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‘Compromise’ and Democracy |
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Written by Editor In-Chief
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Wednesday, 08 December 2010 00:00 |
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During President Obama’s recent efforts to explain his capitulation to the Republicans on extending the Bush regime’s tax cuts for the wealthy, the chief executive officer of American corporatism repeatedly pointed to the agreement as a “compromise.”
Indeed, Obama has made “compromise” a central tenet of the rest of his term, claiming that his deals with Congressional Republicans represent the “best” of American politics.
Well, first things first. Was Obama’s deal a “compromise” agreement with the Republicans? No. In fact, quite the opposite. The only person who compromised in the course of negotiating this deal was Obama. The Republicans were able to get everything they wanted.
Not only did the GOP get their tax cuts for the wealthy extended for two years, but they also got tax cuts for businesses, a reduced estate tax and a reduction in Social Security taxes. More importantly, though, the Republicans got a free pass on extending unemployment insurance payments for workers who have been out of a job for more than six months.
The White House and its shills have pointed to the unemployment extension and said that is where Boehner, McConnell, etc., compromised. However, as numerous dissenting Democrats and liberal commentators have pointed out, Republicans may make noise about “deficit spending,” but they have always voted for extensions when unemployment is high.
After all, the last thing the Congressional Republicans want is to be seen as cutting off the unemployed just before Christmas. They would never fully recover from such an act.
So, why did Obama cave in to the GOP, and why is he calling it a “compromise?”
In any substantively democratic system — whether it is a capitalist or a workers’ democracy — compromise is a central pillar. Whenever representatives or delegates from diverse and differing opinions meet in an assembly, it is inevitable that there will be a need for compromise in order to pass legislation, improve working relationships and get projects done.
But compromise implies that both sides move, make tactical concessions and agreements, and try to build a consensus around deals that do not completely satisfy everyone.
Since the 1990s, and especially after the corporatist coup d’état of 2000, the practical definition of compromise changed. These days, “compromise” is a code word for the Republicans getting everything they want at the expense of the Democrats. At the same time, the activist bases of both parties are standing on the sidelines screaming, “No Compromise!”
After 10 years of corporatist rule and the clearing out of what remained of the democratic content in the American political system, the last of the load-bearing pillars of the old democratic republic has been pulled down by both parties and their active supporters.
When “compromise” becomes a one-way street, the foundation of a democratic system — whether it is nominal or substantial — becomes vulnerable to the quicksand of moralism, emotionalism or other forms of demagogy. When, on top of this, the alignment of forces become crystallized and compromise becomes synonymous with weakness or capitulation, to speak of a democratic political system is to engage in delusional nostalgia, at best.
We communists have no illusions in corporatist capitalism, which is why we reject compromise with the parties and movements of the ruling classes. At the same time, we recognize that there will be a need to reach compromise agreements with fellow working-class organizations and parties within the framework of a workers’ republic. The workers’ republic will be an extreme democracy, and consensus will be the watchword for policy. |
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The Hunt for Julian Assange |
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Written by Editor In-Chief
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Friday, 03 December 2010 00:00 |
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E ver since the website WikiLeaks began releasing the more than 250,000 secret diplomatic dispatches from the U.S. State Department, the American ruling classes have engaged in a virtual war against the Internet phenomenon and its founder, Julian Assange.
In the last week, WikiLeaks has had its website taken down several times. The U.S. government seized the wikileaks.org domain name, and other countries have done similar. Since before the initial release of diplomatic dispatches, WikiLeaks was experiencing “denial of service” attacks, meant to overload the site and make it impossible to view or use.
Two days after the release of the diplomatic dispatches, Interpol issued a “red notice” for Assange, meant to detain and bring him to Sweden to answer charges related to consentual sexual encounters he had with two adult women at separate times, during which Assange did not wear a condom (apparently, that can be called rape in Sweden).
It is rumored that Assange is now in hiding somewhere in Britain, along with many of his close supporters, seeking to avoid arrest by Interpol ... as well as being kidnapped by agents of the U.S. and brought to Washington.
In reality, the Interpol warrant is only a smokescreen, meant mainly to mark Assange with a moralistic “taint” at a time when he and his organization are exposing the brutality, conniving, dirty dealings and crimes of the American ruling classes and their state bodies.
In the last year, WikiLeaks has exposed the actions of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as most recently the general infrastructure of America’s secret diplomacy. This is what has made Assange and his organization the target of the world’s ruling classes. They know that if he can air Washington’s dirty laundry in public, Assange and WikiLeaks can certain do that to any of the other Great Powers, their client states and corporations.
This is why all of Washington is calling WikiLeaks a “terrorist organization” and Assange a “criminal” — even though Assange did not steal any of the information published, and WikiLeaks itself didn’t do anything that the New York Times hasn’t done in the past.
And that is the point here, in our view. Much like when Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the Times, or when “Deep Throat” gave information to Woodward and Bernstein from the Washington Post that eventually brought down the Nixon administration, the WikiLeaks release of the secret dispatches is the democratic right of a free press. That it is being attacked as a kind of “terrorism” is a chilling reminder of how far removed today’s corporatist regime is from the nominal capitalist democracy the United States used to be.
Contrary to the propaganda that flows like raw sewage out of the ruling classes’ mouthpieces (and stinks just as much), communists support openness, transparency and popular (specifically, working-class) checks in the affairs of state. A workers’ republic would abolish secret diplomacy and open all of the archives of the overthrown capitalist state to the public.
The Workers Party in America calls for all attacks on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange being carried out by the ruling classes, their corporations, politicians or states, to cease immediately, and for working people to organize to defend the democratic right of a free press. |
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Following Up on ‘Capital Flow’ |
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Written by Editor In-Chief
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Monday, 06 December 2010 00:00 |
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The lead article in last Friday’s WPA on the so-called “backdoor bailout” (“Capital Flow”) left some readers with questions because of the final paragraphs of the text. Specifically, many readers were curious about how, in the words of the article, “For the most part, this [praise from Wall Street — Eds.] is because it explains how the pillars of American capitalism survived the onset of the Panic — and why the credit crisis has lasted until now.”
An editorial in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, the chief mouthpiece for the finance capitalists, their money and fund managers, stockbrokers and bankers, provides the most insight into why the ruling classes are praising the release of the Federal Reserve documents.
The article starts off with this revealing line: “The Federal Reserve pulled back the curtain yesterday on its emergency lending during the financial panic of 2008 and 2009, and the game to play at home with the kids is: Who didn’t get a bailout?” Like the Journal, WPA’s editors also combed through the spreadsheets available online. And we saw what they are talking about very quickly. Virtually every major capitalist enterprise, corporation, bank, finance house and other assorted business applied for and received loans from the Fed.
When talking about the massive trillion-dollar bribes given to Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, etc., the Journal comments: “This news [about how much these institutions drew from the Fed] makes it impossible to argue that either bank would have survived the storm without the Fed’s cash.” And herein is the rub! The fact is that none of the corporations who went to the Fed “would have survived the storm” without the money.
What does this mean? It means that the Federal Reserve (along with the Treasury Department, through the TARP bribe, and the semi-nationalization of General Motors and Chrysler) became the “lender of last resort” for the entirety of the American capitalist system. For a brief time, the entire American economy — domestic and international — was owned by the Fed like a bank owns a house that is under a mortgage. They owned the banks, major corporations and, through the circulation of the money lent, every subsidiary, supplementary and secondary business dependent on those banks and major capitalist businesses.
What Wall Street is praising is their learning how far the Fed, and Washington in general, was willing to go to preserve their class power and wealth. It was a reassurance that when the current depression begins its “double dip,” the Fed will once again come to their rescue.
The Journal begins to conclude their editorial by asking the obvious question of why virtually the whole of American capitalism took loans from the Fed. However, it seems that the Journal editors were nervous about letting that cat out of the bag. So they tossed a little dust around to cloud the vision and confuse the question of what the Fed considered “systemic risk,” while claiming their asking why was more aimed at the Fed than at capitalism.
In fact, what the Journal and their paymasters don’t want asked is precisely why almost all of America’s industries and services took loans. As we have pointed out before, these were not so much “bailouts” as bribes. In the beginning, there may have been a need to boost bottom lines and credit, but soon after it became a source of relatively free capital for the ruling classes, as evidenced in the “merger-mania” in the banking service over the last two years.
For communists, these facts provide a very fitting context for the current drive toward austerity being conducted by Obama’s “Catfood Commission,” calling for cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and by both parties in Congress over unemployment. |
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Death of the American Dream |
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Written by Editor In-Chief
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Wednesday, 01 December 2010 00:00 |
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T he comment seemed to have the bulk of the corporatist media confounded and indignant. Suze Orman, the personal finance guru who is regularly seen on the 24-hour cable news and business channels, told Forbes magazine, “The American Dream is dead.”
“The middle class has disappeared,” she told the rightwing magazine (the writers and editors of which don’t give a crap about anyone but the wealthy). “We have a highway to poverty and no roads coming out. I fear for [those] who have been kicked out of their homes, could be living on the streets and don’t know how to get another job. Many of the millions of jobs lost I don’t think are coming back. I am really afraid for the majority of Americans today.”
The response to Orman’s comments has been predictable, with many elements of the ruling classes rallying ’round the flag and proclaiming the “new” American Dream to be just for them. For the capitalists and their “middle class” managers, the “new” American Dream is making obscene amounts of money, even if everyone else is living in crushing poverty.
Some of these social parasites have allowed their personal indignation with Orman flow as heavily as their rote propaganda, making references to her sexuality and personal wealth as part of their admonishing her for daring to say there’s any breakdown in the system. Because these elements — a small but controlling minority of the population — live in a virtual bubble, insulated, isolated and inoculated from the harsh realities of American capitalism, they cannot even fathom what it’s like for millions of working people in this country who are having to endure unemployment, poverty and austerity so they can acquire more wealth.
This morning, 800,000 working people (and their spouses and children) woke up to the reality that their only source of income, unemployment insurance, has been cut off and is being held hostage in order to extend tax cuts for the wealthy. The lives and well-being of millions are being used as a bargaining chip between the Republicans and Democrats in Congress (as well as Obama’s White House) in order to make sure that the exploiting and oppressing classes get to keep more of the money they made off of our class’ collective labor.
By this time next month, a total of 2 million will have lost their benefits. By February 1, 2011, upwards of 5 million workers will be cut off unless funding is restored. Including spouses, children and others dependent on that income for survival, close to 12 million working people will be facing hunger, homelessness and desperation by this coming spring.
It appears at this point that the only way unemployment insurance payments will be restored soon is if it is attached to a bill extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. Otherwise, it will fall to the next Congress, dominated by Republicans, to pass such legislation.
Combine this with millions facing foreclosure and eviction from their homes, real unemployment edging closer and closer to 25 percent, the ruling classes slashing wages for workers (including Obama’s two-year pay freeze for federal workers), health insurance corporations raising premiums by double-digit percentages in advance of the imposition of the individual mandate, proposed cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the
slashing of the few other remaining social welfare programs, and it becomes clear that the old “American Dream” has been transformed into a living nightmare for the working class.
Yes, the “American Dream,” as given by Orman and heard among older “middle class” and privileged layers of the working class, is dead — as is the America that created it. There is now only the nightmare of corporatist capitalism ... or the hope of a workers’ republic.
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