Harry Targ
Marge Piercy wrote poetically in a recent issue of
Monthly Review, Who has little, let them have less. “The hatred of the
poor, is it guilt gone rancid? That the rich have so much and still conspire to
steal a baby’s medicine, a woman’s life, a man’s heart and kidney….If they
could push a button, if they could war on the poor here at home as they do abroad
directly with bombs instead of legislation, think they’d hesitate?”
Robert Reich has been a visible observer of the “war on poor and
working families”. Recently, he extrapolated from his new film the claim that
the “war has been prosecuted across seven political fronts.
First, politicians in both state and national governments have
opposed extending unemployment benefits for those who have experienced
joblessness for long periods of time.
Second, these same politicians oppose raising the minimum wage.
Third, in several states governors have rejected federal resources
to support Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.
Fourth, Republicans, with Democratic co-conspirators among
Democrats, have passed legislation (signed by the President) to cut food stamp
payments.
Fifth, at the federal level the Congress has been unable to make
decisions to invest in education and expanded job training programs,
Sixth, in addition, Congress has rejected proposals to invest in
rebuilding the American infrastructure (roads, bridges, transportation
facilities, and green energy manufacturing).
Finally, in Red states and Congress there has been a sustained
campaign to destroy the labor movement. After a thirty year attack on unions in
the private sector, Congress, Red States (and in some cities like Chicago) campaigns
are underway to destroy public sector unions.
Concerning United States imperialism, peace forces have won some
significant victories over the last year that are in the process of being
reversed. Growing pressures on the Obama administration to expand military
support to Israel and/or to engage Iran militarily was defeated last summer by
popular pressures and sectors of the administration which highlighted the use
of diplomatic rather than military tools to expand the U.S. empire.
Shifting toward his neo-conservative and humanitarian
interventionist advisers for a time, Obama flirted with the idea of direct
military engagement against Syria. A war-weary nation, an energized peace
movement, and Congressional objection forced Obama away from the war path in
the Middle East. Shifting again to diplomacy he launched, with the help of
Russia, toward negotiations for tension reduction with Iran, reducing chemical
weapons in Syria, and dialogue to end the brutal civil war in Syria.
Over the last several months, the war factions in the Obama
administration have regained the initiative to stifle ongoing negotiations with
enemies in the Middle East in conjunction with Russia as a partner. United
States covert intervention has fueled escalating protest and violence in
Ukraine. Protesters demanding democratization and an end to corruption there
have been superseded in their political influence by rightwing Ukrainian
factions supported by United States covert operations.
U.S. intervention, clearly tied to neoconservative foreign policy
influentials, led to the ouster of the corrupt but elected leader of Ukraine.
Russia, fearful of the historic drive of western militarists from the Russian
civil war to Germany in two world wars, to NATO and the United States during
the Cold War moved to solidify its control of the Crimean section of Ukraine,
with apparent mass support from citizens of that land. Thus began an escalation
of a new Cold War which Stephen Cohen suggests has the makings of a Cuban
Missile Crisis style escalation of tensions between east and west.
With the eyes of Europe and the United States on the deepening
crisis in Ukraine, United States operatives have been ratcheting up protest
activities in Venezuela.
Protests communicated in the U.S. media promote the idea that there is
massive opposition to the Venezuelan government which is framed as autocratic,
driving the economy into enormous inflation, and making basic food increasingly
scarce. Of course, reports on the ground suggest that protests are largely in
wealthy neighborhoods, involve college students who see their economic futures
as tied to the maintenance of great disparities of wealth and poverty, and
reflect the traditional Latin American ruling classes’ hatred of the poor. In
the majority of locations in Venezuela as reflected in the geography of protest
in that country and recent elections the majority of the population
passionately supports the Bolivarian Revolution.
But the National Endowment for
Democracy and its various arms in both political parties and other covert
agencies decided that the rightwing Venezuelans cannot oust the Chavistas
through elections and must move to a new level of protest violence. For those
of us with a long memory the phases of destabilization in Venezuela can be
referred to with five letters, CHILE.
What is behind the escalating and ruthless rejection of minimally
humane policies in the many states and the country at large as listed by Reich?
And what is behind the escalation to war overseas, with the clear goal of
ending any chance of negotiating settlements of violent disputes, reversing
Russia’s (and later China’s) influence in the world, and destroying people’s
movements in Latin America?
The
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Theory of the “Deep State”
ALEC was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and noted conservatives
such as Senator Jesse Helms and John Kasich to raise money and coordinate the
creation of a counter-revolution in the American political system. Its vision
was one of deregulation, privatization, weakening workers’ rights, and the
facilitation of the unbridled accumulation of private wealth. The achievement
of these goals required the rejection of the public commitment to positive government; the idea that for
societies to function public energies, resources, and commitments are needed to
create and maintain institutions to serve the people. This is so whether the
topic of concern is national security, public safety, education and
infrastructure, and/or providing for the needy.
ALEC established a network of prominent politicians at the national
and state levels, created well-funded lobby groups, funded “research” to justify reactionary
public policies, supported conservative political candidates running for office
virtually everywhere and at all levels of
government. ALEC creates “model” legislation that is introduced in
legislative bodies everywhere on subjects like right-to-work, charter schools,
and privatization of pensions. While politicians pay dues to join ALEC, over 98
percent of ALEC’s budget comes from corporate contributions from such economic
and political influential as Exxon/Mobil, the Koch brothers, the Coors family,
and the Scaife family. ALEC claims to have 2,000 legislative members and over
300 corporate members. Corporations who have benefited legislatively from their
affiliations with ALEC include but are not limited to Altria/Philip Morris USA,
Humana, United Healthcare, Corrections Corporation of America, and Connections
Academy.
One of ALEC’s prominent projects is the creation of the “State
Policy Network,” a collection of think tanks in every state (funded up to $83
million) to generate research “findings” to justify the rightwing model
legislation generated by ALEC. SPN studies have been disseminated on education
healthcare, worker’s rights, energy and the environment, taxes, government
spending, and wages and income equality (Center For Media and Democracy,
“Exposed: The State Policy Network,” November, 2013, p.6)
Of particular concern to workers are the ALEC model bills that have
been introduced in states attacking workers. These include:
-right-to-work legislation
-rules increasing the right for governments to hire non-union
contractors
-changing pension rights for government employees
-repealing minimum wage laws
- eliminating prevailing wage laws for construction workers
-encouraging so-called “free trade” to outsource work
-privatizing public services
-gutting worker’s compensation
The role of ALEC, the Koch Brothers, and the largest
multinational corporations and banks in America suggest that politics
increasingly occurs at two levels. First, at the level of transparency, we
observe politics as “games,” largely about electoral contests, gossip and
frivolous rhetoric. News junkies like myself avidly consume this first level,
glued to the television screen or the social network.
However, Mike Lofgren, a former Republican
Congressional aid has introduced the idea of another level of politics, what he
calls the “deep state.” Lofgren defines the “deep state” as “… a hybrid association of elements of
government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able
to govern in the United States without reference to the consent of the governed
as expressed through the formal political process.” (Mike Lofgren, “Anatomy of the ‘Deep State’:
Hiding in Plain Sight,” Online University
of the Left, February 23, 2014).
Others have examined invisible power structures that rule America (from
C. W. Mills’ classic The Power Elite,
Oxford University Press, 2000 to Robert Perrucci, Earl Wysong, and David
Wright, The New Class Society: Goodbye
American Dream? Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).
The distinction between politics as games vs. the
deep state suggest that the power to make critical decisions reside not in the
superstructure of the political process; the place where competitive games are
played for all to see, but in powerful institutions embedded in society that
can make decisions without requiring popular approval. In domestic politics,
the “deep state” apparatuses such as ALEC and its network of organizational
ties has initiated a resource-rich campaign--from the school board and city
council to the state and nation--to destroy the links between government and
the people. Recall Marge Piercy’s reference to “war on the poor.” And the
public face of the deep state include the selective and manipulative character
of experts, pundits, and major sources of news in the media. This includes what
news consumers are told and what they are not told.
“The
Deep State” and Foreign Policy
Journalist Robert Parry has recently described the
character of the “deep state” and patterns of interference in Ukraine (Robert
Perry, “A Shadow US Foreign Policy,” consortium
news. com, February 27, 2014). Funding for covert operations in support of
“democratization” was initiated by Congress in 1983 when it established the
National Endowment for Democracy. NED currently receives $100 million a year to
engage in non-transparent activities such as in Venezuela and Ukraine.
Parry raises the issue of who is controlling U.S.
covert operations: “NED is one reason why there is so much confusion about the
administration’s policies toward attempted ousters of democratically elected
leaders in Ukraine and Venezuela. Some of the non-government organizations (or
NGOs) supporting these rebellions trace back to NED and its U.S. government
money, even as Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials insist
the U.S. is not behind these insurrections.”
As a result of ousted President Yanukovych’s turn
away from joining the European Union, which would require Ukraine to accept
IMF/EU austerity policies, the deep state institutions shifted from supporting
the elected Ukraine president to funding various opposition elements to him.
Parry reports that Carl Gershman, neoconservative
and president of NED wrote in the Washington
Post last September that the U.S. should push all the countries in Central
Europe to accept so-called free trade agreements and the neoliberal policy
agenda. Although the long-term goal would be removing Putin from office, Parry
said that NED has funded 65 projects in Ukraine creating a “shadow political
structure of media and activist groups.” According to Gershman, “Ukraine is the
biggest prize.”
It is likely that much more data will be uncovered
in the weeks ahead (primarily in alternative media) about United States
involvement in Ukraine, Venezuela, and the dozens of other countries in which
the deep structures of the national security apparatus operate. For now,
several points can be made:
First, a multiplicity of agencies, bureaus, funded
organizations (often called non-governmental organizations or NGOs) engage in
semi-independent foreign policies with political groups in other countries. In
addition, banks, multinational corporations, so-called human rights
organizations and other NGOs are part of the panoply of interventionist
organizations that promote an imperial agenda.
Second, it is not always clear that deep state
structures reflect the official foreign policies defined by the President or
members of the National Security Council who are supposed to be the public face
of United States foreign policy to the
world and the American people.
Third, these deep structures promote long
discredited foreign policies that have their roots in the post-World War Two
period or even further, the Russian Revolution (when the United States and 9
other countries sent troops to help the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow
the new government established by the Bolsheviks).
Fourth, these deep structures also promote the
neo-liberal policy agenda across the global economy: privatization of public
institutions, so-called “free markets,” cutting government services so that
countries can pay back loans from international financial institutions, export
development policies, and dis-empowering workers, peasants, those barely
surviving in the informal sector.
Fifth, even if the President and key foreign policy
decision-makers are not in control of the deep state they still bear
responsibility for the correction of policies created by it.
The
Moral Mondays Fightback
The most exciting social movement development
occurring over the last two years is in the South. In North Carolina the
determined, passionate, and constant protest against a reactionary Koch
Brothers-like legislative agenda has brought thousands of activists to the
state capital in Raleigh for almost a year. Throughout the spring legislative
session activists have engaged in civil disobedience, leading by last June to
over 1,000 arrests.
The leadership of Moral Mondays includes Rev.
William Barber who has argued that we are in the midst of the “third
reconstruction.”
The first reconstruction, after the Civil War consisted of
Black and white workers who struggled to create a democratic South (which would
have impacted on the North as well). It was crushed by white racism and the
establishment of Jim Crow segregation.
The second reconstruction occurred
between Brown vs. Board of Education and candidate Nixon’s “Southern strategy.”
During this period segregation was overturned, Medicare and Medicaid was
established, and Social Security was expanded. Blacks and whites benefited.
Now we are in the midst of a third reconstruction.
Twenty-first century struggles are based on “fusion” politics; that is bringing
all activists—Black, Brown, white, gay/straight, environmentalists—together.
Fusion politics assumes that only a mass movement built on everyone’s issues
can challenge the Koch brothers numerically. Also, each issue is interconnected
causally with every other issue.
Moral Mondays has been gaining more and more
visibility; from North Carolina to South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, soon
Arizona, and up to the Midwest. The movement is based on organizational
pragmatism and leadership, a multi-dimensional fight back strategy, and fusion
of class, race, and gender.
Building
a Better Political Future: Fightbacks, Fusion Politics, Intersectionality, and
Moving Beyond Finance Capitalism
The growing economic devastation and political
marginalization of the working class broadly defined is the centerpiece of the
crisis of our age. At base, the profit system, competition and capital
accumulation, the appropriation of the value of all goods and services by
corporations and banks, political systems that inevitably reflect the needs and
interests of the economically powerful, dramatically constrict the capacity to
create a humane society, one where the maximization of human possibility is
achieved. The analyses of the U.S. economy and polity at this time raise
fundamental questions of how to resist, fight back, and create the possibility
of better world?
Tentative answers to the fundamental question of how
to achieve significant social change requires a sober assessment of where we
are today. What are the basic parameters of economic life in the nation and the
community? Who governs our political institutions? What are the realistic
forces of resistance? What are the relative merits--given power, skill, numbers
of people, levels of organization and traditional values—of electoral work,
mass mobilizations, and constructing alternative institutions in the
intersections of existing society.
Six general points can be raised now:
First, given the varied attacks, as articulated by
Robert Reich, on wages and income, on jobs, on healthcare, on education, on
transportation, reproductive rights, and basic environmental survivability,
fight back movements are justified on all fronts. The assault on the vast
majority of humankind occurs in multiple areas, in multiple ways, and across
policy areas.
Second, as opposed to the capacity to mobilize
masses of people around single issues-the right to form unions, anti-racism,
peace—in the twentieth century, twenty-first century movements require what
Reverend William Barber calls “fusion” politics. Grassroots and national
campaigns around single issues need to be cognizant of and connect with the
multiplicity of issues that shape human concern. Twenty first century movements
should be built on the proposition that these struggles are inextricably connected.
Third, it has become clear today that what the great
progressive movements of the past knew intuitively but not theoretically is
that the intersection of class, race, gender, and environmental consciousness
constructs our problems and how we are going to resolve them. Workers, people
of color, and women, with different gender preferences and concerns about the
physical survival of the planet are all in the same fight and must recognize
it.
Fourth, in countries that have long traditions and
institutions that regularize political competition, particularly elections, it
is necessary to recognize that for lots of people those institutions matter. In
the United States when most people talk about “politics” they are talking about
elections. And as we see in critical moments in our history, elections matter.
But, at the same time, the electoral arena is very much affected by
unconventional politics: mass mobilizations, protest rallies, civil disobedience,
shopfloor and beer hall conversations and even threats of violence. The history
of social change in America confirms that these kinds of politics matter and
matter profoundly. These assumptions lead to the proposition that the politics
of reform and revolution require “inside” and “outside” strategies, often at
the same time. And recent history suggests that the power of money which
increasingly has shaped inside strategy usually can only be challenged by the
mobilization of people, the outside strategy.
Fifth, while social movements have always been
international, given twenty-first century technology they are increasingly so.
Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Dubois, George Padmore and informed worldwide audiences
about the great movements to destroy the colonial systems in Africa and Asia.
These struggles also informed and inspired struggles for liberation in the
United States as well. In our own day, Arab Spring, mobilizations of workers in
the Heartland of the United States, occupy movements, student protests in
Quebec and Santiago, the Bolivarian Revolution, and open rebellion in Greece
and Spain were increasingly seen as part of the same struggle for human
liberation. Now, a modest protest in one geographic space somewhere in the
world because a global event within a matter of hours. And the concerns are
often the same even if the historical contexts vary. The old IWW adage, “an
injury to one is an injury to all,” for reasons of the new technology has been
transformed from a slogan to a reality.
Finally, often what animates a movement is the
embrace of an issue: access to healthcare, raising the minimum wage, ending
fracking, eliminating racist laws, opposing military interventionism. And, as
we return to our own communities, we see that what gets people motivated to act
is often that single issue that most immediately affects them. From there, the
job of progressives is to promote fusion politics; highlight its relevance to
class, race, and gender; develop inside/outside strategies to fight back; and
to connect grassroots struggles to national and international struggles.
The specifics of this are terribly difficult but the
basic outlines are clear. Now we need to act.
