by Stephen Lendman

Clinton’s unabashedly pro-war. She’s a war goddess. Straightaway post-9/11, she urged waging war on terror…She said any nation lending Al Qaeda “aid and comfort will now face the wrath of our country. I’ll stand behind Bush for a long time to come.”

She was Washington’s 67th Secretary of State. She served from January 21, 2009 – February 1, 2013. She’s arguably America’s worst. From 2001 – 2009, she was US Senator from New York. In 2008, she challenged Obama for the Democrat party’s presidential nomination. Supporters urge her to run again in 2016. She’s noncommittal. When asked, she says “I am not thinking about anything like that right now.”

She also said she’ll “do everything (she) can to make sure that women compete at the highest levels, not only in the United States but around the world.”

Husband Bill urges her to run. Some suspect she already made her move.

With or without her support, a “Ready for Hillary” political action committee was formed. It’s raising money for 2016. Campaigning never ends. America’s electoral season is seamless.

Hillary for 2016 T-shirts are on sale. Friends of Hillary Facebook send regular messages. When launching her 2008 campaign, she said “I’m in to win.” Insiders say she hasn’t changed her mind. In 2016, she’ll be 69.

In December, she scored high in public approval. A Washington Post/ABC News poll showed 57% of Americans support her presidential ambitions. Over 80% of Democrats back her candidacy.

Two-thirds of US women do. Two-thirds of Americans give her high marks as America’s top diplomat. She scored higher than any previous Secretary of State in 20 years of polling.

In four years, she visited 112 countries. She traveled nearly a million miles. She self-promoted everywhere. She has larger than life ambitions.

She’s gone from State. She’s very much still involved. The New York Times profiled her. She’s “at the peak of her influence,” it said. She’s “an instant presidential front-runner.”

She’s got lots of time to pursue her goal. “We need a new architecture for this new world,” she says.

Obama exceeded the worst of George Bush. Clinton joined his war cabinet. She’s ideologically hardline. She was a Wellesley College Goldwater Girl. She was president of Wellesley’s Young Republicans.

She’s militantly pro-war. In the 1990s, she was very much part of husband Bill’s foreign policy team. As an aggressive first lady, she had lots of influence.

She was influential in getting Madeleine Albright appointed Secretary of State in 1997. They consulted with each other often.

In her memoirs, Albright described their relationship as an “unprecedented partnership.”

“I was once asked whether it was appropriate for the two of us to work together so closely,” she added. “I agreed that it was a departure from tradition.”

At Secretary of State, Clinton headed foreign policy. She’s complicit in crimes of war and against humanity. She represents the worst of imperial arrogance. She a reliable spear-carrier.

Her outbursts reflect bullying and bluster, not diplomacy. She’s contemptuous of rule of law principles. She scorns democracy. She’s committed to war, not peace.

She’s unabashedly hawkish. As first lady, she urged husband Bill to bomb Belgrade in 1999. She ignored international and constitutional law. She lied about Slobodan Milosevic.

“You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time,” she said. “What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?”

For 78 days, NATO ravaged Yugoslavia. Nearly everything targeted was struck. Massive destruction and disruption followed. An estimated $100 billion in damage was inflicted. A humanitarian disaster resulted. Environmental contamination was extensive.

Large numbers were killed, injured or displaced. Two million people lost their livelihoods. Homes and communities were destroyed.

Nobel laureate Harold Pinter called NATO’s aggression “barbaric (and despicable), another blatant and brutal assertion of US power using NATO as its missile (to consolidate) American domination of Europe.”

Lawless aggression became humanitarian intervention. An avenue to Eurasia was opened. A permanent US military presence was established. American imperialism claimed another trophy.

Clinton’s unabashedly pro-war. She’s a war goddess. Straightaway post-9/11, she urged waging war on terror.

She said any nation lending Al Qaeda “aid and comfort will now face the wrath of our country. I’ll stand behind Bush for a long time to come.”

She supported annual defense (aka war) budgets. She voted for the Patriot Act and other police state legislation. She endorsed cluster bomb use in civilian areas and refugee camps.

She’s against banning land mines. She’s dismissive of human suffering. Wealth, power, privilege and dominance alone matter.

In 2005, she was one of only six Democrat senators opposed to blocking deployment of untested missile defense systems. They’re first-strike offensive weapons.

She supported restriction-free nuclear cooperation with Israel and other US allies violating NPT provisions. She endorsed nuclear weapons use in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She calls them deterrents that “keep the peace.”

She was one of the largest recipients of defense contractor cash. She backed war on Afghanistan and Iraq. She opposed a Democrat resolution. It would have required Bush to try diplomacy before launching war in 2003.

Her 2002 Senate speech supported war. She lied. She said “intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein rebuilt his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program.”

“He has given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members….It is clear that if left unchecked, (he’ll) continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”

“Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.”

“Now this much is undisputed.” What’s undisputed were her bald-faced lies. She repeated them ad nauseam as Secretary of State.

She supports the worst of Israeli lawlessness. At AIPAC’s 2008 convention, she said:

“The United States stands with Israel now and forever.”

We have shared interests….shared ideals….common values. I have a bedrock commitment to Israel’s security.”

(Against Islamic extremists), our two nations are fighting a shared threat.”

“I strongly support Israel’s right to self-defense (and) believe America should aid in that defense.”

“I am committed to making sure that Israel maintains a military edge to meet increasing threats.”

The only threats Israel faces are ones it invents.

“I am deeply concerned about the growing threat in Gaza (and) Hamas’ campaign of terror.”

She lied saying its charter “calls for the destruction of Israel.”

She lied again saying “Iran threatens to destroy Israel.”

She lied a third time, saying “I support calling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard what it is: a terrorist organization. It is imperative that we get both tough and smart about dealing with Iran before it is too late.”

She backs “massive retaliation” if Iran attacks Israel. In 2008, presidential aspirant Clinton said:

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

In other words, she threatened to murder 75 million people. Today it’s nearly 80 million. She’s extremist on all foreign policy issues. She favors police state harshness domestically.

She endorses outsized military budgets. She’s done nothing to contain nuclear proliferation. She supported Bush’s unilateral nuclear first-strike option, including against non-nuclear states.

She represents the worst of America’s dark side. She’s a war criminal multiple times over. She’s arguably America’s most shameless ever secretary of state.

She’s clearly the most brazen. Her language and attitude exceed the worst Cold War rhetoric.

Her take-no-prisoners thinking, character, and demagoguery tell all. She’s addicted to self-aggrandizement and diktat authority.

She relishes death, destruction, and war spoils.

She’s indifferent to human suffering. She’s a monument to wrong over right. She’s a disgrace and embarrassment to her country, position and humanity.

She may become America’s 45th president. Perhaps she won’t get a chance to try. Humanity may not survives its 44th. The fullness of time will tell.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

http://www.dailycensored.com/hillary-clinton-profile-of-imperial-arrogance-and-lawlessness/

Editors’ Note: Let’s face it: Power suits are career enemies of the public interest. We are using the word “career” here and that’s no hyperbole. A power shift toward democracy is not only just, it is indispensable at this point if democracy is to have the slightest chance of surviving in America. Evidence? Just consider this: The CEOs behind the “Fix the Debt” campaign are doubling down, Fortune reports, on their drive to convince Congress to cut spending for Social Security and Medicare. Need we say more?

This Week

Who better deserves to be richly rewarded for the risks they take on the job, the corporate and banking execs who gaze out the windows of comfortable suites high up in Manhattan’s skyscraper towers or the veteran window washers who dangle outside those windows in the bitter cold and searing heat?

Those window washers, we know from a just-published New Yorker profile, face all sorts of dangers. The wind “blows capriciously” around tall buildings. Updrafts and cross-drafts can drive rain torrents every which way. The window washer survival rule of thumb: four stories. If you fall more, you die.

And what risk do power suits face if something goes wrong? Well, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon lost his bank $6 billion. The price he paid? He had his annual pay cut — to $11.5 million. Lehman’s Richard Fuld crashed his entire bank. He had to downsize to a plush new apartment where the living room only stretched 40 feet.

But most execs don’t have to ever worry about sacrificing. They just rig the game so they never lose. More on their charades in this week’s Too Much.

GREED AT A GLANCE
Defenders of our unequal social order are feeling a bit defensive these days — and taking solace from wherever they can find it. The folks at Fox News, for instance, are happily claiming that Downton Abbey, the hit public TV series devoted to life and labor at a 1920s British estate, is helping average Americans warm to rich people. Downton Abbey’s wealthy, says journalist Stuart Varney, come across as “nice” people who “create jobs for heaven’s sake.” More good news for fans of aristocratic fortune: Technology is solving America’s servant shortage! If you can’t find a Downton Abbey-style valet, the luxury Robb Report advises, you can now pick up a fully automated “gentleman’s closet,” complete with a Cognac-and-cigar bar and a golf simulator. Prices start at $2 million . . .

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz collected $28.9 million in 2012, the java giant has just disclosed, an 80 percent hike over the $16.1 million he took home in 2011 when he ranked as the highest-paid chief exec in the Pacific Northwest for the third straight year. Why the big boost? Starbucks board members wanted to reward Schultz for “his critical role as the chief architect and leader of the Starbucks transformation agenda.” That transformation started humming late in 2008 when the company informed baristas that Starbucks would no longer guarantee them an annual “fixed employer match” to their 401(k) contributions. To “grow responsibly and profitably for the long term,” the company explained, “we need to use our benefit dollars in a way that provides the most value to the greatest number.” Or at least to Howard Schultz . . .

How well is the U.S. Treasury monitoring executive pay at the corporate and financial giants U.S. taxpayers have bailed out? Not so well at all, the special inspector general for the bailout reported last week. The three firms still under federal bailout watch last year — AIG, GM, and Ally Financial — passed along 18 requests to hike executive pay. Treasury approved all 18. Overall, notes special inspector general Christy Romero, 68 of the 69 execs Treasury tracked at the three companies took home over $1 million in compensation — and 16 pocketed over $5 million. The original bailout guidelines stipulated that executive pay at taxpayer-rescued firms should not top $500,000 “except for good cause.”

PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK

Big U.S. corporations, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt griped in a recent letter to shareholders, are getting “vilified.” In 2011, Immelt did try to turn that around. He agreed to chair President Obama’s Jobs Council, convinced, he confided to friends, he could move Obama right. Immelt’s CEO-heavy Council went on to advance a variety of corporate policy chestnuts — less regulation, lower corporate taxes — and made no real effort to find common ground with the Council’s labor union reps. Last week President Obama let the Council expire. Immelt can now devote his full attention to sending jobs overseas, underfunding pensions, avoiding taxes, and other aspects of G.E. business as usual. That business pays well. Immelt has averaged $10.3 million the last six years.

PROGRESS AND PROMISE

The CEOs behind the “Fix the Debt” campaign are doubling down, Fortune reports, on their drive to convince Congress to cut spending for Social Security and Medicare. Fix the Debt now has 80 full-time staff and a $45 million war chest. Meanwhile, the corporations these CEOs run continue to sidestep billions in taxes. But activists are pushing back — with a campaign to “Flip the Debt.” Loopholes and shaved tax rates for America’s top 1 percent, Flip the Debt points out, have cost Uncle Sam $2.3 trillion since 2001. Instead of “fixing” the debt with cuts to programs that help average Americans, say activists, we need to “flip the debt” and “put responsibility where it belongs.”

________________

INDISPENSABLE REPORT: Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in all 50 States.

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Stat of the Week

Nearly half of America’s households, reports the Corporation for Enterprise Development, now rate as “liquid asset poor.” These 43.9 percent — 132.1 million people overall — don’t have enough savings to cover “basic expenses” for three months should paychecks suddenly stop. America’s 400 Forbes richest, by contrast, hold assets that average $4.2 billion each, enough to cover what might be termed “lavish expenses” — of $1 million per month — for 350 years.

IN FOCUS

If This California Mansion Could Speak . . .
. . . we would have a fascinating, first-hand history of the roller-coaster first century of federal income taxation

The modern federal income tax turns 100 this year. In Washington, D.C. this week, a distinguished panel of tax experts and historians will be marking the occasion with a special symposium. More such 100th anniversary events are coming. All will no doubt make an important scholarly contribution.

But if we really want to understand just what the federal income tax has accomplished — and failed to accomplish — over the course of the last 100 years, the best place to start just might be a majestic century-old mansion that overlooks Santa Barbara in Southern California.

This mansion and the federal income tax both entered the world the same year, 1913. The manse reflected the prodigious wealth of America’s original Gilded Age plutocracy. The income tax represented an attempt to shrink that plutocracy down to democratic size. That attempt succeeded, but only for a time.

Our latest contemporary sign of federal income taxation’s ultimate failure: A luxury realtor has just placed Santa Barbara’s grandest fine old mansion up for sale — for a whopping $57.5 million.

Frederick Forrest Peabody would be pleased.

A century ago, Peabody rated as one of America’s richest corporate execs. The company he ran manufactured Arrow shirts, and Arrow had become one of America’s most recognizable brand names. The rewards from this recognition? Immense. In 1909, Peabody’s company would declare a 300 percent dividend.

America’s captains of industry faced no taxes back then on dividends or any of their other earnings, and Peabody took full advantage of his rapidly expanding fortune. In 1906, for a sunny getaway from his upstate New York business base, he bought 40 ocean-view hilltop acres in Santa Barbara and a few years later dotted his new acreage with 7,000 eucalyptus trees.

In 1913, Peabody would begin building the home of his dreams amid the eucalyptus, a palace he would call Solana, Spanish for sunny place. Money would be no object. He filled the over 20,000 square-foot edifice with only the finest of finishings, from hand-carved mahogany to 17th century French oak paneling.

Money would be no object because Peabody didn’t have to worry about sharing any of his money with Uncle Sam. The new federal income tax enacted in 1913, right after the ratification of a constitutional amendment that opened the way to income taxation, would prove no more than a minor inconvenience.

Progressive lawmakers in Congress had pushed for a steeply graduated tax that subjected income in the highest income brackets to rates as high as 68 percent. The legislation finally adopted set that top rate at just 7 percent.

This top rate would bounce up during World War I but then sink to 25 percent in the 1920s. By that time, Frederick Forrest Peabody had stepped down from his captain-of-industry perch and settled into a comfortable life as a country squire. In 1919, he would move full-time to Santa Barbara from New York and entertain as many as 150 guests at a time within his opulent Solana space.

Solana, even so, would not prove satisfying enough for Peabody. He divorced, picked up a trophy wife in 1920, and then honeymooned at a 4,500-acre ranch he had bought the year before near a hot springs resort in central California.

Peabody would continue his extravagant spending ways as the low-tax 1920s wore on. In 1926, his outlays for landscaping would win Solana a stop on the annual tour of the posh Garden Club of America.

Peabody would not live to host another tour. He died in 1927, late in his 60s. His widow carried on at Solana. But her plutocratic world was changing, and the federal income tax was rushing that change along.

In the 1930s, under the pressure of growing mass movements for economic justice, tax rates on America’s highest incomes would begin to rise. By 1944, the tax rate on income over $200,000 had soared to 94 percent. The top federal income tax rate would hover near that level for the next 20 years.

Some of America’s rich, mainly the nation’s oilmen, had depletion allowances and other loopholes that shielded them from any significant tax squeeze. But the rich overall felt a real tax bite. By 1958, the year Peabody’s widow died, the nation’s top 0.1 percent had seen their share of national income shrink by two-thirds.

In America’s new tax-the-rich environment of the mid 20th century, manses like Solana, with their huge maintenance costs, had a hard time finding private buyers able to afford their pleasures. Great palaces of America’s plutocracy would soon, in the years after WW II, be turned into suburban subdivisions.

Solana, for its part, would sell in 1959 for just $283,000, a fraction of the estate’s former value. The buyer: the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a nonprofit led by former University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins. The robust debates that took place at his Center, Hutchins announced, would serve as an “early warning system” for American democracy.

But Hutchins and his fellow deep thinkers never saw the danger to democracy that could come from a re-emergent plutocracy. The nation, they believed, had leveled plutocracy forever. Stiff taxes on the rich, they assumed, had become a permanent fixture of American life. They would be wrong.

By the mid 1980s, the high tax rates on high incomes that helped make Frederick Peabody’s Solana such a hard sell in the 1950s had all faded away. With their disappearance, America’s plutocratic order would soon reappear.

The nation’s top 0.1 percent, newly updated research from Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez documents, collected 9.4 percent of the nation’s income in 2011, the most recent year with stats available, over triple the top 0.1 percent share in the late 1950s. This hefty top 0.1 percent share, Saez noted last month, “will likely surge” even more once the 2012 figures become available.

In other words, the luxury realtors from Sotheby’s now hawking Solana — for $57.5 million — don’t figure to be disappointed.

NEW AND NOTABLE
The Games Top Executives Play — and Fix
Ella Hale and Ryan Hyde, In a Rebounding Market, Fortune 500 Companies Granting Fewer Shares and More LTI Value, Towers Watson Executive Compensation Bulletin, January 29, 2013.

Advising corporations on executive compensation has become a lucrative sideline for corporate consulting firms. These firms like to claim they’re helping corporations match up “pay with performance.” But the entire CEO pay-setting process actually serves to make “performance” as irrelevant as possible.

Sometimes the consulting companies inadvertently spill the beans about the charades they’re playing. This new Executive Compensation Bulletin from the consultants at Towers Watson does just that.

In 2009, the bulletin details, Fortune 500 companies saw “a spike” in the number of stock option awards going to top execs. Options give their recipients the right to buy company shares several years down the road at today’s share price.

What made options so attractive in 2009? That year saw the worst of the Great Recession. Corporate shares were trading at their lowest levels in ages.

These shares, of course, figured to increase enormously in value over the next few years, as the overall stock market recovered, and, indeed, the stock market has recovered. Those CEOs who received big option grants in 2009 can now buy their company’s shares at 2009 prices, then turn around and sell them at today’s hugely rebounded 2013 stock market level. Automatic windfall!

With the stock market now back up, of course, new stock options rewards no longer make for sure windfalls down the road. An option to buy shares in 2018 at 2013 prices might not be worth anything. The stock market has already regained all the Great Recession lost ground. Overall share prices might now stagnate over the next few years — or even trend lower.

How is the CEO compensation community responding to this new stock market uncertainty? Corporations are shifting CEO rewards from stock options to just plain stock, shares that executives will automatically own in a few years — without paying anything — so long as they remain on the job.

Executives, once they gain title to these “restricted” shares, can sell them and pocket the proceeds as pure personal profit. So even if their company share price drops from $20 to $15 between now and then, they can still walk away with a $15 per share profit. More windfall!

Fortune 500 companies, Towers Watson reports, are now giving out 72 percent more restricted share rewards to their execs than five years ago. The number of stock option grants is now running 33 percent lower than five years ago.

And people wonder why CEO pay is rising endlessly upward.

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ABOUT TOO MUCH
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From our archives—

By The Rational Radical

AMERICA THE MOST SELFISH

We are the most selfish country ever to have existed.
This conclusion is inescapable if you compare our potential to our actions.

In the past, before the advent of modern technology and medicine, there was a limit to humanity’s ability to reduce suffering on this planet. But given our present advanced technology and unparalleled wealth, the United States could, had it the will, go a long way towards literally creating Heaven on Earth. Then we truly would be the nation on the hill.

We could, if we chose to, wipe out all childhood diseases by a worldwide inoculation program. But we choose not to.

We could, if we chose to, ensure that no human on earth goes hungry. But we choose not to.

We could, if we chose to, provide potable drinking water, sanitation, and shelter to all the world’s people. But we choose not to.

We could, if we chose to, do a host of other specific good works that each reader can imagine. But we choose not to. (We could save, for example, ALL endangered species around the world, beginning with Africa, where constant wars, corruption, habitat destruction, and brutal poverty conspire to threaten the lives of millions of animals. Some charities work there on a pittance to remedy these ills, but with what the US spends on one advanced fighter plane we could fund just about every animal relief program in the African continent today.)

What do we choose to do instead?

We choose to spend our money on, and use our technology for, a myriad of frivolous, often environmentally destructive consumer goods and services: massive SUV’s, giant screen TV’s, countless changes of clothes with every passing fashion, cosmetic surgery, and so on ad infinitum: an endless mélange of gadgets, widgets, and other doodads that no one ever thought they needed until advertising convinced them that they did.

Americans even complain of feeling put upon. Their taxes are too high. They can’t buy a new car often enough. They don’t have enough leisure time.

Please.

The average American has a wider choice of safer food, more material comfort, more personal safety, and an overall easier life than 99.999% of all the humans who have ever lived on this planet.

And we could still have it and at the same time also embark on the Heaven on Earth effort discussed above.

So each one of us needs to look in the mirror, and for whatever setting each of us believes our Final Reckoning will take place in, practice our speech about why we and our society made the choices we did.

••••

Originally run on Sunday, November 10, 2002
Well, I want to thank all the many people who have told me to “Love it or leave it” all these years, starting back in the Vietnam era and continuing to the present day. Back then they demanded to know “Why don’t you go to Russia?” and now they ask “Why don’t you go to Iraq?” Of course, these logic-challenged question-askers would actually themselves be happier in a place like Iraq or the old Soviet Union, since they would not have to be challenged in those countries with hearing dissenting views. But pointing this out is not why I write.

I write because finally, the hidden-to-them logic of their question struck me the other day: I will leave, but not to go to Russia or Iraq. And I won’t leave alone. How about I take New York, California and a few other states with me? That’s right, how about the Prime Blue States secede, and leave all the Red Bushian wasteland expanses to their own devices!

Who needs them? Besides growing our food and providing some other natural resources, what good are those places? Populated largely by morons who continually vote to screw themselves, I don’t want to be associated with them any more.

They’ll still sell our new country food and resources, because who else could buy them? But the rest of us won’t have to be stuck with their fundamentalist-inspired, imbecilic social claptrap and their bellicose, kill-them-all foreign policy that bloodies our name and besmirches our souls more and more with each passing year.

The brains, money and creativity are in the Blue States. Argue with me on that, if you dare.

So citing irreconcilable differences, a select group of us Prime Blue States should amicably separate from the Dunderhead Nation and call ourselves, oh, how about the United States of New America, or USNA?

I like to think outside the box. This may well be thinking outside the entire paper mill. But the inexorable logic of the secession idea just strikes me as so perfect.

A million questions naturally arise, the four main ones of which are:

–There are Constitutional means to add states to the union, so are there — or could there be enacted — Constitutional means for states to leave?

–Which states (or even counties within states?!) should be included in our select departing group?

–What’s the easiest and fairest way to allocate Federal government land, property and debts between the two new political entities?

–What about population transfer issues prior to the secession date, since no state is monolithic, and even hard-core Bushian states have some decent people in them, and, God help us, even we Prime Blue States have some Bushian Neanderthals who I’d love to see permanently cross over the border into the Red Nation.

I guess I need to take out the law books, as well as analyze that 2000 election Blue-Red map while cross-referencing with state population and economic data. (Anyone having any relevant legal cites or economic date please send it!)

Even if there are no established procedures for secession, shouldn’t the Red States want us to leave and make it easy for us to do so? Listening to Limbaugh, Hannity, Lott et al blast liberals, let alone anyone further left, all day and night, 24/7, we would only be giving them what they really want, wouldn’t we?

But just imagine the wonderful feeling that you and I could have if the likes of George Bush, Newt Gingrich, Anton Scalia and Trent Lott were in another country that was now incredibly weak. We wouldn’t have to give a damn what they thought, or what the cretins who considered them their leaders thought either.

It’s just too sweet to imagine…

Peter Schwarz, wsws.org

Eighty years ago, on January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed the leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler, as German chancellor. In the ensuing twelve years, the Hitler regime committed crimes never previously witnessed by mankind. It smashed the organized labor movement, subjected the country to a totalitarian dictatorship, destroyed Europe in an unprovoked war of aggression, and murdered millions of Jews, Roma and other minorities.

January 30, 1933 was a historic turning point. Before then, barbarism and anti-Semitism had been considered traits of economic and cultural backwardness. In 1933, however, the elite of a country that was highly developed both economically and culturally handed over power to a barbaric anti-Semite whose party relied on the dregs of society.

The source of this development lay in the irresolvable contradictions of German and international capitalism. The consequences of World War I and the onset of the global economic crisis in 1929 had ruined broad layers of the working class and middle class. German society was deeply divided; democracy existed only in name. The Weimar Republic survived on the basis of emergency decrees and presidential cabinets as it headed towards a social explosion.

Under these conditions, Hindenburg decided to entrust Hitler with the reins of government. The Nazis were needed to crush the workers’ movement. They had mass support among desperate layers of the petty-bourgeoisie and the lumpen proletariat, which they mobilized against the organized labor movement. The destruction of the labor movement was the prerequisite for the preparation of the war of conquest that German business so urgently demanded.

Hindenburg’s decision was supported by the heads of the army, by big business and by the bourgeois parties. Hitler did not have to conquer power; it was handed to him by the ruling elite. The claim, however, that the majority of Germans supported Hitler is patently false.

In the last election before the handover of power, held in November of 1932, the two major workers’ parties, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD), received half a million more votes than Hitler’s NSDAP. The workers hated the Nazis. Not only did they vote against Hitler, they wanted to fight him. But their leaders proved incapable of conducting such a struggle.

The SPD, which had crushed the proletarian revolution of 1918-19, had no intention of mobilizing the workers. The party took refuge behind the state, which it claimed would tame the Nazis. It encouraged illusions in the police and in the army and Hindenburg, whom the SPD backed in the Reichstag election of 1932. Nine months later, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor.

The social democratic-dominated unions went even further. The General Federation of German Trade Unions (ADGB) professed its loyalty to the new regime and demonstrated on May 1, 1933 under the swastika. All to no avail. On May 2, the Nazis stormed the union headquarters.

The key to stopping Hitler rested in the hands of the Communist Party, which had been founded in 1919 in response to the rightward turn of the SPD. Under the influence of Stalin, however, the KPD pursued a disastrous policy. It refused to make any distinction between National Socialists and Social Democrats, designating the latter as “social fascists.” The KPD leadership strictly refused to conclude a defensive alliance with the SPD against the Nazis.

Leon Trotsky and his followers fought tirelessly for such a united front, and were bitterly persecuted by the Stalinists. The Stalinist policy assumed an ultra-left form, but in fact it concealed the refusal of the Communist Party to undertake any struggle to expose the SPD leadership, win over social democratic workers and mount a serious struggle to oppose Hitler.
“No policy of the Communist Party could, of course, have transformed the Social Democracy into a party of the revolution,” Trotsky wrote in May 1933. “But neither was that the aim. It was necessary to exploit to the limit the contradiction between reformism and fascism—in order to weaken fascism, at the same time weakening reformism by exposing to the workers the incapacity of the Social Democratic leadership. These two tasks fused naturally into one. The policy of the Comintern bureaucracy led to the opposite result: the capitulation of the reformists served the interests of fascism and not of Communism; the Social Democratic workers remained with their leaders; the Communist workers lost faith in themselves and in the leadership.”

Trotsky drew far-reaching conclusions from the disastrous defeat of the German working class. Up until that point, the Left Opposition led by Trotsky fought for a political reorientation of the Communist parties and the Communist International. But following the refusal of the Communist International to draw any lessons from the German catastrophe and its prohibition of any discussion amongst its members of the disastrous policies of the KPD, such an orientation was no longer possible.

“An organization which was not roused by the thunder of fascism” Trotsky declared, “demonstrates thereby that it is dead and that nothing can ever revive it. To say this openly and publicly is our direct duty toward the proletariat and its future.” The task was no longer to reform the Comintern, but to build new communist parties and a new International.

Trotsky met with fierce resistance from centrist groups, which shared some of his criticisms of Stalinism but declared that the establishment of a new International was premature. Such a step, they argued, was possible only on the basis of a fresh upsurge of the revolutionary movement.

Trotsky decisively rejected such arguments. “Marxists, however, are not fatalists,” he wrote. “They do not unload upon the historical process those very tasks which the historical process has posed before them… Without a fused and steeled revolutionary party, a socialist revolution is inconceivable.”

These words once again take on burning and immediate significance. The international crisis of capitalism, which has worsened dramatically since the financial crisis of 2008, places explosive class struggles on the agenda. In Egypt, Greece, Portugal and Spain workers are rebelling on a daily basis against the brutal austerity measures and political attacks being carried out by their governments. The governments resort in response to authoritarian methods and encourage the growth of fascist organizations, such as Golden Dawn in Greece, the National Front in France, and Jobbik in Hungary.

A host of pseudo-leftist organizations together with the trade unions are doing everything in their power to lead the struggles of workers into a dead end and defend bourgeois rule. The most urgent task today is to build a new revolutionary leadership that unites workers internationally and mobilizes them in the struggle for workers’ power and the construction of a socialist society.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Schwarz writes for the World Socialist Web Site, an offshoot of the SEP (Socialist Equality Party), which he naturally endorses as a solution to the crises outlined in the essay.

In a perfect world, I would be considered a liberal-Republican. This is not a perfect world.

I believe that most issues, other than defense of our country, discrimination, poverty and interstate commerce could be handled at the local and/or state level. But it won’t happen. It won’t happen because I am too lazy to care what happens at the local landfill or what happens at school board meeting or who gets turned away from a local hospital or who gets jail time and why.

You see, the world is too complex for me. And the differences apparent in living in San Jose or Columbus or Milwaukee are so insignificant that it is much easier to let all these bothersome issues be decided in congress by national politicians and not have me be annoyed as to whether or not schools will have to close because of low national tests scores or if tipping fees at the city dump are going to be raised because of the new EPA regulations. There is no local anymore.

So in my opinion, it is impossible to be a Republican in modern-day America. In reality, all of us are Democrats because we are so interrelated and dependent on one another that it is impossible to govern 315 million people on a local basis. We’re national baby!

Here’s a perfect illustration: In my city we have about 40,000 illegal immigrants. Down deep inside, most of us would like to load up 8,000 Greyhound busses and send them back to Tijuana. We can’t. Even if we used the entire city budget and rounded up all the illegals and shipped them off—those busboy jobs and laundry jobs and roofing jobs would be calling out to the illegals who live in San Jose or Milwaukee and bingo-bango-bong—we’d have 40,000 different illegals living in our barrios. Besides, who’d takeover all those taco-wagons that I rely on?

So, if you are a Republican, drive your Edsel to the nearest DNC office and lay prostrate. Under Obamacare, you can have your prostate checked while you are there. However, you will have to go to the back of the line before you can become relevant or receive any benefits. And, you must furnish your own rubber glove.

There is only one real political party in America—and it is divided into two broad groups: The Have’s and The Havnots. Neither party can deliver us back to the days of yore, back to the days of Adams and a weak central government. If you’re tired of big-government, sorry, get used to it. Oh, I know there are all these debates going on about cutting the size of the federal government. But it will never happen. It will never happen because politicians have a vested interest in watching government grow. Take away the security blanket of Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and Welfare and Obamacare and food stamps—and we will have anarchy. Cut those benefits and you piss-off 98% of the voters. The easiest group to attack, of course, are the very least of us; the single mothers, the homeless the mentally ill who mostly rely on food-stamps. They don’t vote. So, you might think that *food-stamps would be under attack—nope, the poor have a strong ally in Big Agriculture so even the poor are safe from Draconian cuts.

Wealthy folks had figured out all this interrelated stuff long ago. They don’t much care if the politician they’re backing has a D or a R beside their name, they only care to make sure that the Capital Gains Taxes are not screwed with and that they can still write-off that business expense for the trip to Tijuana and can still swipe hookers through on their American Express card.

Pass the taco sauce.

*Foodstamps should become a new noun this year and I will not have to hyphenate it any longer. There is little point in wasting a noun as a modifier when one comprehensive noun will do quite nicely, thank you. Besides, foodstamps have been around for a generation now and they’re not going anywhere. In fact, we should shorten it to Fstamp and take away any ambiguities with postal-stamps, which, should remain hyphenated because soon they will go the way of the Edsel.

Mike Ingles is a connoisseur of fine-Mexican cuisine in Columbus, Ohio and prefers the spicy sauce.