Though Cowards Flinch

Former US congressman, Tom Tancredo, spoke on Thursday evening at a Tea Party meeting. The Tea Party groups, which we’ve discussed on this blog before, are supposed grassroots supporters of the view that Obama is a socialist and this his massive programme of deficit spending to bail out the US economy is on a par with the measures of Stalin and Hitler. Nuanced stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Speaking to six hundred delegates of what is supposedly the first national Tea Party conference, Tancredo declared his belief that “Barack Hussein Obama” (repeat foreign-sounding middle name ad nauseam) was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.” A lot of commentators have since dwelled on how this echoes the Jim Crow laws which prevented black people voting.

The significance of this should not be lost, in a country which elected a black president. Nevertheless, I think it’s counterproductive to concentrate exclusively on the racial aspect. It is, in fact, an attack on all poor people, of all colours. Whilst black and latino people, and single mothers, are still disproportionately poor according to the last census, the connection of poverty to education is undeniable and transcends race and gender.

American socialists and Democrats should be hammering this message home, as it completely undermines the pretensions of the batshit crazy Tea Party movement to stick up for normal Americans, using rhetoric that portrays Americans as crushed under the jackboot of income tax. It offers the opportunity for radical socialists particularly to escape from the caricature of being addled Ivy League professors.

The Left has confidence in Americans to make up their own mind, without asserting prior conditions before they can have a vote. Moreover, through massive funding of the public school system and full democratic engagement with school boards, it’s the Left which has an answer to the problems of education and poverty.

Meanwhile a genuinely progressive coalition would give substance to our claims of defending the US working class by boosting redistribution – directly and through additional funds for areas of high poverty. Abolishing income tax and FICA tax for those earning under $30,000 and recouping the money through much more stringent corporate taxes, reversing the Bush-era tax cuts and then some, would be a start.

As someone once said, “Let’s hear that dirty word now…SOCIALISM!”

Copyright Danny Miller @ Jew Eat Yet

There’s an interesting comment-piece by Stephanie Gutman over at the Telegraph which neatly feeds into the right-wing narrative that gay rights have gone too far, that political correctness has gone mad. It plays to the notion that we must rein in all these millions of rules about what people can say, think and do, using a fair dollop of ‘common sense’ and ignoring as a joke many things which might otherwise call for a bit of rigidly enforced political correctness in the form of a horsewhip. But enough of my editorializing.

“President Obama is searching desperately for a sop to throw his Left-wing base, and he must have thought he’d found one in the statement in his State of the Union address: “This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.”

“Like so many of the SOTU lines, this was a piece of flim-flam. [...] When Obama announced his new goal, the television cameras cut to the chiefs of the Navy, Army, Air force and Marines. They sat stony-faced.

“Are the service chiefs homophobes? I don’t think so. The US military is generally a very tolerant place. As one of my soldier friends put it, “I never saw any kind of witchhunt. Most commanders had their plates full with doing their jobs.”

“No, the main reason the brass resist changing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell now, while the country is immersed in two wars, is because they recognise that withdrawing the policy would create a new protected category and a new opening for battles over perceived discrimination.

“In other words, since it would be illegal to discharge for homosexuality, many discharges brought for other reasons will be challenged as if they had been brought for homosexuality, as we see in the civilian world when, for instance, a woman fired for lateness insists she was fired because she is a woman and demands a full fledged discrimination trial.”

Hang on, the US military is tolerant? An antidote to such a view should be the most recent rape statistics:

• There were 2,923 reported sexual assaults in the 2008 fiscal year, up from 2,688 in 2007 [63% of this number were allegations of rape or aggravated assault - Ed]
• There 251 incidents in combat areas, including 141 in Iraq and 22 in Afghanistan
• Investigations took place in 2,763 cases. In 832 cases, action was taken, including 317 courts-martial, a rise of 38%
• Of the 6.8% of women and 1.8% of men who indicated they had experienced unwanted sexual contact, the majority – 79% of women and 78% of men – chose not to report it.

This increase in courts-martial is a result of unprecedented public pressure, resulting from journalists throwing the spotlight on women who served in the military. Military policy actually changed in 2005, to improve the rate of reporting the various types of sexual assault, and even still estimates are that those cases which are reported are a small fraction of the incidents actually going on. A March 2009 DoD report suggests ninety percent aren’t reported.

Some of the stories are simply shocking and go beyond the statistics provided above by the BBC, by interviewing veterans who served. The following is an extract from an article written by Helen Benedict in The Nation.

“The double traumas of combat and sexual persecution may be why a 2008 RAND study found that female veterans are suffering double the rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder for their male counterparts.The double traumas of combat and sexual persecution may be why a 2008 RAND study found that female veterans are suffering double the rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder for their male counterparts.[...]

“When Specialist Suzanne Swift reported her sergeant for repeatedly raping her over months and then refused to redeploy under him, the army tried her by court martial for desertion and put her in prison for a month.

“When Cassandra Hernandez of the Air Force reported being gang-raped by three comrades at her training acadamy, her command charged her with indecent behavior for consorting with her rapists.

“When Sergeant Marti Ribeiro reported being raped by a fellow serviceman while she was on guard duty in Afghanistan, the Air Force threatened to court martial her for leaving her weapon behind during the attack. “That would have ruined by career,” she said. “So I shut up.”

“All the men who were accused in these cases went unpunished. Several of them even won promotions.[...]

“Even those few men who are found guilty of sexual assault or rape tend to receive absurdly mild punishments, such as suspension, demotion, or a scolding letter for their file. In 2008, 62 percent of offenders found guilty received mild punishments like this. This amounts to a tiny fraction of the men accused of sexual assault. One particularly grotesque example of this sort of justice is the 2006 case of army sergeant Damon D. Shell, who ran over and killed 20-year-old Private First Class Hannah Gunterman McKinney of the 44th Corps Support Battalion on her base in Iraq on September 4. Shell pleaded guilty to drinking in a war zone, drunken driving and “consensual sodomy” with McKinney, an underage junior soldier to whom he had supplied alcohol until she was incapacitated. Having sex with a person incapacitated by alcohol is legally rape, and using rank to coerce a junior into a sexual act is legally rape in the military, too. Yet a military judge ruled McKinney’s death an accident, said nothing about rape, and sentenced Shell to thirteen months in prison and demotion to private. Shell was not even kicked out of the army.”

So US military personnel are completely understanding and tolerant of homosexuality, even though back in the good ol’ US of A, it’s widely denigrated and attacked, but the attitude to women is almost routinely crude and brutal? Something doesn’t quite stack up.

While it would probably be too simplistic to say that these forms of discrimination emanate from a single, shared, source, they do have a lot in common – especially the emphasis on the link between masculinity and male sexuality which, in an organization designed to blow shit up, is not in short supply to begin with. This is reflected in the view of the heirarchy that women should not be permitted to sign on as frontline combatants.

Simply put, the US military is not the environment one expects tolerant attitudes to thrive, as exemplified by the attitudes to women, and some effort should be made to correct that.

Repealing DADT is a good way to bring many gays and lesbians, who have contributed to the military, out of the closet. A Democratic Congress can amend the USC to get rid of the policy, and it has plenty of support from various former brass, contrary the ‘stony-faced’ image of those who were sitting in the US House of Representatives when Obama gave his State of the Union.

There’s good reason for the attitudes of the brass; during large combat operations, expulsions for being gay actually drop, presumably as it’s a case of “Every man for the front!” Pragmatism about US military recruitment and retention means that the military needs to be open to anyone and can’t waste time throwing people out after a costly and time-consuming investigation initiated because they happen to mention that they’re married to someone of the wrong gender.

Columnists who spin this one as a sop to Obama’s left-wing base are just dressing up their own homophobia as political cynicism. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell gets a lot of attention in college campuses which attempt to ban recruiters on the grounds that the armed forces discriminate, or as a result of a specific hate-crime [e.g.] that provokes media furore, but by and large the Left has a lot of other things to worry about right now – like healthcare and jobs. Anyone who thinks this will swing the mid-terms in November is a fool.

Finally, dismissing attempts to repeal DADT on the grounds that it is going to create another ‘protected group’ which might result in additional litigation is simply not good enough. It may well create such cases, but litigation is the means whereby the individual can defend him or herself against the institution. Even at the expense of frivolous cases where defendants cheekily assert that the dual circumstances of a sanction against them and their membership of a minority constitutes evidence of discrmination, one would have thought the Right would have been all for this.

Apparently not when the issue at stake is homosexuality.

When I last discussed Labour’s pre-budget report, I pointed out that there were a few measures socialists could support, despite the vast bulk of it putting the cost of economic recovery squarely where it doesn’t belong; on the vast majority of working people. One of those measures, which screwed working people even while it also charged business, was the 1% rise in employer and employee national insurance contributions.

It turns out that business, unsurprisingly, thinks that even this modest idea is too much. The CBI had its turn attacking it a few weeks ago, and now the British Chamber of Commerce and Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) have decided to lambast the idea, which, they say, will land businesses with additional charges of some £14 billion over four years.

Bearing in mind the problem this country is going to have with pensions, I’d say employers should be charged a lot more than that. Yet what I specifically wanted to comment on was the evidence CIPD adduced to back up their argument: 8% of employers say the charges will cause lay-offs, 12% say it will prevent them from hiring more staff. What the other 80% say is not released with the press report.

On the basis of this small number, these pressure groups have released a press statement attacking the plans of the government, using the threat of jobs rather like a Damoclean Sword. They’ve also recently, according to the BBC, called for a freeze on the minimum wage for young people. If this isn’t class war, an attempt to pare down as far as possible the already meagre redistributive measures of the government, I don’t know what is.

With Labour floundering in 1980′s-style identity politics (see Harriet Harman’s definition of equality here) rather than mobilising a coalition to increase the lot of people who work hard, to the limit of their skills, and aren’t paid especially well, disaster seems sure to follow. This is, after all, a Labour government which at one time wanted to double the inheritance tax threshold, to outflank the Tories to the right.

Across the water, in liberal Massachusetts, a Republican has soundly beaten his Democratic opponent because the Democratic base didn’t come out to vote. As events in Washington as regards health care reform clearly show, they had nothing to come out and vote for. This is a state where single-payer health care is overwhelmingly supported in poll after poll, but nationally the Democrats are fumbling the ball.

The moral of the story should be perfectly clear; endlessly attempt to appease business or not, it’s up to the leaders of the so-called left-wing parties to put distance between them and their opponents, to act decisively in the interests of their base, the people who elected them. This they have failed to do, and more importantly, show little resolve to do in the future – whether it’s Mandelson attacking the ‘core vote’ strategy or Pelosi saying that real health care reform is essentially dead in the water.

Meanwhile, employers and the parties of capital won’t hesitate to to exactly the opposite, and place the cost of recovery on just the working people we should protect.

Today is Martin Luther King Day across the water in the United States. Everyone knows the story of Dr. King, the civil rights campaigner. Fewer people know the Dr. King who opposed the Vietnam War, or who went up against many elements of the civil rights movement to organise mass marches against poverty, and against US spending on the war, and how it took funds away from the War on Poverty.

Whatever one thinks of the US attempts at welfare, half-hearted as they were, the point that Dr. King made in his speech entitled Beyond Vietnam is still valid today:

A few years ago there was a shining moment in our struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor – - both black and white – - through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

This is just as true of the United Kingdom as of the United States; it is just as true of the War against Terror as the War against Vietnam. The US has spent over a trillion dollars on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, other operations, which are global in reach despite our concentration on Iraq and Afghanistan, are higher still. This does not count what the UK and the other allies have spent.

Dr. King also envisioned plenty of the other moral and political arguments that the Left of today have to make:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.

The US and its loyal allies continue to be the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today, and we haven’t lost our supply of desperate, rejected and angry young men. In the UK, media memes and populist politicians call this group the white working class, though in reality poverty and a feeling of isolation stretch far beyond one colour, whatever the Daily Mail and the BNP would like us to believe.

I would never argue that violence is an impermissible way to achieve a political end, on the basis that violence underpins the creation and continued existence of every State. But I would agree with Dr. King that while our armies are abroad blowing people up and getting blown up, not to mention provoking more terrorist incidents, misdirected, impotent rage and violence on our streets is more likely.

Even were this not true, even were the effects of the wars we’re waging utterly remote from our sceptred isle, Dr. King eloquently exposes the hypocrisy and arrogance of the Western nations.

The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 — in 1945 rather — after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence…

Our situations are readily analogous. Two weeks after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Tony Blair and George Bush broadcast messages that were aimed at the people of Iraq and translated into Arabic. They presented the invasion as a way to liberate the Iraqi people, as a humanitarian intervention, as a way to establish democracy. Pretty much every particular promise was then either abridged or ignored.

Meanwhile, seven years later, American and coalition forces are still in Iraq and the government of the country is neither more grounded in the rule of law nor interested in the service of all the Iraqi people. Instead of giving voice and assistance to the Iraqi people, to overthrow their dictator, as the Vietnamese had done, the UK and US chose their solution, imposed it and killed anyone who disagreed.

Finally, Dr. King struck home with devastating accuracy as regard the general relevance of the movement against the war in Vietnam:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality…and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

And so such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam…

His words have proved their enduring petinence. Since Vietnam, there have been numerous American military expeditions, and British military expeditions, culminating in the last eight years of incessant warfare. Each time, the anti-war movements have gathered, supported by religious groups, non-governmental organisations and the other arms of civil society. Each time, the war has been succeeded by another war.

Clearly we haven’t addressed the underlying issues. In the case of America, by and large this is the impetus to interfere in the government of other countries in order to secure friendly regimes. Britain mostly gets pulled along in the wake of its much larger ally, though raising the flag and sending in the fleet has not been out of the question when it comes to pasting the Left in the name of a mythical ‘patriotism’.

Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite overwhelming opposition to attacking Iraq, and the increasing opposition to the occupation of Afghanistan, will be followed by new wars. The sound and fury of the anti-war movement has not secured political accountability, it has not secured a Party that will stand up, “against all the apathy of conformist thought…in the surrounding world.”

Despite his ostensible anti-communism, Martin Luther King’s contribution to revolutionary thought was both to highlight for a popular movement the need for engagement with human agency, to fight the apathy of conformist thought in our bosom, and with the structure of capitalism, by insisting that, “True compassion…comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

In many respects, Dr. King’s message drew on the practical lessons of Marxism, much in the same way as liberation theology.

These are messages we can re-learn today, both to create a broad and deep political movement, and to actually effect change rather than thoughtlessly buying into messianic hype, which means we win a few elections, and then have to revisit the same issues ten years from now instead of having conquered them and the system that created them, so we can move on to new and more important issues.

But does it come with socialized medicine and means-tested abortions?

It’s easy to claim that Obama and many Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans. It’s not difficult to point out suitable examples, such as the Stupak Amendment. Whenever the Senate and House resolve their different HCR laws (HR  3962, which includes a ‘public option’, and HR 3590, which does not) and, in addition to abortion not being covered, there’s no ‘public option’, it may cause disillusionment amongst the army of activists who secured a Democratic presidency, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.

Yet some of the damage that has lasted since the Republican Revolution of 1994 is being undone. Between May and August, Obama led with legislation that de-funded many of the utterly useless abstinence-only programmes in the US. According to abstinence programme advocate Valerie Huber, by the start of the next fiscal year, September 2010, an additional one hundred and thirty programmes will have to cease their activities. Step forward Senator Orin Hatch (R-Utah) who is trying to cram an abstinence-only amendment into the Senate bill on healthcare reform.

In December, however, some more fruits of a Democratic victory flowered. President Obama signed into law the Omnibus Appropriations bill, finally killing federal funding for abstinence-only programmes. US $110 million will go towards ‘proven’ programmes – i.e. comprehensive sex education. There is no question that comprehensive sex ed. reduces the potential for teen pregnancy and increases rates of ‘safe sex’. As the key 2007 study confirms, as rates of pregnancy and STIs are higher among the poor, this is a key success for the American working class.

Obama has pulled something of a bureaucratic fudge on the issue, however, rather than relying on debate over the merits of abstinence only programmes and the sort of mindset which sustains them. The new law basically outsources sex ed, and anyone seeking federal funds must prove to the new Office of Adolescent Health that their programme is effective. Since abstinence-only programmes are ineffective, this is likely to rule them out. But it also avoids the debate over why people want abstinence only programmes and why they’re wrong.

The other danger is that a revised ‘abstinence’ programme comes back looking for funds, much in the way ‘intelligent design’ was an attempt to get around the clear order of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that Congress should respect no one religion, thereby preventing the teaching of the Genesis creation story on a par with the theory of evolution in public schools. It may be effective, but is it as effective as comprehensive sex education from a young age? This is left unspoken for.

Nevertheless, the HCR bills under conference debate between Senate and House contain respectively an additional US $75m and $50m to be distributed among the states for comprehensive sex education. This is not something only of value to egghead liberals who want to have a beef with those of religious conviction. It is of value to all rungs of American society, particularly the working class, to reduce teenage pregnancies and facilitate taking control of one’s own reproductive system and its uses.

The next challenge, should they choose to accept it, is getting the public option in healthcare approved, and extending municipal and state programmes of free contraceptives to federal level. We know the Democrats aren’t socialists. We know they’re not revolutionaries, they are reformists – and bad ones, by and large. These are still baby steps, if key ones, but they are ones that we should press for as they have immediate results for the practical equality of women, and the health of American labour. Read more…

Paul Sagar has an article up at his place discussing whether or not climate change denialists are duplicitous or simply stupid. I share his continuing shock that so many people – who are, on the surface, well educated – are prepared to deny the reality of anthropogenic global warming. It is surprising to me as to many others that these people are not simply being controversialists but genuinely believe what they say.

Anyone familiar with the global warming ‘controversy’ will know the form. The science academies of every single industrialised nation have issued statements supporting the idea of AGW. Sixteen of them have issued further statements defending the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). All of the research was submitted to peer review, normal scientific practice, and has not been found wanting.

A very small minority of scientists disagree, though many of these have nothing to do with climate-change disciplines. Vociferous members of the commentariat also disagree – no one is unfamiliar with Melanie Phillips for whom “political correctness” is a dangerous project of the Left to throw back the Christian dominance of the UK (!) and for whom President Obama may as well be a Muslim insurgent.

Listening to the radio this morning, however, I was struck by the terms in which US Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) discussed man-made global warming. He called it a “Hollywood Hoax”. Science to one side, and Unity has done a sterling job of attempting to talk through that, the ideology inherent to Inhofe’s remarks should be starkly visible. It posits an image of the ‘average person’ versus the elite.

Inhofe uses such devices regularly:

“In short, it is a direct threat America’s way of life.  If we cannot fly to remote locations, and if few automobiles are capable of pulling boats, jet skies, and campers, and if RVs become a thing of the past as environmentalists would like, then minor climate fluctuations will have little impact on recreation because Americans will not have the means to recreate.”

Again, the image is conjured of a threat to the ‘way of life’ of normal Americans, while hated special interest groups run amok in Washington DC, depriving Americans of their god-given right to influence their representatives. The irony, of course, is that regardless of the rights or wrongs of the science, the sentiment that Inhofe taps each and every time he opens his mouth is probably justified.

Of course Inhofe expresses it in terms of conspiracy, rather than inequalities of power and access created by capitalism. Just listening to him on the US news circuit on the subject of the Copenhagen agreement, “conspiracy” just shrieks from every word. The idea of a shadowy “them” excuses the need to investigate further into the shape and processes of the system which we live in, contibute to and partake of.

This angle is lent weight by massive funding from corporate lobbies to many of its proponents, including Senator Inhofe. It is also lent weight because the average US citizen does feel disenfranchised from their ‘democratic’ government. Most obviously, there are those who connect most with their Christian cultural-religious identity and feel that ‘secularism’ aims to alienate this approach from the government.

Questions of morality are easily fitted in, with immorality becoming a property of “them”, e.g. liberals in favour of abortion rights or gender and sexual equality. This neatly links in to Inhofe’s claim that AGW is a “Hollywood hoax”. Hollywood, naturally, has absolutely nothing to do with climate science. Prominent scientists do not, as far as I have ever seen, patronize the clubs and malls of the Sunset Strip.

The link is the immorality of each. The Hollywood “them” who are corrupting your children through excessive violence and pornography. The activist, lobbyist and scientist “them” who are corrupting your democracy and removing your right to have a say. Americans have to fight hard in order to have a say and that makes this equation believable.

It is climate change activists who have been winning that fight honestly, since they don’t have corporate muscle on their side, but it’s the oldest rhetorical trick in the book to call black, white and white, black and build one’s pile of assumptions from there. This is what Inhofe has done.

It’s easy to retaliate with accusations of duplicity, but the tragedy is that Inhofe probably believes himself. One of the key ‘national’ narratives of the USA is industry and enterprise, pulling oneself up by your bootstraps. Senator Inhofe did just that, building up his own business and, as a businessman, resenting things like federal regulation, unions and the liberals who support them. Which segues nicely to his religious identity.

Similarly not all of these people attacking climate change can be stupid. Ill-informed, sure. The key, however, is in what people and institutions they have chosen to invest with authority and trust. I trust scientists to be honest with their findings, and the scientific system to be rigorous in pointing out problems with the theory and practical evidence, whether it’s on climate change or the rightful classification of illegal drugs.

Other people may not. An inadequate vocabulary and conceptual universe to get to the core of why it is permissible to distrust the scientific elite, or a class position that renders these things indigestible, results in conspiracy theories. We can combat this with proper argumentation, sure, but we also need to approach the issue from a class viewpoint. We need to restore trust and we can do that by winning people over through rebuilding the institutions that allow them to control government, and corporations.

Like taxes and unions.

But try selling that one to Jim Inhofe.

The Powell memo was written by Lewis F. Powell to Eugene Sydnor, Director of the US Chamber of Commerce, in 1971. Powell was a member of the board of eleven corporations and was shortly to be nominated by President Richard Nixon to the US Supreme Court. I only came across this memo care of David Harvey, though it is fairly universally acknowledged to be key evidence in understanding the sea-change in politics during the 1970s between ‘embedded liberalism’ and a more aggressive ‘neo-liberalism’.

There are many interesting things one can garner from the memo. Anyone who has read anything by the American Right over the past three decades will recognize instantly the persecution complex which Powell exhibits on behalf of business, apparently the ‘forgotten man’ of American politics. Some of the evidence adduced in support of such assertions is demonstrably false, such as when Powell talks about politicians tripping over themselves to approve any measure protective of the environment.

What I suspect Powell had in mind at the time was the competition to seem environmentally friendly in 1970, e.g. through Senator Muskie’s amendments to the 1963 Clean Air Act, or President Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, an era which peaked with Ralph Nader’s run for the Presidency. It’s easy to forget that it took powerful popular movements, that borrowed from the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War campaigns, to pressure politicians into passing the laws required to protect clean air and water. Oooh how radical.

Powell laments:

“One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction. The campuses from which much of the criticism emanates are supported by (i) tax funds generated largely from American business, and (ii) contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business.”

This ignores that high levels of taxation to fund social spending and high levels of government intervention were the results of intense class struggle. The battles were fought for forty years on the shop floor and involved American troops and police shooting workers. They were fought out through election cycles, involved millions in poverty and the mass mobilisation of American business and labour for war, where the working class battalions died wholesale and the ruling class battalions fought with Roosevelt for the right to profit from death.

Much more central to our current political situation, however, were Powell’s recommendations for challenging the status quo outlined above.

“The ultimate responsibility for intellectual integrity on the campus must remain on the administrations and faculties of our colleges and universities. But organizations such as the Chamber can assist and activate constructive change in many ways, including the following:
“Staff of scholars…Staff of Speakers…Speaker’s Bureau…Evaluation of Textbooks…Equal Time on the Campus…Balancing of Faculties…Graduate Schools of Business…Secondary Education.”

Powell goes further still to discuss the pro-business use and abuse of television, radio, scholarly journals, books, advertisements, political parties, the courts, ‘stockholder power’ and an ideological narrative about the threat of state intervention to individual freedom.

The last is particularly interesting. With George W. Bush, we saw the defence of ‘freedom’ scale new heights of disingenuity and Newspeak. The narrative of protecting individual freedom only stands up to scrutiny if one forgets that the State didn’t certain regulatory actions in a vacuum, with the goal of constraining ‘freedom’; it was practically bullied into those actions by the very people whose freedom Powell claims is at stake – whether as a result of urban riots, protracted strikes, massive demonstrations or a general flouting of authority on campuses.

All of this is with the intent that, in Powell’s own words;

“Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”

Personally I think it’s time that ‘labour’ and ‘other self-interest groups’ re-learned this particular lesson and began pushing back. On the basis of capitalism, ordinary people – rather than those in charge of business – operate at a disadvantage, because business controls such a large and concentrated slice of wealth, that can be put to particular uses. Such as creating a well-financed and interlocking network of academic departments, think-tanks, forums and professional political lobbyists, to recruit and put to use all those of a certain ideological bent.

This is why our political activism must take a different angle. We will never be able to ape the political methods of our betters, their Westminster lobbyists and group love-in conferences. Instead we can dominate the shop floor, and through that our immediate managers. We can control our communities, and through that our elected representatives. Yet all of these things require funds and organisation, something many left campaigns, like the People’s Charter, are starved of (deliberately, one might suspect), despite being backed by the TUC.

With those funds and that network – which, truthfully, should be easier in so many ways, thanks to information technology – we can link together until it is the economy and the nation we control.

Or as Lewis Powell put it:

“Strength lies in organisation, in careful long range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organisations.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

So apparently in the US there are circular emails and facebook applications claiming that President Obama has renamed the Christmas Tree at the White House, a ‘holiday tree’. The facebook application amused me. Much in the way of the age old question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” it asks “President Obama says that they will have a Holiday Tree this year instead of a Christmas Tree. Do you agree with this?”

It’s popping up in discussion forums and on news sites like myFOX. It’s going up as a question on Yahoo. It’s being posted about on right-wing blogs. No mainstream news organisation that I can see has picked it up yet, but you just know that Bill O’Reilly is waiting in the wings to condemn someone, somewhere for not being Christian enough, as he did with a hapless group of Seattle atheists last year.

No doubt millions of outraged voters will say no, but the whole idea is a hoax. The White House will have two main Christmas Trees, the Obama family Christmas Tree and the National Christmas Tree, across the street from the White House, in the Ellipse. Neither of these are being renamed holiday trees, as FactCheck.org points out:

No less an authority than the National Christmas Tree Association states that this year’s tree was chosen in August and is a Fraser fir grown by Eric and Gloria Sundback of Shepherdstown, W.Va. The news was duly reported by the Associated Press, [...]

That’s confirmed by Semonti Stephens, deputy press secretary to Mrs. Obama. “The Christmas tree will be called the Christmas tree,” she told us in an e-mail exchange. [...]

[The national Christmas tree] isn’t being renamed a “Holiday Tree” either, according to the National Park Service, which has jurisdiction. The park service is already putting together the National Christmas Tree Music Program to be kicked off at the lighting ceremony.

Why is it that people find this rubbish so easy to believe? We know the phenomenon in the UK; Melanie Phillips runs something stupid about it almost every year – which, almost every year, is shot down in flames by people with a blog, a brain and ten minutes to make a few calls and check the sourcing of the story. Or, better yet, access to Google, where the story can often be proved false.

The sort of people who come up with this nonsense are like the crowd in this famous scene:

Having been denounced online for the umpteenth time as a “liberal” (sic), “middle class” “student-type” (etc) as a result of my daring to support the postal strike, I wanted to write a quick article before I head off for a couple of days without the internet.

During the US elections, I remember reading in the Guardian about Mrs Obama’s appearance on one of those awful women’s shows. This was brought to my mind today because I remember wondering where the hell this notion of needing humble roots springs from. The press and various Republicans attacked Mrs Obama for being one of the elite, with her $275,000 per year salary and Princeton education.

Leave aside for a moment the outright hypocrisy of these Republicans – who often claim ‘Christian’ values while diddling their assistants or rent-boys or any number of other things. Politicians evidently feel they can get a gig for beating up on people who appear ‘middle class’, or who speak out on things like poverty without being poor or homeless themselves.

Some of the attacks on Michelle Obama bordered on outright racism during the election, slurring her for fist-jab gesture of the sort which rappers and any hip-hoppish sorts under 25 generally make. It was denounced as a ‘terrorist’s fist-jab’ by (hold your breath) a FOX news presenter, who has since been taken off air apparently. Much in the same way, I suppose, that Obama’s entirely capitalist measures for the banks and healthcare have been denounced as socialistic.

A lot of what Obama has done, beginning with his comment during the primaries that bigotry and violence stemmed from poverty, has been spun as patronizing the poor. The means to combat it, for almost every prominent politicians has been to create a “man-of-the-people” circus from Bill Clinton’s jazz movement right on down.

Obama, Mrs Obama, McCain and the rest have all attempted to portray themselves at one time or another as being like the average American. Mrs Obama, with her recitation of life in south Chicago is just one more in the long line of politicians to reap the benefits of a working-class upbringing. Why is that so special, so valued?

One might almost think that it is considered so important because it acts as a talisman to ward off those who might otherwise suspect all the candidates of being yet more self-serving pawns for big business. How can that be the case, campaign hacks say, when my candidate is working class, who worked him/herself up from the gutter? Is it not the case that, if someone has the genuine interests of workers at heart, it’ll be plainly evident and it won’t matter which class they come from?

The Right loves to make the point, in debate, that all the most famous socialists came from well-to-do households, whereas the best capitalist ideologues pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. This ignores the fact that there is an immense amount of wealth to be tapped by capitalist ideologues, whereas the life of the average ‘professional’ revolutionary involves gutwrenching poverty and borderline alcoholism (from what I’ve seen anyway).

Individual backgrounds do not mean so much as present conditions; someone can have been brought up by middling parents but yet be working class. Someone can have had a great education and attempt to use it for other people’s benefit. We don’t seem to have a problem with doctors or other highly-qualified workers doing this – where’s the difference with politics?

Of course the difference is not principled, it is not an objection to ‘help’ per se, from someone of a wealthier background, it is simply that the snide attacks are indicative of political disagreement – and couching it behind the snide attack is simply dishonest. Ironically it’s not the less well off who object the loudest. As with Obama’s comment during the primaries, it was the other millionaire politicians who screamed foul the loudest.

More revolting still, in the American case, is the next step on that ladder of platitudes; “this [America] is the only country in the world where that is possible.” That’s precisely what Mrs Obama said a few days ago. With comments like that, the media don’t have to spin the news in order to create the narrative they want; the incipient nationalism is there, lock stock and sound bite. The American Dream, rolled into one person.

No doubt Britain has something similar; at its root, this type of triumphalism is summed up “If you like X so much, why don’t you go live there?“

All I can say is bring back Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Our electorates, American and British are forcibly cast and chained to the role of Gatsby, believing ‘in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.’ Someone should read to them the final passage of the Great Gatsby as it has a haunting relevance.

“It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

That is the trajectory of all such snobbery, inverted or actual.

Don Paskini has an article over at Liberal Conspiracy celebrating the fact that in many countries around the world, the Left is actually in power. By demonstrating this, the Don wishes to dispel the (seemingly) dominant narrative that the crisis has not really benefitted the Left. Recent victories in Norway, Portugal, Greece and even Germany, where the Left was ousted from government but collectively polled 46% to the Right’s 48%, are recruited to show that actually many Left ideas are back on the agenda and that the Left is advancing.

Yet all of history is a process. If the Left is elected to stem the tide of capitalism and to redress inequity, deprivation and other social problems, then it must either do this decisively or face defeat and disillusionment. The signs of this happening anywhere – either in Europe or even in the most radical Left regimes of Bolivia or Venezuela – are not good. So what seems like success is ultimately ephemeral, as the “soft” Left is caught within its own contradiction. It cannot on the one hand support healthy capitalist growth and on the other, want peace, equality and socialism.

That this contradiction is real should not be doubted. Germany’s Finance Minister under the previous government, Peer Steinbrueck, was the man who criticized Labour’s massive programme of state expenditure as “crass Keynesianism“. Steinbrueck is a member of the Social Democratic Party. This should show just how wrong we would be to trust to what we know of party political lineage. The SDP may have been the political inheritors of the first mass Marxist party, it may have the party of the German working class, but is it any longer?

Designating someone “left-wing” covers a multitude of sins, not the least of which is not being “left-wing” in any practical sense that extends beyond the rhetorical milieu in which one moves. In America, Obama’s election succeeded on the basis of his social promises, but the key difference between Republicans and Democrats was over fiscal stimulus. Fiscal stimulus has gone ahead, meanwhile what social promises were made have been substantially watered down: the debacle of Afghanistan continues, and social medicine languishes.

This is a phenomenon which seems set to repeat around the world: Papandreou’s PASOK victory in Greece, Stoltenberg’s Labour-led coalition in Norway and so on, though few of these are truly convincing victories. Even in Portugal, where PDS has been virtually New Labour-lite, the re-election has not been particularly convincing, for all the populist rhetoric Socrates could muster. Things like “cutting state bureaucracy” (sound familiar?) have been on the agenda, and the major spending projects have been geared towards a more efficient capitalism.

As Chris Dillow masterfully summarizes, the “Keynesian” approach to fiscal stimulus is essentially pro-capitalist life support. Is that what the Left parties were elected to do? And if so, what makes them Left?

In cases such as Britain and Germany, social democracy has been forced into the role of capitalist handmaiden, gearing up for cuts whilst ploughing money into the banks, essentially depriving Keynesian economics of its one-time social content. As Lenin points out, socialists will not be able to protect the Socialist Internationalists from electoral oblivion. That oblivion has been well and truly earned. There is not a person on the Left who could be enthusiastic about Gordon Brown, despite David Cameron, so why on earth would we expect any less from the average voter?

Yet the “alternative” appeal of social democratic parties that were in opposition as the global crisis has unfolded will soon wear off. Without an organised, democratic, determined movement to hold their feet to the fire, these parties will play out the contradiction enshrined into their ideological attempt both to embrace capitalism and socialism and will be promptly turned out of office by voters who never really got the alternative that they voted for. Obama’s approval ratings, for example, have already begun slipping.

Without this movement, “Left” victories in elections are essentially meaningless. As New Labour has shown, social democratic parties can play a similar role to outrightly capitalist parties. Even here, at the end, Labour has not learned its lesson. Private Eye this week documents some of the corporate funding of the Labour Party conference and the desertion of Labour by their erstwhile corporate friends, all to the sound of a string quartet valiantly playing on as the wounded ship coasts slowly away from the gigantic iceberg.

Even in those places where there is a powerful popular movement, such as Venezuela or Bolivia, there has been no final victory. The strength of “the Right” is derived from the hegemonic and material power created by a system of private ownership and market exchange. Neither of these have been overturned, and in situations where the Left actually has the potential to threaten such interests, the natural recourse of the capitalist ruling class is towards violence. Such has it been in both Bolivia and Venezuela, where the Left has gone furthest.

Neither of these South American movements has delivered on their promises, however. Whilst literacy is increasing and land has been shared out among the peasants, poverty is rife and – especially in Venezeula – Chavez’ regime is increasingly showing its willingness to attack workers in the interests of what was private capitalism and is now state-owned capitalism. This is another contradiction: Chavez’ strongest support comes from among these very workers, and yet here he is using the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state to beat them into submission.

We should be careful when speaking of Left successes, then, in this period of economic crisis. The ‘success’ of winning electoral victories – which is different from actual power – is often ephemeral. Even where it reaps real benefits for the working class, through education or health or social welfare, the very fact that there is no next step means that the step back is almost inevitable. “Left” leaders become assimilated into the political elite, connections are cut with the mass movements that created the electoral opportunity, promises are reneged on.

Obama has managed this effortlessly. Social media, once so important to Obama’s campaign, has actually been quite critical of the new government as a result.

None of which is to say that there aren’t successes. The rise of Die Linke, representing a new strand of militant trades unionism and including many socialist activists attempting to radicalize Germany from the ground up, is a great success. The doubling of Die Linke’s vote is merely the icing on the cake. A new generation is growing up without the familiar, comforting (and tranquilizing?) effect of social democracy; they are looking around for radical ideas which will solve the problems they encounter as a direct result of capitalism.

Leaving aside the new generation, this generation has not said its last word either. The recent London CWU vote to disaffiliate from Labour is a product of the titanic pressures which the Labour Party is holding back through bureaucratic trickery. In Ireland, the traditional hinterland of Irish Labour did not believe the leadership’s assurances that jobs were to be had by approving the Treaty of Lisbon. The poorest and most militant constituencies of Ireland rejected the treaty. The ties between labour and social democracy are fraying.

A few Left electoral successes, in such an unstable climate, and where even Left parties play the part of retrenching capitalists, mean relatively little.

Lastly, but significantly, it bears mentioning that a powerful workers’ movement will be built on the corpses of all those “successes” vaunted by the Don – because not one of them offers a genuine alternative. They are all subject to the contradiction I have laid out above, and must be resolved – either in our favour, with their deepening and broadening to a revolutionary movement (more than likely against the wishes of their leaders) or to inaction and ultimately electoral defeat. So much is up for grabs – of that, these electoral successes are merely a sporadic symptom.

What they don’t demonstrate is that the Left has fully grasped its opportunity: and I think the actual fact is that we have not – globally or, more particularly, here at home.