_,_._,___ There may be a time in future when violence will be necessary to combat the state power of capital in the usa, but without meaning sarcasm there may also be a time when foreign intervention is necessary to liberate America from that power...all things are possible but neither is likely, and the first is even less likely than the second... the world has changed and is changing more rapidly than any of us can keep up with, and those changes not only involve the power of the state to kill more people but also the power of the people to democratically take control of the state...that situation has never before existed and it offers far more hope than trying to organize an army to fight the state, when it is more likely and hopeful that we can disarm that state with democratic power... I’m not advocating that we should all join hands and sing in the face of an attacking army, but if we have not organized an army in our defense we might as well sing as we die since physical resistance under such circumstances would be meaningless...an organized military force will slaughter us unless we can counter it with our own organized military force...this is not to imply support for a non violent philosophy according to the old reality but to suggest that philosophy makes far more sense and offers far more possibility of success in the newly emerging world… past non violence that never fought back physically but accepted vicious attacks with passive resistance swayed many of those watching on film or TV but guaranteed those taking the abuse certain physical pain and possible death...it may seem romantic but thus far it has not worked… despite myths and legends about Gandhi and Martin Luther King, India still suffers appalling poverty and black men are crowding America’s prisons in greater numbers than ever before...and militantly violent opposition brought about by the failure of passive resistance has also failed, leading many to die or waste away in prison at trying to confront massive military force with relatively egotistical, if sincere tactics of killing some policemen and soldiers, taking some temporary territory that the state doesn’t want or need for the moment, or robbing banks… and let’s not forget that both heroic passive figures, Gandhi and MLK, were violently murdered...however, this is a different time and place and it should be remembered and meditated on, if necessary, that the entire world is seeing uprisings of a kind never before imagined, with democratic power possibilities and communications across borders and barriers that can no longer permit the state power to separate , isolate, divide and conquer peoples with the ease in which it could in the past... while our anger may provoke us to wish to strike back at an ugly force of armed representatives of the antidemocratic state, we had better be prepared to counter such force with equal force of our own or forget about it...and organizing an armed, revolutionary uprising in the USA at this time seems as likely as hoping for a messiah to return or show up for the first time…the desperation among the people necessary for such to happen would mean a chaotic situation of near total social breakdown had taken over, and given the tremendous task of trying to create democracy now, that task would seem a more positive endeavor to work on than trying to counter , say, nuclear arms with more nuclear arms, rather than gaining control of nuclear stockpiles and destroying them…the first is hopeless but the second is possible… much better to follow the lead of places like Venezuela and Bolivia, where previous attempts at military coupes , armed uprisings and over throwing governments failed but democratic efforts are showing signs of turning entire nations and areas of the globe around via organized political and economic and not necessarily military power...that kind of force exercised by the people of the west, whose nations have plundered and savaged for generations and continue to do so under control of tiny anti-democratic minorities, would not only ease burdens in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, but create a balanced movement in the west operating in the same democratic, non-violent fashion and offering hope for the global community itself, and not just one or another nation …and doing so with an army of humanity militantly demanding and exercising its rights as a majority against which no minority would have a chance…. |
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
"Occupy" and nonviolence
More Thoughts On the Occupy Movement
The Occupy movement has dramatically and wonderfully seized the political moment, putting Wall Street and its mass media lapdogs on the defensive where they belong.
Predictably, Occupy critics decry the inconvenience of protest, as though protest were not already synonymous with inconvenience. Such antagonists would do well to recall that Martin Luther King was also denounced by his critics for illegal and allegedly immoral behavior. The civil rights movement in its day was every bit as inconvenient as Occupy Wall Street is today, blocking public streets, shutting down department stores, swamping local jails, forcing their unwanted anti-lynching philosophy on an unwilling public. Nevertheless, equipped with the benefit of hindsight, we now know the civil rights protesters were right.
Having said that, the free speech issues would be stark and more compelling if Occupiers were to occupy the major media corporations - NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, - since they monopolize the public airwaves with propaganda on behalf of the 1%. The 99% is flatly excluded from access to large audiences, in spite of the fact that such audiences are composed almost completely of the 99%. This cannot be justified on rational grounds.
Those who don't like public space being occupied ought to ask themselves this: Why can't we engage in real political debate (i.e., not just Democrat vs. Republican) over the public airwaves? Because the private owners of the economy won't let us. We cannot hear social democrats, libertarians, communists, socialists, anarchists, white nationalists, black nationalists, or any other popular grouping engaged in uncensored debate before mass audiences in the United States. Until that changes, public space will continue to be occupied, because that is the only means of bringing the views of popular constituencies before a mass audience.
For those who almost plaintively ask why the Occupy protesters don't express their discontent through the electoral system, one can only say this. How do you target the 1%, (actually probably more like one-tenth of one percent), who own the "private" economy? You can't do it by resorting to electoral politics, as the 1% owns the politicians.
True, a Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, or Ron Paul can run a third party campaign, but the 1% routinely deprives them of media time on the basis that they are merely "vanity" candidates. You can't get elected if you are not seen daily in the mass media, and the mass media is literally owned by the 1%. The last time around Ron Paul finished second in Nevada primaries, a result which was not even announced in the corporate media. The first place and third place finishers were announced, but not the second place finisher. Why? Because Paul is not under the control of the 1%. No populist candidate, whether of the right or the left, can be elected or taken seriously nationally. That's why there's an occupy movement.
Let's stop kidding ourselves about our "democracy." Under capitalism, the business cycle (presided over by the one percent) causes recessions, depressions, panics, and break-downs on a regular basis, after which the perpetrators demand huge public bailouts on the basis that the swindling class is "too big to fail." Only by going well beyond the electoral arena can we do anything about this, i.e., by organized protest.
Was slavery ended at the ballot box? Was child labor? Elections played some role, but a subordinate one, and well after organized protest had re-shaped electoral options (and in slavery's case, the entire society). That's what Occupy Wall Street is trying to do today. All history shows that progress is dependent on popular protest, which is not to say that everything a protest movement does is right. But it is always the midwife of social advancement.
Occupying public space is not the same as destroying it, as occupy critics are prone to claim. Furthermore, we should keep in mind that the Black Bloc has a predilection for trashing, but they are not the entire Occupy movement, far from it. We should also recall that those who shout the loudest for smashing and destroying are routinely found to be working for U.S. intelligence when government documents are published years after the damage has been done. The COINTELPRO documents from the 1960s protests are very revealing as to who the real criminals are, and no thinking person ought to be surprised.
To reiterate, Dr. King was subject to very similar criticisms for "violence" and "inconvenience to working people." But it's now clear he was right and the critics were wrong. While popular movements should try to minimize inconvenience to the public, critics should recognize that faulting protesters for inconvenience is the same as faulting all protest. There is no progress without inconvenience.
Predictably, Occupy critics decry the inconvenience of protest, as though protest were not already synonymous with inconvenience. Such antagonists would do well to recall that Martin Luther King was also denounced by his critics for illegal and allegedly immoral behavior. The civil rights movement in its day was every bit as inconvenient as Occupy Wall Street is today, blocking public streets, shutting down department stores, swamping local jails, forcing their unwanted anti-lynching philosophy on an unwilling public. Nevertheless, equipped with the benefit of hindsight, we now know the civil rights protesters were right.
Having said that, the free speech issues would be stark and more compelling if Occupiers were to occupy the major media corporations - NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, - since they monopolize the public airwaves with propaganda on behalf of the 1%. The 99% is flatly excluded from access to large audiences, in spite of the fact that such audiences are composed almost completely of the 99%. This cannot be justified on rational grounds.
Those who don't like public space being occupied ought to ask themselves this: Why can't we engage in real political debate (i.e., not just Democrat vs. Republican) over the public airwaves? Because the private owners of the economy won't let us. We cannot hear social democrats, libertarians, communists, socialists, anarchists, white nationalists, black nationalists, or any other popular grouping engaged in uncensored debate before mass audiences in the United States. Until that changes, public space will continue to be occupied, because that is the only means of bringing the views of popular constituencies before a mass audience.
For those who almost plaintively ask why the Occupy protesters don't express their discontent through the electoral system, one can only say this. How do you target the 1%, (actually probably more like one-tenth of one percent), who own the "private" economy? You can't do it by resorting to electoral politics, as the 1% owns the politicians.
True, a Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, or Ron Paul can run a third party campaign, but the 1% routinely deprives them of media time on the basis that they are merely "vanity" candidates. You can't get elected if you are not seen daily in the mass media, and the mass media is literally owned by the 1%. The last time around Ron Paul finished second in Nevada primaries, a result which was not even announced in the corporate media. The first place and third place finishers were announced, but not the second place finisher. Why? Because Paul is not under the control of the 1%. No populist candidate, whether of the right or the left, can be elected or taken seriously nationally. That's why there's an occupy movement.
Let's stop kidding ourselves about our "democracy." Under capitalism, the business cycle (presided over by the one percent) causes recessions, depressions, panics, and break-downs on a regular basis, after which the perpetrators demand huge public bailouts on the basis that the swindling class is "too big to fail." Only by going well beyond the electoral arena can we do anything about this, i.e., by organized protest.
Was slavery ended at the ballot box? Was child labor? Elections played some role, but a subordinate one, and well after organized protest had re-shaped electoral options (and in slavery's case, the entire society). That's what Occupy Wall Street is trying to do today. All history shows that progress is dependent on popular protest, which is not to say that everything a protest movement does is right. But it is always the midwife of social advancement.
Occupying public space is not the same as destroying it, as occupy critics are prone to claim. Furthermore, we should keep in mind that the Black Bloc has a predilection for trashing, but they are not the entire Occupy movement, far from it. We should also recall that those who shout the loudest for smashing and destroying are routinely found to be working for U.S. intelligence when government documents are published years after the damage has been done. The COINTELPRO documents from the 1960s protests are very revealing as to who the real criminals are, and no thinking person ought to be surprised.
To reiterate, Dr. King was subject to very similar criticisms for "violence" and "inconvenience to working people." But it's now clear he was right and the critics were wrong. While popular movements should try to minimize inconvenience to the public, critics should recognize that faulting protesters for inconvenience is the same as faulting all protest. There is no progress without inconvenience.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Wiesenthal Center names top 10 anti-Semitic slurs
not from the garlic!
December 13, 2011
The Palestinian Authority president made the remark at the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 23.“I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and the birthplace of Jesus Christ peace be upon him, to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people,” he said.
The Wiesenthal Center said it did not consider statements by terrorist organizations, the Iranian government or “the lunatic fringe."
Other remarks that made the Top 10 list included Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's accusation that "hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed" by Israel; Christian Dior fashion designer John Galliano's rant about his love of Hitler; and director Lars Von Trier, who said he sympathizes a bit with Hitler and that "Israel is a pain in the ass."
“These 10 examples constitute a fraud alert from people who should know better who have crossed the line,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center.
For the 2012 list, the Wiesenthal Center is collecting suggestions from members of the public at slurs2012@wiesenthal.com.
from the garlic:
Early submissions include:
Mrs Grundy, Herbie Weintraub just farted.
Is that Temple Beth Midler or a White Castle?
If a Jew owns a bank is he a Jewish Banker?
Gigantic Balls or Microscopic Brains? Both!
from the nytimes ( so it must be true, right?)
"Iranian officials reacted with outrage and incredulity after President Obama said Monday that the United States had asked Iran to return the drone. “That is a shameless demand raised by the U.S. president,” Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hejazi, the deputy chief of staff of the Iranian military, was quoted by the semiofficial Fars News agency as saying. “They raise such claims instead of apologizing to our Islamic establishment and people.”
Inspired by America's act of supremacist chutzpah, a rapist has demanded that his victim return the condom he left in her vagina.
"Iranian officials reacted with outrage and incredulity after President Obama said Monday that the United States had asked Iran to return the drone. “That is a shameless demand raised by the U.S. president,” Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hejazi, the deputy chief of staff of the Iranian military, was quoted by the semiofficial Fars News agency as saying. “They raise such claims instead of apologizing to our Islamic establishment and people.”
Inspired by America's act of supremacist chutzpah, a rapist has demanded that his victim return the condom he left in her vagina.
Democracy in 2012
“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, torment, slavery, brutalization and moral degradation at the other…”
Karl Marx may not have referred to the 1% and the 99% when he wrote of those extremes in the 19th century, but they certainly capture this moment in the 21st. Americans appalled at minority domination of national wealth as they pay for endless wars, increasing inequality and vanishing public services have joined a rising global movement for democracy.
65% of the planet’s 7 billion people are poor, bringing the 21st century still closer to Marx’s words of the 19th. Humanity’s call for another world is growing louder and more insistent. The forces of reaction are working to smother that voice through their private governments and media but also through supposedly public and even progressive political circles.
In a particularly sad irony, a budding form of anarchic democracy in America grows through the “Occupy” movement, while an attempt at such governance in Libya has been crushed, at least temporarily. The NATO attack succeeded in obliterating a governing force that tried representing a majority of the Libyan people. While Khadafy’s regime made many mistakes after its initial socialist phase, perhaps most seriously in re-aligning with the treacherous west, its Green Book attempt to create real and not simply representative democracy was laughed at by cynics but in line with anarchist dreams of power coming from collective will and not individual leadership. Many in the Occupy movement may not know what really happened in Libya, but under thought control exercised by agents of the 1% relatively few have any idea.
More important, growing numbers of people are learning that minority ruled society is the root cause of most problems facing humanity. That these problems grow more severe each day makes the increased demand for change both timely and ever more necessary. The Climate Change meetings in Durban that found the 1% ruling powers standing in the way of any change threatening their fanatic worship of private investment and belief in the market deity only showed more conclusively that democracy of the 99% must become reality to end the hypocritical sham that has gone by its name far too long.
Occupy Wall Street's General Assembly urged "the people of the world…create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone."
These solutions are impossible under the domain of private capital’s 1%. The un-regulated markets of obsessive profit seeking are like un-protected sex. Even at their best they can produce unwanted results and at their worst they may produce terminal disease, which is what present global market forces have created. We cannot opt for a temporary remission via private profiteering which carries the disease; the 99% need to consider the abolition of minority dominated market forces and the beginning of democratic control of global resources, in the interest of all the earth’s inhabitants and not just a tiny group of multi billionaires. In an alleged modern, civilized, digitized society, it’s time we end stupid mythology about hard work earning people incredible sums of money that bring them the power of gods.
How do people come by such wealth? How many packages must they deliver, students must they teach, patrons must they serve, miles must they drive, wounds must they bandage, legal briefs must they submit, floors must they sweep, children must they raise, to end up with a billion dollars? Ten billion dollars?
What sense does it make to have one human living on millions of dollars a week while billions of humans live on less than five dollars a day?
The imperial rulers maintain dominance only by virtue of military might. Without massive murder power such as was exercised in Libya and is threatened in Syria and Iran, they would already be gone and as global opposition grows that power will soon not be enough to dominate the planet. Newer threats to powerful nations like China and Russia only show the near dementia of rulers nearing the end of their reign.
But the madness of the diminishing cult, with nuclear weapons at their disposal, threatens our future, just as humanity shows signs of coming together to create a different world of peace, social justice and protection for the environment that sustains all mankind. Leaving control of social wealth in private hands would be suicide for the human race.
Henry Ford once said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” He was correct. We need to understand that system and transform it by creating federal , state and municipal public banks , owned, administered and investing according to the wishes of the people whose funds are held by these institutions. We cannot rely on some wealthy people investing according to moral principles unknown to most of their class. They should be taxed and their money democratically invested in the societies that created this wealth in the first place. We need to create a sensible maximum wage and a higher minimum wage that guarantees survival, with a social safety net that allows no one to go hungry, experience untended illness, or live without shelter.
There is far more than enough wealth to house, feed, clothe and benefit everyone, if we simply stop squandering that wealth on minorities who use it to perpetuate a system that is bringing us closer to social disaster. Capitalism is in a crisis which will get much worse before we make it better. In order to do that we need to end inequality and begin to recognize that the survival of one is dependent on the survival of all . 2012 should be a big one for humanity.
Happy New Year.
Still More on Agents of the 1%
“Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you are on, and class analysis is knowing who is there with you.”
anonymous
The emerging class conflict in America involves great confusion among many as to which class they belong to, represent, or stand with. In the far more progressive than usual division of the 1% at the top from the 99%, that overwhelming majority is still fiction when so many of them do not know, care or even think about such social division, but only respond in capitalist individual identity group fashion to any uprising of a social nature:
How come I - and/or my group, my people or whatever minority you are forced into and accept - are not front and center of this movement?
Agents of the 1% are among alleged supporters of the 99% when they directly represent them professionally, criticize them from an allegedly more “revolutionary” position , or when they are carried in establishment journals and other media which find their critiques of society safe enough to disperse among the divided American public to keep it that way.
Divided.
Any attempts to bring people together around common problems and issues will find these agents claiming their particular problem(s) are being slighted by these less politically well informed folks who don't understand the problems of : gays-blacks-women-immigrants-workers-jews-people of color-people of no color -choose one , and need to be better informed before they - the intelligentsia of revolution can possibly join them. As in:
I haven't heard a word from these "occupiers" about Palestinians, the rape of the native Americans, the slaughters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the lynching of Sicilians, and most important, not a word about the plight of Arab-American lesbian hiv positive unemployed people in America...outrageous!
Who the hell really cares if 1% of the richest people in America own congress, the white house , the judiciary , corporate capital and the banks? What the hell difference does it make if climate change and foreign wars advance the cause of capital while destroying the planet and its people, when a disabled gay defrocked priest falsely convicted of child molesting cannot find an apartment in Columbus Ohio and not one of these Occupiers has mentioned his plight?
Let's get our priorities straight.
repeat:
Any attempts to bring people together around common problems and issues will find these agents claiming their particular problem(s) are being slighted by these less politically well informed folks who don't understand the problems of : gays-blacks-women-immigrants-workers-jews-people of color-people of no color -choose one , and need to be better informed before they - the intelligentsia of revolution can possibly join them. As in:
I haven't heard a word from these "occupiers" about Palestinians, the rape of the native Americans, the slaughters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the lynching of Sicilians, and most important, not a word about the plight of Arab-American lesbian hiv positive unemployed people in America...outrageous!
Who the hell really cares if 1% of the richest people in America own congress, the white house , the judiciary , corporate capital and the banks? What the hell difference does it make if climate change and foreign wars advance the cause of capital while destroying the planet and its people, when a disabled gay defrocked priest falsely convicted of child molesting cannot find an apartment in Columbus Ohio and not one of these Occupiers has mentioned his plight?
Let's get our priorities straight.
repeat:
Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you are on, and class analysis is knowing who is there with you.
Which side are we on?
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Capitalist Journalism Linked to Brain Damage
by Michael K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com
We have long since reached the point where the Consumer Product Safety Administration should issue warnings about consuming corporate broadcast and print journalism, which is surely as toxic as anything ingestable. The model has already been set in the tobacco industry, which long ago began warning buyers that "cigarette smoking has been found to be hazardous to your health." So why not a federal warning along the following lines: "Warning! Production and consumption of corporate media content has been found to cause brain damage in laboratory animals, i.e., consumers. If accidentally swallowed, dilute heavily with skepticism until normal brain function returns."
Exhibit A in the brain damage display case should be a recent Forbes column by John Tamny ("What You Don't Often Hear About Those 'Greedy' One Percenters"), which takes the Occupy Wall Street protesters to task for failing to realize that the fabulously wealthy 1% that dominate the political system are in reality our benefactors, and that we had best stop "demonizing" them and instead express gratitude for their heroically self-sacrificing efforts to enrich themselves, which deliver vast trickle-down benefits to all of us.
Such a tall tale would be embarrassing to read even to a class of toddlers, but such is the state of intellectual opinion in the U.S. that such claims are not only given wide dissemination but are typically accorded the status of self-evident truths. This makes the title of the article transparently ludicrous, as who can really believe that we rarely hear that the rich are hardworking benefactors of the general public? In point of fact, the rich are continually praised for the alleged public benefits their asset allocation bestows, so that even the most devoted monk living a completely renunciate life in the remotest possible location could not hope to escape this fatuous theme.
Below are more of the specific claims Tamny makes in his article. Let us examine each of these "ideas" in turn.
1. Critics of the 1% are motivated by envy. They rarely consider the work and sacrifice involved in making it to the top of the economic pyramid.
There can be little doubt that the hungry envy the well fed, but how does that justify a system that awards a tiny minority of investors more wealth than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes while tens of millions of impoverished people die every year from starvation and disease? It does no good to say that the latter group lacks the initiative to take care of itself, since it is obviously impossible to take care of oneself without regular access to food. This is precisely what the starving lack.
Where conditions are less severe than those that obtain under outright starvation, it is not clear that the rich are envied at all. The Occupy movement, for example, does not appear to even be interested in entering the ranks of the wealthy, but rather, seems to want to abolish their class power, so that wealth may be created and distributed differently, and all may live decently. In other words, the goal is not personal enrichment but social well-being: None rich, none poor, all gainfully employed and reasonably well off. The fact that some, many, or all rich people have undergone personal sacrifice to accumulate their fortunes does nothing to discredit this aspiration. In fact, it simply misses the point.
2. If anything, the 1% at the top are the exploited, since they are guaranteed no return and in fact risk their very capital, whereas the "exploited" 99% get paid for their labor no matter what.
Whose capital was risked on the pretext that banks are "too big to fail?" Obviously, the public's. Who sacrificed their homes, jobs, and retirement pensions so that financial swindlers could enrich themselves, often by betting against stocks they were avidly promoting? Obviously, the general public did. Who is currently sitting on trillions of dollars of bailout capital while tens of millions of Americans wallow in economic misery? That's right, the one percent, our economic "benefactors," who somehow never get around to investing in job creation, though they claim they are doing so night and day. But where are the jobs?
On the labor question, the idea that workers enjoy a guarantee of being paid for their labor is absurd. Most of the necessary labor in society is at best very partially paid, and much of it completely unpaid, like the raising of children. At present, the economic gains realized from rising productivity created by human labor are monopolized by a corporate elite that itself produces nothing. Commodification of production is not a productive effort! (Question: How many credit default swaps does it take to feed a family?)
3. Billionaire cable television "visionary" John Malone had to share motel rooms with his fellow owner Bob Magness on the way to the top.
Sacrifice on the way to the top does not justify having a "top." The pyramid structure of capitalism, in which the 99% resemble crabs in a bucket climbing all over each other, in order to arrive at the summit where the 1% reside, is simply unnecessary. Another world is possible, and urgently necessary.
4. Successful people have the nerve, drive, and self-assurance that the rest of us lack, and are extraordinarily hard workers. They "work a lot harder and smarter than do the rest of us."
Let us concede, for the sake of argument, that some combination of personal attributes correlates with financial success under capitalism. Tamny believes "being smart" has a lot to do with this, although without a scientific understanding of human nature we are not in a position to know what the relevant combination of success-breeding qualities are. It seems a reasonable surmise that greed and aggression are more prominent among these than "being smart" is, since these are the qualities capitalism most rewards, but let's leave this part of the discussion aside. What follows from the fact, if it is a fact, that 1% of the people have "success" attributes that the 99% mostly lack? The only thing that logically follows is a critical comment about the perversity of capitalist incentives and rewards, which breed moral indifference at the top and mass starvation and disease at the bottom. Why is such a grotesque social arrangement tolerable, much less praiseworthy?
5. "It's not where we start in life that dictates where we end it."
In fact, quite the contrary. If we are born with the attributes of a mathematical genius, but live in a nomadic society whose members only know how to count to ten, what are the chances that we will develop the ambition to be a mathematical genius, much less fulfill it? What are the chances that a child born with brain damage because his mother passed her pregnancy in chronic hunger, will become a great scientist, a great teacher, a great anything? For that matter, what are the chances that a child born to a billionaire will develop a healthy social conscience? In all of these cases, the chances are close to zero. Only a social revolution could change this, which is hopefully what the Occupy movement will become.
In short, whatever a society's capacity for upward mobility (and it is greatly exaggerated in the U.S.), it simply does not justify an arrangement where one percent of the population monopolizes social wealth for its own enrichment while starving the general public of the resources it needs for education, social services, and even survival.
6. People who criticize Wall Street investment bankers for merely "moving money around" are guilty of "staggering" naivete. These people dispense capital, the lifeblood of society, and their skills are so rare and valuable that work consumes their entire lives.
The frequently joyless grind that so many of the rich become trapped by may simply be added to the rest of the unbearable social costs of capitalism, so that it, too, may spur us on to revolution. There is nothing naive in this. In fact, the "naivete" rests with those who think capitalism, now subject to world-wide protest and virtually constant environmental calamity, is a sustainable system.
7. The 1% "make all of our lives easier, cheaper, and more entertaining."
Suicide is certainly easier and cheaper than living a long life, and the spectacle of an intelligent species being led to extinction by 1% of its members is, admittedly, highly entertaining, but such observations hardly justify a lemming-like devotion to suicidal leadership.
8. John D. Rockefeller thrived in spite of repeated rejections, unlike most people, so he deserved his wealth. This was also true of Steve Jobs and (author) Kathryn Stockett.
In 1914, John D. Rockefeller owned the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, which owned the mines, the boarding houses, the campgrounds, the buildings, the saloons, the recreation spots, the schools, the churches, and the shacks of his coal miners.
Rockefeller employed the miners, the supervisors and guards who beat them, the spies who ferreted out the union members, the scabs that broke the strikes, the company coroners and judges who refused damages for injuries and deaths, and the detectives who ended up riddling the miners' families with bullets from a Gatling gun.
For years Colorado Fuel and Iron Company had ignored the miners’ leaking roofs, sagging floors, and broken windows, the old newspapers nailed to the walls to keep out winter, the thick clouds of soot that blanketed the ground and choked the air, the stagnant creek full of mine slag and garbage that ran behind the miners’ huts, the barefoot, hungry children that played beside the putrid water, the illiterate parents who could offer them no better life, and the inadequacy of $1.60 a day pay. The company summarily rejected the miners’ request for an eight-hour day, an honest weighing of the coal, a chance to shop in non-company stores, a 10% raise, and union recognition.
John D. Rockefeller, with $24 million invested in Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, was utterly devoted to perpetuating misery and preventing unionization: “We would rather that the unfortunate conditions continue...than that American workmen should be deprived of their right, under the Constitution, to work for whom they please.”
One fine day, the miners struck. Troops loyal to Rockefeller mounted a machine gun on a hill overlooking the miners’ camp and exploded two dynamite bombs. The miners grabbed their rifles and took up positions in nearby streams, leaving women and children alone in their tents.
At dusk, the militiamen descended from the hills with coal oil and set fire to the miners’ tents. The workers’ wives and children died like trapped rats while the rampaging soldiers looted their belongings. The next day, a telephone linesman lifted a twisted iron cot and found the “Black Hole of Ludlow,” a pit filled with the charred, pretzel-shaped bodies of two young mothers and eleven children.
Publicist Ivy Lee issued press releases announcing that Rockefeller’s strikebreaking triumph had cast a blow for “industrial freedom.”
Granted, few of us can match John D. Rockefeller in the personal attributes necessary to accumulate vast capital while producing such social disasters, but how many of us want them, or should want them?
The Sources:
Adamic, Louis, "Dynamite - The Story of Class Violence in America," (Chelsea House, 1958)
Chomsky, Noam, "Equality: Language Development, Human Intelligence, and Social Organization," reprinted in "The Chomsky Reader," (Pantheon, 1987)
Foner, Philip S., Ed. "History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 5 - The AFL in the Progressive Era 1910-1915," (International Publishers, 1980)
Tamny, John, "What You Don't Often Hear About Those 'Greedy' One Percenters" Forbes, November 27, 2011
Tye, Larry, "The Father of Spin - Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations," (Crown, 1998)
Yellen, Samuel, "American Labor Struggles," (S.A. Russell, 1936)
www.legalienate.blogspot.com
We have long since reached the point where the Consumer Product Safety Administration should issue warnings about consuming corporate broadcast and print journalism, which is surely as toxic as anything ingestable. The model has already been set in the tobacco industry, which long ago began warning buyers that "cigarette smoking has been found to be hazardous to your health." So why not a federal warning along the following lines: "Warning! Production and consumption of corporate media content has been found to cause brain damage in laboratory animals, i.e., consumers. If accidentally swallowed, dilute heavily with skepticism until normal brain function returns."
Exhibit A in the brain damage display case should be a recent Forbes column by John Tamny ("What You Don't Often Hear About Those 'Greedy' One Percenters"), which takes the Occupy Wall Street protesters to task for failing to realize that the fabulously wealthy 1% that dominate the political system are in reality our benefactors, and that we had best stop "demonizing" them and instead express gratitude for their heroically self-sacrificing efforts to enrich themselves, which deliver vast trickle-down benefits to all of us.
Such a tall tale would be embarrassing to read even to a class of toddlers, but such is the state of intellectual opinion in the U.S. that such claims are not only given wide dissemination but are typically accorded the status of self-evident truths. This makes the title of the article transparently ludicrous, as who can really believe that we rarely hear that the rich are hardworking benefactors of the general public? In point of fact, the rich are continually praised for the alleged public benefits their asset allocation bestows, so that even the most devoted monk living a completely renunciate life in the remotest possible location could not hope to escape this fatuous theme.
Below are more of the specific claims Tamny makes in his article. Let us examine each of these "ideas" in turn.
1. Critics of the 1% are motivated by envy. They rarely consider the work and sacrifice involved in making it to the top of the economic pyramid.
There can be little doubt that the hungry envy the well fed, but how does that justify a system that awards a tiny minority of investors more wealth than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes while tens of millions of impoverished people die every year from starvation and disease? It does no good to say that the latter group lacks the initiative to take care of itself, since it is obviously impossible to take care of oneself without regular access to food. This is precisely what the starving lack.
Where conditions are less severe than those that obtain under outright starvation, it is not clear that the rich are envied at all. The Occupy movement, for example, does not appear to even be interested in entering the ranks of the wealthy, but rather, seems to want to abolish their class power, so that wealth may be created and distributed differently, and all may live decently. In other words, the goal is not personal enrichment but social well-being: None rich, none poor, all gainfully employed and reasonably well off. The fact that some, many, or all rich people have undergone personal sacrifice to accumulate their fortunes does nothing to discredit this aspiration. In fact, it simply misses the point.
2. If anything, the 1% at the top are the exploited, since they are guaranteed no return and in fact risk their very capital, whereas the "exploited" 99% get paid for their labor no matter what.
Whose capital was risked on the pretext that banks are "too big to fail?" Obviously, the public's. Who sacrificed their homes, jobs, and retirement pensions so that financial swindlers could enrich themselves, often by betting against stocks they were avidly promoting? Obviously, the general public did. Who is currently sitting on trillions of dollars of bailout capital while tens of millions of Americans wallow in economic misery? That's right, the one percent, our economic "benefactors," who somehow never get around to investing in job creation, though they claim they are doing so night and day. But where are the jobs?
On the labor question, the idea that workers enjoy a guarantee of being paid for their labor is absurd. Most of the necessary labor in society is at best very partially paid, and much of it completely unpaid, like the raising of children. At present, the economic gains realized from rising productivity created by human labor are monopolized by a corporate elite that itself produces nothing. Commodification of production is not a productive effort! (Question: How many credit default swaps does it take to feed a family?)
3. Billionaire cable television "visionary" John Malone had to share motel rooms with his fellow owner Bob Magness on the way to the top.
Sacrifice on the way to the top does not justify having a "top." The pyramid structure of capitalism, in which the 99% resemble crabs in a bucket climbing all over each other, in order to arrive at the summit where the 1% reside, is simply unnecessary. Another world is possible, and urgently necessary.
4. Successful people have the nerve, drive, and self-assurance that the rest of us lack, and are extraordinarily hard workers. They "work a lot harder and smarter than do the rest of us."
Let us concede, for the sake of argument, that some combination of personal attributes correlates with financial success under capitalism. Tamny believes "being smart" has a lot to do with this, although without a scientific understanding of human nature we are not in a position to know what the relevant combination of success-breeding qualities are. It seems a reasonable surmise that greed and aggression are more prominent among these than "being smart" is, since these are the qualities capitalism most rewards, but let's leave this part of the discussion aside. What follows from the fact, if it is a fact, that 1% of the people have "success" attributes that the 99% mostly lack? The only thing that logically follows is a critical comment about the perversity of capitalist incentives and rewards, which breed moral indifference at the top and mass starvation and disease at the bottom. Why is such a grotesque social arrangement tolerable, much less praiseworthy?
5. "It's not where we start in life that dictates where we end it."
In fact, quite the contrary. If we are born with the attributes of a mathematical genius, but live in a nomadic society whose members only know how to count to ten, what are the chances that we will develop the ambition to be a mathematical genius, much less fulfill it? What are the chances that a child born with brain damage because his mother passed her pregnancy in chronic hunger, will become a great scientist, a great teacher, a great anything? For that matter, what are the chances that a child born to a billionaire will develop a healthy social conscience? In all of these cases, the chances are close to zero. Only a social revolution could change this, which is hopefully what the Occupy movement will become.
In short, whatever a society's capacity for upward mobility (and it is greatly exaggerated in the U.S.), it simply does not justify an arrangement where one percent of the population monopolizes social wealth for its own enrichment while starving the general public of the resources it needs for education, social services, and even survival.
6. People who criticize Wall Street investment bankers for merely "moving money around" are guilty of "staggering" naivete. These people dispense capital, the lifeblood of society, and their skills are so rare and valuable that work consumes their entire lives.
The frequently joyless grind that so many of the rich become trapped by may simply be added to the rest of the unbearable social costs of capitalism, so that it, too, may spur us on to revolution. There is nothing naive in this. In fact, the "naivete" rests with those who think capitalism, now subject to world-wide protest and virtually constant environmental calamity, is a sustainable system.
7. The 1% "make all of our lives easier, cheaper, and more entertaining."
Suicide is certainly easier and cheaper than living a long life, and the spectacle of an intelligent species being led to extinction by 1% of its members is, admittedly, highly entertaining, but such observations hardly justify a lemming-like devotion to suicidal leadership.
8. John D. Rockefeller thrived in spite of repeated rejections, unlike most people, so he deserved his wealth. This was also true of Steve Jobs and (author) Kathryn Stockett.
In 1914, John D. Rockefeller owned the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, which owned the mines, the boarding houses, the campgrounds, the buildings, the saloons, the recreation spots, the schools, the churches, and the shacks of his coal miners.
Rockefeller employed the miners, the supervisors and guards who beat them, the spies who ferreted out the union members, the scabs that broke the strikes, the company coroners and judges who refused damages for injuries and deaths, and the detectives who ended up riddling the miners' families with bullets from a Gatling gun.
For years Colorado Fuel and Iron Company had ignored the miners’ leaking roofs, sagging floors, and broken windows, the old newspapers nailed to the walls to keep out winter, the thick clouds of soot that blanketed the ground and choked the air, the stagnant creek full of mine slag and garbage that ran behind the miners’ huts, the barefoot, hungry children that played beside the putrid water, the illiterate parents who could offer them no better life, and the inadequacy of $1.60 a day pay. The company summarily rejected the miners’ request for an eight-hour day, an honest weighing of the coal, a chance to shop in non-company stores, a 10% raise, and union recognition.
John D. Rockefeller, with $24 million invested in Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, was utterly devoted to perpetuating misery and preventing unionization: “We would rather that the unfortunate conditions continue...than that American workmen should be deprived of their right, under the Constitution, to work for whom they please.”
One fine day, the miners struck. Troops loyal to Rockefeller mounted a machine gun on a hill overlooking the miners’ camp and exploded two dynamite bombs. The miners grabbed their rifles and took up positions in nearby streams, leaving women and children alone in their tents.
At dusk, the militiamen descended from the hills with coal oil and set fire to the miners’ tents. The workers’ wives and children died like trapped rats while the rampaging soldiers looted their belongings. The next day, a telephone linesman lifted a twisted iron cot and found the “Black Hole of Ludlow,” a pit filled with the charred, pretzel-shaped bodies of two young mothers and eleven children.
Publicist Ivy Lee issued press releases announcing that Rockefeller’s strikebreaking triumph had cast a blow for “industrial freedom.”
Granted, few of us can match John D. Rockefeller in the personal attributes necessary to accumulate vast capital while producing such social disasters, but how many of us want them, or should want them?
The Sources:
Adamic, Louis, "Dynamite - The Story of Class Violence in America," (Chelsea House, 1958)
Chomsky, Noam, "Equality: Language Development, Human Intelligence, and Social Organization," reprinted in "The Chomsky Reader," (Pantheon, 1987)
Foner, Philip S., Ed. "History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 5 - The AFL in the Progressive Era 1910-1915," (International Publishers, 1980)
Tamny, John, "What You Don't Often Hear About Those 'Greedy' One Percenters" Forbes, November 27, 2011
Tye, Larry, "The Father of Spin - Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations," (Crown, 1998)
Yellen, Samuel, "American Labor Struggles," (S.A. Russell, 1936)
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