Elections 2016: Good News and Bad News and a Question

First the bad news: Trump won.

Now for the good news: Hillary lost.

(T)he force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake? Naomi Klein - The Guardian

Many of history's great moments are written by such details; as this famous poem illustrates:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a nail.

And it turns out that the good news is truer than the bad news. Look at the graph below:

 Not a Trump landslide, but rather a Hillary collapse       hat @jonathanwebber

Looking at the graph it's obvious that probably any other Republican could have defeated Hillary Clinton and that any other Democrat (certainly Bernie Sanders) could have defeated Trump. 

This means that, thanks to the Clinton machine's insistence on Hillary's entitlement, the absurd face of Donald Trump will someday grace a postage stamp, but more importantly, this also means that the Democratic party is either going to move more to the social-democratic left or disappear... and that is really good news.

And now for a question:

Is globalization dead or does it just smell that way?

Stay tuned. DS

Ask not for whom the Wall falls...

The natives are restless:

Sometimes simple and bold ideas help us see more clearly a complex reality that requires nuanced approaches. I have an "impossibility theorem" for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full. Dani Rodrik

In this sense, the crisis of capitalism has turned into a crisis of democracy. Many feel that their countries are no longer being governed by parliaments and legislatures, but by bank lobbyists, which apply the logic of suicide bombers to secure their privileges: Either they are rescued or they drag the entire sector to its death. Der Spiegel

Despite philosophers of “universal harmonies” such as Francis Fukuyama, Timothy Garton Ash, Vaclav Havel, Bernard Henry Lévy and scores of international “economic advisors” to Boris Yeltsin, who all fantasized about democracy and prosperity, neither really arrived for most people in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Branko Milanovic - The Globalist

We are now in the midst of commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, which was followed in short order by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its entire international system.

I say "commemorate", but when it comes to the collapse of the wall and enormous Soviet system, the word most people use is "celebrate". But here I would interject an ancient Spanish folk proverb, which goes, "when you see your neighbor's beard on fire, put your beard to soak"; or the not so ancient but equally valid American saying, "what goes around, comes around".

In my opinion the most unbiased, irrefutable, undeniable take-away from the collapse of the USSR and its entire ideological superstructure is that huge, powerful, complex and historically successful systems, which have embodied the hopes and dreams of several generations of people all around the world, can just up and die with little or no warning... Soon to be playing in theaters near you.

Why is it so difficult to realize anything so perfectly obvious?

It is very difficult to see this glaring reality because of an enormous think tank and media industry with scores of attending lobbies that was built up during the Cold War, (one which still flourishes), to "win friends and influence people" for our system. This was in most every way a mirror of the Soviet "propaganda" machine.

In the English language the word, "propaganda" fell out of favor during World War One and was replaced by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays with more euphonious terms such as "public relations" and "marketing". 

If we observe that our system has been sold to the world, and more importantly even to ourselves, in exactly the same way as a soft drink, lets look at Coke's slogans over the years. What if instead of: "the pause that refreshes", "things go better with Coke" or, "it's the real thing", they had said the plain truth?

Imagine instead, "Coke tastes really good, it's fantastic with rum in fact, but if you drink enough of it to keep our shareholders happy you will surely become grotesquely obese and you will probably develop diabetes and end up having your legs amputated"... send that up the flag pole and see who salutes. 

With Coca Cola's "propaganda" as your model, compare, "With Liberty and Justice for all" or "All men are created equal" or how about "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth", with the Supreme Court decisions, "Buckley v. Valeo" and "Citizens United v. the Federal Electoral Commission" which have turned the United States into the political equivalent of a fat, diabetic, legless, wreck... As a master analyst writes:

The dominating significance of the mid-term American legislative elections just finished has been the occasion’s dramatic confirmation of the corruption of the American electoral system. This has two elements, the first being its money corruption, unprecedented in American history, and without parallel in the history of major modern western democracies. How can Americans get out of this terrible situation, which threatens to become the permanent condition of American electoral politics? The second significance of this election has been the debasement of debate to a level of vulgarity, misinformation and ignorance that while not unprecedented in American political history, certainly attained new depths and extent.(...) The result of these developments during the past forty years has been the transformation of the United States into a plutocracy, which is to say a state governed by its wealthiest class. No one in America today doubts it. William Pfaff

Where is all this heading? Once upon a time they asked Mao's old sidekick, Zhou Enlai what he thought about the French Revolution of 1789, "It's too early to tell", he replied.

Most people thought Zhou was joking, but there was much, rather Taoist, wisdom in his words. Both the Russian revolution and America's are daughters of the French enlightenment that gave birth to the French revolution; all three propose a "universal" system of values by which all humanity is to achieve happiness. The French version led to Napoleon and Waterloo. This past weekend we celebrated the end of Russia's attempt at making everyone, everywhere, happy.

25 years ago, when the wall went down it looked like the American dream of turning the world into a universal sea of American values was going to come true: World Bank, IMF, WTO, NAFTA, enlarging NATO... An American directed "New World Order had dawned... That sounds a bit stale by now doesn't it? The Chinese sure aren't buying, neither is Russia... I wouldn't count on India either... not to mention Latin America.

Reading the quote from William Pfaff above it would seem that the USA, like the USSR before it, would do well to clean up its own mess at home instead of trying to arrange the world's affairs. DS

Caliphate vs Caliphate... Obama's wild goose chase

"Globalization is the caliphate of the financial markets"

Andrés Rábago - El País

Andrés Rábago's quote is rather perfect.  Here is Wikipedia's definition of the Muslim Caliphate:

Conceptually, a caliphate represents a sovereign state of the entire Muslim faithful, (the Ummah), ruled by a caliph under Islamic law (sharia).

Globalization being the universal rule of the financial markets under the laws of liberal economics, with the bankers being a collegiate "caliph" and "god" being written as "$".

A fundamentalist reading of our system would go something like this: "there is no $ but the $ and the NYSE is its witness" to which its devotees would add, "peace be upon it".

However, our system is bleeding charisma.

Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader. Max Weber

What is the heart of our system's charisma? It's symbol might be the Cornucopia or Horn of Plenty: our faith is based on our system's heretofore eternal ability to create endless wealth and spread it around widely enough so its glaring inequalities were accepted painlessly.  This version of the economy has been in the tank since Lehman Brothers went down and the middle class of the developed countries, not having had the darshan of  "$" for quite a while are losing the faith.

Our economy's inability without end to cut the mustard for the middle class is a gross betrayal of faith which might be compared to some future pope saying ex-catedra that God didn't exist and that he had sold the Vatican to the Holiday Inn chain and was taking the proceeds and moving with his husband to the Bahamas. The tragic chaos and desolation of betrayed faith would shatter the lives of millions.

Thus under the rule of the global caliphate, the natives are restless: Scotland, Catalonia, even in the USA, where according to Reuters, one out of four Americans would like to "secede", all this while thousands march worldwide to "save the planet".  However, with Karl Marx on the "ash heap of history", sitting there in the penalty box, waiting to get back in the game, it seems to me that, for the moment, the only revolution in town is Islamic...

Am I the only one to see a resemblance between Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Pol Pot... between the Islamic State and the Khmer Rouge? With the difference that the Khmer Rouge were a relatively small group of whacked out Maoists in a tiny out of the way place like Cambodia and the IS (according to the CIA) consists of 31,000 well armed, well trained, fanatical, young men (and women) who come from all over the world, bankrolled by some of the most pious of Arab billionaires, armed with one of history's most powerful ideologies, smack dab in the middle of the world's most strategic real estate. "Bring 'em on" said George W. Bush.... well now here they are.

What impresses me most is not all the beheading. We think this brutality is a message directed to us... it isn't; it is a message for everybody except "us". Americans might be shocked and disappointed to discover that after several centuries of  colonial oppression a great part of the world's population can see a white man get his throat cut with total equanimity if not a certain schadenfreude.

What truly does impress me is that the CIA puts IS's numbers at 31,000. This certainly is no a small group of terrorists. 

Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of statistical sampling should shudder at that number. With only 30,624 Muslims randomly polled you would have a reliable indicator of the Ummah's opinion on any subject, so it would be safe to say that for every young man (or woman) with enough courage and initiative to travel so far at so much risk of death, there must be thousands on thousands of young men (and women) who wish they had the guts to do so too. 

Certainly these numbers tell us that even the most moderate Muslims could imagine a young family member involved, very much in the same way that moderate Irish or Basques could easily have a family member in the IRA or ETA and while they disapprove of what they do, they don't stop loving them... As a friend of mine from a very rich family once told me, "blood is thicker than toothpaste". 

This means that our success in running down and exterminating the young men (and women) of the Islamic State may bring us much more trouble down the road than we have today.

A very reliable leading indicator of how wrong this could all go is the recent statement by Tony Blair advocating sending in ground troops... I'm waiting to hear what Bush thinks. DS

Interregnum... after the ball was over

This week William Hague, Britain’s foreign secretary, told the inaugural London Conference hosted by Chatham House that the world was not simply going through a difficult patch, but had entered a period of “systemic disorder”. Financial Times

Nowadays, both advanced economies (like the United States, where unlimited financing of elected officials by financially powerful business interests is simply legalized corruption) and emerging markets (where oligarchs often dominate the economy and the political system) seem to be run for the few. For the many, by contrast, there has been only secular stagnation, with depressed employment and stagnating wages. Nouriel Roubini

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Antonio Gramsci

After the ball was over
Nellie took out her glass eye
Put her false teeth in water
Corked up her bottle of dye
Put her false leg in the corner
Hung up her wig on the door
And all that is left goes to bye byes
After the ball
After The Ball Was Over

What kind of animal are we talking about?

I have to admit that I'm getting bored, but bored as combat soldiers get bored, where fear and boredom mix. Bored with the "systemic disorder" of the "interregnum", the randomness, chaotic entropy of it, which defies rational ordering or analysis: anxiety without any horizon.

At the bottom there is something very simple: when they asked the legendary Willie Sutton why he robbed banks he replied, "because that is where the money is". The money is in tax-havens and it must be taxed and redistributed if humanity is going to have any chance of a "human" future.

It would seem much more useful, in terms of building the capacity to address the environmental crisis, to frame the issue of the environment as linked to a broader struggle that includes the redistribution of income and wealth to more equitably share the costs of environmental restraint; a cultural shift in the balance between individual consumption of goods and collective services; the development of public spaces and desperately needed infrastructural renewal (including mass transit); and the conversion of potentially productive facilities rejected by the market to the production of socially useful and environmentally necessary products and services. Such a framing would also tie the environmental crisis to the obvious need to place democratic planning on the agenda and go so far as to start talking about making private banks into public utilities so that we have access to the financial resources to carry out the above initiatives. Sam Gindin - Jacobin

Alas, who is going to ever bell this cat? DS

Looking at the world through a PRISM

David Seaton's News Links

There is no reverse gear on the machine of governmental power. If power exists, it will be seized and exploited. To do what? That will be revealed in the course of this power’s employment. Its potential uses will automatically be discovered by those who have it or seize it, and may provide surprises. William Pfaff

Many people are asking the following question: why has the United States government been massively spying on nearly everyone in the world?

The answer is very simple: because now they can, that's why.

What was once a labor intensive trade (spying) has been made affordable thanks to recent progress in the crunching of mega-data. More and more is being done in our world with fewer and fewer people. And of course a small number of people are making huge fortunes from all of this.

Thus we can see that PRISM is a metaphor for how technology is eliminating jobs in all the developed world and subcontracting what were once lifetime jobs of total commitment to an organization and its core competencies, pension included, to under-qualified temps of unknown and questionable loyalty, while creating wealth for those who manage all of it.

To get the sort of surveillance that NSA is trying to achieve, the East German Stasi had half of the population spying and informing on the other half and on each other and they had the ministries of the West German capital, Bonn, filled with handsome young East German spies that wooed and bedded the spinster typists of the West German ministers... all of this was very labor intensive.

Sinister?

You bet, but hey, with probably a smaller expenditure percentage-wise of their GDP on black arts than the USA, the DDR had full employment.

But what the godless communists who ruled the German Democratic Republic never figured out was how to get really rich doing this stuff. Here again, America leads the way.

Of the estimated $80 billion the government will spend on intelligence this year, most is spent on private contractors. It is highly doubtful, however, that American taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. The basic justification for outsourcing government work is to get a job done better and cheaper. Outsourcing intelligence does not appear to achieve either aim. Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, cited research from 2008 showing that the government paid private contractors 1.6 times what it would have cost to have had government employees perform the work. That may help reduce the government head count. But employing fewer government workers at greater cost to taxpayers is not downsizing. Such outsourcing simply shifts taxpayer dollars to private hands, where it can wind up in lavish executive pay packages and greater shareholder returns.(...) On top of all these problems is one that makes it hard to acknowledge, let alone solve, any of them: the revolving door between government intelligence agencies and private-sector contractors that conflates public and private interests and entrenches the status quo.   New York Times

Americans like to think of ourselves as the "good guys", a "light unto the gentiles", a "city on the hill", an example and a standard for all humanity to follow. This is getting to be much like an aging person, with eyebrows arched from botox, a dyed hairpiece and lips enhanced to ducklike proportions from injections of bovine collagen, gazing into the mirror and thinking how young they look. They are fooling themselves (which is the object of the exercise) but they aren't fooling anybody else.

Today the USA is a corporate-financial-military security state... in short a "regime".

Where is all this heading? What is to be done?

I opened with a quote from favorite international affairs commentator William Pfaff and I can think of nothing better than ending with another quote of his.

How is this system to be checked and reversed? It is a form of increasingly authoritarian state capitalism practiced by a government that rather than controlling it is controlled by it, because of the development in the past twenty years of an electoral system dominated by money and commercial television. Both parties must conform to their exigencies. All its decisive actors, government, corporate business, and communications industry, have a powerful interest in its perpetuation. Historically, such systems have fallen only to wars or revolution. William Pfaff

Will there ever be an "American Spring" like Turkey's or Brazil's? DS

The First of May... mayday, mayday

David Seaton's News Links

May Day - Margaret Scott

"Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize..."

Joe Hill

The first of May, commemorating bloody labor unrest in Chicago, is celebrated all over the world as the universal holiday of labor... except in the USA of course.

The same USA where "red", the eternally universal color of the world's left, is now, unlike the days of Joseph McCarthy, the color of the Tea Party driven, ultra-conservative, Republican party... Often America's love of deceptive language and euphemism is beyond parody.  

It's no wonder then that many Americans are more than a little confused by now about what the left is actually about and have it confused with many worthy, but traversal, social issues.

In case anybody is interested, the left is really about worker's rights and worker's needs: everything else follows from that.

Most men and women in this world spend most of their lives working, if they can find work, and have little or nothing but their labor to exchange for the necessities of life, therefore: unemployment or bad working conditions + poor pay = a bad life for most people in the world. The left was born to change that equation.

Since the industrial revolution began, working men and women have joined together to force the owners of industry to give them better pay and working conditions, better schools for their children, affordable housing, medical care and pensions. Almost all betterment of working conditions, pay, pensions and all the rest come from that joining together and pressuring, often at the cost of blood. Little or none of it was ever given up gladly by those with the power to grant it.

This joining together and applying pressure is called "the Left". This struggle for better conditions is really what separates the "Left" from the "Right". Other things, however worthy, are mostly extraneous to this division.

For example: if you quizzed many wealthy followers of Ayn Rand or libertarians such as Rand Paul, I'm sure that you would find most of them either supportive or indifferent to gender and racial equality, to gay marriage and legalizing marijuana, but totally opposed to raising the minimum wage, regulating industries and the financial sector or raising the taxes of the one-percenters: and very much in favor of "right to work" laws.

One of the best encapsulations of  this confusion as to what the left is and what it is not was in a marvelous, near-poetic rant; one that touches all the main points in a few lines, posted by the blogger, Kurt Sperry the other day in Firedoglake under the title, "Dear Left, Enjoy Your Pot and Gay Marriage Because That’s All You’re Getting".

The establishment right has pretty much come around to the position that you may get gay married or smoke some pot without government interference, but at the same time we’ll steal your retirement, move your job to China, see that the bank can illegally foreclose you out of your home, give all your tax money away to criminal fraudsters who by the way are also our largest campaign contributors, oh and you’ll be put under microscopic total government surveillance and imprisoned or even killed without trial if that’s what we really want in the new police state we’ve created because dark Muslims booga booga. Kurt Sperry - Firedoglake

Today labor unions are weak and much of the new economy appears difficult to organize and millions of jobs have gone overseas, to previously non-industrialized, non-union, rural areas. This movement actually had begun quite some time before the jobs finally left America. 

Way back in the 1960s, the company my father worked for, a Philadelphia carpet manufacturer, moved most of their production from mills in Pennsylvania, buildings that had been in constant occupation for over a hundred years,  all the way down to north Georgia, to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

These "runaway factories" were looking for tax breaks and unskilled, rural workers, men and women without unions willing to work for much less than the union men and women of Pennsylvania. This was before the worldwide deregulation of globalization, which you might call the "Capitalist International" made moves farther afield possible or even imaginable.

That move to Georgia was a sample of the beginning of a process that has led from American north to the American south, later to Mexico and then to Asia.

The process is just beginning to give the first signs that it might finally be running out of planet.

An event occurred a little over a hundred years ago that was a key for the American left and America's workers achieving many of the improvements in pay and working conditions that the right is doing its best to take away from them to this very day.

The fire at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City, which claimed the lives of 146 young immigrant workers, is one of the worst disasters since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This incident has had great significance to this day because it highlights the inhumane working conditions to which industrial workers can be subjected. To many, its horrors epitomize the extremes of industrialism. The tragedy still dwells in the collective memory of the nation and of the international labor movement. The victims of the tragedy are still celebrated as martyrs at the hands of industrial greed. Cornell University

One hundred and forty six worker died, most of them young Italian and eastern European Jewish immigrant women, many of whom jumped to their deaths to avoid being burned alive.

Let's put that tragedy into perspective by comparing to a similar tragedy unfolding as this post is being written: the Rana Plaza disaster of Bangladesh.

The collapse of the building, the Rana Plaza, is considered the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry. It is known to have claimed at least 377 lives, and hundreds more workers are thought to be missing still, buried in the rubble. The Rana Plaza building contained five garment factories, employing more than 3,000 workers, who were making clothing for European and American consumers. New York Times

Emergency workers hauling large concrete slabs from a collapsed 8-story building said Tuesday they expect to find many dead bodies when they reach the ground floor, indicating the death toll will be far more than the official 386. One estimate said it could be as high as 1,400. The illegally constructed Rana Plaza collapsed on the morning of April 24, bringing down the five garment factories inside.  AP - April 30th

One hundred and forty six to possibly ten times that number. You can see the hundred year trajectory of the international garment industry, from importing impoverished cheap labor to work in New York to exporting production to where poor people are a seemingly inexhaustible resource. 

The Triangle Fire awakened the conscience of most Americans that possessed such a thing and showed them that something was terribly wrong and that the clothes on their backs were drenched in blood and ashes. The immigrant girls of New York were no less foreign to the average American of that time than the workers of Bangladesh are today. It wasn't about "us" and "them". Being human beings was all that was needed to be "us".

Perhaps with today's communications, the video, the photographs, the access to their English language newspapers, mean that the Bengali workers  are even closer to us than the Southern Italian and Eastern European Triangle girls were for the Americans of 1911... We did this to them: the inexpensive clothes on our backs are still drenched in blood and ashes.

(T)he retailers of our RMG products in the USA and Europe cannot shirk their part of responsibility in the deaths due primarily to lack of appropriate working conditions and lax safety arrangements. For example, a year and a half before the Tazreen factory fire, the Wal-Mart shareholders had rejected by 50-1 vote a proposal that required the suppliers to report annually on the safety measures of their factories on the grounds that it would ultimately lead to consumers paying higher cost for the product. And some of the buyers have held their retailers squarely responsible for the deaths in Savar.  Editorial - Daily Star - Dhaka, Bangladesh

I said before that the "runaway factory" process is just beginning to give the first signs that it might finally be running out of planet. The workers wise up, their learning curve gets steeper and steeper, even where it is forbidden they organize   Let us see how this is playing out.

China incomes are on the rise, but the pay scale at some professional jobs in China may surprise the average American. Based on 2011 salaries, some Chinese workers are earning as much as their American counterparts. As U.S. wages go down, China wages are going up.(...) Blue collar wages in major cities are all on the rise. Salaries for skilled management positions are approaching or equal to that of developed country wages for similar positions. This will be exacerbated in the near term by the shrinking size of the working-age population. Population growth rates are expected to turn negative before the end of this decade. Forbes

The May Cheong Group, the plant’s owner, plans to cut its headcount from 12,000 a few years ago to 8,500 by the end of the year. At the same time, it is seeking to retain older workers by offering accommodation for married staff and a crèche for their children. In one room, a machine that looks as though it houses a rotating silver Christmas tree undertakes tasks that would once have required 60 workers. Instead, just two people monitor the machine as it spray-paints the chassis of hundreds of little cars. The future of manufacturing in China may well lie in factories such as this. Financial Times

Double-digit wage increases in China and a shortage of labour for factory work have prompted several companies to move to cheaper countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia(...) As work moves from China to places such as Bangladesh and Cambodia, where wages rise as a result, consumers in the west will have to get used to higher prices for garments and shoes.  Financial Times

This increase in wages and living standards will mean that the Chinese instead of merely being sweated workers will become consumers and the volume of what they could consume is mind boggling. If workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia, aided by American and European consumer and labor organizations fight for their rights, something has got to give and their living standards rise. Perhaps the famous "next historical phase" is staring us right in the face.

What happens as the "runaway factories" run out of planet? As we can see from the May Cheong plant, the answer is robotization... but robots don't consume anything but electricity and not having pockets don't spend anything on clothes or recreation.

Summing up: The Left is about worker's right and needs. Nothing was ever gained without struggle. The front line of today's labor struggle is in the factories of China, Cambodia, Vietnam and Bangladesh and in the shopping malls of America and Europe. 

What should be done? 

Committed individuals and organizations in America and Europe should make every use possible of the new technologies to aid the workers of today's runaway factories to organize and fight for their rights and also to agitate to raise the consciousness of consumers. 

If that is successful and workers in Asia begin to earn decent wages they too will consume. In the countries that the factories ran away from the jobs will begin to return to where the customers with money to spend are and with good jobs those customers will spend more. 

A beneficent circle or an inflationary hell?

Stay tuned, the revolution will be tweeted. DS

Global Civics: The ideas the Tea Party fears most of all

David Seaton's News Links

In my last post I wrote how the fear of a new wave of reform propelled by the problems and abuses arising from globalization.

Global Civics is the idea-force that would make reform possible if it spread, not only possible, but inevitable. Any collective global action would require adopting the ideas expressed here. These ideas, the consciousness of the practical, unavoidable, reality of the unity of humanity are the starting point for any change.

Therefore it is obvious that any interest groups that would feel threatened by this idea-force, would marshal its resources to discredit anything or anyone who in anyway embodied these ideas.

Watch the video and then try to run it through the filter of Fox, Glenn Beck or the Tea Party. Try to imagine how the mentality espoused in the video would affect the lives and wealth of the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson and then the behavior of the American right begins to make some sense. Their survival is at stake. DS

What the Tea Party billionaires are really afraid of

David Seaton's News Links

Before starting off on the Tea Party's craziness, I would like you to examine some images from two nearly identical tragedies that occurred over a hundred years and several thousand miles apart. Later in the post I hope to make a connection between these twin horrors and the strange metamorphosis of the American right. Please bear with me.

Tazreen Fashions Fire, Bangladesh - 2012

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, New York - 1911

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, New York - 1911

The great mystery of American politics, a mystery which no one in the world can fathom, not even most Americans, is why so much money, hot air and spittle is being spent on literally paralyzing the American political system and making it impossible, not just to negotiate solutions, but to even have an intelligent conversation about solving the problems facing everyone, everywhere today. For that is what the Tea Party is really about: making first thought, then negotiation, and finally action impossible.

What is all this sound and fury covering up?

In my opinion it has much to do with where contemporary globalization is leading, the forces that it is setting in motion, which for historically minded Americans could elicit a bit of dèjá vu.

It seems to me that the globalization of today is in many ways similar on a world scale to the explosion of growth, power and sophistication of the US economy in the period after the Civil War, commonly called "The Gilded Age". This was the period of the "robber barons" and viewed nostalgically by many of the American right as a paradise of anarcho-capitalism. This was a period of immense growth and innovation, but also one of enormous inequality, suffering and exploitation and financial crisis, all of it interpenetrated by an ubiquitous political corruption as the enormous new wealth so recently created set about purchasing and deforming to its benefit the institutions of American government: federal, state and local.

The excesses of the Gilded Age gave birth to a mass reform movement in the United States called, "Progressivism". This movement, in a titanic struggle, bridging decades, among other things brought into effect: the regulation of interstate commerce, the breaking up of the monopolies known as "trusts", laws regulating the purity of food and drugs, the rise of labor unions, laws eliminating child labor and in 1913, even progressive income tax, something which still causes intense indignation on the American ultra-right.

I would maintain that today the "Gilded Age" is happening on a global scale. The same viral growth and innovation; the same inequality, suffering and exploitation and financial crisis and similar corruption as rootless, multinational corporations evade much needed tax money and corrupt the political systems where they find themselves, world wide. And today we can add the more recent concerns for climate change and renewable energy.

Action and reaction, just as in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the grotesque abuses of the system brought forth a muscular reform movement to tame the beasts of the Gilded Age, today the feeling is growing all over the world that this new Gilded Age must also be brought under some sort of rational control and regulation. As the center of the world economic system, any general reform and regulation of globalization logically must begin in the United States of America.

That is what the one-percent are afraid of and that is why they fund and promote the paralysis of the American political system.

Just to show you the symmetry between the urge to reform one hundred years ago and to reform today, I'd ask you to take the trouble to read two texts, they are like the tiny samples taken to analyze DNA.

I'm sure you have heard about the terrible fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh a few days ago,which took the lives of over a hundred workers trapped in the blaze, (the color photo at the top of the page shows the aftermath) so the first text I'd like you to read, is about that tragedy:

(...) On the third floor, where firefighters later recovered 69 bodies, Ms. Pakhi was stitching sweater jackets for C&A, a European chain. On the fifth floor, workers were making Faded Glory shorts for Walmart. Ten bodies were recovered there. On the sixth floor, a man named Hashinur Rahman put down his work making True Desire lingerie for Sears and eventually helped save scores of others. Inside one factory office, labor activists found order forms and drawings for a licensee of the United States Marine Corps that makes commercial apparel with the Marines’ logo. In all, 112 workers were killed in a blaze last month that has exposed a glaring disconnect among global clothing brands, the monitoring system used to protect workers and the factories actually filling the orders. After the fire, Walmart, Sears and other retailers made the same startling admission: They say they did not know that Tazreen Fashions was making their clothing.(...) David Hasanat, the chairman of the Viyellatex Group, one of the country’s most highly regarded garment manufacturers, pointed out that global apparel retailers often depend on hundreds of factories to fill orders. Given the scale of work, retailers frequently place orders through suppliers and other middlemen who, in turn, steer work to factories that deliver low costs — a practice he said is hardly unknown to Western retailers and clothing brands. The order for Walmart’s Faded Glory shorts, documents show, was subcontracted from Simco Bangladesh Ltd., a local garment maker. “It is an open secret to allow factories to do that,” Mr. Hasanat said. “End of the day, for them it is the price that matters.” New York Times

A little over a hundred years ago something almost identical happened in the USA. You probably know about it, but read the following text to refresh your memory and to compare it with the Bangladesh tragedy:

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. It was also the second deadliest disaster in New York City – after the burning of the General Slocum on June 15, 1904 – until the destruction of the World Trade Center 90 years later. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women aged sixteen to twenty-three; of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was Providenza Panno at 43, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and "Sara" Rosaria Maltese. Because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits – a common practice at the time to prevent pilferage and unauthorized breaks – many of the workers who could not escape the burning building jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors to the streets below. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers. (emphasis mine)Wikipedia

The only real difference between the two fires is that today the money is not bringing poor immigrant women to America to do the sewing, they are sending the sewing out to poor women in their home countries.

The text I put into bold type, the reforms the Triangle fire produced, is the key, the symbol, to explain the energy and funds behind the Tea Party's mostly successful struggle against rational thought in the USA today.

It is easy to imagine that we will be seeing more and more incidents like these sweatshop fires, some of them may cause thousands of deaths, pollute the atmosphere or spread disease in much the same way that the financial crisis that began in the USA has spread around the world. Today, unless the world cooperates to regulate, what goes around, comes around.

Now it happens that there is only one state in the whole world that is still, for the moment at least, potentially powerful enough to be able to bring this situation under some sort of control at home and abroad, and this state is in theory a democracy that is elected by its citizens to serve them.

That state is, of course, the United States of America.

Now, for the state apparatus of the United States of America to bring the situation under control in America and to a great extent around the world, all the branches of the state, executive, legislative and judiciary would have to be in nearly total alignment, as they were during World War Two.

Keeping that from happening, paralyzing the political system, with racism and paranoia so that unity is entirely unthinkable except around "supporting our troops" to defend the "homeland" against the threat of "terrorism" is what the Tea Party movement and every move of Fox and Kochs is about.

So that is what it is really all about: it is about not legislating and not getting things done... to paralyze the government of the United States of America at a critical time in its history and the history of the world at large. To prevent the system from flushing itself out and regenerating itself. To cut the wires of the burglar alarms so they can sack the house, the house of everyone in the world, in peace. Their peace. DS

Globalization: King and country

David Seaton's News Links

We are white mice participating in a great historical experiment.

The idea of completely untrammeled, frictionless capitalism has only been a theoretical construct till now, but we are almost there today.

There are basically two -- untried -- theories of how this would play out.

On one hand the free market liberals believe that, if not interfered with, the markets will bring mankind an endless cornucopia of good things that will lift all boats.

On the other hand Marx believed that left to its own devices, the system would tear itself apart.

Us white mice have front row seats at this experiment, rather like crab lice at the birth of Jesus.

All over the world and increasingly in developed countries like the USA, this metastasizing process of anarcho-capitalism that I call "stateless-imperialism" is producing a hardening mass of misery, which in America is known as the "working poor": an intractable class of unemployed, or underemployed human beings, or if they have work (often needing several jobs to get by) they are invariably overworked, over exploited, always underpaid, socially excluded and in general, politically inert. These are America's untermenschen, living in what is said to be the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world. A place which fills its mouth with phrases like, "all men are created equal" and washes it down with the greatest levels of inequality on the planet... even greater than in India.

Once again Indian metaphors arise, and this is because the Indians have been working on codifying this social stratification for thousands of years. So looking at their caste system will give us a clearer idea of where we are headed.

Everybody has heard of "untouchables", but many people that are unfamiliar with the workings of India's ancient caste system are probably unaware that there are categories way below the untouchables called the "unapproachables" and the "un-seeables". That is to say human beings you cannot share open space with and other human beings you cannot even lay eyes upon without being polluted.These last two categories are most applicable to today's gated-community, America.

"We've got the message. But my college kid, the babysitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just feel like if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't get how it works." guest at a Romney Hamptons fundraiser (hat doonesbury)

And paradoxically, America's affluent usually choose members of this underclass to take care of their children and cook their food.  However, except for that strange intimacy, the wealthy have put as much mental and physical space as they can between themselves and this mass of suffering humanity, denying them even a decent education and healthcare... This in the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world. No high caste Indian could be colder or crueler then then America's wealthy, not even get close. India is our future, nearly our present, not some exotic oddity.

Martin Luther King, America's most successful social activist's greatest influence was Mahatma Gandhi, so, not so indirectly, Gandhi may be one of America's most influential thinkers

King took as his model Gandhi's tactics and more importantly, perhaps, Gandhi's seamless infusion of political activism  with a spirituality that allowed King to connect on a deeply emotional plane with Americans of all colors and creeds just as Gandhi did with Indians.

Today, in great part thanks to Martin Luther King, America's "untouchables" are no longer so rigorously color coded, however these days, many who once sat comfortably at America's groaning table now have become familiar with the humiliation of un-aproachibility and invisibility, to add to their precarious hardscrabble existence without adequate healthcare or education.

In many ways Dr. King was more successful than Gandhi, that an African-American sits in the Oval Office today is the living proof of his success.

Today what is missing from the left is the emotional energy that came from MLK's Gandhian infusing of activism with spirituality.

In his 2008 campaign Barack Obama showed that Americans are still moved by the beauty of our English language when it invokes social justice... That there was little practical follow up to the "soaring rhetoric" in no way invalidates the revelation that many Americans are hungry for another social leader like Martin Luther King. For me that is the challenge that faces the American left in defending what should be its natural constituency, America's working poor. DS

The World Economy: into the Wild Blue Yonder

David Seaton's News Links

 

It would be comforting for many to imagine that our globalized economy is a conspiracy,  a murky cabal, directed from the shadows by some Bilderberger-ish, ecumenical-protocol, of sinister "elders", who are pulling all the strings.

I say comforting because presumably, if sufficiently intimidated, the people who got us into this mess could easily pull their strings and get us out.

However, I am afraid that instead of being something so tidy, there are no identifiable human hands on the controls of our world and the whole thing is simply on automatic pilot...

How does that work?

I could illustrate that with an old joke I recall.

An airliner takes off full of people and a metallic voice comes over the speaker system:

"Welcome aboard Acme Airlines flight 505 to London, the first totally automatic flight in aviation history, this is your computerized control system speaking, totally free from any possibility of human error, there is no pilot on board,. We hope you enjoy your flight. We will be flying at an altitude of 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet, 30,000 feet,  30,000 feet....

That is where I think we are right now. No one is in charge: the system itself has taken over and has no idea of the future but to grow endlessly.

In globalization, the deregulated system expresses itself freely qua-system and even the famous buttinsky billionaires like Sheldon Adelson or the Koch Brothers and their Tea Party accolytes are mere puppets, reacting like Pavlovian pooches to the stimuli produced by the unshackled world mishagoss, as are those politicians they use their billions to influence (buy, bribe).

I call this system "stateless-imperialism".

Classical state imperialism could be illustrated by the 19th century British empire's destruction of India's native textile industry and forcing Indians to buy cheap, industrially produced, cloth from Britain's satanic mills. This captive market made Britain rich and caused many an Indian weaver to literally starve to death and sucked commercial life out of India's villages.

In short imperialism was generally good for the British, but generally bad for the Indians and the distinction between being British and being Indian was clearly marked with indelible ink.

Stateless imperialism is quite similar in its effects, but the lines of winners and losers has little reference to state boundaries, color or creed.

A roughly hypothetical example might go something like this. The prices on the world cotton market, chock a block with subsidies, but without significant tariff barriers, fall dramatically and this allows the reborn Indian textile industry to turn out a lot of cloth cheaply and allows the many brown and nimble fingers of sweatshop ladies in India and other Asian countries to turn out attractive clothing at near-slave wages; clothing which is to be sold by multinationals in expensive boutiques all over the developed world and after being worn there, turns up second hand in the street markets of Africa thereby putting native African industry out of business.

Meanwhile, thousands of Indian cotton farmers, with the collapse of world cotton prices, finding themselves drowning in debts they are unable to pay, commit suicide, leaving their widows and orphaned children to sell themselves into indentured servitude to eventually pay those debts.

Of course in this environment the British textile industry disappeared ages ago and its descendents loiter on street corners wearing hoodies.

All of this is logical, cause and effect. Just business... unchained business.

The suffering is the same as in state-imperialism, but in stateless-imperialism there is no "king and country" and no "viceroy" and certainly no one lining up to "bear the white man's burden". In classic state-imperialism, identifiable robber barons, celebrated in song and story, controlled entire industries. Today there are no Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller figures, once upon a time there was a man actually named J. P. Morgan, God only knows what or who J. P. Morgan really is today. Now, like "flight 505 to London", the world economy is flying itself... look ma, no hands.

When I say this world system is on automatic-pilot, I'm not saying that are no human beings involved in running these mechanisms, only that these humans are merely hired managers with stock options, whose only assignment is to maximize shareholder value, if they don't do so they will soon be replaced by their board of directors, men and women who themselves represent only a tiny fraction of the total, largely faceless, equity. In short, faceless men and women create "value" for faceless often momentary shareholders in mastodonic enterprises of no clear national or personal affiliation and whose only horizon is the quarterly report.

Many have ridden this impersonal process to wealth, but none control it and the fallen lie all about us and the walking wounded crowd the roads. DS

The Darkest Hour Is Just Before Dawn

David Seaton's News Links

Between the civil war in Syria, for that is what it is, and the threat of an Israeli attack on Iran, which would set the region -- at the very least -- ablaze, and probably start off a chain of events that could tip the whole world into full-scale depression, we have plenty to worry about... things that could pull our attention decisively away from the saga of Jeremy Lin.

At the bottom of what most of us worriers worry about is the economic crisis. In a nutshell we are looking at the result of an increasingly "friction-less" world market.

Perhaps the core problem is that we are a consumer economy and our consumption, from designer tee-shirts  to the iPad and the iPhone, depends almost entirely on the slave wages and slave working conditions of millions upon millions of Chinese workers, who, without old age pensions and healthcare, save all their money and so do not consume what we produce. Our money goes there and it doesn't come back and our own workers are impoverished by this phenomenon and thus also consume less and less.

And if we managed to solve this problem and the Chinese workers earned enough to consume like we do, we the "breathing class" would suffocate in the ensuing pollution and if the enriched Chinese chose to eat cereal-fed, animal protein on the scale we do, mass starvation in the third (or not so third) world would result... without entering into the feedlot methane gas and water pollution issues that enough steers, swine and chickens to supply a billion Chinese with a diet like ours would produce.

The sheer contradiction and intractability enclosed in the scenario described means that inevitably our entire system is in question and our priorities must adjust to this new reality and adjust they will, even if it takes great wars and massive civil disturbance to bring the adjustments about.

In every established hierarchy, those who most benefit from the statu quo naturally write the rules and laws that best suit their interests and also do their best to create an intellectual and political climate that makes any real questioning of that situation "unthinkable".

Nobody describes this paradox better than the Slovenian philosophe à tout faire, Slavoj Zizek does:

In such a constellation, the very idea of a radical social transformation may appear as an impossible dream—yet the term ‘impossible’ should make us stop and think. Today, possible and impossible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into excess. On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, we are told that ‘nothing is impossible’: we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions, entire archives of music, films and tv series are available to download, space travel is available to everyone (at a price). There is the prospect of enhancing our physical and psychic abilities, of manipulating our basic properties through interventions into the genome; even the tech-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into software that can be downloaded into one or another set of hardware.  On the other hand, in the domain of socio-economic relations, our era perceives itself as the age of maturity in which humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality—read: capitalist socio-economic reality—with all its impossibilities. The commandment you cannot is its mot d’ordre: you cannot engage in large collective acts, which necessarily end in totalitarian terror; you cannot cling to the old welfare state, it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis; you cannot isolate yourself from the global market, without falling prey to the spectre of North Korean juche.

Zizek concludes: "Today we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequence of non-action could be disastrous."

The disruption of existing relationships of power and authority, that the inevitable changes the situation will increasingly demand, goes a long way to explaining the polarization of much of politics today; especially where the world's power is still predominately brokered, the USA. And it is no surprise that the sound and the fury is mostly coming from the right, those who represent those who have much to lose if today's existing relationships of power and authority should ever change.

So that is the real bottom line: we have the privilege of living in a time of profound changes... a time of fear and a time of hope. As to hope, hopefully the metaphor that titles this post is apt, and the darkest hour does come just before dawn. DS

Thomas Friedman and the hangman

David Seaton's News Links

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. Thomas Friedman - NYT

In older factories and, before them, on the farm, there were opportunities for almost everybody: the bright and the slow, the sociable and the awkward, the people with children and those without. All came to work unskilled, at first, and then slowly learned things, on the job, that made them more valuable. Especially in the mid-20th century, as manufacturing employment was rocketing toward its zenith, mistakes and disadvantages in childhood and adolescence did not foreclose adult opportunity. For most of U.S. history, most people had a slow and steady wind at their back, a combination of economic forces that didn’t make life easy but gave many of us little pushes forward that allowed us to earn a bit more every year. Over a lifetime, it all added up to a better sort of life than the one we were born into. That wind seems to be dying for a lot of Americans. What the country will be like without it is not quite clear. Adam Davidson - The Atlantic

The awkward fact about "average" people, or "average" anything for that matter is that there are so many of them... of "us" really, because most of us are average something, one way or another, intelligence, weight, height, sex appeal, you name it.... Anything that savagely attacks the "average" attacks the majority and the majority, barring massive police state repression and even then, will eventually fight back.

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.” George Soros quoted in the Daily Beast 

We are being told that we must be more competitive. What does that mean? Another quote from Tom Friedman's globalist panegyric, this time a paean to China.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ”

Friedman, of course thinks that this is just great, but I simply do not believe that Americans or Europeans would be willing to endure working conditions like that very long without revolting, except, perhaps, during the struggles of a world war. 

Suddenly Karl Marx of all people is reappearing in "polite" conversation and if you take a look at the following quotes taken at random and out of context and compare them with what you have read in the articles quoted above, you'll easily see why:

• Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
• Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
• The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
• The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
• (Free Trade) breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

So we are moving toward, or have moved to a society where even in developed countries increasingly a tiny minority lives very well and "average" people, by definition the majority, live badly, return to the living and working conditions of the days of Charles Dickens, conditions that took countless years and endless blood to meliorate... and even an "average" student of history will know that under such conditions revolutions happen.

I'm sorry to keep bringing the old boy up, but it was Lenin who said that a capitalist will sell you a rope on Friday that you are going to hang him with on Sunday... just to make a profit on Saturday... he can't help himself. Vladimir Ilych's mummy must be laughing his little wax head off when they turn out the lights in his tomb at night. DS

Globalization: fun and games

David Seaton's News Links

Open "Google Translate" and set the translation to English to Chinese (traditional), then write in the word "jokes", which will produce the Chinese ideogram 笑話, then paste that into Google-Google and it will produce the  following search results (click here). 

Choose one of the pages at random and press the "translate this page" link. I chose this one (click here).

Here is a sample Chinese joke:

A family of three sisters also married, while back home after the honeymoon
Whisper them in their bedroom with her ​​mother and asked her how they felt the first night.

Embarrassed to talk about her public
I saw a magazine on the table, said Sister turn to air ads like this
Civil Aviation Advertising: out of thousands of times, happy as an immortal

Then turn to cigarette advertising sister
It read: one in hand, food for thought

Then turn to a sister family of soy sauce ad
Read: bit mellow, delicious

Finally, the three sisters have to tell her mother arguing with her ​​own feeling
Mother not to turn up a chocolate ad
Says: just melt in the mouth, do not melt in the hand

I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.... Brave New World. DS