Free Money for Everyone! What’s the World Coming To?

Daniel Raventós

Barcelona.

From Liberia, to Tokyo, to the Cherokee Nation and Old Europe, more and more people are talking about Basic Income in all kinds of different forums. If the global economic and environmental crises have had any positive effect it would be that people are fighting back. As history has so often shown, the neediest people are those who best understand human rights (in their absence). For more than three millennia the three basic principles of human rights, freedom, justice and human dignity, have been inscribed on clay and stone tablets, parchment and paper, usually after they have been shouted for and fought for, all around the world, in streets, squares and a variety of battlefields, from Mount Vesuvius (Spartacus) to slave ships. Nobody has to be taught these principles because all humans understand them as their rights. In the concept of “universal human rights”, “universal” is redundant since the qualifier “human” means all humans. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), it qualifies “Declaration”, suggesting the geographical scope of the proclamation rather than rights for all humans. In any case, the “universal” rights it pledged were swiftly rendered into separate “generations” of broken promises floating above and outside social and juridical institutions, without any mechanisms of guarantee and bestowed piecemeal by leaders or in the warped forms of humanitarianism and charity, although it is obvious that the generalised nature of a human right theoretically distinguishes it from any privilege confined to a group, class or caste. Now, with the obscenely growing gap between rich and poor, when it is estimated that by 2016 the richest 1% will own more than the rest of the world, the universal principle is more urgent than ever.

Basic Income is one very practical example of a universal human right. It is not just an economic measure to eradicate poverty but an income paid by the State to each member or accredited resident of a society, regardless of whether he or she wishes to engage in paid employment, or is rich or poor, independently of any other sources of income and irrespective of cohabitation arrangements in the domestic sphere. The fact that everyone receives a Basic Income doesn’t mean that everyone gains: the rich lose. How to finance it is as important as the quantity involved and we favour progressive tax reform which redistributes wealth from the rich to the rest of the population. Precisely the opposite of recent trends. In guaranteeing the most basic right of all, that of material existence, it would bring a host of side benefits, as many studies show. In the case of work, for example, it could have a major positive impact, not only in this regard but also in other spheres. With her momentous climate change alert This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein pulls together elements of science, politics, geopolitics, economics, the “stupid growth” and “stupid profits” of capitalism, “extractivism”, patriarchy, psychology, ethics and activism, inter alia, which shape the future of the planet. She concludes that there is an urgent need for valuing work that we currently don’t value and specifically mentions Basic Income, saying, “there has to be a stronger social safety net because when people don’t have options, they’re going to make bad choices”. For Klein, the “universal” sense of Basic Income is that it could help to transform the way we treat and think about our whole (social and physical) environment.

After years of having relatively few supporters, the idea of Basic Income is now spreading around the world. In Spain – probably “the place on Earth where the debate around Basic Income is most advanced” – after five years of public spending cuts, depressed demand, record unemployment, burgeoning poverty, and a growing public debt now at around 100% of GDP, and after twenty years of discussion in universities, grassroots movements and social networks, Basic Income is finally going mainstream. Although the new game-changing left-wing political party Podemos has temporarily retreated from its initial Basic Income proposal in favour of “full employment” (more fitting, perhaps, for the welfare states of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s), many party members are Basic Income stalwarts. Other political organisations now proposing it include Equo, Pirata and Bildu (a coalition in the Basque Country) and, in Galicia, Anova, while still more small parties have projects which, while not strictly a Basic Income, come close.

A recent number of the Basic Income Earth Network newsletter gives an idea of the worldwide spread of different versions of Basic Income. In Greece the new ruling party Syriza has declared its aim to establish “a closer link between pension contribution and income… and provide targeted assistance to employees between 50 and 65, including through a Guaranteed Basic Income scheme so as to eliminate the social and political pressure of early retirement which over-burdens the pension funds”. In Finland, 65.5% of 1,642 (out of nearly 2,000) candidates for the parliamentary elections on 19 April publicly support the policy. Cyprus has passed a new law giving low income families a Guaranteed Minimum Income of €480 a month. In 2013, a grassroots movement in Switzerland called for a Basic Income of 2,500 Swiss francs per month and received over 100,000 signatures needed to force a referendum on the proposal. Ninety per cent of the members of Hungary’s Green-Left party Párbeszéd Magyarországért (“Dialogue for Hungary”) have voted for a Basic Income to which all citizens would be entitled, €80 per month for children, €160 for adults and €240 for young mothers. The poverty line in Hungary is estimated at around €200 for a single adult. In Portugal, where Basic Income is relatively unknown and misunderstood, the political party LIVRE has included Basic Income in its draft political programme for the autumn elections this year. Now recognising that inequality and social justice are also “green” issues, the fast-growing Green Party of England and Wales has announced that a Basic Income will be included in its manifesto.

Outside Europe, Basic Income is gaining support in other industrialised countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Alaska is an outstanding example because since 1982 it has had its own particular form of Basic Income, an unconditional annual dividend paid on an individual basis to all people who have lived there for at least twelve months (except those convicted of felony in the past year). The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF), consisting of 25% of the proceeds of the state’s mineral (oil and gas) sales or royalties, foots the bill. The annual payout is based on a five-year average of APF earnings and has varied from $331.29 in 1984 to $3,269 in 2008. Although this “Basic Income” doesn’t entail tax reform, its benefits are undeniable. Alaska features among the states with the lowest poverty rates in the United States and is one of the least unequal. In 2009, the dividend added US$900 million to Alaskans’ purchasing power, the equivalent of 10,000 new jobs.

The idea of Basic Income has taken root in the countries of the South as an anti-poverty measure, for example in Brazil, Namibia and South Africa. Brazil is the world’s first country to have adopted a law (2003) calling for gradual introduction of a Basic Income. In South Africa, trade unions, churches and many NGOs are calling for it and, in Namibia, the Basic Income Grant Coalition (headed by the Council of Churches, National Union of Namibian Workers, Namibian NGO Forum, National Youth Council and the Namibian Network of AIDS Service Organisations) conducted a two-year pilot project (2007–2009) in Otjivero-Omitara, a low-income rural area, where 930 inhabitants received a monthly payment of 100 Namibian dollars each (US$12.4). The payment was small but the results were surprising: numbers of underweight children went from 42% to 10%; school dropout rates fell from 40% to almost 0%; the number of small businesses increased, as did the purchasing power of the inhabitants, thereby creating a market for the new products. However, the Namibian government has thus far balked at introducing a national Basic Income. In Mexico City a pension paid as a right to all people (some 410,000) of 68 years and over has also paid social dividends: increased autonomy and freedom of the aged, more respect in the family milieu, greater public visibility, improved self esteem, better nutrition and health, and a decrease in social inequality. In 2010, a partial Basic Income was introduced in India in a UNICEF-supported pilot scheme conducted by the trade union Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). For one year, 6,000 individuals in rural areas of Madhya Pradesh received an unconditional payment, working out at about US$24 per month for the average family. The project ended with improved nutrition, health, education, housing and infrastructure, economic activity and, especially, educational attainment.

Other initiatives, related to Basic Income to the extent that they are “free money programmes” have given one-off payments to homeless people in London, to the poor inhabitants of a village in the west of Kenya, and to girls and women in Malawi. All of them show clear correlations between free money and lower crime rates, reduced inequality, less malnutrition, lower infant mortality and teenage pregnancy rates, less truancy, better school completion rates, greater economic growth and higher emancipation rates. Then there is the interesting case of Cherokee, North Carolina (population 8,000) where the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation owns the casino. In 1996, the tribal council voted to distribute half the casino’s profits evenly among its approximately 15,000 members so as to give the community a share in the gambling wealth. The payouts have risen from $500 to about $10,000 per person per year. Jane Costello, a Duke University researcher who has been studying the effects of these payments on 1,420 Cherokee-area children over the last twenty years, comparing the lives of poor children who got the payments with those who didn’t, found that, some years on, those getting the payments were one grade ahead in school compared with those who didn’t, overall mental health improved, and behavioural problems in this group decreased by 40% and crime rates by 22%.

The “partial” Basic Income programmes and one-off “free money” initiatives are instructive because they demonstrate that small unconditional payments can make great differences in social and mental health. If a one-off non-universal payment can have such positive effects, what could a “true” Basic Income do? But what is a Basic Income? There is some confusion here because what is often thought to be “Basic Income” takes many forms and different names. Spain, for example, has a “renda garantida de ciutadania” in the Statute of Catalonia, while in other Autonomous Regions it appears as a “salario social” or “renta mínima de inserción”. However, these are all conditioned subsidies for people below a certain income threshold. Podemos came up with an impeccably defined Basic Income in the heady days of its win at the European elections but then opted out, while the smaller parties, Bildu, Anova and Equo, have programmed a Basic Income close to the definition used by the Spanish Red Renta Básica(Basic Income Network). This coincides with that adopted in November 2007 by the Universal Declaration of Emergent Human Rights, approved at the Universal Forum of Cultures in Monterrey. Basic Income is enshrined as a human right in Article 1 (3):

The right to a basic income or universal citizen’s income that guarantees to every human being, independently of age, gender, sexual orientation, civil or employment status, the right to live in material conditions of dignity. To this end, a regular cash payment, financed by tax reforms and covered by the state budget, and sufficient to cover his or her basic needs, is recognised as a right of citizenship of every member-resident of the society, whatever his or her other sources of income may be.

Rather than holding out a right to having certain minimal vital needs covered in cases of poverty or some catastrophe, Article 1 (3) enshrines Basic Income as a right, an ongoing guarantee to every single individual of being able “to live in material conditions of dignity”. No one would be excluded by poverty from engaging in social life and exercising her or his rights and duties as a citizen. It conceives of this right on a universal scale, for rich and poor, developed or developing countries alike.

A guaranteed basic income, above the poverty line, for everybody, would offer a much firmer, autonomous base of existence to (theoretically) all the world’s citizens. The economic independence furnished by a basic income, paid not to households but to individuals, would establish a kind of domestic “counter-power” that could strengthen the bargaining position of women, especially those dependent on the husband or male head of the family, or low earners in exploitative, part time or discontinuous employment. Many farmers in poor countries and workers in developed countries are struggling to survive. In capitalist economies, unemployment is comparable with the landlessness of small farmers in agrarian societies because both economies are characterised by dispossession of land and other means of production. The dispossessed must then sell their labour, usually in crushing conditions, in order to subsist. One of the basic features of today’s economic functioning is the great power of capital to bring the working population to heel. Underlying this disciplinary capacity is the existence of a large, jobless part of the population. When the possibility of dismissal looms ever-larger, the working population must accept increasingly worse conditions from bosses having the whip hand. In a situation close to full employment, when this existed, the power of employers was diminished. A Basic Income would represent an effective tool for countering the disciplinary power of capital and would make leaving the job market a viable option. Although it may seem paradoxical at first sight, many unions (with a few honorable exceptions) have failed to understand the enormous capacity of Basic Income for undermining the discipline that capital can and does impose in a situation of widespread unemployment.

In poor countries this possibility of non-dominated organisation of labour power could bring into being alternative networks of production while also protecting traditional ways of life. For example, a group of small farmers could buy a tractor to increase food production, and a truck to take their produce to a market. This would expand productive networks and encourage sustainable community development, which would then give villagers more effective leverage in claiming essential or improved infrastructure, for example schools, clinics, roads and bridges. In a post-conflict situation, a Basic Income would also have beneficial effects by enabling a return to traditional forms of community-based production and, thus reintegrating people, would help to defuse the potential for violence that flares up periodically and dramatically especially among uprooted young people who have no opportunities to work, or because evident signs of increasing social inequality in a traumatised society are a permanent flashpoint for a generalised feeling of injustice. Food security is vitally important. Such a basic matter as a well-balanced diet could be greatly favoured, for example, if people could transport vegetables to the coast and fish to inland villages. This alone could make a notable difference in the overall health of the population. Economic development is better achieved by breaking ties of dependency and promoting robust productive initiatives at both individual and group levels, projects that are conceived and planned within the society as opposed to the often drastically inappropriate schemes that are imposed from outside aid agencies.

A Basic Income is not difficult to finance, as a recent exhaustive study for Catalonia has shown. Another study recently carried out for the Kingdom of Spain as a whole, based on a sample of almost two million income tax declarations, showed that a Basic Income at the poverty threshold of €7,500 per year (and a fifth of that to under-eighteens) could be financed without touching any social service and, moreover, saving a lot in administrative costs and welfare payments of lesser sums, which would be abolished. A person getting a pension of €1,500 per month would receive the same (€650 as Basic Income and €850 as a pension) but the person now receiving benefits or a pension of €400 would receive €650, more than 60% extra. These two studies are based on a system of progressive income tax redistribution in which the richest 20% would finance the Basic Income, which they would also receive. The lower-income 70% of the population would gain; a neat reverse of the present situation. Introducing a Basic Income is not an economic problem but a political one.

Each zone and country is different, but financing should basically entail changing budgetary priorities, reform of taxation systems or increasing VAT and excise duties on luxury goods, cars, alcohol or tobacco, and financial transaction taxes, for example. This achieves a substantial reduction in inequality of income distribution and greater simplicity and internal coherence in taxation and welfare systems. Basic Income isn’t a panacea that would solve all the world’s social and economic problems, but it would mean wider-spread opportunities for people to participate in productive activities, enhanced social inclusion within stronger communities, greater political and social participation, and a major reduction of poverty and poverty-related problems. It is not an isolated economic policy but part of an overall project in the domain of political economy, aiming to guarantee and fortify the material existence of the whole population. It is an institutionally guaranteed and inclusive form of property that might also be seen as a kind of indemnification of past and present wrongs because it calls upon the more privileged citizens to contribute towards achieving the right of existence for everyone. Herein resides the political obstacle to Basic Income.

The Racial Injustices of Mass Deportation

Tanya Golash-Boza

Comprehensive immigration reform, it seems, is no longer on the political agenda. It is incumbent upon us (by us I mean people committed to immigrant rights and racial justice) to put it back on the agenda. And, the focus of that agenda should be the repeal of the 1996 laws: IIRIRA and AEDPA.

Between 2009 and 2013, I carried out a research project that involved interviewing 147 deportees in four countries. One of the deportees I met, who I will call Ryan, was living outside of Kingston, Jamaica in the house of a distant relative. I will share his story with you, as it is emblematic of many of the problems with immigration law enforcement in the United States and points to the need for reform of the 1996 laws.

Ryan moved to Brooklyn, New York, with his mother, when he was six years old. There, he finished high school and enrolled in college. Things were going well for Ryan until he made one mistake that would change his life.

When Ryan was about 20 years old, he received a phone call from a friend, who asked Ryan for a ride home. As they were driving home, they came across a police checkpoint. It turned out Ryan’s friend was carrying cocaine. Ryan and his friend were found guilty of drug possession and Ryan was sentenced to 18 months in boot camp. When Ryan was released, his fiancé, his daughter, and his mother came to pick him up from boot camp.

However, Ryan was not permitted to go home with his family. Ryan was a legal permanent resident of the United States. And, he had been convicted of possession of narcotics, and thus faced mandatory deportation to Jamaica. From one day to the next, Ryan’s life fell apart.

Ryan was deported due to changes in deportation law passed in 1996 that made deportation mandatory for certain crimes. Since the implementation of these laws in 1997, over five million people have been deported from the United States.

The current period is exceptional insofar as there has never previously been a time when so many people were deported from the United States.

Five million people since 1997. That’s a huge number. It’s over twice the sum total of all deportations prior to 1997. The details of these numbers are often the subject of debate. However, no matter how you slice it, we are in a moment of mass deportation and the effects of this policy are felt in communities across this country and throughout Latin America.

A recent Pew survey revealed that over a quarter of Latinos know someone who has been deported or detained in the past year. This means the effects of deportation are reverberating far beyond these five million individual deportations.

Last year, over 100,000 people who were living in the United States were apprehended by immigration law enforcement agents and deported to their countries of birth. That is three times as many interior removals as there were in 2003. An interior removal refers to someone like Ryan who was living in the United States prior to being deported.

Over the past decade, over 200,000 people who had lived in the United States for more than ten years have been removed from this country. That amounts to the city of Rochester, New York, being depleted of its population over the course of 10 years. Or perhaps more accurately, imagine every father in San Francisco being removed from the country.

Last year, about 100,000 parents of U.S. citizen children were removed from the United States. That’s ten times as many as the sum total of all parents of U.S. citizens removed between 1997 and 2006.

Not only is mass deportation on the rise, it also targets specific populations. About 90% of deportees have been men, and nearly all (97%) are from the Americas, even though about half of all non-citizens are women and only 60 percent of non-citizens are from the Americas.

Mass deportation happens often with minimal due process. In 2009, 231 immigration judges heard more than 300,000 cases – an average of over 1,200 per judge. Dana L. Marks, an immigration judge in San Francisco explained that asylum hearings often feel “like holding death penalty cases in traffic court.”

Immigration court is a bit like traffic court. It is an administrative court without the due process protections of criminal courts. In immigration proceedings, you have no right to legal representation. You can be detained without bond. You can be deported without a full hearing. Ryan, for example, never got to tell a judge that he had come to the United States when he was six, that he qualified for and had applied for citizenship, that he was a college student, that his daughter had just been born, or even that he had no family or friends in Jamaica.

The 1996 laws took away most of judge’s discretionary power in aggravated felony cases. Those convicted now face mandatory and automatic deportation, no matter the extenuating circumstances. Even legal permanent residents like Ryan who have lived in the United States for decades, and have extensive family ties in this country, are subject to deportation for relatively minor crimes they may have committed years ago.

How do we make sense of this? Why is the United States deporting more people than ever before? Why are black and Latino men targeted? And, why are deportation laws so draconian?

In my forthcoming book, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism (NYU Press 2015), I argue that mass deportation is best understood as an instance of racialized state repression, a practice that has a long history in this country.

The racialized and gendered nature of immigration law enforcement – specifically the targeting of black and Latino men – should be unsurprising to anyone familiar with the history of state repression in the United States. The enslavement of African Americans, the internment of the Japanese, and the mass deportation of Mexicans in the 1930s were all official state practices that targeted specific ethnic or racial groups.

In today’s political climate of colorblind racism, it is unacceptable to have a policy that explicitly targets one group. However, it is legal and acceptable to have a policy that – in its implementation – produces disparate outcomes. Insofar as deportation laws are colorblind in their language, it is legally permissible that they are discriminatory in practice.

It is thus well beyond time to change the course of history. We can start by repealing the 1996 laws.

A Frightful Prospect: Hillary vs. Jeb

ANDREW LEVINE

Around the world, elections happen; they are scheduled or called and then they are over and done with – all in short order. America is “exceptional.” Even before 2015’s April showers, 2016’s November election is taking shape.

The good news is that the first six months are usually low key. There is no reason to expect that this year will be different.

There is therefore plenty of time to stock up on anti-emetics. If, as seems likely, Hillary and Jeb become the candidates, the need for them will be acute.

There is time too to pray to a merciful God that we will not have to endure that nightmarish scenario, and that neither of those miscreants will ever see the inside of the Oval Office again.

The age of miracles is past, but what the hell. How about this:

“O Lord: in the marketing campaign about to be launched. please make the Democrats’ hucksters promote someone, anyone, less noxious than Hillary Clinton. And, for comic relief, let there be a bevy of certifiable whack jobs on the Republican side, like there was in 2012.”

But where can you find a merciful God?

Indeed, unless God is even more sadistic than past evidence suggests, there is only one conclusion to draw: that the Devil is running the show. For what besides deviltry could account for the fact that guilt by association has lost its sting – even for Bill Clinton’s wife and, more amazing still, for a scion of the House of Bush?

That is the bad news that balances the good news that we still have time. — more time than money, though. In American elections, money is not the main factor; it is the only factor.

And so, the Devil is having His way. In Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire, Democratic and Republican operatives are already hard at work preparing for next year’s caucuses and primaries.

Through their efforts and the corporate media’s, we will likely find ourselves saddled with a general election that pits Hillary against Jeb.

In a saner possible world, this would be unthinkable. In the actual world, it is shaping up to be our fate.

Therefore, stock up on those anti-emetics before the stores run out.

* * *

Once upon a time, liberals made Hillary out to be the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Clinton presidency. That fantasy lasted for years.

Unlike the bizarre notion, a decade later, that Barack Obama would superintend a Second Coming of the New Deal, the idea that Hillary was the good one had legs.

Illusions about the Obama presidency barely survived Inauguration Day. But it wasn’t until the Clintons were getting ready to move out of the White House that it finally dawned on the average liberal that, of the two Clintons, Hillary was the one more wedded to neoliberal nostrums, to Wall Street, to the military-industrial complex, and to America’s masters of war.

By then, it had become clear too that she was easily as opportunistic as her better half, as secretive, and as disingenuous.

It was also obvious that she is not very good at what she does.

Of course, the evidence had been there all along. The most obvious example: that, as First Lady, she set the cause of health care reform back a generation.

Instead of making health care a right, she contrived to make it a cash cow for her family’s corporate backers. But she couldn’t pull even that off.

Had she not floundered so badly, Obama would not have been able, twenty years later, to pick up the ball she dropped and run with it – into the arms of the insurance companies and the for-profit health care industry.

The Clintons were dead set on undoing as many New Deal-Great Society advances as they could. They even had Social Security in their crosshairs. Hillary failed at that too – thanks in large part to her hubby’s philandering. In Bill’s last years as President, there was only one woman close to him who served America well: her name was Monica Lewinsky.

By the time the nineties were over, those of us who looked forward to seeing the Clintons fade into obscurity would have been hard pressed to say which one we wanted most to see less of. It hardly mattered, though. The Clintons never went away.

Bill promoted himself and his interests assiduously, while Hillary parachuted into New York State and got herself elected Senator – on the strength of her celebrity, her Washington experience, and, not incidentally, a whole lot of corporate money.

Her Senate career was, as they say, undistinguished.

She was still at it, though, when, having bested her in the 2008 caucuses and primaries, Barack Obama found it expedient to make her his Secretary of State. At the time, liberal pundits explained that the reincarnation of FDR would govern through “a team of rivals,” just as pop historian Doris Kearns Goodwin claimed that Abraham Lincoln had.

The Obama foreign policy team did such a poor job overall that it is hard to know whom to blame for what.   But when real historians finally sort it all out, expect that Hillary will get a lot of the blame for making befuddlement the guiding principle of American foreign policy.

Who, then, would want to see her take on even graver responsibilities?

Remarkably, there are people who do. Maybe some of them are inveterate Obama-boosters who want to see their man look good in comparison. Others are unreconstructed Clintonites left over from the nineties, or Hillary diehards left over from her 2008 campaign in the Democratic primaries.

And don’t forget second-wave feminists worried that, if Hillary somehow fails to gain the nomination again, they will not live long enough to see a woman elected President of the United States.

This will happen too, unless fortune smiles on these United States between now and the Democratic Party’s 2016 convention. From that point on, the way the system works, only a Republican could defeat her and, with Jeb Bush their best shot, they won’t even come close.

* * *

If any of the spawn of the Silver Fox and George the Father seemed destined for the Oval Office, it was Jeb, not George W. George was what is known in polite society as a “fuck up.”

In time, though, he did what many like him had done before – he exchanged chronic dipsomania for faith in the Lord. Meanwhile, Bush family fixers had gotten him out of more than a few jams and set him up on Easy Street.

He gathered his own posse too; its star, Karl Rove, famously became his “brain.” Before long, the wayward son found himself installed as Governor of Texas.

Around the same time, also with a little help from his family and his family’s friends, Jeb became Governor of Florida.

The conventional wisdom, back then was that Jeb was the more capable of the two and the more rightwing. Their careers as governors bore this out.

Indeed, it was not until after 9/11 that George shed his bumbling, “compassionate conservative” image. Under the tutelage of Dick Cheney, the most villainous Vice President in American history, he morphed into a full-fledged (though still dimwitted), blustering, red meat neoconservative.

He then went on to make a mess of everything he did. While this was going on, Jeb, the smarter one, largely stayed out of public view.

This changed when Obama became President. On several occasions, Jeb surreptitiously tested the political waters. Seeing the results, he wisely remained more outside the fray than in – until now.

Because he has been out of public life for so long, evidence of where he now stands is weak. However, most informed observers agree that Jeb remains a shade or two to his brother’s right.

The grandees of the Grand Old Party, the GOP, are OK with this; he is one of them, after all, so they trust him to look after their interests. And while he may be a tad too reactionary for some of them, they do need a candidate who will keep their base on board.

It is far from clear, though, that the base they must appease will find George H.W.’s second son retrograde enough.

Very likely, they won’t; and very likely too, he will be the nominee anyway. Money talks.

Another Mitt Romney situation is therefore shaping up. If events play out this way, Bush will lose, just as surely as Romney did.

Then the good news will be that Hillary will slide through that “glass ceiling” that, for want of anything more positive to say, she and her supporters talk so much about.

That will be the bad news as well.

* * *

In the race to the bottom that our politics has become, the GOP’s smarty-pants du jour, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, author of the infamous open letter to Iranian legislators that forty-seven Republican Senators signed, wants to overturn the Constitution’s prohibition of Bills of Attainder through which, under Common Law, British monarchs could not only punish perceived enemies without trial, but also – by the doctrine of “corruption of blood” – their spouses, their children, their siblings, and even their grandparents and grandchildren.

Cotton’s intuitions are medieval, but not entirely inappropriate where the Bush family is concerned – at least not from the standpoint of universal justice.

They don’t pertain to the Clintons, however.

Even before she became a Senator and a Secretary of State, Hillary was more than Bill’s spouse; she was, by her own account, a fellow perpetrator – with much to answer for in her own right.

Not only did she help end “welfare as we know it”; she joined her husband in waging a protracted struggle against the entire liberal settlement that coalesced in the Roosevelt to Johnson era and that began to unravel in the waning days of the Carter presidency.

It was during Ronald Reagan’s presidency that the cause the Clintons advanced fully entered fully into public consciousness. Since then, in America at least, “neoliberalism” and “Reaganism” have been synonymous.

The Clintons were never ideologically committed Reaganites. They were opportunists: knowing then, and knowing now, where their bread is buttered.

And indeed there have always been beneficiaries of the Reaganite turn eager to butter their bread. They realize that the Clintons have a knack for bringing the opposition along. All Democrats do, but the Clintons are better at it than most.

Thus Bill was a more effective Reaganite president than any Republican, including Reagan himself; more effective too than Obama has so far been.   Perhaps Hillary will outdo him.

Jeb, on the other hand, has, so far, done little, if anything, to put the United States on a perpetual war footing or to increase the supply of enemies it can fight against. And neither has he done much outside Florida to help banksters and other corporate criminals wreak havoc with the impunity to which they have become accustomed.

Brother George did all that and more. His Poppy began the destruction of Iraq, and the Clinton administration continued, with sanctions, what the first President Bush began with force of arms. But George W. upped the ante many fold.

Whether by design or because he was in over his head, he took aim at the entire Middle East, laying the groundwork for the even broader assault on the Muslim world that the Nobel laureate Obama would later oversee.

He also helped steer the United States into the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression; and, as much or more than his successor, he shredded Constitutional protections of basic rights and liberties whenever it suited his administration’s purposes.

Now, less than eight years later, his brother wants to take up where he left off.

How could such an idea even be floated, much less taken seriously by one of our two semi-established political parties? One can only be amazed.

And, though it means conceding that Tom Cotton’s thinking is not entirely off the wall, the very thought of Jeb running for President makes it hard not to acknowledge what jurists took for granted in the days before progress in the arts and sciences made the idea seem appalling: that Bills of Attainder have a certain appeal.

* * *

However that may be, we have an electoral season ahead in which we can count on major party candidates, distinguished only for their noxiousness, saying little, if anything, of genuine importance on any of the real issues of the day.

This means that our perpetual war regime will again get a free pass, and that it will continue to metastasize.

Forsaking a “peace dividend,” the first Bush set this “new world order” in motion. The Clintons then accelerated the pace of its development. They made the endless wars that would follow inevitable — once a suitable pretext was found.

And so, with the assistance of the Saudi-backed Islamists who drove hijacked airplanes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, George Bush and Dick Cheney unleashed what they called a Global War on Terror.

This was a godsend for the military-industrial-national security state apparatus; for the neocons who rose to power under Cheney’s aegis, it was a dream come true.

Obama dropped the name and, to his credit, ended some of the more egregious forms of torture that Bush and Cheney had allowed. He made a few minor cosmetic changes as well. He also made the new dispensation truly global.

As for what Hillary will do, we can only speculate – and worry.

An even greater cause for concern is the Clinton family penchant for going after Russia, its nuclear weapons notwithstanding. The Clintons were triumphalists, and they made sure the Russians knew it.

Bill’s provocations occurred when Russia was too weak to offer much resistance; when its empire was lost and its economy was wrecked – less by the version of socialism it used to have than by the version of capitalism it was acquiring.

Now Clintonites in the Obama administration, many of them Hillary’s people, are at it again. The difference is that these days Russia is no longer weak.

It is natural to think of Cold War mongering and nuclear brinksmanship as a neocon thing, something Republicans do. It is an Obama-Clinton thing too. The so-called “humanitarian interventionists” they empowered are neocons under the skin.   They sport a kinder-gentler patina, but they are every bit as dangerous.

* * *

The total surveillance state that goes along with a perpetual war regime will escape serious criticism in the coming election too.

Having means, motive and opportunity after 9/11, Bush and then Obama set their sights on hard won and longstanding privacy and due process rights. Everyone says that they regret that it has comes to this, but no one will lift a finger to do anything that might turn the situation around – no one, that is, in the political mainstream.

Brother Jeb is obviously fine with total surveillance. Don’t expect Hillary to challenge any of it either.

Also, don’t expect her presidency to be more transparent than Obama’s or Bush’s — not if her piqued reaction to the Wikileaks and Edward Snowden revelations is any indication.

Those revelations embarrassed her, and the State Department she ran, but that doesn’t entirely explain her irritation. As the scandal around her emails underscores, she believes that it is her prerogative to rule secretively, when doing so suits her purpose. Keeping the public in the dark is a Clinton family tradition.

The irony is that thanks to the explosion of internet-enabled samizdat journalism, self-serving government lies and prevarications no longer automatically control public opinion.

That the American empire is the problem, not the solution, is, by now, widely understood; also government opacity has come to be widely despised. Infringements of privacy and due process rights in the name of national security fool no one either – except, of course, the willfully misled.

A large and growing segment of the public is therefore more than ready for a profound change of course. It is those who govern that lag behind.

These and other pressing issues are not discussed in the coming election. But that is hardly the worst of it. Presidential elections suck up all the air in the room. At best, they put constructive political efforts on hold — more often, they set them back; more often still they defeat them altogether.

Thus the 2012 electoral season helped do Occupy Wall Street in; this is more the norm than the exception.

* * *

Expect also that nothing constructive for holding back global warming will come from a Hillary versus Jeb election – or, for that matter, from a contest between any Democrat with any chance at all of securing the nomination, running against any Republican.

However, the situation with global warming is not quite the same as it is with war and peace and basic rights and liberties.

With the exception of a few “climate change deniers,” the bipartisan consensus is on the right side of the global warming issue – if anything, the political class is a little ahead of the general population, thanks to corporate media’s diligent dumbing down efforts.

But no leading political figure – certainly not Hillary or Jeb – is prepared to do much about it – not while there are powerful corporate interests opposed, and not so long as it remains easy to kick the proverbial can down the road.

Global warming is like the weather; everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. This used to be because there wasn’t anything anybody could do. With global warming, there is. Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans won’t.

Certainly, Hillary won’t. Even less can be expected from Jeb Bush.

Fortunately, though, Jeb will never be President – not for “corruption of blood” reasons, compelling as they are, but, incredible as it seems, because too many Republicans think that his views, including his views on global warming, are too far out in left field.

Meanwhile, temperatures rise and the predictable consequences unfold.

It will be this way until some catastrophic event, or series of events, awakens a level of public concern that even Democrats and Republicans can no longer ignore — or unless enlightened statesmanship somehow supersedes politics as usual.

I’d bet on the catastrophes.

* * *

Both parties are also on the same page on rising inequality; they’re all against it.

To be sure, the idea that the love of money is the root of all evil is foreign to Democrats and Republicans alike. Both parties are out for all the “campaign contributions” they can get, notwithstanding the offense to democracy or the plain fact that a great many evils do follow from the corruption that ensues.

At the same time, though, they all pay lip service to the idea that increasing economic inequality is the root of many of the distinctive evils of our time.

High on the list is the sheer injustice of it. On this point, most fair-minded people agree. But not quite all.

Within the Republican fold, there are libertarians who do not object to grossly unequal distributions of income and wealth on grounds of justice.   Quite the contrary; they are wedded to views that suggest that everyone has a right to all they can acquire, provided only that their holdings are acquired through market transactions and inheritance (or other forms of gifting); not from plunder, force or fraud.

But even such doctrinaire free marketeers as these have come to realize that there are good reasons to resist rising inequality, irrespective of their views about what justice requires.

For one, inequalities of the kind and extent that are on the rise lately are bad for business – because a system that enriches only the very few, at the expense of the many, cannot sustain a level of demand conducive to economic growth.

Moreover, thanks to rising inequality, the great fear of centuries past – that too much inequality leads to political instability – is again making itself felt.

Syriza in Greece – and perhaps, before long too, Podemos in Spain, and like-minded political formations in Portugal, Ireland and elsewhere – frighten the ruling classes.   They are still a long way from modifying, much less ending, the neoliberal policies that have made these challenges to their power inevitable, but they are inching forward to that realization.

Unlike global warming, the evils of inequality are a problem now — for nearly everybody, ninety-nine percent of us, or more. It is therefore unsurprising that there is nothing similar to climate change denial where inequality is concerned, nothing nearly as politically debilitating.

But, as with global warming, the solutions the major political parties put forward are, at best, woefully inadequate palliatives.

On the Republican side, there is wrongheaded and frequently incoherent prattle about the virtues of “free markets” and about how even the vestiges of past government policies intended to raise people up actually make them worse off.

The underlying rationale, as best one can be made out, is that these programs somehow thwart equal opportunity, which then somehow leads to unequal outcomes.

It is not worth trying to puzzle through the purported connections; clear thinking is not the Republicans’ strong suit.

Democrats propose what amounts to a modest restoration of the social policies liberal Democrats introduced decades ago, plus modest spending on public works. Wanting to seem “strong on defense,” they don’t dare suggest cutting back on military spending or on any of the other wasteful expenditures that make it fiscally impossible for the state to do anyone much good.

Neither do they have much to say about why inequality is on the rise.

Their silence is puzzling, inasmuch as they know full well how capitalist societies typically counter the inequalities capitalism generates. Like their social democratic counterparts in Europe and elsewhere, they used to do a lot of that themselves — through redistributive taxation and welfare state measures of various kinds. They know too that strong labor movements can also be helpful too.

The consensus view, though, is that the days when these and other left alternatives within capitalism were feasible are over. There is even more agreement that alternatives to capitalism itself are out of the question.

No one in the political mainstream even bothers to say why. Hardly anyone on the fringes does either.

Evidently, it has lately become so widely assumed that, as Margaret Thatcher might say, “there is no alternative,” that it is simply taken for granted that capitalism must always be with us, and that the kind of capitalism we now have is the only kind there now can be.

And so, for all practical purposes, a century and a half of socialist and anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist theory and practice, and many decades of academic research, might as well never have happened.

But, of course, it did happen, and there is much to be learned from all of it.

Just don’t expect any of it to be brought up by Democrats or Republicans during the coming election season.   At least Mrs. Thatcher thought it worth her while to drive the “there is no alternative” idea home. Democrats and Republicans can’t be bothered.

Therefore, instead of a serious discussion of ways of addressing a problem that everyone acknowledges, there will be a whole lot of sound and fury that can be counted on to signify nothing.

* * *

If only the problems facing us were less urgent, the eighteen months ahead would be an excellent time to put politics on hold; to let the electoral spectacle unfold as it must, while, as Nietzsche would say, averting one’s gaze, as best one can.

Why nauseate oneself?

The short answer is because too much is at stake.

Presidential elections are sales campaigns; and the one that will soon be upon us is likely to be sillier, more enervating, and more disgusting than most – especially with Hillary and the Bush family involved.

But, with cunning and skill, even an election about nothing in which worse-than-nothing candidates compete can be put to advantage.

A Hillary versus Jeb election is a frightful prospect indeed. But because presidential elections, even ones as dismal as the one that lies ahead, focus peoples’ minds, the occasion can be used to work towards getting the public to focus on the real and urgent issues of our time – on war and peace, rights and liberties, global warming, and the increasing inequality that is feeding injustice and stifling what little democracy we have left.

Above all, it presents an opportunity for talking about the urgency of making left alternatives within capitalism and alternatives to capitalism itself, socialist alternatives, part of political discourse again.

There is no reason why such a discussion cannot now take place, and every reason why it should.

Impending catastrophes stare us in the face. Unless there is a change of course soon, the dangers will intensify.

But nothing will get better until the underlying causes of the perils we face are exposed and subjected to scrutiny. This cannot happen as long as the lessons gained in the pre-neoliberal age are off the agenda entirely, and as long as socialism is never even mentioned, much less discussed.

Ironically, the sheer inanity of the election we are facing makes the discussion of these and other pertinent issues more, not less feasible; it makes real politics possible. Full speed ahead, therefore; there truly is no alternative.

The End of the Liberal Zionist Façade

Neve Gordon

Benjamin Netanyahu is truly a magician. Just this past Friday, most polls indicated that his Likud party would likely receive around 21 seats in the Israeli Knesset, four seats less than Yitzhak (Bougie) Herzog’s Zionist Camp (Labor Party’s new name). Revelations of corruption at the Prime Minister’s residence followed by a damning comptroller report about the real estate crisis, alongside industrial downsizing, union strikes, predictions of a weakening economy, a diplomatic stalemate, and increasing international isolation all seemed to indicate that Netanyahu was on his way out. But just when it seemed that the Zionist camp would replace the nationalist camp, the crafty campaigner began pulling rabbits out of his hat.

As if his decision to alienate the Obama Administration over the Iran negotiations was not enough, Netanyahu began pandering to the right by notifying the world that Palestinians were destined to remain stateless since he no longer believed in the creation of another Arab state alongside Israel. He presented the Likud party as the victims of a leftist media conspiracy aimed at ousting the right-wing government, while conveniently ignoring that his ally Sheldon Adelson owned Yisrael Hayom, Israel’s most widely circulated paper. He entreated his voters to return “home” promising to address their economic needs. And on Election Day itself, he frightened the Jews by declaring that Israel’s Palestinian citizens were rushing to the polls in droves, thus presenting Palestinians who cast votes for their own representatives as an existential threat.

Pandering and fear mongering together with hatred for Arabs and the left are the ingredients of Netanyahu’s secret potion, and it now appears that many voters were indeed seduced. Within a matter of a few days Netanyahu garnered almost ten additional seats for his party, cannibalizing two of his extreme right allies: Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinuand Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi. Owing to his magic, the Likud did much better than expected, and together with the ultra-Orthodox parties and a new party recently formed by a former Likud minister, Kulanu (All of US), an extreme right wing bloc with 67 out of 120 seats will almost certainly be created (and this even before the soldier’s votes have been calculated, which are usually right of center).

The outcome is clear: the people of Israel have voted for Apartheid.

It is now extremely likely that a spate of anti-democratic laws that had been shelved will soon resurface. These include laws that monitor and limit the financing of human rights NGOs, restrict freedom of the expression, reduce the authority of the Supreme Court, cancel the official status of Arabic, and, of course, bring to a vote the nation-state law. This bill, which was originally drafted by a Likud member, defines Jewishness as the state’s default in any instance, legal or legislative, in which the state’s Jewishness and its democratic aspirations clash‫. This means that Laws that provide equal rights to all citizens can be struck down on the pretense that they violate the state’s Jewish character. Moreover, this law reserves communal rights for Jews alone, thus denying Palestinian citizens any kind of national identity.

Alongside anti-democratic legislation, we can also expect an array of discriminatory policies to be enacted. The new government will likely implement some variation of the Prawer plan, which intends to forcefully relocate thousands of Palestinian Bedouins and take over their land. It will continue pouring billions of dollars on Israel’s settlement in the West Bank and Golan Heights and expropriate more houses and land in East Jerusalem. And it will probably imprison thousands of refugees and “illegal” migrant laborers from Africa currently workers in Israeli cities.

There is, however, one clear advantage to the election results: clarity. At least now there will be no liberal Zionist façade, camouflaging Israel’s unwillingness to dismantle its colonial project. The Israeli refrain that a diplomatic solution with the Palestinians cannot be achieved because the Palestinians lack leadership will ring even more hollow. Finally, the claim that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East will exposed for what it is: a half truth. While Israel is a democracy for Jews it is a repressive regime for Palestinians.

We can also expect little resistance to the right-wing government, since Herzog’s Zionist Camp and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid are also Arabphobes and therefore less against the substance of such a government and more against Netanyahu’s blatant right wing style. After all it was a political pac associated with Herzog’s party that in the days leading to the elections paid for large billboards with a picture of (Bibi) Netanyahu and his extreme right contender Naftali Bennett warning the viewers that “With Bibibennet we will remain stuck with the Palestinians for eternity.”  The pac must have overlooked the fact that 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinians.

And yet, during these elections there was one ray of light that shimmered through the darkness. The attempt by most of the Jewish parties to sideline the Palestinian citizens produced an unintended result. Creating a united front, the Palestinians garnered 14 seats, almost 25 percent more than they received in the previous elections, and they are now the third biggest faction in the Knesset. Unlike many of his counterparts, Ayman Odeh, the head of the new Joint Arab List, is a true leader. Extremely incisive, he often uses irony and wit to undermine his detractors while advancing an egalitarian vision for the future. In a moment of candor, a well-known Israeli commentator characterized his demeanor as a serious threat: “He’s really dangerous,” she said, “he projects something every Israeli can relate to.”

Will this threat be able to stop the imminent entrenchment of a tide of new Apartheid laws? I sincerely doubt it.

Syriza’s Call for German Reparations

Joshua Tartakovsky

Athens.

Developments are happening faster than the speed of light both in Greece and around the world. It is not often that people are happy to be quickly proven wrong, but luckily the opportunity arrived. Following the Eurogroup agreement and the way it was presented to the public as an end of austerity and as a victory, indicated that the Syriza government is a captive to the Institutions. I expressed the possibility that unless public opposition mounts, Syriza will end up bending to pressure. Recent events, however, suggest that this is untrue. A public mobilization was not necessary, Germany’s humiliating dictates while the Greek public is suffering under the yoke of austerity have already turned the tide and the Syriza Government is resisting Germany’s patronizing and suffocating actions. As argued earlier, Syriza is pursuing a policy of uniting the nation by demanding justice. What goal may it have in mind? What caused this turn? and where may it lead to?

In his speech to the Hellenic Parliament, Prime Minister Tsipras touched on the issue which both some Anglo-Saxon socialists and Conservative Germans would wish would have avoided. Tsipras brought to public view the issue of reparations of World War II, and the fact Germany did not pay back the interest-free forced loan made on the Greek bank by the German occupation forces until today. While some reparations were paid in the 1950s, these were quite small considering the damage and did not include the forced loan. Tsipras demanded reparations from Germany for the immense damage and killing caused during the brutal German occupation as a necessary act to restore historical justice. The parliament decided on the establishment of a committee led by economists and historians who will pursue the issue of reparations. The Greek Justice Minister said that if necessary, he would consider seizing German assets in Greece, including, for example, the Goethe Institutes in Athens and Thessaloniki and even homes of German citizens.

Alexis Tsipras has come under attack by various international socialist groups due to his perceived ultra-nationalism. Some international socialists are uncomfortable with nationalism, due to their hope that working class around the world will unite regardless of national boundaries and due perhaps to Western countries own bitter legacy with nationalism, fascism and colonialism. Others argued that by its appeal to nationalism, “Syriza ignores the class dimensions of the economic crisis” while letting the oligarchs off the hook. However, it is undeniable that the entire Greek people are captive to dictates of the Institutions and that the territory of Greece has come under a German occupation in the past. Furthermore, Syriza pledged to crack down on the oligarchs and has publicly addressed on various occasions the need to provide social justice. What Syriza did not do, however, was to pretend that questions of historical justice are no longer relevant.

The speech given by Tsipras was seen by the World Socialist Website as “the clearest indication of the right-wing and bourgeois character of his government.” However, international socialists often fail to understand that countries that undergo colonization as in the case of many Latin American countries, or a fascist occupation, as was in the case of Greece, have every right to protect their sovereignty. This disagreement is not new. While the Trotsky school objects to “socialism in one country” waiting for a world revolution, Marxism as interpreted by Lenin draws a distinction between revolutionary nationalism of an oppressed nation and reactionary nationalism of a colonialist state. Indeed, the revolutionary governments of Cuba and Venezuela did not shy from appealing to nationalism and to protect their sovereignty. Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro not only spoke using nationalist terms which are bad music for some Western socialists ears, but took actions against imperial and colonial powers operating on their land. Chavez famously said that “we are the Sons of Bolivar”, referring to Simon Bolivar, the revolutionary leader who fought against Spanish colonization. Fidel frequently mentioned Jose Marti, a Cuban nationalist who opposed American colonization of the island. The desire to have a “ a homeland free and sovereign”, as Tsipras said in the parliament, is a legitimate one. It is absurd to presume that oppressed countries or occupied territories cannot appeal to nationalism due to the argument that this may make it more difficult to garner international support.

Tsipras made it clear in his speech in parliament that his vision is a transnational one. Tsipras said that he wishes to “honor the male and female fighters from all over the world who gave their lives for the freedom of their homelands, who gave their lives in order to defeat Nazism”. In so doing, he expressed his solidarity with the Communist and other resistance groups across Europe and with the fighters of the Red Army, who achieved the victory. (Indeed, Tsipras plans to attend the May 9 victory celebration of the Red Army in Moscow). He therefore clarified that he supports international solidarity against fascism and is not a xenophobic nationalist.

Tsipras then went on to pay tribute to the “fighters of the Greek national resistance, who gave their lives in order to rid the country from the Nazi atrocities and occupation.” Here Tsipras accomplished a double goal. First, providing a quick history lesson to many Greeks who under the formal education system have not always learned about the fascist resistance considering the fact that the UK supported the Greek Nazi collaborators and reactionaries in 1944 and placed them in power. Secondly, incorporating the history of Communist resistance into formal national history even for those who familiar with the past.

Tsipras also highlighted in his speech the fact that the Eurogroup has failed to live up to basic decency. He said that he does not preach to others and would not want to be preached to either, while the country has been patronized by northern Europe that sought to rob it of dignity. “Often lately, when listening to provocative statements from abroad, I am reminded of the famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus says: “They see the spike in their brother’s eye, but not the pole in their own,” said Tsipras. It appears that Tsipras realizes full well that the Eurogroup has no plans to accommodate Greece’s demands on debt restructuring and an easing of austerity. Indeed, despite the desperate attempt of Finance Minister Vaourfakis to meet the demands of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem said that Greece’s reform proposals were insufficient. This led Greece to suggest that a referendum may be introduced in which the public will decide on whether to remain in the Euro. What is clear is that a significant period of time did not need to pass before the contradictions in the Eurogroup agreement came to light and before it became increasingly obvious that the government cannot please both the Institutions and the public.

It appears therefore, that Tsipras’ patience is starting to wear thin and rather than being on the defensive he chose to take the intiative. The question remains, however, whether the demand for reparations is merely an attempt to secure more finances for the country, and achieve a better bargaining position, or whether it is a genuine attempt to mobilize the public behind him so that the population will undergo a process of radicalization and will be ripe for a Grexit. The latter appears to be more likely in light of Greece’s dire economic state, yet only time will dispel the fog on this issue.

Tsipras demands for reparations, however, and the possibility of taking over German assets in Greece, echo other eras of oppressed countries resisting colonization. The grabbing of assets can be seen as a first step towards securing national sovereignty and restoring dignity, before more ambitious social programs are pursued. Cuban President Fidel Castro famously took control of US property in Cuba following aggression taken by the United States following the Revolution. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez seized assets of foreign oil contractors in Venezuela drawing the wrath of the United States, in 2009. Yet Chavez also seized national oil contractors while Tsipras has not attempted to nationalize the banks at home, leaving his long term plans unclear.

Chavez did not shy from nationalist statements against the US, much as Tsipras is seeking to mobilize the nation against a German financial occupation. “Go to hell, Yankee sh*ts”, Chavez said, “here stands a dignified people. Go to hell a hundred times, we are the sons of Bolivar.” Tsipras rallying call against Germany, along with his visit to the memorial in Kaisariani, where 200 Greek partisans were executed, in his first day as prime minister, can be seen as following Chavez steps, even while using softer language.

International socialists have traditionally shied away from nationalism. Their belief was that nationalism serves as a boundary and a barrier for international workers and oppressed groups beyond national borders. And yet for a country to assert its sovereignty, is not narrow nationalism but basic dignity. The concern expressed, however, that a nationalist appeal will dispel international solidarity, is not rooted in history. “Hands-off Venezuela” and “Hands-off Cuba” campaigns have been taking place in Western Europe and the United States, although these respective countries asserted their national sovereignty and revoked a historical examples of patriotism. One must be aware, however, of the danger of a general anti-German sentiment and to this end, it would be wise of Tsipras to mobilize members of the German Leftist party die Linke to his cause.

The question remains to what degree will Tsipras continue to confront Germany despite the risks involved, whether he is doing so in order to prepare the people for a Plan B, and whether he will be willing to compromise after receiving compensation, assuming this is granted, rather than demanding an entire restructuring of the debt conditions. Germany has already ruled out reparations, however. Yet the issue is sure to heighten tensions and nationalist sentiments in Greece.

While it is too early to say where this will lead, Tsipras, at least for now, is pursuing the same line led out by Marti, Bolivar, Fidel and Chavez. Indeed, privately-owned television channels in Greece have already began their demonization campaign of Tsipras, reminding one of the Venezuelan corporate media campaign against Chavez.

Why the Real Unemployment is Double the ‘Official’ Unemployment Rate

Pete Dolack

How many people are really out of work? The answer is surprisingly difficult to ascertain. For reasons that are likely ideological at least in part, official unemployment figures greatly under-report the true number of people lacking necessary full-time work.

That the “reserve army of labor” is quite large goes a long way toward explaining the persistence of stagnant wages in an era of increasing productivity.

How large? Across North America, Europe and Australia, the real unemployment rate is approximately double the “official” unemployment rate.

The “official” unemployment rate in the United States, for example, was 5.5 percent for February 2015. That is the figure that is widely reported. But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps track of various other unemployment rates, the most pertinent being its “U-6” figure. The U-6 unemployment rate includes all who are counted as unemployed in the “official” rate, plus discouraged workers, the total of those employed part time but not able to secure full-time work and all persons marginally attached to the labor force (those who wish to work but have given up). The actual U.S. unemployment rate for February 2015, therefore, is 11 percent.

Canada makes it much more difficult to know its real unemployment rate. The official Canadian unemployment rate for February was 6.8 percent, a slight increase from January that Statistics Canada attributes to “more people search[ing] for work.” The official measurement in Canada, as in the U.S., European Union and Australia, mirrors the official standard for measuring employment defined by the International Labour Organization — those not working at all and who are “actively looking for work.” (The ILO is an agency of the United Nations.)

Statistics Canada’s closest measure toward counting full unemployment is its R8 statistic, but the R8 counts people in part-time work, including those wanting full-time work, as “full-time equivalents,” thus underestimating the number of under-employed by hundreds of thousands, according to an analysis by The Globe and Mail. There are further hundreds of thousands not counted because they do not meet the criteria for “looking for work.” Thus The Globe and Mail analysis estimates Canada’s real unemployment rate for 2012 was 14.2 percent rather than the official 7.2 percent. Thus Canada’s true current unemployment rate today is likely about 14 percent.

Everywhere you look, more are out of work

The gap is nearly as large in Europe as in North America. The official European Union unemployment rate was 9.8 percent in January 2015. The European Union’s Eurostat service requires some digging to find out the actual unemployment rate, requiring adding up different parameters. Under-employed workers and discouraged workers comprise four percent of the E.U. workforce each, and if we add the one percent of those seeking work but not immediately available, that pushes the actual unemployment rate to about 19 percent.

The same pattern holds for Australia. The Australia Bureau of Statistics revealed that its measure of “extended labour force under-utilisation” — this includes “discouraged” jobseekers, the “underemployed” and those who want to start work within a month, but cannot begin immediately — was 13.1 percent in August 2012 (the latest for which I can find), in contrast to the “official,” and far more widely reported, unemployment rate of five percent at the time.

Concomitant with these sobering statistics is the length of time people are out of work. In the European Union, for example, the long-term unemployment rate — defined as the number of people out of work for at least 12 months — doubled from 2008 to 2013. The number of U.S. workers unemployed for six months or longer more than tripled from 2007 to 2013.

Thanks to the specter of chronic high unemployment, and capitalists’ ability to transfer jobs overseas as “free trade” rules become more draconian, it comes as little surprise that the share of gross domestic income going to wages has declined steadily. In the U.S., the share has declined from 51.5 percent in 1970 to about 42 percent. But even that decline likely understates the amount of compensation going to working people because almost all gains in recent decades has gone to the top one percent.

Around the world, worker productivity has risen over the past four decades while wages have been nearly flat. Simply put, we’d all be making much more money if wages had merely kept pace with increased productivity.

Insecure work is the global norm

The increased ability of capital to move at will around the world has done much to exacerbate these trends. The desire of capitalists to depress wages to buoy profitability is a driving force behind their push for governments to adopt “free trade” deals that accelerate the movement of production to low-wage, regulation-free countries. On a global basis, those with steady employment are actually a minority of the world’s workers.

Using International Labour Organization figures as a starting point, professors John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney calculate that the “global reserve army of labor” — workers who are underemployed, unemployed or “vulnerably employed” (including informal workers) — totals 2.4 billion. In contrast, the world’s wage workers total 1.4 billion — far less! Writing in their book The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China, they write:

“It is the existence of a reserve army that in its maximum extent is more than 70 percent larger than the active labor army that serves to restrain wages globally, and particularly in poorer countries. Indeed, most of this reserve army is located in the underdeveloped countries of the world, though its growth can be seen today in the rich countries as well.” [page 145]

The earliest countries that adopted capitalism could “export” their “excess” population though mass emigration. From 1820 to 1915, Professors Foster and McChesney write, more than 50 million people left Europe for the “new world.” But there are no longer such places for developing countries to send the people for whom capitalism at home can not supply employment. Not even a seven percent growth rate for 50 years across the entire global South could absorb more than a third of the peasantry leaving the countryside for cities, they write. Such a sustained growth rate is extremely unlikely.

As with the growing environmental crisis, these mounting economic problems are functions of the need for ceaseless growth. Once again, infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet, especially one that is approaching its limits. Worse, to keep the system functioning at all, the planned obsolescence of consumer products necessary to continually stimulate household spending accelerates the exploitation of natural resources at unsustainable rates and all this unnecessary consumption produces pollution increasingly stressing the environment.

Humanity is currently consuming the equivalent of one and a half earths, according to the non-profit group Global Footprint Network. A separate report by WWF–World Wide Fund For Nature in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London and Global Footprint Network, calculates that the Middle East/Central Asia, Asia-Pacific, North America and European Union regions are each consuming about double their regional biocapacity.

We have only one Earth. And that one Earth is in the grips of a system that takes at a pace that, unless reversed, will leave it a wrecked hulk while throwing ever more people into poverty and immiseration. That this can go on indefinitely is the biggest fantasy.