant of the White House "gets" that individual liberty is a core progressive value.
The early internecine battles in government agencies over medical marijuana raids and immigration enforcement raids (in which Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano have now smacked down renegade law enforcement agents that attempted to test them early on) provide very hopeful indications.
Another indication that the new administration "gets" matters of individual liberty came in yesterday's State Department press briefing and the explanation of why the US voted against a proposed UN resolution to criminalize offensive speech:
The United States shares the repugnance at any attempt to glorify or otherwise promote Nazi ideology. However, this resolution fails to distinguish between actions and statements that, while offensive, should be protected by freedom of expression, and actions that incite violence, which should be prohibited.
The United States remains convinced that governments should not punish speech, even that which is deemed offensive or hateful. In a free society hateful ideas fail on account of their own intrinsic lack of merit. Curtailing expression is not a viable or effective means of eliminating racism and related intolerance.
Want to know if your "progressive" buddy has any deep thought at all when comes to individual liberty? Ask him what he thinks of that supposed "anti-Nazi" resolution and the US vote against it. Consider the question to be a strip of litmus paper that will reveal a general tendency on other matters of personal freedom. Because the real measure of commitment to civil rights and freedoms is whether one defends them for those he finds offensive, too.
Where we Social Justice Libertarians part from the dominant tendencies of that which today calls itself libertarianism is that we believe that individual liberty must extend especially to those who cannot afford the private property (or incorporated shield) upon which to practice it: the poor, the immigrant, the youth and in the overall milieu that merges outsiders with the underclass that the Criminal Justice Industrial Complex persecutes thousands of moments of each day. We also understand that violations of the liberties of those without much property are carried out daily by the private sector against them. And we understand that some kind of counter-force to the market (whether a state or a workplace union or council) has to be organized to protect those freedoms daily.
As a new economic system rises out of the ashes of the old, we need to be vigilant that the new one (or ones) doesn't repeat the shared mistakes of the "Free Market" and "Soviet" ideologues alike: centralism, militarism and invasion of personal liberty.
That's where the most interesting domestic fights to come in the United States will be waged. And we'll be surprised both by those we once considered allies who will emerge as our opponents in those battles and by those previous rivals who will emerge as our unexpected allies. It is along that pivot that I greatly suspect another realignment in US politics - beyond the limits of "Democrat vs. Republican" - will be born out of the new economic paradigm that presently emerges.
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Comments
fascinating post
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 4:45 pm by BR (not verified)This was an interesting read.
Your comment about health care mandates (which I also oppose) made me wonder: would you support a single-payer system? Isn't that a form of mandate?
And in a "market-based" universal system, would you be ok with the closest analogue - a mandate that those without insurance buy government insurance? (Like Medicare-for-all except that it'd be mandatory for the uninsured.)
Single Payer
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 4:54 pm by Al GiordanoBR - Single payer would not mandate anybody to see a doctor, subject him or her self to tests, or fill out questionnaires with personal information. It would simply allow the person to do so if he or she wanted that kind of care.
Medicare and Medicaid work the same way: Nothing requires eligible citizens to contract with Medicare or Medicaid - or surrender personal data far in advance - to be able to avail themselves of its services prior to seeking them. (Social Security, likewise, is not invasive like a health insurance "mandate").
However, a mandate to contract either private sector or government insurance would both be invasive.
The great thing about single payer is that everybody pays whether or not we ever avail ourselves of it. There are people who live to a ripe healthy age without ever seeing a doctor. I meet them, in their 90s, in other countries all the time. Any kind of insurance requires the individual to subject himself to invasive questions whether or not he or she ever becomes ill enough to require medical services. That's just nuts.
so a medicare-for-all mandate would be ok?
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 5:11 pm by BR (not verified)So from your perspective, would an ideal (yet realizable) outcome of the soon-to-be-discussed health care bill be a Medicare-for-all mandate in which all those who can afford health care but do not already pay for it (or receive it, in the case of Medicare/Medicaid recipients) would be required to pay a single-payer-like tax at income tax time, the services of thich they could opt to avail themselves as desired?
Such an approach would ensure that those who are uninsured would be covered (thereby decreasing overall costs from ER visits) but would not have to fork over information until they chose to. And it would pave the way for single payer...
By the way, there is a danger here of violating your first principle. Is there inherent risk in a centrally-run (say single-payer) health care system in a country of our size?
Some good news on the
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 5:16 pm by EnzoValenzetti (not verified)Some good news on the detainees front:
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who was being held "indefinitely" by Bush for the past five years, is to be indicted through the traditional legal system.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/02/almarri-indictmen...
Let's hope this signals where Obama is going.
On mandates and Social Justice Libertarianism
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 5:23 pm by Kathleen HarganI agree with you, Al in your stance against mandates. I had not considered it from the perspective of privacy, but from an economic perspective. I have worked with low income families for years, and such a mandate with no guarantees of affordability (I cannot believe that we could trust insurance companies to manage cost, and believe that a mandated system would make use of already existing insurance companies) puts yet another burden on already suffering families.
On the topic of social justice libertarianism, I hope you continue to write on this topic. I was intrigued when you first used this term in your writing here (was it maybe the post on Alinski? I don't remember); I remain intrigued and look forward to more.
Anarchists and
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 5:23 pm by RC (not verified)Anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists is not a phrase you find here most days, but I was very happy to find it. So, some other time, Al, how about giving your readers a primer on Anarchy as opposed to Chaos and the concept that being an Anarchist does not equate with being a bomb thrower, and finally, perhaps a short history of Anarchy as a concept and movement and some examples. That would be a great service. I've often told people I know {people who would understand the concept} that the computer age and the internet have made the world safe for Anarchy. And thanks for devoting the time and space to the market and the Izum debates.
Another libertarianism is possible
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 5:40 pm by Toby Higbie (not verified)Thanks for this interesting intervention, Al. I often find myself pointing out to my "libertarian" students that they've highjacked a name once claimed by the likes of Emma Goldman.
Although one can find any number of ideological programs put out by the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists of the early 20th century, I think their legacy is most instructive when considered as a tendency, an approach to the state, or a set of questions and critiques. Of course, this was seen as a weakness by others on the left. But at this point, there is no real organized left in the US. We're starting from scratch.
I can't figure out how to imbed this image from Goldman's Mother Earth (1914), but it's always been one of my favorites as it captures the critique of capitalism and state-oriented radicalisms:
http://www.newberry.org/outspoken/exhibitimages/2a09.jpg
Embedded
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 6:27 pm by Joel Wiensexcellent post
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 6:55 pm by Amanda (not verified)A really excellent post and a fascinating read -- thank you.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about health care mandates -- even if there are strategies implemented to address affordability -- because the debate then quickly spirals, as it has in Massachusetts, into one of judging other people's choices and priorities with their own money and it gets very judgemental in a very negative way.
I recall one hearing here in MA on the new health care mandate where one of the officials on the health care board overseeing how to deal with affordability asserted that a cell phone is a frivolous expense, therefore people who are low income don't need one and that cost shouldn't be considered as part of a discussion on what people can reasonably be expected to afford vis a vis health care premiums. So patronizing!
And while I acknowledge that the MA health care system is better than the horrific status quo, I would hope we would aim higher than "a less sucky alternative than the status quo" in terms of a national health care solution. We can do better.
By the way, why in discussions about single payer health care is there so frequently mention of our country's size being an obstacle to such a solution? What relevance does this have in people's minds, I wonder? There are plenty of big countries that have single payer systems of one form or another and they seem to work okay. Why is a private insurance system somehow implicitly better/simpler for a huge country (as that is the implication)? Sometimes I think that what the issue is about really is race -- ie we are too complex of a country, we are much more heterogeneous than Sweden, Denmark, etc. But if that was an obstacle to a social safety net system working adequately, then why has Social Security been so successful in the US? (Not criticizing any of the previous comments, btw -- just wanting to better understand.)
Thanks again for the great post.
Social Justice Libertarians
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 7:05 pm by Erik SchimekAnarchism is the closest match to my political philosophy, although I would consider myself more of a primitivist than a syndicalist. Reconciling this philosophy with the current social and environmental realities is challenging :)
You wrote that there are three mistakes, "[W]e need to be vigilant that the new one (or ones) doesn't repeat the shared mistakes of the "Free Market" and "Soviet" ideologues alike: centralism, militarism and invasion of personal liberty."
I think you're missing a fundamental mistake: resource depletion.
How would this new form of governance be more sustainable if it doesn't begin with the recognition that we are on a dangerous path of resource depletion, which is driven by the need to turn ever increasing amounts of natural resources and human activities into engines of economic growth?
In other words, there aren't many more oil wells to discover or rainforests to turn into cattle ranches. We've already monetized everything that a stay-at-home parent used to do, and put them into the workforce. We've already filled our 2500 square foot homes with plastic gizmos. Now the 'third world' is now demanding the same lifestyle ... but there's not enough to go around.
I would like to know how Social Justice Libertarians might develop a vision for an egalitarian, sustainable economy. I would appreciate any thoughts you have on the matter.
Thank you, Al.
This is good stuff, Al. I
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 7:19 pm by JoAnn JonesThis is good stuff, Al. I am going to reread it a couple of times to make sure I get all of it. At first glance, I was reminded of a speech my brother sent me by Dmitry Orlov, whose book, "Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects," posits that the arrival of peak oil will affect us in similar fashion to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He seems to think that decentralization is the key to survival. The link for the speech is:
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/48082
I am starting to read his book this weekend. Now I have two difficult concepts to wrap my brain around, thanks to you and Dmitry.
JoAnn
great post Al
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 7:57 pm by Karen DesmondI completely agree with your point about the difficult negotiation progressives will face as regards issues of individual liberty. Although I would consider myself pretty far left in my politics, I am absolutely uneasy with the infringments many progressives would favor particularly with regard to health care (which was discussed at length in the previous thread) and education. I don't believe the state so far has shown its competence as a provider of education to our nation's children and as a homeschooler (of the John Holt "unschooler" style rather than Christian Evangelical) I believe that I am the best judge of the needs of my children as regards their "education" and not the state.
Social justice, protecting the environment, regulating agribusiness, etc., etc. these are all areas I believe government involvement be of benefit.
KD
I stand with you, Al. Here's
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 8:35 pm by J (not verified)I stand with you, Al. Here's my question, tho:
I think Obama gets it, but I don't think the Dem party does...
Witness the unarticulated election campaigns (like NY 20th D).
The 2010 Congressional election could be a crucial place for a
third party to elect 10 to 15 % of Congress. A party that can
articulate these values and goals, and a party that could agree
to work with Dems, but not be Dems. A party with a small
representation in Congress that could swing critical votes.
Any suggestions for a good name for that party? And how would candidates
qualify to claim its backing?
Hamsher disaster
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 8:39 pm by Joel WiensBrace yourselves...here come the activists!
Al, thought you were...
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 8:58 pm by bonkers (not verified)only going to post when you had something to say? ;)
Interesting topic to have here since earlier today I discovered this for the time (thanks to Tbogg at FDL):
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2002/03/22/i-hate-your-politics/
Seems to relate to what a lot people here might be feeling.
I agree with
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 9:01 pm by Christi DemuthErik Schimek == Resource depletion is one of my biggest concerns. I second this:
good
Submitted February 26, 2009 - 11:18 pm by celia (not verified)hey
I really liked what you wrote, I have like many others pondering such questions and investigating history.
I live in the UK however, and we don't have Obama. We've been trying to grapple with the same questions and see what we think may emerge here in our own politics and economics. It is mixed depending on who you speak to. I recently chatted with the commerce (shorter easy term for now) driector for my university, and he pretty much thinks philaphrony or at least 'for profit' being the measure for success will be gone or at least dulled. However facing our politics it is harder to see it that way. It seems (and here I am still undecided) that our gov is coming down on the side of corporations and definitely anti-liberty (that has been growing sharply over the last few years) and unfortunatly it may seem like that is not going to ease up. They may talk for the people but it's not actually passing through, a smokescreen. I'm unsure yet, still haven't worked out my mind.
Have you any thoughts on the rest of the world, rather than just America, I could sure do with some help.
Thanks for your blog,
Celia
Medicaid and Medicare Patients Already Pay Medicare
Submitted February 27, 2009 - 7:34 am by CarolDuhart (not verified)The world of transfer payments isn't as black and white as you might think. Depending upon the state, a person recieving Medicaid may be a part-time worker. Some retirees work part-time as well. There are people who work seasonally, or who are self-employed, or contract workers. Those who work for an entity that witholds taxes also pay Medicare taxes as well.
Not to mention that many recipients have worked for employers for a life-time or very long stretches and have accumulated both Social Security and Medicare credit. So when such a person is laid off, they are drawing on what they have already paid.
Lawyer asks if its time to legalize marijuana-others too
Submitted February 27, 2009 - 8:26 am by Alexa (not verified)Time For Marijuana Legalization?
And a comment from the same CBS News site:
If they legalize pot, there will be fights in the potato chip aisles in convenience stores everywhere. Shortages of Doritos. There will also be people driving 35 miles an hour in the fast lane. Couch sales will soar. Maybe even a sofa shortage. Smokers will have to find something besides the police to be paranoid about. Video games sales will skyrocket. It will be the end of the world as we know it.
Some responses
Submitted February 27, 2009 - 10:10 am by Al Giordano@ Erik Schimek - Resource depletion is certainly a big factor in today's current economic quagmire and probably was in the fall of the Soviet system, too. More importantly, the fast depletion of certain resources (whether oil or tracts of rainforest or the fast "development" of certain industries and regions) flooded the ecosystem with pollutants and destroyed many of the most previously pristine areas (I'm particularly thinking of seacoasts and mountains and rivers plagued by the tourist industry that turned them into cesspools).
Yet can't most of that be described either by centralization, militarism and invasion of personal liberty? I don't see it as separate.
Centralized energy systems are more polluting than decentralized ones (a basic tenet that goes back to E.F. Schumacher's book, "Small Is Beautiful" and Amory Lovins' pioneering work on alternative energy). Even centralized wind and solar projects carry harm for the natural environment that decentralized ones do not.
Militarism is almost singularly environmentally destructive, whether it results in oil fields in Iraq being set to fire, the depleted uranium from anti-tank missiles that poison the region, landmines left behind, or 14 percent of Colombian lands sprayed by aerial herbicides in the US-paid military intervention there... not to mention the vast amount of oil used by warcraft.
And if we accept, as I do, that personal liberty includes necessarily the right to clean air and water and food, we can see how those with property (from the agribusinesses that displaced the family farm and now own most of the farmland and rely more heavily on chemicals, pesticides, hormones and such to the boom of development of tourist meccas by the big hotel chains and others depleting the water and replacing it with sewage and garbage to the big centralized coal plants and gas guzzling SUVs that the poor can't afford that nonetheless give their kids asthma as never before in history) then we've just hit the losing tri-fecta.
Capitalism has been terrible for the natural environment, and a mere peek at the environmental conditions in China - where in urban centers the air is so thick with pollution you can't see a half-mile ahead of you - show that state control doesn't necessarily change that situation, at least not when it is centralized state control.
Decentralizing energy and agriculture to the level where it can be controlled and guided on the community and regional level, ending the military adventures that despoil the environment while using up disproportionate resources, and recognizing that private property ownership doesn't extend the right to pollute against personal rights to clean air, water and food won't by themselves solve 100 percent of the environmental crisis, but I would posit would get us at least halfway there.
And overpopulation plays a role in this. And we know that the more dire the poverty a people are kept in, the more kids per capita they have. In that sense, a redistribution of not just wealth, but also income and power is key to saving the planet.
J - A third party effort in a non-parliamentary political system like the United States is doomed to fail from day one. I, too, have a distaste for the Democratic Party and the two-party system. And as I hint in this essay, looking ahead I think we will see a realignment (but I don't claim to know what it looks like: there have been some shifts in US history in which one of the major parties gave way to a new one) but I don't see any of those in play effectively for the 2010 elections. I would say that those of us that are not "party liners" have the best opportunities to change the context by which both parties govern in the area of community organizing outside of the electoral system, rather than attempting Quixotic Naderesque or Green Party-like campaigns that often have negative and unintended consequences (see Bush-Gore, 2000).
Joel - I don't think that project you link - an effort by the SEIU and some other organizations and bloggers to primary conservative Democratic members of Congress - is necessarily a bad thing (although you're correct: if the likes of Hamsher are directing it, I don't expect them to be successful at it either). I think primaries are the right place to wage those challenges. The problem is that when we look at Netroots successes, we end up with a whole 'nother kind of Blue Dog Democrat (see Tester, Jon) and I often think that to too many of them the word "progressive" has failed to accept the multi-racial nature of the population. If you look, for example, at the new "progressive caucus" in the US House, with the exception of one Hawaiian, they're all white: black and hispanic legislators are avoiding it and the promotors of that project must ask themselves "why?"
CarolDuhart - To be clear, I haven't voiced any objection to everybody paying in to health care or medicaid or any such thing. That's as it should be. What I object to is being forced to contract with an insurance company or the government in a way that forces the individual to provide information about his and her personal health (physical and mental) to any company or system. I think it is everybody's responsibility to help pay to make health care accessible to all people, including those of us that hope to never avail ourselves of it.
labor unions, too
Submitted February 27, 2009 - 10:13 am by Walter Dufresne (not verified)Thanks, Al, for this piece.
IMHO, old-fashioned democratic and progressive labor unions, run by and dominated by their rank and file members, are a key method for progress. For your readers who are already in unionized workforces, consider becoming active within your union. And for workers seeking economic justice and a fair share of the corporate pie, know that some unions *will* work to organize and improve conditions in your industry and in your workplace. The economic trickle down within a community from democratic unions beats the pants off fatcat trickle down any day.
nice catch on the language
Submitted February 27, 2009 - 10:19 am by Jeff LarsonI have been wondering whatever happened to the use of "laissez faire" as a pejorative, as in "blind laissez faire policies". I don't necessarily miss the term though. We need some new terms and need to stop attaching too much baggage to any of our frequently used labels.
What I dug about Obama long ago is that he isn't stuck in the 70's ideological battles and language. Few "pundits" understood that even though he frequently told them about it. (aside: Al are you as tired as I am that media folks attach a "-gate" suffix to anything that whifs of scandal?) It is great to see him redefining the issues, battle lines and the language itself by which we discuss the problems of the day.
You may fine this odd Al, but the written work I thought of first after reading your post is Pope John Paul II's Laborem Exercens, the encyclical in which he lays down principles to uphold the dignity of work. He discusses excesses of capitalism and communism and a broad range of related topics including human rights. It is strong on principles and short on solutions though. Agnostics may not like the faith language in it. But it is interesting to read the section on the rights of workers and importance of unions considering the document was written just one year after the foundation of Solidarity.
Although certainly not a
Submitted February 27, 2009 - 2:05 pm by RC (not verified)Although certainly not a panacea, having far fewer humans on the planet would help the environment enormously and I hope whatever is necessary to encourage all passengers on Earth to limit their contribution to the reproduction imperative to one or no offspring by education and even monetary encouragement is done before more policies of forced limitations as exist in China are necessary. Or, let's find a way to get to Mars and we can pollute there too.
Perhaps I'm Missing Something
Submitted February 27, 2009 - 2:19 pm by kaleidescope (not verified)I look around for a powerful movement of social justice libertarians doing cross-demographic organizing and I don't see it. I spend about a third of my time on an economically devastated Indian reservation in far northern California. Nobody has come and knocked on my door trying to organize me into an anarcho-syndicalist collective. I try to imagine what it would be like for anarcho-syndicalist organizers to do cross-demographic organizing by going door to door in the Milwaukee Missouri Synod Lutheran Archie Bunker neighborhoods I grew up in. "Sir, I would like to organize you into an anarcho-syndacalist collective." I just don't see it.
In my youth I was an anarcho-syndacalist who wanted to organize the working class to take action against their bosses. I worked as a factory worker at marginal Milawukee industries like soda and pipe-nipple manufacturing. I spent a lot of time eating lunch, taking coffee breaks and playing cards in a, you know, cross-demographic way with my co-workers. They really wanted the liberty to discriminate against black people, to lock up their daughters if they even thought about dating a black guy, and they thought that any talk of income redistribution, taxing the wealthy or inconveniencing corporations was nothing but, "commie claptrap." They also wanted the liberty to beat people up who smoked pot or who had long hair or who were "faggots." You might say they were really into liberty of a sort, at least for themselves.
Can you show us some examples of where the kind of anarcho-syndacalist cross-demographic organizing you talk about has actually resulted in long term, successful collectives? It would be especially helpful if you could direct us to some successful long-standing cross-demographic anarcho-syndicalist collectives.
@ kaleidescope
Submitted February 27, 2009 - 3:03 pm by Al GiordanoKaleidescope - You are absolutely correct that very few self proclaimed "anarchists" in the US have done cross-demographic community organizing there. (I don't think I claimed that they did, for what it's worth.)
The only projects that come to mind are in the New York area: a jumpstarted IWW (International Workers of the World, or the Wobblies) effort to organize truckers and supermarket employees, and something called Movimiento por El Barrio doing housing and other organizing work in the boroughs. But they're fairly nascent efforts. We'll see where they are later on down the line.
When people call themselves "anarchists" I find Murray Bookchin's dialectic of "social anarchists" vs. "lifestyle anarchists" helpful (even if Bookchin's book on the subject was too motivated by sour grapes over the relative success of Hakim Bey's writings, which I also think are marvelous even if many who claim to adhere to his prose haven't themselves crawled out of the "lifestyle" ghetto.)
As for Social Justice Libertarian organizing, there is one great example: The case of Tulia, Texas, after drug war profiling targeted African-Americans to the extreme, and the William Kunstler fund sent organizer Randy Credico in there with others and they organized with the locals to create a local crisis that led to a national scandal around it, and put the issue of racial profiling on the docket in a big way.
I've recently encouraged some of the same folks who helped make that happen to get busy in El Paso, Texas, where the city council last month resolved in favor of opening a national debate on drug legalization. Not clear if that's going to happen, but it's an organizing opportunity that is very ripe for victory.
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