Latin America: The Pendulum Swings to the Right


HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Introduction

The gangster Macri ingratiating himself with Germany's Merkel. World capitalists are delighted on both sides of the Atlantic with his brutal rule.

Clearly the pendulum has swung to the right in the past few years. Numerous questions arise. What kind of right? How far right? How did they gain power? What is their appeal? How sustainable are the right wing regimes? Who are their international allies and adversaries? Having taken power, how have the rightist regimes performed and by what criteria is success or failure measured?

While the left has been in retreat, they still retain power in some states. Numerous questions arise. What is the nature of the left today? Why have some regimes continued while others have declined or been vanquished? Can the left recover its in uence and under what conditions and with what programmatic appeal.

We will proceed by discussing the character and policies of the right and left and their direction. We will conclude by analyzing the dynamics of right and left policies, alignments and future perspectives.

Right-Radicalism: The Face of Power

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he right wing regimes are driven by intent to implement structural changes: they look to reordering the nature of the state, economic and social relations and international political and economic alignments.

Radical right regimes rule in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras and Chile.

In several countries extreme right regimes have made abrupt changes, while in others they build on incremental changes constituted over time.

The changes in Argentina and Brazil represent examples of extreme regressive transformations directed at reversing income distribution, property relations, international alignments and military strategies. The goal is to redistribute income upwardly, to re-concentrate wealth, property- ownership upward and externally and to subscribe to imperial doctrine. These pluto-populist regimes are run by rulers, who openly speak to and for very powerful domestic and overseas investors and are generous in their distribution of subsidies and state resources – a kind of ‘populism for the plutocrats’.

The rise and consolidation of extremist right regimes in Argentina and Brazil are based on several decisive interventions, combining elections and violence, purges and co-optation, mass media propaganda and deep corruption.

Mauricio Macri was backed by the major media, led by the Clarin conglomerate, as well as by the international financial press (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.). Wall Street speculators and Washington’s overseas political apparatus subsidized his electoral campaign.

Macri, his family, cronies and financial accomplices, transferred public resources to private accounts. Provincial political bosses and their patronage operations joined forces with the wealthy financial sectors of Buenos Aires to secure votes in the Capital.

Upon his election, the Mauricio Macri regime transferred five billion dollars to the notorious Wall Street speculator, Paul Singer, signed off on multi-billion dollar, high interest loans, increased utility fees six fold, privatized oil, gas and public lands and fired tens of thousands of public sector employees.

Macri organized a political purge and arrest of opposition political leaders, including former President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner. Several provincial activists were jailed or even assassinated.

Macri is a success story from the perspective of Wall Street, Washington and the Porteño business elite. Wages and salaries have declined for Argentine workers. Utility companies secured their highest pro ts ever. Bankers doubled interest rate returns. Importers became millionaires. Agro-business incomes skyrocketed as their taxes were reduced.

The Macris with the Trumps, paying obeisance to the seat of the empire.

From the perspective of Argentina’s small and medium business enterprises President Macri’s regime has been a disaster: Many thousands have gone bankrupt because of high utility costs and harsh competition from cheap Chinese imports. In addition to the drop in wages and salaries, unemployment and under employment doubled and the rate of extreme poverty tripled.

The economy, as a whole, foundered. Debt financing failed to promote growth, productivity, innovation and exports. Foreign investment experienced easy entry, big profits and fast departure. The promise of prosperity was narrowly based around a quarter of the population. To weaken the expected public discontent – the regime shut down independent media voices, unleashed thugs against critics and co-opted pliable gangster trade union bosses to break strikes.

Public protests and strikes multiplied but were ignored and repressed. Popular leaders and activists are stigmatized by the Macri- financed media hacks.

Barring a major social upheaval or economic collapse, Macri will exploit the fragmentation of the opposition to secure re-election as a model gangster for Wall Street. Macri is prepared to sign o on US military bases, EU free trade agreements, and greater police liaison with Israel’s sinister secret police, Mossad.

Brazil has followed Macri’s far right policies.

Seizing power through a phony impeachment operation, the mega- swindler Michel Temer immediately proceeded to dismantle the entire public sector, freeze salaries for twenty years, and extend retirement age for pensioners by five to ten years. Temer led over a thousand bribe-taking elected officials in the multi-billion dollar pillage of the state oil company and every major public infrastructure project.

Coup, corruption and contempt were hidden by a system granting Congressional impunity until independent prosecutors investigated, charged and jailed several dozen politicians, but not Temer. Despite 95% public disapproval, President Temer remains in power with the total backing of Wall Street, the Pentagon and Sao Paulo bankers.

Mexico, the long-standing narco-assassin state, continues to elect one thieving PRI-PAN political regime after another. Billions in illicit profits flow to the overseas tax havens of money laundering bankers, US and Canadian mine owners. Mexican and international manufacturers extracted double digit profits sent to overseas accounts and tax havens. Mexico broke its own miserable record in elite tax avoidance, while extending low wage-tax ‘free trade zones’. Millions of Mexicans have ed across the border to escape predatory gangster capitalism. The ow of hundreds of millions of dollars of pro ts by US and Canadian multi-nationals were a result of the ‘unequal exchange’ between US capital and Mexican labor, held in place by Mexico’s fraudulent electoral system.

In at least two well-known presidential elections in 1988 and 2006, left of center candidates, Cuahtemoc Cárdenas and Manuel Lopez Obrador, won with healthy margins of victory, only to have their victories stolen by fraudulent vote counts.

Peru’s rightist mining regimes, alternated between the overtly bloody Fujimori dictatorship and corrupt electoral regimes. What is consistent in Peruvian politics is the handover of mineral resources to foreign capital, pervasive corruption and the brutal exploitation of natural resources by US and Canadian mining and drilling corporations in regions inhabited by Indian communities.

The extreme right ousted elected left-of-center governments, including President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay (2008-2012) and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras (2006-2009), with the active support and approval of the US State Department. Narco-presidents now wield power by means of repression, including violence against popular movements and the killing of scores of peasant and urban activists. This year, a grossly rigged election in Honduras ensured the continuity of narco-regimes and US military bases.

The spread of the extreme right from Central America and Mexico to the Southern Cone provides the groundwork for the re-assertion of US centered military alliances and regional trade pacts.

The rise of the extreme right ensures the most lucrative privatizations and the highest rates of return on overseas bank loans. The far right is quick to crack down on popular dissent and electoral challenges with violence. At most the far right allows a few rotating elites with nationalist pretensions to provide a façade of electoral democracy.

The Shift from the Center-Left to the Center-Right

The political swings to the far right have had profound ripple effects – as nominal center-left regimes have swung to the center-right.

Two regimes have moved decisively from the center-left to the center- right: Uruguay under Tabare Vazquez of the ‘Broad Front’ and Ecuador with the recent election of Lenin Moreno of PAIS Alliance. In both cases the groundwork was established via accommodations with oligarchs of the traditional right parties. The previous center-left regimes of Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa and Uruguayan President Jose Mujica succeeded in pushing for public investments and social reforms. They combined their leftist rhetoric while capitalizing on the global high prices and high demand for agro-mineral exports to finance their reforms. With the decline in world prices and the public exposure of corruption, the newly elected center-left parties nominated and elected center–right candidates who turned anti- corruption campaigns into vehicles for embracing neoliberal economic policies. The center-right presidents rejected economic nationalism, encouraged large scale foreign investment and implemented fiscal austerity programs appealing to the upper middle class and ruling class.

The center-right regimes marginalized the leftist sectors of their parties. In the case of Ecuador, they split the party, with the newly elected president realigning international policies away from the left (Bolivia, Venezuela) and toward the US and the far right-- while shedding the legacy of their predecessor in terms of popular social programs.

With the decline in export prices the center-right regimes offered generous subsidies to foreign investors in agriculture and forestry in Uruguay, and mine owners and exporters in Ecuador.

The newly converted center-right regimes joined with their established counterparts in Chile and joined the Trans Paci c Partnership with Asian nations, the EU and the US.

The center-right sought to manipulate the social rhetoric of the previous center-left regimes in order to retain popular voters while securing support from the business elite.

The Left Moves to the Center Left

Bolivia, under Evo Morales, has demonstrated an exceptional capacity for sustaining growth, securing re-election and neutralizing the opposition by combining a radical left foreign policy with a moderate, mixed public-private export economy. While Bolivia condemns US imperialism, major oil, gas, metals and lithium multi-nationals have invested heavily in Bolivia. Evo Morales has moderated his ideological posture shifting from revolutionary socialism to a local version of liberal democratic cultural politics.

Evo Morales’ embrace of a mixed economy has neutralized any overt hostility from the US and the new far-right regimes in the region.

Though remaining politically independent, Bolivia has integrated its exports with the far right neoliberal regimes in the region. President Evo Morales’s moderate economic policies, diversity of mineral exports, fiscal responsibility, incremental social reforms, and support from well-organized social movements has led to political stability and social continuity despite the volatility of commodity prices.

Venezuela’s left regimes under President Hugo Chavez and Maduro have followed a divergent course with harsh consequences. Totally dependent on extraordinary global oil prices, Venezuela proceeded to finance generous welfare programs at home and abroad. Under President Chavez leadership, Venezuela adopted a consequential anti-imperialist policy successfully opposing a US centered free trade agreement (LAFTA) and launching an anti-imperialist alternative, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA).

Advancing social welfare and financing overseas allies without diversifying the economy and markets and increasing production was predicated on continuous high returns on a single volatile export – oil.

Unlike Bolivia under President Evo Morales, who built his power with the support of an organized, class conscious and disciplined mass base, Venezuela counted on an amorphous electoral alliance, which included slum dwellers, defectors from the corrupt traditional parties (across the spectrum) and opportunists intent on grabbing office and perks. Political education was reduced to mouthing slogans, cheering the President and distributing consumer goods.

Venezuelan technocrats and political loyalists occupied highly lucrative positions, especially in the petroleum sector and were not held to account by workers’ councils or competent state auditors. Corruption was rampant and billions of dollars of oil wealth was stolen. This pillage was tolerated because of the huge influx of petro-dollars due to historic high prices and high demand. This led to a bizarre situation where the regime spoke of socialism and funded massive social programs, while the major banks, food distributors, importers and transportation operators were controlled by hostile private oligarchs who pocketed enormous profits while manufacturing shortages and promoting inflation. Despite the problems, the Venezuelan voters gave the regime a series of electoral victories over the US proxies and oligarch politicians. This tended to create overconfidence in the regime that the Bolivarian socialist model was irrevocable.

The precipitous drop of oil prices, global demand, and export earnings led to the decline of imports and consumption. Unlike Bolivia, foreign reserves declined, the rampant theft of billions was belatedly uncovered and the US-backed rightwing opposition returned to violent ‘direct action’ and sabotage while hoarding essential food, consumer goods and medicine. Shortages led to widespread black marketeering. Public sector corruption and hostile opposition control of the private banking, retail and industrial sectors, backed by the US, paralyzed the economy. The economy has been in a free-fall and electoral support has eroded. Despite the regime’s severe problems, the majority of low income voters correctly understood that their chances of surviving under the US-backed oligarchic opposition would be worse and the embattled left continued to win gubernatorial and municipal elections up through 2017.

Venezuela’s economic vulnerability and negative growth rate led to increased indebtedness. The opposition of the extreme right regimes in Latin America and Washington’s economic sanctions has intensified food shortages and increased unemployment.

In contrast, Bolivia effectively defeated US-elite coup plots between 2008-10. The Santa Cruz-based oligarchs faced the clear choice of either sharing profits and social stability by signing off on social pacts (workers/peasants, capital and state) with the Morales government or facing an alliance of the government and the militant labor movement prepared to expropriate their holdings. The elites chose economic collaboration while pursuing low intensity electoral opposition.

Conclusion

Left opposition is in retreat from state power. Opposition to the extreme right is likely to grow, given the harsh, uncompromising assault on income, pensions, the rise in the cost of living, severe reductions in social programs and attacks on private and public sector employment. The extreme right has several options, none of which offer any concessions to the left. They have chosen to heighten police state measures (the Macri solution); they attempt to fragment the opposition by negotiating with the opportunist trade union and political party bosses; and they reshuffle degraded rulers with new faces to continue policies (the Brazilian solution).

The formerly revolutionary left parties, movements and leaders have evolved toward electoral politics, protests and job action. So far they do not represent an effective political option at the national level.

The center-left, especially in Brazil and Ecuador, is in a strong position with dynamic political leaders (Lula DaSilva and Correa) but face trumped up charges by right-wing prosecutors who intend to exclude them from running for office. Unless the center-left reformers engage in prolonged large-scale mass activity, the far right will effectively undermine their political recovery.

The US imperial state has temporarily regained proxy regimes, military allies and economic resources and markets. China and the European Union profit from optimal economic conditions offered by the far right regimes. The US military program has effectively neutralized the radical opposition in Colombia, and the Trump regime has intensified and imposed new sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba.

The Trump regime's ‘triumphalist’ celebration is premature – no decisive strategic victory has taken place, despite important short term advances in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. However large outflows of profits, major transfers of ownership to foreign investors, favorable tax rates, low tariff and trade policies have yet to generate new productive facilities, sustainable growth and to ensure economic fundamentals. Maximizing profits and ignoring investments in productivity and innovation to promote domestic markets and demand has bankrupted tens of thousands of medium and small local commercial and manufacturing firms. This has led to rising chronic unemployment and underemployment. Marginalization and social polarization without political leadership is growing. Such conditions led to ‘spontaneous’ uprisings in Argentina 2001, Ecuador 2000 and Bolivia 2005.

The far right in power may not evoke a rebellion of the far left but its policies can certainly undermine the stability and continuity of the current regimes. At a minimum, it can lead to some version of the center left and restoration of the welfare and employment regimes now in tatters.

In the meantime the far right will press ahead with their perverse agenda combining deep reversals of social welfare, the degradation of national sovereignty and economic stagnation with a formidable profit maximizing performance. 

  James Petras is a world-renowned public intellectual. He is a retired Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who has published extensively on Latin American and Middle Eastern political issues.

black-horizontal
[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]



(Indirect) Cinema Reviews—THE POST

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by NORMAN SOLOMON

The Real Story Behind Katharine Graham and “The Post” 

Movie critics are already hailing “The Post,” directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Millions of people will see the film in early winter. But the real-life political story of Graham and her newspaper is not a narrative that’s headed to the multiplexes.

GRAHAM WEARING THE STANDARD ATTIRE AND DO OF SOCIALITES—AH, LIFE IS SWEET.

“The Post” comes 20 years after Graham’s autobiography Personal History appeared and won enormous praise. Read as a memoir, the book is a poignant account of Graham’s long quest to overcome sexism, learn the newspaper business and gain self-esteem. Read as media history, however, it is deceptive.

“I don’t believe that whom I was or wasn’t friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications,” Graham wrote. However, Robert Parry — who was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the last three years of the 1980s — has shed some light on the shadows of Graham’s reassuring prose. Contrary to the claims in her book, Parry said he witnessed “self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national security figures.”

Among Parry’s examples: “On one occasion in 1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua’s Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation.” (The 1996 memoir of former CIA Director Robert Gates confirmed that Parry had the story right all along.)

Graham’s book exudes affection for Kissinger as well as Robert McNamara and other luminaries of various administrations who remained her close friends until she died in 2001. To Graham, men like McNamara and Kissinger — the main war architects for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — were wonderful human beings.

In sharp contrast, Graham devoted dozens of righteous pages to vilifying Post press operators who went on strike in 1975. She stressed the damage done to printing equipment as the walkout began and “the unforgivable acts of violence throughout the strike.” It is a profound commentary on her outlook that thuggish deeds by a few of the strikers were “unforgivable” — but men like McNamara and Kissinger were lovable after they oversaw horrendous slaughter in Southeast Asia.

Graham’s autobiography portrays union stalwarts as mostly ruffians or dupes. “Only a handful of [Newspaper Guild] members had gone out for reasons I respected,” she told readers. “One was John Hanrahan, a good reporter and a nice man who came from a longtime labor family and simply couldn’t cross a picket line. He never did come back. Living your beliefs is a rare virtue and greatly to be admired.”

But for Hanrahan (whose Republican parents actually never belonged to a union) the admiration was far from mutual. As he put it, “The Washington Post under Katharine Graham pioneered the union-busting ‘replacement worker’ strategy that Ronald Reagan subsequently used against the air-traffic controllers and that corporate America — in the Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone and other strikes — used to throw thousands of workers out of their jobs in the 1980s and the ’90s.”

The Washington Post deserves credit for publishing sections of the Pentagon Papers immediately after a federal court injunction in mid-June 1971 stopped the New York Times from continuing to print excerpts from the secret document. That’s the high point of the Washington Post’s record in relation to the Vietnam War. The newspaper strongly supported the war for many years.

Yet Graham’s book avoids any semblance of introspection about the Vietnam War and the human costs of the Post’s support for it. Her book recounts that she huddled with a writer in line to take charge of the editorial page in August 1966: “We agreed that the Post ought to work its way out of the very supportive editorial position it had taken, but we couldn’t be precipitous; we had to move away gradually from where we had been.” Vast carnage resulted from such unwillingness to be “precipitous.”

Although widely touted as a feminist parable, Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography is notably bereft of solidarity for women without affluence or white skin. They barely seemed to exist in her range of vision; painful realities of class and racial biases were dim, faraway specks. Overall the 625-page book gives short shrift to the unrich and unfamous, whose lives are peripheral to the drama played out by the wealthy publisher’s dazzling peers. The name of Martin Luther King Jr. does not appear in her star-studded, history-drenched book.

Katharine Graham’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers was indeed laudable, helping to expose lies that had greased the wheels of the war machinery with such horrific consequences in Vietnam. But the Washington Post was instrumental in avidly promoting the lies that made the Vietnam War possible in the first place. No amount of rave reviews or Oscar nominations for “The Post” will change that awful truth.  

About the Author
 Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, where he coordinates ExposeFacts. Solomon is a co-founder of RootsAction.org.

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report 



Jury acquits all six defendants in first trial of Inauguration Day protesters

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

By Patrick Martin
WSWS.ORG

A Washington DC jury has acquitted all six defendants of all charges against them, in the first trial of the victims of mass arrests by police during the inauguration of President Trump last January 20.


The so-called J20 defendants faced sentences of as long as 50 years in prison if they had been convicted on the seven counts each one faced, including two of rioting and five of destruction of property. Instead, the jury delivered not-guilty verdicts on all 42 separate counts. Judge Lynn Leibovitz previously dismissed one of the most serious charges, felony inciting to riot, for all six defendants.

The six included Jennifer Armento, 38, of Philadelphia; Oliver Harris, 28, of Philadelphia; Brittne Lawson, 27, of Aspinwall, Pennsylvania; Michelle Machio, 26, of Asheville, North Carolina; Christina Simmons, 20, of Cockeysville, Maryland; and Alexei Wood, 27, of San Antonio, Texas, a freelance journalist who was live-blogging the inauguration protests.

The verdict was a shattering setback for the government’s case, which was an antidemocratic frame-up from beginning to end. Prosecutors readily conceded in statements to the jury that there was no evidence that any of the six defendants had committed acts of violence or property destruction. They nonetheless insisted that merely by remaining in the demonstration while scattered acts of violence took place, all six were guilty.

Outside the courtroom, the defendants hugged each other and their attorneys and supporters, many of them in tears. Defendant Jennifer Armento said the verdict “shows the country that the jury was unwilling to do what the government wanted them to do, which was criminalize dissent.”

“People won’t be afraid to show up and go protest and get in the streets and not be worried that they’ll get mass arrested like we did,” said Michelle Machio, one of the six acquitted defendants. “This sets a really strong precedent that that’s not ok and you can’t criminalize dissent.”

The prosecution case was prepared exhaustively, using the defendants’ cellphones, confiscated by the police during the arrests, as well as the video record of Alexei Wood’s contemporaneous live-blog, which allowed prosecutors to track his movements throughout Inauguration Day (but showed Wood doing nothing more than recording and commenting on the actions of both the police and protesters).

The prosecution was aided by Judge Leibovitz, who allowed the questioning of jurors about their political views on President Trump during jury selection. Multiple potential jurors were removed when they voiced sympathy for the anti-Trump protests, or said they would not “give greater weight” to police testimony than to the testimony of the defendants.

The judge is notorious as a hard-line sentencer, but also for pushing for speedier processing of cases, which apparently worked against the prosecution strategy. Prosecutors initially divided the nearly 200 defendants into four categories, with a handful of those linked to specific acts of violence in the top category and targeted for the first trial.

When procedural obstacles threatened to delay any trials until next year, Leibovitz insisted on a trial starting in late November with six defendants whose attorneys volunteered to go first. The result was a group of six defendants drawn from the fourth category, those most distant from any individual act of violence, and including two volunteer medics.

The US Attorney’s office issued a statement reiterating the claim that a riot occurred on Inauguration Day and that the remaining defendants would be held collectively responsible, based on a “rigorous review for each defendant.” This strongly implies that the remaining 166 defendants could still face trial.

The trial as a whole was a milestone in the attempt to destroy the constitutional rights to free assembly and free speech. The mass arrest of more than 200 people was itself unconstitutional, and was ordered by the Obama Justice Department, not Trump, who was not yet exercising presidential authority when police surrounded protesters, in a tactic known as “kettling,” grabbing all who could not escape.

Under the Trump Justice Department, prosecution was conducted with aggressive attacks on constitutional rights, including demands for the email, Facebook and cellphone records of the groups coordinating the J20 protests. Prosecutors also made use of an undercover video made by the ultra-right Project Veritas group, which has infiltrated liberal and antigovernment groups, using heavily edited and even doctored videos to cause scandal.

Defense attorneys introduced evidence from the Twitter accounts of several of the arresting officers showing anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic remarks, as well as political attacks on groups the police characterized as “anarchists.”

Sara Kropf, the attorney for Brittne Lawson, the cancer nurse, said in her closing argument, “This is about politics. This is about police and local prosecutors who work for the Department of Justice. And we know who they report to,” she said, referring to President Trump. “All the government proved was that these individuals showed up and walked as protesters,” she said. “And that is not a crime.”

Brett E. Cohen, the defense attorney for Alexei Wood, told the World Socialist Web Site that the verdict was a “major victory for journalists and people trying to exercise their First Amendment rights. Mr. Wood came to the demonstration intending to cover it, and he leaves Washington eleven months later the same way he came, innocent of any crime.”

Cohen explained that the prosecution was based on “guilt by association,” and that the judge had denied any challenge to that theory on constitutional grounds, although she did agree that the prosecution had failed to prove that any of the six defendants had engaged in inciting to riot, dismissing this charge.

The decision to prosecute more than 200 people on multiple felony charges carrying up to 60 years in prison was grossly over-charging, he indicated. “The whole thing was ridiculous,” he said. Normal practice for most of the defendants would have been “restitution, community service, get out of town. That would have made sense.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, which supported the defense, issued a statement calling for dismissal of charges against all the remaining defendants. The organization has filed a civil suit against the unlawful mass roundup, pepper spraying and detention of hundreds of nonviolent demonstrators.

“Today’s verdict reaffirms two central constitutional principles of our democracy: first, that dissent is not a crime, and second, that our justice system does not permit guilt by association,” the ACLU spokesman, Scott Michelman, said.

“For nearly a year, these people have been under the cloud of felony charges that have turned their lives upside down, subjecting them to the anxiety and expense of defending themselves against charges that should never have been brought. No one should have to fear arrest or prosecution for coming to the nation’s capital to express opinions peacefully, no matter what those opinions may be.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Martin is a senior editorialist with wsws.org, a socialist publication.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

black-horizontal
[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

window.newShareCountsAuto="smart";



A Rising Tide: In Defense of Socialist Billionaires

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

The Octant
Insights and reporting from Caleb Maupin

Angolan billionaire Dos Santos

The common charge of hypocrisy against wealthy people with leftist views (“champagne socialists” “limousine liberals”) now has a new twist, as the growing number of billionaires in China, or the purported wealth of leaders in Bolivarian countries, is presented as proof that socialism is simply a myth utilized by power hungry politicians.

These very common charges are based on a misconception, and fundamental lack of understanding about what socialism really is, and why it is different from capitalism. Furthermore, if one looks into the lives and activities of various figures labelled as “Socialist Oligarchs” and sees how they acquire their wealth, and how they function in their respective society, it is apparent that they are quite a different breed than the western profiteers they are compared to.

 

What is Socialism? What is Capitalism?

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n order to understand why the phrase “socialist billionaire” is not an oxymoron, it is important to clarify the difference between the two economic systems. Contrary to popular cliché socialism and communism are not “everyone getting paid the same wage no matter how hard they work.”

Marxism defines capitalism as “the anarchy of production.” Mao Zedong referred to “profits in command.” Frederick Engels wrote “under capitalism, the means of production only function as preliminary transformation into capital.” Capitalism is a system in which production is carried out, and society operates in order to make profits for a group of owners. The centers of economic power are controlled by a small group of wealthy owners, who use them to enrich themselves.

Socialism, on the other hand, is an economy where a central plan, not the chaos of the market, has taken charge. In socialist countries, key centers of economic power, banking, natural resources, major industries, are in the hands of the state. The state utilizes its control over these “means of production” to rationally plan the economy, and increase the living standards. Socialist countries like the former Soviet Union, or contemporary China, have “Five Year Plans.” They also tend to have tightly organized and politicized populations, which enforce the goals and ideology of the revolution on a local level.

In every socialist country, a level of wealth inequality has existed. Doctors do not get paid the same wage as factory workers. Bureaucrats who are responsible for huge state controlled industries are compensated for taking on such tasks. Most modern socialist countries have a market sector which is subordinated to the state apparatus, and functions in accordance with its plans and vision. Socialist countries tend to have many private hotels and restaurants, in addition to state run industries, banks, and natural resources.

To be clear, Karl Marx did envision a “higher stage of communism” eventually emerging after vast material abundance and advances in technology broke down the need for state coercion. In this ideal state, people could live “each according to his own ability and each according to his needs.” Even the most radical Marxists understand that this higher stage is probably thousands of years in the future, and that impoverished countries that have adopted socialist methods are nowhere near it.

Now, with this basic understanding of terms, we can go to examine the “socialist billionaires.”

African Oil, Poverty & Wealth

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]mid the poverty, there are plenty of billionaires in Africa, but they are not all the same. The top oil producing and exporting country in Africa is Nigeria. The country has over 100 million people who live on less than $1 per day. The World Food Program has recently warned of famine conditions in the country. Western oil corporations have dominated Nigeria for over a century and it remains a deeply impoverished country, despite the constant extraction of its natural resources.

Nigerian Mike Adenuga has acquired $9.9 billion functioning as a middle man for the Niger Delta Region. He oversees and secures the ability of companies like BP, Chevron, and Exxon-Mobil to extract oil. Folorunsho Alakija plays a similar role, with partial ownership of an oil block. Despite donating to charity, Nigeria’s billionaires are essentially functionaries in this process of keeping Nigeria poor. The conditions in the oil rich Niger Delta Region reveal that despite this African country being quite wealthy, Wall Street corporations are getting rich while this capitalist African country remains very poor.

However, one of the fastest growing economies in the world today is in another African oil-exporting country, Angola. Following its independence from Portugal, Angola experienced 27 years of civil war. The United States armed and trained various factions to fight against the revolutionary socialist government led by the Movement for the Liberation of the People of Angola (MPLA).

After the civil war finally ended in 2002, the MPLA government has overseen an astoundingly high rate of economic growth. The GDP increased on an average of 11.1% from 2001 to 2010. 50% of Angola’s GDP comes from oil, all of which is processed through the state controlled oil corporation Sonangol.

China has started buying oil from Angola, and in exchange, has begun financing huge amounts of infrastructure development. As China finances new highways and railways, coffee production, diamond mining, and other parts of the once stagnant Angolan economy have begun to sprout up, subsidized by state oil revenue. At the recent World Trade Organization meeting in Buenos Aires, the Angolan Trade Minister announced that by 2021, Angola is expected to become “a middle income country.” Many western economists have marveled at Angola’s recent achievements.

Meet Africa’s Richest Woman

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]sabel Dos Santos, the richest woman in Africa, is quite different from the billionaires of Nigeria. Dos Santos was born in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, where her father and mother, revolutionary guerrilla fighters, were living in exile. She studied Electrical Engineering at King’s College in London. Her first job was as a project manager for a company contracted to clean and disinfect the city of Launda. Santos, whose father was the longtime President of the country after independence, has spent her adult life traveling across the world, finding western corporations to invest in the Angolan economy, an economy that almost entirely revolves around its state run oil company. After two decades of setting up contracts and joint ventures with Sonangol, she was appointed to be the chairwoman of the State oil firm in 2016.

As Exxon-Mobil, BP, Haliburton, Total, and other western oil companies have recently ended their relationship with Sonangol, the western press has shown no small amount of contempt for Dos Santos, who recently stepped down. The press labels her a “princess” and points out that she is the richest woman in Africa, with assets of approximately $3.5 billion.

What did Dos Santos do to inflame so much hatred? According to the Wall Street Journal she oversaw a “turgid bureaucracy.” In its dealing western oil companies Sonagol apparently “required that they buy supplies from select domestic firms.” Furthermore, Sonangol would not allow western corporations to claim recently discovered natural gas resources in Angola which “by law belongs to the government.”

The grievance of the western press is essentially that Dos Santos, who has spent her adult life working with the Angolan government to bring in foreign investment, was making sure that her people got a share in the profits from their natural resources. Her “turgid bureaucracy” was ensuring that western oil giants bought supplies from local companies, and securing state control over the newly discovered natural gas resources. The press complains that Sonangol delayed the process of selling state assets, and did not immediately approve projects at the speed the western conglomerates desired. In essence, western corporations are angry that Angola is not Nigeria. Dos Santos and the revolutionary socialist government are not going to allow their country to be plundered.

As western oil giants pull out, Angola will continue exporting oil to its biggest costumer and top financier, the People’s Republic of China.

A Different Breed of Billionaires

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]os Santos has earned her vast wealth by making Angola more wealthy and prosperous, in the context of an economy that is state controlled. Is this not admirable?

Wang Jianlin, the second richest man in China, is a member of the Communist Party. He owns a huge real-estate and financial conglomerate called Dalian Wanda. He was once a member of the People’s Liberation Army, serving as a border guard and moving up the ranks.

Wang’s entire career in China’s nominally “private sector” has been done under the complete control and supervision of the Communist Party. Wang has arranged for foreign investors to help him beautify China’s cities with modern housing. As Vice-Chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, Wang ensures that all economic activity in the country is carried out in accordance with the state’s Five Year Development Plans.

As a dedicated Communist, Wang feels that Hollywood movies have a detrimental effect on both China and the world. He attempted to buy an American movie studio, raising eyebrows across the planet, when he gave a speech criticizing Hollywood for the poor quality of its product. Wang is now helping to establish the Oriental Movie Metropolis in Qingdao, hoping to create an alternative to Hollywood with its problematically themed films.

Wealth, But Not Power

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he real difference between billionaires who function in socialist economies like Wang Jianlin and Isabelle Dos Santos is found even beyond how they acquire their wealth.

In the lead up to the 19th Communist Party Congress in China, concerns about capital flight were abundant. The Communist Party felt that Chinese corporations should be focused on operating within the country, not in overseas adventures. So, the world watched as Wang Jianlin, the second richest man in China, complied with the party’s wishes and stopped investing overseas. The financial giant that Wang built may have acquired him a great deal of wealth and power, but in essence, this empire does not belong to him. The party has control.

Billionaire Liu Han—executed for corporate crimes, not exactly the American way.

In 2015, Liu Han, a Chinese billionaire mine owner who was heavily involved in organized crime was executed at the age of 49. Since 2013, a large number of Chinese officials have been charged for corruption and sent to prison. Xi Jinping’s “8 Point Regulations” are being harshly enforced in order to ensure that the Chinese government doesn’t become a group of hired corporate stooges. Bribery is harshly penalized, in order to make sure that the 90 million members of the Communist Party keep control over the growing number of millionaires and billionaires.

Those who own China’s domestic car manufacturing corporations, which are already heavily subsidized and controlled by the state, were recently told by the government that 1 out of every 10 cars they produce must be a “New Energy Vehicle” that did not run on gasoline. Despite these companies being nominally private, they had no choice but to obey. Foreign car importers received the same mandate.

In 2016, the Islamic Republic of Iran also executed a billionaire. Babak Zanjani had been using his contracts with Iran’s state run oil company to steal billions of dollars from the public treasury. When he was caught, his wealth could not save him, and a government that describes its system as “not capitalism, but Islam,” and tightly controls the economy, swiftly took his life. While Iran has many wealthy individuals, the ideological organization known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remains the biggest economic entity in the country. Iran’s government controlled oil resources and industries, aligned with a population organized in community “basigue” councils, makes sure that Iran’s private corporations function according to the wishes of the Supreme Leader.

At the end of the day, billionaires who function in non-capitalist countries are completely different than their financial peers in the west. Unlike the ruling class of western capitalist nations, these wealthy people are not the rulers, but are merely well paid functionaries, helping to carry out the government’s agenda of development. The “socialist billionaires” spend their lives acquiring foreign investments, and overseeing nominally private entities, and yes, getting very well compensated in the process. But at the end of the day, they have no real “economic freedom.” They do not rule over the country, rather, the country’s state, dependent on a tightly organized and politicized population, rules over them.

The leaders of China, Bolivia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Angola, and other states with socialist economies are certainly concerned about controlling income inequality, and curbing its negative affects. However, the rise of “socialist billionaires” in these states tends to accompany a rising standard of living for the whole population. Unlike in the capitalist model where impoverishing the population leads to greater profits for those who own the major centers of economic power, a centrally planned economy can function closer to the old aphorism: “a rising tide raises all boats.” The more foreign investment and joint ventures the socialist billionaires can arrange, the more prosperity can be expanded among the entire population.

Imagine if rustbelt states in the USA like Ohio, Kentucky, or Indiana, had dedicated, skilled business people, working day and night, not trying to squeeze yet another drop of wealth out of the region, but rather to eliminate poverty and create better conditions. Imagine if government controlled industries and natural resources in these regions, which guaranteed a level of job security and benefits to the population, were being subsidized by investments and joint ventures with corporations. Would it not be reasonable that those who work tirelessly to arrange these deals receive a substantial share of the wealth they are bringing in?

Rather than lamenting the hypocrisy of wealthy people in non-capitalist states, those who seek social justice should really be concerned about another group of billionaires. Unlike Wang, Dos Santos, and others, most of the billionaires in this world cooperate with a global setup dominated by Wall Street and London. They maintain their wealth through monopolies, not raising people out of poverty, but keeping the world poor. It is these financial elites of the western world, rightly called “monopolists” that are the greatest barrier to development, security, and global peace.

Originally Published in New Eastern Outlook. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caleb Maupin is a journalist and political analyst who appears frequently on RT and PressTV. Tasnim News Agency described him as "a native of Ohio who has campaigned against war and the U.S. financial system". He was a member of Workers World Party, and Fight Imperialism – Stand Together though he has recently distanced himself from that organization. He also worked as a youth organizer for the International Action Center and was involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement from its planning stages.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

black-horizontal
[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

window.newShareCountsAuto="smart";



How Inequality Kills

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by ALAN NASSER

The Global March of Neoliberalism: The World Inequality Report 2018

How many studies and savants does it take to admit that unrestrained capitalism is designed to create enormous inequality?

Contrary to the assumptions of left-liberal commentators, neoliberalism is not merely a bad policy adopted by “greedy” elites. It is in fact a fundamental systemic rejection of the post-laissez-faire settlement put in place in just about all of the developed capitalist countries after the Second World War. Out with the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society and forward with what is essentially a resurrection of 1920s capitalism. Because capitalism is a globally integrated system, if neoliberalism exists on a significant scale anywhere, it must exist everywhere. It is thus a “New World Order,” a phrase deployed by G. H. W. Bush and Adolf Hitler.

Neoliberalism is an eminently rational arrangement for the capitalists and their political cronies who instituted it. The system is called capitalism, not laborism, because it was forged for centuries and is presided over by those whose overarching objective is to maintain a settlement that serves the interests of owners of capital. Adam Smith’s tome is called The Wealth of Nations, not The Income of Nations or The Wages of Nations. The bottom-line priority of those who own society’s most valuable asset, its means of production, is that society be organized around the continuous increase of wealth, especially the wealth and income of its wealthiest. The welfare state foils that project. The evidence is unambiguous: after the Depression and during the great expansion of the Golden Age, we witnessed the unprecedented: the share of national income flowing to the one percent continued to fall by an increasing percentage each decade during the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and early ‘70s. (1) These were the only years in American history when an essential feature of State policy was to increase social services benefitting the working class and redistribute income from the wealthiest to those who do society’s work. And these were also the only years in the history of the republic that featured ongoing and increasing downward redistribution. This was the result of New Deal and Great Society social legislation, and the power of labor unions. Hence, from the perspective of the enlightened capitalist, the legacy of these policies must be reversed.

The World Inequality Report  2018

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he undoing of social democracy must be effected on a global scale. Because one of the principal effects of neoliberalism is the remarkable growth of inequality, Thomas Piketty and associates have produced the World Inequality Report  2018, assessing the growth of worldwide inequality. (2) They conclude that “income inequality has increased in nearly all countries,” and that “rising inequality… can lead to various sorts of political, economic, and social catastrophes.” Inequality is lowest in Europe, where social-democratic economic policy is strongest, and has increased rapidly in North America, where the top 10 percent cop 47 percent of national income. The divergence in inequality levels is particularly extreme between Western Europe, which, as noted, retains significant vestiges of welfare state policy, and the United States, whose social democratic policies are the stingiest among the developed capitalist countries. The share of national income of the top 1 percent in both regions in 1980 was about the same, close to 10 percent. By 2016 it had risen slightly, to 12 percent in Western Europe, while in the United States it soared to 20 percent, while the share of the bottom 50 percent decreased from more than 20 percent in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016. Between 1980 and 2016 the global 1 percent captured twice as much of the growth in income as the bottom 50 percent. What’s more, Credit Suisse reports that as of 2015 the richest global 1 percent had accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together. (3) In the same year, a mere 62 individuals had accumulated as much wealth as is held by the bottom 50 percent of humanity. (4)

The World Inequality Report reminds us that  “economic inequality is largely driven by the unequal ownership of capital..,” as we should expect in capitalist countries.  Capital can be either privately or publicly owned. With neoliberalism’s idolatry of the private and ongoing decimation of the public, we are not surprised to learn that “since 1980, very large transfers of public to private wealth occurred in nearly all countries… While national wealth has substantially increased, public wealth is now negative or close to zero in rich countries. Arguably this limits the ability of governments to tackle inequality; certainly it has important implications for wealth inequality among individuals.” The situation is graver still if we acknowledge, as the authors of this study apparently do not, that governments in the capitalist countries have no intention to “tackle inequality.” Quite the contrary. What we are witnessing is the bipartisan effort to “starve the beast.” As the study puts it, “Over the past decades, countries have become richer but governments have become poor.” The net public wealth (public assets minus public debts) of the most aggressively neoliberal advanced countries, the United States and the UK, “has even become negative in recent years.” “The balance between private and public wealth is a crucial determinant of the level of inequality.” In their summation, the authors conclude that ‘In a future in which “business as usual” continues, global inequality will further increase’.

Capital can be either privately or publicly owned. With neoliberalism’s idolatry of the private and ongoing decimation of the public, we are not surprised to learn that “since 1980, very large transfers of public to private wealth occurred in nearly all countries… While national wealth has substantially increased, public wealth is now negative or close to zero in rich countries.

The whole picture draws out the implications of Thomas Piketty’s demonstration that it belongs to the nature of capitalism that more and more private wealth tends to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. (5) The plutocrats pass their booty on to their progeny, so that an increasing portion of total wealth is inherited. Indeed, as of today between 50 and 70 percent of U.S. household wealth is inherited. (6) If this continues, it is a matter of arithmetic that the U.S. is headed for rule by dynasty.

How Neoliberal Austerity Kills

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here is decisive evidence that neoliberalism’s widening inequality tends to generate uncommon rates of physical and mental health disorders. (7) A Princeton study found that middle-aged non-Hispanic white Americans suffered a great increase in mortality between 1998 and 2013. (8) This was the first such case in American history. The increase is entirely concentrated among persons with a high school degree or less, a reliable criterion of poverty. Among whites with any college experience, mortality rates have declined during this period. And disease is not the issue. The predominant causes of death are suicide, chronic alcohol abuse and drug overdoses. Paul Krugman has noted that these statistics mirror “the collapse in Russian life expectancy after the fall of communism.” (9) The Princeton study labels these mortalities “deaths of despair.” It is noteworthy that among the population in question, wages have fallen by over 30 percent since 1969. (10) In a detailed study of the health effects of austerity, based on data from the Great Depression, Asian countries during the 1990s Asian Financial Crisis, and European countries suffering austerity policies after the 2008 crisis, researchers found that the more austerity was practiced in a country, the more people became ill and the more people died. (11)

Homicide and murder are also strongly related to inequality. The World Bank reports that inequality predicts about half of the variance in murder rates between the U.S. and other countries and the FBI notes that of U.S. murders for which the precipitating reason is known over half stem from the agent’s sense that he had been “dissed.” (12) Persons shoot someone who has cut them off in traffic or beat them to a parking spot.

In connection with the high number of homicides associated with dissing, i.e. challenging a person’s sense of self-respect or personal worth, the psychologist and neuroscientist Martin Daly documents the intimate connection between inequality and loss of personal and social status. He shows that inequality predicts homicide rates “better than any other variable.” (13) In America, status is determined by how much a person has, and having is a matter of the standard of material living one enjoys, competitively conceived in terms of how one compares with others. And the admired standard is one’s level of material comfort, determined for the non-wealthy by a good job and the ability to support a family or the ability to enjoy a comfortable and independent standard of living as a single person. These makers of social status and self-respect are unavailable to those at the lower ends of the income hierarchy and the unemployed. Self-respect is one of men’s (and most homicides are male-on-male) most prized goods, and self-respect, as much as income and wealth, is unequally distributed. In a society where there are structurally determined winners and losers, if one is a loser one’s social reputation is all one has, all one can brandish, in order to maintain a sense of self-respect and personal worth. A diss is a blow to both social reputation and self-respect, and if one has nothing else, the threat looms disproportionately large.

While gang murders are not the majority of murders by the poor, they display in stripped-down form the way in which dissing translates to a social put-down and social denigration makes for personal humiliation and devaluation. The disser becomes a deadly rival. The research I cite in this essay shows that this syndrome is by no means limited to gang culture.

Most recently, David Ansell, a physician and social epidemiologist, has demonstrated in an exhaustive study that the acceleration of inequality between high and low socioeconomic groups over the past three decades has resulted in higher mortality rates for the poorest strata of the working class. He concludes that “[I]nequality triggers so many causes of premature death that we need to treat inequality as a disease and eradicate it, just as we seek to halt any epidemic.” (14) Capitalism, in its post-welfare-state form, kills.

Notes.

(1) Piketty, Thomas and Saez, Emmanuel (2006) “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective,” American Economic Association: Papers and Proceedings, 96, No.2 May

http://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf

(3   (3) Credit Suisse (2015) ‘Global Wealth Databook 2015’. Total net wealth at constant exchange rate (USD billion). http://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/index.cfm?fileid=C26E3824-E868-56E0-CCA04D4BB9B9ADD5

(4) Hardoon, Deborah (2017) “An Economy For the 99 Percent,” Oxfam Briefing Paper    https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp-economy-for-        99-percent-160117-en.pdf

(5) Picketty, Thomas (2014) Capital in the Twenty First Century Harvard University Press

(6) Roth, Steve (2017) “Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity” Evonomics

(8) Case, Anne and Deaton, Angus (2015) “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. September 17

Heartland of Darkness,” The New York Times.  November 4

(10) Cooper, Ryan (2015) “Why Poor White Americans Are Dying of Despair,” The Hill.  November 6

(11) Stuckler, David abd Basu, Sanjay (2013) The Body Economic  Why Austerity   Kills. New York: Basic Books

(12) Szalavitz, Maia (2017) “Why Inequality Predicts Homicide Rates Better Than Any Other Variable” Evonomics 

(13) Daly, Martin (2016) Killing the Competition  Economic Inequality and Homicide. New York: Routledge

(14) Ansell, David (2017) The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. vii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 is professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College. His website is:http://www.alannasser.org.  His book, Overripe Economy  American Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy, will be published by Pluto Press in June, 2018. If you would like to be notified when the book is released, please send a request to nassera@evergreen.edu

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

black-horizontal
[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

window.newShareCountsAuto="smart";