Suicide Squad

by Stephen Fleischman

It’s out in the open now. They can’t work us over anymore. We know who they are.

Our own oligarchy is out to bring this country down. Global capitalism, feel-ing the pulse of socialism, is fighting to make the world safe for corporate hegemony—and corporate America is leading the pack.

It began with the destruction of our manufacturing base; off-shoring plants, outsourcing jobs to the lowest wage areas—a race to the bottom.

Will we let them continue the process? Who do we have to stop?

–the military-industrial complex that President Ike Eisenhower warned us about way back in the 20th Century. You can add the mainstream media complex to that…

–and the mighty corporate insurance and pharmaceutical industry that’s been keeping proper health care from the American people for over sixty years. When they hear the words “single payer”, they reach for their guns.

–and there is the rest of corporate America and its rabble of sycophants, the military contractors and their mercenaries to keep the wars going, the hordes of lobbyists, the propagandists that pervade our institutions, all of academia from grade schools to universities, radio, television, internet, print and new media.

Leading this parade is the custom made front man—POTUS—the President of the United States. It was originally conceived to be a front woman, Hil-lary Clinton. But along came a Chicagoan, Barack Obama, with a liberal and wishful thinker following, promising to end the wars and give the people single payer health care.

So the power structure dumped Hillary and gave the prize to Obama. (Oh, you thought the election had something to do with it?)

Obama fit the image of the POTUS they wanted, from his charm to the color of his skin —the Pied Piper of the South Side—his subservience guaranteed by the two major pillars of the oligarchy.

Hillary, of course, was pissed but she wasn’t going to break ranks. She gracefully accepted the position of Secretary of State.

The oligarchy’s strategy, the Ayn Rand sagacity of the 20th Century—attack “big” government, return to laissez-faire capitalism.

It goes with monopoly and war. One or two or more wars must be kept go-ing for the economy’s sake. Empire building is part of this game. Our empire is extensive.

“Obama is commander-in-chief of an unprecedented network of military bases that is still expanding,” says Catherine Lutz in “The New Statesman” (7/30/09). She has made the count. “The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories. The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (£89bn). The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over.”

Obama continues the surge of US troops into Afghanistan. Apparently, he hasn’t heard yet that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Hasn’t he read Kipling?

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

I guess Obama has never kippled.

He continues to spread the beneficence of America into what is now called Af-Pak, killing civilians indiscriminately in Pakistan with his new toy, the remote controlled drone.

While all this is going on, we are also leading this country and the world into an economic predicament. Employment is flopping, businesses are flipping and home mortgages failing.

Wall Street is being led by the same people who brought it to the ragged edge of disaster. Two of them, Gaithner and Summers, are rewarded by Obama, the former, made Secretary of the Treasury, the latter, top economic advisor to the President.

Legislation for the people is languishing in Congress.

“We have a system today that works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn’t always work well for you,” President Obama admitted in a speech to a town hall meeting in Raleigh, NC, last week, “what we will have when we pass these reforms, are health insurance consumer protections to make sure that those who have insurance are treated fairly and insurance companies are held accountable.”

What he hasn’t insisted on is the “public option” in the legislative package. Is he worried he won’t have the insurance industry’s bundle when he runs for re-election in a few years?

Corporate power stands in the way–antithesis of democracy. Corporate groups are joined together into a single governing body in which the different groups are mandated to negotiate with each other to establish policies in the interest of the multiple groups. This is defined by Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, as Corporatism.

Now that we know what is happening and who the scoundrels are, what are we going to do about it?

Yes, Say the Word

by Stephen Fleischman

Single Payer National Health Insurance.  Horrors! We can’t have that! That’s Socialism!

Yes, say the word, Socialism!

We can say it and we can have it—at least a little bit of it; even in a capitalist country. A little government for the people—not the corporations—might be a good thing.

Insurance is defined as a promise of compensation for future losses in exchange for a periodic payment. We’ve been sold every kind there is—life insurance, fire insurance, auto insurance, health insurance…

Health doesn’t belong in that group. You can’t put a price on a person’s health. Health care is a right, like education, and not a privilege.

Insurance Companies are in business for profit. Health insurance companies are in business to make a profit on your health. There should be a law against that!

The health insurance companies, in this country, have made so many billions of dollars on peoples’ health, have created so powerful a lobby, bought up so many legislators, it’s going to be a mammoth job to get rid of them, but that’s what we have to do. Health insurance companies are useless and unnecessary. They’re just blood suckers.

Meanwhile their minions, and that includes President Barack Obama, are trying to put on a show. There’s a lot of palaver about health care “reform”.  “Cut health care costs” is the mantra. Have the American people fallen to the level where they will believe that drivel?

It’s a red herring. Billions can be saved by getting rid of the health insurance companies. It can be done with the stroke of a pen. But that’s the chippie. The purpose of the desperate obfuscation is to save the health insurance industry’s sacred profits.

Going in the wrong direction, Obama is gunning for cuts in Medicare and Medicaid? Why pick on the old and the poor, for God’s sake!

To use an aphorism of your professed role model, Abraham Lincoln, you’re trying to fool all of the people all of the time.

Why do the minions of the health insurance companies cringe when they hear the term “single payer”? Because they know it means real universal health care, the kind civilized, industrial nations, around the world, offer to their citizens.

The health insurance companies (we’ll call them bloodsuckers) won’t allow the term “single payer” or the term “public option” to be used in the so-called debate that’s going on now in the halls of Congress.

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat from Montana, is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, one of the committees whose job it is to craft some legislation performing the miracle of “health care reform”. Recently, in the course of one of these debates, he threw some advocates of the single payer system out of his office. And furthermore, they were arrested! And they happened to be some prominent people in the health care field.

Psychiatrist Carol Paris, one of “the Baucus 13” who got arrested, told The Billings (Montana) Gazette, “The next 60 days are critical; we need to keep the heat on Sen. Baucus (and Congress and the president).”

In an interview with The Gazette, Paris said she used to believe that the private health insurance market could be reformed to improve health care, and she spent several years lobbying for it.

“After a few years, I came to the conclusion that it was just a phenomenal waste of time,” she said. “At that point, I just said, there has to be a better place for me to put my time and energy.”

Paris is now a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, whose 16,000 members are pushing for a national, publicly funded insurance plan that would replace private health insurance.

When she joined PNHP, to push for a single-payer system, Paris and other members found themselves basically ignored by Congress. They felt they had to do something dramatic to gain attention.

The Billing Gazette reports that they deliberately planned to protest – and get arrested – at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on health reform, chaired by Baucus.

Paris and her colleagues showed up the morning of May 5, spread themselves around in the gallery audience and, one by one, interrupted Baucus as he started the meeting.

“I interrupt this so-called public hearing to bring you the following unpaid political announcement: Put single-payer on the table,” Paris said before she was arrested. “My name is Dr. Carol Paris, and I approved this message.”

Capitol police arrested the protesters, who have been charged with disrupting Congress.

Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” reports that Senator Baucus has received more campaign money from health and insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress. “In the past six years, nearly one-fourth of every dime raised by Baucus and his political-action committee has come from groups and individuals associated with drug companies.

Dr. Paris said her experience in private practice has convinced her that true reform can happen only if private health insurance is replaced with national, public insurance for all.

“No longer would physicians’ staff have to spend hours dealing with multiple insurers on billing, and no longer would patients have to worry about which doctor they can go to,” she said. “You can go to any doctor of their choice. It’s in the private insurance industry where choice is restricted.”

Dr. Paris says she hears “over and over and over again” how people are frustrated by the current system, and that as soon as they understand how single-payer would work, they usually support it.

“I think that the only thing that keeps this from happening is the lack of political will by the president and our Congress,”

So, yes, say the word.

A little bit of Socialism, anyone?

Where Were You When Journalism Died?

by Stephen Fleischman

The death of Walter Cronkite is an appropriate time to reflect on what’s happened to journalism in America.

Walter and I came to CBS around the same time, in the early 1950s. Sig Mickelson, head of the CBS News and Public Affairs division, at the time, brought Walter in to anchor the first television coverage of a presidential election convention in 1952 and incidentally coined the term “anchorman”.

Irving Gitlin, who ran the Public Affairs section, under Mickelson, brought me in to produce documentaries. In most cases, network correspondents came out of print journalism, television news producers out of film docu-mentaries. Fred Friendly, who started the controversial program “See It Now” in 1951, came out of radio and always thought of television as radio with pictures, and admitted it.

Cronkite embodied the spirit of television journalism. In the 1960s and 70s, there was still some leeway for experimentation. I produced a number of news documentaries with Walter as host and narrator during that period.

In those days, the networks were still mostly independently owned—they had not yet been conglomerated.

William S. Paley, a cigar-maker in Philadelphia created the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) from a small radio network he bought in order to advertise his cigars.

By 1981, when Walter Cronkite handed over the CBS anchor desk to Dan Rather, the process of mergers and acquisitions was well under way.

Television networks were created in order to provide programming to affili-ate local stations. The cost of producing the entertainment or news programs was financed through advertising; so commercial operations got into the game from the very beginning. Profits were shared between the network and their affiliated stations.

In the beginning, each network was limited to owning and operating only five local stations, (called the o&os), usually in the major markets, but they serviced many affiliates.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an independent US gov-ernment agency, established by the Communications Act of 1934, was charged with regulating interstate and international communications by ra-dio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC makes and is supposed to enforce the rules.

Rule #1—the Fairness Doctrine. In news and public affairs programming, stations must present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that is “honest, equitable and balanced” in the Commission’s view or they could be subject to losing their broadcast license.

I haven’t heard of a case where a station lost its license for this reason, but I guess there must be one. However, in 1987, the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine. Oh, well, I guess it didn’t matter.

With the coming of color and the cable news networks, television became even more marinated in commercialism than it was when there were only three commercial networks.

As early as 1961, Newton Minnow, then-head of the FCC made his famous “vaste wasteland” speech before the National Association of Broadcasters convention. Minnow gave the broadcasters unshirted hell for not doing more to serve the public interest.

But that message went in one ear and out the other.

As time went on, the FCC kept loosening the reins, allowing the networks more and more latitude, not only in accumulating more and more o&os, but in deregulating mergers and acquisitions as well.

Today, the mainstream media is in a sorry state. Six corporate media giants with a stranglehold on information, control most of what we see, hear, and read. The five largest are AOL Time-Warner; the Walt Disney Company that now owns the ABC Television Network; Bertelsmann, a German firm with more than $15 billion in media assets; Sumner Redstone’s Viacom that owns CBS; Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation that controls and runs Fox News on TV and the New York Post on paper and all the news they fix to print.

In addition, they all have interests in major movie studios, other TV chan-nels and networks, cable companies, most of the music companies, book publishing, retail stores, amusement parks, video games, and merchandising and on and on.

Such a concentration of media power in so few hands violates every known theory of a free market place of ideas that is the essence of democracy.

“While television is supposed to be free,” said Walter Lippmann, prominent journalist, in 1959, “it has, in fact, become the creature, the servant and in-deed the prostitute of merchandising.”

Despite his distain for commercial television, Lippmann also exhibited his distain for the intelligence of the American public. He didn’t think they were smart enough to understand complex political issues. The public needed journalists to filter the news for them; elites to interpret what policy-makers and politicians were doing, something called “manufacturing consent” as de-fined by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book by that name, subtitled “The Political Economy of the Mass Media”.

In their view, the media serves and propagandizes for “powerful societal in-terests” that controls and finances them. These interests have important agendas that they want to advance and they have the means with which to do it. It is not accomplished by crude intervention but by the “selection of right-thinking personnel, by editors and working journalists who internalize the priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.”

Reporters working in the field call it “Do-It-Yourself Censorship”. You have to know just how far you can push the envelope or you won’t be working in the field very long.

The big change in television came when news became a profit center. With the collapse of the Fairness Doctrine and the laxity of the FCC, the News Departments at the Networks no longer felt they had to perform a public service. “Earn your own way, Buddy. Get a sponsor. Show a profit.” News shows started running commercials.

This was the new media world Walter Cronkite saw coming. He didn’t like it, either.

Good-bye, Walter.

Good night and good luck, as Ed Murrow would say.

And that’s the way it is.

Finger in the Dike

by Stephen Fleischman

Why doesn’t Barack Obama just put his finger in the dike, as the little Dutch boy did in Holland, to save the dike from crashing and flooding the countryside?

President Obama has a stimulus package. He could shove that in the dike. There’s been a lot of talk about stimulus packages lately but I haven’t heard the words “single payer” even once. Nor have I heard the words, “Employee Free Choice Act” being bandied about.

These are two options one would think would be at the top of Obama’s list to stimulate the economy. There are others, too, like “repeal Taft Hartley”.

I thought the mission here was to create jobs. Obama has been talking about creating four million of ‘em in the next two years. Lots of luck! Especially if he is trying to do it without lifting the burden on employers of supplying health care to their workers—or of not actively supporting the rebuilding of the union movement in this country by encouraging collective bargaining, enforcing the Wagner Act and passing Employee Free Choice.

You can’t talk about jobs without talking about labor unions. Labor unions protect jobs and are important to job holders because that’s the way higher wages are won. And higher wages stimulate the economy because that’s the way working families get some purchasing power, some money in their hands so they can buy the stuff that they make.

A good capitalist should know how capitalism works. Just as he has to make sure he has the raw materials to make his product, he has to make sure he has the labor power on hand, no matter how efficient and hi-tech his plant may be. He has to make sure his workers get paid enough to reproduce themselves or he’ll have no workers. He also needs them because that’s where his profit comes from, the surplus value created by workers. That’s the way the system works, Brother. Get used to it, because you’re going to hear a lot more about that as the depression deepens. What depression? The one we’re in now.

President Obama must have had a very embarrassing moment the other day when Tom Daschle fell out from under him as his Secretary of Health and Human Services—the day the lead editorial in the New York Times revealed that Mr. Daschle had failed to pay over $128,000 in taxes because his benefactor had neglected to give him a 1099 form.

The editorial also revealed that Mr. Daschle “cashed in on his political savvy and influence to earn $5 million in recent years”, two million of that from a law and lobbying firm, $2 million from a private equity firm, and “hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches to interest groups, including those representing health insurance plans, medical equipment distributors and pharmacy boards. Although Mr. Daschle was not a registered lobbyist, he offered policy advice to the UnitedHealth Group, a huge insurance conglomerate. He was also a trustee of the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.”

If there was a heavy odor of conflict-of-interest surrounding the would-be Secretary of Health and Human Services, President Barack Obama apparently wasn’t able to sniff it out—or perhaps he had a problem of his own in this area since he was the recipient of $2.2 million contribution from the health insurance industry during his election campaign.

Mr. Daschle took the advice of the New York Times and withdrew his name.

The stimulus bill didn’t receive a single Republican vote in the House. The Republicans wanted tax cuts, not a knee-jerk Democratic tax-and-spend bill. President Obama tried to convince the Republicans that stimulus meant spend. That was the point. You stimulate by spending. Don’t know if that got through or not.

His sober assessment that this financial crisis could turn into a catastrophe didn’t faze the Republicans. They’re back in the hen-house now picking away. I would bet that when they’re finished there won’t be a corn kernel or an earmark left in the bill. Maybe Obama just doesn’t know how to handle Republicans.

There is not a kid in all of the Netherlands who doesn’t know the story of the little Dutch boy who stuck his finger in the dike and saved the country. That little boy represents the spirit of the whole country.

Not a leak can show itself anywhere either in its politics, honor, or public safety, that a million fingers are not ready to stop it, at any cost.

Maybe we can all take a lesson from that.

The Ghost of Times Past

by Stephen Fleischman

A spectre is haunting America—the spectre of Taft-Hartley.

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, otherwise known as The Labor-Management Relations Act, became law in the Truman Administration after World War II, restricting the power of labor unions and clobbering the working class.

During the war, labor had won many victories, achieving higher wages, better working conditions, health benefits and pension plans. Even women were working in defense industries. Remember “Rosie the riveter”?

A real “labor movement” was built in the United States, with the strengthening of the AFL and the creation of the CIO. It contributed to the broadening of the middle class. The workers were winning a round in the class struggle.

Labor’s standing was uplifted a decade earlier, in the depth of The Great Depression, when a Senator from New York ushered a bill through Congress that became known as the Wagner Act, officially the National Labor Relations Act, and created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to act on labor matters.

The Act protected the rights of workers in the private sector, establishing the legality to organize labor unions, to engage in collective bargaining, and to take part in strikes and other forms of concerted activities in support of their demands. It was the best thing that had happened to labor in a long time, tending to level the playing field and allowing for a more equitable distribution of wealth. Workers gained the purchasing power with which to buy the products they produced. It kept the economy afloat.

The NLRB was given the power to investigate and decide on charges of unfair labor practices and to conduct elections in which workers would have the opportunity to decide whether they wanted to be represented by a union. The government was on the side of the people, for a change.

Then, Taft-Hartley hit—a McCarthy period bill sponsored by Republican right-wingers, Senator Robert Taft and Rep. Fred Hartley. Taft-Hartley was designed to put labor back in its hole. It was enacted by Congress, overriding President Truman’s veto. Labor leaders called it the “slave-labor bill”. It pulled the teeth and tore the claws out of the Wagner Act.

Corporate power went on a crusade to crush the organized labor movement in this country. Taft-Hartley was the weapon.

According to the Wall Street Journal they succeeded nicely, “In the US, just 7.5% of private-sector workers are union members.” (8-22-08 A11) Now, the economy is down in the hole with the work force.

Instead of building on our industrial and manufacturing base, our greedy and grave-digging capitalists have off-shored their plants and out-sourced our jobs to places where labor costs are lowest; where profits are the only thing that matters. A race to the bottom. We are now importing the products our own workers should be producing.

If you didn’t know we’ve been in a recession for over a year, you haven’t been paying attention. The economic collapse facing this country is spreading world-wide.

“We are experiencing an unprecedented economic crisis that has to be dealt with and dealt with rapidly,” Obama told reporters on Friday (1-23-09) as he met with lawmakers at the White House. He’s trying to get a stimulus package of around $825 billion out of Congress by mid-February. He thinks he can rescue the economy by throwing money at it. The Republicans, of course, want tax cuts.

The first thing Obama should do is get Congress to repeal Taft-Hartley and it wouldn’t cost him a dime. If he could help revive the union movement he might get some higher wages in the hands of the working class and create some purchasing power.

The second thing he should do is get the Employee Free Choice Act through Congress. Under the Act, the NLRB would recognize a union’s role as an official bargaining agent if a majority of employees authorized representation via a card check (signing a card stipulating their preference), without requiring the cumbersome secret ballot election that has cracked many a union when the employer has purposely tied it up in bureaucratic red tape.

The Employee Free Choice bill got through the House in 2007 and had majority support in the Senate, but was never voted on due to a Republican-led filibuster. President Obama has expressed his support of the measure.

The third thing President Obama should do is make “close shop” and “union shop” mandatory for all infrastructure projects financed by the current stimulus package. Encourage collective bargaining and strengthen the unions. That’s been a long-standing tradition on government financed jobs.

The fourth thing the President should do is to make bread and milk free to all families with children living below the poverty line.

It would show that the President cares about people.

What he does with the rest of the 825 Billion dollar stimulus package may help the economy in the short term.

Foreign Entanglements

by Stephen Fleischman

In this season of farewell addresses and inaugurals, it would be a good time to remember the famous farewell address of George Washington.

Although the advice Washington gave to the fledging nation was “beware of foreign entanglements”, he did not used those particular four words in his farewell address. This may be a shock to many who keep quoting him mistakenly.

But there is no doubt about what he meant.

“The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest,” said George.

Well, it seems by George Washington’s definition, the United States, today, is a slave nation. We have an “habitual hatred” of Iran and an “habitual fondness” for Israel. Couldn’t be clearer.

George went on to say, “A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”

Did he mean Israel and the United States? Of course not. Israel didn’t exist then. But maybe old George was prescient? Sounds to me like he’s describing what’s been happening in Gaza the last three weeks.

We certainly have been facilitating Israel’s massacre of the people of Gaza by supplying much of the weaponry they have been using and we’ve been helping them out at the United Nations Security Council.

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can pick up a phone and call George W. Bush, and tell him how to vote on a UN resolution, you know this country is still a slave state. Olmert did so order Bush how to vote on a cease-fire resolution on Gaza. Bush obeyed and told Condoleezza Rice, his Secretary of State, to abstain from voting on the very resolution that she helped draft. Now that’s going beyond Chutzpah!

George Washington, in his farewell address, goes on to talk about politicians, those “deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favored nation.” It gives them, he says, “the facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity… a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption or infatuation.”

Was he talking about the Bush Administration or the neo-cons at the Pentagon?

George continues his farewell address with some more advice for us. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.”

How about military connection? George doesn’t say much about that. I would say it is an “entanglement”.

It is estimated that we have about 751 military bases in about 130 countries, not counting those we have in the two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, where presumptive wars rage. No one can quite precisely pin down who the enemy is or tell us what “victory” would consist of but that doesn’t seem to matter as American soldiers continue to die (over 4000, now) and taxpayer dollars flood out at the rate of about $12 billion a month. When asked what the reason for it is, the government should tell us the truth—profits.

War criminals Dick Cheney and George Bush seem to be about to fly the coop scot-free, but they have their albatrosses around their necks and they never know when the occasion might arise when they will come up and bite them.

Perhaps President-Elect Barack Obama needs a strong perfected warning concerning his aggravated criminal liability for any murders committed either by US military forces or by client states after he assumes office on January 20th.

By some counts, Obama is already a war criminal by vice of his actions in the Senate supporting US aggression against Afghanistan and funding for the occupation of Iraq, to mention two. Unless Obama radically changes course on a dime, there will be a qualitative moment, probably on Tuesday the way things are going now, when the first victim is wantonly slain by US forces a moment after he becomes Commander in Chief. The mantle of war criminal will come fluttering down upon his shoulders as he joins his predecessors waiting for the albatross to bite.

The fact that Obama has surrounded himself with such notorious war-mongers as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel, and has kept on Bush’s Secretary of War, Robert Gates, shows the overwhelming probability that he will fecklessly disregard any lawful warning, however cogent.

A final piece of advice; perhaps meant for an Obama obeisant to Israel by a prescient George Washington:

“There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.”

CARD CHECK

by Stephen Fleischman

Note to the new prez: a stimulus package won’t do you a damn bit of good unless you can create a surge of purchasing power that will raise spending to lofty heights.

Note to the new working class: demography and immigration have now made you the vanguard; Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, Pakistanis, Middle Easterners, Africans, and others who have migrated to the United States to partake in the American dream. The Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Slavs and other middle Europeans have moved up the ladder to fresher fields.

The former union leaders are gone, too; the Gene Debs’, the David Dubinskys, the Sidney Hillmans, The Walter Reuthers , the John L Lewis’, all dim memories.

Today, you are fighting new battles for a fundamental idea—collective bargaining.

The Wagner Act, otherwise known as The National Labor Relations Act was passed during the Roosevelt Administration in 1935. It established a Federal law to protect the rights of workers in the private sector to organize unions, to engage in, and encourage, collective bargaining for labor, permit strikes and other forms of concerted activity in support of their demands. The corporate oligarchy, or “economic royalists” as Franklin Roosevelt called them, fought it, tooth and nail, all the way.

The Act worked well for about 50 of its 75 years. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States, founded by Samuel Gompers in Columbus, Ohio in 1886. The AFL consisted (and still consists) mainly of craft unions.

John L. Lewis, former head of the United Mine Workers, saw industrialism in the US expanding in the first half of the 20th Century. He saw the need for organizing workers in mass production industries. He formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), encompassing steel workers, mine, mill and smelter workers, auto workers, electrical and communication workers, and so many others all open to African Americans and other minorities.

Both federations grew rapidly during the Great Depression. By 1955, they merged, forming the new entity known as the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), as we know it today.

A strong labor movement was welded in the United States that lasted through the 1970s that raised the standard of living for workers. Unions fought for higher wages, better working conditions, health benefits and pension plans. It formed the basis of a broader middle class, the pride of America.

The attack on labor by corporate power was, nevertheless, unrelenting. The “economic royalists”, as Roosevelt called the corporate oligarchy at the time, fought the trade union movement from the very beginning. The profit system necessitated squeezing every bit of labor’s surplus value out of the worker.

Trade unions were forced to fight for survival with bargaining, boycotts and blood. Most of the time, union violence was provoked by industry, exemplified in 1937 when Chicago police killed ten striking steel workers in a bloody, historic battle—the Memorial Day massacre.

Eventually, of course, the employers succeeded.

You could say that the current problem began with the Reagan “revolution”. He struck the first blow by breaking the air-controllers’ (PATCO) strike. It proceeded from there. Corporate power went on a crusade to crush the organized labor movement in this country.

Under capitalism, the assault on labor has always been overwhelming, continuous, inhuman and destructive from the beginning of the industrial revolution to this very day. No wonder unions are dysfunctional and chaotic. So are most of their leaders. If they’re not coerced, co-opted or corrupted, they’re framed, jailed or neutralized in some way. At this stage in our history, corporate America has done a pretty smashing job.

The battle today roils around the attempt in Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. It could give labor organization a fresh boost.

The Act, if passed, would establish a level playing field for workers and union organizers in their struggle against employers and contractors who exploit and intimidate their employees.

Under an Employee Free Choice Act, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) would recognize the union’s role as the official bargaining agent if a majority of employees authorized representation via a card check (signing a card stipulating their preference), without requiring a secret ballot election.

The bill was passed by the House in 2007 and had majority support in the Senate, but was never voted on due to a Republican-led filibuster.

In the new Obama Administration, passing the EFCA will become a number one priority for organized labor. Barack Obama has expressed his support of the measure.

It would get his stimulus package off to a flying start to see a little more of workers’ surplus value lifting purchasing power rather than flowing up into the pockets of the economic royalists.

What Goes Around

by Stephen Fleischman

What happens when one mighty militarized nation smashes a small, defenseless country?

The United States of America has smashed Iraq. The militarized state of Israel is smashing the Gaza Strip.

We have only to wait for the effect to come around.

In Hinduism, the word Karma defines the universal principle of action and reaction that governs all life—the relationship between one event, called cause, and another, called effect, which is the direct consequence, or result, of the first.
Justin Raimondo, in Antiwar.com (1-5-09), says that this latest aerial assault of shock and awe by the Israelis on the Gaza Strip and the subsequent invasion with tanks and artillery benefits al-Qaeda affiliates and the Israelis; and “the losers are the Palestinians and the American people, with the former enduring the slaughter and the later paying for it. We will pay for it not only in billions of our tax dollars, but in terms of the hate-America factor, which will skyrocket on the Arab ‘street’ and inspire many to take up arms against us.”

We have already seen this in “9/11”—the destruction of the World Trade towers. The glib explanation for it was, “They hate us because we’re rich, successful, democratic…” A more reasonable explanation for it would be that our lop-sided foreign policy relating to Israel and the Arab world had a lot to do with building up that hate.

Back in 1933, we had an economic collapse after a stock market crash that led to “the Great Depression”. In the 1932 presidential election, Herbert Hoover, Republican incumbent, lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrat, who was inaugurated in March of 1933. In that interim period between the November election and the inauguration date (later changed to January 20th), the country sank deeper into depression—very much like it is starting to do now, while waiting for the incoming Obama Administration to officially start governing the country.

Roosevelt took immediate action. He put through the Securities Act of 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to stem the downward spiral.

Glass-Steagall had the greater wallop. It got to the root of the problem. Up to that time, bankers and brokers were sometimes indistinguishable. Congress examined the mixing of the “commercial” and “investment” banking industries that occurred in the 1920s. There were conflicts of interest and fraud in many banking activities. The Glass-Steagall Act set up a stringent barrier to the mixing of these activities as well as establishing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect bank deposits.

Glass-Steagall served the country very well for many years. It kept the manipulators and speculators at bay. Like church and state, commercial banking and investment banking must be kept separate.

But, in the 1980s, it fell apart. The “banksters” got the upper hand. The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act was passed. It started nipping away at Glass-Steagall. A major blow came in November of 1999. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, the notorious tax-cutter, led the charge. Provisions that prohibit a bank holding company from owning other financial companies were repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The bill was signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton. The deregulators had a field day.

Our economy is now in free fall again, with no Glass-Steagall law to rescue it. In effect, we’ve come around to where we were at the end of the Hoover era in the early 1930s.

There must be a lesson here.

When the first settlers came to America, they found Native American tribes living in a state of primitive communism.

Lewis Henry Morgan, American anthropologist, explored this era in the development of human culture in his classic work, “Ancient Society”, published in 1877. He describes the “communism in living” evident in the village architecture of Native Americans.

Friedrich Engels, collaborator of Karl Marx, in his work, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, published in 1884, was heavily influenced by Morgan’s evolutionary history. Engels postulated that primitive communism applied to early human societies because hunter-gatherer cultures did not create surpluses.

In a primitive communist society, all able bodied persons would have engaged in obtaining food, and everyone would share in what was produced by hunting and gathering. There would be almost no private property other than articles of clothing and similar personal items, because primitive society produced no surplus; what was produced was quickly consumed. The few things that existed for any length of time (tools, housing) were held communally. There would have been no state.

Primitive societies may have contained all of the features presently associated with the goals of “communism” as conceived today, exemplified by the Marxist slogan, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist society will produce; the idea is that there will be enough to satisfy everyone’s needs

With the world now threatened by economic collapse, we may soon find ourselves in a situation where there are no surpluses.

What does this foretell?

Will we be in a state of communism, perhaps less primitive, more sophisticated?

Will we rebuild, but on a higher level?

What went around could come around….

Single Payer Spearhead

by Stephen Fleischman

Grab the bull by the horns! Not the Merrill Lynch bull, that’s already been slaughtered—but the horns of the raging bull known as the Health Insurance Industry. That’s what Barack Obama must do in his first hundred days in the Oval Office.

With the economy in free-fall, instituting a single-payer health plan would go a long way in slowing that fall and would win back the support of his base, the liberal and progressive wing of the Democratic Party that won him the election. Single Payer should be the spearhead of his promised humongous stimulus package. And it would be easy. The infrastructure is there. All he has to do is tell Congress to extend Medicare to all citizens and he would sign the bill. It would be a bold move. In a single stroke, he would create a great legacy for himself. His only problem—he would have to bite the hand that fed him. He took millions from the Health Insurance Industry to finance his campaign. They gave him the money to insure that those two verboten words “single payer” would never be mumbled. And they weren’t—during the entire campaign.

Now, it is true that back in 2003, when Barack was an Illinois state senator, he spoke to an AFL-CIO group and told them, “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care plan. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody.” Those were his exact words. It’s in the public record. When Obama threw his hat into the ring in 2008, and the long primary battle with Hillary Clinton for the nomination began, Obama’s sentiments seem to have morphed from single payer to “affordable” health care. That means working in alliance with the Health Insurance companies. None of the candidates have ever used the term “single payer”. They had all kept the specifics of their health plans very vague, fudging words like “universal” and “national” and for a very good reason. There was a raging bull out there listening to every word.

Hillary learned her lesson back in 1992 when she and Bill tried to finagle some kind of Rube Goldberg health insurance plan. It angered the bull and the Health Insurance Industry dropped a bomb on them in the form of a TV commercial with Harry and Louise sitting around the kitchen table talking health plans and calling Hillary and Bill’s plan “socialized medicine”. Heavens to Betsy! Horrors! Socialized Medicine! Hillary and Bill got off that tack real fast and became the Bonnie and Clyde of politics in other areas.

Are we going to go on talking the talk and getting ripped off by Big Insurance and Big Pharma forever? Why can’t we have what every other industrialized nation in the world enjoys—some form of national health insurance run by the government, yes…socialized medicine? The current health insurance system in America violates the very essence of the principle of insurance. Here’s how it’s supposed to work: you pay a small premium for a large benefit. The more people paying into the pool, the lower will be the premium. The larger the pool, the more efficient the system. So why not the whole country? In the current US system, there are literally tens of thousands of different, and overlapping health care organizations generating a blizzard of paperwork in an administrative wilderness creating enormous waste. There are thousands, if not millions of people pushing paper around. The overhead is estimated to be over 30%; whereas Medicare operates on an overhead of around 3 or 4%.

A look back at the endless squabble over health care in this country will reveal where this timidity about single payer comes from. “Socialized Medicine” were the scare words. They were used the way George W. Bush now uses “the war on terror”; to scare the American people into accepting two useless, endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the American Medical Association (AMA), after World War II, that raised the bug-a-boo of “socialized medicine” when they saw something new blowing in the wind—pre-paid medical plans. Organized medicine saw these plans as a threat to their “fee for service” system. (You go to a doctor, you get a service, and you pay a fee) That’s the way they wanted to keep it, by God!

It was Henry Kaiser, the auto maker and ship builder, who came up with the idea of a Health Maintenance Organization for his employees—a prepaid medical plan (You pay a small monthly fee, you get your entire medical and hospital needs free of any other charges). The City of New York jumped right in with HIP (Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York), a pre-paid health plan for the city employees. “Socialized Medicine!” screamed the AMA. Physicians and surgeons manned the battle stations. Many saw their seven figure incomes taking flight. Other HMOs mushroomed around the country. And, then, in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson made “medical care for the aged” part of his “Great Society” package. We know it today as “Medicare”. Then, came Medicaid, medical care for the indigent. The flood gates were opened. For the first time, huge amounts of government money started pouring into the health care system.

The insurance companies knew a good thing when they saw it. Organized medicine, the AMA and its state and county medical societies, did not—paralyzed by their fear of government intrusion. Insurance companies relished the enormous cash flow of government money emanating from Medicare and Medicaid and other government programs like Champus, medical coverage for servicemen and their families. Insurance companies set up their own private plans, yes, HMOs, to sop up all that loose cash. They turned pre-paid plans into their opposite, not “socialized medicine” for the people, but corporate welfare for the insurance companies. Through the years, they increased premiums and cut services, raking in billions of dollars in profits instead of providing not-for-profit medical services to their subscribers. The doctors allowed themselves to be co-opted and blind-sided. They allowed the pre-paid plans to get away from them. The fear of “socialized medicine” dimmed their vision. So instead of “socialized medicine” the doctors got privatized sweatshops where some doctors cannot make medical decisions without the approval of an HMO bureaucrat. Managed care became mismanaged medicine.

Is this the system Barack Obama wants to continue with his “affordable” health care plan, begging the Health Insurance companies for the few crumbs falling from the table while they continue to rake in whopping billions in profits off our backs? Or will he be a man of principle, take the bull by the horns, come forward with his true beliefs as he expressed them in 2003, and give us the change we can believe in?

Beyond Decadence

by Stephen Fleischman

The story of Bernie Madoff is the perfect paradigm for morality in the era of monopoly capitalism.

As an investment broker with a “black box”, Madoff managed to swindle $50 billion, yes, billion—before being caught. Madoff targeted his own people in the Jewish community and even ripped off charitable organizations that were supporting humanitarian projects in Israel. He used the oldest of the old scams, the Ponzi or pyramid scheme—paying off old investors with exorbitant fictitious interest, money from new investors, while investing nothing.

According to Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia, the original schemer was Sarah Howe, who in 1880 opened up a “Ladies Deposit” in Boston promising eight percent interest, although she had no method of making profits. This unique scheme was billed as “for women only.” Howe was arrested on October 18, 1880 by New York City Police and sentenced to three years in prison. There have been a myriad of schemers through the decades since then, with stakes getting higher as capitalist greed developed. Wall Street, itself, is a kind of gambling casino where, apparently, pyramid schemers can operate.

What makes it possible?

Greed and negligence.

Greed on the part of the schemer and the public. Negligence on the part of the government and the regulators whose job it is to see to it that our financial markets operate on the up and up—primarily the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Greed is one of the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Greed is defined as an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially wealth.

As the expression goes, “We all have a little larceny in our hearts”.

Does that describe Bernie Madoff, or does that describe his host of victims?

Well, both.

Capitalism brings out the worst in people. People are not monolithic, they are multifaceted.

The Roman Catholic Church recognizes “Seven Virtues” which correspond inversely to each of the seven deadly sins—Chastity for Lust, Temperance for Gluttony, Charity for Greed, Diligence for Sloth, Patience for Wrath, Kindness for Envy and Humility for Pride.

Why can’t we be more charitable, less greedy?

We can be if we change the material conditions of our lives—the economic system under which we live—the profit system.

Karl Marx made an astounding discovery that stands with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the Id, the Ego and the Super-ego.

Marx discovered that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. His monumental analysis of capitalism, “Das Kapital”, the first of three volumes published in 1867, described the new mercantile world of capitalism growing out of feudalism, and how the system is based on the exploitation of one class by another (the proletariat or working class by the bourgeoisie or capitalist class) and that “profits” are derived from the surplus value created by labor in the process of production. Capitalism is based on the theft of labor power from the workers by the owners of the means of production.

The main drive of the capitalist is to maximize profits, always trying to squeeze more surplus value out of his workers by cutting wages, increasing hours of work for the same pay, denying benefits and other handy techniques.

The workers’ main weapon for fighting back is the strike. But that takes solidarity and unionization, of which there is little around, lately.

The only outstanding recent example is the successful sit-down strike by the workers at the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago. In 1937, there were 733 such sit-in strikes, growing out of the example set by the General Motors workers in Flint, Michigan who closed down 3 GM plants.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) was formed, despite GM’s vow to prevent it.

The US developed a strong industrial labor movement with such leaders as John L. Louis, of the United Mine Workers and a leader in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) There were many others to follow. A strong union movement, winning higher wages and benefits and a better distribution of wealth, contributed to America’s development of a broad middle class.

That was then, this is now.

The onslaught on the labor movement in this country began with the Reagan Administration’s attack on the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981.

Twelve thousand air traffic controllers went out on strike for higher wages and better working conditions, setting off a chain of events that would redefine labor relations in America.

On August 3, 1981, President Reagan gave the PATCO strikers 48 hours to return to work. Two days later, when the strikers refused, Reagan carried out his threat. He fired 12,000 controllers and banned them from federal service for three years.

This was a tip-off to employers in the private sector. The government was on their side. The onslaught continued in the intervening years and capital effectively broke the back of the labor movement in this country.

Is there a lesson here, for today—as we head into another great depression?

The lesson may be that we’ll have to wait for the crash to come before the working class of America can get organized again.

Meanwhile, greed is the order of the day.