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The Union and The Tea Party

February 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Last stand for the Cheese Heads? or for Unions everywhere?

The Republican-dominated Wisconsin legislature along with the Republican governor, Scott Walker, are on the verge of adopting legislation requiring public sector workers to contribute to their own health care and retirement.  The legislation would also strip public sector workers of their right of collective bargaining.  In response to this, at least 30,000 pubic sector workers have staged an angry rally in front of the state house.  The Tea Party, in response to this, is staging its own rally, which could give rise to a dangerous confrontation.

But if both sides were willing to listen to reason, an unlikely possibility, they would realize how this should play out.  With many non-government workers out of jobs and with union workers with jobs paying taxes to support the public sector, there is reason to believe that there is not going to be solidarity on this issue.  Taxpayers in general don’t see why public sector workers in a time of fiscal crisis should not be obliged to pay something towards their health care the way everyone else does.  The same is true of retirement.  The opposition to this is misguided.  The sense of entitlement of public sector workers is unjustified in these conditions.  And whilst many pubic sector workers are not all that well paid, there are some whose salaries are unconscionable.  School administration is one of the biggest offenders, with some on Long Island pulling down $250,000 a year.  Suffolk County, Long Island, police earn six-figure salaries with considerable benefits.  This has all contributed to the gigantic deficits state and local governments are running, the biggest one actually now in Texas, a state with no income tax.

I am Ayn Rand and even I support Unions, you dope.

By the same token, the Tea Party activists have no business opposing collective bargaining.  Ayn Rand argued from a libertarian perspective that free association was a fundamental right and that the state has no business prohibiting unions. She also supported the right to strike. She was right.  If the basic position of the Tea Party is to get the government off our backs, they cannot justify this totalitarian interference by the state with the fundamental rights of individuals to band together voluntarily.  There is a basic contradiction in this that they are unwilling to recognize.

But what if state workers go on strike to force unreasonable demands on the taxpayers who support them?  Ronald

If you expect me to pay for it, there must be more of it.

Reagan fired the air controllers in such a situation. Anyone who supports unions without reservations should have witnessed a leading teachers’ union official creating a major disturbance at the fanciest restaurant in Albany when he refused to pay his bill because he insisted the portion was too small.  Those sitting at the table with him, including some teachers, supported him. This guy is grossly overweight, a living caricature of a union boss.

The Democratic Party is dominated by the pubic sector unions and as such, is supporting the demonstrators in Wisconsin.  Similar demonstrations are planned throughout the country.  There is justification for this because the right in America has been determined to smash the unions and get rid of the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Employment Practices Act.  Not for nothing did Reagan grant amnesty to two and a half million illegal aliens.  He did not do this out of the generosity of his heart. These were workers who were prepared to accept much lower wages than organized labor demanded.  The twelve million aliens in America are here to do the same thing.

The AFL-CIO is now a shadow of what it was when George Meany wielded power like a potentate and Lane Kirkland ran the Democratic Party for him.  The United Auto Workers, one of the most powerful unions in the country, was forced to give up benefits and take lower salaries when the industry collapsed. Because the AFL-CIO supported the Vietnam War, many young Americans saw it as the enemy.  When they nominated McGovern and defeated Hubert Humphrey, the hawkish tool of the AFL-CIO, the power of the unions in national politics was emasculated.

There is an important aspect of American labor history that most uncritical supporters of the unions are unaware of. A COVERT LIFE, the journalist Ted Morgan’s biography of Jay Lovestone, ne Jacob Liebstein, should be required reading although it received scant attention when it came out.  Lovestone was a founder of the American Communist Party but was personally expelled by Joseph Stalin at a Comintern convention in Moscow because of Stalin’s distrust of him. He escaped from Russia, fearing for his life.  Lovestone then organized a group that called themselves the “Lovestonites,” a sort of independent Communist Party of their own.  What happened after they disbanded changed the course of labor history.  While Lovestone was serving as the head of the AFL-CIO international division, CIA recruited him.  James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA counter-intelligence became his case officer and close friend.  The union allowed itself to be used for various CIA operations around the world.  In Africa, it supported the Pan African Congress in order to undermine the African National Congress.  It was the PAC that organized the demonstrations at Sharpeville that led to the infamous massacre by white police and troops.  The demonstrations were supposed to show up the ANC, which had refused to participate.

The strong support of the AFL-CIO for the Vietnam War was an outgrowth of Lovestone’s power as a CIA operative.  Many of the anti-war activists ultimately became libertarian entrepreneurs with no use for the unions and with considerable distrust of the state.  The libertarian movement in America is pro-capitalist and decidedly anti-war.  They have left the unions in the dust.  The recent public sector union demonstrations could, like the mineworkers strike in Britain, be their last hurrah.

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Unfair to Bismarck

January 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

"I hate to tell you I told you so, but..."

Largely because of F.A. Hayek’s THE ROAD TO SURFDOM, the legacy of Bismarck is in ill-repute. His “cradle to the grave” policies of providing a safety net to all Germans is somehow considered the origin of the destruction of human liberty.  But there is another interpretation of Bismarck that contradicts this and America would do well to heed its lessons.

Bismarck orchestrated the unification of the German Empire and became Chancellor under Wilhelm I. He detested Socialism so much that he drove Socialists from their homes.  His anti-Socialist Laws outlawed the Social Democratic Party.  He then concluded that the only effective way to defeat Socialism was through a limited form of self-government that provided sufficiently for its citizens in a capitalist society so they would never be tempted to adopt collectivism as a solution to their problems.  He had the good fortune to have an ally in the Kaiser, who was relatively enlightened and who trusted Bismarck.  When the Kaiser died, Frederick III, a representative of the great, now largely forgotten German liberal tradition succeeded him.  He had no desire to engage in aggressive war and renounced any intention by Germany to build a large and powerful navy, something Great Britain feared.  Germany was becoming a brilliant success, a leader in industry and commerce with the world’s greatest universities.  Tragically, Frederick died of cancer after ninety days and Willy, the one with the withered arm and a temper, succeeded him as Kaiser Wilhelm II.  One of his first acts was to fire Bismarck, who had warned him against starting another war in Europe.  He memorably remarked, “If another war starts in Europe, it will be because of some silly thing in the Balkans.”

The road to serfdom was not Bismarck’s fault.  Willy was responsible, bungling Germany into the Great War, leading to defeat and the ultimate rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany.  Unlike Bismarck, Hitler imposed a command model economy.  Had Frederick lived, none of this would have happened.

For a while it looked as if Germany was going to win.  The Germans humiliated Russia and the

Thanks, Willy!

Russians blamed the Czar who became hugely unpopular, ultimately enabling Lenin to stage the Bolshevik revolution.  Creating the world’s first Communist state, he set about nationalizing private property and creating a global threat to Capitalism.

It was in this environment that the Russian Communists seized Ayn Rand’s father’s pharmacy.  She never forgot that.  More than Hayek, Rand’s condemnation of any kind of state action, including social welfare, shaped the minds of countless Americans. For Rand, the solution to the problems of the human condition was laissez-faire capitalism.  Her influence can be felt very much today amongst the Tea Party activists who condemn every program offered by Obama as Socialist.  He is denounced as a Marxist, determined to lead America on the road to serfdom.  It was Glenn Beck’s calling attention to Hayek’s THE ROAD TO SERFDOM that drove it to number one on Amazon.com, which surely would have delighted the old-school Austrian gentleman. But they are wrong and Bismarck was right.

Capitalism can only succeed if there is a safety net for the citizens of a country in which a free market economy prevails.  Unemployment insurance and Social Security both help in a time of economic contraction and recession by enabling great numbers of people to keep spending.  Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s most conservative prime minister, supported the National Health as well, recognizing that in the end it is cheaper than having vast numbers of people unable to work because of illness. Ronald Reagan, America’s most conservative president and a close friend of Margaret Thatcher, endorsed the safety net.  He worked closely with the Democrats in Congress, particularly Patrick Moynihan, in rescuing Social Security.

In this context it should be remembered that Hayek supported Social Security as well, even going so far as to say “probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire capitalism.” (Here he is referring to the 19th-century free market liberalism). Hayek writes that the government has a role to play in the economy through the monetary system (a view that he later withdrew), work-hours regulation, social welfare, and institutions for the flow of proper information. Hayek even dedicated THE ROAD TO SERFDOM to “my fellow socialists.” So, to a certain extent, Hayek argues against the very basic premises of his own book.   In any event, it would appear that Beck and his ilk have never read it. Which is terribly unfair to Bismark… and to America.

Okay, I didn't read the damn thing! It's really long and confusing!

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The Bush Tax Cuts Scam

December 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

What, share my wealth?

In the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville noted how democracy and capitalism combined to foster an inordinate amount of envy in American life. “I never met in America with any citizen so poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich,” he wrote. The American’s envy, he went on, kept him in constant “anticipation of those good things fate still obstinately withheld from him.”

George McGovern experienced the direct effects of his advocacy of wealth sharing, which was greeted with hostility by hard-up Americans.   So did Barack Obama when he said he supported “spreading the wealth around.”   McGovern concluded that all Americans believe they will catch the gold ring on the Merry-Go-Round.

Unlike many other nations, particularly in Europe where the great disparity of wealth led Marx and Engels to write the Communist Manifesto and Socialism took root culminating in the Russian Revolution, this has never been a particularly popular approach to inequality in America.  When Mother Gitlow, the famous Communist agitator, addressed a group of Irish workers in New York, she was shouted down and heckled.

The reason for this is that America is supposed to be the “land of opportunity.”   American historian James Truslow Adams coined the term “American Dream” in his 1931 book The Epic of America. His American Dream is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

In a country that now has a worse class system than Britain, and where the worth of a person is determined by how much money and

We're number one!

how many possessions he has, the myth nevertheless persists.  The tiresome repetition of the phrase, “the American Dream” by politicians of all persuasions, including Obama, has made it a meaningless platitude.  America, which used to lead the world by far in college graduates, has dropped considerably behind other industrialized nations, largely because more and more Americans simply cannot afford higher education any longer. The once great California university system founded by Clark Kerr, boasting such gold-standard institutions as Berkeley and UCLA, was free.  Now, with tuition increases making the cost prohibitive for many Californians, the American Dream in the Golden State is rapidly receding, much as it is across the country.

No matter how wretched an American’s circumstances, when told that taxes will go up for the wealthy, he is offended, firmly convinced that he will one day be rich and would not want the government taking away his money.  Because of this it is very difficult to get Americans to act together in the furtherance of objectives that might benefit everyone collectively.  The mass opposition to the health care reform bill, which would prevent insurance companies from cutting off benefits once you got sick, is a prime example of this absurd mentality, a product of the relentless propaganda designed to perpetuate the illusion that you can climb the social ladder in what is an increasingly stratified society.

Senator Claire McCaskill told Tea Party activists that the curtain had gone up after the election and that they should look to see who was really pulling the strings.  It was the wealthy and powerful, whose objective is simply to get more wealth and power.  The entire Republican platform now is to cut taxes for the wealthy and get rid of Obama, nothing else.  If they could find another war, maybe with Iran, they would go for that as well.

Yet Americans, in a tie with Ireland for the lowest math scores of all industrialized nations, with lousy science and reading scores, have become a nation of illiterates and believe all the crap that is fed them by the endless propaganda coming from corporate America.  Blacks, who at one point in American history made up a preponderance of the country’s college graduates, have descended into a world of illusion that has led to an increase in violent crime amongst young males in the inner city fueled by frustration and envy.

Obama needs to tell the American people that they are getting screwed and not to believe the bull that the plutocracy is selling them.  If the deal to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to two years goes through, Obama will have his chance in 2012.  He must put the choice directly to the Americans.  “If you vote Republican again, you will get what you deserve.”

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O’Donnel’s Revolution

December 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The “I’m-not-a-witch” losing candidate for the United States Senate in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, has landed a book deal with

Okay, so I ride a broomstick at night whilst wearing a silly hat. That makes me a witch?

St. Martin’s Press.  This anti-Establishment Tea Partier is represented by one of the top literary agencies, Trident Media.  So far, no one’s talking about the size of the advance.

In the book, O’Donnell will reveal her frustrations with American electoral politics and her experience defeating an Establishment Republican with Tea Party support.  O’Donnell made this statement: “The 2010 midterm elections were just the beginning—the first rumblings of a revolution that has not fully erupted.  I plan on making my book one of the revolution’s catalysts.”

Her book is hardly going to be THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO or Tom Paine’s COMMON SENSE.  But this is what revolutions have come to in America.  We have had the “Reagan Revolution, “The Gingrich Revolution” and now this, the “Tea Party Revolution,” and its chief theorist will be an empty-headed nincompoop who can barely speak a sentence.  What are the chances that she will be the actual author?  Of course, it will be snapped up by the radical right across the nation and will make all the bestseller lists, including The New York Times.  All the struggling bohemian writers in Brooklyn will be gnashing their teeth at St. Martin’s total sellout, jumping the shark with this specious project.  But there is something more important going on here than meets the eye and it has to do with the meaning of revolution.

When the left speaks of revolution, the FBI goes after them and they are branded as “un-American.”  But when Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Palin, Beck and now O’Donnell speak of revolution, it is perfectly acceptable because it comes from the right.  Hitler, too, said he was a revolutionary but what is true of these so-called rightwing revolutionaries is that they are, in fact, counter-revolutionaries, all backed by forces of reaction. Under the banner of defeating socialism and communism, they are determined to stamp out the social progress achieved by progressives. They all tend to be racist to some degree and when you scrape the surface, big money is backing all of them.  The corporate and financial types are paranoid about socialism because they believe they are threatened by a violent revolution that will take away all they have.   When the market crashed in 2008, wealthy New Yorkers hired security guards because they feared poor blacks and Hispanics would descend upon them from Harlem and the Bronx.

The ones with the money are far from revolutionaries.  They consider themselves to be conservatives, part of a respectable ideological tradition going back to William Pitt, but they are not.  They are much more like the conservatives in Germany who were terrified of a Communist Revolution and saw in Hitler and the Nazis potential allies in defeating it. They assumed that they could co-opt them and rule behind the scenes with Hitler as a sort of front man with no real desire to govern but wanting only to make speeches and bask in the limelight.

That's Mister Fuhrer to you.

What happened was the reverse.  Hitler devoured the conservatives, who ended up dependent on him.  Pappen, the conservative Deputy Chancellor, had no power.  He actually opposed Kristalnacht, to no avail. And old Hindenburg, the national hero who had defeated Hitler when he was elected president of Germany, succumbed as well.

The Republican Party is now going the way of the German conservatives.  Terrified of Obama because they are convinced he is a Socialist, they allied themselves with the Tea Party after Tea Party-backed candidates succeeded in routing numerous members of the GOP old guard in primaries.  And while they are trying to block Palin with a traditional Republican, Mitt Romney, in the end they will accept Palin because they are so terrified of what they are convinced is a socialist conspiracy to take over the country.  At a recent Tea Party-sponsored meeting of candidates for chairman of the Republican National Committee, the Tea Party activists dominated, with all of the candidates pandering to the radical right.

Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, once Richard Nixon’s protégé, finds himself the next target of the Tea Party. As one of Lugar’s Tea Party opponents in Indiana put it, he has become “moderate.”  Getting rid of Lugar is, as a Tea Party activist at the beauty contest held for candidates seeking the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee put it, a “priority.”  They would not support any candidate for chairman of the party who did not share this objective.  Jack Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri who is from an old-line aristocratic family, lamented that the Republican Party has become so extreme that it is now “beyond redemption.”  But, of course, he is one of the  “elites” that Sarah Palin has vowed to purge from the Party.  And once she has, the counterrevolution will be in full force, calling itself a version of the original American Revolution, as the Tea Partiers proclaim.  Jefferson would not think so.

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The Second Coming

December 1, 2010 By 11 Comments

The Best

William Butler Yeats, who still never ceases to astound, wrote these prophetic lines in one of his greatest poems, THE SECOND

COMING:

“The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”

It is astonishing how accurately this describes the condition in America today.  A vibrant progressive movement elected Barack Obama to the presidency, seeing in him someone who opposed the war in Iraq and who had a profound commitment to social justice.  And while it is true that his first priority was to prevent America from sinking into a major depression, he sought to compromise with the right on health care, even as they rebuffed him at every turn.  He failed to lead with a major jobs program and relied on a watered-down stimulus that, while denounced by the right as wasteful, was, in fact, made up to a considerable degree by tax cuts.

This resulted in the rise, in the form of the Tea Party, of the free-market populists who saw any effort by the government to alleviate

The Worst

the suffering of countless Americans as wasteful spending.  Their “passionate intensity” revived the spirits of the defeated right and they attacked the Democrats with a ferocity unmatched in American history.  And as Yeats so admirably put it, they are the “worst.”  What followed was the sweeping Republican victory in the House of Representatives and major gains in the Senate.  Hatred of Obama’s health-care reform legislation, fueled by the lies from Sarah Palin about death panels, led to the defeat in Wisconsin of Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin progressive in the tradition of Robert LaFollette, a progressive Republican who would today be run out of the party and defeated in a primary by some nut case. The candidate who defeated Feingold is a prime example of the “worst.”

The young people and minorities who were behind the momentum that led to Obama’s election became disillusioned and many failed to turn up at the polls.  And while this behavior was self-defeating and unjustified, it is, nevertheless, understandable.  Obama was Yeats’ “best” and he somehow seemed to have lost his “conviction,” as did most of the Democrats who ran from their record, terrified of the label “socialist.”   The right rolled over them as a consequence.

People often ask what the difference is between the Republicans and the Democrats.  It is this:  The Democrats don’t have the courage of their convictions while the Republicans have no convictions.  What they are great at is knowing how to manipulate the “dumb goyim,” as Hitler privately ridiculed his own supporters in Germany, ironically using a Jewish expression to describe them.

This is precisely where the Democrats fall down.  But it is not their fault entirely.  Ever since the Civil Rights Movement, there has been a brewing rage amongst the whites of the South and, for want of a better term, “the heartland.”   The anti-war movement of the Sixties traumatized the same people, who still think of that era as a time when America was on the verge of descending into degeneracy, Communism and chaos.  What they fail to understand is that all of this was brought about by the refusal of America to give blacks their rights and by a futile and stupid war that Lyndon Johnson allowed himself to be dragged into and that Nixon continued, largely for political expediency.  It was the very pressure of the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements that led to racial justice and the end to the war, both of which were, ultimately, to America’s benefit.

It has always been puzzling why Kennedy and Johnson didn’t frame the civil rights issue from the point of view of national security.  Johnson did explain to Richard Russell after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that it was a foreign policy victory, but he never said publicly what John Foster Dulles told Eisenhower privately; that if America did not give its blacks their rights, all of Africa would go Communist.  Day after day, the Soviet Union denounced “American racism” in the United Nations, making a deep impression on the newly independent African states.  Had all of Africa gone Communist, the result of the Cold War could have been totally different.

So when Rand Paul starts talking about repealing major portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he is making the same arguments George Wallace and Richard Nixon made to win power.

"I voted for Rand."

Now Al Qaeda tells young black people around the world that America is still a racist country.  It is incredible that Obama has not addressed the nation and told them, as Kennedy and Johnson should have with regard to Civil Rights, that Al Qaeda recruits new followers by telling them America is an unjust country that allows its people to die because they can’t afford medical care and fails to keep them employed–which is, in fact, what Al Qaeda does.  You don’t have to manipulate the “dumb goyim.”  There are rational arguments to be made on behalf of progressive reforms.  Obama just needs to make them.

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