Mike’s Letter from America: Cairo, Manama, Madison

Mike’s Letter from America: Wisconsin rising.

The ruler has given himself powers described by his critics as ‘dictatorial’. He is attempting to virtually outlaw government workers’ unions, and threatens to use troops against strikers. Opposition leaders have fled across the border and gone into hiding. Tens of thousands of protesters are camped out in the capital city.

No, this is not a Middle Eastern despotism. This is Wisconsin, in America’s Midwest. The ‘dictator’ is not Mubarak, Bin Ali, or Sheikh al-Khalifa – it is Republican governor Scott Walker. This week, he announced big increases in public employees’ pension and health insurance contributions (equivalent to a 7% pay cut), and proposed legislation that would ban collective bargaining for most state workers on anything but base pay. In other words, all but the most minimal right to unionize would be stripped away. To top it all, he has threatened to deploy the National Guard (the state militia) if public sector workers go on strike.

To be poor, a leftist, a trade unionist, woman or a minority is to feel like a punch-bag right now, as a vengeful hard-right Republican Party pushes its pet projects in Congress and the state legislatures. Fortunately, the people of Wisconsin do not share the pessimism and feeling of powerlessness that afflicts much of the American left. Day after day, thousands of union members and their supporters have poured into Wisconsin’s capital, Madison, and laid siege to the Republican-controlled state legislature as it has tried to push through the anti-union law. As of Wednesday (Feb 16), 30,000 people were in or outside the Capital building. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivYnS6DcFUA&feature=youtu.be; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/us/17wisconsin.html?_r=1. Responding to the pressure put on them by the protestors, Democrats in the state senate walked out, denying the Republicans the quorum needed to pass the law. Then events took a surreal turn, as the Democratic senators left the state for ‘a secure, undisclosed location’ to avoid being tracked down by state police and ordered to return to the senate.

Parallels with the revolution in Egypt have not been lost on anybody. Republican congressman Paul Ryan called the peaceful protest a ‘riot’ and complained that ‘Cairo has moved to Madison’. Protesters have carried Egyptian flags, sung ‘march like an Egyptian’ and called for the overthrow of ‘Hosni Walker’. Reports on TV and social media reflect the sense of excitement and self-empowerment among the protestors. Teachers in Madison, defying threats of the sack, phoned in ‘sick’ and descended on the Capitol, forcing the city’s schools to close. Hundreds of school and university students have also walked out. Members of unions unaffected by the ban – notably the fire fighters – have joined the protests regardless, understanding that this is an attack on all unions. Another echo of Cairo can be seen in the totally peaceful nature of the protests, and the impressive level of solidarity and self-organization. Websites and social media pages representing the protesters are full of requests for – and more importantly, offers of – support, food, water, blankets, warm clothes etc. While the protesters have stopped short of storming the senate chamber, they are essentially in occupation of the Capitol.

The backdrop to these events is an all-out Republican assault on anything even vaguely progressive. The Mid-term elections saw a landslide - albeit on a very low turnout – for the Republicans, not only in Congress, but also in state legislatures and governors’ mansions. The recession has left both the federal and state governments with huge debts, and the Republicans – now dominated by the far right– are using this as an excuse to attack everything that smacks even vaguely of socialism, from Public Broadcasting (funding threated with the axe) via Planned Parenthood (funding cut off) to the unions.

Walker’s actions in Wisconsin expose the lie that this is about balancing the books. The anti-union law is being promoted as part of a budgetary measure, but the state’s deficit of around $130 million is almost identical to the amount ($140 million) given away last month in tax cuts for business. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/wisconsin-gov-walker-ginned-up-budget-shortfall-to-undercut-worker-rights.php

The pattern is repeated across the country – in my home state of Michigan, the new Republican governor just announced $180 million in cuts in public sector pay, just after commissioning a rigged survey that claimed (wrongly) that public employees are better paid than workers in the private sector. The assault on public-sector workers is not just (or even mainly) about cutting spending, it is an attack on a highly unionized part of the workforce.

The Wisconsin protesters have dubbed Madison ‘Ground Zero for the labor movement’, and they are not exaggerating – the stakes are that high. If Walker succeeds, this will be a massive blow to the basic human right to organize unions. However, the huge and rapid groundswell of opposition was clearly the last thing the governor expected. The Republican union-busters have been completely wrong-footed, and the Democrats who have been happy to accept union support while offering nothing in return have been forced to find a backbone. Events in Madison have captured the imagination of the whole movement across the United States, as the deadening feeling of pessimism that has hung over the left since the Reagan era is lifting like fog on a sunny morning. Maybe we are being too optimistic, maybe this is just a last, glorious, defiant gesture. But I don’t think so - it looks and feels like a turning point. The fight-back starts here – the American working class is back.

Mikes Letter from America- MuBarack, the President and the Fox

MuBarack, the President and the Fox

You would think they’d be delighted; in the tenth year of the ‘War on Terror’ (a war which Barack Obama continues to wage, even if he never calls it by that name) democracy, as promised by the neo-con ideologues, just might be spreading throughout the Middle East. However, the uprising in Egypt has been greeted by American politicians and media at best with ambivalence, at worst with condemnation.

The Egyptian Revolution is world news, and has (I hope!) been adequately covered by the British media, so I am not going to spend a lot of time explaining what is probably obvious – that democracy promotion and ’regime change’ from below was never part of America’s plan, and that Egyptian dictator Mubarak is a key-pin of the whole US strategy in the Middle East – a strongman who has kept leftists and Islamists under his thumb, and who has played a crucial role in enforcing the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Instead, I want to focus on the reaction of the media and politicians here in the US, to show just how wrong footed they have been by events in Egypt.

First, take Glenn Beck - please! (This joke was stolen from a papyrus found in an Egyptian pyramid). This Fox News host has become the unofficial mouthpiece of the Tea Party movement, and by extension of the Republican right. His angle is to hysterically proclaim the Obama administration a threat to freedom, and to accuse opponents of being communists or Nazis (or usually both). So faced with an actual dictator, you would think he would be delighted at the prospect of his removal by people power? Not a bit of it; he explained to fellow Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly that the movement in Egypt was being run by Islamists and communists. (Communism, in the Stalinist sense of the word, today only exists in two places – North Korea and Glenn Beck’s imagination). According to Beck the ‘radical left’ in the US and ‘Islamic radicals’ are plotting nothing less than ‘the destruction of the Western world.’ I had no idea the American left was so powerful.

Given their Islamophobia, it is perhaps not surprising that Beck, O’Reilly and co should cheer on somebody who is killing Arabs, even if that person is an Arab himself. In the more mainstream news media, the tone has been less pro-Mubarak, and more ‘what’s in it for us?’ Never mind the Egyptians dying at the hands of Mubarak’s thugs; how will this affect oil prices? So-called foreign policy experts have reminded us that Mubarak has been a source of stability, a friend of Israel, and a bulwark against radical Islam. The strategic significance of the Suez Canal has been mentioned so often you would think it’s 1956.

More importantly, Obama and his administration were less than enthusiastic about the outbreak of democracy in the Middle East. We don’t know what deals are being cut right now between Obama and Mubarak, but it appears that, now they see which way the tide is flowing, the US government wants to ease Mubarak out (preferably in favour of his former intelligence chief, Vice President Omar Suleiman. The Americans know him well from his cooperation with CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ torture program).Their initial response was very different, however; Vice-President Joe Biden said “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things… I would not refer to him as a dictator.” Hillary Clinton also saw stability as more important than democracy; she made the curious statement that the US had backed democracy in Egypt for over thirty years (the same thirty years that Mubarak has been in power), and has talked only of an ‘orderly transition’ in power. As for vacillator-in-chief Barack Obama, while he has begun gently suggesting Mubarak should go, he has done his best not to put any real pressure on him (such as threatening to cut off the 1 billion-per-year military aid he receives from the US). Maybe he is keeping quiet for fear of drawing too much attention to his and previous US presidents’ friendship with the Egyptian dictator? Type ‘Obama Mubarak’ into a Google images search and you will get over 85 million results.

Finally, one important fact has been missed by nearly all the US media; the upheavals in the Arab world are as much about bread as they are about democracy. When Hillary Clinton talked of the people of the Middle East wanting ‘economic freedom’, she forgot that it has been economic ‘freedom’ in the form of neo-liberal policies that sparked the rebellion in Tunisia, which began with the suicide of an unemployed man. This is the same economic philosophy that has been destroying the livelihoods of American workers for the last thirty years. Compare Egypt with the USA; one is a sham democracy dominated by a corrupt wealthy elite, with growing poverty, inequality and social divisions. The other has pyramids.

Mike's Letter from America No20

Mid-term Elections: Why the Democrats lost (and why the Tea Party haven’t won)

The opinion polls before the recent midterm elections reported that the Republicans and Democrats were neck-and-neck. They also predicted – correctly - that the Democrats were about to lose.

Confused? Well, it all comes down to what the media dubbed the ‘enthusiasm gap’. If you ask the electorate as a whole, they rate the Democrats, and Obama in particular, in the high-40s%. But polls of people who said they are definitely going to vote gave the Republicans a clear lead. In other words, there are more apathetic Democrat than Republican voters. Come November 2nd, the GOP was able to get out its vote, while Democrats stayed at home. We are now faced with strong Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and a reduced Democratic majority in the Senate, which means that Obama is seriously weakened for the last two years of his term.

Why did this happen? Well, apparently it’s all our fault. According to the White House it is all because moaning leftists are carping unfairly about the greatest president since FDR. To White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs, we are a bunch of ingrates with unrealistic expectations, while Vice-President Biden told liberals to stop ‘whining’ about the administration. The argument goes that Obama has been saddled with a huge deficit and two wars that he inherited from Bush (true) and an obstructive Republican congressional minority that filibusters everything in sight (also true). Therefore we should all have stopped moaning and worked for his reelection. If we do not muster the same enthusiasm for Democrats as the Tea Party and other assorted crazies do for the Republicans, we will have nobody but ourselves to blame if [insert name of far-right conservative bogeyman here] is in the White House come 2013.

To borrow a memorable phrase from Blackadder, there’s only one thing wrong with this argument: it’s bollocks. The Democrats have given their supporters plenty to be unenthusiastic about. Obama has not just continued but escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He got out of Iraq, but only by declaring that the 50,000 troops still there are not combat troops. The much trumpeted healthcare reform (which Democrat candidates seemed curiously unwilling to defend in their election campaigns) is so timid and peace-meal that even the good things about it have largely not yet come into effect. And it’s not the case that the Democrats could not get things done if they wanted – the anti-gay ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, which fell victim to yet another Republican filibuster in the Senate, would be gone by now had Obama’s own Department of Justice not appealed when it was struck down in the courts.

The best example of the Democrats’ apparent unwillingness to do anything, even to save their own skins, is the issue of tax cuts. Passed back in the early days of George W’s presidency, these had an expiry date attached to them by Congress at the time, and are about to run out. On the eve of the elections, the Democrats hit on the idea of extending them except for people earning over $250,000 a year. This would have undermined the Republicans’ claim that Democrats are the party of high taxes, won them popularity among 98% of the population, and only alienated the top 2% who mainly vote Republican anyway. But instead of doing something both progressive and popular the Dems decided to postpone any vote on the tax cuts until after the elections. With those elections now lost, they are talking of ‘compromise’ on the issue – although having already agreed with 98% of the Bush tax cuts, it’s hard to see how they can compromise any further.

While November 2nd was undoubtedly a bad day for the Democrats, it would be wrong to buy into the media idea that it represents an historic shift to the right. To begin with, less than 40% of the eligible population voted, so the swing of 7% to the Republicans compared to Obama’s victory in 2008 translates in reality to only 3% of the electorate. Many more – some 40 million people compared to 2008 – simply stayed away, disgusted with both parties. Far from being a seismic shift, this was just a typical midterm election, in which voters – rather like British voters in by-elections - cast a protest vote against whoever is in office at the time.

If the Democrats were losers, so were the much-hyped ‘Tea Party’. The majority of Republican Tea Party candidates were beaten, and when they ran against ‘moderate’ Republicans they usually did badly (with the notable exception of Marco Rubio in the Florida senate race, who beat both a Democrat and the ex-Republican governor running as an independent). In Sarah Palin’s Alaska, the official Republican senate candidate – Joe Miller, a Tea Partier – looks set to lose to a fellow Republican who wasn’t even on the ballot. The USA allows ‘write-in’ votes, and Miller’s political fate right now rests on whether the voters were able to spell the name of his rival, Lisa Murkowski. In Colorado, anti-immigrant Republican Tom Tancredo ran as an independent for governor, and while he beat the official Republican candidate, he lost by a humiliating 14% margin to the Democrat.

In straight Democrat vs Republican races, the Tea Party did little better. The most high-profile of Sarah Palin’s ‘Momma Grizzlies’, Christine ‘masturbation is a sin’ O’Donnell, lost heavily in Delaware, as was expected. More seriously for the Republicans, in Nevada Tea Partier Sharron Angle, who was touted to beat the Democrats’ unpopular senate leader Harry Reid, lost by a clear 5% margin. Results like this ensured that the Democrats held on to the Senate more comfortably than any of the pollsters had predicted.

So America is not moving to the right, but do the Democrats get this? Of course not. In those three-way races with Republican ‘independents’ running, the Dems’ leadership often stabbed their own candidates in the back. Florida’s Kendrick Meek was pressured to withdraw by Bill Clinton, no less, while in the election for governor of Rhode Island, Obama failed to endorse the official Democratic candidate – who, to his credit, told the president he could ‘shove it’.

As with all elections, especially the close ones, enormous pressure was placed on the left to back whoever was most likely to beat the Republicans, no matter how right-wing they were. The folly of this strategy was shown most clearly in West Virginia, where Jesse Johnson was running a credible campaign for the Mountain Party, the local affiliate of the Greens. Johnson was never going to win the election for senator, but he was polling well, and getting good media coverage. Come election day, however, voters closed ranks behind right-wing Democrat Joe Manchin, who is in the pocket of the coal companies, and was filmed in one campaign ad shooting a copy of the proposed ‘Cap and Trade’ anti-climate change legislation. Manchin won, and has rewarded the Democratic Party for its loyalty by hinting he may cross over to the Republicans anyway.

The next two years, with Republicans in control of half of Congress, will certainly not be easy. But it is important not to buy into the idea that the country has moved decisively to the right, or the equally dangerous idea that we have to loyally fall in line behind Obama. Left candidates who gain even a half-respectable vote are very rare, but they exist. West Virginia’s Jesse Johnson made inroads because he is an activist, who linked his campaign to workers’ struggles and the fight against the environmental degradation of his state by big coal companies. Those are the kinds of struggles that will stop the Republicans in their tracks.

Mike's Letter from America No18

It's not a Mosque and it's not a Ground Zero

You know it's an election year when politicians start whipping up fear against minorities.

First gay marriage (legalized in California, then banned, unbanned, and now in legal limbo) was supposed to undermine American society. Then Arizona passed a racist law allowing the police to demand to see the papers of anyone they think is an illegal immigrant (that is, anyone who looks Latino). Now, however, the Republicans think they have found the trump card to winning the mid-term elections in November: The 'Ground Zero Mosque'.

Firstly, we need to get one thing clear – the 'Ground Zero Mosque' is not at Ground Zero and is not a Mosque. A Muslim group called the Cordoba Initiative plans to build a 13-story interfaith community centre, and were given the OK by New York City two weeks ago. Of these thirteen floors, only two will be devoted to prayer space. Far from being 'at Ground Zero', the building will be two blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center. So it would more accurate to call it the 'Half a Mile from Ground Zero Building that's 15.3% Mosque'.

Until recently, this project was wholly uncontroversial. However, a concerted campaign starting in the far-right blogosphere has whipped up an Islamophobic attack against building a mosque on 'hallowed ground' amid claims that the building – established by a moderate Sufi group that stresses interfaith outreach – will be a terrorist recruiting center.

It's not hard to unpick the hypocrisy and warped thinking of these people. Apparently a mosque offends the 'hallowed ground' status of the area, but a Burger King, the 'New York Dolls' strip club, and countless stalls selling 9/11 tourist kitsch are entirely in keeping with the solemnity of the site. Of course, the feelings of 9/11 victims' families have been used to attack the project (even though many families publicly support it), but the fact that Ground Zero is a grave for hundreds of people has not stopped plans to build the new 'Freedom Tower' as prime real estate on it. Tenants are already being lined up for this new office space, including a Chinese company that will set up a 'China Center' in the tower. In another era, the right would have complained about 'godless Chinese Communists' setting up shop on 'hallowed ground' – but that was yesterday's scapegoat, yesterday's bogeyman.

The campaign against Park51 (to give the centre its proper name) could be dismissed as yet another publicity stunt by the borderline-insane world of far-right bloggers, as it is being peddled by the same sort of people who claim to have located President Obama's Kenyan birth certificate. Pamela Geller, the blogger who started the whole frenzy, believes Obama is the secret illegitimate son of Malcolm X, and that the Nazis were inspired by Muslim ideas! http://www.loonwatch.com/2009/08/pamela-geller-the-looniest-blogger-ever/ However, the moment Obama himself made some moderate comments in support of Park51, the mainstream Republicans seized upon the issue, promising to make it a cornerstone of their election campaign.

This is a classic 'wedge issue' – a distraction cynically designed to win votes for the right by whipping up fear and playing on people's emotions. Some Republicans are quite open about this – one congressman admitted that opposing gay marriage wasn't going to work as an issue for them, but that the 'Ground Zero Mosque' was. They were aided by the president's clumsy intervention, doing the familiar Obama two-step of taking a principled stand (his speech defending Park51) then spoiling it by losing his nerve and back-peddling (saying that he supported the right of New York's Muslims to build the centre, but wouldn't support them actually do it). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C23mCQvJ8I4 With Obama dithering, the Republicans scented blood, pinning the issue on the president (who, according to a recent poll, 46% of Republican supporters believe is a Muslim).

Many top Democrats followed Obama's unprincipled lead. New York governor David Paterson has talked of 'compromise' and offered a site for the 'mosque' further from Ground Zero – as if allowing the center to be driven up-town by an Islamophobic hate campaign is somehow a liberal act. Democratic senate leader Harry Reid (involved in a close reelection race in Nevada) was equally bad, echoing Paterson's view that Park51 should be built somewhere else. Even former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, something of a hero to the left of the party, has backed this line of 'compromise' with racists. Far from being ashamed of their cowardice, the Democrats have had the chutzpah to attack the left. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs complained of Obama's critics on the left that 'they will [only] be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon'. Both sound good to me, Robert.

The Republicans' rhetorical attacks on Muslims are bad enough, but they will only fuel the very real attacks faced by America's Muslim community. The facebook page 'say no to the Mosque at Ground Zero' is full of racist abuse and even direct threats of violence. In Jacksonville, Florida, a bomb exploded outside a mosque, fortunately killing nobody. In Tennessee, a mosque was burned to the ground. In Florida, a church plans to mark the 9/11 anniversary with a 'Koran Burning'. This is the sort of atmosphere that could lead to Muslims being attacked or even killed, and the Republicans are pouring fuel on the fire while the Democrats remain silent.

Fortunately, there is resistance. A challenge by a conservative Christian group to building a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee sparked off a big, multi-faith campaign in defence of the Muslim community. http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/20/challenging-islamophobia Movements such as this point the way to challenging the racists, but we also need to build a principled alternative to the Democratic Party.

P.S.
If you've ever wondered where the term 'Ground Zero' comes from, it originally meant the center point of a nuclear explosion. At the 'real' Ground Zero in Hiroshima, the Japanese built not a lucrative office development but a Peace Memorial Park. In 1996, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site – over the objections of the USA. Still, America honours the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in its own way – check out these cool atom bomb earrings! http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/14624

Letter from America No 18

One Year of Obama

Barack Obama has now been in office for over a year, and, given the heightened expectations around his ‘Hope and Change’ rhetoric, it is not surprising to find his presidency falling short of expectations. I’m going to leave aside the hysterical criticism of Obama from the rabid right – these people think anybody to the left of Ronald Reagan is a socialist, and just cannot get over the fact that a Black Democrat is president. No, there are more realistic reasons for opposing Obama than those offered by right-wing conspiracy theorists.

Obama’s commitment to sending more troops to Afghanistan was a blow to those on the left who had faith in him. It was, however, hardly a betrayal, as he had constantly said he would do so during his election campaign. Although Obama seems to have genuinely opposed the Iraq war from the beginning (unlike most of the Democrats in Congress, who voted for it at the time), in his debates with John McCain he criticised it not on principle, but because it was the ‘wrong war,’ distracting the US from what, presumably, is the ‘right war’ in Afghanistan. What is more worrying is the depth of Obama’s commitment to the ‘right war’. The 30,000 troops he committed late last year was the MAXIMUM number recommended by the generals. In other words, Obama is almost more militaristic than the military. Since Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last October, the US military presence Afghanistan has become bigger than that in Iraq.

Obama is also moving to the right on the economy. The recession forced him to break long-standing free-market taboos by pumping money into the economy, which was a welcome step. However, in his State of the Union address in January he promised a spending freeze and was positively Thatcheresque in his praise of small businesses as the key to job creation.

Obama’s biggest failure, however, is in healthcare reform. Despite the claims made by Republicans that they are a Trojan Horse for socialism, Obama’s proposals are incredibly modest, focusing on reform of the private health insurance companies, rather than the creation of an NHS-style comprehensive public system. Even these cautious reforms have been watered down by conservative Democrats in Congress;  the House of Representatives passed an amendment effectively banning abortion from being paid for by health insurance, while the Senate removed the idea of the ‘public option’, a government-run scheme that would compete with (but not replace) private health insurance. What is left of the ‘reforms’ might even make the system worse, as the 40 million Americans currently uninsured will be mandated to buy insurance through the very private companies that are the cause of the whole mess that is U.S. health ‘care’.

Obama and the Democrats have proceeding with amazing caution for a party that controls the presidency and has huge majorities in both houses of Congress. From day one, Obama has preached ‘bipartisanship’, despite the fact that the Republicans have vowed to do everything they can to disrupt his agenda. Their tactics of using delaying measures in Congress alongside corporate-funded, fake-grass-roots demonstrations have been remarkably effective. Rather than respond by mobilizing their own supporters, the Democrats have obsessed about parliamentary procedure, and attempt to smooth-talk the mythical ‘moderate’ Republicans into voting for reform by removing any measures that might offend the big insurance companies.

It need not have been this way. Obama swept to victory in 2008 on a wave of enthusiasm and the hard work put in by a movement of new, young activists. Some people, such as Michael Moore and err… me, wrongly believed that this movement might take on its own momentum, and push Obama to the left despite himself. What we underestimated was how far ‘Obama the movement’ was a top-down affair with the sole aim of getting Obama elected. It was demobilized as soon as he was in the White House, apart from the odd mass email from HQ urging supporters to write to their congressman. Also demobilized was any kind of independent movement that might have held Obama’s feet to the fire. The anti-war movement, already divided, was undermined when the pro-Democrat section decided to pack up for the duration of the election and put all its hopes in an Obama presidency. This strategy has been repaid in drone attacks and civilian deaths in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

As has been the case throughout U.S. history, the real movements for change are coming from outside the Democratic Party. Last year’s massive march in Washington for same-sex marriage rights was mobilized by a coalition of grassroots organizations, including socialists, and was opposed by Democratic politicians and even the mainstream gay rights organizations until they realized they could not stop it. And it had Lady Gaga as a speaker, which is something the Christian Right will never have.

 

Mike's Letter from America No 15

The Worst of Health

Yesterday, I went to have some blood samples taken. The first thing I was asked when I got to the clinic was ‘could I see your insurance card?’ This is always the first thing an American resident is asked when going for the first time to a doctor, dentist, or even a hospital – except in the direst of emergencies, no insurance = no treatment.

The irony of this is that, if you believe the Republicans and their allies in the media, in Britain or other countries that have a public health system ‘government bureaucrats come between you and your doctor’. Yet in 39 years under the care of the NHS, I never had to see a bureaucrat, government or otherwise. When I lived in Oxford, the NHS medical centre was literally across the road - the only thing ‘between me and my doctor’ was a street. In the US, however, the private bureaucracy of the insurance companies always stands between a patient and his or her physician.

Another example of my experience of the US healthcare system: soon after arrival in America, I went to the pharmacy for a prescribed nasal spray. When told it would cost me $40 (about £26), I asked whether they had remembered to deduct the portion paid by the insurance. They told me that yes, they had, and that the full price for the medicine was more like $400! Now, I know for a fact that this medicine sold for a market rate of about £8 in the UK, where it is obtainable over the counter. With a prescription, of course, it costs even less (and is free in Scotland or Wales).

As shown by Michael Moore’s movie Sicko, the US healthcare system regularly fails those who need it most. Over 47 million Americans (nearly 20% of the population) have no health insurance and, as Moore demonstrated, even those who are covered constantly find that their insurers fail to pay up. Whole armies of bureaucrats are employed by the insurance companies to investigate their clients to find loopholes that will allow them not to pay for their treatment. In 1993, when health care reform was proposed by the Clinton administration, the insurers paid out 95c for every $1 they collected in premiums; now, the figure is only 80c. Meanwhile, their profits have increased by over 400%.

Fortunately, Obama has a plan. To listen to the Republicans and the pundits on Fox News, you’d think he was going to bring in a fully-funded public health-care system, paid for by expropriating the bourgeoisie while strangling some particularly adorable puppies. In fact, Obama’s plans are incredibly moderate, consisting mainly of a public insurance scheme to compete with the private insurers, and making it compulsory for employers to offer health coverage to their workers. His administration has been very careful to reassure the health insurance industry that their profits will be left intact. A few weeks ago, Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was on the radio telling listeners that the government-sponsored public insurance scheme would not undercut the private insurers – to which my reaction as ‘why the hell not?’

The other plank of the healthcare scam is the pharmaceutical companies. My $400 nasal spray incident was made possible by the fact that the in insurers are essentially in cahoots with the drugs companies to maximize their profits. Pharmaceutical companies can charge what they like, knowing insurers will (grudgingly) pay up; insurers can charge what they like, knowing that the public have no other choice but to pay their premiums. Yet the Obama plan leaves the big pharmaceutical companies untouched. Recently, Harry and Louise, the adorable white middle-class couple who famously appeared in ads opposing Clinton’s health reform proposals (paid for, of course, by the health insurance industry), have been on our screens again. This time, however, they are supporting Obama’s plan. And who is paying for the ads? The lobby representing the drugs companies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOr17a4ZOIU You may think any healthcare reform that is backed by big pharma is not a reform worthy of the name – and you’d be right.

Still, Obama’s plan is a tiny step in the right direction. It ought to be very popular – polls show that 72% of Americans want some kind of public health insurance. Yet the barrage of lies and scare tactics against ‘socialized medicine’ seem to be having an effect, with some polls showing Obama losing popularity over the healthcare issue. The ‘Blue Dogs’ (right-wing Democrats who would not be out of place in David Cameron’s Tory Party) are getting cold feet, and Democrat senators are trying to cobble together a deal with the Republicans to remove even the tiny, weak public insurance scheme proposed by the president.

Ironically, public health care already exists in the USA. Medicare/Medicaid, which covers the poorest and the elderly, has been in place since the 1960s, and is incredibly popular. More to the point, members of Congress benefit from a health insurance scheme of the sort that they would deny the rest of us. The military also have publically-funded health insurance, and John Stewart on the Daily Show managed to get neo-con Bill Krystol to admit that (a) it is better than private health care and (b) that the rest of us don’t deserve the same. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa69puS7J0Q

If health care reform is scuppered again, as it was under Clinton, it will show where true power lies in US society. The Democrats have the presidency, both houses of Congress (including a supposedly unassailable 60-40 majority in the Senate), and the backing of 72% of the population. But the private health industry has the $500 million it paid last year on lobbying and campaign contributions to politicians. It will take a mass campaign from outside the halls of Congress to counter that, and make sure Democratic congressmen vote with their electors, not with the lobbyists.

Mike's Letter from America No 14

Factories Close, Guantanamo Stays Open

‘Do you approve of President Obama?’ asks a quiz on Facebook. Polls are always pretty unreliable, especially online ones, which tend to be self-selecting. But the more scientific polls reveal that, while some of the initial euphoria about Obama’s election has worn off, his approval ratings have been consistently over 60%. Gordon Brown (assuming he’s still PM by the time I finish writing this) could only dream of such ratings. The problem with the poll, of course, is that it begs the question ‘approve of what?’ Do I approve of the fact that Obama, not John McCain, is president? Well, yes, but there is a lot to disapprove of about the Obama administration.

The biggest question facing the US at the moment is, of course, the economy. To be fair to Obama, he has carried out some vaguely social-democratic polices, but more by accident than design, as he has been forced to take measures (like FDR in the Great Depression) to save capitalism from itself. Most striking has been Obama’s behavior toward General Motors (GM). First, the president insisted on sacking the company’s CEO after GM received a government bail-out – a small step perhaps, but an astonishing breach of the free-market  taboo against state intervention that has dominated politics for the last 30 years. Now, following GM’s bankruptcy, the federal government has taken a 60% share of the company. Nobody will say the word, but this is in effect nationalization. Something apparently even more radical occurred in Chrysler, where a trust controlled by the auto workers’ union the UAW received a controlling share of the company

The auto industry is a subject close to the hearts of us in Michigan, home to the so-called ‘Big Three’ car manufacturers (Ford, Chrysler, and GM) all of which are in various degrees of distress. Given that Michigan already has the worst economy of any of the 50 states, with unemployment in double figures, the crisis in the car industry could send the state into economic meltdown. So have Obama and the UAW ridden to the rescue, implementing a socialist utopia of nationalization under workers’ control?

Not so fast. The government intervention is designed to stabilize GM and manage its bankruptcy. No jobs are being saved, on the contrary, the government and the union are there to manage the redundancies, which continue almost daily. (This morning, GM announced another 400 redundancies in Flint, Michigan, a city whose plight was explored in Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me.) The Democrats were quick to reassure big business that Congress would not be running GM (which begs the question, why nationalize a company if you’re going to leave its running to the executives who drove it to bankruptcy?). For its part, UAW bureaucracy, which has led the way in selling pay cuts and the loss of pensions to its members, is acting to smooth the process of bankruptcy and redundancies. As for Chrysler, the UAW is using its share to finance its members’ pensions (which, until the union sold out, had been paid for by the employers anyway), and has stated it will not control management of the company.

Let us leave the depressing prospect of the devastated economy of Michigan to consider more positive matters. Isn’t Obama closing down Guantanamo? Well, no, not really, as he is only closing it down in order to move the inmates to other prisons. The whole regime of detention without charge or trial is to continue, and the administration’s lawyers even came up with a new, updated definition of ‘illegal combatants’ to justify their continued detention. But even the plan to move the deckchairs on this ethical Titanic was too much for the Democrats in Congress. Following a hysterical fear-campaign by the Republicans, invoking images of dangerous terrorist running free in small-town America, Democratic senators crumbled, and the measure to close Guantanamo was defeated by an astonishing margin of 90 to 6, in a senate that contains only 40 Republicans.

Surely, at least in foreign policy Obama is progressive? Part of his continuing appeal is that he has changed the tone compared to Bush. In place of confrontation and a contemptuous dismissal of other cultures and nations, Obama is very good at making the right noises about peace and cooperation.  His speech in Cairo was a great example of his approach, dotted with references to Islam and Arabic culture that won over his audience. He even mildly criticized Israel, but the substance of his speech left little of comfort for the Palestinians, who were told they had no right to armed resistance, and must accept whatever crumbs are handed them from the negotiating table. Meanwhile, Obama is moving more troops to Afghanistan, and Afghan and Pakistani civilians are dying in the continuation of Bush’s ‘War on Terror.’

It is too early to see if any alternative to the left of Obama is going to emerge, and most liberals seem prepared to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, especially as he is about to launch long-awaited health care reforms. But the optimistic opinion polls disguise growing unease over the economy and torture, and (unlike the depressing scenario in the European elections) the Republicans are ill-placed to take advantage of it. When the right organized a series of ‘tea-bagging’ demonstrations (don’t ask!) against wholly-imaginary Obama tax increases, the turn out in most places was pathetic, and the notion of ‘tea-bagging’ received widespread ridicule. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLsKt4O4Yw8 More good news is that the wretched bureaucratic leadership of the UAW is not the whole story when it comes to the labor movement in the US. Union membership is growing rapidly in the service sector, and in 2007 union membership figures increased nationally for the first time in 25 years. As I’ve written before, the gay rights movement is growing in reaction to California’s ban on same-sex marriage, and the conservatives have been forced onto the back foot over this issue. Finally, despite the Republicans attempts to (ludicrously) scare people by labeling Obama a socialist, opinion polls show that half the population actually think socialism is a good idea. Maybe we should believe those polls after all?

Mike's Letter from America #13

Letter from America #13

An Indecent Proposition

The election of Barack Obama signified many things, and one of these was the apparent failure of the Right’s ‘culture wars’ strategy. This concept had its roots in the 1960s, when Nixon’s Republicans sought to mobilize the ‘silent majority’ (who they believed to be innately conservative) against 60s radicalism.  It worked in 1968, when a year usually remembered for is revolutionary potential saw Nixon reelected, with some southern states voting even further to the right for the racist segregationist George Wallace. The idea that the working class vote could be split by appealing to conservative ‘values’ seemed to work again for Reagan in the 1980s and for George W Bush in the 2000s.

The idea that the Democrats lost in these decades because they alienated white working class people through the adoption of radical ideas is deeply flawed. It is difficult, for example, to see what was radical about John Kerry’s campaign in 2004. But it is true, however, that the Democrats’ failure to put forward economic arguments that would appeal to the working class, or, in 2004, to make a clear anti-war argument, made it easier for the Republicans to push their ‘values’ agenda. For the Republicans of course, ‘values’ include homophobia, opposition to affirmative action, denial of women’s right to choose, and so on.

Obama’s election marked a shift away from that. Not because Obama is a radical, but because the logic of the disastrous economic implosion, and the hugely unpopular war in Iraq, forced him to place these issues at center stage. And the electorate responded, ignoring Obama’s ethnicity, his Muslim background, or his supposed links to terrorists to elect the country’s first Black president, and the first Democrat to win over 50% of the popular vote since Carter in 1976.

There is, however, one area where the ‘culture wars’ still seem to be raging, and that is the question of same-sex marriage. On election night last year, amid the celebrations of Obama’s victory, liberals in California were lamenting the passage of Proposition 8, which amended the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Less well publicized was the success of similar votes in Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas. This week, the California Supreme Court heard an appeal from Proposition 8’s opponents, arguing that the ban is unconstitutional – the court’s decision is yet to be announced.

We on the left used to take a rather stand-offish position on this issue, arguing that, while of course same-sex couples should have the right to marry, it was hardly the central issue of the struggle. The desire for LGBT people to emulate the bourgeois nuclear family, with all the tensions, lies and hypocrisy that went with that institution, wasn’t something that struck us as particularly liberating. Such as position would be unthinkable today, as the issue of ‘gay marriage’ has become a symbol of the entire argument over the rights of LGBT people. When the Right go to the effort of organizing referendums to change state constitutions, for the sole purpose of interfering in people’s personal lives, it’s obvious that this is a human rights issue which the left cannot ignore.

Although the California vote received the most attention, the sheer bigotry of gay marriage opponents is best illustrated by the ‘Unmarried Couple Adoption Ban’, which does exactly what it says on the tin – denies unmarried couples, whether gay or straight, the right to adopt children. In other words, Arkansas’s self-proclaimed defenders of the family would rather deny children a family than have them brought up by people living in the ‘wrong’ kind of relationship. Just for good measure, Florida voted to end benefits for unmarried couples, including straight couples. In these circumstances, the idea that an attack on minorities is an attack on all us ceases to be mere rhetoric, as the gay-bashers seek to impose their narrow definition of ‘family’ on everyone. 

The activists fighting to overturn Proposition 8 in the courts are absolutely right to do so. But they need to win the argument with those working class people (including many African-Americans) who voted for Obama but also voted for Proposition 8. The right-wing media gleefully seized on the fact that the number of Black Californians voting for the gay-marriage ban was about equal to the proposition’s margin of victory. This of course blatantly ignores just how many white people also voted for it, but it shows the potential for the Right to use divide-and-rule tactics among minorities. Clearly, homophobia has to be challenged not just directly (although Californian activists report that they are winning the argument with many former ‘yes’ voters), but indirectly, in the context of building mass movements that unite people across boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. As the economy plunges deeper into crisis, there is clearly a danger that working class people will be encouraged to take out their frustrations on minorities.

Which brings me to the good news. There are signs of resistance amid the gloom. Back before Christmas, there was a lot of publicity about the struggle of the workers of Republic Windows and Doors. These mainly Latino workers in Chicago were laid off without the severance pay to which they were legally entitled. After a lot of media publicity, most of it favorable, their story was lost in the saga of Rod Blagojevich, corrupt governor of Illinois. What the media neglected to tell us is that the Republic workers won! They demonstrated that workers can fight back even in a recession, and in doing so can unite people of different backgrounds. We’re going to need a lot of that kind of spirit in the months and years ahead.

Mike's Letter from America #12

Inauguration Day

I wasn’t with the crowds who thronged the National Mall in Washington for Obama’s inauguration, but I managed to capture some of the feeling of being squeezed tightly together while trying to catch a glimpse of a distant TV screen. I was teaching at the time, but decided to end my class early, and my students and I gathered around a public TV screen in a crowded corridor to catch the ‘historic occasion’ (copyright: all of the media).

As with all things Obama-related, it is hard to cut through the media hype to understand the true significance of the occasion. The inauguration of the USA’s first African-American president, coming immediately after Martin Luther King Day, was certainly an inspiring reminder of just how far the country has come since the days of segregation and ‘Jim Crow’. But listening to the self-congratulation in the media, you would think that electing a Black president had ended racism and exonerated the USA for over 200 years of systematic oppression of African-Americans.

Despite the hype, there were many genuinely moving moments, mostly related to the presence in the vast crowds in Washington of veteran civil rights activists. Five of the ‘Little Rock 9’ (the black students who integrated an all-white high school in Arkansas 50 years ago, in the face of angry racist mobs) were there, as was a 105-year-old African-American woman who braved the sub-zero temperatures against all the well-meaning advice of her doctors and carers. The record attendance of over 2 million people at the ceremony shows that there is a genuine public mood behind the rhetoric of change.

There are some hopeful signs that Obama does mean what he says about ‘change’, such as his pledge to close Guantanamo, and to roll back Bush’s attacks on abortion rights, as well as a refreshing willingness to proclaim the need for state intervention in the economy. Yet there is a gulf between the expectations placed on Obama and the reality of what his administration is likely to achieve. Partly, this is because of the mess he has been left by Bush – a looming depression and two wars. Partly, too, it is inevitable that any reformist leader will fail to match the hopes of the left – after all, the man is not, nor has he ever been, a socialist (despite what the right wing media pundits claim).  But many of Obama’s picks for his team suggest the he is intentionally moving to the right. They include:

·       Homophobic preacher Rick Warren, chosen to give the benediction at the Inauguration.

·       White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, son of a member of the right-wing Zionist terrorist organisation Irgun, and, like many Democratic politicians, an uncritical supporter of Israel. Emanuel even volunteered to work with the Israeli military during the 1991 Gulf War.

·       Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – Obama’s foreign policy will be in the hands of somebody who has threatened to ‘obliterate’ Iran

·       Susan Rice, Ambassador to the UN, and the person you are most likely to hear from if Obama plans a ‘humanitarian’ invasion to end genocide in Darfur.  Unfortunately for her humanitarian credentials, during her stint as secretary for African affairs in Bill Clinton’s state department she gave the green light to the Rwandan invasion of the Congo, sparking a civil war that has left 4 million dead.

·       Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary. Voted most likely to get us out of the recession, perhaps because he helped get us into it, during his time with the Federal Reserve (the US equivalent of the Bank of England), where he was a major instigator of the bail-out of Wall Street.

·       Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn, who knows all about military affairs from his time as a lobbyist for arms manufacturer Raytheon.

Finally, Obama himself has been sounding very hawkish recently. He advocates withdrawal from Iraq, but largely in order to send more troops to Afghanistan. His inauguration speech sounded at times like a challenge to a fight, albeit in more poetic terms then Bush would have managed. Take the phrases “our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred”, or “our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” These could have come from the Bush ‘War on Terror’ lexicon.

Obama today, like Blair in 1997, is actually to the right of the popular mood that swept him to power. Our best hope is that this mood pushes the new president in directions that he doesn’t want to go. There is, for example, growing pressure on Obama to put members of the Bush administration on trial for their use of torture.  http://washingtonindependent.com/26162/obama-may-be-required-to-prosecute-bush-officials-for-war-crimes When the cable news station MSBNC presented its pre-inauguration coverage from what appeared to be a fish-tank on the National Mall, the crowds outside could be seen holding posters with slogans such as ‘try Bush for war crimes’.

One incident from Tuesday seems to sum up the tensions and contradictions within Obama’s base. In the run-up to the inauguration, tickets for the event were as sought-after as golden tickets to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, with many changing hands for hundreds of dollars on ebay. Yet, as our local university newspaper reported, many holders of the coveted tickets never made it to their seats, as “a large number of people chanting ‘yes we can’ broke through a police barricade at the main entrance on Independence Avenue.”

Will Obama stand with the people with the golden tickets, or will he be made to listen to the millions standing outside in the cold? That is the question that will define American politics for the next four years.

Mike’s Letter from America #11

Why Obama Won

So he did it! At 11 pm Eastern Standard Time, Barrack Obama was confirmed as the first African-American to be elected president of the United States. The sheer historic nature of this achievement, less than fifty years after the Civil Rights movement was struggling to end segregation and Jim Crow, makes it hard just yet to put it in perspective, and what follows is my own attempt to draw some instant conclusions. Reactions to Obama’s win range from a belief among his supporters that anything is possible, to the warning of TV pundits that he has to ‘govern from the centre’, and that we must downplay our expectations. There will be plenty of time in the future to consider if, when, how, and why Obama will let down those high hopes, but right now the dominant mood is one of celebration at the end of 8 years of neoconservative rule. 160,000 people gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park to hear Obama’s victory speech, and there are reports of spontaneous celebrations in the streets up and down the country. Obama may not be a radical (despite what McCain says), but this certainly doesn’t feel like any old election.

The feeling of history being made is not just down to Obama being African-American, there is also a real feeling of change in the air. Young people came out to vote in unprecedented numbers, and the votes of first-time electors went about 2-1 in favour of Obama. But Obama won across the board, increasing the Democratic vote among all sectors, including white workers, who are so often written off as ignorant conservative rednecks. McCain’s patronizing attempts to laud ‘Joe the Plumber’ (a reactionary tax-dodging petty-bourgeois wannabee who had 5 minutes of fame interrogating Obama on his tax plans) as a working class hero spectacularly failed in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Joe’s native Ohio. The reason?

The economy.

Or, as Bill Clinton used to say, ‘the economy, stupid’. 63% of voters said the economy was their main concern, and the Wall Street crash of 2 months ago really sealed McCain and the Republicans’ fate, as working people rightly blamed years of free market policies and corporate deregulation for their plight. But even before that moment, home repossessions and rising unemployment meant that the economy was already the leading issue among voters.

But the move toward Obama is more than simply a case of booting out an unpopular government when times are bad. It represents a move to the left, despite the best efforts of the Democratic Party hierarchy to be ‘moderate’. In a mild, filtered, and very American way, Obama was forced to talk about class. Whereas before he had stressed his plans to cut tax for the bottom 95%, in a speech that I heard on TV on Monday he was talking up the same policy as an INCREASE in taxes on the rich, and attacking the record profits of the oil companies. Whether he does it is another matter, but the fact that he was saying it was significant of a political shift. So too is the constant stress on the ‘middle class’ in the speeches of Obama and Biden. The concept of the middle class in the US is rather different from in Europe, as Americans like to deny that this country has a working class. In the sense that Obama used it, referring to the people who are losing their jobs and homes, it meant the working class.

Further proof that Obama’s win symbolizes a shift to the left is the question of Iraq. On the face of it, this was not the big issue that it might have been. Only 10% of voters said it was their main concern. However, with the economy dominating the election campaign, that still left the war as the second biggest issue among voters. It’s true that Obama hardly emphasized his anti-war credentials in the debates, as he stressed his support for escalation in Afghanistan, and seemed unable to challenge McCain’s claim that ‘the surge is working’ in Iraq. Nevertheless, Obama is the first person ever to win a U.S. presidential election while opposing a war that’s still in progress.

Finally, Obama’s win was sealed on the ground by an amazing volunteer army of enthusiastic, and usually young, supporters. To take an example close to home (literally) my teenage step-daughter and a group of her friends, all of them too young to vote, formed a pro-Obama group at high school, and have been out at least twice every week for the last two months knocking on doors, making phone calls, and putting together campaign materials. I cannot think of any like this happening in my memory around electoral politics, only in mass movements such as Stop the War and the Anti-Nazi League.

That’s why the election of Obama feels different from Blair’s election in 1997. Yes, there was a similar sense of euphoria and history around Blair. Yes, Obama is also a centrist like Blair, and even now there is speculation about which former Republicans will be asked to join his cabinet. But there is the making of a mass movement behind Obama, and it’s to that movement, rather than to Obama himself, that we must look for real ‘change you can believe in.’   

Mikes letter from America #10

Republicans: racist, crazy, and losing

Amid the wreckage of the U.S. economy, John McCain’s election hopes also seem to be collapsing into rubble. It seems hard now to believe that, just over a month ago, McCain was ahead in the polls, boosted by the selection of a dynamic younger running-mate in Sarah Palin (not that it’s hard to be younger or more dynamic than John McCain). Now, it’s true that McCain was barely ahead, and that the ‘Palin bounce’ soon disappeared when people realized she was ultra-conservative and crazy as hell. But what has really done for McCain and the Republicans is the economy’s latest lurch into the abyss. Try as they might to spread the blame (e.g., by accusing the Democrats of making it too easy for poor people and minorities to get mortgages) the Republicans cannot avoid the fact that it was their policies of deregulating the banking system, rewarding Wall Street, and pushing wages down so low that working people had to go into debt to survive, that got us into this mess. What was once a razor’s-edge contest now looks like a potential landslide, with Obama’s poll lead into double digits. Of course, the Republicans will try to steal the election by forcing African Americans off the electoral register, but they will be hard pressed to overturn a deficit of up to 14%. Worse news yet for the Republicans is that Obama leads not only in crucial swing states, but also in states such as Virginia which the Democrats have not won in over 40 years.

In this situation, the McCain camp are desperately trying to distract voters from the economy by resorting to personal smears against Obama, often voiced by Palin, who plays the role of attack-dog while leaving McCain to appear decent and reasonable. So Palin unearthed an old non-story about Obama’s supposed ‘terrorist’ links to an aging 60s radical in Chicago. Bill Ayers, a former member of the ‘Weather Underground’, was involved in bombing the Pentagon in 1972, in protest against the Vietnam War. His two-pound bomb killed nobody, while millions were killed in the war which Ayers opposed. Decades later, having renounced armed actions, he became a well-respected campaigner for school reform, and briefly sat on the same education committee as Obama. Palin defines this as Obama ‘palling around with terrorists.’ But of course, such nuances are not the point – the point is to get the words ‘Obama’ and ‘terrorist’ into the same sentence, preferably including Obama’s middle name Hussein, add the comment that ‘he’s not one of us’, and let the audience take away the message ‘Obama = Muslim = terrorist = Black.’ The real danger of this kind of rhetoric is shown by the kinds of comments shouted by McCain-Palin supporters at rallies when Obama’s name is mentioned: ‘terrorist’, ‘treason’ and even ‘kill him.’ At one of McCain’s cozy ‘town hall meetings’, the Republican candidate was embarrassed when a woman questioner said she didn’t trust Obama because ‘he’s an Arab.’

None of these tactics are working, however, as the economy dominates every political discussion. Ironically, Obama is benefiting from a real sense of class anger that the Democrats have done nothing to encourage. In fact, Obama and the Democratic leadership (along with McCain and the Republican leaders) in Congress supported the highly unpopular ‘bail-out’ plan, which the public rightly viewed as rewarding Wall Street’s irresponsible behaviour by giving the bankers hundreds of billions of dollars of tax-payers’ money. When the initial version of the bail-out was defeated in Congress, the opposition was written off by political pundits as an extremist alliance of right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats, bolstered by the ignorant public’s failure to see just what a good thing the bail-out package really was. In fact, both sides of the house were reacting to public pressure, as millions of voters bombarded their congressmen with angry phone calls and emails. There were also small but highly significant demonstrations by unions, in Washington, in New York (where trade unionists marched down Wall Street) and in towns across the country. The victory was temporary, as Congress passed a revamped version of the bill the following week, but it shows what can be achieved. As for Wall Street, it celebrated its salvation by suffering record losses.

There are tough times ahead, as the credit crisis turns into a global crisis of capital. Obama’s support for the bail-out is a warning that the Democrats still broadly accept the priorities of the free market. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that nobody believes the free market works anymore, but neither major party will come out and say it. There is a consensus among the leaders of both parties that the best way to get out of the crisis is to hand over billions to those who got us into it. If Obama wins we should (if I may paraphrase Churchill on a socialist blog!) ‘allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing’, but then go down to our local union or community organization and knuckle down to the hard work of resisting those who want to make us pay for their crisis.

 

Mike’s Letter from America # 9

Got the T-Shirt?

Sometimes Wikipedia gets it right. A few weeks ago the much-maligned on-line encyclopedia described Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee for vice-president, several hours before the official announcement was made. Ironically at the same time I was telling my students about the dangers of trusting Wikipedia as a reliable source. As I drove home from class, BBC World Service on my car radio was announcing that, indeed the governor of Alaska was to be John McCain’s running-mate.

 Needless to say, there is nothing good about Palin’s nomination, despite her being only the second woman to run for the vice-presidency on a major-party ticket, and despite some of her critics comparing her to Hugo Chavez! (http://www.adn.com/front/story/442702.html) Palin ticks most of the Christian-conservative boxes: anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-environment, pro-war, pro-creationism. She is on record as saying that the Iraq War was ‘God’s task’ for Americans. It goes without saying that, as a Republican from oil-rich Alaska, she is in favor in drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and doesn’t believe that climate change is human-made. An opponent of abortion (even in cases of rape), she also advocates ‘abstinence only’ sex-education in schools. Soon after her candidacy was announced, it was revealed that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter was pregnant, suggesting that abstinence hadn’t been entirely successful in the case of her own family. As mayor of the small town of Wasilla, Alaska, she insisted on rape victims paying $1200 for the cost of the ‘rape kit’ used by the police to obtain forensic evidence. As governor, she attempted to fire her sister’s ex-husband from his job as a state policeman, and then sacked the state official who refused to go along with it. Just for good measure, she is now refusing to cooperate with the official investigation into the affair.

Palin is a curious choice given the Republicans’ criticism of Obama as too inexperienced, as before she became governor less than two years ago her highest political office was mayor of a city with fewer than 9000 inhabitants. But of course, this isn’t about Palin’s abilities (or lack of them), it’s a cynical ploy by the Republicans to embarrass the Democrats in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s narrow failure to win the presidential nomination, and to win over women voters. This always seemed unlikely, given Palin’s views on rape and abortion, and the latest polls show a 21% swing to the Democrats among women voters.  

Palin’s reputation (such as it is) rests on the bogus claim that she is an outspoken anti-establishment figure – much like McCain, but even more conservative. At the Republican convention she claimed, to loud cheers, to have stopped the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’. This was a notorious example of what are euphemistically known as ‘earmarks’ (and less politely, as ‘pork’); spending measures added to bills in Congress by representatives keen to see federal money spent on their home states. What she failed to mention was that she initially campaigned for the bridge, and (unless it’s been removed by now) Wikipedia shows a picture of her wearing a T-shirt supporting the project. It’s true that, as governor, she cancelled the bridge - but she still kept the money. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge  

All of this confirms what we already know – that the Republican right are a bunch of bigoted right-wing Christian fruit loops in hock to Big Oil. But what’s happening in the Democratic camp? As I reported last time, Obama is moving to the right to court ‘mainstream’ America, but that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm his supporters feel. Right now, my 14-year-old step-daughter has just returned from an Obama rally (“it was AWESOME”) which gives you some indication of Obama’s appeal to idealistic young people.

The gulf between the suspicions that we on the left may have of Obama, and the excitement felt about his candidacy among many Americans, was brought home to me when I attended the Detroit Jazz Festival during the Labor Day weekend, just after the Democratic convention where Obama officially accepted his party’s nomination. Detroit is one of the Blackest cities in the northern states, and arguably one of the most working-class. At its height, the now-devastated automobile industry of ‘Motor City’ attracted hundreds of thousands of African-American workers to Michigan, escaping poverty and segregation in the South. I was struck by how many people – and, in particular, how many African-American people – were wearing Obama T-shirts. And they weren’t official T-shirts from the Obama campaign, but an exuberant array of different (no doubt unofficial) designs, including a particularly fetching image of Obama’s face picked out in sequins. But perhaps the most revealing shirt (politically revealing, that is) showed a picture of Obama’s face morphed with that of Martin Luther King, above the words ‘I was there when history was made’ along with the date and the name of a local cinema. The shirt was, of course, worn by an African-American man. In other words, Obama’s acceptance speech was not only viewed by millions of people on their TVs at home – it was an event that working-class Black people went out to bars, theatres, and cinemas to watch together, so that they could share a moment of history.

There lies the contradiction of Obama – a very mainstream candidate in terms of his policies, he has nonetheless become for millions an inspiration and a symbol of hope. Given the choice between ‘Obama the movement’ (to use Michael Moore’s phrase) and a Republican ticket that has just unambiguously identified itself with the most reactionary and loopy elements of the Christian right, it’s increasingly difficult for socialists to argue the ‘they’re as bad each other’ line. Somehow, the left in the U.S.A. has to find a way of identifying with ‘Obama the movement’ while arguing the case for an anti-capitalist third party.  

Respect goes West- Mikes letter from America #6

Letter from America #6 – Obama the Marxist?

They think it’s all over ... possibly… Last week’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries saw Barack Obama finally begin to emerge as the likely Democratic presidential nominee. Hillary Clinton has vowed to fight on, but her ‘victory’ speech in Indianapolis last week was full of conciliatory comments about the need to unite against the Republicans, suggesting she’s a candidate who knows her days are numbered.

Why has it taken so long to reach this point? In part, it’s down to the closeness of the race – most campaigns for the presidential nomination are over by now, with one candidate emerging as front runner, while those trailing drop out, nursing their wounds and their bank balances. But the arcane nature of the Democrats’ system for choosing a presidential candidate is the main reason that the issue is still undecided, and could remain so until the convention in August. The primaries and caucuses that have been contested so bitterly over the last four months elect only about 80% of the delegates to the party convention. The remaining 20% are so-called ‘super-delegates’, party officials or professional politicians who do not need to go through the tiresome business of being elected. To put it in the language of the British Labour Party – these are the block votes that protect the party leadership from too much internal democracy. As neither candidate can realistically gain a majority of elected delegates, this month’s primaries are as much about impressing the super-delegates as they are about winning votes. By winning big in North Carolina, and losing by only the narrowest of margins in Indiana, Obama sent a message to the party hierarchy that he is able to beat John McCain in November.

It is hard not to warm to Barack Obama, as he has been subjected to a witch-hunt in the media, which, disgracefully, Clinton was happy to pander to. Obama was slammed for old comments made by his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who was filmed giving a sermon attacking the USA’s record of oppressing African Americans, ending with a cry of ‘God Bless America? No, God Damn America!’ Then Obama was taped making comments at a private meeting in which he described small-town working-class Americans as ‘bitter’, who ‘cling to their guns and religion’.

Hillary Clinton leapt on these comments, and tried to turn herself into the champion of poor white America. Obama’s comments on ‘bitter’ blue-collar workers were, when read in context, quite perceptive – he was actually sympathizing with white working-class people, and urging liberals not to write them off, but to understand why they turn to ‘guns and religion’ in reaction to an economic system that sees them as dispensable.  Clinton, however, attacked him as an ‘elitist’, leading to the nauseating spectacle of the Ivy-League-educated millionaire wife of a former president presenting herself as a woman of the people.

Does this mean the left should support Obama? Compared to Clinton, who recently threatened to ‘obliterate’ Iran if it attacked Israel, or to McCain, who would like to stay in Iraq for 100 years if necessary, the junior senator for Illinois certainly seems preferable. After all, anybody whom Fox News dubs a ‘Marxist’ can’t be all bad. Obama not only opposed the Iraq War, but spoke at a public rally against it in 2003, when Clinton and most of the Democrats in Congress were voting to authorize it. However, the Iraq War aside, there is very little that separates Obama and Clinton. Obama is less gung-ho on the ‘War on Terror’, but still supports it in principle – one of his criticisms of the Iraq War is that it distracts from the war in Afghanistan, which he supports. He is also in favour of keeping US bases in Iraq after ‘withdrawal’, and of using the US military there to fight ‘Al-Qaida’ – which makes for an odd kind of withdrawal. His economic and social policies are little different from Clinton’s. Obama talks a good game on the looming recession, but has said nothing to suggest he will seek a solution from outside the current free-market orthodoxies.

The film-maker Michael Moore put forward one of the more sophisticated arguments for why the left should back Obama. His argument is to vote not for Obama the man, but for ‘Obama the movement’. Yes, Moore argues, Obama is another mainstream politician, but he has enthused and energized hundreds of thousands of young people and first-time voters, and has succeeded in mobilizing the anti-war vote. Therefore there will be a movement in place to hold Obama to account if he is elected president.  http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=225

There’s nothing wrong with Moore’s logic, but I think he comes to the wrong conclusion. He is spot-on when he argues that the left should approach electoral politics in terms of how it connects to the wider movement. That is why Respect was launched in the UK – not because we believe we will win a majority in parliament any time soon, but because the party can articulate the voice of the anti-war movement. That, too, is why much of the US left supported the Green Party’s Ralph Nader in 2000 – not because he could win, but because his campaign was linked to the emerging anti-capitalist movement. But Moore’s error is in seeing Obama as part of such a movement; Yes, Obama deserves credit for opposing the Iraq War when it was unpopular to do so, but his speech at that rally in Chicago in 2003 was the last time (to my knowledge) that he spoke at any public event of the anti-war movement. In fact, enrolling the anti-war movement into campaigning for Obama (or for the Democrats in general) would only weaken it. The tail-ending of the pro-war Democrats has been the biggest weakness the US anti-war movement. According to the US Green Party, many anti-war organizations have even decided to scale back their campaigns in the run-up to the elections, for fear of embarrassing the Democratic Party.  http://www.gp.org/press/pr-national.php?ID=18  In these circumstances, the last thing the movement needs is closer links to a Democratic politician.

Yet, despite all I’ve written, I would argue against taking an ultra-left or sectarian attitude to Obama’s supporters. The fact that somebody who vocally and publicly opposed the invasion of Iraq looks set to beat a member of the Democratic establishment who wants to nuke Iran is significant of a change of mood among the American people. So is the fact that, for the first time, an African-American has a real chance of being elected president. After all, the older black voters who supported Obama in North Carolina will remember a time when it was impossible for an African-American to even vote in the South. We should not have any illusions in Obama as an agent of change, but should welcome the changes that make his election possible.  

Respect goes west. Mikes Letter from America #5

Get stimulated!

‘Bear Stearns’ sounds like the name of a survivalist TV presenter: ‘This week, Bear Stearns climbs Everest one-handed, before feasting on caterpillars and patronizing the natives in East Borneo’. In reality, Bear Stearns is the name of an investment back, and is far from being rugged and sturdy right now. Last week, it became the latest ‘victim’ of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The term ‘victim’ is relative: unlike the thousands of Americans who are suffering foreclosure on their homes, Bear Stearns was bailed out by J P Morgan, with the obliging aid of the Federal Reserve (the US equivalent of the Bank of England).

This was just the latest in a series of blows that have hit the US economy over the last few months. The sub-prime crisis broke last year, followed by: a stock-market crash (sorry, ‘correction’); the major bank Citigroup wobbling before being bailed out by the oil-sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi; oil prices soaring above $100 a barrel; and the dollar continuing to plunge. The Federal Reserve, led by the hapless Ben Bernanke, has been cutting interest rates faster than a carpet warehouse slashes its prices. All this is set against a global picture where US hegemony is threatened by the rising economies of India and China.
Economists often warn us not to read too much into financial ups and downs on Wall Street, and reassure us that these will not affect the ‘real world’. I would say that the 63,000 American workers who lost their jobs in February (the worst month for job losses in five years) are certainly feeling the effects in their ‘real world’. But in other ways, it’s true that the world of the bankers and that of the ordinary citizen don’t seem to connect. Not wishing to sound cynical, but you would think that this would at least be a good time to buy a house, with house prices at rock-bottom and interest rates plummeting. Yet while the banks benefit from low Fed lending rates, the borrowing rate for ordinary lenders is actually INCREASING! Not content with a planned bail-out by central banks, the predatory lenders who got us into this mess to begin with are trying to steady the ship by screwing extra money out of borrowers.

What is really galling about the credit crisis (apart from the obvious - working class people losing their homes) is the sheer hypocrisy. The people who tell us that the free market is the only system that works, and who laud the ‘risk takers’, are now happy to bail out the banks after their ‘risk-taking’ back-fired. Now here’s a novel idea – instead of spending public funds to prop up the banks, why not use them to help the people who are losing their homes to foreclosure? No, wait, we can’t do that – that would be state intervention, that would be dangerously close to (whisper it) socialism!

At least we still have the Bush administration’s ‘stimulus package’, which gives tax rebates in the hope of re-inflating the economy. Now, I have to confess that my wife and I are bad consumers – we put our tax rebate into our savings, instead of doing our patriotic duty by spending it on an American car or gambling it on the stock exchange. At $600 a head, the stimulus cheques are hardly an invitation to workers to spend, spend, spend. And there lies the basic problem with the US economy – American workers simply don’t earn enough. They have not had a pay-rise in real terms for the last 5 years – and in 4 of those 5 years, their salaries actually went down. And what happened to corporate profits in the same period? Why, they went up! [Statistics junkies can see this and other charts and analysis here: http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/03/obama-price-of-hope.html ]

As Robert Reich – Clinton’s former Labor Secretary – pointed out on NPR*, people took on sub-prime mortgages not because they were foolishly trying to get rich quick, but because they were struggling to survive on less than a living wage. With their homes gone, those families literally have nothing left to give. Reich is hardly a socialist – on his blog, he writes “I’m not suggesting anything so draconian and ideologically objectionable as public ownership. Perish the thought. Let the Brits bail out their big bank and nationalize it …” http://robertreich.blogspot.com/ Rather, he realizes that a mass-consumer capitalist economy cannot function without workers who can afford to buy the goods that they produce.

The question is, how will the working class react? They are being offered no solutions by the Democratic candidates in their increasingly bitter feud for the nomination. The left in the US is weak, and its pro-Democrat section is busy campaigning for the pro-business Barrack Obama. So where does workers’ anger go? Does it go in nationalist and anti-immigrant directions? Or – to paraphrase the poet Langston Hughes – “does it explode”? There may not be an explosion on the horizon, but last year’s strikes in the entertainment industry showed there are sparks of militancy in the most unexpected areas. Something’s got to give.

*National Public Radio: the equivalent of BBC Radio 4, only with less funding but – on the plus side - no John Humphries.