It is true that “defense” is included on an even basis in the across-the-board federal budget cuts mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act—the $85 billion in automatic spending reductions that took effect on March 1, 2013, as a result of the government’s failure to make a “deficit reduction deal” at the beginning of the year. But sequester is no disaster for the giant corporate component of the military industrial complex (MIC) that outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned Americans about in 1960. 

This is for three basic reasons. First, the corporate warmasters’ many heavily “defense”-sponsored supporters in Congress (the “Hawks on the Hill,” led by Senator John McCain [R-AZ]) were determined to soften the sequester blow to the war industry by giving the Pentagon more flexibility than other federal departments will garner to adjust spending across its programs. At the end of March, President Barack Obama signed a bill granting that flexibility, which will be utilized to make sure that war contractors are not hurt. As new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said during his confirmation hearing: “The continuing health of the [military-] industrial base will be a high priority.”

Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale was more specific in a sequestration briefing. “I don’t anticipate that we will cancel many, if any, contracts…. I would like to say to reassure them [military firms],” Hale added, “that if you’ve a contract with us, we’re going to pay you.”

 Second, the Pentagon is well-positioned to absorb cuts thanks to the significant and disproportionate increase in U.S. military spending that occurred over the previous decade. That spending nearly doubled between 2001 and 2012, rising to a fifth of the federal budget and a remarkable 57 percent of federal discretionary spending. Domestic discretionary spending, by contrast, rose by only 8 percent during the same period, a telling disparity given the significant increases in joblessness and poverty that came with the Great Recession (National Priorities Project, “Sequestration, the Pentagon, and the States,” February 21, 2013). 

Along the way, the National Priorities Project notes that the Pentagon continues to “waste billions of [taxpayer] dollars developing and purchasing Cold War legacy weapons” (examples include the F-34 Fighter, the V-22 Osprey Aircraft, and the SSN-774 Virginia Attack Submarine) that bear little relation to real “national security” threats in the 21st century. As socialistworker.org noted on the eve of the cuts last February, “the $46 billion cut that the Pentagon would suffer from sequestration is a drop in the bucket compared to its $400 billion F-35 joint strike fighter project, which has been plagued by cost overruns for practically meaningless improvements over existing aircraft” (“The Austerity v. Austerity Debate,” socialistworker.org, February 27, 2013).

On a less spectacular and more comic level, leading defense budget analyst Ben Freeman of the Project on Government Oversight reports that the Pentagon “recently spent taxpayer money on an app that lets you know when it’s time for a coffee break and $1.5 million to develop its own brand of beef jerky.”

The Pentagon cuts are small in comparison to the massive amounts of taxpayer money defense contractors receive and store up through the Pentagon system. According to Freeman: “Every year for the last five years, the Pentagon has doled out at least $360 billion to contractors. In fact, every year since the war in Afghanistan began contractors have received more than half of the Pentagon’s total budget…contractors have received more taxpayer money than the Department of Defense’s civilian employees and nearly 1.4 million active duty military personnel combined….All that money has really added up. So much so that the Pentagon contractors are sitting on a backlog of contracts worth nearly as much as the entirety of Pentagon sequestration…. In other words, even if contractors absorbed all of the Pentagon sequestration cuts, they’d still be on track to receive more than $300 billion a year in new contracts, which is more than double what any other country in the world spends on its military” (Ben Freeman, “Despite Hype, Defense Industry Still Thriving After Sequestration,” Salon, March 12, 2013). 

Which brings us to the third reason for the MIC to stop crying sequester wolf. In fact, it’s civilian employees, not contractors, who are being significantly hurt by the cuts. Even as he has declared his reassurance of no lost contracts and profits to defense corporations, Comptroller Hale announced that the Pentagon would furlough most of its civilian workforce one day per week, without pay, for the rest of the fiscal year. The Pentagon has subsequently cut the originally projected number of furloughed days from 22 to 14, still significant amount of lost wages (amounting to about $2.5 billion) for nearly 800,000 workers.

Meanwhile, significant cuts are being inflexibly imposed on essential domestic social programs—no small problem in the U.S.—home to by far and away the most extreme inequality and the highest poverty rate among all rich nations. Millions of Americans struggle to find adequate shelter, health care, education, and food, not to mention minimally adequate employment chances. Their struggle has become considerably more difficult thanks to the slashing of government benefits and supports and to the depressive economic impact of cutting $85 billion in government spending. Since the fiscal year began last October, the one year cut is being pressed into just seven months, leading to cuts as high as 10 percent in unemployment checks. It appears that 70,000 pre-school children will be booted out of the federally funded Head Start in the name of sequester before the end of the current school year.

A Short History  

All of this is fairly predictable given the massive Pentagon System’s longstanding central role in the workings of the nation’s reigning wealth-concentrating profits system. One of the lessons of the Great Depression was that the U.S. “free enterprise system” could not survive without significant federal government spending. The question was what sort of spending would hold sway: expenditure on human and social welfare or on military empire? 

Guns won out over butter, on the whole, reflecting both the global ambitions of the United States post-WWII power elite and the related imperatives of domestic business class rule. As the U.S. economic elite determined, massive spending on military empire, war, and the preparation for war provided a useful way for government to stimulate demand and sustain the domestic corporate political economy without fueling threats to business class power and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few in the way that “progressive civilian spending” (Edward S. Herman’s useful phrase) would. Business Week explained this elite preference for war over welfare when it came to “Keynesian” stimulus in February 1949.  

The magazine noted that: “there’s a tremendous social and economic difference between welfare pump-priming and military pump-priming…. Military spending doesn’t really alter the structure of the economy. It goes through the regular channels. As far as a businessman is concerned, a munitions order from the government is much like an order from a private customer. But the kind of welfare and public works spending that [liberals and leftists favor]…does alter the economy. It makes new channels of its own. It creates new institutions. It redistributes wealth….. It changes the whole economic pattern.” (“From Cold War to Cold Peace?” Business Week, February 12, 1949, quoted in Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, 1985, 209-2010.)

 In the early 1990s, the leading critic of U.S. imperialism, Noam Chomsky, elaborated on Business Week’s post-WWII reflections in explaining why there would be no “peace dividend” (no major shift of resources from military to domestic social spending) after the demise of the official Cold War enemy: “Business leaders recognized that social spending could stimulate the economy, but much preferred the military Keynesian alternative—for reasons having to do with privilege and power….The Pentagon system[’s]…form of industrial policy does not have the undesirable side-effects of social spending directed at human needs. Apart from unwelcome redistributive effects, the latter policies tend to interfere with managerial prerogatives; useful production may undercut private gain, while state-subsidized waste production (arms, Man-on-the-Moon extravaganzas, etc.) is a gift to the owners and managers, to whom any marketable spin-offs will be promptly delivered. Social spending may also arouse public interest and participation, thus enhancing the threat of democracy; the public cares about hospitals, roads, neighborhoods, but has no opinions about the choice of missile and high-tech fighter planes. The defects of social spending do not taint the military-Keynesian alternative” (Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, 1994, 100-101).

It was with these sorts of considerations in mind, no doubt, that former and future General Electric (GE) President and sitting War Production Board executive Charles Edward Wilson warned in 1944 about what later became known as “the Vietnam syndrome”—the reluctance of ordinary citizens to support the open-ended commitment of American troops and resources to military conflict abroad. “The revulsion against war not too long hence,” Wilson cautioned fellow U.S. industrialists and policymakers, “will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must now begin to set the machinery in motion for a permanent war economy” (quoted in Joel Bleifuss, “Leader of the PAC,” In These Times, December 16-23, 1986, 4). The Cold War provided the justification for the continuation of such an economy for more than four decades. 

The American power elite’s fondness for military over social Keynesianism—and for a permanent war political economy over a permanent progressive justice and anti-poverty economy—survived the struggle between Soviet “socialism” and American “capitalism,” as predicted by those who understood the state-capitalist functions of the Cold War for the investor class. Thus, it was that military spending remained at colossal Cold War levels during the “interwar period” between the decline of the Soviet system and 9/11/2001.  

Then came the jetliner attacks, predictable blowback from imperial U.S. policy in the oil-rich Middle East. The stunning al Qaeda assault served as the “the New Pearl Harbor” that Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and other members of the ultra-imperialist Project for a New American Century thought would be necessary for military spending to reach the unprecedented levels they saw as required to extend U.S. global dominance, beginning with major new invasions of the oil-rich Middle East. 

No Peace Dividend

Defense” spending has increased significantly under the supposed “peace” president Barack Obama, an empire-vetted militarist who advised and agreed before the 2008 election that (in the words of researchers at the leading financial bailout recipient firm Morgan Stanley) “there is no peace dividend” (Heidi Wood et al., “Early Thoughts on Obama and Defense,” Morgan Stanley Research, Aerospace and Defense, November 5, 2008). The government could have attained the $4 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years that Obama proposed early in the 2011 “debt-ceiling crisis” simply by returning to the enormous military budgets of the Clinton era. As Ronald Reagan’s former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb noted in early 2011, American military spending, adjusted for inflation, was “higher than at any time since the end of World War II. Over the past decade,” Korb acknowledged, “the U.S. share of global military spending has risen from one-third to one-half. The United States now spends six times as much as China, the country with the next biggest budget” (CNNMoney, January 5, 2011).

The title of the essay in which Korb made these scandalous observations was “How to Cut $1 Trillion From the Pentagon.” Such a move has been just as completely off the table of serious policy discussion in the Empire-rebranding Age of Obama as it was during the long national Bush-Cheney nightmare. As Edward S. Herman observes, the newly inaugurated Obama: “…soon found that that political success demanded killing foreigners; that budget enlargement for killing was easy, but spending for progressive civilian needs was difficult and would anger powerful people. He quickly adapted to being a warrior president, his seemingly most proud accomplishment being the killing of bin-Laden…. Obama had played all the war cards. He has lauded the Vietnam War as a noble enterprise…. Like Bush he loves to speak to military cadres where he can draw resounding applause with patriotic and belligerent rhetoric” (Edward S. Herman, “Support Our Troops, Our War, and Our War Criminals,” Z Magazine, April 2013). 

An Open-Ended Entitlement 

Claiming to be nervous about “the business impact of the winding down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” (the Wall Street Journal) and Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s call for modest reductions in “security spending,” the AIA (anchored by war masters Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon) launched a major lobbying push to defend their interests on Capitol Hill as the debt-ceiling crisis that brought us the sequester heated up in the summer of 2011 (Nathan Hodge, “Defense Industry Fears More Budget Cuts,” Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2011). In reality, the high-tech “defense” firms have had little to fear in Washington, where the Pentagon never has to worry about fiscal solvency even as Wall Street interests claim regularly and falsely that Social Security is nearing bankruptcy and thus requires privatization. As Herman wryly observed in June 2009: “The Pentagon has regular gigantic overruns in its payments for weapons systems and fraud and waste are endemic. But the Pentagon is never threatened with ‘insolvency.’ Its overruns and waste are simply passed on to taxpayers. The supine media, while occasionally chiding the Pentagon for, say, ‘running almost $300 billion over estimates and averaging 22 months behind delivery’ never talk about any crisis in the funding of overkill, military boondoggles, and waste.… We know that in the real world the taxpayer funds the Pentagon on an open-ended basis without any trust funds or limits beyond what logrolling can produce. After all, it is protecting our ‘national security,’ using the phrase with its usual infinite elasticity to cover anything the Pentagon, its contractors, their lobbyists, and the congressional servants of the military-industrial complex want.” (Edward S. Herman, “John Yoo, Social Security, and Korean Threat,” Z Magazine, June 2009.) 

The military system enjoys an open-ended entitlement to tap the treasury of a government that has spent decades raiding the Social Security trust fund to offset deficits caused by the war budget and tax cuts and loopholes for the rich (Jack Rasmus, “Budgets, Taxes, and Classes in America,” Z Magazine, June 2011). 

War is a Racket 

War is a racket,” wrote Smedley Butler, a decorated Marine general who recalled functioning in essence as “a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers” during numerous early 20th century deployments in Central America and the Caribbean. The militarism that he coordinated enriched a select few wealthy Americans, Butler reflected, not the mostly working class soldiers on the front lines. “How many of the war millionaires shouldered a rifle. How many of them dug a trench?” 

Butler’s reflections have, if anything, grown in relevance since World War II when the U.S. became home to the greatest empire the world has ever seen—and to a vast military-industrial complex whose direct prices (including mass death and injury in a long line of neocolonial wars of invasion and occupation from Korea through Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan) and more indirect costs (including social welfare opportunity costs) have been borne by American society as a whole (not to mention the many millions of non-American others killed, injured and displaced by the U.S. military and its military client states) as the benefits have flowed especially to wealthy Americans. Today, as during the Cold War and before, Ralph Nader notes, war and the apparently permanent preparation for war is a source of corporate mega-profits as it provides a deceptive cloak of national unity behind which elites concentrate wealth and power, shaming those who question that upward redistribution as unpatriotic carpers seeking to “divide rather unite America” (Ralph Nader, The Seventeen Solutions). 

Military Keynesian remains intact while the business class’s campaign to dismantle what’s left of the welfare state takes another step forward in poverty- and prison-ridden America. Such are the “perverted priorities” (Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase) of policymakers in the U.S., the “beacon to the world of the way life should be,” to quote onetime U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX), reflecting on why George W. Bush should be allowed to invade Iraq if he wanted to. Z

Paul Street is an author and journalist in Iowa City, Iowa. His next book, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy, is available fall 2013.

“Wall Street Owns the Country” (1890) 

Though you wouldn’t have know it from the characteristically superficial and amnesiac way in which dominant U.S. mass media covered the populist and Left-led Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Rebellion, the United States has long been scarred by harsh socio-economic and class disparities that have defied its “land of equality” mythology and raised popular fears and anger about the undemocratic domination of the nation’s economy, society, and politics by the rich and powerful Few. The historical peak of such concern came in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when millions of American populists, socialists, anarchists, labor rebels, and progressives of various stripe rallied and railed against the stupendous concentration of wealth amidst massive poverty and economic insecurity that came along with the United States’ rise to industrial supremacy and the emergence of the modern “managerial” corporation as the leading form of American capitalist enterprise, at once largely financed by and feeding the deep pockets of an ascendant Wall Street. This is how the great Kansas populist orator Mary Ellen Lease put things to an angry crowd in 1890, one hundred and twenty-one years before OWS launched its remarkable but short-lived, police state-dismantled encampment in lower Manhattan: 

“Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street….Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags….” 

“…The politicians said we suffered from ‘overproduction.’ ‘Overproduction!,’ when 10,000 little children starve to death every year in the U.S. and over 100,000 shop girls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for bread…” 

“There are thirty men in the United States whose aggregate wealth is over one and one-half billion dollars. And there are half a million looking for work….The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.” [3] 

Another sterling populist speaker of the time spoke in similar and hauntingly Occupy-foreshadowing terms, adding a critique of the two dominant parties’ (Republicans and Democrats) shared subservience to the moneyed power. As Ignatius Donnelly noted at the People’s Party national convention on July 4^th, 1892: 

“We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized…The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.” 

“…The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down….The fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty.” 

“We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them…. …They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires…. [4]

All the Wealth of Society Comes to Them” (1906) 

Twelve years later, after a decade in which a major industrial depression furthered the control of the economy by a small number of giant corporations and in the wake of a failed national strike against the leading U.S. meatpacking chains Swift’s and Armour’s, the American socialist, novelist, and pamphleteer Upton Sinclair captured a broadly held sentiment when he wrote the following in the widely read socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason:

 “Rise up…and look about you.They own all the instruments and means of production. They own the railroads and the telegraphs, the coal mines and the oil fields, the factories and the stores! They own half the farms and have mortgages on the rest.They own society. They own the government! [5]”  

In 1906, Sinclair published his bestselling novel The Jungle, set among the workers in Chicago’s gigantic animal slaughtering and meatpacking houses. A brilliant expose of the unsanitary and oppressive conditions in one of the nation’s leading food industries, the novel neared its conclusion with its battered proletarian protagonist standing transfixed before a mesmerizing radical orator who spoke of the shocking disparities that had emerged in early 20^th century America. The speaker told of the misery inflicted on the laboring multitudes who endured homelessness, hunger, poverty and “the curse of the wage-slave[s], who toil every hour they can stand and see, who are condemned till the end of their days to monotony and weariness, to hunger and misery, to heat and cold, to dirt and disease….” Then the orator asked his listeners to regard the luxuriant, parasitic lives and power of the wealthy few: 

“…turn over the page with me and gaze upon the other side of the picture. There are a thousand – ten thousand, maybe – who are the masters of these slaves, who own their toil…They live in palaces, they riot in luxury and extravagance – such as no words can describe, as makes the imagination reel and stagger, makes the soul grow sick and faint. They spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend millions for horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets, for shiny little stones with which to deck their bodies. Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in ostentation and recklessness, in the destroying of useful and necessary things, in the wasting of the labor and the lives of their fellow creatures, the toil and anguish of the nations, the sweat and tears of the human race!” 

“It is all theirs – it comes to them…all the wealth of society comes to them. The farmer tills the soil, the miner digs the earth, the weaver tends the loom, the mason carves the stone, the clever man invents, the shrewd man directs, the wise man studies, the inspired man sings – and all the results…are gathered in one stupendous stream and poured into their laps! The whole of society is in their grip, the whole labor of the world lies at their mercy….They own not merely the labor of society, they have bought the governments; and everywhere they used their raped and stolen power to entrench themselves and their privileges, to dig deeper and wider the channels through which the rivers of profit flow to them!”[6] 

In the original, serialized version of The Jungle, Sinclair used a fictional representation of the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs to extend his observation that the wealthy “masters” owned “the whole of society” by having the candidate claim that “the two [dominant U.S.] political parties”- the Democrats and the Republican – were “two wings of the same bird of prey. The people [are] allowed to choose between their candidates, and both of them [are] controlled, and all their nominations [are] dictated by, the same [money] power.”[7] This was hardly a negligible sentiment among Americans during the Progressive Age (1890-1917), a high water mark for Socialist electoral success in the U.S. and legislative action to address the system’s most malignant abuses.

 “The Well-Born[‘s] Government of Oppression (1787) 

Deep “populist” suspicions of the wealthy Few and their political reach have hardly been restricted to late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. During the great debate over the U.S. Constitution in the late 1780s, “Anti-Federalist” opponents of ratification warned that a strong a new and powerful government would be captured by wealthy merchants, creditors, and other “moneyed elites” opposed to the interests of ordinary Americans. Genuinely popular self-government, they said, thrived best in small jurisdictions where political rulers and everyday citizens interacted daily. Only wealthy elites, “ignorant of the sentiments of the middling and lower classes,” possessed the resources to win election to a national government. New York Congressman Melancton Smith warned that the Constitution would lead to the domination of “the common people” by “the well-born” and a “government of oppression.” (Fittingly enough, the distinguished American historian Eric Foner notes that pro-Constitution sentiment was strongest among “mean of substantial property.” If ratification had been put up to a popular plebiscite, the economic historian Lee Soltow has shown, it would not have passed, thanks to the opposition of the non-wealthy majority.)[8] 

“Temple of Mammon” (1830s) 

Four decades later, early U.S. trade unionists and workingmen’s parties denounced what they saw as “the most unequal and unjustifiable distribution of wealth in the hands of a few individuals.” A popular newspaper cartoon from the mid-1830s bore the title “A Confederacy Against the Constitution and the Rights of the People.” It portrayed a diabolical “Temple of Mammon” where a wealthy northern manufacturer conspired with a rich southern planter, saying “You Southern Barons have black Slaves; will you not allow us to make White Slaves of our poor population in our Manufacturing Baronies?” In a similar vein, a labor placard from the time was titled “The Rich Against the Poor!” It proclaimed that “the Freemen of the North are now on a level with the Slaves of the South with no other privileges than laboring that drones may fatten on our lifeblood.”[9] 

Against “Industrial Dictatorship” and “Privileged Enterprise” (FDR/1930s) 

Trumped during the 1860s by North-South sectional conflict and the slavery question, popular anger at the wealthy few and their business order nonetheless lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction to fuel numerous epic labor strikes and other popular struggles across the late 19^th century and into the Progressive Age. The open expression of popular loathing of the rich and powerful was interrupted and challenged again by World War I, the federal government and business elite’s Red Scare campaign against labor activists and real and perceived radicals after the war, and a remarkable but short-lived and unequally distributed burst of economic growth in the 1920s. 

But the anger naturally resurfaced in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression. The greatest economic collapse in history, responsible for mass hunger, homelessness, and unemployment rates that reached 30 percent, the Depression was transparently triggered by the reckless malfeasance of the Wall Street financial elite and driven and deepened by an astonishing, government-led upward distribution of wealth and income after the war. In 1940, a former Wall Street trader named Fred Schwed wrote a humorous, anecdote-filled book titled Where are the Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street, wherein he observed that the American public believed that Wall Street was inhabited mainly by “crooks and scoundrels, and very clever ones at that; that they will sell for millions what they know is worthless; in short that they are villains.” It was “an extreme view,” economic writer John Cassidy notes, “but public antagonism toward bankers and other financiers” during and beyond the 1930s would “ke[ep] them in check for forty years,” fueling policies that “restrained the growth of the banking sector” across the 1940s and the post-WWII years: limits on interest rates, a prohibition on deposit-taking institutions from issuing securities, preventing financial institutions from merging with one another [10] — policies whose repeal over the long neoliberal era (1979-present) would contribute to the great financial collapse of 2008-2009. 

The rage against wealthy masters who caused the collapse worked its way into the rhetoric of the White House. In 1935 and 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) “turned the [1936] presidential election into a contest between the haves and the have-nots.”[11] In his 1936 acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, Roosevelt thundered against the “economic royalists” and “privileged princes” who sought “a new industrial dictatorship.” FDR called “the over-privileged” an “enemy within our gates” and argued that “private enterprise” had become “too private.” It had become “privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.” The economic elite, FDR noted, “complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”[12] 

In his end-of-campaign speech at Madison Square Garden, Roosevelt called his quest for re-election a struggle between “the millions who never had a chance” and “organized money.” The “forces of selfishness and lust for power,” he observed, “have never before …been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.” [13] 

“We have,” FDR said in his second Inaugural Address, “begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government.”[14] 

 No sitting U.S. president before or since has ever appealed so boldly to class hostility. Still, FDR’s successor Harry Truman liked to identify himself with the fight of the “everyday man” against “special privilege” and Democratic politicians have always retained a certain carefully calibrated measure of FDR’s populist-sounding rhetoric for vote-getting use at election time – as when Obama inveighed against “the breathtaking greed of a few” in a 2011 campaign speech in Osawatomie, Kansas.

 “The Property Party” 

Tens of millions of workers, farmers, unemployed, and middle class progressives enlisted in FDR’s Democratic New Deal coalition. Still, many leftists, including the well known radical commentator Ferdinand Lundberg, never forgot that Roosevelt and his party were no less dedicated to the rich man’s profit system than the Republicans and their wealthy backers. Even as the New Deal reconfigured U.S. politics and introduced such hallmark progressive policy achievements as the National Labor Relations Act (legalizing and empowering union organizing and collective bargaining rights) and the Social Security Act (introducing old age pensions for Americans 65 and over, and unemployment insurance), Lundberg echoed Upton Sinclair by noting that “The United States can be looked on as having, in effect, a single party: the Property Party. This party can be looked upon as having two subdivisions: The Republican Party, hostile to accommodating adjustments (hence dubbed ‘Conservative’) and the Democratic Party, of recent decades favoring such adjustments (hence dubbed ‘Liberal’).” [15] 

“The Minority in Business and Finance Who Own and Run This Country” (Savio) 

The New Left rebellion of the late 1950s,1960s, and early 1970s may have focused primarily on black civil rights and the Vietnam War but it also contained a strong dose of opposition to the rich and their business system. Its underlying populism and democratic socialism is captured in the following formulation in Students for a Democratic Society’s founding 1962 Port Huron Statement: “the economy is of such social importance that is major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.”[16] In December of 1964, Free Speech Movement (FSM) leader Mario Savio’s charge that the modern corporate “university’s ‘respectable’ bureaucracy masks the financial plutocrats.” American capitalists and their “authoritarian” system – the “machine” whose “operation” Savio said had become “so odious…that you can’t take part [and have to] put your bodies on the gears …to make it stop”[17] – and amoral profit imperatives were held in distinctly low esteem by the insurgent popular movements and the counterculture that emerged during these years. Four years after the FSM, Savio nicely channeled the feelings of many New Left activists on the profit system and what Occupy would latter call “the 1%.” In a statement that might be seen as prefiguring contemporary concerns about environmental ruin, Savio announced his candidacy for the California state senate: 

“All those who gain least from war and poverty – the working people, the small farmers, the small businessmen, the professionals…must join together now against the minority in business and finance who own and run this country, and whose lust for power and profit and whose utter disregard for human suffering threatens now to bring the world to a final catastrophe….Our great task is to organize the people into a new majority. Americans are practical people….we must convince them that it is essential that our economy be dominated by production to satisfy human needs, not to swell profits; that this production can be planned publicly and democratically…and that administration of the economy should be highly decentralized so that the decisions are really made by the people…”.[18]

The New Gilded Age 

Occupy’s anger and rhetoric was richly consistent with this all-too-forgotten history, which suggests that populist anti-plutocracy and suspicion of concentrated capitalist wealth and power is “as American as Apple Pie.” Such anger is richly appropriate to life under the United States current Second Gilded Age (1979-20??), the nation’s post New Deal and “neoliberal” era in which the U.S. is far and away the industrialized world’s most unequal country (its wealth distribution is now more comparable to Latin America and Africa than it is to Western Europe ad Japan) and which the richest 400 Americans now possess more wealth together than the entire bottom half of the population (the six Wal-Mart heirs together have as much net worth as the bottom 41.5 percent) [19] – a reflection among other things of the fact that lowest two U.S. wealth quintiles (the bottom 40 percent) of the U.S. control an astonishingly paltry 0.3 percent of the nation’s net worth, essentially nothing.[20] Half the nation’s population is now officially “low-income” and a third lives either in poverty or “near poverty” (at or below 150% of the federal government’s notoriously inadequate official poverty level) while the owners of Wall Street and corporate America enjoy record-setting profits and hyper-opulent lifestyles that would make the original Robber Barons blush. 

These savage inequalities are the result not of any deficiency of effort, education, wholesomeness, or still on the part of ordinary American working and middle class people.[21] They are a clear and predictable result of numerous government policies reflecting the corrupting power of the nations leading financial institutions and other giant corporations.[22] “All the wealth of society comes to [the rich and powerful] because that’s how the game is rigged by corporate- and Wall Street-captive policymakers at all levels of government. “It is not,” the progressive economist Laurence Mishel writes, “that the economy been broken for the last 30 years or so, but rather that it is working as has been designed to work…For 30 years, policy levers have been pulled to help the well-off, and this policy orientation worked spectacularly on its own terms.” [23] 

For that and other reasons, the contemporary capital-occupied United States is overdue for rank-and-file re-Occupation from the bottom up – for another great wave of popular anti-plutocratic rebellion, one that builds on the lessons and record of earlier generations of egalitarian rebels and revolutionaries up to and beyond OWS. 

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of many books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (2007) and The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010). His next volume, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm) will be available this Fall.

[1] Oxfam, The Cost of Inequality (January 2013), http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/the-cost-of-inequality-how-wealth-and-income-extremes-hurt-us-all-266321 

[2] The World Bank, “Poverty At a Glance” (April 2013), http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTPA/0,,contentMDK:20040961~menuPK:435040~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:430367~isCURL:Y,00.html

 [3] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of United States (New York, 1980), 288.

[4]  Larry Goodwyn, The Populist Movement  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 167-168

[5] Upton Sinclair, “You Have Lost the Strike! And Now What Are You Going to Do About it?” The Appeal to Reason, September 17, 1904.

 [6] Upton Sinclair, The Jungle ([1906]New York: Vintage, 1985), 363-64. 

[7] The Appeal to Reason, no. 459, September 17, 1904, 1, reproduced in Gene DeGruson, ed., The Lost First Edition of Sinclair’s “The Jungle” (Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Press, 1988), Illustration L. 

[8] Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History, volume 1 (New York: WW Norton, 2005), 257; Lee Soltow, Distribution of Wealth and Income in the United States in 1798 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 215-228. 

[9] American Social History Project, Who Built America? Volumes (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 333-34. 

[10]  Fred Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street (New York: Wiley, 2006 [1940]), quoted in John Cassidy, “What Good is Wall Street?” The New Yorker, November 29, 2010. 

[11] Robert S. McElvane, The Great Depression (New York: Times Books, 1993), 281. 

[12]FranklinDelanoRoosevelt, “Rendezvous With Destiny: Speech Before the 1936 Democratic National Convention,”Philadelphia,PA, June 27, 1936.  

[13] McElvane, The Great Depression, 280-81. 

[14] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937, read full text at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5105

 [15] Quoted in Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), 13. 

[16]  Students for a Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement (June 1962), http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html

 [17] Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2012), 216-217.

[18] Rosenfeld, Subversives, 412. 

[19] Tampa Bay Times, “Bernie Sanders Says Walmart Heirs  Own More Wealth Than Bottom 40 Percent of Americans,”  PolitiFact.com (July 31, 2012), http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/; Truth-0-Meter, “Michael Moore Says 400 Americans Have More Wealth Than Half of All Americans Combined,” (March 2011), Journal-Sentinel PolitiFact Wisconsin,  read online at  http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/mar/10/michael-moore/michael-moore-says-400-americans-have-more-wealth-/ (accessed December 18, 2012) 

[20 Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, “Building a Better AmericaOne Wealth Quintile at a Time,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2010. 

[21] For some excellent evidence-based alternatives to dominant neoliberal (bourgeois) victim-blaming narratives (including the “skills gap” narrative) on contemporary U.S. inequality and poverty, see Jeff Madrick, “The Anti-Economist: Half Empty,” Harper’s Magazine (December 2012); Roger Bybee, “Elites Push the Skills Gap Myth,” Z Magazine (April 2013); Marc Levine, The Skills Gap and Unemployment in Wisconsin: Separating Fact From Fiction (University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Center for Economic Development (March 2013).   

[22] I detail those policies (with no great claim to originality) in the third and fourth chapters of my forthcoming book They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, Fall 2013). 

[23] Josh Bivens, Failure By Design: The Story of America’s Broken Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

According to the New York Times’ economics writer Nelson Schwartz, “it’s tough to make sense of the economy these days.” In what he calls “a seeming riddle,” Schwartz notes that the stock market “is defying gravity, marching ever higher” even as hiring and consumer confidence are down and “austerity reigns in Washington.” 

On one hand, everyday working people and smaller businesses – what pundits and politicians like to call Main Street – are hurting. The pain comes in no small part from “The fiscal tightening in Washington – primarily the automatic budget cuts imposed by Congress…and the increase in Social Security taxes this year.” Small business is “dead in water” (so says the head of the National Federation of Independent Businesses), generating a bleak mood that “remains stuck near recession levels.” 

On the other hand, corporate “earnings” are at record levels. Profits for the largest 100 companies in the Standards & Poor 500 stock index are expected to increase by 6.6% this quarter. Fully 22% of the S&P 500’s profits will come from the nation’s largest 10 publicly traded companies, up from 18% in 2010 [1].

 Schwartz could have added that after-tax U.S. corporate profits last year were $1.75 trillion, a more-than-50% increase over the previous record of $1.125 trillion in 2006. He might have noted that, as Joel Geier recently observed in the International Socialist Review, those “profits were the highest percentage of GDP on record, with wages the lowest percentage historically.” 

Schwartz could also have added that U.S. corporations are currently sitting on a remarkable $2 trillion cash hoard – a giant surplus that could be used to put people to work, to fund social programs for the many millions of poor, and/or to pay down the deficit that corporate propagandists and corporate-captive politicians constantly (and disingenuously) bemoan. The hoard is used instead to “fuel…the asset bubble of the stock market rally of recent months, as cash moves out of low interest-rate bonds into equities or [into] mergers and acquisitions” [2].

Additions aside, where’s the “riddle?” The notion of there being a paradox or something “tough to make sense of” in the fact that Main Street and working class America are hurting while Wall Street and corporate America are thriving is naïve. It is based on the childish assumption of a harmony of interests between the wealthy few’s giant corporations and the rest of us. 

Capitalist reality is rather different. Contrary to any notion of shared interests, less business and market share for smaller and medium-sized business is more business and market share for giant firms. Less hiring sustains the “reserve army of [jobless] labor” (Marx’s excellent still relevant term), which helps suppress wages, which boosts profits. The deficit and austerity reflect the reduction of taxes on U.S. corporations, who have been quietly granted a remarkable 50% tax cut between 2006 and 2012 (another great sign of the “progressive” Obama era!) while slashing the social wage. The reduction of the social wage (benefits to workers that come from sources other than employment) deepens workers’ reluctance to challenge bosses and demand higher rent levels for their labor power [3].

The powerful and highly class-conscious political and policy actors in the corporate and financial “1%” [4] know all this very well. They do not rely on the market alone to bring about record-setting profits while millions struggle with the merely “human recession” that festers beneath the “statistical recovery.” Behind their “anti-government” and “free market” rhetoric, they pull plutocratic strings to ensure that government works on behalf of big capital and the upward distribution of wealth. Thanks in no small part to their pressure, for example, the White House and Congress imposed the lion’s share of last year’s last-minute tax increase on the working and middle classes – not the so well-to-do who sit atop a class structure that is now so savagely unequal that the six Walton (Wal-Mart) heirs have as much total net worth as the bottom 41.5% of Americans [5]. The majority of the whittled-down Obama tax hike – $125 billion of the $212 billion increase – came from increasing the payroll tax by 2%. This amounted to a 2% wage reduction for all Americans making less than $113,000 a year. Thanks to elite money influence, it remains unthinkable that policymakers would exhibit a serious commitment to deficit reduction and to the reasonable funding of Social Security by getting rid of the blatantly regressive cap on payroll taxation beyond $113,000 [6].

To mention another among many examples of U.S. state capitalism today, the Federal Reserve has acted since the Great Recession’s onset to:

 “organize…the rapid, large-scale concentration of the banking system, subsidizing the largest banks’ acquisition of weaker, less efficient banks that were on the verge of bankruptcy….In this crisis, the state arranged for and provided indirect capital in order to concentrate finance capital. The top five banks (Chase, Wells, Bank of America, Citicorp, and Goldman Sachs) now control more than 70 percent of bank assets, up from 50 percent before the crisis. The Fed forced through sales (of Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and many others) to the top banks at prices beneficial to them, guaranteeing the non-performing loans of the banks being sold, and has assured the large banks of its protection on the grounds that they are too big to fail. As a result, the rates the large banks pay for capital are significantly lower than their smaller, weaker, non-Fed-protected competitors, subsidizing their profits by billions of dollars each year…..” 

As if that isn’t plutocratic enough, the Fed has “kept interest rates at zero for more than four years, giving the banks free money with which to speculate (in commodities, stocks, junk bonds, derivatives, and the whole symphony of instruments that provoked the financial panic of 2008) and restore their balance sheets. The Fed has bought $1 trillion of mortgage-backed securities and continues to do so at a rate of $40 billion a month…” [7].

It is true that, as Schwartz worries, the current austerity (imposed by big capital, as Schwartz fails to note) threatens to slow the “recovery.” Big capital has a response to that concern: “So what?” The biggest “American” companies tend to be multinational corporations like General Electric (GE), which garners more revenue and employs more workers abroad than at “home.” As Schwartz reports, the U.S. share of GE’s workforce and revenues fell from 51% and 55% to 44% and 47% between 2005 and 2012, respectively [8].

At the same time, the elite business class is banking on the U.S. becoming a more hospitable (profitable) environment for investment and production in the not-so distant future, once the shocks imposed by fiscal austerity force down wages, benefits, taxes and regulations to the point deemed sufficient. As Geier observes, the Obama administration’s introduction of a two-tier wage system (cutting new hires’ hourly wage from $28 to $16) is part of a domestic restructuring plan whereby “the United States is becoming the cheap labor market of the industrialized world” [9].The regressive auto bailout was just one of many ways in which the corporate- and Wall Street-captive federal government has been helping the latest crisis play the basic role assigned to recessions and depressions under the profits system: cutting labor, materials, tax and regulatory costs for capital, eliminating “less efficient” capital, and concentrating wealth and control into fewer hands. Another method is the recent dramatic, Washington-approved and environmentally disastrous expansion of domestic oil and gas production through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling [10].

There’s no mysterious paradox – no hint of a “riddle” – in all of this. It’s American State Capitalism 101, working for the rich and powerful as always and now posing an ever more clearly imminent threat to life on Earth. 

Paul Street is the author of many books. His next volume is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, Fall 2013).

1. N. Schwartz, “As Wall Street Soars in Tough Era,” NYT, April 15, 2013, A1, B9. 

2. J.Geier, “Capitalism’s Long Crisis,” ISR 88 (March-April 2013), 4. 

3. For a useful discussion of the importance of the social wage to workers’ labor market bargaining power, see Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, The New Class War: Reagan’s Assault on the Welfare State and Its Consequences {New York: Pantheon, 1985), 22-36, 53-70

4.  use quote marks because the real beneficiaries of American neoliberal capitalism are in a far more elevated income and wealth segment than just the top hundredth. As the global business journalist Cynthia Freeland noted last year: “Notwithstanding Occupy Wall Streets focus on the ‘one per cent’ or Obama’s choice of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars as the level at which taxes on family incomes should rise, the salient dividing line between rich and not-rich is much higher up the income-distribution scale.” Cynthia Freeland, “Super-Rich Irony: Why do Billionaires Feel Victimized by Obama,” New Yorker, October 8, 2012. It should be noted that Obama was subsequently prevailed upon to push the tax-rise threshold for family income to $400,000.

5. Tampa Bay Times, “Bernie Sanders Says Walmart Heirs Own More Wealth Than Bottom 40 Percent of Americans,” PolitiFact.com (July 31, 2012), http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/ . See also Truth-0-Meter, “Michael Moore Says 400 Americans Have More Wealth Than Half of All Americans Combined,” (March 2011), Journal-Sentinel PolitiFact Wisconsin, read online at http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/mar/10/michael-moore/michael-moore-says-400-americans-have-more-wealth-/ (accessed December 18, 2012). The unnamed authors of this fact-checking provide exhaustive sources and data supportingMoore’s assertion 

6. Geier, “Capitalism’s Long Crisis,” 6, 

7. Geier, 5. 

8. Schwartz, “As Wall Street Soars,” B9. 

9. Geier, 6. 

10. For a chilling account, see Richard Manning, “Letter From Elkhorn Ranch: Bakken Business,” Harper’s Magazine (March 2013)

Think of the values and ideas we left progressives tend to identify with and defend and advance against those rapacious “1%”’ masters of capital, for whom the Golden Rule is that “those who have the gold deserve to rule.” Words that first come to mind probably include solidarity, democracy, the common good, equality, justice, peace, and dignity. Other terms might arise: human rights, socialism, freedom, liberty, the commons, people over profits, and people’s power.

Here’s one you might not think to mention: empathy. Empathy, which Gloria Steinem once called “the most radical of human emotions,” means the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes – to understand and sense what that other is experiencing and feeling. In Christian terms it refers to the decision to “love your neighbor as yourself,” yielding the original Golden Rule:  “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In Buddhist terms, empathy means exchanging oneself for others, subordinating ego to what the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.” It means abandoning the standard reigning Western sense of a solid, separate self apart from other sentient beings and the earth we share.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is perhaps the ultimate example of what the left political scientist and teacher Gary Olson calls “dangerous empathy.”  Having dedicated his life early on to “agape” – to a sense of “redeeming good will for all men, an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return (emphasis added)”[1] – Dr. King was moved to protest the U.S. racist and imperial slaughter called “the Vietnam War” when he saw photos of Vietnamese children killed and burned by American “liberators.” His civil rights colleague Bernard Lee never forgot King’s response:

“When he came to Ramparts magazine he stopped. He froze as he looked at the pictures from Vietnam. He saw a picture of a Vietnamese mother holding baby, a baby killed by our military. Then Martin just pushed the plate of food away from him. I looked up and said, ‘Doesn’t it taste any good?’, and he answered, ‘Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.’ …That’s when the decision was made. Martin had known about the war before then, of course, and had spoken out against it. But it was then that he decided to commit himself to oppose it.” [2]

King’s decision came with no small risk. He was assassinated (or executed) on April 4, 1968, one year to the day after he gave his famous “Time to Break the Silence” speech, in which his sense of what he called “the true meaning of compassion” compelled him to openly oppose U.S. war crimes abroad and to acknowledge that the U.S. was “the leading purveyor of violence in the world today.” On behalf of “all of us….bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism,” King said that “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.” [3]

The word “empathy” no doubt strikes some angry, aggression-attached radicals as soft and “touchy-feely” – as something for sappy, “bleeding heart liberal” social workers and school psychologists. It’s the stuff of sentimental bourgeois moralists like Charles Dickens, who specialized in the fantasy of the good rich man who helps poor people he comes to care about (e,g, Mr. Bownlow’s rescue of the street orphan Oliver Twist) but who (contrary to the British Communist Party’s Popular Front-era effort to claim him as a “proletarian” writer) never embraced the working class struggle and revolutionary change required.[4] “Empathy” is not for serious, tough-minded revolutionaries, who know that the profits system needs to be overthrown and that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”

Or is it? How can solidarity and camaraderie (not to mention comradeship) in shared struggle for democracy/liberty/ justice/ the common good/protection of the commons/socialism/peace etc. form and endure among people without basic empathy for each other? Serious popular movements have always depended and thrived on the embrace of a core rejection of individualistic and narcissistic ego, trading in “I, me, me, mine” for the notion that “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

For what its worth, empathy for the plight of others is written all over the famous first volume of the legendarily tough- and revolution-minded Karl Marx’s Capital,  which contains long and evocative passages on the dreadful damage done to British workers’ health and happiness by capital’s “voracious appetite for surplus labor.” Consistent with the horrific reports in Frederick Engels’ Condition of the English Working Class (1844), Capital is loaded with lengthy quotes from factory inspectors on the terrible price imposed on working class individuals, and communities by the bourgeoisie’s relentless quest to squeeze as much profit as possible from those who toiled in their despotic and “hidden abode of production.” From his partly Engels-funded perch in the British Museum, Marx recoiled at how the worker “emerges from the process of [vicious capitalist] production looking different from when he entered it.” As he wrote in his chapter on “The Working Day”:

“In the market, as owner of the commodity ‘labor power,’ [the worker] stood face to face with other owners of commodities, one owner against another owner. The contract by which he sold his labor power to the capitalist proclaimed in black and white, so to speak, that he was free to dispose of himself. But when the transaction was concluded, it was discovered that he was no ‘free agent’, that the period of time for which he is free to sell his labor power is the period of time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not let go ‘while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited” (emphasis added).[5]

For his part, King ended his life in agreement with Marx on some key matters. “The black revolution,” King wrote in a posthumously published essay, was “forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced” (emphasis added).[6] Consistent with the often harsh and quick-tempered ole Mole and contrary to sentimental middle-class moralists and reformers before and since Dickens, King determined that, in his words in 1967, “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in men or faulty operations” (emphasis added). [7]

For King as for Marx and generations of serious radicals before and since, one did not act sufficiently on one’s concern for others through isolated acts of charity and assistance. A serious believer in the Golden Rule worked to eliminate the underlying structures of inequality and oppression that gave rise to the need for charity in the first place. “Philanthropy,” King wrote in The Strength to Love (1963), “is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which makes philanthropy necessary.” [8]

The U.S. ruling class understands the dangerous power of empathy quite well. As Olson shows in his important new book Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture, and the Brain, the reigning neoliberal culture that the rich have promoted with great success over the last four decades is dedicated among other things to the eradication of human beings’ capacity for empathy. Consistent with the vicious neoliberal pioneer Margaret Thatcher’s claims that “there is no such thing as a society” and that “there is no such thing as collective conscience, collective kindness,” the dominant doctrine promotes a “feral” society in which life is all about personal gain and the primary concern of serious adults is “mine, mine, mine.” Neoliberal ideology and culture attacks the bonds that connect humans to each other – and to their shared natural environment and other sentient beings. It might be termed “the political economy of narcissism. Once people are brought around to the belief that society is a chimera,” Olson observes, “a perverse ‘rational pursuit of self-interest’ favors the commodification of the self as a survival strategy,” leading to “a commodification of morals” and “an incapacity for empathy” as “people are increasingly valued only for their utility, their market value.”[9]

The authoritarian implications are chilling. A democratic political culture cannot last or take root in a society whose members are simply out to serve their narrowly defined self-interests. It cannot flourish in a society where people have been turned into “disconnected, apolitical individuals,” as Latin Americanist scholar Cathy Schneider has described the shell-shocked Chilean people after a U.S-sponsored military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile’s Marxist president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 ( “Latin America’s 9/11,” ushering in a mass murderous and proto-fascist dictatorship that instituted neoliberal economic policies designed by American academicians from the University of Chicago’s “free market” economics department). Under the reigning neoliberal doctrine of what we might call the post-Allende era, the populace must be “taught,” in the British global justice activist Susan George’s words:

“to believe that we are not citizens or members of a social body but discrete, individual consumers. We are entirely responsible for our own destinies and if we fall by the wayside for whatever reason—illness, job loss, accident, failure, whatever—it’s our own fault….We have no responsibility for other people either. Solidarity is a banished word. …. That’s the essence of the neo-liberal spirit: ‘You’re on your own’….If you are well-schooled in neo-liberalism, you will never join a social movement, never engage in a struggle against an unjust action of the government, never contribute to an effort to protect the natural world….”(emphasis added). [10]

Look at the longstanding Wall Street campaign to dismantle Social Security. It’s about more than the billions of dollars in profits the leading financial institutions expect to result from privatizing the nation’s successful and popular public old age retirement system. Also relevant to that system’s rich and powerful enemies is the dangerously empathic and egalitarian rooting of Social Security in what Olson calls “the principle of caring about others who are living on the margins.” [11] As Noam Chomsky has noted, “The preferred doctrines” promoted by the corporate and financial elite “are just to care about yourself; don’t care about anyone else…The very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other, that we have responsibility for one another, that’s sort of frightening for those who want a society which is dominated by power, authority, wealth, in which people are passive and obedient…” (emphasis added).[12] “You have,” Chomsky has told the Canadian law professor Joel Bakan, “to drive out of people’s heads natural sentiments like care about others….the ideal is to have individuals who are totally disassociated from one another; who don’t care about anyone else.”[13]

Yet even as it works to wipe out our capacity for empathy, the business elite also and at the same time exploits that capacity for selfish purposes. As Olson demonstrates in a chapter titled “Neuromarketing 101: Branding Empathy,” corporations widely deploy sinister neuroscience-informed marketing strategies that utilize fake empathy. “How to Empathize Your Way to Profits” reads the title of a business article that shows its readers how “wearing [potential customers’] skin” gives their business an edge over the competition in taking advantage of consumers’ “emotional triggers.” The notion that corporations “care” and “feel for” for people, other sentient beings (a recent example is Coca Cola’s advertising campaign identifying itself with the fate of the Polar Bear) is ubiquitous in American advertising and public relations. [14]

The notion is a lie. Beneath the pretense of concern, American corporations, Olson notes, are “empathy-devoid psychopaths.” In 2003, the Canadian law professor Joel Bakan published his widely read volume The Corporation: the Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Noting that the U.S. judiciary defined corporations as legal “persons” by the end of the 19^th century, Bakan posed an interesting question: what kind of “person” is a modern corporation?  His answer: a sociopath, consistent with the corporation’s judicially certified mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its investors’ selfish economic self-interest, regardless of – and without any guilt or conscience about – any injury it may cause to others and the common good along the way. Bakan asked the internationally recognized psychologist Dr. Robert Hare to evaluate the modern corporation against his globally acclaimed diagnostic tool The Psychopathy Checklist. The results were instructive:

“Hare found there was a close match. The corporation is irresponsible, Dr. Hare said, because ‘in an attempt to satisfy the corporate goal, everybody else is put at risk.’ Corporations try to “manipulate everything, including public opinion,’ and they are grandiose, always insisting ‘that we’re number one, we’re the best.’ A lack of empathy and asocial tendencies are also key characteristics of the corporation, says Hare – “their behavior indicates that they don’t really concern themselves with their victims’; and corporations often refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions and are unable to feel remorse: ‘If [corporations] get caught [breaking the law], they pay big fines and they continue doing what they did before anyway. And in fact in many cases the fines and penalties and the penalties paid by the organizations are trivial compared to the profits they rake in.’….Finally, according to Dr. Hare, corporations relate to others superficially:  ‘their whole goal is to present themselves to the public in a way that is appealing to the public [but] in fact may not be representative of what th[e] organization is really like.’  Human psychopaths are notorious for their ability to use charm as a mask to hide their dangerously self-obsessed personalities. For corporations, [claims of] social responsibility may play the same role.”[15]

It goes back a long way. The modern corporation’s cloak of personhood provides a great shield of invisibility for capitalists who reap enormous benefits from the economies of scale and the barriers to competition afforded by their freedom to combine assets while avoiding liability beyond their individual investment for the harm their agglomerated entities cause. “The basis of a corporation,” Chomsky casually noted last year, “is limited liability, meaning as a participant in a corporation you’re not personally liable if it, say, murders tens of thousands in Bhopal.”[16]

Despite its cautionary title and harsh findings, Olson’s powerful little[17] book concludes on an optimistic note. The author is convinced on the basis of recent neuroscience findings (particularly Marco Iacoboni’s path-breaking work on “mirror neurons”) that human beings are “wired for empathy” by an evolutionary process that selected mutual concern for the common good over atomization and selfishness as key to human survival. The reigning neoliberal (really bourgeois) notion that human beings are basically selfish and competitive is a great lie promoted for selfish reasons by the disproportionately sociopathic capitalist elite.[18] Our task as “dangerous Samaritans” and revolutionaries is to more properly align our institutional and ideological order with our underlying human and caring nature. Given the currently “ecocidal” level of capitalism’s threat to a livable environment,[19] that task would now appear to be nothing less than a life or death matter for the species.

Paul Street’s next book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, fall 2013).

Iowa City, IA, April 4, 2013.

Postscript (April 5, 2013). A television advertisement for an insurance company during the Iowa-Baylor basketball game last night proclaimed the following: “Everythng we do, we do for you.”  The company apparently has no capitalist investors with selfish profit motives. This claim of selflessness is of course ubiquitious in corporate advertising and public relations. In its many commercials on the “public” broadcasting system  (“P”BS, which claims during its membership fundraising drives to have “no corporate sponsors to answer to” —-a brazen lie), the leading war contractor The Boeing Corporation boasts of its selfless service to Americans, including “our troops,” who are of course employed in purely humanitarian and altruistic operations around the world.  British Petroleum’s (BP’s) ads on “P”BS purport to portray that company’s noble commitment to a clean environment, making sure to show pictures of windmills and clean Gulf Coast beaches and so on.  Individual sociopaths are notorious for their ability to elicit sympathy and to appear altruistc and concerned as they commit their crimes.  Corporations are experts of this deception on a monumental scale, with dire implications for our and other species.

Selected Endnotes

“This is Not Dick Cheney We’re Talking About”

Questioned by a handful of Senate Democrats on his secret killer drone program earlier this month, Barack Obama said “This is not Dick Cheney we’re talking about here.”

“No Mr. President,” one of those Senators should have retorted (none did), “it is not. It is worse, actually, in three ways. First, Cheney was Vice President and you, sir, are President. Second, you have gone very far beyond George W. Bush and Dick Cheney when it comes to the cowardly and indiscriminate murder of thousands of people with drones. Third, you have done this under the cloak of liberalism, progressivism, peace, and multiculturalism whereas Bush and Cheney were openly reactionary white-nationalist messianic-militarists, which made their evil easier to identify and oppose.”

Of 366 U.S. drone attacks that have killed 3,581 people in Pakistan since 2002, 316 have been launched by the Obama administration. Less than 2 percent of those killed have been high-profile Taliban militants, the avowed targets. Many of those blasted out of earthly existence by America’s airborne remote-control killing machines have been innocent bystanders, including women and children.

Along with his proclaimed right to order the targeted killing of even U.S. citizens on executive choice alone (with no judicial or congressional review), Obama’s drone war “breaks new ground in criminality and in enlarging the scope of acceptable war crimes” (Edward S. Herman, “Support Our Troops, Our War, and Our War Crimes,” Z Magazine, April 2013, 7).

Unworthy Victims of Indeterminate Number

How many people has the U.S, killed via drones since 9/11 in the richly ironic name of a “war on terrorism”? 4000? 5000? 10,000? U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently pegged the toll at precisely 4,700. Graham’s total sounds low. Perhaps he was revealing privileged information from a high-level briefing, perhaps not. Who knows? The real number is mysterious, thanks to the drone program’s secrecy (which will survive the transfer of its management from the CIA to the Defense Department) and to the officially unworthy nature of the predominantly Muslim and nonwhite victims of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

A sign of that official unworthiness is found in the curious fact that many of those in Washington who have advocated judicial review of Obama’s decisions to order the targeted killings of terrorists would limit that review to the murder of American citizens. As Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu asked in a letter to the New York Times last February, “Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours? That President Obama can sign off on a decision to kill us with less worry about judicial scrutiny than if the target is American?  Would your Supreme Court really want to tell humankind that we, like the slave Dred Scott in the 19^th century, are not as human as you are?” (NYT, February 13, 2013, A26).

 Why Obama Loves Drones

There’s no mystery about the drone war’s appeal to Barack “the Empire’s New Clothes” Obama and to the military empire he was selected/elected to re-brand. Like the Vietnam War, the U.S. ground invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan proved to be bloody fiascos that were launched on dubious grounds and created a steady flow of dead and damaged U.S. military veterans. This has tried the citizenry’s patience with the recurrent overseas conflicts required by the nation’s costly “permanent war political economy” (Herman’s excellent phrase), which accounts for more than half of the nation’s discretionary federal spending and nearly half the world’s military spending. Call it “the Iraq syndrome,” if you like.

Drone warfare keeps deep-pockets “defense” (empire) contractors happy while offering quick and “efficient” kills of distant Evil Others without the unseemly sight and cost of “our boys” in body bags, wheelchairs, and psych-wards. Drone kills let Obama look like a righteous, blood-spilling Commander-in-Chief to his more militaristic supporters (and opponents) while he gets to pacify his more peace-oriented “progressive base” by overseeing the removal of defeated ground forces from their supposedly benevolent missions[1] in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Launched without an effort to seek congressional approval (unlike Bush and Cheney’s invasion of Iraq), the Libyan War (remember that?) also let Obama reign death and destruction from the sky on devilish Muslim enemies without risking U.S. casualties. But drones go beyond bombs in reducing the spread of politically uncomfortable “collateral damage.”

The U.S. currently possesses roughly 7,500 drones in its military inventory, purchased at a price of $28 million each – no small taxpayer-funded profit stream for the leading drone war manufacturers Boeing, ITT Corp, Honeywell, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, and General Atomics Corp. ( “Drone – FAQ,” KNOWDRONES at http://www.knowdrones.com/FAQ.pdf)

 Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

On a much happier note, a series of public protests against the domestic infrastructure that supports Washington’s overseas drone campaign are planned for April of 2013. According to The Guardian’s Paul Harris:

“The protests will begin on April 3 with a rally in New York, followed by three days of protest outside the facilities of companies that make drones, including at San Diego-based General Atomics which makes Predator and Reaper drones….Later in the month, protests will take place at universities and other institutions that conduct research into drones or help train drone pilots and operators. At the end of the month, rallies and demonstrations will target military bases in the US from where drones operate, including Hancock air base near Syracuse, New York.”

The group behind the effort, the Network to Stop Drone Surveillance and Warfare, says that its April Days of Action are intended to forge a popular movement for an end to U.S. drone warfare.

This is a very welcome development, one I strongly encourage Americans and others to join. The activists behind the protests are correct to take the fight beyond government to the “defense” corporations and also to the universities that develop Superpower’s drone technologies. For what its worth, killer drone research and development is just one of the many ways in which American universities have been “pulled into the machinations of the national security state” (see Henry A. Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex [Paradigm, 2007]). The universities, which long ago resumed their normal historical pattern of supine self-subordination to the corporate and military state, have escaped serious public scrutiny of their cozy relationship with the imperial “defense” establishment for far too long.

It’s a protest plan that might even raise a smile from Dwight Eisenhower. It is not widely known that he originally meant to call the “military-industrial complex” he so presciently warned Americans about “the military-industrial-academic complex.”  The second phrase was dropped from his famous 1961 farewell address but got picked up again in the later 1960s by the Vietnam War critic and U.S. Senator William Fulbright (Giroux, University in Chains, 14-15) – a rare Senator who might have actually responded to Obama in the terms suggested at the beginning of this essay.

 Politicians or Citizens?

Such individuals are nowhere to be found in the contemporary Democratic Party. As Herman notes, “increasing numbers of liberal Democrats have gotten on board [Obama’s] war-oriented ship of state and also find his warrior actions and rhetoric agreeable” (Herman, “Support Our Troops,” 7). It is left to a clownish arch-reactionary Teapublican named Rand Paul to make any significant protest against Obama’s drone war policy – and against the related problem of domestically deployed drones – in the U.S. Congress.

But then, if the Age of Obama has taught us anything on progressive change and how it happens, it should be that it’s not about politicians and their calculations. As Howard Zinn noted in an early 2007 commentary on the Democratic Party’s continuing willingness to fund the invasion of Iraq:

“We who protest the war are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable…It is not easy, in the corrupting atmosphere of Washington, D.C., to hold on firmly to the truth, to resist the temptation of capitulation that presents itself as compromise. Except for the rare few, our representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be ‘realistic.’ We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth. That, history suggests, is the most realistic thing a citizen can do” (H. Zinn, “Are We Politicians or Citizens?” The Progressive. May 2007).

Paul Street is the author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real of Power (Paradigm, 2010), Crashing the Tea Party (Paradigm, 2011, co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio), and numerous other books. His next book, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2013) will be out this fall.

Behold the Times’ editorial board’s reflections this morning (I am writing on Wednesday, March 20, 2013) on the tenth anniversary of the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq:

“Ten years after it began, the Iraq war still haunts the United States in the nearly 4,500 troops who died there; the more than 30,000 American wounded who have come home; the more than $2 trillion spent on combat operations and reconstruction, which inflated the deficit; and in the lessons learned about the limits of American leadership and power.” 

“It haunts Iraq too, where the total number of casualties is believed to have surpassed 100,000 but has never been officially determined; and where one strongman was traded for another, albeit under a more pluralistic system with a democratic veneer. The country is increasingly influenced by Iran and buffeted by the regional turmoil caused by the Arab Spring.” (“Ten Years After,” NYT, March 20, 2013, A22).

I am struck by three problems in these two short paragraphs. First, consider the term “the Iraq War.”  Besides being historically unspecific (it could also be applied to Dessert Storm [1991] or Iraq’s long U.S.-fueled war with Iran in the 1980s), the designation “the Iraq war” tells you nothing about the basic fact of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (OIF), which is that it was a monumentally illegal and immoral and brazenly imperial invasion and occupation of Iraq by the world’s only Superpower. It was not just a war that Uncle Sam happened into somehow on Iraqi soil. 

Second, the Times editors underplay the damage the imperial invasion and occupation did to Iraq. Their reflections on what “haunts Iraq” is quite an understatement of the appalling havoc America wreaked in Mesopotamia. As the left journalist, author and editor Tom Engelhardt noted in mid-January of 2008:

“Whether civilian dead between the invasion of 2003 and mid-2006 (before the worst year of civil-war level violence even hit) was in the range of 600,000 as a study in the British medical journal, The Lancet reported, or 150,000 as a recent World Health Organization study suggests, whether two million or 2.5 million Iraqis have fled the country, whether 1.1 million or more than two million have been displaced internally, whether electricity blackouts and water shortages have marginally increased or decreased, whether the country’s health-care system is beyond resuscitation or could still be revived, whether Iraqi oil production has nearly crept back to the low point of the Saddam Hussein-era or not, whether fields of opium poppies are, for the first time, spreading across the country’s agricultural lands or still relatively localized, Iraq is a continuing disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory.” <!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1] 

According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in the December 2007 edition of the mainstream journal Current History, “The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century…The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–>

Third, it is telling that the Times’ editors see the United States as “haunted” only “in” the losses inflicted on its own people and government. Shouldn’t it also and especially be haunted by mass-murderous Mongols-surpassing misery its criminal war of invasion and occupation imposed on the people of Iraq? Even going by the Times editors’ lowball statistics, the damage done to Iraq far surpasses the damage to the United States in both absolute and proportional terms.

Part of why the Times’ editors don’t seem more disturbed by the harm inflicted on the Iraqis is suggested in a lament that comes later in their “Ten Years After” editorial. “None of the Bush administration’s war architects have been called to account for their mistakes,” the editors complain, “and even now, many are invited to speak on policy issues as if they were not responsible for one of the worst strategic blunders in American foreign policy” [emphasis added] (New York Times Editors, “Ten Years After”). 

Another and related part of the reason for the editors’ indifference is suggested in an Op Ed piece by that vanguard neoliberal war champion and regular Times columnist Thomas Friedman one page over in today’s paper. “Given its history of brutal dictatorship,” Friedman proclaims, “Iraq might seem to be the last place in the Middle East we should have tried to help give birth to a self-governing democracy…Iraqi society under Saddam has been traumatized,” Friedman writes, “and the impact of 35 years of authoritarian rule will not dissipate quickly” – as if nothing had been done by the U.S. to traumatize Iraq when and after Saddam was deposed. Unreal. 

Friedman concludes with hope that “all who sacrificed so that Iraq would have an opportunity for decent governance” will see democracy flourish in coming years, yielding a “positive judgment” on the invasion (T. Friedman, “Democrats, Dragons, and Drones,” NYT, March 20, 2013, A23). 

Never mind that the invasion was launched under thoroughly false and concocted pretexts (“weapons of mass destruction” and supposed connections between Saddam and al Qaeda/9-11). Or that freedom- and democracy-promotion were only installed as the main reason for the neocolonial war of invasion once the original pretexts were exposed as deceptions. Or that the occupation continued over and against the opposition of the great majority of Iraqi people. Or that the real and frankly imperial goal behind the invasion, deeply consistent with U.S. foreign policy since World War II and before, was clear as day to millions at home and abroad: to deepen U.S. control over Iraqi’s remarkable and largely untapped reserves of economically and strategically hyper-significant oil. 

There’s nothing new here. The Times editors’ criticism of the Iraq invasion/occupation falls within the same narrow “hawk-dove” spectrum that defined and restricted acceptable power elite foreign policy debate during the Vietnam era. Then as now the bipartisan imperial Establishment’s official “doves” (including later Barack Obama adviser Anthony Lake) could only question the practical outcomes (for American power and lives) and implementation of a monumentally mass murderous and deeply criminal war of aggression they insisted on seeing (or claiming to see) as driven by noble and democratic (never imperialist or racist) goals. And the people on the wrong end of Uncle Sam’s inherently dignified global guns and policies were beyond the sphere of the “doves” imaginable concern. The supposed “antiwar” establishment’s critique was about the Vietnam War’s negative impact on American lives and power, not the U.S. military’s role in killing 2 million or more Southeast Asians. “The doves,” Noam Chomsky recalled in 1984:

“felt that the [Vietnam] war was ‘a hopeless cause’ ….[But] Everyone across the all-too narrow elite spectrum — ‘doves’ no less than ‘hawks’ – agreed that it was a ‘failed crusade,’ noble but ‘illusory’ and undertaken with the ‘loftiest intentions’ …there is a possible position omitted from the fierce debate between hawks and doves, namely the position of the peace movement, a position in fact shared by the large majority of citizens as recently as 1982: the war was not merely a ‘mistake,’ as the official doves allege, but was ‘fundamentally wrong and immoral.’ To put it plainly: war crimes, including the crime of launching an aggressive war, are wrong, even if they succeed in their ‘noble’ aims.  This position does not enter the debate, even to be refuted; it is unthinkable within the ideological mainstream” (emphasis added).

Chomsky recalled the comments of the “antiwar” New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who once described the U.S. assault on Vietnam as “a blundering effort to do good” – consistent with what Chomsky called “the fundamental doctrine that the [U.S.] state is benevolent, governed by the loftiest intentions.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[3] 

Such, more than four decades later, is the recycled doctrinal claim of the bipartisan imperial establishment (from the president on down) in relation to Iraq. The notion that the criminal, immoral and petro-imperialist attack on Iraq was, well…criminal, immoral and petro-imperialist is simply unthinkable within reign elite doctrinal parameters. As Chomsky noted five years ago, “the reasoning and the underlying attitudes carry over with almost no change to the critical commentary on the US invasion of Iraq.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[4] 

It is disgusting that messianic militarists like Paul Wolfowitz and other “OIF” planners and propagandists are treated with respect and receive hefty speaking fees to share their rancid views on world events in the wake of their monumental transgressions. Wolfowitz, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest, including Condi Rice and Colin Powell (the onetime My Lai whitewasher who sold the criminally false WMD pretext for the invasion at the United Nations) should be confined behind bars for the rest of their days. But “mistakes” and “strategic blunders” don’t really cut it by any civilized moral criteria when it comes to evaluating the criminal and brazenly petro-imperialist (and richly bipartisan) U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

[1] Tom Engelhardt, “The Corpse on the Gurney: the Success Mantra in Iraq,” Antiwar.com, January 18, 2008, read at www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=12229

First published on ZNet on March 8, 2013.

1. Michael Albert: First, can you tell folks just a bit about where you are from, how you became radical, and what your current focuses are? 

Paul Street: I became radical in part by growing up in a very liberal middle class family in the University of Chicago (UC) neighborhood (Hyde Park) during the 1960s. My parents took me to see Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Soldier Field in 1966. They helped out with the Chicago Freedom Movement on housing and schools issues. 

The ethos in my household was that you always sided with the underdog (part of why you had to be a White Sox fan and hate the New York Yankees) and you didn’t blame poor and oppressed people for their circumstances. I remember my mother taking me once a year to spend a day in the school where she taught at 47^th and Wabash, in the middle of the Chicago Housing Projects (a lesson in segregation and disparity). I remember my father (who was a sociologist and a remarkable jazz pianist) driving me up to look at the “rich Republican bastards” up on the Gold Coast and in Lake Forest and Winnetka and Kenilworth. I remember one of my father’s students taking me to hear Pete Seeger in Old Town. I’ve got an old photo my father took of my mother walking a picket line in a teachers’ strike in (I think 1969) and another one of her dressed to march in an antiwar Moratorium event. 

In the summer of 1969 we took a summer vacation to Europe. We were in London at the same time that the U.S. landed on the moon. It was the first time BBC television had stayed on past midnight, I believe. British people the next day would congratulate us: “way to go Yank,” stuff like that, as if we’d had anything to do with it. My father responded by saying basically “thanks but no thanks.” He told them how many poor people there were in “wealthy” America. He thought that the money spent on the Cold War lunar spectacle would have been better invested in meeting human needs at home – imagine. That’s the kind of household I grew up in.

It wasn’t just my family that leaned left. It was the neighborhood and the school, both integrated to a degree that was exceptional in Chicago at that time. In an old fifth grade class picture from the UC Lab School, I’m wearing a “Dump Daley” button. I’m sitting next to a girl with a peace symbol on her cap. I remember the silent mass march that stretched down Woodlawn Avenue the day after King was killed in 1968. You couldn’t see the beginning or end of it. 

I never quite forgave my parents for moving out of Hyde Park. They left suddenly and without warning for Long Island (SUNY-Stony Brook 1970-73) and then Ann Arbor (1973-76), which turned out to be disastrous for them –a real decline. I dropped out, which knocked me off the track to higher educational success. It didn’t take much or long to fall off. I was fortunate to graduate high school. I did thanks to an alternative high school (Community High) in Ann Arbor, where the feeling was very countercultural and New Left. 

In retrospect, there was some serendipity here. If my folks had stayed in Hyde Park I would have coasted like Arne Duncan through K-12 at the UC Lab School (where I had done very well) and gone to some elite university and been integrated into the corporate-academic system. Instead, I ended up associating and identifying with a different and more working and lower class set of folks, traveling the country by bus, and working different low-paid jobs back in Chicago (the North Side this time, a different city). When I decided I did want to attend college (working as a dishwasher and bellhop was instructive in that regard), I ended up out in DeKalb, Illinois (where my father had grown up, by coincidence) at Northern Illinois University (NIU), where the history department was something like half-Marxist and very much on the cutting edge of the New Left “revision” of American History. I was drawn to that like a moth to a lamp. It was the “little red schoolhouse on the prairie.”  I read The Communist Manifesto and Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution and Lenin’s Imperialism and Frederick Engels’ Socialism, Scientific and Utopian and Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and Arnold Kettle’s Introduction to the English Novel and Marx’s Capital (the parts I could understand at the time) and that was it. 

It was like a bright light bulb going on in a dark basement. And it was an instant community, including undergrads, grad students, and faculty. I was a “Marxist historian” in training. I woke up with a (generally left) book next to my bed for about 4 years in a row. 

From this point on, my views were radical left. The question was would I express those views only through academic pursuits or would I also or perhaps exclusively develop and act on them outside the ivory tower. As it turned out, except for some impromptu speeches and rants – especially one that surprised me against the Persian Gulf War in NIU’s Martin Luther King Commons in 1991, when we had an antiwar movement for about 2 days – I only really found my writing and speaking voice many years later when I got free of the academy (on which I had already overdosed as a child and adolescent to be perfectly honest). Some of that started to occur when I got a job working on contemporary policy issues at a small social policy shop at NIU in the middle 1990s. My boss there operated with a base in the school, but funding came from outside and the audience for studies I worked on was not academic – it was journalists, community groups, policymakers, and politicians etc. 

I was pleasantly surprised at how easily and enjoyably I took to (a) to studying and writing about contemporary issues and current events, not just the past and (b) writing and speaking for a more public and engaged audience, with the intention of contributing to policy change in the present and near-term future. 

I remember at this time a change when I walked into a bookstore. Prior to the mid 1990s, I had walked straight to the History section. Now I walked over to Current Events and divided my time between that section and the political journals. 

By the end of the decade I was sending pieces to Z Magazine and other Left venues. Another neat and radicalizing thing that happened around this time was the emergence of the global justice movement the end of the Clinton years. It was extraordinary. I taught some mass U.S. History surveys on a part-time basis at NIU in 1999 and every class seemed to have 10 kids or so ready to join Students Against Sweatshops. We ended up taking a big trip down to Washington to protest the World Bank. 

Left-anarchist thought didn’t really get much attention or respect when I was a student at NIU (or at Binghamton, where I did a doctorate in U.S. history), given the hard Marxist emphasis. The only way I got exposed to the left libertarian tradition was through the labor history (my academic specialty) I studied at the graduate level, which introduced me to an important left-anarchist-leaning essay by Stephen Marglin (“What Do Bosses Do?”) and to the history of syndicalist and anarchist movements in the U.S. (the IWW) and Europe. 

I didn’t read anything by Noam Chomsky until probably 1993. That happened in the context of trying to make some sense out of U.S. foreign policy in preparing U.S. history courses I taught as an adjunct instructor in and around Chicago (I taught at six different schools and universities in the 1990s –itself something of a re-radicalizing experience). Besides shedding an enormous amount of empirical and conceptual light on U.S. imperialism and more, Chomsky for me was something of a second light bulb going off in a dark basement in relation to the left-libertarian/anarchist tradition. I remember reading a short book he recommended by Rudolf Rocker (the title escapes me) that was a wonderful exposition of the left-libertarian-socialist tradition and analysis (it kind of does for left anarchism/libertarian socialism what Engels’ Socialism Scientific and Utopian does for “Marxism”). 

Regarding current focuses, I’m currently finishing up a book titled They Rule: The Wealthy Few v. Democracy and a Decent Future (Paradigm, 2013), which is a nice follow-up to my books on the Obama and the Tea Party phenomena. This time I get to look more comprehensively and explicitly than I did in my previous volumes at the whole system of class rule in the U.S. The book was inspired by the Occupy Movement/ Moment, which I think was remarkable on numerous levels. 

They Rule has a strong ecological dimension, reflecting my agreement with something Herve Kempf said in his book The Rich Are Destroying the Earth: ”the left will be reborn by uniting the causes of inequality and the environment – or, unfit, it will disappear in the general disorder that will sweep it and everything else away.”  

2. What from your earlier times of radicalization seems most relevant to your views now? What remains relevant in present circumstances?

Well, it’s all relevant, minus some of the childish sectarian concerns and the obsession with the Russian Revolution and Trotsky that seemed to be part of the process. What seems most relevant at present is the environmental aspect – the understanding that state capitalism is institutionally wired to basically wipe out a livable planet. The profits system is “exterminist,” to use a word that the great British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson coined in the 1980s. Thompson was talking about the nuclear arms race, but the term applies just as well if not more appropriately to what John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues call “the ecological rift,” led by anthropogenic global warming (AGW). 

After my initial Marxist radicalization at NIU, I got very into the writings of the socialist environmentalist Barry Commoner (who died last year) in the late 1970s, when there was a lot of talk about energy and energy policy in the wake of the Arab oil crisis. We even had Jimmy Carter lecturing Americans on the need to consume less stuff and conserve more energy. He had solar panels on the White House for God’s sake. 

We had the Three Mile Island near-disaster, which was the cause of the first protest I participated in as an adult – and also how I met my wife Janet Razbadouski, who was the leading activist on campus and way ahead of me and all the local big shot academic Marxists on nuclear power and the environment. There was this strong ecology- and related energy-focused dimension to becoming left at that time – at least there was for me. I remember putting up posters for Commoner’s Citizens Party presidential campaign in 1980. 

I lost touch with environmental issues as I got caught up in trying to make a living doing academic studies and adjunct teaching during the 1980s and 1990s. I started paying belated attention to ecological issues about 10 years ago and was like, “holy shit, we’ve got a generation at most to save a livable planet. Weren’t we talking about these things front and center in the Seventies?” Back in the 1970s it was about Nukes, along with more traditional air and water pollution and pesticides and the like. Now, of course, the leading problem is AGW, which John Sanbonmatsu rightly calls “the no. 1 issue of our or any time.” As Chomsky says, “if the [the environmental] catastrophe isn’t…averted – [then] in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter.” What good is it to inherit a poisoned Earth from “the 1%?” – more equally sharing out a poison pie? 

I am not suggesting that we trade in red or red and black for green. To the contrary, I have no confidence that AGW or other key parts of the “ecological rift” can be overcome within the profits system. Saving humans and other living things from environmental catastrophe – preserving a decent future and livable planet – means confronting what Dr. King called “the real issue to be faced….the radical reconstruction of society itself.” 

“The rich,” Herve Kemp has reminded us, “are destroying the earth” – the rich and above all their profits system 

3. At the other extreme, since earlier days, much has happened. What do you think is profoundly different now from when you first became radical? What new insights do you think have changed your views, or ratified them in recent years? 

Where to start on what’s profoundly different? Since I first became radical: 

• The Soviet bloc vaporized and with it any credible state-specific military counter to American militarism as Russia morphed from Stalinism to neoliberal gangsterism.
• U.S. manufacturing base has all but disappeared and finance capital has seized power, dismantling and de-developing much of the nation.
• Neoliberal ideology (which says that social solidarity, the common good, and human empathy are defunct and dysfunctional) knocked off the lingering social Keynesian liberalism of the long New Deal era.
• The percentage of U.S. workers enrolled in unions fell from 27 to 11 percent – to a pre-Great Depression level.
• The loathsome rat and arch reactionary Ronald Reagan was elected to the U.S. presidency. He served two terms, doing enormous damage at home and abroad.
• Japan was overtaken by the U.S. as the industrialized nation with the longest working hours
• Wages and benefits have stagnated or fallen for most while wealth and income has skyrocketed for the top tenth, especially for the richest within the top 1 percent.
• U.S. inequality has reached “Second Gilded Age” levels, on par with the 1920s.
• “Marxist-Lenninist” China has emerged as the great new center of manufacturing and global capitalist accumulation.
• The U.S. prison population (now over 2 million) has increased more than 6 times over and 1 in 3 black adult males are now saddled with the crippling lifelong mark of a felony record, aptly termed “the New Jim Crow” by law professor Michelle Alexander.
• Poor kids’ former entitlement to public family cash assistance was liquidated
• The low-wage anti-union import platform Wal-Mart replaced high-wage unionized General Motors as the nation’s leading corporation (and leading “template” for labor-management relations).
• The universities returned to their normal historical pattern of abject servility to the corporate and imperial establishment.
• Corporate media ownership has shrunk yet further to what is it now…8, 7, 6, 5…corporations owning more than half of all media print and electronic? (I lose track).
• The Internet emerged for better and/or worse and countless millions Americans are regularly zoned-out in front of atomized glowing computer screens on private e-mail chats, Facebook “walls” (Ray Bradbury must have appreciated that term), Twitter, and iPhones.
• There has emerged a related mass prescription epidemic of psychosomatic drugs (Aldous Huxley would appreciate that).
• The Supreme Court installed a proto-fascistic messianic militarist in the White House on openly absurd grounds (Bush v. Gore, 2000). He served two terms and did enormous damage at home and abroad.
• The Supreme Court has permitted (on openly absurd grounds – Citizens United, 2010) the nation’s sociopathic corporations to invest unlimited sums from their business treasuries in the deepening their already extreme plutocratic control of U.S. politics – this in the name of free speech.
• Both of the official political organizations (which barely resemble parties anymore) have moved well to the right of the citizenry qua electorate in abject service to “the unelected dictatorship of money” (Edward Herman and David Peterson’s excellent phrase).
• Urban and national policing have become highly militarized and ever more technologically sophisticated as the war on “homeland” (a lovely and revealing phrase) dissent has been buttressed by a significant and chilling expansion of police state powers (e.g. indefinite detention and rendition) in the wake of 9/11.
• Runaway carbon emissions generated by the growth addicted profits system are now pushing the climate quickly towards an irreversible “tipping point” that has some earth and life scientists talking in serious terms about the not-so distant threat of human extinction.

To me this is all in many ways a validation of what the radical thinkers I first read and studied in the 1970s said and wrote. It’s “socialism or barbarism,” Rosa Luxembourg once wrote. She was quite right but Istvan Meszaros added a critical caveat relating to the global ecological crisis: “socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky.”  To me, the Neoliberal era (1973 through the present) is in many ways the profits system returning pretty much to its vicious long duree norm. The Keynesian Golden Age after World War II (1945-1973) – when inequality fell and good union jobs were plentiful in the U.S. – was the anomalous period. “Neoliberalism” is nothing new. You can read about its basic ethos and character in The Communist Manifesto, Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation and Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Capital. 1848-1875, not to mention Marx’s magisterial volumes. We have had a series of economic crises – 2007 to the present being the biggest of all – that are straight out of Marx: declining rates of profit and over-accumulation of capital, related to financial speculation and so on. What’s called globalization, also less than novel, is a validation of Marx and Engels’ basic point that working men and women “have no country” and must unite across national borders. 

Still, looking back on all this and especially on the environmental crisis, I am much less classically “Marxist” than I was in the late 1970s and 1980s. It’s not just about taking over the forces of production from the monopoly capitalist property masters – the bourgeoisie – and repacking those forces within the more democratic relations of socialism by and for “the proletariat.” Those forces themselves are cancerous and exterminist to no small degree, like nuclear warheads. Modern capitalism has responded to the chronic over-accumulation of capital and the related declining rate of profit that results from its success in increasing labor productivity by mutating into what Foster and his colleague Brett Clark call “an economy of built-in waste: both economic and ecological.” The leading forms of waste include: “a gargantuan and ever-expanding sales effort penetrating into the structure of production itself; planned obsolescence (including planned psychological obsolescence); (3) production of luxury goods for an opulent minority; (4) prodigious military and penal-state spending; and (5)…a whole speculative superstructure in the form of finance, insurance, and real estate market.”  (Foster and Clark, “The Planetary Emergency, Monthly Review, December 2012). Reflecting on the massive building into the production process of such monumentally resource-squandering but profits-serving waste as advertising and plastic-packaging, Foster and Clark have revised Marx’s famous circuit of merchant and industrial capital (M-C-M’) to include an investment that is dedicated to nothing more than “the specifically capitalist use value” (CK) of promoting exchange value: M-CK-M’. In the world of M-CK-M’, much of what passes for wealth becomes “illth” (John Ruskin). The very techniques and design of production, not merely its ownership and the distribution of its rewards, have become perverted and cancerous – a threat to the survival of human and other sentient beings –under “late capitalism,” which certainly gives new and unintended meaning to Fukuyama’s reflections on “liberal” capitalism and the “End of History.” 

Thinking about all this, and reflecting on the U.S. building trades’ and the AFL-CIO’s predictable enthusiasm for the eco-cidal Keystone XL pipeline, I am less impressed by Marx’s dichotomy of bourgeoisie versus proletariat than I am by his related and I think more far-reaching dichotomy of use value versus exchange value. I’m all for rank and file working class struggle, but there’s little basis anymore for accepting Marx’s neo-Hegelian notion that there is any kind of historical law mandating the supersession of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat as the revolutionary historical class (what C Wright Mills called “The Labor Metaphysic”). People of all class backgrounds (and of all genders and races and nationalities and so on) who care about living in a decent and democratic society need to come together to plan and fight for a democratic, environmentally sustainable/harmonious, and non-egoistic set of forces and relations of production and distribution and more. We need to create an anti-hierarchical and participatory structuring of work and of social and political institutions along lines that left anarchists and others have long advocated in opposition not only to capitalist managers but also to avowedly socialist coordinators (remember Bakunin’s prophetic warnings against the “Red Bureaucracy” that left intellectuals promised to impose in the place of bourgeois management). 

There’s some instructive recent history to consider. The ease with which the former “Marxist” Soviet Union and “Marxist” China transitioned into more classically capitalist relations and integrated into the world capitalist system and then generated their own propertied oligarchies (I think I heard recently that “communist” China now has more than 640 billionaires) ought to tell any of us who still don’t get it that it is not sufficient to replace or pre-empt private ownership of the means of production (and of the means transportation and communications and finance and distribution) with state ownership. We also have to address the rooting of class inequality in the authoritarian (“capitalist” if you like) division of labor – the alienating, hierarchical, and unequal organization of work/the labor process. It is quite remarkable how many former Soviet and “Marxist” Chinese coordinators and bureaucrats have translated privileged positions in the social division of labor into more classically bourgeois wealth forms once restrictions on private productive property were torn down. Of course, many millions or Russians are considerably worse off in the era of neoliberal market “freedom” than they were in the late Soviet period, just as many millions of black South Africans are actually worse off in the post-apartheid era, regardless of the fact that, as Chomsky says, there are some black faces in the limousines now.

 4. When you consider activism over the last twenty years or so, what new lessons seem to you to emerge with importance for the future? Again, what might those involved in those years have done differently, or better, to have attained more progress? 

Well, I’ll mention some lessons and leave it open on how “new” they are: 

• The necessity of organizing and regularly communicating and acting on an international basis. Capital is militantly global and the left has no chance of countering its power without also acting on the planetary scale.
• The necessity of serious strategic thinking on how to win, both short-term (progressive and revolutionary reforms) and long-term (revolutionary systemic change including the overdue transcendence of the exterminist profits system)  It’s not enough just to pound our chests and express our outrage – to mouth off and protest and channel popular angers for a while. A posture of permanent reactive resistance to the dominant culture gets tiresome and exhausting, pushing the ball up the hill only to see it rolled back again. What’s the plan here? What do we want to see and make happen? How are we going to get there? What will it take? What are we willing to do (and perhaps give up) in order to move forward and win? I have seen too much angry and alienated “expressivism” and too little “strategicism” (these are Sanbonmatsu’s terms) on the left over many years.
• The necessity of developing a reasonably detailed vision of what sort of desirable and viable sustainable alternative-democratic society we want to create as the culmination of the struggle we are asking everyday citizens and workers to undertake, often at all no small risk and discomfort.
• The necessity of building “permanent,” long-term, and deeply entrenched cadres and structures that united around a core left project of social, political, and environmental transformation. We have tended in the past to flit in and out of different causes and issues, leaving little real long term institutional basis and presence. We don’t have a Left with a permanent life to match that of those great super powerful artificial “persons” called corporations, who work to subvert the common good 24-7, 7 days a week.
• The necessity of keeping our eyes on the prize of economic justice and class inequality and on the need to confront the ruling class.
• The necessity of organizing in a way responds to the needs and encourages the widespread active participation of working and lower class people (I saw working class people antagonized and turned off by Occupy’s General Assemblies, which tended to get very cumbersome and frankly navel-gazing and time-squandering).
• The necessity of uniting the causes of ecology and equality through the advance of a “Green New Deal” that simultaneously addresses the problem of eco-cide and the problems of mass structural employment and poverty (and more) by putting millions to socially useful and environmentally necessary public work converting our economy from waste and profit and the endless accumulation of private wealth to the meeting of human needs, protection of the commons, and the advance of the common good.    

Perhaps I will address some of your question about things that might have been done differently in my next answer below.

5. Why do you think earlier generations of leftists, specifically those of the sixties era, failed to accomplish remotely as much as we had hoped? Do you see any broad reasons that indicate things that might be done better in the future? 

It’s hard to know how exactly much of the failure you mention has to do with factors internal to the movement and its people and how much was about external factors including though not limited to repression – i.e. COINTELPRO and the like. We know that there was a very deliberate and class-conscious authoritarian response by the American power elite to the democratic flowerings of the 1960s and early 1970s. 

With that caveat in mind, one of the New Left’s flaws was its tendency to move from one big march and demonstration and cause to another and another. The Old Left (here I would include the CP, the SWP, and the Socialist Party) did more to lay down long-term institutional structures and generated longer-term activist cadres so that, you know, in moments of crisis, ordinary folks could say, “quick, go get the Reds.” 

A lot of former New Leftists I’ve known in the past seem to have migrated into academic careerism, where their often formidable and valuable skills have tended to be wasted and their former commitments have tended to fade. There are some admirable and enviable exceptions, to be sure – a disproportionate number of them in NYC it seems. 

The New Left often seemed not to have kept its eyes on the prize of capitalism and economic justice, tending to get blown up by social identity politics and a flight from questions of class and the profits system. I don’t want to overdo this point.Mario Savio’s famous 1964 “End of History” speech at U Cal Berkeley included the charge that the modern corporate “university’s ‘respectable’ bureaucracy masks the financial plutocrats.” American capitalists and their authoritarian system (the “machine” whose “operation” Savio said had become “so odious…that you can’t take part [and have to] put your bodies on the gears …to make it stop”) was held in distinctly low esteem by the insurgent popular movements and counterculture that emerged during these years. Four years after the Free Speech Movement, Savio channeled the sensibilities of many New Left activists on the profits system and seemed to prefigure contemporary concerns about environmental ruin in announcing his candidacy for the California state senate:

 “All those who gain least from war and poverty – the working people, the small farmers, the small businessmen, the professionals…must join together now against the minority in business and finance who own and run this country, and whose lust for power and profit and whose utter disregard for human suffering threatens now to bring the world to a final catastrophe….Our great task it to organize the people into a new majority. Americans are practical people….we must convince them that it is essential that our economy be dominated by production to satisfy human needs, not to swell profits; that this production can be planned publicly and democratically…and that administration of the economy should be highly decentralized so that the decisions are really made by the people….”

Dr. King himself said somewhat similar-sounding things. Sadly, that critical left economic equality and justice message often got muddled and lost for reasons both internal and external to the New Left movement. I think the attachment to social identity politics coming out of the Sixties is part of how so many former New Leftists (I will not name names, which would be counter-productive) made themselves look a little silly over  the deeply conservative “Wall Street Barry” Obama in 2007 and 2008 and (in  some cases since). I doubt that Savio would have gotten sucked in. He would have sensed something that John Pilger noted in 2009: 

“The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is indeed exciting to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race together with gender and even class can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe, above all, is the class one serves. George W. Bush’s inner circle from the State Department to the Supreme Court was perhaps the most multiracial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary”.

I’ll add that I’ve repeatedly seen promising left movements and moments undone by that great destroyer ego, which comes down to misplaced faith in a solid and separate self who always knows better than others and is often in a seemingly constant state of war with others, including folks who ought to be comrades. Ordinary workers and citizens can smell egomania and narcissism a mile off and are not about to risk anything lining up with people who seem as selfish and amoral as the folks in power. 

Sectarianism was a big part of what blew up the student New Left at the end of the Sixties. I think particularly of the crazy Maoist shoot-off from SDS – the Progressive Labor Party – and also the Weatherman tendency, which got into blowing stuff up and breaking windows at banks and was pretty freaky on different levels. Egomania and narcissism were critical to the split up of SDS and are big driving forces (along with sheer stupidity and ignorance) behind sectarianism.  We also know that the FBI, COINTELPRO, local police Red Squads and other parts of the national security and surveillance state played key roles in feeding splits and messing up New Leftists’ lives and prospects. 

On a positive note, I think there’s reason to think that de-valuation of class and capitalism is going to be much less of problem for the Next Left. Sitting in the Great Recession sewer of the Second Gilded Age amidst the first great crisis of capitalism in its neoliberal phase (to paraphrase David McNally) and in a time when the profits system ever more evidently threatens life on Earth, I think it’s clear to most serious radicals now that the great issue of our time is precisely the economic system that is dominated by Savio’s “financial plutocrats” and “the minority in business and finance who and run this country” (run it into the ground, we might add, with eco-cidal/exterminst results leading to  Savio’s “final catastrophe”). This, after all was the issue that briefly held center political stage thanks to the Occupy Movement in the fall of 2011 – a movement that had to be torn down by militarized police to make way for the re-installation of the next “highly personalized quadrennial electoral extravaganza” (Noam Chomsky’s phrase) as the definition of “politics….the only politics that matters.” 

To a remarkable degree, the last extravaganza was geared around Occupy’s issue – economic inequality. Obama is with the 1%, of course, but at the level of campaign rhetoric 2012 revolved around class inequality more than any U.S. presidential election since 1936. I find that intriguing and hopeful. 

While scary and terrible in numerous ways, the environmental crisis today poses the question of the profits system’s fundamental and deadly incompatibility with the common good. It’s (a) revolution or (b) escalating eco-cide, as is becoming ever more evident across a full planet – one that can no longer healthily sustain the system’s addiction to endless accumulation and growth.  

6. You do a lot of public speaking, I believe. What do you think is its value – not just yours, of course, but in general? What suggestions do you have for people willing and eager to do public speaking for activist consciousness raising and organizing to speed their progress toward being really effective?<!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–><!–[endif]–>

Well, it’s one of the few ways I know for an academically unaffiliated left intellectual to make any money. Beyond that, which matters (because leftists need money to get by), a talk by a left activist or intellectual can be good occasion for activist networking and inspiration. A few months ago, when Barbara Ehrneriech spoke in Iowa City, a local progressive used the Q&A period to start off a successful movement to vote down a referendum to spend millions of dollars on a jail expansion. 

A good and informed speaker shares information that people need – I’ve left every Noam Chomsky lecture I’ve ever attended with significantly more knowledge on things that matter than I had going in. When I heard Ehrenreich, I learned a lot about what various municipalities are doing to do poor and homeless people around the country – terrible stuff I had no idea about. 

Over the last few years, I’ve been able to share information that listeners didn’t have time or energy to dig up on their own regarding things like Barack Obama’s less-than progressive policy history and world view, the corporate funding behind “the Tea Party,” and the degree and impact of racially disparate mass incarceration. 

I think it is good for time to be set aside in any serious left talk to address what can and should be done to address the problems being discussed. We are engaged change-seeking activists, not Mandarin-like academics, after all, and we “can’t be neutral on a moving train” (as Howard Zinn said). Without talking about solutions and alternatives and things people can do, much of what we radicals have to say about the world as it is can sound pretty depressing and paralyzing. There’s nothing inherently authoritarian about addressing Lenin’s question of What is to be Done? Speak not only about what you are against but also what you are for, and not just in terms of short-term policy changes but also in terms of big systemic change – what Dr. King called “the real question to be faced,” after all. You don’t have to do this in your formal talk. It can come in the Q&A. But it should come before people walk out of the lecture room or hall. 

Another thing I’ll add is that you’ve got to bring some humor to the occasion. Public political speaking isn’t the comedy club but the issues we leftists talk about our just rife with comic opportunity. The laughable absurdities of the current authoritarian system are endless, after all. Working in some laughter is humanizing and a good way to connect. 

7, From the experiences you have had, what do you think are the similar and different features of student bodies now and when you were in school, or even now as compared to the nineties? How do you explain changes you see among college age young people? What implications, if any, do those differences have for the tasks we face to attain a better world? 

Except for some of the lucky rich kids at the elite schools, students today have much, much less free time for reading and activism than I did when I was in school. They have much higher tuition bills and other expenses and of course they tend now to carry a huge burden of student debt. They are much more likely to be working, commuting, and living at home. They often have less time and energy for subject matters that don’t seem to directly relate to getting a job and paying off their loans. And they are constantly on their iPhones and computers and Facebook and other the Web – very distracted. There are fewer working class kids in college and university today – they can’t afford it anymore (my best and favorite students when I taught American history were from working and lower class backgrounds). There used to be much more in the way of coherent student neighborhoods and sections of campus – something that tended to nurture community and activism. 

It’s about neoliberal capitalism and the New Gilded Age obviously. I guess it’s a mixed bag: less time and space for radical reflection and activism but at the same time more economic oppression to make at least some students open to such reflection and activism, particularly around issues of economic justice. 

I think it would be interesting to teach again at the college/university level in the wake of the Great Recession and Occupy and in light of the deepening ecological catastrophe capitalism is imposing. A properly alienated academic I know tells ME that “Marxism is hot in academia right now.”  I’m not sure what that really means but it’s intriguing. 

8. Much is made of the radical potentials of the internet, social networking, etc. Do you think the internet and social networking, as it has existed and been used, has overall aided or hindered the emergence of lasting, insightful, and committed movements?<!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–><!–[endif]–>

It’s a mixed bag. I have somewhat Luddite tendencies on the Internet but I don’t give into them at the end of the day, obviously since my writings are all over the Web. On one hand it can be very atomizing and deadening and sedentary and narcissistic and vicious and overwhelming (information overload) and distracting and diversionary, even addictive for many. And of course you have all this commercial overlay and niche marketing and corporate exploitation and spying on Facebook and Google and so forth. On the other hand, used properly, the Internet is obviously a very powerful medium for effective political communication and information dissemination across geographic boundaries – something that is very important given the necessity of global organization. I’d have to say it’s a draw – half-good and half-bad – in terms of its overall impact to date. At the same time I’d say that we have no choice but to use the Internet and social networking as part of our activist toolbox. We should fight to keep the Internet and social networking as open to democratic use as possible and work to foster specifically left-democratic forms of Internet communication and social-networking. We cannot afford to be Web Luddites, I’m afraid. 

9. When asked what you are for – what you want for a future better society and world, broadly, how do you answer? 

Well I distinguish between short-term and long-term. Short term I am for a number of reforms that would make the world safer, more decent and democratic under the existing system – things like the Employee Free Choice Act (which would re-legalize union organizing in this county), public financing of elections, Single Payer health insurance, a financial transaction tax, Green jobs public works programs, stronger environmental regulations, an expanded social safety net, and…the list goes on. Longer-term I honestly do not believe that humanity can reasonably hope for a democratic or decent future beyond one more generation (at most) of state capitalism. That means I am for anti-capitalist transformation – transcendence of the predatory and pre-historical nightmare that is the profits system. The rub is that we are now in something of an ecological race against time when it comes to getting past that system. The long-term project of revolution seems like an ever more short-term necessity. “The hour,” to quote Bob Dylan, “is getting late.” 

10. You are a member of IOPS – International Organization for a Participatory Society. Why? What about it caused you to join? What hopes do you have for it?

I think I’ve pretty much said it  While I have warm feelings for other left groups out there, IOPS comes the closest to embodying the different values and necessities I’ve voiced above. 

Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org) is the author of many books, including The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010) and Crashing the Tea Party (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio, Paradigm 2011). He can be reached at paul.street99@gmail.com

A presidential thumbs-down on the pipeline will do significant damage to the corporate carbon-industrial complex’s capacity to set-off this terrible eco-cidal incendiary. That would buy humanity some time to properly address anthropogenic global warming (AGW), which increasingly poses the issue of human extinction. This is the leading issue of or our any time, something that is understood by the tens of thousands who hit the streets on a cold day in Washington this weekend – the largest gathering the country has even seen on the climate issue. A flicker of, well, Hope, resides in the oval office, whose current resident originally campaigned for the White House on a promise to address that problem and who said in his Second Inaugural Address that America must reduce the “dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet” and honor “the overwhelming judgment of science….for the sake of our children and our future.” 

Remarkably enough, the nation’s “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, did not see Sunday’s historic rally as part of “All the News That’s Fit to print” in the first section of its Monday edition. It was a chilling deletion. Here are some of the news topics the Times did see as fit for inclusion – as more relevant than a mass demonstration against increasingly imminent Ecocide – in that section:

* The tech industry’s growing interest in the gambling industry (page 1).

* A car, van, truck and motorbike police pound (humorously called “the car Guantanamo”) in Kabul, Afghanistan (page 1). 

* Irish assistance to an Irish-American neighborhood in Queens (Breezy Point) that was particularly devastated by Hurricane Sandy (page 1).

* The fraud prosecution of a former Israel Foreign Minister.

* Catholics’ confusion about “what to call a retired Pope.”

“In a rational world,” the leading liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued in the fall of 2009, “the looming climate disaster would be our dominant political and policy concern” (emphasid added, NYT, September 27, 2009). 

Krugman’s Monday Times reflection focused on the case for a higher minimum wage. He made a smart and admirable argument. Still, his essay could have been marked for later in the week. Monday would have been a very good time for Krugman to publish a column on the issue that would top our list of worries “in a rational world.” 

The Monday Times did mention Sunday’s historic climate demonstration. The reference came in the paper’s business section, in a story titled “Obama Faces Risks in Pipeline Decision” (NYT, February 18, 2013, B1). The story was placed alongside an article on the Facebook marketing strategies of Universal Studio’s “Fast and Furious” car-racing film series and a report on the rising use of cheaper parts in the manufacture of virtual reality game sets. It under-reported the Sunday protest’s turnout, saying only that “thousands rallied.” Its opening premise held that Obama faces  “a choice between environmental advocates…or causing a deep and perhaps lasting rift with Canada” – as if: (1) the Keystone and climate issues are mainly about green activists, not the harsh material threat posed by AGW and (2) “Canada” is a monolithic entity that unanimously supports tar sands oil extraction and does not contain millions of citizens who are more concerned with the preservation of a livable earth than with the expansion of gross Canadian national petroleum exports and the increase of multinational oil corporations’ super-profits. 

Environmentalists were rendered invisible in the article’s definition of “Canada,” whose spokespersons were presented as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Lorraine Mitchelmore, president of Shell Canada. 

The story’s related concern that “Canada” might “retaliate” against the U.S. if Obama says no to Keystone XL was deceptive and almost amusing given the Canadian government and corporate sector’s deepening incorporation into the economic and imperial orbit of the North American Superpower. 

The Times said nothing about another risk Obama faces: soiling his legacy with a decision that will significantly accelerate the climate catastrophe and help further mark him as a monumental environmental hypocrite. 

By placing their reportage on Sunday’s climate rally in the business section, the Times’ editors suggest that the Keystone pipeline is mainly a corporate and marketing matter, not an issue of central public and political concern for the fate of the species and other living things.    

After this horrid coverage on Monday, it was fitting that Tuesday’s Times published a personal assault on Hansen and the leading environmental activist and Keystone opponent Bill McKibben by the thuggish Times columnist Joe Nocera. 

“Like it or not,” Nocera proclaims, “ fossil fuels are going to remain the world’s dominant energy source for the foreseeable future, and we are far better off getting our oil from Canada than say, Venezuela.” (NYT, Feb. 19, 2013, A23). 

Left-led Venezuela, after all, uses oil proceeds to attack poverty and to foster Latin American resistance to U.S. imperial control, whereas conservative-run Canada is a reliable subordinate partner in trade, investment, neoliberal ideology, and imperial violence. 

Who exactly are “we?” I am aware of more than a few (United States of) Americans – myself included – who prefer to fill up our beaten-up old Japanese cars with Venezuelan petroleum. 

Meanwhile “the foreseeable future” is looking (with all due respect for smart Marxist critics of “catastrophism”) more dystopian than ever, thanks in no small part to the profits system’s inextricably linked addictions to fossil fuels, epic waste, accumulation and growth.    

Paul Street (paul.street99@gmail.com and www.paulstreet.org) is an author and activist in Iowa City, IA.  

Selected Endnotes

Mentioning the “dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet,” Obama said that “for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.” He noted that “the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15” and that “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods — all are now more frequent and more intense.”

“We can choose to believe,” Obama added, “that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it’s too late.” 

Take that, American Petroleum Institute. The President knows that the dire consensus findings of climate science aren’t bogus.

But how excited do people who care about the fate of livable ecology really want to get about such rhetoric in light of the president’s actual climate record? I heard candidate Obama say similar green-sounding things in Iowa in 2007 and 2008 only to watch his presidency green-light expanded offshore oil drilling and almost single-handedly deep-six efforts to restrict global greenhouse emissions at international climate summits in Copenhagen and Durban. Obama has approved and celebrated (in the name of “national energy independence”) the environmentally noxious “homeland” practice of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), whereby the carbon-industrial complex has discovered a deadly new way to waste energy and poison water supplies, and to extract and spew fossil fuels. Listen to the following judgment on the president’s less-than-inspiring climate policy résuméé in the latest issue of the legendarily Obama-worshipping magazine Rolling Stone:

Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change. After promising in 2008 that his presidency would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” President Obama went silent on the most crucial issue of our time. He failed to talk openly with Americans about the risks of continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, failed to put political muscle behind legislation to cap carbon pollution, failed to meaningfully engage in international climate negotiations [that significantly minimizes his terrible role in the failure of the global summits – P.S.], failed to use the power of his office to end the fake “debate’ about” the reality of global warming and failed to prepare Americans – and the world – for life on a rapidly warming planet. It was as if the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced became a political inconvenience for the president once he became elected (emphasis added). [1]

 The president’s inspiring words are one thing; policy deeds are something else altogether. That basic distinction ought to have been driven home once and for all by his first term, a grand tutorial on who really runs the country – a moneyed oligarchy that remains firmly entrenched beneath and beyond the nation’s formally democratic character.

But ok, fine. Let’s say you want to cut Obama some slack and give the nation’s first technically black president a second (or third or fourth or…) chance to be a green president (“green” as in saving the earth, not the color of corporate and Wall Street money) in his second term. He’s the only president we’ve got and, unlike all but a small number of elected Republican officials, he says he agrees with climate science, right? He can’t run for a third term and this is his chance to burnish his “progressive legacy” by (among other things) acting to help save the species (and other living things) from greenhouse gassing…right?

The fact that Obama defeated Mitt Romney last fall means there’s at least a chance of a decent decision. The Republican candidate promised to make signing off on Keystone XL his very first action as president and there’s no reason not to believe he would have acted in accord with that promise…right? 

As it happens, there’s a policy decision staring Obama in the face right now – one that goes close to the heart of the climate problem and “to act before it’s too late.” It received no direct mention in the SOTUA, but it had to be on his mind as tens of thousands of environmentalist protestors prepared gather in Washington to demonstrate around that decision.

I am referring, of course, to whether President Obama is going to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which, “if built, is slated to bring some of the ‘dirtiest’, oil on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast” (Michael T. Klare). How much of this “dirty,” that is tar sands, oil (extracted at great carbon-generating, water-wrecking, and ecology-despoiling expense from landlocked reserves of sand and clay in northwest Canada)? Alberta is home to a trillion barrels of this highly toxic but carbon-rich form of petroleum, equivalent to the conventional oil reserves of any nation except Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. According to leading climate activist and writer Bill McKibben, releasing this vast greenhouse reservoir into the atmosphere in coming years will “run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would bring if not hell, than at least a world with a similar temperature.”[2]

The leading climate scientist and current director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen has been blunt about the consequences of spilling Alberta’s distinctively filthy greenhouse load on Mother Earth. It’s “Game Over for the climate…. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels,” Hansen noted in The New York Times last year, “there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.” No wonder Hansen was perturbed to read Obama telling Rolling Stone that he expected Canada to exploit the oil in its huge tar sands deposits “regardless of what we do.” [3]   

The president who says he wants to honor “the overwhelming judgment of science…for the sake of our children and our future” may have it in his power to defuse this Epic Carbon Bomb. Since the Keystone XL pipeline crosses an international (U.S.-Canada) border, it’s the president alone who makes the final decision on whether the eco-cidal, environmentally exterminist project should proceed. And a negative judgment from the White House may do the trick to kill the corporate assault on Alberta tar sands for the near future, buying us more time to save a livable planet. This is because none of the other methods being considered to bring Alberta’s tar sands oil to the global market appear to be economically or politically viable. They all face steep barriers to profitability that are likely to undercut the massive fixed capital investment required to extract and transport Albert’s dirty oil outside of Canada’s limited market.

Obama may well be wrong if he believes that Canada’s tar sands oil is going into the atmosphere “regardless of what we do” – regardless, that is, in this context, of what he does. Obama’s decision is likely to either save or sink the tar sands industry. His approval would ensure investors “enough return to justify their massive investments. It would also,” Michael Klare notes, “prompt additional investments in tar-sands projects and further production increases by an industry that assumed opposition to future pipelines had been weakened by this victory.” [4]

How will the president decide? As will surprise nobody familiar with my writings on Obama since the summer of 2004, I am less than optimistic about the chances that he will respect the wishes of climate scientists and the protestors outside his gates. For what its worth, some of his post-election rhetoric is less than encouraging. When asked about global warming at his first post-election press conference, for example, the president said that “the American people have been so focused on our economy and jobs and growth that if the message is somehow ‘we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change,’ I don’t think that anybody is going to go for that” (emphasis added).

This was a dreadful, ecologically appalling statement in two key ways. First, Obama used the phrase “simply to address climate change” as if global warming was a minor matter compared to “jobs and growth.” That was a tellingly dismissive way in which to refer to what has become gravest current threat to human existence.

Second, Obama’s comment bought into what Mother Jones editors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery rightly call “the jobs vs. climate action straw man….a false and outdated dichotomy propagated by those with a vested interest in the status quo….”[5] Tackling climate change and other environmental ills in a meaningful way means putting many millions of people to work at all skill levels to design, implement, construct, conduct, and coordinate the essential environmental, climate-friendly  retro-fitting of economy and society: the ecological re-conversion of production, transportation, office space,  homes, agriculture, and public space. [6]

In his SOTUA, Obama said that “The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence. We need to encourage that. That’s why my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new gas and oil permits.”  That sounds like a thumb up to Keystone to me.

It is relevant that Obama made no mention of Keystone in the address. It was a curious deletion in light of the imminence of his decision and the green-sounding rhetoric of his talk – a reflection perhaps of the vast resources the “energy industry” has been pouring into pushing (in the name of national “energy security” and “American jobs”) for the pipeline’s approval.

I could be wrong. I hope I am. I hope that Bill McKibben and his 350 comrades and allies make a loud and significant impact in Washington D.C. this weekend. It is a hopeful sign that Obama’s recently appointed Secretary of State John F. Kerry is a self-described “climate hawk” who says he will be deeply engaged in the State Department’s review of the pipeline.

Still, I will not be surprised if and when Obama does with some delay what Romney pledged to do right away. And I will not be surprised when a rising number of us on the green left are (for better or worse) considering the moral urgency of mass direct action and sabotage in light of a post-democratic political process that long ago sold its soul to the unelected, interrelated, and significantly petro-capitalist dictatorships of money and empire.

Paul Street (paulstree99@yahoo.com) is the author of many books, including The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010), Crashing the Tea Party (co-authored wit Anthony DiMaggio, Paradigm, 2011). His next book (tentatively titled They Rule), a study of ruling class power and its environmental (among other and related) consequences, should be available next summer or fall.

Selected Endnotes

By Paul Street.  First published on ZNet on February 6, 2013.In the final quarter of election year 2012, the northeastern United States was hit by two terrible tragedies linked to the word “Sandy.” One week before the election, tropical super-storm Hurricane Sandy killed 263 people across 7 countries, caused U.S. damage of at least $64 billion, and ravaged New York and New Jersey, providing memorable images of lower Manhattan under water. Five weeks after the election, a deranged young man with an assault weapon massacred 20 children and 6 adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The two terrible events both held global attention and the news cycle for many days. They both elicited shock, horror, sympathy, and offers of assistance around the world. And both were the latest in a series of incidents resulting from a deep underlying problem that deserved an urgent response from policy-makers and the political culture.

Its fury and staying power fueled by climate change, Hurricane Sandy was preceded by numerous recent episodes of extreme weather resulting from anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Examples include the remarkable wildfires, windstorms, tornadoes, heat waves, floods and droughts of 2011 and 2012, the hottest year on record – just a small portion of the wild climatology we’ve been seeing around the planet over many years, as predicted by climate science.

The Sandy Hook slaughter was preceded by horrific gun massacres at Columbine High School (1997), Virginia Tech University (April 2007), Northern Illinois University (February 2008), Tucson, Arizona (the Gabriel Giffords shooting in January 2011), and Aurora, Colorado (the Dark Knight movie shootings of July, 2012).

These mass shootings are only the most grisly and well-known examples of “homeland” death by gunfire in recent decades. Between mid-1968 and the present, more Americans have died inside the U.S. from gun violence than in all the nation’s wars, including the Civil War.[1]  

But this is where the parallels between Hurricane Sandy and the Sandy Hook massacre end. Sandy Hook and what it says about gun violence in America have elicited a rapid, high-profile political response, reaching up to the presidential level and resulting in bold rhetoric and reform proposals from the White House and Congress. The media has channeled widespread public anger over the sorry state of the nation’s gun laws and the power of the nation’s proto-fascistic gun lobby (the National Rifle Association).

Sandy Hook has catalyzed a distinct political moment in which there may be a real chance for the passage of measures to increase public safety. President Barack Obama and his speechwriters have met the moment with eloquent rhetoric matching Obama’s campaign for Mount Rushmore. Whether meaningful protections will be enacted remains to be seen, but a real national debate on the nation’s gun laws and the problem of gun violence has emerged and moved to the front of U.S. politics.

 “Obama’s Biggest Failure”

Things are rather different with Hurricane Sandy and what it ought to tell us about AGW. The deadly “superstorm” has sparked no remotely comparable response on the part of the president or anyone else in power. Yes, Obama’s election night victory speech contained a brief reference to how Americans want their children to grow up in a country “that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” The president’s Second Inaugural Address went further, saying that “We, the people…will respond to the threat of climate change” to protect “our children and future generations” from “the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.”

But so what? Big deal. The president made no statements of specific political or policy intent in relation to AGW, the leading issue of the millennium. And why should anyone be impressed by his green-sounding words in light of his deeds as president so far – deeds that stand in cold defiance of his lofty, green-sounding 2007 and 2008 campaign rhetoric? Here is a reasonable judgment on Obama’s terrible and hypocritical climate record to date in the latest issue of Rolling Stone: 

“Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change. After promising in 2008 that his presidency would be ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,’ President Obama went silent on the most crucial issue of our time. He failed to talk openly with Americans about the risks of continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, failed to put political muscle behind legislation to cap carbon pollution, failed to meaningfully engage in international climate negotiations, failed to use the power of his office to end the fake ‘debate’ about the reality of global warming and failed to prepare Americans – and the world – for life on a rapidly warming planet. It was as if the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced became a political inconvenience for the president once he became elected.” [2] 

If anything, Rolling Stone understates Obama’s first-term shabbiness on climate change. The president has not merely “failed to meaningfully engage in international climate negotiations.” He has actively undermined those negotiations, leading some participants to observe that more progress would have occurred without U.S. participation. Along the way, the president has signed off on escalated offshore oil drilling and the ecologically disastrous practice of domestic hydraulic fracturing. During his second nationally televised presidential election debate with Mitt Romney, the president tussled with his Republican opponent over who would burn more of the nation’s fossil fuels in the name of national energy independence. The two contenders managed to make no references whatsoever to global warming or the environment in a debate that spent a remarkable 12 minutes on energy policy.

Obama set the stage for this horrific record early in first administration. When asked by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about the climate problems presented by fossil fuels (including Canadian tar sands oil, shale oil and gas, and goal) he responded with the standard and deadly western capitalist fantasy that “this can be solved with technology.”[3] 

“….Simply to Address Climate Change”

Will things change for the better in “Ba-frack” Obama’s s second term? The president’s vaguely inspiring words are one thing; concrete policy deeds are something else altogether. While that basic distinction ought to have driven home once and for all by his first term, which was a great tutorial on who really runs the country – the nation’s unelected dictatorship of corporate and financial money – beneath and beyond the fake-populist rhetoric of corporate-captive major party politicians. Still, many on the liberal “left” can’t seem to resist the instinct to fawn over “the bold progressive direction” supposedly signaled by the president’s Second Inaugural Address.

Even just at the rhetoric level, however, Obama’s first post-election press conference gave a depressing sign that his first term climate fiasco will continue. When asked about global warming, the president said that “the American people have been so focused on our economy and jobs and growth that if the message is somehow ‘we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change,’ I don’t think that anybody is going to go for that” (emphasis added).

This was a dreadful, ecologically appalling statement in two key ways. First, Obama used the phrase “simply to address climate change” as if global warming was a minor matter compared to “jobs and growth.” That was a tellingly dismissive way in which to refer to what has become gravest current threat to human existence and “the number 1 issue of our or any time” (philosopher John Sanbonmatsu). A protest placard common outside the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit – a conference that Obama almost singlehandedly destroyed[4] – offers a fit rejoinder: “THERE’S NO ECONOMY ON A DEAD PLANET.”

Second, Obama’s comment bought into what Mother Jones editors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery rightly call “the jobs vs. climate action straw man….a false and outdated dichotomy propagated by those with a vested interest in the status quo….”[5] Tackling climate change and other environmental ills in a meaningful way means putting many millions of people to work at all skill levels to design, implement, construct, conduct, and coordinate the essential environmental, climate-friendly  retro-fitting of economy and society: the ecological re-conversion of production, transportation, office space,  homes, agriculture, and public space. [6] 

“All You Climate Change People”

Obama’s horrible press conference remark takes me back to a similarly garbled and ecology-liquidating statement by CNN’s Candy Crowley after the second Obama-Romney debate, which Crowley moderated without calling on an audience member who was ready and desperate to ask the candidates about their positions on global warming. “Climate change,” Crowley said, “I had that question, all you climate change people; we just, you know again, we knew the economy was still the main thing so you knew you kind of wanted to go with the economy.”   

By “you climate change people,” Crowley was presumably referring to the 160,000 Americans who signed petitions begging her and/or the first presidential debate moderator (the doddering ex-Marine Jim Lehrer) to ask the next U.S. president about the single most critical problem facing humanity.

When Google and the Commission on Presidential Debates asked voters to express their views on what questions should be asked, the most popular query was “what action will you take to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions?”  

It was all to no avail. The 2012 presidential election was the first one since 1980 in which the entire series of presidential and vice-presidential debates did not include a single direct question about climate change or environmental protection more broadly. 

Superstorm Cassandra at Five to Midnight

Hurricane Sandy tried its best to bring the issue to bear on the election. She had some success. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg cited the superstorm while endorsing Obama on the grounds that the president acknowledged the existence of AGW and Romney did not. Sandy may have encouraged some independents to select Obama on those grounds.

Still, the epic hurricane might have been better named “Cassandra” in terms of its lasting political impact. Obama’s “liberal” political capital will be invested first in gun control and then on immigration. Climate change remains a distant priority. The likelihood that it will emerge as a genuine concern is reduced by the continuing and recently deepened stagnation of American capitalism, something that promises to elevate “jobs,” “the economy” and “growth” over environmental concerns in the short-term election cycle time-frames that rule the attention spans of American politicians. It was futile, perhaps, to hope that Sandy – its remarkable fury driven by human-warmed ocean waters – would do much to break through the elite consensus of climate silence. The record-setting heat, droughts, and forest and grass fires of 2012 didn’t do the trick, so how was yet another example of Nature’s revenge going to succeed?

The irony behind the contrast between the attention and urgency granted gun violence after Sandy Hook and the continuing marginalization of AGW after Sandy is that the climate problem poses by far and away the gravest threat to humanity (and to thousands of other species as well). The danger is not greater simply than gun violence. It’s more extreme than the continuing dire threat posed by nuclear weapons. It’s not for nothing that the leading environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben calls human-generated climate change “the biggest thing that’s ever happened in history.”

American gun violence is a hideous and ongoing calamity. But it is thanks mainly to the dramatically escalating climate catastrophe (it appears that summer Arctic ice will disappear by 2020, not 2050 as previously estimated), not guns and not even nuclear proliferation, that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently pushed its annual positioning of humanity’s doomsday clock back to just 5 minutes short of midnight.[7] 

“It’s Invisible”

Why this ironic disparity in concern, coverage, and action between gun violence and AGW? Part of the problem was suggested recently by Yale University geographer Anthony Leiserowitz on the Public Broadcasting System’s Bill Moyers’ Journal. By Leiserowtiz’s reckoning, it would be difficult to design a threat that is a worse fit than climate change for human beings’ underlying physiological and psychological capacity to sense danger. As he explained to Moyers:

“…we are exquisitely attuned to what’s happening in our immediate environment and what we can see around us and what literally touches us physically. If you’re walking through the woods and you hear the crack of a stick behind you, your body immediately goes into a fear response, a fight or flight response. Climate change isn’t that kind of problem. It’s not an immediate, visceral threat.”

“…this very day we can look out the window and there’s CO2, carbon dioxide, pouring out of tailpipes, pouring out of buildings, pouring out of smokestacks. And yet we can’t see it; it’s invisible.”

“The fundamental causes of this global problem are invisible to us. And likewise the impacts are largely invisible to us as well unless you know where to look….And it’s a problem that is seemingly faceless. It’s not like terrorists…who are coming after us trying to kill us and challenge our fundamental values….” [8]

Leiserowitz could have left al Qaeda out of it and said that climate change isn’t experienced like a deeply disturbed young white American male entering an elementary school or a university lecture hall or a high school cafeteria or a shopping mall or a movie theater with an assault rife, shooting off rounds of ammunition that crack and thud into chairs, walls, and human bone and tissue. Sandy Hook and other recent gun massacres epitomize the “immediate, visceral” and “visible” sort of dangers to which our biochemistry is finely adjusted. 

“Very Happy” Exterminists and Their System

And yet numerous visible signs of AGW are seen and felt, often in very concrete and immediate ways: the windstorms and wildfires, the crushing heat, the more frequent and intense tornadoes and hurricanes, the floods and storm-surges and other not-so “natural” that can and do destroy homes, communities, and lives in rather direct ways. Millions of Americans would experience AGW as a terrible and tangible threat to their safety – and that of the their children – and maybe even as “a challenge to our fundamental values” if the nation’s agenda-setting and opinion- and feeling-shaping corporate media operatives and politicians (Candy Crowley and Barack Obama are just two among many) behaved in accord with the elementary requirements of public service by making the salvation of livable ecology the nation’s top priority. This would involve regularly making the Greenhouse Gas and weather connections understood by modern Earth science explicit, linking immediate dangers to the anthropogenic shrinking of rain forests, the mass die-offs of species, the accelerated passing of the world’s largest trees, the melting of tundra and permafrost, and the gurgling of methane across the vanishing Great North. It would involve connecting Americans’ fate with that of other people around the world, something far more distinctly global than the nationally specific problem of American gun violence.

For starters, it would require covering the climate and the environment, to which U.S. media gives miniscule attention at best. Gun violence, by sharp contrast, is a regularly nightly news staple.

That the political and media class doesn’t choose the priorities and make the connections required is a reflection all of the vast material, political, and propagandistic power of the corporate carbon-industrial complex (CCIC) and of the basic reality that the growth-addicted U.S. and global profits system runs on oil, gas, coal, and methane-spewing animal agriculture.[9] It’s one thing for that system’s owners and managers to see some assault weapons, magazine clips, and gun shows taken down and come off the streets. The system doesn’t quite run on private assault weapons and the domestic gun market.

It’s quite another thing for the unelected dictatorship to permit a serious political and policy response to the deadly carbon addiction that fuels its wealth. As a result, it invests heavily to prevent the populace from getting it that Exxon-Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, the frackers and tar-sands extractors, the coal industry, and the rest of the vast CCIC are socio-pathological mass killers – highly organized and unimaginably wealthy exterminists who are steadily greenhouse-gassing humanity and other species into extinction. Thus, as Noam Chomsky told Occupy Boston in the fall of 2011, “large-scale propaganda operations, openly announced by the business community, seek to convince the public that climate change is all a liberal hoax. Why pay attention to these scientists?” [10] Media and political elites comply, selling the fake “debate” over global warming and consigning those who would rescue a livable Earth to a silly little corner for “you climate change people.”  The president does his best to pacify those with realistic fears of eco-cide with progressive-sounding Stockholm Syndrome rhetoric that masks persistent lethal petro-capitalist reality.

The money behind the disinformation campaign hasn’t come from just any old businesses, of course. As Leiserowitz notes, the campaign is “driven by fossil fuel company interests who are the world’s most profitable companies.” Those interests are “very happy, thank you very much,” Leiserowtiz notes “with the status quo.”[11] 

“Very happy,” that is, with the growing reality of environmental collapse on many fronts and most particularly catastrophic climate change resulting from excessive human generated carbon emissions.[12] According to research released in the spring of 2012 by the science journal Nature, humanity is now facing an imminent threat of extinction – a threat caused by its reckless exploitation of the natural environment. The report reveals that our planet’s biosphere is steadily and ever more rapidly approaching a “tipping point,” meaning that all of the planet’s ecosystems are nearing sudden and irreversible change that will not be conducive to human life. ”The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including… fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations,” wrote lead author Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California-Berkeley. “My colleagues who study climate-induced changes through the Earth’s history are more than pretty worried,” co-researcher Arne Mooers, a professor of biodiversity at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, said in a statement. “In fact, some are terrified.”[13]

Gun violence is a terrible and despicable problem, an American scandal that merits decisive public intervention on numerous levels. But let’s be clear about something here. The human and multi-species death count promised by the sociopaths in the CCIC and their many elite allies and enablers in the political and media Establishment is shaping up to make every other atrocity in the human past seem like child’s play. 

They Live, We Die

The next time you are startled by the crack of a stick behind you in the woods or by a car backfiring on the street, try not to worry about someone coming at you with a gun. Imagine instead an oil company CEO sitting around with his favorite lobbyists plotting the final destruction of life on Earth. Think of John Carpenter’s classic dystopian science fiction horror film They Live (1988)[14] and imagine the creepy Koch brothers (oil and energy capitalists above all) and their carbon-capitalist brethren as evil alien creatures running and ruining the planet for no other purposes than endless selfish gain. The institutional and societal reality of AGW behind is more complex than that, of course, but this would be a good starting point for many of us as we struggle to rewire our hearts and minds to meet the greatest threat of our or any human time.

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com and www.paulstreet.org) is the author of many books, including The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real of Power (2010) and Crashing the Tea Party (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio, 2011). He is currently finishing his next volume, to be released later this year: THEY RULE:  “The 1%” and the Profits System v. Democracy and the Future.