It’s hardly a secret that the US left is barely alive. While left-wing movements in the US have hardly shaken the foundations of power in my life time, they have known moments of modest success, reshaping the political landscape in significant and irreversible ways. Since World War II, left activism has stirred and nourished important movements like the struggles for African American equality and against US aggression in Vietnam. The left has also played important roles in fueling struggles for women’s and gay rights and for strengthening environmental protection. While 1960s talk of revolution and radical alternatives were more hyperbole than real, the ferment of those days was real.

Unfortunately, little of the US left’s modest success penetrated the labor movement, a social force defanged and declawed by anti-Communism early in the Cold War. And little of the left’s wave of vitality challenged the two-party system in any serious way. As the risings of the sixties recede further and further in our collective memory, the quantity and quality of popular struggle diminishes as well.

It’s not just the number of actions or the size of the crowds that are shrinking, but also the ideological understanding that purports to animate our US left. That is, the ideas embraced by various elements of the left have grown more and more murky and superficial.

What Ails the Left?

There are many symptoms and causes of the relative decline of the US left.

But always looming in the shadows of struggles for social justice is the demon of anti-Communism. Other peoples have suffered periods of hysterical, paranoid anti-Communism, but few countries outside of the US have elevated it to a state religion. While fear of Islam may have currently replaced Cold War fears as the national obsession, anti-Communism remains deeply embedded in the national psyche. Recent movies featuring West Coast and East Coast invasions of the US by forces from the tiny Democratic People’s Republic of Korea only underscore the persistence of this demon.

Of course the US left is neither immune from nor unwelcoming to Red-baiting. From the fifties, “leftists” could earn respectability and credibility with the public ritual of denouncing Communism. It was from this period that critical financial umbilical chords from the most prominent, most influential left and liberal formations to wealthy donors, foundations, and, in some nefarious cases, the security services were established. Any independent organizations deriving grass roots funding from workers’ organizations or the nationally oppressed were routinely looked at suspiciously for Red ties.

By the early sixties, the purge of everything Red or even Pink was largely completed. Everything—words, ideas, associations—even vaguely linked to Communism had disappeared from the mainstream. And the rise of a “new” left reflected the weight of that legacy. Both opportunism and ignorance led most of the left’s new leadership to establish a political camp to the right or left of Communism, demonstrably distant from Communism: radical democracy and social democracy to the right; Maoism and anarchism to the left.

Arguably this failure to establish an honest, objective encounter with Communism, this Cold War attitude of framing all politics as a counterweight to Communism, contributed mightily to the decline of the left in the next decade. The student base and alienation from working people demonstrated the shallowness of New Left ideology. Most leaders and activists turned to careers, the Democratic Party, the social service bureaucracy, or retreated to the universities.

Anti-Communism continued and continues as a blind faith. The fall of Soviet and Eastern European socialism added a new dimension to the anti-Communist canon: Not only was Communism evil, but it didn’t work.

Without the foil of real existing socialism, the US left drifted aimlessly. Some found an ideological anchor in “market socialism,” especially with the rise of Market-Leninism in the Peoples’ Republic of China. Others found romantic answers in Comandante Zero, a pipe-smoking, inscrutable poet/revolutionary diminutive caricature of Che Guevera. Still others attempted to restore life to the New Left of the sixties. One cannot but be reminded of the situation of Russian revolutionaries after the suppressed 1905 uprising as described by Lenin:

The years of reaction (1907-10). Tsarism was victorious. All the revolutionary and opposition parties were smashed. Depression, demoralisation, splits, discord, defection, and pornography took the place of politics. There was an ever greater drift towards philosophical idealism; mysticism became the garb of counter-revolutionary sentiments. (Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder)

Where most European Communists degenerated into social democrats in this period, US leftists, scarred by anti-Communism and with no similar tradition, found hope in narrow-issue activism, cult-like formations, or the unlikely revival of the New Deal Democratic Party.

Obama and the Left

The candidacy of Barack Obama proved to be a disaster for the US left. Anti-war and social justice activists put aside their signs and plans and flocked to the Obama campaign. Grandiose expectations were conjured out of thin air; a candidate associated in the past with conservative Democrats and a professed admirer of Ronald Reagan was imagined to be the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and even cautious measures of critical support were overwhelmed by wild-eyed enthusiasm.

After the election, most of the US left kept faith with Obama, a faith that has produced very little of the anticipated change, but succeeded in disarming the left. The big loser was the historically most progressive element in US politics: the African American community. Understandably, African Americans rallied to support the first African American president, but his administration has neither represented African Americans nor lifted a finger to relieve the sinking material conditions of life for that community. In fact, often more has been done for African Americans under Republican presidents when the left is actively and vocally pressuring and Democrats are in opposition! As an example, no Republican president would get away with so few African American appointees or nominees in an administration as has the current President!

The US ruling class has successfully and opportunistically gauged the hard won level of racial tolerance of US voters. The new face of US policy and diplomacy presented by Obama was welcomed everywhere—at home and abroad—over the failed Bush regime. A byproduct of this tactic is the disarming of the left and the silencing of African American leaders. Tragically, the US left has accepted the shallow symbolism of an African American president at the expense of the African American masses.

The Crisis and the Left

For the left in the US and internationally, the profound economic crisis beginning in 2008 and continuing today offers a great opportunity to mount an anti-capitalist offensive and project a clear alternative. For over a century and a half that alternative was socialism. The vision articulated over that period differed from time to time, but shared some straightforward features: the theoretical primacy of class relations, public ownership of productive assets, an end to exploitation, a new democracy based upon the rule of the working majority, and social and economic planning. Each feature clearly addresses a glaring, unacceptable shortcoming of capitalism.

But in the US, our left will not address the devastation wrought by capitalism and embrace these features or even discuss them honestly. One of the most prominent and respected national leaders of the anti-war movement recently said: “I used to think I was a socialist… But I also think that people should have the right to be individually enterprising. I have yet to see the society that I would like to live in but I see pieces of it, bits and pieces of it here and there.” This is hardly encouragement for the 11.7 million US citizens looking for a job, the nearly 8 million who would prefer a full-time job over their part-time employment, or the tens of millions who still lack health insurance, all benefits once guaranteed and delivered by real, existing socialism.

Another prominent left pundit, in reviewing another left oracle’s “new economy” manifesto, remarks that the author’s assumptions are “…that socialism, as we have known it in the 20th century did not work.” He blithely concedes that the book’s author “spends little time critiquing 20th century socialism.” Not deterred by the lack of argument, the reviewer affirms that “I was persuaded… that a glimpse into the future is critical largely due to reality of the failure of 20th century socialism, or more accurately, what is better described as the crisis of socialism.” “…did not work, “failure,” “crisis” are the unexamined, easy assumptions of our floundering left.

So what do they offer as an alternative?

Anything but the socialism associated with Communism. They take us back to the foolishness that Marx and Engels called “utopian socialism,” the schemes concocted by Fourier and Owen in the early 19th century. In the Communist Manifesto they conclude that utopians “…therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias, of founding isolated phalansteres, of establishing ‘Home Colonies,’ or setting up a ‘Little Icaria”—pocket editions of the New Jerusalem—and to realize all these castles in the air, and they are compelled to appeal to the feeling and purses of the bourgeois… They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new gospel.”

We find a modern incarnation of utopianism in the “New Economy” movement, the US left’s current flavor of the day. Back in late 2011, Professor Gar Alperovitz reached for the golden ring of utopia with his America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming our Wealth, our Liberty, and our Democracy, a book that promised to take the disenfranchised in the US from peasants to lords. Alperovitz, like his utopian predecessors, believes that ideas generously given from a fount of wisdom will, if only embraced by those below, lead to “democratizing capital.” Alperovitz’s magical ideas are the spawning of “thousands of co-ops, worker-owned businesses, land trusts, and municipal enterprises” that will, with time, “democratize the deep structure of the American economic system.” A more romantic version of Marx and Engel’s derisive “new gospel” I cannot imagine.

The very notion of “democratizing” something, let us say “capital,” that doesn’t wish to be “democratized” is mind-boggling. Will capital be embarrassed into sharing the wealth? Will the success of co-ops demonstrate to Exxon that energy should be free to all and produced in an environmentally sound manner? Will the 17-trillion-dollar US-based multinational corporate behemoth shudder in the face of worker-owned enterprises and co-ops, surrendering control of the boards of directors to the people?

I don’t think so.

Alperovitz points to existing self-styled alternative ownership models like ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Programs), community development corporations, co-ops, etc. as the way forward (he concedes that ESOPs have a dubious record). As such, they would offer a relatively painless “evolutionary” road different “from traditional theories of ‘revolution’.” Many “businessmen, bankers, and others, in fact, commonly support the idea [of co-ops] on practical and moral grounds,” Alperovitz proclaims. Of course they do; they see no challenge to capitalism and a possible opportunity to cash in!

The fact that “castles in the air” ideas like Alperovitz’s actually gain traction demonstrates the sad state of the US left. The fact that opinion polls show a decided increase in interest in socialism is encouraging; however, the fact that those new to the idea must taste through the unappealing, non-nourishing gruel currently favored by so many on the left is disappointing.

For more than a century and a half, socialism—the public and democratic ownership of the essential means of production under a majority peoples’ democracy—continues to be the only ultimate answer to a tenuous and destructive capitalist system.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

May 8, 2013

Bombs set off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15 killed three and wounded over 200 people. The metropolitan area became a virtual war zone. Officials at every level let loose with doomsday-style retaliatory proclamations. For many, however, the clamor served to resurrect memories of U.S. terrorism against Cuba and anti-terrorist verbiage that is full of contradictions.

Almost one year before the Marathon bombings, on April 27, 2012, the office of a tourist agency in Coral Gables, Florida that promotes charter flights and legal travel to Cuba was firebombed and destroyed. A local blogger said of owner Vivian Mannerud, “Too bad she was not inside the office.”

Ms. Mannerud pointed out recently that, “to this day, not one elected official — and in particular, James Cason, mayor of Coral Gables — has ever come out to denounce this act of terrorism.” There are still no suspects and few signs of ongoing investigation. The Boston and Florida situations are very different, and perhaps the lack of deaths and injuries in the Florida case account for some of the muted response there. But in the past even when Cuba and supporters of Cuba are beset with chaos and calamity reminiscent of the Boston experience, impunity prevailed.

Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada engineered the murderous downing of a fully loaded Cuban airliner at sea in 1976. Posada alone arranged for hotel bombings in Cuba in 1997. They found safe haven in Florida.

The U.S. government itself is a purveyor of terrorism. Wars, drones, economic sanctions, puppet insurgencies, torture regimens, and prison abuses terrorize peoples throughout the world. The United States exports spies and informants and supports the militarized police forces and national armies of puppet governments. Terror fostered by the United States aggravates hostilities and swells enemy ranks. Vicious cycles ensue and conflicts expand. Openings multiply for the U.S. government to claim victimization and to rationalize its own terror attacks.

Cuba stands alone as remaining apart from this deadly interchange. Anti-Cuban terror flows in only one direction. Cuban sources indicate that U.S. – based terrorists have killed almost 3500 people over 50 years, either Cubans or friends of Cuba. By contrast, U.S. military and intelligence officials now and then reiterate that Cuba represents no military or economic threat to the United States.

Yet the U. S. government maintains Cuba on its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Apologists point to Basque separatists welcomed in Cuba and to sanctuary given leftist Colombian guerrillas. Spain, of course, asked that Cuba take in the Basques, and Colombia embraced Cuba’s offer to host government negotiations with the guerrillas. And political refuge provided for Assata Shakur has long been cited.

Having escaped from a U.S. prison, the black liberation combatant moved to Cuba. Conveniently enough, the United States was recently able simultaneously to announce that Cuba will remain on its list of terror – sponsoring states and that Assata Shakur was being placed on the FBI’s ten “most wanted terrorist” list, also that the bounty for her capture and return to the United States was re-set at $2 million. Many legal observers remain highly critical of the prosecution and trial in 1977 through which she was convicted of murdering a New Jersey policeman.

Why then, if Cuba is quite blameless as a sponsor of terrorism, have terror attacks against Cuba continued?

The assumption here is that the U.S. government, as minder of an empire, is serious about its duty to counter revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements from their earliest stirrings to their taking of power and beyond. U.S. governments have been dealing with Cuban revolutionaries for almost 150 years. In reaction to anti-annexationist, anti-racist independence struggles led by Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo, the United States ended up invading Cuba. U. S. troops helped beat down an Afro-Cuban uprising in 1912. In the early 1930’s student and labor mobilizations, anti-imperialist in nature, were harbingers of a socialist revolution that took charge in 1959. Special treatment for Cuba may stem, in part, from an anti-imperialism that never quit.

That’s not all U.S. power brokers have to worry about. Despite bashings, Cuba poses the threat of a good example. The socialist state has ensured prolonged life expectancy, low infant mortality, ready access to high quality education and jobs, adequate nutrition and housing, and inculcation of ethical, communitarian, and culturally-inherited values. Cubans even weather natural disasters in exemplary fashion. Cuba’s adventures in international solidarity add insult to injury. Beleaguered Cuba contested apartheid in southern Africa, cares for the sick and injured throughout the world, and educates young people from all over.

And annoyingly Cuba defends itself against terror in targeted, non-violent ways not likely to provoke retaliation. Cuban volunteers moved to Florida to monitor U.S. based terrorists so that Cuba could prepare against attacks, maybe prevent them. For their pains, the Cuban Five, as they are known, were subjected to a biased trial and long, cruel sentences. A worldwide movement is demanding that U.S. President Obama release them.

Because the Five targeted violent private organizations operating from bases in Florida, their activities and their trial highlighted the general role of proxy warriors. Use of proxies frees central authorities from having publically to take responsibility for state – sponsored terror campaigns. In effect, the Five helped elucidate similarities among a variety of non-state perpetrators, specifically between Florida private paramilitary groups and terrorist individuals and autonomous groups elsewhere, even those at war with the United States. That bit of political education may have earned the Cuban Five a good part of their wildly excessive penalties.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/10/north-koreas-justifiable-anger/  and  http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/08/what-north-koreans-think/

Health care spending has been rising throughout the world as aging and
more affluent populations spend on their health. Nowhere, however, has
the cost of health care risen as fast as in the United States where costs
soared because of rising administrative expense. Compared with other
affluent countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (the OECD), the United States spends over twice as much per
person as is spent elsewhere. Before 1971 when Canada enacted its
Medicare program, a single-payer government funded health care system,
Canada spent a higher share of its national income on health care than did
the United States; since then, however, while Canada has controlled costs,
spending has soared in the United States so that we now spend over $3000
more per person. That is $12,000 for a family of four that is not
available for travel, education, housing, or food.

Elsewhere, increases in health care spending have been associated with
improvements in the provision of health care and, therefore, go with
increasing life expectancy. In the United States, however, spending has
increased because of rising administrative costs and increases in the
price of prescription drugs and, therefore, has yielded relatively few
benefits in improvements in care. Comparing changes in health-care
spending and life expectancy between 1971 and 2008, other affluent OECD
members gained a year of life expectancy for every $453 in spending; in
the United States, however, life expectancy has increased less and
spending has risen sharply more so that each year of increased life
expectancy has cost over twice as much as in these other countries.
Health care spending in the United States has increased by $1283 for every
additional year of life expectancy; had our spending per year of added
life increased at only the rate of other countries we would be spending
over $4500 less per person, $18,000 saved for the average family of four.
Most of the difference in relative expenditures, most of the growing waste
in spending in the United States, is due to increasing administrative
costs in the provision of private health insurance and in the billing and
insurance operations within doctors’ offices and in hospitals. The
average physician in the United States now spends four-times as much
interacting with insurance companies as does the average physician in
Ontario, Canada, over $80,000 per physician compared with a little over
$20,000 in Ontario. Prescription drug prices and administrative expenses
have been the fastest rising costs in the United States health care
system; from 1980 to 2005, administrative costs rose by 1300% while drug
prices rose by nearly 2000%. There are now 2.5 million administrative
support personnel in the American health care system; more than the number
of nurses, and five times the number of physicians. We now have more
health-care managers than physicians and surgeons.

Rising costs drive up health insurance premiums so that a family health
insurance plan now costs about 40% of the average family wage income, up
from 7% in 1960. Rising costs are denying ever more Americans access to
health care even while businesses and governments wrestle with rising
health care spending that squeezes resources available for other purposes.
While other countries have controlled health care costs by restraining
administrative expenses and drug prices, ballooning costs in the United
States come from policies promoted by economists who have urged
governments and providers to control costs by making consumers responsible
for more of the costs even while raising administrative costs and ignoring
monopolistic pricing of pharmaceuticals. Viewing the injured, sick, and
disabled as “consumers,” economists see insurance as the source of rising
costs because they are not responsible for the costs of care they receive
and, therefore, overuse health care. Rising copayments and deductibles
are intended to discourage “consumers” from “abusing” health care, as if
the victims of auto accidents or cancer should shop around for cheaper,
and competition among insurers while limiting provider services by
providing more administrative supervision. Ignoring evidence that
Americans are less likely to see doctors and other health providers than
are residents of other affluent countries, these economists have blamed
the high cost of our health care on insurance which, they assume, leads to
wasteful over-practice and the provision of unnecessary health care
services. Their solution is greater cost sharing, more regulation of
providers, capitation, and even the end to insurance by substituting
medical savings accounts for insurance.

For 40 years, many economists’ have promoted increasing cost sharing
through higher copayments and deductibles, the replacement of
fee-for-service payment systems with capitation where providers are paid a
fixed amount for patients as in Health Maintenance Organizations, and
competition where multiple insurers offer a variety of plans catered to
individual consumer’s interests and in competition with each other. Far
from limiting health care cost increases, these practices have produced
the worst of all worlds, rising costs along with restrictions on access.
Costs have risen because these recommendations have inflated the
administrative burden in health care, the costs of the billing and
insurance activities within provider offices as well as the cost of the
health insurance industry itself. While restricting access, limiting the
benefit to Americans of some of the dramatic improvements in health care
practice of the last decades, these practices have not bent the cost curve
or slowed health care inflation even while denying more and more Americans
access to affordable health care.

The failure of price incentives and competition to control health care
costs could have been predicted had economists appreciated that health
insurance is not a commodity and the sick are not consumers like those
shopping for the best pair of sandals or brand of peanut butter.

Producers of commodities might try to accommodate consumer wishes because
they can profit by selling more. Health insurers, on the contrary, can
better increase their profits by selling less, by identifying people
likely to need care and driving them away (“lemon dropping”) even while
attracting the lucky and healthy (“cherry picking”). Most health care
expenditures go to a relatively few people, the unlucky who develop an
illness or suffer an accident; insurers, therefore, can dramatically lower
their costs by finding those who will be expensive and getting rid of
their business; encouraging them to find another insurance plan or even to
die.

A form of “adverse selection,” or screening of potential customers by
insurance companies, can be profitable for the individual firm but it
comes at the cost of raising costs for the community as a whole. As a
country, we now spend almost $200 billion administering the health
insurance industry and over $800 billion in administering the health care
industry, or over a quarter of total spending. Add to this the
inefficiency in delivery that comes from a fragmented finance system that
inhibits coordination of care, and the inflated prices for prescription
drugs, and easily a third of total spending is wasted or going to
monopolistic profits.

The waste involved in the current system has a redeeming feature: it
provides abundant space for an improved system that could improve access
and services even while dramatically lowering costs by eliminating
administrative waste. If we lowered administrative costs and drug prices
to the Canadian level, we could save nearly $600 billion dollars, more
than enough to provide coverage to all of the uninsured while improving
access for the millions of underinsured. If we see past the bad
recommendations of market-fundamentalists, we can improve health care and
save money. An outcome that even economists should favor.

Gerald Friedman
Professor of Economics
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, MA. 01003
gfriedma@econs.umass.edu

Professor Friedman has written extensively on single payer health care and
HR 676. His article explaining the economics of single payer is available
here:

http://www.pnhp.org/sites/default/files/docs/2012/Dollars%20and%20Sense.pdf

Distributed by:

All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care–HR 676
c/o Nurses Professional Organization (NPO)
1169 Eastern Parkway, Suite 2218
Louisville, KY 40217
(502) 636 1551

Email: nursenpo@aol.com
http://unionsforsinglepayer.org
5/5/13

Henrique Capriles, the losing pro-capitalist candidate in the April 14 presidential election in Venezuela, says in the April 25 edition of El Universal that “We are not afraid of your threats. The truth will see the light. You can not twist the truth.The truth is that you stole the election,” he added.

“WE ARE NOT AFRAID OF YOUR THREATS”

Eight people were murdered and over 70 people were seriously injured in post-election violence incited, in large part, by defeated bourgeois candidate Capriles immediately after Capriles lost the close April 14 race. The democratic government with a growing proletarian content in Venezuela vows to apprehend and prosecute the criminals who murdered and injured Venezuelan citizens over the election results. Capriles calls this vow by the Venezuelan government to apprehend and prosecute criminals a “threat” against him and his supporters.

The people of Venezuela are not afraid of Capriles and his supporters.

“THE TRUTH WILL SEE THE LIGHT”

The truth already sees the light. The truth is Capriles is a bad loser. And, everybody, including his suppporters, knows it.

“YOU CAN NOT TWIST THE TRUTH”

Then why does Capriles persist in twisting.

In other words, this twisting is lying. Capriles lied before the campaign, during the campaign, and after the campaign.

“THE TRUTH IS THAT YOU STOLE THE ELECTION”

That’s Capriles favorite lie after the campaign.

The majority of the Venezuelan people rejects Capriles’ lie about an election theft.

National Electoral Council, which supervises Venezuelan elections, rejects Capriles’ lie. This Council supervised seven elections in which Capriles was a candidate over the last 14 years.This Council recognized Capriles as the winner in five of his seven races — one for national legislator, two for mayor of Baruta, and two for governor of Miranda. Capriles gloated when the Council called him the winner in these five races. But Capriles, a bad loser, sniveled both times the Council declared him the loser in races for president. So, to Capriles, the Council is right when the Council finds for Capriles but wrong when it doesn’t. Capriles is a two-faced hypocrite who can’t stand to lose.

Of the 34 members countries of the OAS, all but four — namely, the reactionary bourgeois regimes in Washingtion DC, Paraguay,Canada, and Panama — recognize the April 14 election as free and fair. So, all but two Latin American and Caribbean countries — Panama and Paraguay — recognize the legitimacy of the Venezuelan Government. Nicolas Maduro would not enjoy overwhelming regional support if he “stole” the election as Capriles falsely asserts .

Most of the countries of the world — including many of the closest allies of US imperialists like UK, France, Germany, Japan — reject Capriles’ lie about a stolen April 14 election and recognize the Nicolas Maduro Government.

Only Capriles, the bombing-dropping and missile-shooting imperialist regimes, and the vile bourgeois media in Venezuela and around the world spread Capriles’ lie that the April 14 election in Venezuela was stolen.

President Garry “Gabby” Frost brought the resolution before the council in
response to an appeal from the All Unions Committee for Single Payer
Health Care–HR 676 and from Pippa Abston, MD, Ph D, a board member of
Physicians for a National Health Program and a Huntsville, Alabama,
pediatrician.

“Health care is a necessity not a privilege,” said President Frost after
the adoption of the resolution for HR 676. “Everybody’s got to have it.
This is the only industrialized nation that does not have it.”

The Northeast Alabama Labor Council is the 145th Central Labor Council to
endorse HR 676. The council represents workers in nine counties, Calhoun,
Chambers, Cherokee, Cleburne, DeKalb, Etowah, Marshall, Randolph, and St.
Clair. The Southwest Alabama Labor Council in Mobile and the Alabama
State AFL-CIO had previously endorsed HR 676.

President Frost, who is the Business Manager of Local 498, United
Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters, reports that Local 498 has also
endorsed HR 676. That brings the total of union organizations that have
endorsed HR 676 to 600.

Dr. Pippa Abston commented on the importance of these union endorsements
of HR 676. She said, “As an Alabama physician and Physicians for a
National Health Program board member, I am thrilled to hear this news!
Medicare for All is an achievable, practical way to address our healthcare
needs and would go a long way towards relieving our state’s constant
budget struggles. Thank you to our friends in Labor for helping bring HR
676 a step closer to success.”

HR 676 would institute a single payer health care system by expanding a
greatly improved Medicare to everyone residing in the U. S.

HR 676 would cover every person for all necessary medical care including
prescription drugs, hospital, surgical, outpatient services, primary and
preventive care, emergency services, dental (including oral surgery,
periodontics, endodontics), mental health, home health, physical therapy,
rehabilitation (including for substance abuse), vision care and
correction, hearing services including hearing aids, chiropractic, durable
medical equipment, palliative care, podiatric care, and long term care.

HR 676 ends deductibles and co-payments. HR 676 would save hundreds of
billions annually by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the
private health insurance industry and HMOs.

In the current Congress, HR 676 has 41 co-sponsors in addition to Conyers.

HR 676 has been endorsed by 600 union organizations including 145 Central
Labor Councils/Area Labor Federations and 41 state AFL-CIO’s (KY, PA, CT,
OH, DE, ND, WA, SC, WY, VT, FL, WI, WV, SD, NC, MO, MN, ME, AR, MD-DC, TX,
IA, AZ, TN, OR, GA, OK, KS, CO, IN, AL, CA, AK, MI, MT, NE, NJ, NY, NV, MA
& RI).

For further information, a list of union endorsers, or a sample
endorsement resolution, contact:

Kay Tillow
All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care–HR 676
c/o Nurses Professional Organization (NPO)
1169 Eastern Parkway, Suite 2218
Louisville, KY 40217
(502) 636 1551

Email: nursenpo@aol.com
http://unionsforsinglepayer.org
4/21/13

on earth day
the struggles
like the chains
link and we
search for the
ways to break
the chains of
slavery and
then to build
the chains
linking our fights
in solidarity
and victorious
harmony.

berkeley ca

gary hicks

On the rare occasion, an article appears in the mainstream press that takes a deeper, more thoughtful view of human affairs, a document that gives a hint or glimpse of an unspoken truth beyond the pablum that occupies media puppets. Such an occasion was the publishing of The New York Times opinion piece entitled “State Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America” (3-31-2013) and authored by former Reaganite budget director, David Stockman.

Now Stockman is a renegade from corporate Republicanism; he actually believes in the ancient principles put forward by Adam Smith and other classical capitalist thinkers. While corporate Republicans cozy up to their party’s ugly, fascistic outliers, they always, in the end, make their bed with the rich and powerful. Stockman, on the other hand, actually embraces the mythical virtues of small business ownership and town hall democracy. In classical Marxist terms, he represents the ideology of the petite-bourgeoisie.

In the swamp occupied by Democratic and Republican politicos—the breeding ground for conventional politics—such views are unwelcome. Principled politics from the right or the left are alien equally to the snakes and the rats that prey on the cognitively weak and unwary.

Stockman is in a panic because he sees beyond the stock market euphoria and Pollyanna commentaries that have induced the mass delusions of the last several months. And what he sees angers him.

Stockman constructs an indictment, a list of charges against the current US economy: growth of output is woefully inadequate, jobs are both indecently scarce and low paying, the incomes and the net worth of “ordinary” citizens are dropping while poverty is on the rise. To anyone with a grip on reality, these are not signs of real economic recovery or systemic success. He notes that “we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.” And yet imagine the toll if no remedial action had been taken! Surely, this unintended critique of eighty years of state-monopoly governance counts as a devastating charge against modern capitalism. If the era of state-monopoly capitalism can do no better than produce the sad state outlined by Stockman, it is decidedly a failure.

Stockman dares speak the truth so discomforting to liberals and social democrats: [World War II] “did far more to end the Depression than the New Deal did,” though he misleadingly praises the Eisenhower years for its “sound money and fiscal rectitude.” Perhaps he is too young to remember the massive increases in military spending, the ambitious interstate highway system, and the enormous growth of public spending brought on by the Cold War and the Sputnik panic. In any case, the dose of war socialism and the “frenetic… activism” of state-monopoly capitalism kept the capitalist ship afloat, though with fewer and fewer rewards for the majority of US citizens.

Stockman correctly sees that the remedies pursued by US state-monopoly capitalism directed more and more of the lubricant of public funds towards the financial sector over the last decades: the Greenspan “put,” the Long-Term Capital Management bailout, extended ultra-low interest rates, TARP, Fed purchases of bank junk, the support of federal bond prices, and support for equity markets. He calls this, not incorrectly, “Keynesianism—for the wealthy.”

And this is a salient point. It is commonplace to express the differences between Democratic and Republican policy makers since the Reagan era as pro- and anti-Keynesianism. But this is wrong. Ironically, it was only during the Clinton administration that growth of government spending was at all curtailed and today fiscal and monetary expansion remains a ready tool of the ruling class well after Reagan’s departure. Certainly Keynesian pump priming has taken new and evolving forms over decades: direct job creation, military spending, massive space programs, infrastructure projects, public-private partnerships, repair of financial institutions, and stimulation of financial demand. While one or the other may be the favored priming tool of rulers at any given time, the similarities of the forms are far more important to recognize than their differences. State intervention in markets continues to be at the core of contemporary state-monopoly capitalism. Stockman sees this; others don’t.

In Stockman’s account, the enabler of pump priming in all of its forms has been debt. Borrowing or printing money is the means to continue the regimen of “frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism.” But, in his view, this regimen is running out of steam. “The future is bleak.” And the “Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it…”

A bleak picture indeed, but one entrenched in reality.

So if modern capitalism– in its state-monopoly form– is a disaster, does that mean that Stockman advocates socialism?

Definitely not. Instead he holds out for a nostalgic return to the gold standard. Avoiding what he calls “end-state metastasis,” “would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy [the wholesale rejection of state-monopoly capitalism! ZZ]. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would have to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.”

In short, Stockman advocates going back to a conjured idyllic time before state-monopoly capitalism, a time imagined by the petite-bourgeoisie as one of healthy competition, entrepreneurship, and opportunity. For him, the golden age of capitalism would be the pre-depression era of small town USA, family farms, vibrant and expansive industry and foreign policy isolationism. Of course any pretense of continuity or viability of that era was dashed by the Great Depression. In fact, the policies decried by Stockman (and associated by Marxists with state-monopoly capitalism) served as a temporary backstop to the further contraction of the capitalist system produced by that fantastic era.

Stockman may wish for a return to an earlier time just as others may wish to time travel back to the court of Louis XIV, but it isn’t going to happen. Capitalism, like any organism, has its own life span, its own history. Saved from a critical illness, capitalism passed from its laissez faire period to a period of intensifying state intervention and management. Today, that phase of capitalism’s development—state-monopoly capitalism– is also threatened with a critical illness. I would not be so bold as to predict capitalism’s imminent death, but certainly it will not be revived by reliving its past as Stockman fantasizes.

At a time when liberals and conservatives argue pathetically over the right mix of austerity and stimulus, Stockman is a welcome mainstream herald of the profound crisis pummeling global capitalism. His anxiety and anger reflect a deeper understanding of the contradictions of the moment. His rant, spiked with sarcasm and vitriol, stands in stark relief against the smugness of the lap dog punditry.

Krugman Strides into the Ring

The Stockman screed generated a storm of opposition. Liberals and the fuzzy, mushy left were particularly affronted. Unlike Stockman, they would like to only turn the clock back to the early seventies, another supposedly “idyllic” time when business unionism was generating satisfactory contracts, the “Great Society” programs were blooming, and war in Vietnam was winding down (at least for US combatants). The fruits of the civil rights struggles and urban uprisings were realized in the creation of programs, bureaucracies, and other buffering agents against domestic insurgency. Jobs servicing the Great Society generated a stratum of social liberals who matured into the base of a social democratic left inside and outside of the Democratic Party. For them, the world turned evil and foreboding with the Reagan “revolution,” a movement they characterize as neo-liberalism.

In the dust-up with Stockman, Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times, assumed the role of savior and protector of their interests and perspective. Krugman, the darling of the “respectable” left, attacked Stockman for his audacious critique of the track record of state intervention in the capitalist economy. Anyone who follows Krugman knows that his response to the crisis is a simple solution: spend more public funds and spend freely until growth perks up. The soft left finds this an agreeable solution because it promises to save capitalism (and forestall socialism!) while creating a potential material basis for pet welfare programs. It is simply the fantasy of another New Deal. And never mind that Krugman doesn’t share the fantasy!

Apparently, the Stockman-Krugman battle merited a major media appearance before the Sunday morning gasbags, the big stage for what our media passes off as intellectual fare. While I lacked the stomach to watch the sparring between the two, refereed by the likes of Huffington, van Sustern, and Will, I would commend an entertaining account of the match by Mike Whitney in Counterpunch (Krugman vs. Stockman, April 11, 2013).

The merit of Stockman’s account is that he is righteously indignant with an economic system that has failed the great majority of people and inflicted great pain and uncertainty. He goes beyond the dominant rhetoric of “we are all in this together” and “we are all at fault” to find systemic rot in capitalism. He correctly places the blame for this at the doorstep of state-monopoly capitalism, the stage of capitalism evolved to rescue the system from the accumulated contradictions of laissez faire capitalism, contradictions brought to light by the Great Depression. But he cannot go where logic would take him. He cannot entertain options that would transcend capitalism. Thus, he is resigned to a pathetic nostalgia for a bygone era where the contradictions of capitalism did not appear in such sharp focus. While he stretches the bounds of mainstream thinking, he can not see beyond markets and private ownership; he cannot see socialism.

Krugman and most of the US left are thoroughly conventional in their thinking—they offer a more “enlightened” management of the economic system and a cheerful capitalism with a human face. They would be hard pressed to point to a period when capitalism bore a human face, however. Nonetheless, they are undaunted before a rising tide of interest in the socialist option. They are resolute in their fear and rejection of real socialism.

Pressured by five years of relentless economic crisis and increasing signs of favor towards socialism, especially with the young, our feckless left offers a cold plate of empty slogans of localism, anti-consumerism, platitudinous “participatory” democracy, cooperatives, and a vacuous “new” economy. As if these are answers to the $17 trillion dollar US multinational, monopoly capital behemoth. In truth, these are simply evasions and dissemblance.

If Stockton is right and capitalism is “state-wrecked,” then its time to leave the wreckage and turn to socialism.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/dan-kovalik/us-must-recognize-venezuela_b_3103540.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha2CypO0Y64&feature=youtu.be