Word is, 20% of Americans are in favor of boycotting companies sucking up to Donald Trump. If you’ve sworn off Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter/X, and scrubbed your amazon.com account, good for you. There are all sorts of reasons for breaking up with these companies besides the fact that they’re collaborating with a criminal and a fascist.

One collaborator, America’s Second Oligarch, Jeff Bezos, owns much of the global economy: 2lemetry; AbeBooks; Accept.com; Alexa and IVONA Software; Alexa Internet; Amazon; Amiato; Amie Street; Annapurna Labs; AppThwack; Art19; Audible; Avalon Books; Back to Basics Toys; Bebo; Bezos Day One Fund; Biba Systems; Blink Home; Blue Origin; Body Labs; Bookpages; BookSurge; Box Office Mojo; Brilliance Audio; BuyVIP; Canvas Technology; Cloostermans; Cloud9 IDE; CloudEndure; ClusterK; Colis Privé; ComiXology; Convergence Corporation; Curse; CustomFlix; Digital Photography Review; Dispatch; Do.com; Double Helix Games; e-Niche Incorporated; E8 Storage; Eero; Egghead Software; Elemental Technologies; Emvantage Payments; Evi; Fabric.com; GameSparks; GlowRoad; Goo Technologies; GoodGame; Goodreads; Graphiq; Harvest.ai; IGDB; IMDb; INLT; iRobot; Joyo.com; Junglee; Kiva Systems; Leep Technology Inc.; Lexcycle; Liquavista; LiveBid.com; LoveFilm; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM); MindCorps Incorporated; Mobipocket; NICE; One Medical; Orbeus; OurHouse.com; Partpic; Pillpack; PlanetAll; Pushbutton; Quidsi; Reflexive Entertainment; Ring; Rooftop Media; Safaba Translation Systems; Shelfari; Shoefitr; Shopbop; Sizmek Ad Server; Sizmek Dynamic Creative Optimization; Small Parts; SnapTell; Souq.com; Spirit.ai; Sqrrl; Strio.AI; Tapzo; Teachstreet; Telebook; TenMarks Education; TextPayMe; The Book Depository; The Washington Post; Thinkbox Software; Toby Press; Tool Crib of the North; Touchco; TSO Logic; Twitch; Umbra 3D; UpNext; Veeqo; Westland; Whole Foods; Wickr; Wing.ae; Withoutabox; Wondery; Woot; Yap; Zappos; Zoox.

Many if not most of the corporations we are forced to deal with are just plain evil. Questionable lists of so-called “ethical” companies can’t be believed — some actually include insurance, pharma, and tech companies known to be highly un-ethical. Until people have finally had enough of Capitalism and Capitalists, we’re all in the sad position of having to choose between handing over our cash to outright Bond villains or slightly less evil oligarchs.

My own efforts to thoroughly cut ties with Jeff Bezos are roughly 99%. I discovered, even after dropping amazon.com, the Washington Post (whose editorials, Bezos has decreed, must now tow a pro-business line), Kindle software, and AbeBooks, that Goodreads was another Bezos company. Both The Story Graph and LibraryThing import a Goodreads library and both have mobile apps. Both work fine.

The last link will be my Audible subscription, which expires shortly. If you are considering a similar move, here are a few Audible alternatives:

• Audiobooks.com : $14.95 / month
• Chirp : pay for each book
• Everand : $11.99 / month
• Libro.fm : $14.99 / month or pay for each book
• Libby : FREE with a library membership

The last year has been one hell of an eye-opener. One party is openly fascist; the other is the habitual party of war and corporatism, now tripping over itself to play ball with an incoming swarm of fascists.

For all the siloed activist groups fighting America’s many ills, there is still no major political party that faithfully represents working people, with principles that oppose (among other things) the American foreign policy and imperialism that have driven the genocide in Gaza.

And for all the letter-writing, stand-outs, polite calls to Congressmen and Senators, online petitions, Zoom meetings, teach-ins, and donations to “lesser evil” politicians, there is very little to show for it. By now most of us must know, at least at some level, that we are working at cross-purposes by supporting two parties of billionaires while fighting them on every injustice they create — thanks to the mandates we stupidly hand them at the polls, year after year, election after election.

We are well beyond reform of a system that, for my entire adult life, has waged war and regime change on the rest of the world and shows no sign of letting up. We are well beyond reforming a system that shows no interest in improving the lives of average people. And we are well beyond trusting any existing political party to fix it — especially the one that sells itself as the Lesser Evil. They’ve had their chance. Thousands of chances, actually.

The Democratic Party — the party of segregationists in the Sixties, of Viet Nam into the Seventies, Big Business in the Eighties, and Clintonism and wars in the Middle East from the Nineties until now — was never actually liberal, although many Americans (myself included) once held out hope that it could be.

In recent memory we’ve seen the Manchins, Sinemas, Kennedys, Fettermans and Gabbards abandon it outright or unabashedly prostrate themselves before the fascists. In recent weeks we have seen the supposedly “liberal” media make a beeline to Mar-a-Lago to suck up to the new Führer, and we’ve watched “liberal” tech bros suddenly go full MAGA. That one-time “liberals” can so easily flip an ideological switch is a sign of the inherent poverty and unreliability of liberalism.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. If you read history, capitulations by liberals occur at almost every time of economic or political crisis. But it’s not really a capitulation when they’re simply revealing what they actually stand for.

Predatory liberalism — not just the American variety, but in virtually every Western nation — is fundamentally illiberal — or it would not perpetually wage war on non-Western nations and the global South, both militarily and economically. If liberalism were not fundamentally lacking it might show some appetite for fighting fascism rather than continually making nice with it.

As Trump and his scavenging oligarchs begin to pick at and chow down on what is left of American democracy, it’s clearer to me than ever that the root cause of all this insanity is Capitalism. And the loss of the 2024 election was in many ways the rejection of the half-hearted, dual-faced liberalism of an important segment of the American middle class that still embraces it.

Middle class liberals — centrist Democrats for the most part, union bosses, professional and academic gatekeepers, corporate America’s upper layer of management, the MBAs, tax lawyers, financial advisors, well-remunerated technologists, inventors, developers, entrepreneurs, health executives, and opinion-shapers — for all their lawn signs and donations, they’re not really willing to risk privilege, status or employment by fighting the hand that feeds them.

As a politically ambiguous class they’re confused about which side they’re on. And for all their half-hearted activism, that side has never been squarely or decisively the side of justice for the poor and oppressed. Both Gaza and liberalism’s new accommodation with fascism bear this out. The reluctance to abandon the Democratic Party is another symptom.

In 1931, after being terrorized by Harlan County mining company thugs who invaded her house looking for her union organizer husband, Florence Reece wrote “Which Side Are You On?”

Regardless of where we are in this society, or where we came from, this is the central question facing America right now. And it’s a serious question that has to be answered honestly after considering what such a commitment really means.

Which side are you on?

From left to right: Olaf Scholz; Justin Trudeau; Emmanuel Macron; Giorgia Meloni; Joe Biden; Fumio Kishida; and Rishi Sunak

If there’s one picture that best illustrates the collapse of confidence in neoliberalism it’s last Summer’s photo op of the presidents and prime ministers who make up the G7. This is an informal group of major economic powers who promote neoliberal and neocolonial economic policies and, despite the IMF’s formal ties to the UN, have their big fat fingers on the levers of the International Monetary Fund.

With the notable exception of neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni, this entire crop of investment bankers, hedge fund operators, and professional politicians pictured last Summer is either gone or on the way out — their positions soon to be occupied by conservative liberals (if ever there was an oxymoron), harsher conservatives, outright fascists, or fascist-friendly replacements. In many cases those departing came from parties claiming to be “liberal.”

Though faces may change and the parties may change, the basic government policies curiously remain the same. This is as true in Britain, Germany, Japan, or Canada as it is in the United States. You can vote for a “liberal” or a “conservative” but in either case you’ll get austerity, militarism, and neoliberalism. Just with different frostings in different packet sizes.

Here, then, is the G7 Class of 2024.

Kanzler Olaf Scholz of the German Social Democratic Party may have once been a left-leaning labor lawyer, but he soon drank the neoliberal and NATO kool-aid. Scholz suffered a no-confidence vote in December and is likely to be replaced by Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union, which has signaled its willingness to work with the the openly fascist AfD Party.

FORMER Canadian Prime Minister of the Liberal Party, a birthright PM (his father Pierre was also a Canadian PM), quickly entered politics after college. Since 1968 Canadians have had 30 years of prime ministers named Trudeau. Trudeau resigned a few days ago, offering the Liberals a chance to tap a back bench filled with bankers and economic tinkerers. But polls favor the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre, a fiscal and libertarian conservative, Friedmanite, and crypto bro.

French President Emmanuel Macron, an investment banker, created right-of-center En Marche and Renaissance parties that have imposed austerity programs and pursued militaristic policies. Macron’s party trailed Marie LePen’s fascist party by 17 points in the June 2024 European Parliament elections and then suffered major losses in the July French election. Neither Macron’s Renaissance, the left-ish New Popular Front, nor LePen’s National Rally, has enough votes to control Parliament outright. LePen is expected to run again in 2027, but the power of the National Rally party, particularly on economic issues, is growing. Macron, who is still vulnerable to no-confidence votes, is essentially a lame duck who has promised to leave major issues to referenda on which National Rally will push even harsher policies.

Who says Italian fascism is dead? Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of the fascist Brothers of Italy cut her teeth as a student activist and served as a youth minister under far-right Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi. She claims to have a journalism degree but in fact Meloni studied “hospitality” at a technical college. Still relatively young (at 47) the telegenic career politician is a zealous pan-European fascist rated positively by 57% of Italian voters. The ruling class loves her as well: Forbes magazine rates Meloni the “third most powerful woman in the world.” Don’t expect her to leave office for quite some time.

FORMER U.S. President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party needs no introduction. Soft on segregation and a self-described Zionist, Biden worked for two seconds as a lawyer and makes a big deal of his working class roots in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But long ago Biden ditched the working class when he began buying up houses he could scarcely afford. Among Biden’s many accomplishments are: greasing Clarence Thomas’s way to the Supreme Court by sliming Anita Hill, opposing school busing, writing broken windows policing legislation, authorizing massive expenditures for the military, pursuing a reckless foreign policy, and partnering in conducting a genocide. Biden’s participation in Israel’s war on Gaza very likely cost him the election.

FORMER Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of the Liberal Democratic Party is a former investment banker who introduced a “new capitalism” initiative that some tried to call a New Deal. But his economic reforms were undercut by austerity measures, increased military spending, and inflation. Like Biden, Kishida was a negotiator who cut backroom deals with far right nationalists to remain in power. In many ways Kishida was more popular outside Japan than inside. He survived an assassination attempt in 2023 (following Shinzo Abe’s in 2022). Last October Kishida was replaced by Shigeru Ishiba, also from the LDP. Like his predecessor, Ishiba is a conservative and a militarist.

FORMER British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the Conservative Party is a hedge fund magnate (just shy of a billionaire) who presided over a highly unpopular government which collapsed in July 2024. Sunak was replaced in the next election by the Labor Party’s Keir Starmer, a former federal prosecutor. Like Bill Clinton, Starmer has pushed his own party even farther to the right than it had been drifting. The new Liberal PM changes nothing for most Britons.

In our economic system, to make money investors rely on the stability of the dollar as well as the fiscal duty of the U.S. government to back up all debts. But profitability requires even more of government. The gears of commerce must be greased by the Fed, the Treasury, by Congress, by the President, by financial institutions, by legions of business groups and lobbyists, by laws and tax codes that privilege investors and “job creators” – all cheered on by a mainstream press almost exclusively owned by billionaires.

Our complex, fragile Capitalist economy has failed several times in recent memory, requiring extraordinary levels of governmental support and bailouts. For something so precarious, the system requires faith and superstition as much as technocratic know-how and can only survive when all the previously-named actors play their parts in theatrical rituals designed to keep the whole rickety house of cards from toppling. The debt ceiling crisis illustrates this perfectly.

CNN warned us of economic “armaggedon” while the New York Times claimed that a failure to reach an accord would unleash a “horror scenario,” the total collapse of the world economy. It was widely reported that the U.S. had never in its history defaulted – except for all the times it had. In 1933 the U.S. refused to honor the gold standard, instead opting to pay its debt off in devalued currency. And in 1971 the U.S. refused to honor the Bretton Woods Agreement, which had pegged the dollar to a value of gold, again opting to pay off debts in devalued currency. In both cases creditors got stiffed.

Running low? Just print more.

The U.S. national debt is now almost $32 TRILLION. This is a number so staggering that, in practical terms, it can never be repaid. Nor does the U.S. government ever need (or intend) to. Unlike you, the U.S. Treasury can simply print more money. If “trust me” is all that is required for the economy to work, and skepticism is severely discouraged, then government doesn’t even need to raise sufficient taxes to pay for its programs. In this way the super-rich aren’t required to pay their fair share.

Add to this the fact that the largest government programs – especially “defense” outlays – are bloated beyond imagination and can’t even pass an audit. Despite this there is little effort by either political party to slow down military spending. Of all the expenditures responsible for our massive accumulating national debt, military spending is #2 and interest on that debt is #1. In short, the national debt is bipartisan in origin and the failure to deal with it equally bipartisan. And where there is “debate” without actual disagreement you find only staged theatre and spectacle.

White House OMB 2023

Thus, the debt ceiling “crisis” we just witnessed was another semi-annual performance completely divorced from reality. No other nation on earth has a debt ceiling – with the exception of Denmark, where the average citizen has never even heard of it. There is no intention of ever paying off the U.S. national debt. There is no intention of ever reaching a balanced budget. And staging such congressional theatre is completely unnecessary in the first place – because the U.S Constitution says that, no matter what, the bills must always be paid:

“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

But assuming creditors would come banging on the door, demanding their money, who are they and how much leverage do they have?

Contrary to a common notion of China holding an exaggerated quantity of the national debt, it turns out that roughly 40% of the debt is held by the U.S. government itself. The Federal Reserve is the largest single creditor, followed by Social Security, the U.S. military, Civil Service retirement funds, and other intragovernmental accounts. The remaining 60% is held by millions of public investors, sometimes nations, sometimes huge bond holders, sometimes a teenager who has forgotten about the treasury bond his nana bought him at birth.

Foreign nations account for less than a quarter of our creditors and include: Japan ($1.08T); China ($870B); United Kingdom ($645.8B); Belgium ($332.9B); Luxembourg ($312.9B); Cayman Islands ($283.3B); Switzerland ($266.7B); Ireland ($250B); Canada ($229B); Brazil ($225.9B). Nations like Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands do not even necessarily hold all these U.S. treasury notes themselves; instead much of those portfolios represent tax-shelters parked offshore for oligarchs, mobsters, and multinationals.

According to the conventional wisdom, “In a default, interest rates on U.S. Treasurys would skyrocket (because investors would demand a higher rate in exchange for taking the risk that they might not be paid back), and Treasurys might no longer be usable as collateral (because their underlying value would not be clear). The entire world financial system could simply freeze.”

That is, a world financial system frozen not because Treasurys became worthless overnight or debts cannot be repaid, but because momentarily the value of Treasurys cannot be quantified. It’s hard to sympathize with the financial markets. Most working Americans deal with much more urgent uncertainty than this every day.

Given the constitutional obligation to back debt, the debt crisis means only that the process of repaying bills might be delayed. Barring the dissolution of the United States of America and the abolition of the Constitution, debts will be paid – eventually. Thus, a “world financial crisis” would not result from an actual default but because of uncertainties regarding the possibility that the U.S. might not pay off its bills immediately.

It is shockingly of lesser importance that the debt itself has become so large that no one actually expects it to ever be paid off or intends to ever tax the rich sufficiently to pay for a government whose machinery guarantees their own profits. Or that neither party insists on the primacy of spending the national treasure on actual people with real needs. Instead, the whole machinery of government seems designed to mainly service financial markets and gun runners.

The real object of this week’s high theater seems to have been to propitiate the gods of investment. And these old scoundrels require human sacrifice. Since the debt ceiling was invented in 1917, the main object of such “negotiations” has been to demand austerity and deregulation. Inasmuch as some government programs address poverty, starvation, healthcare, the environment, and joblessness, the destruction of these programs through so-called bipartisan “fiscal responsibility” makes the former beneficiaries of the hobbled social safety net more vulnerable than ever.

When the debt ceiling deal was first announced, the Business Roundtable (Josh Bolton), the National Association of Manufacturers (Jay Timmons), the Chamber of Commerce (Suzanne Clark), and various securities markets groups like the Financial Services Forum (Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, etc.) all congratulated the political performers for their “bipartisanship” — and then demanded even more austerity and deregulation.

The press stepped up as well to play their assigned role, sticking to the narrative that the manufactured and unique-in-all-the-world political ritual was a real “crisis.” Politicians who supported the deal were lauded by the press for their bipartisan pragmatism and sensibility while those who opposed it were labelled “fringe” and excoriated for their recklessness. Democrats reluctant to inflict suffering on Americans relying on SNAP and TANF programs were lumped together as “extremist” with sadists from the GOP for whom no measure of suffering inflicted on the poor is sufficient.

Why, then, did more House Democrats than Republicans vote for the Financial Responsibility Act? First, there are two wings of the Democratic Party. One, relatively tiny, includes Democrats who believe in social and economic justice. The other, the overwhelming majority, numbers those eager to be recognized for their bipartisanship.

Happily, both Massachusetts Senators (Warren and Markey) and two members of the Massachusetts House delegation (Pressley and McGovern) voted against the FRA for moral and ethical reasons. But it was troubling that a majority of Democrats, including the President, were all too willing to sacrifice America’s most vulnerable citizens on the altars of bipartisanship and market stability.

Centrist Democrats, who comprise the majority of their party, embrace bipartisanship while Republicans thumb their noses (or flip their fingers) at it. The debt ceiling vote reflected this. The centrists are not really enemies of austerity, militarism, or neoliberalism, and many of them give only lip service to social and racial justice. There’s simply not enough distance between these creatures and Romney Republicans to make them enemies. hence, “bipartisanship” becomes an excuse for accommodation and outright agreement. A virtue.

Jon Schwartz has a great article in the Intercept about Democrats hiding behind bipartisanship. And a lot of sins have been committed in its name:

• The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, passed during the Clinton administration overwhelmingly by Democrats, exempted a boatload of financial instruments from regulation
• The 2001 Authorization for Use of Force, which unleashed America’s most costly war (which today accounts for 25% of our national debt) and which all but one Democrats voted for is still in effect and has expanded military strikes, drone attacks, and assassinations to 12 countries.
• The AUMF of 2002 was used to authorize the invasion of Iraq.
• The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 gave tax breaks to corporations repatriating to U.S. shores. It didn’t create many jobs but it sure padded corporate pay.
• The Budget Control Act of 2011 was the daddy of this week’s “fiscal responsibility act.” It imposed $1 TRILLION worth of cuts on social programs and made millions of Americans financially more vulnerable.

At some point Americans are going to have to confront a couple of very simple questions: Why do we live together in a society? And: What is the purpose of government?

If we live together in a society to undermine and ignore each other’s needs, this is no kind of society at all. If the purpose of government is only to enable the exploitation of citizens for the benefit of the wealthy, this isn’t going to work either. At some point those being duped are going to get wise to being unfairly treated.

This week the debt crisis again raised these questions. And for the most part neither Republicans nor Democrats could come up with satisfactory answers.

I recently received a couple of replies from friends mentioning both Artificial Intelligence and social media. AI and internet technology are often treated as separate disciplines, but the two have now fused as search engines, help desk software, and medical diagnostic and other research tools increasingly incorporate sophisticated neural network processing and natural language models.

Both a novelty and a threat, AI has now blown past the Turing Test – a test of human verisimiltude – as we are increasingly bombarded with wholly invented images, almost-convincing “scholarship,” and computer-generated replies to human social media posts.

Since to some degree AI performs certain tasks like a human, this now calls into question our value as real humans. Under Capitalism, economic vulnerability has now become sharpened by a very specific kind of existential fear.

Both of my friends’ observations stand by themselves so I will simply reproduce them here:

“The bigger problem is what to do about lack of regulation of a technology that poses a threat on a number of levels in the name of a sacred freedom. The technology has long since outpaced societal regulation to prevent its misuse and harm and that needs to be redressed, not just offending platforms boycotted.”

and

“While Stephen Hawkin thought AI was our biggest threat, and it may well be, I find it sad that we collectively refuse to see that our fears that machines will have no use for us and do us in are also a projection of our culture’s attitude towards many humans and all of the non-human world.”

To the first reader, computer technology poses an intractable regulatory issue pitting personal freedoms against the uncontrolled forces of technological development. To the second, it is a moral issue. AI awakens human fears of suddenly finding ourselves lower on the food chain. And since AI calls into question our value as humans, we are reminded of how inhuman we have been to the world around us: to other humans, animals, and our environment.

These are both apt and wise observations. But both are framed in terms of the present realities of our economic and legal systems. Neither observation identifies a particular culprit or a possible solution.

Yet computer technology today poses precisely the same problems that 19th Century British Luddites encountered with the introduction of automation and steam powering of textile factories.

Contrary to the common understanding of the term, “Luddites” were not technophobes who disliked technology they could not comprehend. These weavers and spinners knew exactly how the technology worked. Rather, Luddites resented that the new technology was being forced upon them by industrialists bent on destroying their livelihoods because they now owned all the means of production and distribution. For the Luddites, this was a fight for economic survival, not an effort to keep up with technology.

As early as 1811 Luddites in the English Midlands began destroying textile factories and almost immediately became targets of both private retaliation and state repression. There were mass hangings and deportations to Australia. Children, rather than adult artisans, were soon put to work in these factories. The Industrial Revolution was so grim and foul that Charles Dickens wrote about it and Karl Marx developed a whole theory around it.

But even Karl Marx showed little sympathy for the Luddites. After all, for him economic progress was human progress; feudalism replaced barbarism; Capitalism replaced feudalism; and socialism would ultimately replace Capitalism. Opposing technological development wasn’t the answer for either 19th Century Marxists or Capitalists. And for 20th Century Capitalists and Communists alike, technology was practically fetishized.

Many of us internalize a fatalistic view of technology forced upon us by billionaires: we regard the introduction of new technologies as inevitable and we struggle to keep up and pay for it. We rarely ponder what life would be like if we actually had a voice in deciding how to use new technology. Instead, it is always up to the courts to address wrongs and abuses, and the courts can’t keep up either. But in any case, this is the wrong institution to regulate technology.

But back to Marx. Marx had no crystal ball, though he certainly had a keen mind. But for all that intellect he also had no idea that two feudal societies, Russia and China, would skip right over Capitalism directly into a broken form of socialism. Marx never fully connected slavery or racism with colonialism; for him slavery was simply a more extreme form of theft of labor value and, in the end, just another “economic category.”

“Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus, slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.”

It would be up to later writers (Cedric Robinson, W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams) to make the case that Capitalism could never have existed without colonialism and racism.

But Marx was right about at least two things: (1) the labor of workers is being stolen; and (2) the end of Capitalism will involve changes in both production and social relations. After Capitalism’s time is finally up, capital (and this includes technology and intellectual property) will pass from the exclusive hands of industrialists, venture capitalists, and billionaires and become a commonly-owned, socially-controlled resource. A social good.

With the end of Capitalism – at least the predatory, completely unregulated Stage 4 variant the GOP champions – we all will finally have a say in how capital / technology / IP can be used – and for what social ends.

No more Murdochs (FOX), Musks (Twitter), Zuckerbergs (Facebook), or Sam Altmans or Peter Thiels (ChatGPT) changing your world.

But to get there we’ll have to change theirs.

Americans don’t fully recognize the importance of labor or the potential combined political power of working people. Or maybe we have simply allowed ourselves to be persuaded that that’s a “far-left” viewpoint.

Somehow it’s only class warfare when workers make their demands known.

Throughout the world, and in Europe particularly, May Day (or International Workers’ Day) is celebrated with displays of unity and power, such as today’s protests in France against President Macron’s decree raising the French retirement age.

Meanwhile, in the US, GOP-controlled states are rolling back worker protections, including those barring child labor.

For the most part it is anathema — or down-right “communist” — to point out the degree of exploitation of workers in America.

A new book by Melissa Hope Ditmore, a scholar who focuses on sex trafficking, makes the observation that sex and human trafficking are not all that different from the routine exploitation of workers. “Trafficking into agricultural, industry, and domestic work has always received scant attention compared with trafficking into sex work, despite its enormous scale and impact on the economy,” Ditmore writes.

Many of these most difficult jobs are still exempted from Social Security benefits created under the New Deal — which incidentally occurred during Jim Crow. Domestic laborers, nannies, lettuce pickers, elder care workers, house cleaners, teacher’s aides, and non-professional workers in the medical industry are all low-paid, mainly female and, more often than not, exploited. This extends to immigrants and the working poor who toil in the so-called “Gig economy” — basically piecework jobs that exclude them from full benefits.

In the worst days of the pandemic, the elderly and immune-compromised, in particular, depended on “gig economy” delivery services. We depended upon checkout clerks who did not have the luxury of working from home. These and the millions of healthcare workers who went to work every day, running the risk of contracting a virus for which there was then no immunization or treatment, were the real heroes of the day.

All over America, often in abysmal and unsafe working conditions, agricultural workers kept supply chains running so that the more privileged could continue to buy meats and vegetables even as the pandemic raged.

And across the country, particularly in Florida, being a teacher has now become a virtually impossible job for those who believe in teaching the truth and protecting vulnerable students. This is a profession that has never been adequately compensated, but is now literally under attack.

We are in the habit of reflexively thanking servicemen for participating in fairly questionable foreign wars and adventures, but we never thank the real heroes for their service. So in the absence of widespread May Day celebrations, I’m raising a toast tonight to the workers of the world and the power and remuneration they so richly deserve.

The Senate is supposed to reach agreement today on some sort of Coronavirus financial package. There are fundamental disagreements over whether we let families die and slide into even deeper financial ruin while we bail out the travel, hotel, airline, and financial industries; whether we let Trump and Mnuchin access a half trillion dollar slush fund; and what kinds of strings should be attached to corporate bailouts. Both sides have offered their own rescue plans. The Democrat version alone is 1400 pages.

Whether we end up calling it a rescue plan, a stimulus package, a bailout, a lifeline, or a disgrace depends on what we learn later today. Don’t get your hopes up. We live in a county that has always valued the mighty dollar more than human life. Now, this week, today, some are going to face that bitter truth for the first time.

We certainly know what the Republican administration and its Fox News cabinet think. People, at least of the expendable variety, must sacrifice themselve (or have it done to them) through inadequate testing, an absence of virus protection, lack of testing, and privatized healthcare that currently excludes them — just to keep the economy running for the owners.

Three months after the virus was first identified (it’s called COVID-19 because it was discovered in 2019) Americans still have insufficient ventilators, no masks, and almost no testing kits. And there is still no national plan to lock down people at home to minimize fatalities and to keep them financially solvent as the crisis unfolds.

The administration has shown us graphs showing that social distancing may help reduce pressure on hospital admissions. But they haven’t shown us their spreadsheet showing the cost in human lives in one column, and the cost to the economy in another.

But Republican priorities are pretty clear. What are a few million deaths if casinos can be kept open? Just ask Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, who told FOX News’ Tucker Carlson he’d to worship a golden calf if it saves business — which he confuses for a nation of human beings:

“So, I’m going to be smart, I think all of my fellow grandparents out there are going to be smart. We all wanna live, we wanna live with our grandchildren for as long as we can,” he added. “But the point is, our biggest gift we give to our country and our children and our grandchildren is the legacy of our country.”

Naturally, the President agrees. “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” Trump said. “This is not a country that was built for this.”

No, the United States is an all-day-all-night casino in one of Trump’s hotels.

An effective lockdown could go on for months. The Wuhan lockdown lasted seven weeks, and during the 1918 Spanish Flu public gatherings in the United States were banned in some places for as long as six months. When Hong Kong temporarily suspended its lockdown after a few weeks, it experienced a spike in new infections and was forced to lock down citizens again. So we know that keeping people sheltered in place must go on much longer than just two weeks.

But Trump knows better than the scientists. Appearing to confuse the disease’s incubation period with its duration, Trump thinks everything will be over in a couple of weeks. “America will again, and soon, be open for business.” Anthony Fauci, who is the only person in the entire Trump administration with the guts to disagree with his boss publicly, thinks lockdown measures should be of much longer duration. Trump has acknowledged Fauci’s disagreement, but the very stable genius has decided he knows better than the world’s epidemiologists.

This is the sort of cynical, callous, and criminal disregard for human life we have come to expect from Trump and his bobble-headed sycophants in the new Republican Party — the same people who told Americans with a straight face that a national healthcare plan would create Death Panels to determine who gets life-saving health care, and who must, regretfully of course, die. But now Republicans have outed themselves as the ultimate Death Panel. Money talks, and if protecting the public costs too much, then money says: the public is expendable.

By the end of the day we’ll know if Congress votes for preservation of millions of human lives — or the preservation of Capitalism for a second time in just twelve years.

There are many things a global pandemic ought to make us see with new eyes — what social animals we really are, for one. Now is a good time for us all to insist that we actually live in a society, not just an economy. I’ve heard from and communicated with my friends and neighbors more these last two weeks than at any other time. When these connections are limited, we feel deeply what we take for granted.

Another is the value of our fellow citizens. In a world where the working class doesn’t get enough respect, maybe now we should recognize there is a whole army of “essential workers” keeping the lights on, the stores open, and infrastructure going. It’s not just first responders and medical caregivers who are the real heroes. We all are. We are all indispensable pieces of a whole.

And maybe, too, we ought to reconsider the purpose of government. Our society is not mere scaffolding for Business and Capital, with government there mainly to collect taxes, enforce property rights, and police city streets. There is an essential role for government to play in keeping citizens safe, healthy, and economically secure.

As companies shed workers and lobby [again] for massive economic bailouts, it should be obvious that the market economy is not a machine designed to look out for anyone’s interests but its own. Conversations about the social safety net, basic income, and a government that defends its people in ways besides building walls and bombs must reshape what kind of society we will live in and the quality of lives its citizens can lead.

That is, once the world has been rebooted.

It’s increasingly clear that we also need to take the risks to human life of environmental change and pandemics much more seriously. Deferring action on climate change for 10-20 more years will lead to the same sort of crisis that deferring action on pandemics has created. Google the 2006 TED Talk on global pandemics by Epidemiologist Dr. Larry Brilliant.

About thirteen minutes into the video Brilliant predicts with uncanny accuracy the pandemic we are experiencing today. And he asks for the world to take action to prevent it from happening. But that TED talk was 14 years ago, and today we can see the result of complacency, denial and inaction.

It may be too much to ask — from a nation that voted for “America First” and which does not believe it is truly a part of a world community, doesn’t fully recognize the UN or the legitimacy of international courts, only briefly joined international environmental accords, and which rejects basic science — that we must participate, if not take a leading role, in an international health plan such as the one Dr. Brilliant suggests. But it would be the smart and right and sane thing to do.

We will soon see if the world is capable of saving itself through solidarity, justice and rationality. Unfortunately, centuries of human history present a strong case against it. But what other choice do we have?

With the help of more than 6,000 lobbyists the 1% of the 1% — America’s super-rich — managed to ram through a new tax code in the U.S. Congress designed entirely for themselves. Here in the Commonwealth similar looters are unhappy the “little people” have been fighting back.

The RaiseUp Coalition — a broad coalition of workers and social justice groups in Massachusetts — succeeded in getting the so-called “Millionaire’s Tax” on the 2018 state ballot. It took thousands of hours of ordinary people standing in the freezing cold or drizzle, and being chased from supermarket parking lots, to gather the signatures. Now, however, the richest of the rich are trying to have the ballot initiative blocked — by taking away our right to vote on it.

A complaint before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court claims Attorney General Maura Healey and State Secretary William Galvin overstepped their authority by permitting what is essentially a progressive income tax to be added to the ballot.

Healy and Galvin are being sued by Christopher Anderson, Westford, President of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, Inc. (“MHTC”); Christopher Carlozzi, Malden, State Director of the National Federation of Independent Business (“NFIB”); Richard C. Lord, Peabody, President and Chief Executive Officer of Associated Industries of Massachusetts (“AIM”); Eileen McAnneny, Melrose, President of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation (“Foundation”); and Daniel O’Connell, Boston, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership (“MACP”).

When these lobbying groups were pocketing massive tax breaks not one of them one was screaming “Class Warfare!” But now when called upon to pay their fair share, well, things are quite different. Fourteen members of the Mass High Tech Council alone have managed to extort $144.7 million in tax breaks from the state — and the $150 million in salaries of the executives who run these companies were paid for almost entirely by taxpayers. Nevertheless, taxpayer largesse was never enough for these parasites.

If you are a voter, please sign the RaiseUp petition to demand that the tax initiative stays on the ballot.

And if you are a legislator — just pass the Millionaire’s Tax! If the people’s house were really doing the people’s work we wouldn’t need ballot initiatives like this.

Forget the fake news for a second. It’s real enough but the most insidious assaults on democracy come in the form of endless “opinion shapers” and legislation from right-wing think tanks and lobbyists doing the bidding of an American oligarchy.

I just finished reading a piece in CommonWealth which argues that the Fair Share Amendment is liberal-elitist. The author, Josh McCabe of Wellesley College’s Freedom Project, says that by increasing taxes on multi-millionaires the federal SALT (state and local tax) exemption will be triggered, permitting gazillionaires to pay lower federal taxes. McCabe goes on to say that SALT has cost the feds about $100 billion in revenues and states will have to scramble to pay for their own services out of pocket. He asks:

“The amendment means residents of poor states such as Mississippi (ranked 50th in per capita income) will partially subsidize residents of wealthy Massachusetts (ranked third in per capita income). In what sense is it fair to place some of the burden on Mississippi to pay for schools in Wellesley or roads in Andover?

If this sounds almost reasonable on the surface, consider for a moment that the super-rich already pay lower tax rates than wage earners and have many opportunities and legions of tax lawyers helping them to avoid paying their fair share. States like Massachusetts that want to raise taxes to pay for services are simply being smarter and more responsible to their citizens than, say, Mississippi. And Mississippi is already a drain on the rest of the nation, particularly Blue States, receiving $2.02 in federal money for every $1 their citizens pay in taxes. Nice try, though, Mr. McCabe.

Besides following the money it’s always a good idea to see who’s advocating for tax breaks for the super-rich. Predictably, the Freedom Project (as in “freedom” from paying taxes) is dedicated to the free market fundamentalism of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and Friedrich August von Hayek.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that Wellseley’s Freedom Project is bought and paid for by Charles Koch?

So nice of CommonWealth to give them a free platform.

* * *

And, while we’re still talking about oligarchs: if you were watching the British election and envied the Brits their chance to call an election and throw out the government, you’re not alone.

Impeachment right now seems like the only option open to citizens, but Paul Street’s article Impeach the U.S. Constitution points out that the real problem is our system of government – not factionalism, not Donald Trump.

Yes, the Founding Fathers were either high on crack when they came up with this insane system – or the founding slavemasters were intent on building an oligarchy. Turns out, it was the latter:

I am always darkly amused when I hear one of my fellow Americans call for a return from our current “deep state” plutocracy and empire to the supposedly benevolent and democratic rules and values of the nation’s sacred founders and Constitution. Democracy was the last thing the nation’s founders wanted to see break out in the new republic. Drawn from the elite propertied segments in the new republic, most of the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention shared their compatriot John Jay’s view that “Those who own the country ought to govern it.”

As the celebrated U.S. historian Richard Hofstader noted in his classic 1948 text, “The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It”: “In their minds, liberty was linked not to democracy but to property.” Democracy was a dangerous concept to them, conferring “unchecked rule by the masses,” which was “sure to bring arbitrary redistribution of property, destroying the very essence of liberty.”

Donald Trump is their crowning achievement.

For numerous reasons I have never liked golf. My apologies to those of you who see something in it besides a bunch of old guys hacking away at $4 balls with $500 clubs. Maybe the time outside can be a salve for a stressed-out businessman. Maybe there’s something to it after all. But it’s a ridiculous game played by goofy looking people in lime green pants, weird shoes and weird hats. Just look at the smirking grifter in the photo.

Worse, it’s a rigged game. All sorts of handicapping schemes give free points to lousy players. And usually the lousy players get their free points, well, because that’s what gentlemen deserve out on the links.

Sort of like Capitalism.

Capitalists get their profits from the sweat and ingenuity of people who work for them – and then pocket the cash. Over time, as a class, Capitalists become wealthier and wealthier, while over time workers struggle to keep the lights on. Labor and business have always played an adversarial game, and the system has always been rigged in favor of business.

Because, in the language of golf, the duffers get all the handicaps.

Two points for union-busting. Two points for right-to-work laws. Two points for anti-union legislation. Two points for keeping the minimum wage below survival wages. Two points for saddling working people with taxes while the super-rich get tax shelters. Ten points for making sure members of Congress are all millionaires. Five points for a stacked Supreme Court. Five points for making housing, education, and medical costs unbearably high. Ten points for receiving free oil, mineral, and gas drilling rights on public land. Ten points for producing goods and saddling the public with the resulting remediation costs and Superfund cleanups. Five points for preventing municipalities from competing with monopolies by offering citizens broadband services. A hundred points for government bailouts. Twenty points for R&D grants. Fifty points for bringing a business to the state. A hundred points for a decade free of paying taxes on that business. Fifty points for the state picking up the tab for worker training. Five hundred points for Citizens United. And so on.

And still – with all these corporate giveaways – they whine that they can’t compete.

But when you have every advantage and you still can’t win, there’s something wrong with the game.

19th century Socialists, specifically Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, thought they were living in the End Times of Capitalism – a system they saw rapidly approaching the limits of human and natural exploitation. It would only be a matter of years, they thought, before its injustices, contradictions and cyclical crises would lead workers in European democracies to reject and replace the system with Socialism.

These old Socialists never anticipated our hyper-predatory 21st Century Capitalism with its even more obscene levels of income inequality, and they never thought for a second that feudal states like China or Russia could be shoe-horned into their model of European political evolution. In Russia, the Narodniks thought they could adapt Marxism, but Marx himself had doubts. After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels corresponded with Russian revolutionaries like Plekhanov. But Engels died in 1895, a generation before the Bolsheviks came to power.

The authoritarian states that arose out of Communism were neither foreseen nor advocated by Marx or Engels. But the two “Marxists” did anticipate Capitalist globalism, chronic market manipulation, the necessity of government bailouts, monopolies, privatization of public resources, and the rise of authoritarianism – all to sustain a system that, in the long run, is unsustainable.

The 2016 election was many things. On the one hand it was a last gasp of American White Privilege. And on the other the election was a sweeping rejection of Neoliberalism – a belief that liberal democracy is somehow compatible with robber barons, hedge fund managers, secret trade deals, market manipulation, monopolies, mass incarceration and spying on citizens. Pretty much – Capitalism.

The Republican working class rejected Neoliberalism because it hadn’t been doing much for them lately – especially in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Instead, they let themselves be duped by an Orange Mussolini who dazzled them with race baiting, Jesus, and a return to coal mines. The Democratic working class was more hopeful that reducing the crushing costs of education and healthcare might keep them afloat. But both the GOP and the DNC were selling a similar bill of goods to similarly duped constituencies.

And even though they gave it one last shot, Democrats could no longer sell the Neoliberal product they’d been hawking for 30 years. In fact, there were so many young Democrats who had lost faith in Capitalism that the DNC had to resort to subterfuge to derail an old Democratic Socialist offering better ideas.

So, for the moment, Advanced Capitalism is still alive under Trump. Just barely.

White Nationalists and Evangelicals may think the Trump administration has finally brought them to the Promised Land. Liberals may think the recent series of vicious Executive Orders are nothing less than the rollback of social progress of the last hundred years. And some may call all this weird nastiness “populism.” But what we are really witnessing is a team of private physicians tending to a rich, geriatric patient who is dying. Mr. Moneybags has brought in a team of doctors and lawyers to save himself and his legacy. Only most, like him, are hacks.

The Trump administration’s unprecedented number of billionaires, financial manipulators, and retired military is the logical result (if not the last resort) of a system that can no longer trust its own citizens or coexist with nature and democracy to ensure its survival. At his Inauguration the “populist” Mr. Moneybags made a point of surrounding himself with fellow billionaires, making it abundantly clear whose interests he really intends to serve.

Since the little people started yammering about income inequality, demanding the protection of rivers, oceans and the ecosphere, and calling for real democracy – it was obvious things would have to change. It would be necessary to bring in the Big Guns to gut all the institutions that protect and serve these Bolsheviks, ingrates, Saul-Alinskians, and Welfare Queens – remind them who’s Boss. Even the usual neoliberal technocrats could no longer be trusted with the reins of government. Thus the billionaires, the generals, the proto-fascists were recruited for the job. Put people in charge of the justice apparatus who can guarantee there will be no justice.

No doubt these are acts of desperation, but desperate times – for billionaires – call for desperate measures.

The midterm 2018 elections will be here before we know it. All the promises of security, prosperity, White American renewal, replacing science with scripture, and making America “great again” will ultimately be doomed to failure. The coal industry is gone. The robots are coming. The White House is criminally incompetent, ham-handed in its propaganda efforts, and its plans are often little more than half-baked talking points. The deliriously happy billionaires and hucksters who have been tapped to save Capitalism are so focused on stuffing dollars into their own pockets that it will create an unintended form of transparency.

If democracy does survive, and even a modicum of common-sense prevails, I have to believe Americans will finally see the real picture – and reject Trump and his kleptocracy.

But what then for Democrats? Double down on Neoliberalism? Or something different? Maybe not exactly what those old Socialists had in mind – but something rational, equitable, and fair. A game that isn’t fixed. Something that puts people before obscene profit, something that can survive on its own without crisis or strongmen. Something that will elevate the lives of all Americans – not just those living in their gilded towers.

Something that would truly make America great again.

Stephen Grossman’s piece, “Capitalism allows Americans to prosper,” lists a number of technologies which benefited humanity or changed society in some way. In most of the piece, Grossman conflates the scientific method and engineering advances with Capitalism itself.

I would probably agree with him that Capitalism has survived this long because greed is an unavoidably innate human characteristic. People were selling things and accumulating money long before accounting, international banking, and commodity trading were invented centuries ago.

In the 21st Century alone we have seen Capitalism in a variety of forms: an American version with varying degrees of greediness; a version under Fascism; a post-war European social-democratic variety; and now Chinese and Russian versions laced with remnants of their old command economies. If Capitalism is more-or-less a natural human activity, the question should not be “whether Capitalism?” It should be “what kind?”

But let’s deal with Grossman’s nonsense. It was cavemen who first discovered fire and the arrow. It was Communists who first sent a cosmonaut into space. Textiles, pottery, bronze, the wheel, the fulcrum, chemistry, navigation, celestial observation, agriculture, and many other sciences and technologies – all these were discovered or developed long before Capitalism became the religion of “Objectivists” like Mr. Grossman. If greed is an innate human characteristic, so is curiosity and laziness – the true mothers of science and technology.

Grossman claims that “the most rational people in any industry, company, or job selfishly pursuing their own happiness, increased everyone’s productivity vastly more than in any society in history.” To the stunted child workers of Fall River inhaling textile fibers, or the coal miners of Kentucky living half a life to profit someone else, this type of “productivity” is not something – to use Grossman’s own language – that a rational person would objectively choose for himself.

Indeed, it was in the 18th and 19th centuries – in which workers were exploited to such a degree – described nicely by Dickens and others – that they were kept in perpetual poverty; or lived “short and brutish” lives precisely because of the nature of piecework or industrial employment; or that the environment was polluted to such an extent – which led to alternate economic theories, revolutions, reforms, regulations, and the compromises we see today.

In contrast to the industrialists of the 18th and 19th century of which Mr. Grossman is enamored, today we know that our natural resources are finite. The capacity of garbage dumps, fuel supplies, water, minerals, even the capacity of the earth to deal with carbon emissions – everything is finite. And yet the main users and abusers of these resources produce products of questionable utility with dangers and expensive disposal costs like there is no tomorrow – and these costs are usually borne by society, not the companies producing them. A good example is our own PCB-contaminated harbor.

For Grossman there does not seem to be any middle ground. “Do you want Stalin… or Steve Jobs?” he asks. Now that we have discovered that many of Steve Jobs’ iPads were produced in Asian sweatshops, simplistic rhetoric like this should be tweaked to ask instead: What kind of Capitalism is acceptable?

This was published in the Standard Times on December 3, 2012
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20121203/opinion/212030324

Don’t give me that old time religion.

American Free Market fundamentalists claim that regulation, taxes, government interference, and lack of incentives are stifling job creation and business growth. No matter that many of them are already operating off-shore, pay no taxes, or are stashing their money out of reach of the IRS.

Not enough people stop to think that the overall state of the world economy might also have something to do with it — what with Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, and now Italy in economic crisis. Wealthier Eurozone nations like Germany and France are on the hook for a lot of European debt, and this will ultimately hit them if weaker economies default. And then there’s Japan, which has been battling sluggish economic growth for over a decade. That’s a lot of uncertainty. More uncertainty than knowing you have to pay your taxes every year on April 15^th at a predictable tax rate.

With so many capitalist nations sick or on life support, where are all the customers for American products and services going to come from? The reticence to expand businesses and hire people may actually have more to do with the dismal chances of recouping investments in an uncertain world. But it certainly is convenient to blame unions, government, regulators, and those calling for Big Business to pay its fair share of taxes instead of considering the scary proposition that Capitalism itself is on the ropes.

Surely there must be a country somewhere which provides all the incentives, tax relief and lack of regulation that Big Business craves, and that country would naturally have the most dynamic free-enterprise economy in the world — if the acolytes of Milton Friedman are right. And it is a given that all that economic success would occur in a democratic country with well-educated, free, and healthy citizens. Turns out, this is a Free Market Fundamentalist’s delusion.

Where is this supposed paradise?

Qatar and Paraguay have impressive GDP growth according to 2010 figures from the International Monetary Fund. On this same list on which the US finds itself 117^th with 2.84% growth, there are a handful of economies with double-digit increases (Singapore, Taiwan, India, China) and approximately 70 with growth over 5%. Mexico and Bangladesh have twice the growth of the United States and Afghanistan three times our growth. Using CIA World Factbook figures, Taiwan and China both claim to have poverty rates half that of Switzerland’s 5%. India’s is 25% and ours is 12%. Even Syria has a lower poverty rate than the United States. Leon Panetta said so. But many of these countries are not free. For example, Singapore abolished trial by jury and for China they’re optional. Some of these economic “dynamos” are in war zones. Some are places you wouldn’t even want to visit.

So it would appear that economic growth can either lift a nation’s standard of living or leave millions in poverty even while profits are taken. But growth or recession can change in a heartbeat. Singapore’s economic growth, for example, is expected to plummet to a third of their 2010 figures as the world economy cools. However, ask a Free Market Fundamentalist why this phenomenon happens here in the US, and they’ll tell you that it’s due to too much regulation and taxation, both of which have been in decline since the Reagan administration.

So the next time a Tea Party person reads his voodoo economics off his palm, or quotes Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman, they’re just invoking their prophets and reciting their economic prayers. Like any religion, it has little to do with reality and everything to do with wishful thinking. Wall Street’s, not ours.

In these pages we have recently been treated to a series of letters to the editor blasting the newly-passed Health Care Reform bill. There is something common to all these letters – they are from people who have perverse notions of why it is we live together in a society, what our individual obligations to society are, what society’s obligations to us are, and what values we as a society choose to define ourselves. The current debate over health care is once again an argument over a Social Contract.

John Clifford (“Health care law is about power and control”), who represents himself as an “independent,” is nevertheless a determined mouthpiece for the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Party. Clifford whines that mandating that all American citizens buy private medical insurance is somehow a step in the direction of socialized medicine and presents a list of talking points torn from the inventive pages of gop.gov. Rodney Fernandes (“Dawn of the entitlement age”) portrays those who receive public assistance as zoo animals, ignoring the corporate welfare “entitlements” and bailouts we have treated American business to for decades. Randall Faria (“Ignoring true cost of health law”) takes a less severe approach, applauding new provisions preventing insurance companies from excluding those with preexisting conditions – but his main objection is that it’s not good for business. He writes, “it will not be long before my employers realize it will be cheaper to pay the fine than continue my coverage.” Apparently his employer hasn’t realized all this time that it would be cheaper to simply not offer insurance at all. Nelson Strebor (“Health care is not a right”) believes in Social Darwinism and Tea Parties.

Then there is Ron Wisner (“Democrat’s massive money pit”), who presumably dashes off some of his posts to libertarianletter.com while taking his yacht on the Marion-Bermuda race. Mr. Wisner, who fulminates against illegal immigrants, in support of the Iraq war, and who blames the financial crisis on government not letting market forces prevail, actually addresses the Social Contract in one of his blog posts. Wisner rejects the Social Contract, writing that “the individual has been enjoined to give up some of those fruits to less productive citizens, not because of any agreement, nor because of any hope of gain, proportional or otherwise to his loss, but as mandatory largess and to a notion of sanctimonious altruism. There now ceases to be a quid pro quo.” He also writes: “If the individual chooses to do otherwise, he may leave the company of men and his survival is thus solely an issue for himself and his industriousness and innate abilities.” Mr. Wisner’s notions remind me of those of the 19th century anarcho-capitalist, Lysander Spooner, who ended up pronouncing the U.S. Constitution null and void.

Yes, there is a certain element of “quid-pro-quo” in a Social Contract. We support society; it supports us. But the Social Contract also involves agreement on what kind of society we want to live in. It also involves the prioritization of social goals – not always based on simple dollars. And it defines what kind of values we choose as a society. A society that cares more about education and health care of its citizens is a totally different one from a society that wages billion-dollar-a-day wars. A society that funds its libraries distinguishes itself from one that provides funding for junkets to China for corporations thinking about relocating their operations. A society that raises its taxes a fraction of a percent is different from one which hands out tax breaks. A society that cares about health care for the children of others is different from one prepared to let the uninsured fend for themselves.

Most of these views, particularly Wisner’s, remind us of Thomas Hobbes’ famous thoughts on the Social Contract. Hobbes wrote that, without a Social Contract, life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Instead, we would live like animals in a state of nature, where we would enjoy the “right to all things” but there would be “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes).

If you haven’t figured it out yet, that’s the Tea Party vision for America.

The mainstream media and right-wing blogosphere is filled with strange theories about Iranian plans to destroy Jews in some variant of a nuclear “Final Solution.” What’s frightening is that the same people who spread this nonsense are the ones that got us into Iraq. And the ones who believe these lies are the same ones who claimed that the Iraqis were responsible for 9/11. And when we listen to a Khadafy or an Ahmadinejad at the UN, their words make no sense to Western diplomats — if they stay to listen to these speeches at all.

Lost amid the religious verbiage, hate of Israel’s Apartheid form of government, posturing for the rest of the Muslim world, and their downright quirkiness, both Khadafy and Ahmadinijad have nevertheless been delivering a consistent, coherent message to Western nations of the Security Council: Your time is up and we’re tired of playing by your rules. For its part, the West has also been delivering a message: Nothing has changed. The world is still ours. This was certainly the case in New York and Pittsburgh this week.

In his rambling, extemporaneous speech at the UN, Moammar Khadafy slammed the notion of privileged Western nations leading the Security Council:

[The Security Council] is political feudalism for those who have a permanent seat. […] It should not be called the Security Council, it should be called the terror council. […] Permanent is something for God only. We are not fools to give the power of veto to great powers so they can use us and treat us as second-class citizens.

An even more reviled speaker in Western eyes, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad, made the same points more lucidly in his speech:

It is not acceptable that the United Nations and the Security Council, whose decisions must represent all nations and governments by the application of the most democratic methods in their decision making processes, be dominated by a few governments and serve their interests. In a world where cultures, thoughts and public opinions should be the determining factors, the continuation of the present situation is impossible, and fundamental changes seem to be unavoidable.

[…] Marxism is gone. It is now history. The expansionist Capitalism will certainly have the same fate. […] We must all remain vigilant to prevent the pursuit of colonialist, discriminatory and inhuman goals under the cover of the slogans for change and in new formats. The world needs to undergo fundamental changes and all must engage collectively to make them happen in the right direction, and through such efforts no one and no government would consider itself an exception to change or superior to others and try to impose its will on others by proclaiming world leadership.

Ahmadinejad took aim at Israel, likening the slaughter of civilians in Gaza to “genocide”:

How can the crimes of the occupiers against defenseless women and children and destruction of their homes, farms, hospitals and schools be supported unconditionally by certain governments, and at the same time, the oppressed men and women be subject to genocide and heaviest economic blockade being denied of their basic needs, food, water and medicine.

This was apparently too much for France and the United States to bear. “It is disappointing that Mr. Ahmadinejad has once again chosen to espouse hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” Mark Kornblau, a spokesman to the US mission to the UN, said in a statement. Right on queue, 13 Western nations then walked out of a speech that covered much more ground than Israel.

Between New York and Pittsburgh, backroom meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria involving the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Israel, the Obama administration has been busy. Busy swatting down the Goldstone report, abandoning serious demands on settlements, and engaging in war frenzy to either impose more sanctions on Iran, or support bombing it, on behalf of Israel. When Obama came to the podium, he enumerated four main themes in a “new” American relationship to the rest of the world:

First, we must stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and seek the goal of a world without them. […] Because a world in which IAEA inspections are avoided and the United Nation’s demands are ignored will leave all people less safe, and all nations less secure.

That brings me to the second pillar for our future: the pursuit of peace. […] That effort must begin with an unshakeable determination that the murder of innocent men, women and children will never be tolerated.

Third, we must recognize that in the 21st century, there will be no peace unless we take responsibility for the preservation of our planet. […] We will press ahead with deep cuts in emissions to reach the goals that we set for 2020, and eventually 2050.

And this leads me to the final pillar that must fortify our future: a global economy that advances opportunity for all people. […] In Pittsburgh, we will work with the world’s largest economies to chart a course for growth that is balanced and sustained.

Yet when we parse the Obamaspeak and compare it to the President’s actual actions this week and this month, all the flowery speech rings hollow. Nothing has changed. The world order will remain the same.

Rather than the global or regional non-proliferation he spoke of, Obama’s actual non-proliferation consists of: No nukes for Iran. North Korea, a much more terrifying nuclear power ruled by an unhinged despot who has actually killed millions of his own citizens and whose nation has already tested nuclear weapons, merits a mere “tsk tsk” from the President. While Israel and the United States have staged simulated war exercises against Iran, Iran has not threatened Israel and no Iranian weapons testing has been detected. But Israel and/or the US are on the verge of attacking Iran militarily solely because Israel, our proxy in the region, fears losing its nuclear monopoly.

The pursuit of peace, particularly the claim that the murder of innocent civilians will never be tolerated, becomes another one of the President’s hollow high school valedictory speeches when measured against his own administration’s promise to torpedo the UN’s Goldstone report and prevent Israeli war crime charges from ever reaching the Hague. Of course, the United States could someday find itself in the same position as Israel, given Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, illegal renditions, assassinations,  waterboarding, drone bombings, and the use of mercenaries in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. So perhaps avoiding the Hague is just American pragmatism. But for a country winding up one war in Iraq, escalating another in Afghanistan, and rattling drums for a third in Iran, the “pursuit of peace” is Orwellian Newspeak.

The last two themes, global warming and globalism, don’t inspire confidence either. Neither the President nor I will be around in 2050 when emission levels are low enough to do any good, and I wonder how much of the planet will be. As for global prosperity, Obama seems to offer a view that opportunity in the developing countries will be linked to sustained, balanced growth in the traditional industrialized nations. Did no one else hear anything new? Globalism and Capitalism have failed. Oratory won’t change the facts.

Even though we might not share the Libyan president’s taste in clothing or the Iranian president’s mock Holocaust denial, you’ve got to admit: the UN Security Council is an anachronistic body. It’s 1948 in a time warp. It still consists of the colonial powers who made such a mess of the Middle East right after WW2, and they’re still trying to set the rules, still reminding everyone that the Security Council is theirs, and that they control memberships in the nuclear club. And, with the exception of China, an old White Boy’s club at that.

But out with the old and in with the new. Two of the permanent members, France and Britain (each scarcely over 60 million) have insignificant populations compared to Indonesia or Pakistan (both Muslim states), India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Japan, Mexico, or Brazil — all of which have populations over 100 million and two of which are also nuclear states. At least two of these would be better candidates for permanent memberships on the Security Council.

So Khadafy and Ahmadinejad’s arguments really shouldn’t come as a surprise in a world that has changed greatly since 1948. These two leaders may not be the most accessible to Westerners, but they have been echoing the sentiments of many of the 187 other nations of the UN whose views are routinely ignored or vetoed by present members of the Security Council.

The Goldstone report is a case in point.

The report, commissioned by the UN, condemns Israeli and Hamas crimes against civilians during Operation Cast Lead last winter. Aside from various ad hominem attacks on Judge Goldstone, himself a Zionist Jew, no one has seriously attacked its actual findings. The only issue that the US, France, and Britain have with the report is that the investigation was not initiated with their blessings. Hence, in UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s words: no mandate. Apparently the rest of the world did not agree. Yet the US will very likely veto the transmission of the findings to the Hague.

Iran’s nuclear program also illustrates the same point.

In the Sixties a handful of Western nations were instrumental in providing Israel with nuclear weapons: the US, France, and Norway all played various parts. The United States has played a game for decades of pretending Israel has no nuclear weapons, and the other members of the Security Council have played along. When the Shah of Iran was in power, the United States and Germany actually helped Iran develop nuclear power. But now with an Iranian government that no longer takes orders from the West, the rules were simply changed.

When the world is yours, you can do what you want.