Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Readers of Thatched Cottage may recall that in my blog of March 13th of this year, titled "Our Amorphous Constitutional Protections," I reproduced the picture below, obviously created by another American citizen who fears that we may soon be running, as Cary Grant did in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, from predator drones.  I will confess to being shocked to find that President Obama, who ran promising a change from the Bush administration, has already signed on to fill the American skies with military drones.  I reproduce here the full text of the article which presently appears on the World Socialist web site (wsws.org).   I cannot recall seeing the story in the New York Times for some reason.
     In a way, this is nothing new.  A PBS documentary on the Cold War (now apparently deeply shelved beyond reach in its archives) once showed how the U.S. spent billions of dollars to monitor Soviet submarines in the Pacific Ocean by covering basically every inch of the planet's largest body of water with radar buoys.  It then went to the expense of training hundreds of surveillance workers to just stare at radar screens twenty-four hours a day.  Military experts at the time bragged that, while at first monitors had trouble distinguishing between dolphins and submarines, they soon could spot not only nuclear subs but distinguish between ocean species.  I can only assume that the program is still in place and that we are still paying for it.  It seems that there is endless money to spend on projects such as these, very little for meeting social needs.  Many believe that the USSR collapsed because they just couldn't keep up with our military expenditures and wasted too much their resources in the effort.  Ironically, the US may meet a similar fate fighting enemies imagined and domestic, let alone the real bad guys.









Thousands of military drones to be deployed over US mainland

By Tom Carter
18 June 2012

A recent Department of Defense report to Congress as well as a number of media investigations have exposed government plans to deploy tens of thousands of drones over the US mainland in the coming years.

Predator drone firing hellfire missile

An investigative report published over the weekend by the Christian Science Monitor cited the government’s own estimates that “as many as 30,000 drones could be part of intelligence gathering and law enforcement here in the United States within the next ten years.”

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as “drones,” are extremely sophisticated remotely-operated aircraft, developed and manufactured by the military-industrial complex in recent years at a cost of billions of dollars.

Drones vary in size from the four-pound RQ-11B Raven surveillance drone, which can be launched by hand, to the giant MQ-9 Reaper combat drone, manufactured by Northrup Grumman. The Reaper has a maximum take-off weight of 7,000 pounds, including up to 3,000 pounds of bombs, missiles and other armaments.

The infamous MQ-1 Predator drone, armed with 100-pound Hellfire missiles, is the Obama administration’s favored weapon in its illegal assassination program. A Predator drone was used in the unprecedented assassination of a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen last September.

With a push of a button, thousands of pounds of high explosives can be dropped on anyone, anywhere in the world, with startling precision. Safe behind video screens at military bases within the US, military drone operators refer to their victims as “bug splats.” Thousands of innocent civilians have already been murdered in this way in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Current and projected drone bases in the US [Source: US Air Force]

An April Department of Defense report, titled “Future Unmanned Aircraft Systems Training, Operations, and Sustainability,” reveals that a massive drone infrastructure is already being erected within the US, with billions of dollars being allocated, bases being erected, thousands of pilots and crews being trained, and inventories being stockpiled.

The report identifies 110 military bases that will serve as drone launch sites. The deadly Predator and Reaper drones will operate out of Creech Air Force Base (AFB) in Nevada, Holloman AFB and Cannon AFB in New Mexico, Fort Drum in New York, Grand Forks in North Dakota, Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota, Whiteman AFB in Missouri, and the Southern California Logistics Airport, among others.

The accompanying map, from an Air Force power-point presentation released this month, shows current and projected locations for drone bases within the US.

The Department of Defense report argues for lifting the current framework of restrictions on drone flights over the US on the grounds that it “does not provide the level of airspace access necessary to accomplish the wide range of DoD UAS missions at current and projected operational tempos (OPTEMPOs).”

The language of the report is revealing and ominous. “This constraint will only be exacerbated as combat operations shift from abroad and systems return to US locations,” the report states. It expressly refers to plans to “conduct continental United States (CONUS)-based missions.”

In January, Congress passed HR 658, which requires the Federal Aviation Administration to take steps to facilitate the integration of drones “into the national airspace system.” President Obama signed the bill on February 14 with no public discussion or comment. (See “Drones come to the US”)

Since Obama signed the bill, hundreds of drones have already begun flying over the US to spy on and monitor the population. A recent ABC News investigative report entitled “UAVs: Will Our Civil Liberties Be Droned Out?” outlined the possibility of drones buzzing overhead becoming “a fact of daily life.”

ABC News reported: “Drones can carry facial recognition cameras, license plate scanners, thermal imaging cameras, open WiFi sniffers, and other sensors. And they can be armed.”

“Among the most eager to fly domestic drones are America’s police departments,” the report stated. “In Texas, a Montgomery county sheriff’s office recently said it would deploy a drone bought with money from a Department of Homeland Security grant and was contemplating arming the drone with non-lethal weapons like tear gas, rubber bullets or Taser-style rounds.”

The ABC News report identified “political protests” as one of the activities that can be monitored by drones.

In December, the American Civil Liberties Union published a detailed report on the dangers of a massive build-up of surveillance drones within the US, warning that “our privacy laws are not strong enough to ensure that the new technology will be used responsibly and consistently with democratic values.”

Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU, described last month a “nightmare scenario” of widespread drone spying leading “to an oppressive atmosphere where people learn to think twice about everything they do, knowing that it will be recorded, charted, scrutinized by increasingly intelligent computers, and possibly used to target them.”

According to a Los Angeles Times article in December of last year, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) are already using Predator drones for operations within the US. Last week, a huge Global Hawk drone being operated by the US Navy for an unknown purpose crashed in Maryland.

The deployment of tens of thousands of surveillance drones over the mainland US takes on special significance in light of recent revelations that the Obama administration is secretly constructing “bottomless” databases to house information gathered about US citizens. (See “Obama administration expands illegal surveillance of Americans”)

The build-up of drone bases within the US is one component of preparations by the US government for a confrontation with its own population. Like everything else associated with the so-called “war on terror”—including torture, detention without trial, warrantless spying, assassinations, military tribunals, and expanded executive and intelligence powers—the use of drones for spying and assassination in the Middle East is a prelude to the development of systems that will ultimately be used against the American people in the event of social upheavals.

On “Terror Tuesdays” at the White House, President Obama helps draw up a list of opponents of US policy overseas who are to be illegally assassinated by drone-fired missiles. These “kill lists” have already included US citizens. With tens of thousands of drones flying overhead, and with the US mainland designated as a “battleground” in the never-ending and geographically unlimited “war on terror,” the US ruling class hopes one day soon to be able to eliminate its domestic opponents with similar ease.

A Lunatic Fringe Poised to Take Power

Call me a masochist, but I have spent considerable time watching C-Span's coverage of the seemingly countless right wing events and rallies designed to electrify the right wing base in anticipation of the next elections.  If I did not have an innocent's basic trust of C-Span as an institution, I might conclude that they are intentionally drowning us in right wing propaganda.  It seems the right wing gets a lot more time.  I choose rather to conclude that C-Span is actually doing us a service by taking us into the belly of the right wing beast and letting us in on what they are really like, particularly when they are among friends and taking on the role of cheerleaders for the cause.     Newt Gingrich has the gift of being able to impersonate a rational human being.  He has assimilated some of the mannerisms of the liberal establishment only so that he can effectively turn those very mannerisms against their source.  In one recent speech, he stated that the 2012 election will be "the most important election since the election of 1860."  He did not elaborate, but given the tenor of his speech, one can speculate.  The election of 1860 gave us Abraham Lincoln and precipitated the firing on Fort Sumter.  I wonder, does Newt think the country would have been better off if Lincoln had lost?  It is worthwhile to revisit the 1860 election, in which, as it turned out, Lincoln won with only 40% of the popular vote, the remainder being divided between the Southern candidates, Breckinridge and Bell and Douglas, the Illinois Democrat.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860)

     There has been the growing sense, for a long time, but particularly since the election of our first Black president, that the right smells an opportunity not merely to roll back American history to the time before the New Deal, but to the time before the Civil War and Reconstruction.  (In the case of George Bush, we even seemed in danger of going back to a period before the Magna Carta of 1215 which established that the "law of the land" trumped the whims of the monarch. Aspects of Bush's magisterial overreach sadly linger in the Obama administration.)

     The passivity of the Democratic Party in recent years, its willingness to "compromise," (particularly since Arkansan Bill Clinton, supposedly the "first Black president," invited serious inroads into the hard-won protections of the New Deal such as the tearing up of Glass-Steagall), created an ideological vacuum which allowed heretofore unheard of incursions of what were once considered uniquely Southern manifestations such as "Bible Belt" evangelism and the generalized notion that the working class, even if it could not literally be enslaved, should be overseen by an aristocratic, neo-plantation-owner class that would keep them in line.  Thus, while, their darkest fantasies aside, no one would accuse the right of planning to reinstitute black slavery, a case can be made that some form of wage slavery would be just fine.   A nation which once fought a war (in which casualties by latest estimate numbered over 700,000 of its citizens) ostensibly not to end but to stop the spread of slavery outside of the deep South, now stands by as the values of the deep South threaten to engulf the entire nation.

      The right wing tantrum that we are currently being treated to goes largely without a response from whatever you want to call the vestigial "left" in this country.   Obama is portrayed as the anti-Christ, a foreigner, a socialist, anti-religion, anti-freedom.  Large numbers of Americans are ill-equipped to put the right wing hate campaign in any perspective.  Many are poorly educated thanks to the decades long campaign against education in this country.  Even the minority who read anything are constantly being told that the mainstream media is controlled by the left (a laughable notion given who owns media in this country) and therefore not to be trusted.  Thus the cosmically disingenuous criticisms of Obama for not making more progress on the economy or giving us a health plan we could all greet with enthusiasm when lack of progress is the direct result of the Republican Party's brazenly announced strategy of gridlock.  The half a quadrillion in dervivatives still floating in the financial ether that were the result of amazing corporate greed made possible by shooting down all sane regulation are ignored.
      What had always been an undercurrent in our history, obvious even in the compromises which gave us our constitution, that is, the fear that democacy was equal to mob rule, has now become an overarching theme.  Undercurrents and once-thought-of as relatively innocuous palliatives such as agnostic Ike inserting "under God" into the pledge of allegiance have been reborn as mainstream thought.  History is daily being rewritten and carved into stone.   Even elementary school students were once taught, for example, that the founding fathers, children of the Englightenment, had been deists rather than members of any Protestant sect.  Now, however, Thomas Jefferson, a man as likely to believe in the divinity of Jesus as he might the tooth fairy, is being reconstrued as a devout Christian.  The combination of religious zealotry and its accompanying tendency to find science deeply suspect is responsible for the wholesale rewriting of our textbooks to ensure that future generations of American children will be able to envision Jefferson as a church-goer and dinosaur bones as bogus artifacts planted by left wing conspirators.  Aiding in this effort is the emergence of countless right wing "think tanks" having constant seminars with all the trappings of orthodox academia--the blue back drops with neatly printed logos, Q and A's with three questions at a time being taken from the floor, the right mix of old line WASP "hands" and neo-liberal cabalists.
     The current occupant of the White House has revealed himself to be not quite the "change" millions of Americans who have not yet drunk from the poisoned well had hoped for.  It would not be too extreme to state baldly that many feel duped by the 2008 election.  Election results in 2010 and in Massachusetts and the recent failed recall in Wisconsin are other disturbing possible harbingers of what can occur when large numbers of voters feel they were betrayed.  And the current Republican candidate seems relatively innocuous compare to, let's say, a Gingrich, a Santorum or a Palin.  But if the Republicans take the White House in November, the lunatic fringe in this country will go on a rampage.
      

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

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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.