LABOR CELEBRATES ITS HISTORY: MILITANT TRADE UNIONISM STILL NEEDED

  Harry Targ

LABOR DAY PARADE, 1882. The first Labor Day Parade, held in Union Square, New York City, by the Knights of Labor on 5 September 1882. Wood engraving from a contemporary American newspaper.

https://www.granger.com/results.asp?image=0041831

On the morning of September 5, 1882, 30,000 men and women bricklayers, freight handlers, printers, blacksmiths, railroad workers, cigar makers, furriers, seamstresses and other workers lined up to begin the first Labor Day march in New York City. Many of the marchers carried signs with such messages as "Labor Will Be United," "Eight Hours for Work-Eight Hours for Rest-Eight Hours for What We Will" and "Strike With the Ballot."

The New York Central Labor Union spread the word about Labor Day and two years later a national labor organization, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, resolved at its convention that the first Monday in September be set aside as labor's national holiday. It was to be celebrated by all workers, Black and white, women and men, young and old, skilled and unskilled, industrial and craft. After years of labor-initiated celebrations, the Haymarket Affair of 1886, and the rise of a worldwide anarchist and socialist workers’ movements, and growing support for a Labor Day in cities and states around the nation, Congress finally adopted Labor Day as a national holiday in 1894.

The original Labor Day was designed to symbolize the demand for the 8-hour day, a healthy work environment, adequate rest, and basic health and other benefits. It also was designed to express the pride that workers felt about their role in the production of all the goods and services in the society. Finally, Labor Day was a time to mobilize workers for the ongoing struggle to achieve a fair and living wage, safe and productive worksites, basic economic security, and worker participation in economic and political decision making.

And the conditions that necessitated the building of a strong labor movement still exist.

First, since the 1970s, there has been increasing class polarization. Gaps in distributions of wealth and income have grown. Real wages of workers have stagnated since the 1970s. In addition, workplace benefits have declined, including pensions. Permanent jobs have been replaced by contingent labor. The percentage of unionization of the work force has declined by two-thirds. A recent study estimates that only one-fourth of jobs today are “good jobs”, paying at least $16 an hour. And, on the other hand, the share of income and wealth accumulated by the top one percent or ten percent or twenty percent, the entire privileged class, has risen. The rich have gotten richer while the poor poorer. 

Second, since the 1980s, workers and their families have experienced downward mobility, that is their social and economic position has declined. This has occurred because stable, well-paying jobs have disappeared due to outsourcing, capital flight, and deindustrialization. By any number of measures, the “American Dream” of helping one’s children to move up the status ladder has been reversed. 

Third, the increasing accumulation of wealth and power through tax cuts, deregulation of financialization, and declining government support for public services have encouraged the privileged to embark on class secession. Increasingly, the privileged class withdraws its support for public institutions as it funds its own private schools, libraries, recreational facilities, and additional social services. The rich build gated communities, electrify their fences, hire private guards to protect themselves and create private institutions to replace public ones. Robert Reich once referred to the “secession of the successful” which refers to the elites combining “traditional forms of physical and social separation and increasing numbers of privately provided services with the ideology of neoliberalism, an idea system of free market fundamentalism that encourages and legitimates hostility to public institutions.” Sociologists Earl Wysong and Robert Perrucci concluded that “class secession today involves both a separatist social identity and a conscious secessionist mentality.”

In sum long-term trends in the United States since the 1970s have led to growing wealth and power at one pole and increasing immiseration at the other pole. The idea of a broad middle class is further away from reality than ever. 

For the vast majority of Americans economic security is declining. And, most importantly, the privileged class, which has built its wealth and power on the growing immiseration of the new working class, including service and part time workers, is physically, financially, and ideologically seceding from the system that historically claimed to provide at least some institutional support for enrichment of the citizenry at large. Data also shows how the brutality of the new class society particularly impacts on people of color, women, immigrants, and other traditionally marginalized people. 

The specific issues of the 21^st century are different than the 1880s but the general concerns of workers remain the same

            -Workers must stop plant closings and the millions of good jobs that have been lost because of capital flight.

          -Workers must stop the shift in the economy from well-paying jobs to part-time and minimum wage jobs. Workers must reverse the 30-year decline in real wages that Americans have experienced.

          -Workers must challenge the decline in health and safety in the workplace.

         -Workers must struggle to reverse the rise in the numbers of homeless people and the declining ability of people to pay for health care.

        -Workers must join with their brothers and sisters from Mexico, Canada, Asia, and Africa to oppose the pitting of underpaid and overworked men and women in one country against men and women in other countries using the excuse of "free trade."

        -And finally, it is clearer now than ever that worker solidarity worldwide is needed to stop militarism, wasteful military spending, and war.

To achieve these goals, workers have to combat the economic and political assault on trade unions which reached massive proportions in the 1980s and 1990s. Without trade unions, there would have been no Labor Day proclaimed in 1882 and there would be no Labor Day in 2025.

https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/search?q=the+new+class+society

COMEDIANS: The New Revolutionaries

  Harry Targ

Reddit

"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!". ^{Karl Marx}

“Comedians of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your jokes.” Harry Targ

 

(Richard Pryor on racism and capitalism:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TCFfmecFYpw)

The twenty-first century is strange. Most of the modest social benefits provided by many governments are being reversed. Contrary to expectations in a “post-Cold War” world, violence has increased and competition between Cold War adversaries continues. And to quote from Vijay Prashad, we are living in an “age of cruelty.” We are helpless observers as a holocaust is being perpetrated on the people in Gaza. And while a police state is rounding up “illegals,” convicted felons are being pardoned, (and some elected or appointed to office), masses of people are hitting the streets to protest virtually all these egregious immoralities perpetrated by ruling classes and political elites. And it has gotten to the point with these horrific developments that we must look to comedians to save us.

And before we look askance at a defense of comedians, we should recognize that they historically have stimulated us to think about the human condition. Paradoxically profit and criticism have over the years conflicted. In the post World War Two period a panoply of comedians have surfaced who generated popularity and profit, and at the same time challenged the evils of capitalism, war-making, class antagonisms, racism, and patriarchy.

For those of us growing up in the fifties Tom Lehrer was cheerfully accessible while communicating ideas about atomic war, hate, and militarism. And while Lenny Bruce was too acerbic for some he spawned subsequent generations of very radical comedic talents including George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Lily Tomlin. And then radical/political humor became mainstreamed on television including Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show and the John Oliver program. Television series such as MASH critiqued war, Other programs, some funny and some serious, analyzed commercialism, greed, ruling classes, and racism.

So now in a period where democratic discourse is more threatened than ever, even more than the McCarthy era of the 1950s, fascist sectors of the ruling class, after attacking the universities, the media, protesters, and “foreigners,” are targeting the comedians, the last refuge of deep criticism of the US political economy. 

As we rise to defend academic freedom in the universities, vibrant curricula in K- twelve educational institutions, the right to protest (and vote) and independent media, we cannot forget the comedians. Historically, they have communicated radical ideas to larger sections of the population than many others who have resisted monopoly capitalism and war.

 

 

 

WAR, MILITARISM, AND RESISTANCE: A DIALECTICAL VIEW (a repost): Still Relevant in 2025

 Harry Targ

Monday, October 1, 2018

While aspects of the global order have changed since this essay was written, the main elements--imperialism, militarism, and resistance--remain. In recent days, countries of Europe, Russia, and China have begun to dialogue in opposition to United States global hegemony. While instabilities in the Global South continue, grassroots movements seeking autonomy from neoliberal austerity survive in Venezuela, and models of economic development continue to progress in countries such as Cuba, and China and Russia are further connecting with the Global South. Undergirding this are grassroots mobilizations growing against neo-fascism, racism, sexism, exploitation, and environmental devastation. The Trump administration, through dramatic increases in military spending, a proposed militarization of space, increased covert interventions, confrontations with Russia and China and traditional allies in Europe and North America, is desperately trying to forestall the declining relative power of the United States in the world. This ironically is speeding the growth of resistance. (HT)

Harry Targ

Imperialism

I still find compelling the main points about modern imperialism articulated by Lenin in his famous essay on the subject. Reflecting on the transformations of capitalism from its early manufacturing days until the twentieth century he argued that economic concentration had replaced a multiplicity of semi-independent economic actors, manufacturing capital had merged with financial institutions creating a system of monopoly finance capital, and as a consequence the export of capital--what we would call today foreign investment, financial speculation, and the debt system--would replace the export of commodities as the dominant form of economic exchange on a global basis. During some periods capitalist states would divide up the world each extracting wealth of all kinds from its own sphere of influence and during other periods they would engage in competition and even war to pursue profits. Lenin could not foresee a time, from the mid-20^th century until now, when resistance would come not only from competing and militarized capitalist states but from masses of people in colonized, neocolonial, and dependent societies.

The Cold War and Post-Cold War International Systems

The latest phase of the system Lenin described was constructed at the end of World War II. The United States emerged from the war as the most powerful nation and used military, economic, political, and cultural tools to enshrine its dominance. This meant building a system to crush the emerging Socialist Bloc, controlling the drive toward independence of former colonies, and shaping the politics of lesser but significant capitalist states. To achieve these difficult goals, the United States began to construct a “permanent war economy.”

By the 1960s, the United States capacity to control the economic and military destiny of the world was severely challenged. The Tet Offensive of January, 1968 represented a metaphoric great divide as U.S. presumptions of hegemony were sorely challenged by a poor but passionate Vietnamese people’s army. From the late 1960s onward the U.S. was challenged not only on the battlefield but in the global economy. Rates of profit of U.S. corporations declined. Industrialization had led to overproduction. Working classes in the United States and other capitalist countries had gained more rights and privileges. Socialist countries were experiencing significant growth spurts. Countries of the Global South began to demand a New International Economic Order that regulated the way global capitalism worked. In addition, inter-capitalist rivalry grew. On top of all this the price of oil increased markedly.

The response of the global capitalist powers (the G7 countries) to the crisis of capitalism was a dramatic shift in the pursuit of profit from the production of goods and services to what became known as financialization, or financial speculation. The banks Lenin talked about became instrumental. With rising oil prices, oil rich countries awash in new profits, and banks swelling with petrodollars, nations were enticed and forced to borrow to pay for the oil that cost many times more than it had in the recent past. The global debt system was launched. When the United States freed the dollar from the gold standard, currencies themselves became a source of speculation.

The debt system gave international financial institutions and banks the power to impose demands on countries that required loans. Thus, the IMF, the World Bank, regional international banks, and private institutions demanded that the world’s countries open their doors to foreign investors, cut their government programs, privatize their economies, and shift to exporting commodities to earn the cash to pay back the bankers. The era of neoliberalism was advanced by globalization, the scientific, technological, and cultural capacity to traverse the globe. No geographic space could maintain autonomy from global capitalism. So a Cold War that was launched by creating a permanent war economy was transformed by financialization, neoliberalism, and globalization. With the shift of work from higher wage capitalist centers to low wage peripheries, deindustrialization became a common feature of the economic landscape.

By the 21^st century the system of neoliberal globalization was facilitated by new techniques of empire. Wars which traditionally had been fought between states were now fought within states. The United States established a military presence virtually all across the globe with an estimated 700 to 1,000 military installations in at least 40 countries. Major functions of the globalization of military operations had become privatized so massive U.S. corporations gained even more profits from war-making than they had during the days of the Cold War. The military—public and private—began to engage in assassinations and covert “humanitarian interventions.” And, aided by new technologies, the United States and other capitalist countries, using unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, could make war on enemies without “boots on the ground.” As we have learned, intelligence gathering, spying on people, has immeasurably advanced as well.

To put it succinctly, while imperialism remains generically as it has been throughout history today:

-Imperialism has become truly global.

-The military continues to be big business, sucking up at least half of the federal budget.

-The United States has developed the capacity to fight wars without soldiers on the ground.

-Empires, particularly the United States empire, kill with impunity.

-The connections between economic interest and militarism remain central.

-Ideologies defending 21^st century military interventions vary from those neoconservatives who argue that the United States must use its power to maximize our global position to the humanitarian interventionists who claim that the United States acts in the world for good.

Resistance

This narrative is not unfamiliar to us. What is less familiar is the idea that throughout history the forces of domination have been challenged by resistance, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. It is important to note that the drive for U.S. hegemony, for example, has been affected by resistance. A recent articulation of this narrative appears in the writings of Vijay Prashad, who has described the efforts of the newly independent nations of the Global South to achieve political and economic sovereignty. Many of these efforts from the 1950s to the 1970s faltered at the steps of the debt system and neoliberal globalization. But the struggle has continued. In addition, there have been examples of people such as the Cubans and the Vietnamese who, with much pain and suffering, were able to achieve some measure of economic sovereignty and political independence.

21^st century movements for change are varied and complicate the efforts of imperialism to achieve its goals. Resistance includes the following:

-Mercosur, a trade organization that includes Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and others waiting for admittance constitutes the third largest trading bloc in the world.

-The development of collaborative relationships among powerful Global South nations. For example, representatives from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) recently met to chart an independent agenda in global affairs.

-The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) consists of ten Latin American/Caribbean countries which are launching a program of economic integration and political cooperation.

-The Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) is a new grouping of some 33 Western Hemisphere nations, minus the United States and Canada, which will seek to expand regional collaboration.

-Individual nations, based on their historic resistance to imperialism, such as Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and Bolivia, continue to inspire activists.

-The United Nations system, considerably weakened from the days of the Cold War, still engages in global mobilizations through its conferences, support for some progressive NGOs, and projects involving education, development, and peacekeeping. Affiliated organized such as the International Labor Organization pursue goals that are sometimes independent of imperial agendas.

-Global anti-capitalist mobilizations, such as the World Social Forum, have brought together thousands of activists largely from the Global South to discuss the problems faced by workers, women, indigenous people, environmental activists, and others.

-Perhaps most important at this time is the grassroots mobilizations of millions of people all across the globe demanding economic justice, worker rights, gender equality, environmental justice,  and peace. Such mobilizations, while stimulated by local issues, are defined as part of a global movement such as “From Tahrir Square to Madison, Wisconsin.” People worldwide, particularly the young, workers, and women are seeing the common dimensions of struggle against imperialism.

Where Do Left and Progressive Forces Fit?

First, we on the left need to “bring imperialism back in;” that is socialist organizations can through education revisit and revise the theory of imperialism so that it is more serviceable for 21^st century socialist movements.

Second, progressives should link war/peace issues to environmental issues, to gender issues, to class issues, and race issues. As Martin Luther King declared in 1967: “I speak of the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

Third, every socialist and progressive organization should challenge the permanent war economy. Andrew Bacevich pointed out that the framers of the permanent war economy in the 1940s believed that the role of the citizenry was to remain quiescent, pliant, and supportive of the decisions made by the foreign policy establishment. That assumption must be resisted.

Fourth, local and national work should link economic justice, environmental preservation, and peace. These issues are inextricably connected.

Finally, left and progressive groups should respond to specific imperial transgressions by:

-working to cut military budgets

-opposing drone warfare

-saying no to US military aid to Syrian rebels

-supporting the just demands of the Palestinian people

-challenging the construction of military bases in Asia

-demanding an end to subversion in Latin America

-calling for the release of the Cuban 5

-insisting on the end of the Cuban blockade.

This essay was originally prepared for the national convention of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) on Friday, July 19, 2013, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

WHEN THE CONTENT OF EDUCATION IS UNDER THREAT WE CELEBRATE HOWARD ZINN: born August 24, 1922

Harry Targ

Rush Limbaugh once remarked on his radio show to the effect that “we” have captured most institutions in the society with the exception of the university. Since politics is usually about the contestation of ideas and the development of ideas comes from an understanding of the past and its connection to the present and the future, schools and universities can aptly be seen as “contested terrain.” That is teachers and students learn about their world through reading, writing, debating, and advocating policies, ideas, and values in educational settings.

Consequently, if one sector of society wishes to gain and maintain political and economic power they might see particular value in controlling the ideas that are disseminated in educational institutions. During the dark days of the Cold War professors who had the “wrong” ideas were fired. Professional associations in many disciplines rewarded scholars who worked within accepted perspectives on history, or political science, or literature, or sociology and denied recognition to others. The preferred ideas trickled down to primary and secondary education.  In most instances, professors and teachers who suffered as a result of their teaching were merely presenting competing views so that their students would have more informed reasons for deciding on their own what interpretations of subject matter made the most sense.

American history was a prime example of how controversial teaching would become. Most historians after World War II wrote and taught about the American experience emphasizing that elites made history, men made history more than women, social movements were absent from historical change, history moved in the direction of consensus rather than conflict, and the United States always played a positive role in world history. European occupation of North America, the elimination of Native Peoples, building a powerful economy on the backs of a slave system, and a U.S. pattern of involvement in foreign wars were all ignored or slighted. 

Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, A People’s History of the United States, which has been read by millions compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions. He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most importantly, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few. ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

Speakers at ALEC events included then Governors Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jan Brewer, John Kasich, and Mitch Daniels. ALEC legislative programs included lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers' unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that denied climate change and more effectively celebrated the successes of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

The conservative Bradley Foundation awarded $400 million to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws and traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers. Two of the four recipients of the organizations 2013 award for support of “American democratic capitalism” were Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, and Purdue President Mitch Daniels.

Associations which lobbied for restricting academic freedom in higher education included David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS sought to bring together scholars whose work opposed multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia. 

Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This is a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS did not want included in course curricula, in middle school, high school, or the university. 

Their cause has been taken up today by the Trump Administration and its political allies with a vengeance. Attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, charges of "antisemitism" leveled against critics of United States foreign policy and its support of Israel, and legislation in states like Indiana calling for the review of tenured faculty to make sure their teaching materials are "fair and balanced" are contemporary examples of the struggle by economic and political elites to control and manipulate the educational process.

However, if education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula contradict the spirit of free and rigorous thought.  

(Some of this essay appeared in the Fort Wayne, Journal Gazette, August 5, 2013).

NATO: FROM FIGHTING SOCIALISM TO GLOBAL EMPIRE, FOREVER WARS CONTINUE: part of a repost

 Harry Targ

The Tricontinental

To quote a tired but true slogan, “war is not the answer.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine destroyed the lives and property of Ukrainians, the lives of Russian soldiers and protesters, and continues to raise fears of an escalation of war throughout Europe, and the danger of nuclear war.

“We” need to demand “back-channel negotiations” (not public displays) as occurred during the Cuban missile crisis, diplomacy at the United Nations, and summit meetings of diplomats from Russia, Ukraine, and Europe. And conversations on the agenda should include forbidding Ukraine from joining NATO, establishing regional autonomy for Ukraine citizens who want it, pulling back NATO bases from Eastern European states, and/or abolishing NATO itself because the reason for its creation in the first place, defending against an attacking Soviet Union, is no longer an issue.

The "we” at this moment could be a resurgent international peace movement, taking inspiration from peace activists in Russia and around the world. As horrible as this moment is, it is potentially a “teachable moment,” a moment when peace becomes part of the global progressive agenda again and people all around the world can begin to examine existing international institutions such as NATO, the United Nations, and the Bretton Woods systems. And now, peace and justice movements should recognize new international realities emerging largely from the Global South.

As James Goldgeier wrote over twenty years ago on a Brookings Institute web page: “The dean of America’s Russia experts, George F. Kennan, had called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.’ Kennan, the architect of America’s post-World War II strategy of containment of the Soviet Union, believed, as did most other Russia experts in the United States, that expanding NATO would damage beyond repair U.S. efforts to transform Russia from enemy to partner.” (James Goldgeier, Brookings Institute, “The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO: How, When, Why, and What Next?“, June 1, 1999)

THE UNITED STATES OVERTHROWS A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNMENT IN IRAN FOR OIL on August 19, 1953

Harry Targ

Code Pink

The history of U.S./Iranian relations has been long and painful. Before the dramatic United States involvement in that country, Iran’s vital oil resource had been under control of the weakening British empire. In 1901 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) consolidated control of much of the production, refining, and export of Iranian oil. Local oligarchs received only 16 percent of the oil revenue from the global sale of the oil.

After World War II, with a young monarch Mohammad Reza Shah serving as the Iranian ruler and Iranian masses living in poverty, Iranian nationalists mobilized to seize control of their valuable resource. Upper class nationalist Mohammed Mosaddegh became Prime Minister and asserted the power of the parliament over the monarchy. The parliament voted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The British government enlisted the United States in 1953 to overthrow the Mossadegh regime using covert operations directed by the CIA. After Mossadegh was imprisoned and the Shah given full power to impose his will on an angry population, a new oil consortium agreement was established in 1954 which allowed five U.S. oil companies to gain a 40 percent share of Iranian oil. Anglo-Iranian would retain another 40 percent, and the rest would be given to rich Iranians.

Over the years, the Shah’s regime became the bulwark of US power in the increasingly vital Persian Gulf region. In the Nixon period, Iran was defined as a key “gendarme” state, which would serve as a surrogate western police power to oversee the region. Presumably Iran would protect the flow of Gulf oil to the United States, Europe, and Japan. By the 1970s, the Shah’s military was the fifth largest in the world.

To the great surprise of left critics of the Shah’s dictatorship, the CIA, and the Carter administration, the Shah’s regime began to crumble in the summer of 1978 as large strikes were organized by oil workers against the regime. In January, 1979, massive street protests led by the religious community doomed the regime. As Iranian soldiers refused to fire upon street demonstrators, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, urged the president to send troops to Iran to save the U.S. regional policeman, the Shah, from overthrow. That proposal was rejected by Carter.

After jockeying for power in the post-revolutionary period, religious leaders consolidated their power over the political system. To add embarrassment to loss of economic and geopolitical control over the vital Persian Gulf region, Iranian students took 52 U.S. diplomats and military attaches hostage and held them for 444 days. In 1980 Carter authorized a military rescue effort that failed. The bungled military operation further damaged the image of infallibility that American foreign policy elites, and the public, held about the nation’s power and destiny.

In the 1980s, to challenge Iran’s potential for becoming the hegemonic power in the Gulf, the Reagan administration sided with Iraq in the brutal war between it and Iran. In 1988, shortly before the end of the Iraq/Iran war U.S. planes shot down a civilian Iranian airliner killing 290 people aboard.

Subsequent to the ignoble history of U.S. support for the Shah’s dictatorship, militarization, the overthrow of Mosaddegh, the embarrassment of the hostage taking, funding Iraq in the brutal Gulf war of the 1980s, the United States has maintained hostility to Iran despite occasional signals from the latter of a desire to establish better relations and a short-lived nuclear treaty. U.S. policy has included an economic embargo, efforts to create region-wide opposition to the regime, expressions of support for a large and justifiable internal movement for democracy and secularization in the country, and encouragement for growing Israeli threats against Iran which recently led to Israel’s bombing of Iran.

Along with interventions in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia the US coup in Iran in August 19, 1953 epitomized United States interventionist foreign policy since the end of World War II.

COMEDIANS: THE NEW REVOLUTIONARIES

 Harry Targ

Reddit

"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!". ^{Karl Marx}

“Comedians of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your jokes.” Harry Targ

 

(Richard Pryor on racism and capitalism:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TCFfmecFYpw)

The twenty-first century is strange. Most of the modest social benefits provided by many governments are being reversed. Contrary to expectations in a “post-Cold War” world, violence has increased and competition between Cold War adversaries continues. And to quote from Vijay Prashad, we are living in an “age of cruelty.” We are helpless observers as a holocaust is being perpetrated on the people in Gaza. And while a police state is rounding up “illegals,” convicted felons are being pardoned, (and some elected or appointed to office), masses of people are hitting the streets to protest virtually all these egregious immoralities perpetrated by ruling classes and political elites. And it has gotten to the point with these horrific developments that we must look to comedians to save us.

And before we look askance at a defense of comedians, we should recognize that they historically have stimulated us to think about the human condition. Paradoxically profit and criticism have over the years conflicted. In the post World War Two period a panoply of comedians have surfaced who generated popularity and profit, and at the same time challenged the evils of capitalism, war-making, class antagonisms, racism, and patriarchy.

For those of us growing up in the fifties Tom Lehrer was cheerfully accessible while communicating ideas about atomic war, hate, and militarism. And while Lenny Bruce was too acerbic for some he spawned subsequent generations of very radical comedic talents including George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Lily Tomlin. And then radical/political humor became mainstreamed on television including Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show and the John Oliver program. Television series such as MASH critiqued war, Other programs, some funny and some serious, analyzed commercialism, greed, ruling classes, and racism.

So now in a period where democratic discourse is more threatened than ever, even more than the McCarthy era of the 1950s, fascist sectors of the ruling class, after attacking the universities, the media, protesters, and “foreigners,” are targeting the comedians, the last refuge of deep criticism of the US political economy. 

As we rise to defend academic freedom in the universities, vibrant curricula in K- twelve educational institutions, the right to protest (and vote) and independent media, we cannot forget the comedians. Historically, they have communicated radical ideas to larger sections of the population than many others who have resisted monopoly capitalism and war.