Scott Walker and the Union Movement

While it would not be an exaggeration to say that I am heartbroken over the outcome of the move to replace Wisconsin's Scott Walker, it did serve the purpose of prompting me to consider why a majority of voters find him (and his like in other venues, such as Chris Christie and Paul Ryan), an acceptable leader.   How do we explain, progressives can often be heard to ask, why it is that large numbers--increasingly a majority--of Americans vote against their own interests? Those on the left do much head-scratching over why, in the heat of a financial crisis visited upon us by billionaire hedge fund managers, the average American expresses far more anger toward the guy down the block who happens to belong to a union.  Some write off this tendency as mere jealousy.  Your neighbor with a union card is a far more convenient target of opportunity than the one percent of his fellow Americans hidden from view in their gated, country club communities.  In fact, given the prevailing values of capitalist America, the one percent are actually respected and admired, just one lottery ticket away from being the neighbors you really deserve.  While those who occupy Zucotti Park are depicted as a lot of grungy malcontents in the financial district, the one percent are the true occupiers of Wall Street, a capitalist Valhalla synonymous with what was once called the Great American Dream.  The forty-eight percent of us who are either dismayed by or contemptuous of this attitude, however, may want to reflect on one significant reason the divide among us developed.
     Ultimately, the thread that runs through not merely the success of opportunistic demagogues on the right but also the Tea Party phenomenon and the general drift to the right in this country reveals the deep and lingering effects of a once fiercely debated issue in the American union movement, namely, the tendency to create what was called an "aristocracy of labor."  It is a dichotomy as old as the battles that once took place between the A.F. of L. and the C.I.O.  It helps to explain how during the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, teachers, rather than corporate felons, became public enemy number one.
    It is often pointed out that union membership in this country, once at 40% of the work force, has declined to the 12% or so who continue hold union cards.  Changes in the global economy, outsourcing, the nation's post-1960s social battles and the fact that unions were never exactly popular, have all contributed to this outcome, but the inherent conflicts in the history of the union movement have also played a large role. 
     Needless to say, throughout our history, the owners of American business did their best to block unions from forming in the first place and, where that failed, resorted to subverting or pacifying them the best they could.  Union organizers were characterized as communists, un-American, but because the union movement became an inexorable force growing out of the desperate economic conditions of the early twentieth century, it was seen as an evil better to tolerate than invite more dire alternatives.  This is not to say that the truce that came to exist between the big unions and goverment was not hard won.  Incidents of striking workers being clubbed, shot down or even massacred riddle our history.   If unions were never popular, the main culprit was obviously the unrelenting campaign against them spear-headed by business interests.  It is nevertheless important to understand that, for millions of workers, the unions were themselves the problem. 

     The popular 1950s film, On the Waterfront, with Marlon Brando portraying the brother of a thug connected to a corrupt longshoreman's union, might serve as an icon of unionism's divided identity.  From the Teamsters' Jimmy Hoffa to the United Federation of Teachers' Al Shanker, a variety of union leadership evolved that often placed democratic unionists in opposition to their own leadership.  Many union organizers in the 1930s were in fact communists, but by the 1950s and early 1960s, HUAC, McCarthyism and the cold war had forced most radicals out of the movement.  This, of course, did not prevent anti-union interests from continuing to caricature unions as subversive and anti-American.  But the philosophical differences between the school of thought personified by Samuel Gompers, who put a premium on skilled workers, and the opposing view personified by the leadership of the C.I.O., that sought to include all workers, took a toll on the movement as a whole.
     We now have automotive plants and other industries relocating to the South where business need not worry about pesky unions and thus the cost of wages and benefits are minimized.  There was a time when this would have caused great conflict among workers, but now, they see themselves fortunate to just have a job; there is a Chinese boy or girl they are told, who will be happy to do your job for a small fraction of the hourly wage you demand. As a result, the union movement has become essentially moribund.
     Ever since Ronald Reagan destroyed the Air Traffic Controllers' union, there has been an inexorable campaign to entirely expunge an already hobbled union movement from this country.  Unions became a target of opportunity for the right wing, and they have taken full advantage of the historical moment.  Milton Friedman had a virulent hatred of teachers' unions and the full panoply of supposed "reforms", (Cf. Walker's use of this term, the right wing euphemism for rolling back any and all advances since the New Deal), such as charter schools, merit pay, elimination of tenure or, at its most extreme manifestation, as we have seen in Wisconsin, the elimination of collective bargaining for public employees' unions.
    So, yes, my fellow forty-eight percenters, there are good reasons why so many American voters seem to be voting against their own interests.  If the problem of educating working class Americans to who their real enemy is was difficult before the conservative counter-revolution, it has become far more difficult now.  If we really care, we will stop scratching our heads, and get out there and, yes, organize.  It won't happen by itself.

Public Employees' Unions

As most New Yorkers of a certain age can recall, there's a line in Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper, a comic look at a post-WWIII future, in which the character he portrays explains what happened with the line, "a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead."  It is ironic that the man who, in the early 1960s, saw it as his mission to wrest control of the teachers' union from radical leftists came to rule with an iron hand over the largest and one of the most fearsome union locals in the A.F. of L. -C.I.O.  Actually, a law known as the Feinberg Law had done most of Shanker's work for him.  In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld the law, which was designed to prohibit communists from teaching in the New York City public schools, with dissenting justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter asserting that the decision ""turns the school system into a spying project." (Cf. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/supreme-court-rules-on-communist-teachers).   What likely prompted Woody Allen to pen his famous line, however, was Shanker's role in the 1968 teachers' strike, a strike that closed the New York City schools for three months and left scars that are still in evidence over forty years later.  
      One aftermath of that strike which might be considered a foreshock of Scott Walker's recent success at prohibiting teachers to participate in collective bargaining, was New York State's Taylor Law, which deprived teachers of a far more pungent right for unions--the right to strike.  (In another ironic footnote to these events, the single deciding vote for the law in the New York legislature was cast by a school teacher, Conservative Party member, Vincent Riccio.)  Without the right to strike or the right to collective bargaining, a union is no longer a union, it is at best a loosely organized professional organization.
     Shanker had always done his best to rein in the left of his organization.  The union's Delegate Assembly, which at one time had sent delegates in numbers proportional to the total on a school's staff, was reduced to two delegates per school when the DA proved too unwieldy by overriding  Shanker's opposition to its vote to have the union go on the record as opposed to the war in Vietnam.  The term of office for chapter leaders was lengthened, and, when thousands of teachers opposed the 1968 strike, the union's leadership was purged of dissidents.  Over 8,000 teachers were allowed to be "excessed," many of whom had also dissented from the union's tactics in dealing with the issue of community control.  So much for democratic unionism.  Even in a rank and file that consists of teachers, never a particularly radical bunch, after 1968 the UFT was effectively contolled by Shanker and his hand-picked loyalists who vigilantly guarded against the slightest manifestation of radicalism.  To the handful who knew Shanker's history, his affiliation with the virulently anti-communist Max Schactman socialists and his USIA connections, none of this came as a surprise.  The only militant unionists Shanker ever supported were the members of Lech Walesa's Polish Solidarity (Solidarnoc) who contributed to the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.   In 1998, Shanker was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Clinton.
     The history of the United Federation of Teachers parallels the history of many unions in this country.  There is only one reason that public service employees' unions (PSEUs)continue to exist: it is not quite so easy to outsource police, teachers and fire fighters.   If they could, you can be sure, they would, especially in an era that has seen prisons and even the armed forces placed increasingly in private hands.  Though difficult to eliminate, there have been ceaseless efforts to tame the PSEUs.  Much of what gets in the media about the outrageous benefits enjoyed by the PSEUs is not only horror stories, it is just plain false.  In the UFT here in New York, for example, the city has just announced the introduction of Tier 6, the effect of which will be to see benefits gradually decline to a fraction of what the few remaining dinosaurs who entered the system fifty years ago are currently entitled to.   The work of rolling back wages and benefits has largely been done.  For the right, the only remaining task is to break the unions entirely.  It is no longer enough to use the older strategy of planting the seeds of self-destruction by ensuring that Medal of Freedom winners kept militants in check.  
  

Finally, a Tiny Fissure in the Wall of Lies

As far as most Americans can tell, world opinion is, with the single exception of Russia, otherwise unanimous on the subject of conditions in Syria.  President Hassad must go.   For listeners of National Public Radio's Sunday morning show, On the Media, however, a small fissure in the wall of lies we have been treated to managed to erupt.   (I would refer readers who wish a full account to the NPR web site where a full audiocast of the interview with Lauren Wolf of the Women Under Siege Project may be heard.)   Ms. Wolf's work with the project led her to probe more deeply into accusations made by Senator Joe Lieberman, (Israel's ambassador to the U.S. Senate), that members of the Syrian Army were raping large numbers of Syrian women.   Asked what had sent up a "red flag," Ms. Wolf stated that she began to see a pattern in the reports; they seemed remarkably similar, as if they might be coming out of a propaganda ministry rather than unbiased reports.  It seemed, she said, that "they only want us to be ctiticizing the Syrian army."   Recounting how false reports led us into the disatrous war with Iraq, she felt an obligation to verify the charges made by Senator Lieberman.  It so happened that the NPR broadcast coincided with the New York Times report on President Hassad's speech to his parliament.  Although it seems almost dangerous to commit this thought to print in the climate that prevails in this country, I find that Hassad's representation of the treatment his regime is receiving from the American-led campaign against him is essentially accurate:

"...some people went as far as denying the existence of the foreign factor altogether and considered this argument an escape from internal obligations. They argued that the gist of the problem a disagreement between Syrian parties and that what is happening on the ground is a purely peaceful movement and that the source of any violence is the state. Some people made this argument in malice and bad faith and others made it with naivety, lack of knowledge, and as a result of media  forgeries. Now, and after more than a year from the beginning of these events, things are clearer and masks have been lifted. The international role in what is happening is already well-known not only for decades, but for centuries past. And I don't think it's going to change in the foreseeable future. Colonialism is still colonialism. It only changed in terms of methods and ways of  attack."                                                            
    On the subject of whether or not anti-government activities have taken the form of peaceful protests, the Western press seems unconcerned about contradicting itself almost daily.  While on the one hand having presented a scenario in which innocent protesters have been massacred by the Syrian army, it concurrently publishes numerous reports of the U.S. and its allies arming the "resistance," and of armed conflict occurring in many of Syria's population centers.  There are frequent threats of a military intervention similar to that Nato (the U.S.) employed in Libya.  Even the French, only recently seen as bad boys unwilling to join the "coalition of the willing,"  have threatened military intervention.  Someone finally succeeded in placing a pod beneath France's bed, it seems.  It is obvious that the U.S. has persuaded its allies that it will tolerate nothing less than unanimity next time around.
     Of course, anyone who focuses on the contradictory pronouncements made by those who are clearly seeking "regime change" in Syria is placed in the position of appearing to defend dictatorship over democracy.  One need not, however, be exactly an admirer of Assad to be appalled by the gross intervention in the affairs of sovereign states.  The late Bush administration's brazen broadcasting in its official statement of U.S. foreign policy its self-appointed right to pre-emptively attack any and all of its perceived enemies without regard for sovereignty only brought into the light of day a policy which the U.S. has long followed somewhat more covertly.
     Even so, not since the era of Yellow Journalism has there been more unbridled saber rattling than over Syria.  The campaign to pacify and bring under the U.S.-Israeli "peace umbrella" the swath of Muslim nations that stretches from Tunisia to China, coyly labeled the Arab Spring, has for now, beyond its ultimate goal of a Pax Americana for the entire globe, the shorter term goal of isolating and conquering Iran, seen as the major obstacle to the U.S.'s plan.

The Chart

Okay, let's take a look at this chart:

Mean Performance on Mathematics Scale

	Range of ranks1
Country	Upper rank2	Lower rank3
Hong Kong (China)	1	3
Finland	1	4
South Korea	1	5
Netherlands	2	7
Liechtenstein	2	9
Japan	3	10
Canada	5	9
Belgium	5	10
Macao (China)	6	12
Switzerland	6	12
Australia	9	12
New Zealand	9	13
Czech Republic	12	17
Iceland	13	16
Denmark	13	17
France	14	18
Sweden	15	19
Austria	16	20
Germany	17	21
Ireland	17	21
Slovak Republic	19	24
Norway	21	24
Luxembourg	22	24
Poland	22	26
Hungary	22	27
Spain	25	28
Latvia	25	28
United States	25	28
Russian Federation	29	31
Portugal	29	31
Italy	29	31
Greece	32	33
Serbia	32	34
Turkey	33	36
Uruguay	34	36
Thailand	34	36
Mexico	37	37
Indonesia	38	40
Tunisia	38	40
Brazil	38	40

 

 

First of all, take a careful look at those countries that are ranked higher than the U.S.  They are among the most racially homogeneous societies in the world.  Many of them plan on staying that way, with little immigration, the imposition of bars against acquiring citizenship, and, in some cases, outright xenophobia.  Going down the list, we find a predominance of nations like Finland, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, Belgium, Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Ireland, the Slovak Republic, Norway, Luxembourg.  Most of these are nations that are small in population as well as tending to be homogeneous in nature, and, dare we say it, extremely white.  So white, in fact, that for this observer at least, they elicit thoughts of claims of Nordic and Teutonic superiority which, since the Nazis gave eugenics a bad name a little while back, are no longer uttered in polite company.
     Outside of Northern Europe (with the exception of those darned socialist French), other locations given high rankings tend to be either in Asia or such outposts of the old British Empire as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  Note, too, that with regard to Asia, such island provinces as Hong Kong and Macao appear.  Since 2003, of course, as the "economic tigers" have allocated more and more of their resources to improving education, other Asian locales have joined the higher rankings.
    
Have standards declined in U.S. public schools?  Well, that depends a great deal on which public schools we are looking at, doesn't it?  If we are looking at the public schools in Scarsdale, let's say, we will get a very different picture than we will if we look at public schools in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant or East New York.  Has anyone thought to, just out of curiosity, compare the results of kids in Scarsdale or Chevy Chase or Ann Arbor with those of kids in Finland? There are no doubt many who look at the rankings and mindlessly conclude that what we are seeing is clear evidence of the racial superiority of whites and Asians.  If school performance were just about race, however, we might expect that whites performed uniformly well on standardized tests.  What one actually finds is that there is a wide spread between the performance of white students that is largely dependent on income.  In other words, some are more equal than others.  To cite just one example from a voluminous literature on this subject, take a look at the observations of one school administrator in Westchester:

The three top-spending districts (on a gross basis)—Briarcliff ($24,738), North Salem ($24,486), and Bronxville ($24,068)—each spend approximately $10,000 more per pupil than Yonkers ($14,170), Port Chester ($14,461), and Mount Vernon ($14,955). The disparity between instructional expenditures is even more profound. Although they serve roughly the same size student populations, Rye ($12,531) spends about 50 percent more on per-pupil instruction than Port Chester ($8,299). “I can’t compete on a per-capita spending level,” says Charles Coletti, school superintendent of Port Chester. “Financial comparisons don’t work for my district. They never have, and they never will.**

**http://www.westchestermagazine.com/Westchester-Magazine/March-2006/Our-Smartest-Public-High-School-Report-Card/

None of us is immune to the tsk-tsking about declining standards.  There was never a time in history when the observation was not made that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, to coin a phrase.  There are probably very few of us who have not drawn dark conclusions from charts such as the one presented here.  On the other hand, while it is certainly fair to conclude that certain standards (my favorite is handwriting) have declined, if we don't keep in mind that statistics often lie and deceive, we will become party to a campaign that, rather than being motivated by a desire to improve American education is actually motivated to dismantle our public school system.  If anything, what the charts have to teach us is that funding for American schools should be standardized.  That is the real way to ensure that no child is left behind.

The Right Wing Campaign Against Public Education

First, let's look at a typical report on the relative success among a select group of nations with regard to student performance in mathematics.  (Although the scores go back to 2003, later assessments show basically the same results.  Since results in reading and science are comparable, in the interest of brevity and for the purpose of this post, math results will suffice.)

International Comparison of Math, Reading, and Science Skills Among 15-Year-Olds

More than 250,000 15-year old students from 41 countries participated in the assessment. The countries included all major industrialized nations (results for Britain were not available) and 11 other nations that chose to participate. The test scores are from 2003.

Mean Performance on Mathematics Scale

	Range of ranks1
Country	Upper rank2	Lower rank3
Hong Kong (China)	1	3
Finland	1	4
South Korea	1	5
Netherlands	2	7
Liechtenstein	2	9
Japan	3	10
Canada	5	9
Belgium	5	10
Macao (China)	6	12
Switzerland	6	12
Australia	9	12
New Zealand	9	13
Czech Republic	12	17
Iceland	13	16
Denmark	13	17
France	14	18
Sweden	15	19
Austria	16	20
Germany	17	21
Ireland	17	21
Slovak Republic	19	24
Norway	21	24
Luxembourg	22	24
Poland	22	26
Hungary	22	27
Spain	25	28
Latvia	25	28
United States	25	28
Russian Federation	29	31
Portugal	29	31
Italy	29	31
Greece	32	33
Serbia	32	34
Turkey	33	36
Uruguay	34	36
Thailand	34	36
Mexico	37	37
Indonesia	38	40
Tunisia	38	40
Brazil	38	40

1. Because data are based on samples, it is not possible to report exact rank order positions for countries. However, it is possible to report the range of rank order positions within which the country mean lies with 95% likelihood.

2. Rank based on top two levels of proficiency (out of six) on mean scale of mathematical performance.

3. Rank based on lowest two levels of proficiency (out of six) on mean scale of mathematical performance.

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD PISA (Program for Student Assessment) 2003 database

Read more: International Comparison of Math, Reading, and Science Skills Among 15-Year-Olds — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923110.html#ixzz1vlE0xEI4

Web site:  http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923110.html
______________________

We've all seen this or similar charts.  We have in fact been bombarded with such statistics, the publication and announcement of which is inevitably accompanied by hand wringing, hair pulling and keening over the terrible condition of U.S. schools.  "Why," the rhetoric goes, "is the most powerful nation in the world faring so badly?"   Before analyzing the chart above, let us keep in mind that two prominent figures emerged in recent years to spearhead the attack on public education in this country--Milton Friedman and Michelle Rhee.  Along with numerous other true believers, they became the poster children for an attack which, as we shall see, has been only tangentially, if at all, focused on what ails our schools but very interested in destroying the remnants of a once powerful union movement in the United states.  Thus Friedman and Rhee's answer to the puzzle is that what is wrong with the schools are the teachers.  It is hard to tell whether the better literary reference here is to George Orwell or Lewis Carroll, but forced to come up with an explanation for the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression after thirty years of having its way with the American economy, the right wing would point to the chart above and say, "None of this would have happened had it not been for the teachers (or, more to the point, the fact that teachers are unionized and actually have [defined benefit!] pensions)."  Why is the U.S. ranked between Latvia and Russia in the above rankings?  Because those benighted teachers have been leaning on their shovels, collecting enormous pensions and moreover setting a terrible example for working class Americans who, dating back to Ronald Reagan's busting of the Air Traffic Controllers Union, been gradually deprived of their unions and such outrageous benefits as health plans and pensions.  No hedge fund and derivatives traders have been tried in our courts after bankrupting the world economy, but in the court of public opinion, teachers are now Public Enemy No. 1 (although they may be in a narrow tie for that distinction with irresponsible Black men and women who were bilked out of their savings by being lured into "no-doc" mortgages in an attempt to find adequate housing).   From New Jersey's Governor Christie to Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker, across the nation, the cry has gone out, "Get those damned teachers!"

Friedman, coming out of the Rockefeller haunt at the University of Chicago, breeding ground for the group of economists who wished to lobotomize the U.S. in an effort to make them forget the New Deal and embrace nineteenth century laissez-faire economics as well as the so-called neo-liberal cabal that sees as its mission the making of a world safe for the U.S. and Israel, went to his deathbed bemoaning the fact that, try as he could, he had failed to destroy teachers' unions and privatize American schools.

Michelle Rhee, a Korean-American capitalizing on the perception that Asian culture has some magic potion* they feed to their kids to make them excel in school, proceeded to institute a reign of terror in the Washington, D.C. school system for teachers she characterized as poor performers. Ms. Rhee, catching the scent of a career opportunity, has gone on to recreate herself as a guru for the whole litany of right wing prescriptions for reinventing education in America--vouchers, charter schools, teaching to the test, merit pay, doing away with tenure, and so on.  It is a prescription for basically complete privatization and the utilization of techniques in schools taken from the pages of the kind of corporate manuals that make chicken farming so attractive a sector of the growing unregulated, non-union U.S. economy. 
     *(After all, statistics do not lie. The student population at New York's Stuyvesant High School, probably the toughest ticket for admission to an elite public school in the nation, is now 75% Asian. And no one is readier to believe in the genetic intellectual superiority of Asians than these kids. If anyone needs further examples of Asian superiority, take a look at enrollment figures at MIT or a host of other prestigious U.S. schools.  Few Americans truly understand the Asian "secret."  Having visited many schools throughout Asia, I can testify to the fact that their superior results have almost nothing to do with the quality of their teachers or even the educational material in their schools, both of which suffer by comparison with the best that the U.S. has to offer.  It has a lot to do with family pride and face and far more days and hours spent in school supplemented by countless prep academies given the job of sharpening skills and getting their students into the best high schools, colleges and universities.  Few if any U.S. children would tolerate the regimen imposed on kids throughout Asia.)

Historically, over the latter half of the twentieth century, no group was more critical of the short-comings of American education than the left.  Their critique, however, centered not on the failings of teachers but rather on the failings of a system that had basically turned its back on the millions of black and brown and poor kids who, in many of the nation's cities, left behind in the dust of white flight to the suburbs, were relegated to schools that were grossly underfunded to meet their needs.  In fact, many of the most severe critics of urban public schools were the very teachers working within them.  This often proved to be so much the case, that conservative union leaders like the late Al Shanker, (as well as his hand-picked successors), had to take on the usual role of an American labor leader, that of gatekeeper, doing his best to tamp down the "radicals" within his rank and file.  Like so many other American movements, the movement within the unions to take a more aggressive stance in behalf of their young charges ran into a wall in 1968.  That was the year a three-month long teachers' strike grew out of another Rockefeller inspiration.  Former JFK cabinet member, McGeorge Bundy, (ever alert to opportunities for pacification programs) and his Ford Foundation issued a report on Community Control of the Schools.  What was a barely disguised effort to entrench segregation in Northern schools was seen as an opportunity for the ambitious within many of the target communities and an excuse to purge white teachers among the many already employed as teachers in those communities.  The schools, race relations, teachers' unions, the public image of school teachers and lot more would never be the same after that long and ugly strike.

And, in an effort to give a full picture, some time should be taken to address one other player in the great school debate as we have seen it play out over the last fifty years.  In effect transcending the differences between right wing and left wing critiques of our schools, this third group devoted itself to pointing out to an innocent American public that, wholesome as their faith in the power of education might be, it was, at bottom irrelevant as a determinant for success or even social mobility.  What mattered far more was class.*  This, of course, is the nasty little secret hidden under the cover of the Norman Rockwell quilt stitched on the Great American Dream Machine.  The implications of this school of thought are enormous.  If true, then spending more money on what were once called "ghetto schools" was just throwing good money after bad.  Judged by cold statistics, all of those bleeding hearts (another popular phrase of the period) were just wasting their time.

     *(No surprise, Christopher Jencks, the leading proponent of this analysis, was a product of Exeter, Harvard and the London School of Economics.  He was, and still is, a leading figure among that group of intellectuals given the assignment of responding to left wing (Marxist) analyses.  Doling out such assignments to truly loyal Americans is one of the major roles of our elite universities, often with considerable help from such governmental organizations as you can probably imagine and need not be listed here.) 

     To some extent, this argument had some weight for both right and left wing educational critics.  Certainly the left, schooled in the literature of class warfare, had to admit that there was some merit to this viewpoint.  It seemed a rather depressing and demoralizing turn in the pedagogical literature--unless all that was being offered was an academic version of "the poor shall always be with us."   The only problem was that no one seemed prepared to put the theory to the ultimate test by actually funding schools for poor kids at the same level their brother and sister American kids enjoyed in Scarsdale or Chevy Chase or Ann Arbor. 

Next: A Close Look at The Chart 

Plastics, Benjamin, Plastics

A recent involvement in archiving the cache of photographs that my brothers and I discovered in the basement of our late father has had several unanticipated consequences.  

      A preoccupation with the past and, in particular, one's family ancestry seems to be in the zeitgeist at the moment.  Given the many unpleasant realities that the post-twentieth century world has given us, this is probably to be expected.  Then, too, the baby boomer generation, now well into its dotage, and having the leisure and affluence to indulge its whims, has reached a stage where reflection upon its past translates into such phenomena as the success of on-line web sites for exploring one's ancestry or the popularity of "Skip" Gates' PBS specials exploring the DNA trail of various celebrities.   There are no doubt countless other explanations for what is going on--more of us are college educated, we are often the children and the grandchildren of immigrants with a sense of having "arrived" or just old-fashioned nostalgia.

     In the process of poring over hundreds of old photos, however, I gradually became aware that my reaction to the images they contained had a certain leitmotif.  I began to sense a certain calm that the images projected.  Partly, this may have been due to the fact that one organizing principle that I employed when assembling the photos into small journals or scrap books was to restrict my selection to only black and white or, if they were even older, sepia samples.   Now, without a long digression on the subject of the power black and white photography (including film) has as we are now well into a technicolor world, I began to realize just how important my editorial decision was.  Included in the family collection, there were obviously many color pictures taken since color photography had begun to replace black and white photography as the preferred modality for family snapshots, a quantum leap that had begun in the late 1950s.  Many, if not most, of the color photos seemed to have faded and lost their resolution with the passing years.  They often had an orange cast that I some time ago came to associate with prints of feature films made in the 1960s, a decade in which orange seemed to dominate the palette.  Surprisingly, the old black and white photos have often held up a lot better than the color photos that came to replace them in most family albums.  Perhaps the difference can best be summed up by asking the reader to mentally compare the impact made by a Cartier-Bresson or Capra print to that made by a video tape of a B movie photographed in color during the 1960s.  In any case, I stayed in my black and white realm, postponing the time when perhaps some over-arching insight would allow me to treat all those color images.

   

     As I was looking at one cousin's photo, I became aware of the specific impact that the backgrounds in many of the older photographs was having upon me.  Completely absent from the older photos was a common element in photos of more recent vintage--plastic.  Instead, it was a world in which wood and brick, glass, stone and iron dominated.  Even the clothing worn continues to project the aura of natural substances--of cotton and wool rather than of the still emerging technical marvels of nylon and polyester. 

       Of course, there are still residential areas in which natural materials are almost exclusively utilized, but these tend to be in the more affluent districts, segregated from commercial zones.  For most of us, plastic awnings, signage and building materials are all around us.  We are literally drowning in plastic.  This is not just an aesthetic concern.  The recently broadcast PBS documentary, Bag It!, frighteningly illustrates the extent to which just one plastic item, the common grocery store bag, used by the billions, has come to represent a clear and present danger to our environment, particularly in our oceans.   That danger, it appears, only worsens as plastic breaks down.  Plastic is biodegradable.  Though slow to break down, once it does, the small globules of the substance come to resemble plankton and other sea life whereupon, to their peril, it is ingested by larger animals. 

,      There are some who might accuse me of being a victim of nostalgia, of being psychologically predisposed to a past world that, photographed in black and white, was never really as uncluttered and "pure" as the impression those pictures create.   While there may be an element of that at work, nevertheless, when I look back at images from the pre-plastic world we once had, I cannot shake the conviction that steps must be taken to restore our quality of life and to protect the environment.  (I have already taken to bringing my own net bag to the supermarket and turning down their plastic bags, for one.)  Certainly, greater regulation of disposable plastic must be instituted.  And plastic should be used a lot less to begin with.  My own niche cause, however, is to find some remedy for the use of plastic in signage and building exteriors.  Do a mental exercise in your own community.  Study the landscape and then try to imagine how the place would look if all of that plastic were removed.   Except for a handful of individuals who find in scenes such as the one below a perverse satisfaction in that what is at work is unfettered freedom of expression, a kind of avant-garde, felicitous alternative to order and proportion, most of us I am convinced would breathe a welcome sign of relief were all the plastic and the neon that often accompanies it to disappear. 

      One solution would be to prohibit the use of plastic or at least to oblige builders and architects to submit to some benevolent local branch of government an application for its appopriate use.  An alternative might be to declare an amnesty, something akin to the measures taken to get individuals to turn in illegally owned guns; in other words, pay people to take down the plastic and return to the days of wood and paint and glass. 

     While, unfortunately, unlike Miniver Cheevy, I appear not to be growing lean, I obviously join him in having many reasons for assailing the seasons.  I have in these posts written of my disdain for, among other things, the automobile, skyscrapers and the saturation of the earth in ammonium nitrate in the name of encouraging its further overcrowding. 

     In the end, I maintain faith in the notion that one day mankind will come to its senses and abandon its gravely flawed technological sorcery for a regimen that truly nourishes body and soul.

   

      

Trotsky's Ghost: Part Three

It now seems fairly certain that all ensuing crises will be global in nature.  Due to the world-wide interlocking directorate that exists under the ever-frailer aegis of the U.S. dollar, it would be difficult to contain a crisis within the borders of a single nation.  Even China, with its command economy, will be hard pressed to shield itself from an economic epidemic beyond its borders so long as it relies so heavily on exports to other nations.  The economic fates of the Western hemisphere and Europe are intertwined.  Even sub-Saharan Africa, desperately struggling with the colonial "inheritance" left behind by its former European masters, will certainly not be immune.

     All this brings to mind the novel St. Petersburg written by the Russian novelist Andrei Bely in 1916, on the eve of the Russian revolution.  The novel's device is to place a time bomb in the home of a Russian aristocrat early on.  Through all of its remaining pages, the reader can hear that bomb ticking away.  The plot device serves, of course, as a metaphor for the conditions that led to the real explosions that would be set off in the aftermath of World War I. 
     The new millenium, of course, has brought us nothing so much as a sharpened awareness that we are not living with just one ticking time bomb, but three.  At the moment the economic crisis is on the front pages, but embedded under a layer or two of denial are two crises that may well explode before we ever reach a resolution of our economic troubles, namely the environmental crisis and, third, the perpetual risk that men in power will resort to the time-worn solution for getting out of a jam, the use of real rather than metaphoric bombs.  (Viewers of PBS's current Masterpiece Theater offering, titled Birdsong, have been exposed to the devastating loss of life that took place during World War I.  Viewers who are students of the history will understand that that was precisely the point.) 
     The Russians, though no longer ruled by communist commissars, are clearly still beyond the pale.  Their internet news service, RT.com, gives us daily reminders of the build-up of military forces in the Persian Gulf and their attitude toward U.S. missile deployments in Eastern Europe becomes daily more belligerent.  Echoes of the wacky, millennial doomsday prognostications that have long predicted a global cataclysm in 2012 can be found everywhere in the media.  In truth, there is a frightening suspicion that, ironically, the risk of war is now greater than it ever was during the heat of the nominally cold war.
    In my previous post, I chided Paul Krugman for not taking his analysis to the next level and flat out acknowledging that Western policy makers are not merely avoiding taking the measures necessary for at least ameliorating the economic crisis, but are in fact determined to exacerbate it.  There is, however, an even deeper layer of the onion to be peeled away.  If, as I suggested, they are interested in reverting to nineteenth century laissez faire capitalism, the question still remains: why are they willing to go to such an extreme?  To some extent, no doubt, philosophical and ideological factors are in play, but is there more?  The strong suspicion arises that traditional capitalism has died on the long vines of derivatives and other such expressions of unbridled greed.  To use an alternative metaphor, there is now so much grit in the capitalist cogs that the machine has essentially ground to a halt.   There is no new idea out there.  No obvious remedy.  Don't count on the New York Times printing an obituary, however.  Not yet.
     Some followers of Trotsky's thoughts are already finding conditions ripe in the present situation for a global turn to what is for them the obvious alternative--socialism and communism.
     Tick...tick..tick...

(Above photo of Andrei Bely from the pages of Wikipedia.)
    

Trotsky's Ghost: Part Two

The right wing's explanation for the current economic malaise bear a remarkable similarity to the position it takes on climate change (already a euphemism they engineered for the more stark and direct "global warming"); the right, in keeping with its state corporatist bias, effectively exports responsibility for the crisis, creating the illusion that some natural process is at work rather than its being a quite clearly man-made disaster.  Great credit must be given to Naomi Klein, whose The Shock Doctrine lays bare the right wing's tendency to see in every disaster an opportunity to erode the public interest in favor of private profit, but what we are currently witnessing goes beyond even Klein's dark scenarios in that the right is engineering this disaster.
     This evening, National Public Radio broadcast an interview with Paul Krugman on the occasion of the publication of his new book, End This Depression Now!  Krugman, whose Nobel Prize should have been for tenacity, has consistently beaten the drum in his New York Times column for more spending as a way out of what he courageously labels a depression.  There is a certain poignancy in this man, ironically hired by none other than Paul Bernanke to his Princeton teaching post, to foreswear vanity and fashion and attempt to get out the truth, becoming virtually a voice in the wilderness.  Like most prophets, however, the good doctor seems to suffer from a kind of tunnel vision.  This is the way it goes: Krugman knows that current policy is counter-productive, that more spending is needed to resuscitate an economy in depression, not less.  When asked why his former boss and now head of the Fed, Bernanke, will not implement what he must know is the needed cure, he shrugs, cocks his head to the side and speculates that the man must be under a lot of pressure to stay the current course.
     Krugman simply seems incapable of seeing the obvious.  Yes, he must get credit for calling a spade a spade, for laying out a viable plan for recovery and for being unflagging in his devotion and energy when it comes to the needs of a populace about which he clearly cares.  He will even place the blame where it belongs.  For example, he acknowledged in the radio broadcast that it is true that the richest elements in our society would suffer a bit financially for the gains made by the vast majority were we to reinfuse the economy with cash and allow a 4% inflation rate, and that only by raising more voices like his can there be any hope of turning things around.  What Krugman seems unwilling or incapable of doing is seeing the larger picture. 
     The right's clear policy is to throw oil on the flames of the current depression.  It wants a depression.  Not only does the Republican Party do anything and everything it can to stand in the way of improving the economy, (even if it means harming the lives of millions of Americans), it makes no effort to keep the strategy a secret.  On the contrary, it loudly proclaims the strategy, practically from the rooftops.  In fact, we have heard such phrases as "starving the beast" as far back as the Reagan administration.  Our latter day iteration of the same construct is the use of "gridlock" as an actual "strategy".  After an apparently dazed and confused electorate gave Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections, the cry went out:  "Two more years of gridlock and then the White House!"
     Through the years following the Great Depression of the 1930s, most Americans would have found it unthinkable to dismantle the social safety net that we associate with New Deal reforms.  Thirty years of right wing propagandizing and historical revisionism, however, has brought us to a crossroads in which the right is now insisting on what in the playground would be called a "do-over."  "Let's have another depression.  Bring it on!"  Only this time, we will let the market do its magic, unfettered by socialist ideology.


     If all of this seems a bit mad, reminiscent of medieval religious battles, there are good reasons for it.  There has always been a strain in right wing philosophy based on the belief that the ordinary man cannot deal with freedom from worrying about his fate.  It is seen as dangerous to established order.  It emerges in what is often described as the "mean-spiritedness" of right wing ideologues experiencing the rapture.  Take a good look at Paul Ryan, for example, whose lean mien, glazed eyes and inappropriate smiles could get him a part in a drama on the Spanish Inquisition.   Or consider the fretting of Rick Santorum over sexual freedom.  For the right, the "only thing we have to fear is freedom from fear itself."  One of the ironies in all this is that although the right finds the roots of America's cultural deterioration in the revolutions of the 1960s, there has clearly been more vulgarity, crassness and social deterioration introduced since the inception of the Reaganite counter-revolution than anything we witnessed among peaceniks and flower children.  The latter groups seem innocent, even wholesome, compared to two generations bred on unharnessed commercialism and despair for the future.  Television, which provides a kind of CAT scan of the culture, (and which even in the 1950s was already being described as "a vast waste land"), has, under a regimen of deregulation and corporate freedom, filled the airwaves (or now, signifcantly, the cable wires) with fluttering vampires, ghosts, angels, psychics and reality show strivers whose competitions hearken back to the dance marathons of the Great Depression.
     In the present climate, wholesome young professors of economics who see a possible remedy to our economic problems, who, in other words, still believe in reform, may be a bit out of their league.  The portents are now out there for something more dramatic than a mere tweaking of the economic dials by the Federal Reserve.
    
 

Trotsky's Ghost: Part One

There was a time, not so long ago when, in cavernous New York cafeterias, men old enough to remember the events that took place in Russia in 1917 sat and endlessly argued over "a glass tea" the relative merits of Stalin's and Trotsky's approach to world revolution. For those outside of those storied circles, possessing even the most superficial acquaintance with Marxism, one phrase endures: "socialism in one country."  When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, just short of its 75th birthday, leftists on all sides of the debate must have heard that phrase echoing in their thoughts--whether they were happy to admit it or not.  Just as Trotsky had warned, socialism in one country, (or, as it turned out, even in two or three countries), seemed proven untenable.  The debate over the actual causes of the collapse of the U.S.S.R., along with the de facto collapse of Maoism in China, (particularly, needless to say, for those familiar with the left's penchant for ceaseless debate and secatarianism),  will continue apace.  A look at a political map of the globe, however, reveals a reality that seems undebatable.  Except for a handful of roaring mice like the aged Castro brothers or the teenage dictator in Pyongyang, the world has been cleansed of communist "experiments."

     For true believers, whether they subscribed to Trotsky's critique or not, what happened in the formerly communist countries was not a fair test of Marxist ideology, of communism or even socialism.  To the followers of Trotsky, his essential insight that the only lasting revolution would be a worldwide one has been vindicated by events.  Others within the left wing fold point to flaws within the regimes themselves that in a sense front-loaded them for failure.  The Chinese leadership that took over after the Gang of Four was dispatched and inaugurated the state capitalism that now rules adopted an interesting line, "Great heros make mistakes."  It is a line that is heard everywhere throughout China and has wide application--from the excesses of Mao's Cultural Revolution to, surprisingly, such historical phenomena as Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek's fall from grace and eventual exile in Taiwan.  Of mistakes ascribed to Stalin, little need be said here.

     Yet, when Vladimir Putin famously stated his belief that the fall of the Soviet Union was the "greatest tragedy of the twentieth century," one could almost hear the collective sigh of sympathy that his utterance elicited from like-minded souls around the world.  In the liberal West, of course, there is little doubt that the world is now better off for being rid of the U.S.S.R., but, on the left, there are many even among the followers of Trotsky who must be wondering.  Is socialism in no country (at least no major power) proving to be better for mankind than socialism in one country? 

     The post-Soviet era in which we are now living is one in which policy makers in the West seem not content merely to be rid of the Evil Empire(s) but see the oportunity to roll back advances made by the working classes that they were never happy to have conceded in the first place and only did so out of fear that those very masses might be seduced by "foreign" ideologies.   Thus, it is not enough to be rid of revolutionaries like the Stalinists, Maoists and Trotskyites, they have pushed the envelope to include such rather innocuous reformers as Keynes, or, for that matter, even Bismarck.

     The paradigm that seems to have been at work for some time now is one for which the cry might well be carpe diem!  "Let us roll back the reforms of the last century to a point whereby a new wave of socialist thought will have to dig itself out of a hole so deep that a counter-reformation will be nigh impossible.  When will events ever be more favorable for such a project?" 

      

    

    

A Big Chicken Comes Home to Roost

FDR, the man the right loved to hate, the man whose commemorative coin (the dime) often got painted red by his demonizers, the man anti-Semites called Rosenfeld, is seen by many historians as having in fact "saved capitalism." The neo-con revision of his legacy, however, is that the steps he took were unnecessary, that everything would have eventually corrected itself in our then crippled system if market forces had been allowed to play out. What the arguments being made before the Supreme Court right now richly illustrate is that the compromises Roosevelt was forced to make in order to keep the masses of the 1930s from getting out their pitchforks and still keep the country from the dread fate of turning into a European social democracy, (read socialist state), contained the seeds of the eventual destruction of even so sacrosanct an innovation as social security.

It is more than likely that the Supreme Court will strike down the so-called individual mandate in President Obama's health bill. There is even a strong possibility that the court will overturn the entire bill. But the consequences may be more far-reaching than that. If the court finds that governments cannot force citizens to make investments in their own future, it will not just be the health bill and social security that will fall, but the very concept of government having a role in health, education, housing, and a host of other aspects of our lives that we have taken for granted since the 1930s..

When FDR implemented his New Deal, the ruling classes saw in the existence of the Soviet Union a real and present danger to their very existence. When, in 1991, the U.S.S.R. collapsed, right wing ideologues sensed a historical opportunity to forward their agenda without opposition. Carpe diem became the call of the day. There would never be another such window of opportunity in which to roll back the advances made by the working classes. There was no longer an alternative system to turn to.

What the current debate proves is that half-way measures are always dangerous. The right is striking at the weak underbelly of liberal programs, programs that have always tried to moderate between complete laissez-faire capitalism, with its constant threat of pushing the working classes too far and into the streets, and socialism, the philosophy which has as its core tenet that governments have the responsibility of representing all of the people in a society. If the right gets its way, ironically, it may be planting the seeds of its own destruction.

The Mason-Dixon Line is Now at the Canadian Border

Although in an earlier post (The Hologram of a Republican Party) I argued that media coverage of the Republican primaries were giving us a skewed (and depressing) image of currently prevailing American values, some recent news stories have served to remind us of how it is not just the deep South or the Bible Belt that has a problem with race, science, religion, economics and foreign policy. As NPR reported this morning, large percentages of the American public--from the Candian border to the Rio Grande, can now be counted on, for example, to disbelieve the theory of evolution and the president's affiliation with Christianity. For once smug Northerners, (those perhaps whom Newt Gingrich calls the Northern "elites"), the hard to accept reality is that our problems are at bottom national problems, too widespread to be relegated to a benighted Southland. Let us not forget that the good people of Pennsylvania sent Rick Santorum to the U.S. Senate.

The story that has triggered a good deal of soul-searching about who we are as a people grows out of the killing of a young Black boy, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. When the president went on the record by noting that, if he had a son, his son would likely look just like the boy who was killed, we were guaranteed a tempest. While, on the one hand, the Trayvon Martin incident is an ugly reminder of a period when lynchings were common in the South and Black Codes prevailed, an honest Notherner will also be reminded not just of the controversy surrounding the stop-and-frisk laws being employed in New York City, but also the Sean Bell case or even the incident involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

Unless young people today are fortunate enough to be the recipients of an exceptional education, there are no doubt millions of young Americans who are not just ignorant of what slavery and post-Reconstruction terror under the Black Codes looked like in the South, they will also have no way of knowing that discrimination and terror against Black Americans was not exclusive to the South. And, with regard to more recent history, they will not be aware of the sea change that took place in American politics after the Civil Rights Laws of the 1960s saw the almost overnight abandonment of the South's Democratic Party, (the so-called Dixicrats), with Southern conservatives becoming Republicans, ironically the party of the abolitionists during the Civil War period. Hundreds of American cities were in flames during the "burn, baby, burn" episode of the 1960s. Combined with literally millions of anti-Vietnam war protesters taking to the streets, the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, (the year the world ended), and, twelve years later, the disffiliation of much of the white Northern working class in the Reagan Democrat phenomenon essentially gave us the political landscape in which we now all live.

Prior to the Black liberation movement of the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. had come to be viewed internationally as cousin to the South African apartheid regime. Among the memorable events of 1968 was the issuance of the Kerner Commission report which concluded that "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." Although much has changed in the ensuing forty-five years, and the report unsurprisingly generated a lot of conservative opposition, many would argue that even the presence of a Black man in the White House cannot alter the fundamental reality of the U.S. as a deeply divided society. The Mephistophelian bargain struck by the white working class was to forfeit many of the gains it had made in the twentieth century--its union strongholds, its standard of living, its urban life style, and more--for assurances that they would be protected from an expanding Black insurrection or the imposition of a truly integrated society. In this bargain lies the key to the oft-posed question, "Why does the working class so often vote against its own interests?"

Race may not explain everything about American life. It may seem unrelated to foreign policy matters, the military industrial complex or the greed of laissez-faire capitalism that has been given license to indulge itself, but the fact is that the "race card" is still being played, and played quite effectively. It has empowered some of the darkest elements in on the American political landscape, and, for that, it is not just Southerners who are to blame.

Our Amorphous Constitutional Protections

The image to the left is not a weapon currently employed by the U.S. military; it is a drone conjured up by the creators of the "Terminator" films. As is frequently the case with science-fiction, that film turned out to be far more prophetic than most viewers could have imagined at the time. Brian Lehrer, on his NPR show here in New York, has hosted a discussion of the constitutionality of using drones to "take out" U.S. citizens said to be enemies of the state without any formal charges being brought against them or being given the benefits of a trial. In the course of this morning's program, Jack Goldsmith, a former member of the Bush administration argued that citizens who are victims of such attacks are being given due process; it's just a question of how one defines what a citizen is due. (It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is?) The argument is further made that these executions have been given the approval of the U.S. congress.


What we are witnessing is a classic example of the paradox of "Locke's Socks," a mind experiment in which one begins with, let us say, a white sock and, then, by a series of seemingly modest alterations, perhaps a red thread here, a green thread there, we go through enough of these iterations of the sock to entitle us to ask the question, "is it still the same sock?" It is interesting that members of the right wing, who usually pride themselves on being "strict constructionists" when it comes to our constitution are unphased by the liberties presently being taken with the venerated document.


Flawed as the American constitution may be, citizens of just about every political persuasion have, for the most part, taken for granted its protections. The most egregious devaluation of those protections clearly took place during the Bush regime, but there have, of course, been precedents in our history. One need not go as far back as Lincoln during the Civil War or FDR during World War II to find that the U.S. government is capable of using war-time conditions to suspend constitutional rights. On the other hand, most Americans reeled back in horror as Bill Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, found it was permissible to have U.S. Army tanks blast their way into an encampment of trouble-makers occupied by women and children in Waco, Texas.


What has made the recent use of drone attacks so chilling is that they are being utilized by a president who, as a candidate, appeared opposed to the use of terror, suspension of the right of habeus corpus and summary execution. President Obama's falling into line with Bush administration protocols could be written off as just one more disappointment in his actual as opposed to promised performance were it not for the fact that it seems to conjure up the unmistakable impression that there are forces determined not only to bring us back to nineteenth century economic conditions, but political conditions as they existed before the signing of the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century.


For this citizen, there is little comfort in being told that Congress has given its approval to a particular course of action, or, given its present cast of characters, the approval of the Supreme Court. And, although there were a handful of government lawyers who had the integrity to resign rather than compromise what they saw as the actual mandate of the constitution, the Bush administration made clear that it is far from impossible to find lawyers in Washington who will sign off on just about anything a president requests. (There was slight solace indeed for German Jews who were told that good, stolid German judges had found no basis for objecting to their treatment at the hands of the Third Reich.)



What does not often get expressed is the fear that the slippery slope we are presently on will one day have drones flying over Mid-Western plains or the corridors between skyscrapers in our big cities searching out pronounced enemies of the state. Once inured to overseas assassinations, will some Americans be desensitized to the prospect of taking out dangerous rabble rousers protesting some future "austerity program" designed to protect the prerogatives of the one percent?

The Hologram of a Republican Party

The inception of a Republican presidential primary season that begins almost a year and a half before the election takes place is an elaborate magic act, a set of mirrors and lasers projected into every nook and cranny of the media and designed to distract the electorate from the underlying and fundamental fact that this is a party whose primary mission is to dismantle government and impose an as yet unimagined array of austerity measures. The longer this show goes on, the more distance there is from the reality of how Republicans actually behave when they take office. Had an election taken place in the immediate aftermath of the paralysis the government experienced throughout 2010 and 2011, there is a good chance that the voting public would have come out in large enough numbers to throw the curs out of both the halls of congress. And it is about numbers. Turnout in the Republican primaries has been low in almost every state, not really a surprise when the choice is from a slate that consists of an erstwhile moderate Republican pretending to be more reactionary than he is (in an effort to energize the one constituency among Republicans that still cares, namely, the ultra-right Evangelical types who co-opted [in what has become typical Republican newspeak] the Tea Party label from a group of colonial rebels their inborn Tory inclinations would have had them opposing in the 1700s), a young man whose eyes are red-rimmed with the rapture, a has-been pseudo-intellectual from the 1990s who can barely contain his rage, and an affable country doctor who wants to crucify the country on a cross of gold. European observers, it is said, are either mystified or amused at the character and caliber of the men this country considers suitable for so powerful an office.

Though it seems to fly in the face of reason, I await another rabbit pulled from a Republican silk hat. This year’s Sarah Palin may still be, (barring some as yet undisclosed skeleton that would preclude his having a run at the presidency), Chris Christie, the current governor of New Jersey. Those who discount him because of his weight or his somewhat coarse style overlook the intelligence and deftness this former federal prosecutor displayed in imposing his austerity measures on the state of New Jersey. It is possible that none of the present candidates will go to the Republican National Convention with the required number of delegates to gain the nomination. There is a real possibility that we will be treated to a deadlocked convention and will see a “Draft Christie” movement emerge. Such drama would serve to electrify the now depressed and moribund Republican Party.

If what we have in the Republican Party at present is a hologram invented with the cooperation of the mainstream media, this is not to say that the last three years of the Obama administration have demonstrated any less political sleight of hand on the part of Democrats. By November of 2008, the Bush administration had been taken over by the permanent government types on the Iraqi War Commission and decades of Republican (and Clintonian) dismantling of economic regulation had thrown the American economy into utter chaos. Conditions were remarkably similar to those that prevailed when Franklin Roosevelt ascended to the presidency after the 1929 Crash and the ensuing depression. Obama’s election was a cri de coeur from the American people. So disappointing was the actual performance of the man the country had chosen as its savior that by the elections of 2010, most voters abstained and essentially by default allowed the so-called Tea Party types to play out a feeble version of a mass movement of the angry and the disenchanted. There would be no universal health care, no restoration—in spite of the ponderous and tepid Dodd-Frank bill—of the regulations introduced during the New Deal to rein in the greed of the speculators, no public works programs, and a stance on the crisis facing American schools that has at its center a generalized freudenschade with regard to the fact that teachers were among the remaining few American workers who still had unions and pensions. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in the White House did not hesitate to bomb Libya back to the stone age and employs that most chilling of phrases, “we are not taking anything off the table” when it comes to Iran’s insistence on pursuing its nuclear program while remaining mute on the hundreds of nuclear warheads possessed by Israel.

Only the erstwhile communist regimes in Russia and China now fail to go along and take their cue from Washington and its allies in the capitals of Europe. Hayek and Friedman have replaced Marx and Lenin and even John Maynard Keynes. Just as revolutions are spear-headed not by the poor but by the middle class, it takes liberals like Franklin Roosevelt to save capitalism when it is in crisis. We are now, particularly in an era of globalization when conditions are not localized, on new ground. If people are a little tense right now, it is because that ground seems to be shaking.

The Speech that Obama Should Have Made

"The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression." How many times have we heard these words since the current crisis erupted in 2008? At the risk of imposing on my good readers' patience, I here reproduce Franklin Roosevelt's innaugural address, delivered in the midst of that earlier crisis. I urge you to set aside a few moments and read it in its entirety. It is a fascinating document. Much that FDR said on that Saturday morning of March 4, 1933 has immediate relevance to the economic, social and moral conditions that we live with today, almost 80 years later.

A close reading will also reveal, after the pro forma praise of the U.S. constitution, more than a mere suggestion in the speech that FDR was willing to take on powers that were near dictatorial to get the job done. There is a lot worth considering in this speech, not all of which will make progressives happy. On the other hand, the right wing has spent the last thirty years or more trying to undo the prescription for economic and social justice that what came to be called the New Deal laid out and largely enacted. The great value of this speech is that, for this reader at least, it makes evident why that opposition is still so frenzied.


"I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.
In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.
More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.
Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.
Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.
Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.
Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land. The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities. It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms. It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. It can be helped by the unifying of relief activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical, and unequal. It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.
Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.
There are the lines of attack. I shall presently urge upon a new Congress in special session detailed measures for their fulfillment, and I shall seek the immediate assistance of the several States.
Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy. I favor as a practical policy the putting of first things first. I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment.
The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic. It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in all parts of the United States—a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer. It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that the recovery will endure.
In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.
If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.
With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.
Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors. Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.
It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.
I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.
But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.
We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of the national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike. We aim at the assurance of a rounded and permanent national life.
We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.
In this dedication of a Nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days to come."