American Scene
Submitted by Gary Rumor on Sun, 2009-08-16 21:26
The United States is in a ferment over the collapse of the Capitalist system. Rural white activists are forming militia movements to oppose what they see as a socialist government. These are the 'birthers' people who believe that President Obama is not a citizen and 'teabaggers' people who do not want to see government funding of industry and finance. Most recently these activists have been joined by right wing foundations who have funded campaigns to oppose a National Health Care plan.
Obama represents a response on the part of corporate capitalism to a general disgust among the American populace with the misgovernment under President Bush, with his war mongering invading Iraq, and embroiling the nation in this war on terror instead of treating international terrorism as a police problem that should involve the intelligence services not the military.
When the economy collapsed last year the right wing in the American power elite lost its credibility. The response of Obama to the crisis in the financial markets last fall led the big moneyed investors to shift from the Republican Party to the Democrats.
The radical right, based in libertarian think tanks, gun owners groups, fundamentalist Christian churches, anti tax groups and race based neo fascist groups have mounted a campaign to defeat the movement for socialized medicine. They are joined by some business groups but others including the pharmaceutical industry and much of the health care industry has already signed on to the Presidents plan for creating universal health care. President Obama has promised not to slash the profits of the industry in exchange the industry has agreed not to oppose the President's legislation. The President has aggreed to not support a single payer option which would wipe out the private insurance industry. Instead he has proposed a public optional insurance plan for people who are not happy with their current health plans. This has been watered down from something that would insure all 45 million uninsured Americans to something that may only cover a few million persons. This is a far cry from the universal health care that Obama promised in his campaign. He has come a lot further than Clinton did back in 1993, but it is not what people hoped for.
On the economic side the toxic assets of the finance industry that was taken over by the Federal Government and still remains on the books of the medium sized financial institutions remains as a potential drag on the growth of the economy. Most likely rather than dealing with this directly the finance experts seem to think they can simply isolate them, and then grow around them treating this like a dead sea zone in a living ocean of financial activity. Whether that is possible or if this toxic debt will starve the economy of the oxygen of funds required to keep the economy liquid and active is another question. This is a crude analogy but perhaps apt enough to describe this financial dead sea.
As Marxist economists have pointed out what we have is a crisis of overproduction with the financial sector or the requisition authorization sector as it should more properly be called, frozen up due to an extremely large number of authorizations given to persons who were not able to respond with the correct value keys. If we can consider money, or assets as value keys that turn the handle that releases some of the stored up wealth in the cornucopia of human productivity. Essentially the valuation system is not functioning properly. We produce more wealth than ever, but it is sitting in warehouses, or producers are being forced into idle potential productivity. This is because there is a breaking down of the system of permissions known as the international finance system. Value is pegged the the US Dollar. China in particular has bought huge amounts of this in the form of T-bills. This dysfunction is endemic to the capitalist system of exchange. What is needed is a new system of accounting for distribution of value to those who need it. What is required is a social system of value that does not repress creativity and economic productivity as the State Capitalism under the Soviet Union.
There must be a new system of valuation that is not based on the accumulation of value into the hands of a few individuals. This is the social wealth created by all of us together. We need to find a method of allocating the product of this labor in a democratic manner that is both efficient and fair. We can learn from the mistakes of the past and create a truly democratic socialism now that we have the technology and the productivity to make it work.
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Hy Gary, and welcome here.
Hy Gary,
and welcome here. Thanks for the given evidence
red greets
Health insurance and cost cutting
Health insurance and cost cutting
Hi Gary,
What is most likely arise at the present out of the health care bill is a cost cutting measure that will cut medicare "overpayments" to hospitals. The public hospitals in turn will have less in the way of funds to treat people without health insurance in emergency rooms, compounding a bad situation for public hospitals around the country. People do have a good reason to fear these cost cutting measures. National Health Insurance has been an illusion that the Democratic Party has tried to sell its "voter base" in every election for decades now. Any scheme for insuring the uninsured will likely take the form of a coercive scheme to force the uninsured to buy discount health insurance, as exists in Massachusetts.
The Obama administration, could easily sign an executive order mandating the expansion of the existing Medicare program into a national health insurance program for everyone, not simply the bureaucrats in the government, the armed forces and the elderly as the current Medicare plan in the US is, for the most part, set up. For the capitalists health care "reform" can only be a cost cutting measure.
With China warning the US to stop printing money or it will sell off its treasury bills, more ominous troubles are appearing on the horizon. With jobless reports showing no tangible let up in layoffs and unemployment benefits lasting at the most for twenty seven weeks. With food stamp use at an all time high, the average stipends being approximately $83 to $133 dollars per person. Cuts to the programs and changes to the way they are administered have resulted in UI and Food Stamps having a backlog of claimants that aren't getting served. Since there is technology now employed in these programs that largely eliminating the need for human beings to answer claimants questions, there us usually no recourse in obtaining benefits than to wait for benefits you might never receive. The recovery as it was being called last week has now been shaken with the weeks news that the rate of new unemployment claims has increased by another 15,000.
I would say so much that it wasn't creativity or technological innovation that was repressed in the former USSR, but rather it was the working class that was repressed and the very crisis caused the Soviet Union to fall apart is the same thing that is now plaguing the world economy and has been plaguing it since the Nixon administration was compelled to end the Bretton Woods accords and unhinge the dollar from any remaining link to gold, thus floating the value of the currency to the advantage of US capitalism alone. Rounds of state bankruptcies, cuts and layoffs are likely to continue for the rest of this year and next. By the end of this year it has been said that half of all the country's mortgages held could be "underwater". As the prices of homes are still falling the numbers of bad mortgages are bound to keep increasing. It isn't even certain just how much on the capitalists balance books is toxic debt and what isn't, given the creative accounting, the massive injection of treasury funds into the system, the fluid economic situation, the capitalists themselves cannot know just how much debt is so-called toxic debt. The reduction in workers living standards is meant to be permanent. The anger on the right-wing has a social basis that goes deeper than just hysterical reactionary politics. For a badly confused and depoliticized mass to react to the current crisis, they then predictably do so in a reactionary fashion. The "teabag" protests are a reaction to the fact that the Obama administration handed the keys of the treasury over to Wall Street. It is easy to manipulate such sentiments. It isn't just the rightist reactionaries that are angry, as Obama has abandoned almost everything he said he would do. Guantanamo is set to be shut down but the prisoners will be sent to a new prison, possibly in Michigan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will only continue. It was only last October that Obama was promising universal health care in his speeches.
It is Democratic Party itself that has defeated the health insurance proposal, cleverly creating a cost cutting measure and giving it a public "option", then dropping the public option as fast as you can say EFCA (the "Employee Free Choice Act" touted by the unions as their salvation-quietly killed off by the Obama administration).
Revolutionaries need to start arguing, not simply for a break with the two-party system but the overthrow of the capitalist system that created it. There is more than enough anger among the general population currently for a major social explosion, but there is an enormous legacy of passivity, propaganda to be overcome. Workers should seize the democracy for themselves while giving the capitalist class nothing less than a dictatorship.
Internationalist Greetings
I don’t think I gave much of
I don't think I gave much of an answer for the main points of Gary's posting. So I'll belatedly make another stab at it here.
As we know the current crisis broke out first in finance and real estate. What should be noted is that capital invested into production is unprofitable compared to the profits that can be gained in finance and that this parasitic activity grows out of the inherent crisis of capitalism, out of falling rates of profit and overproduction. No less stark than the unprofitability of capitalist production is the level to which technology has developed the means of production and communication. Capitalism has become a barrier to its own development. The capitalists no less have transformed into asset stripping financial parasites who wont invest in the messy process of production and whose power grows out of the barrel of a gun. While the technologies the capitalism has created point towards greater possibilities than capitalist society can provide.
In a very real sense what exists in the US is a more adaptable form of state-capitalism, based on military expenditure, manipulation of interest rates, the printing of money, of research and development on behalf of capitalists carried out and paid for by public universities. It was the state sector itself that paid for the research that created the microprocessor. Private capitalists do little or no research of their own, it is cheaper to let state entities do it for them. The US economy initially grew in the nineteenth century by protecting itself with tariffs and trade barriers from the might of the British capitalists.
There is a political psychosis of reaction among those layers whose consciousness has been formed by the religion of anti-communism and Christian theology. The unthinkable has happened to the nationalistic consciousness of the US public. The USA has been shaken to its ideological foundations and respectable bourgeois opinion has no answers for events they neither foresaw, nor understood. The result is political hysteria, conspiracy theories, end-times prophecy and rabid militarism. This American 'individualism' cannot comprehend what is happening because it cannot comprehend society in any meaningfully broad sense. If things go wrong with their plans and policies, they blame 'socialism' as the source of all society's ills, without any reality-based reference point at all. These are people who thought that US power and might would have no end. Now they are faced with a reality that they are incapable of understanding. After decades of budget cutting on every level of US government, the end result is not more prosperity but a very anemic state incapable of reacting to a crisis and incapable of even the most basic imperial task of crushing former, or potential client states into submission. Fear of this ultra-right plays into the hands of the party in power and serves the ruling democrats well and allows them to fully pursue any austerity measure they wish.
The bodies are piling up
The bodies are piling up furiously and maybe the big shots are seriously thinking about sending the troops into Mexico.
Fretting over a scenario in which armed U.S. soldiers could be called to the border — or even over it — to hold back lawlessness and violence, Undersecretary of the Army Joseph Westphal invoked a contentious word to describe Mexico’s problem with drug cartels:He called it an “insurgency.”Speaking at the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics on Monday, the second-highest ranking civilian official in the U.S. Army spent most of his lecture explaining the economic and bureaucratic obstacles faced by defense budget makers amid complicated challenges in the Middle East and South Asia.But in response to a student’s question about strategic blind spots in U.S. foreign policy, Westphal switched hemispheres.“One of them in particular for me is Latin America and in particular Mexico,” he said. “As all of you know, there is a form of insurgency in Mexico with the drug cartels that’s right on our border.”
This would be enormous.
related, Tens of thousands
related,
Tens of thousands of Illinois residents are expected to be affected when drug and alcohol treatment and prevention centres across the state have their budgets cut from March 15.The harsh budget cuts, proposed by Illinois governor Pat Quinn, who is a Democrat, will mean that from next month, all state funding will be cut.After that date, only federal (national) Medicaid dollars will be available to fund the state's drug and alcohol treatment and prevention programmes, which means that some centres are facing closure.Talking to the News-Gazette, which serves East Central Illinois, Sara Howe, CEO of the Illinois Alcoholism and Drug Dependence Association said: '80 per cent of our clients on March 15 would be thrown out of care'.That adds up to around 55,000 people who will lose their help battling drugs.
Under the pretext of the war
Under the pretext of the war against drugs, the US is flying unmanned aircraft over Mexico.
DECAY- The city of Detroit
DECAY-
The city of Detroit lost 25 percent of its population between 2001 and 2010, according to newly released census data. In all, 237,500 left the city, a rate of one person every 22 minutes. It is the largest ten-year decline for any large city in US history, and second in percentage terms only to the decline experienced by New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Detroit's population, 713,777, is at its lowest point since World War I............As a result, Detroit is the poorest city in America, with a real unemployment rate of about 50 percent.What has been done to Detroit is a concentrated expression of a broader process. Other industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast continue to decline sharply—Cleveland’s population fell by over 17 percent between 2000 and 2010. Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Buffalo—formerly the arc of American industrial might—have fallen in population to levels not seen in many decades.The transformation of the United States from the world’s industrial colossus into a second-rate industrial power was a protracted process, spanning many decades. It is a profound expression of the decline of American capitalism. At the same time, the gutting of manufacturing was a critical component of the conscious class policy pursued by the American ruling elite.
counterpunch.org War on
War on drugs and wall street profits
War on capitalism too, which
War on capitalism too, which is what the article above is really about, but is too coy or too scared to actually say. I appreciate that Gary doesn't actually want to use the 'C' word, as many people still associate communism with the horror that was the USSR, But to use the expression "democratic socialism" instead...well many people think that's what Obama is all about, don't they? Isn't there a danger in disguising or dumbing down what it is we really wish to replace capitalism with? And if it's possible to write about "the collapse of the capitalist system" as Gary does,then why not take the bull by the horns and write about - please don't look while I say it - ccccccommuniism. And include an explanation of what it is and what it isn't. It may at first feel a bit like doing something naughty in public, but there's nothing porno about class consciousness, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or a finally achieved communism. We must be proud and brave. War on capitalism.
To me communism is about
To me communism is about using relatively small geographical units as the base of a proletarian council structure.
Exactly how that works I am not totally sure, I doubt it will be like the 1917 situation where the proletariat in massive factories were almost given a ready made organisation.
dated but
dated but relevant
youtube.com
So Steve, I read the “naked
So Steve, I read the "naked capitalism" thing, but didn't understand it or see why you posted it. As to your understanding of what communism is "small geographical units" etc. I don't understand that either and appear to be suffering a complete failure to understand syndrome. But I do agree that the revolution - if and when it comes - will not be a repeat of 1917. But as you've said elsewhere the working class seems totally unresponsive to the idea of communism, so maybe there'll never be a revolution, just speeded up barbarism. But keep up your good work in the unions! I don't really understand them, and their poisonous function, either.
One thing Lenin said was the
One thing Lenin said was the dictatorship of the proletariat would take many forms.
Now, it seems to me that the form of the base unit of a delegatory system could vary according to what already exists on the ground, and I think the details will be worked out by a practical attempt.
Optimism and pessimism about the possibility of revolution seem to be two sides of the same coin.
If you want revolution, the answer is you...contribute something.
Unions-nothing positive from them. If they did not exist we'd be better off.
Historically, that was not always the case, hence their survival.
alternet.org Mexico’s
Mexico's carnage is that of the age of effective global government by multinational banks – banks that, according to Antonio Maria Costa, the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, have been for years kept afloat by laundering drug and criminal profits. Cartel bosses and street gangbangers cannot go around in trucks full of cash. They have to bank it – and politicians could throttle this river of money, as they have with actions against terrorist funding. But they choose not to, for obvious reasons: the good burgers of capitalism and their political quislings depend on this money, while bleating about the evils of drugs cooked in the ghetto and snorted up the noses of the rich.So Mexico's war is how the future will look, because it belongs not in the 19th century with wars of empire, or the 20th with wars of ideology, race and religion – but utterly in a present to which the global economy is committed, and to a zeitgeist of frenzied materialism we adamantly refuse to temper: it is the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad. Twelve years ago Cardona and the writer Charles Bowden curated a book called Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future. They could not have known how prescient their title was. In a recent book, Murder City, Bowden puts it another way: "Juarez is not a breakdown of the social order. Juarez is the new order."
when we look closer, we
when we look closer, we find that Greedy Bastards have rebranded racism and made it acceptable again, by calling it "the war on drugs. "These statistics compiled by New York Times columnist Charles Blow and author Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow) are mind-blowing. Since 1971, there have been more than 40 million arrests for drug-related offenses. Even though blacks and whites have similar levels of drug use, blacks are ten times as likely to be incarcerated for drug crimes. "There are more blacks under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.""As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race."In 2005, 4 out of 5 drug arrests were for possession not trafficking, and 80% of the increase in drug arrests in the 1990s was for marijuana.There are 50,000 arrests for low-level pot possession a year in New York City, representing one out of every seven cases that turn up in criminal courts. Most of these arrested are black and hispanic men.