Wisconsin: The First Stop in An American Uprising? | Common Dreams

Wisconsin: The First Stop in An American Uprising? | Common Dreams

The Politics of Class Warfare

Across the country, the poor and middle class have suffered from the economic collapse: jobs disappeared, mortgages sank underneath debt, and opportunities for a college education evaporated. Much of the bailout that was supposed to fix the economy went to the very institutions that caused the collapse. Many of these institutions are now using tax loopholes and offshore tax shelters to avoid paying taxes.
The poor and middle class, those who didn't cause the collapse but have felt the most pain from the poor economy, are now being asked to sacrifice again.

It took some time for a political response to coalesce. The Tea Party movement was able to direct discontent away from the Wall Street titans who brought the economy to its knees. Funding from the Koch brothers’ petro-fortune along with fawning attention from Fox News helped get the libertarian movement off the ground. But progressives remained fragmented and few built active, organized bases. Many waited for President Obama to act.

The tide may now be turning. Inspired by people-power movements around the world, people in the United States are beginning push back. The poor and middle class, those who didn't cause the collapse but have felt the most pain from the poor economy, are now being asked to sacrifice again.

Politicians are scurrying to cut spending, but fewer than one in five Americans say the federal budget deficit is their chief worry about the economy, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center; 44 percent say they're most worried about jobs. Polls show that Americans also want spending for education, investment in infrastructure, and environmental protection. Yet spending in all these areas is up for drastic cuts in state and federal budgets.

Likewise, on the tax side, 59 percent of Americans opposed extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, according to a Bloomberg poll. Congress cut the taxes anyway, and the package will cost $800 billion over just two years.

Until now, polls have been one of the few places where anger at government policies that favor the rich while cutting service to the middle-class has been visible. But the crowds in Madison and the momentum of US Uncut tell us that may be about to change.

As a statement on the US Uncut website puts it: “We demand that before the hard-working, tax-paying families of this country are once again forced to sacrifice, the corporations who have so richly profited from our labor, our patronage, and our bailouts be compelled to pay their taxes and contribute their fair share to the continued prosperity of our nation. We will organize, we will mobilize, and we will NOT be quiet!”

Guest Post: Awareness of Poverty Over Three Centuries � naked capitalism

Guest Post: Awareness of Poverty Over Three Centuries naked capitalism

The first Poverty Enlightenment

In his excellent history of the idea of distributive justice, Samuel Fleischacker (2004, p.7) argues that in pre-modern times, “the poor appeared to be a particularly vicious class of people, a class of people who deserved nothing”. In the early 18th century, Robert Moss instructed the poor man “to rest contented with that state or condition in which it hath pleased God to rank him”. The French doctor and moralist Philippe Hecquet wrote in 1740 that “The poor are like the shadows in a painting: they provide the necessary contrast”. To the extent that any effort was made to explain poverty it was seen as either “God’s will” or a purely private matter, stemming from bad personal behaviour, such as laziness. Indeed, hunger was often seen as a good thing, as it motivated poor people to work.

A new questioning of longstanding social ranks emerged in the later 18th century, most notably in France. In the 1780s, The Marriage of Figaro, a play by Pierre Baumarchais, had Parisian audiences taking side with the servants in laughing at the aristocracy. Some of this new egalitarian spirit spilled across the English Channel, though it met with some stiff resistance. In 1806 Patrick Colquhoun, the founder of the police force in England, wrote that poverty “is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation.”

The first Poverty Enlightenment was the time when poverty started to be seen as a politico-economic outcome rather than the manifestation of some natural order. Poor people started to aspire to be otherwise. But poverty was still widely accepted in the literature as a more-or-less inevitable fact of life. The economics of the 18th and 19th centuries did not offer any serious challenge to this view. Some economists saw poverty as an essential condition for economic development. No doubt it was agreed that rising real wage rates would reduce poverty, but it was argued that this would undermine wealth accumulation by reducing labour supply and (in the Mercantilist schema) making exports uncompetitive, and even corrupting the values of workers as they aspired to luxury goods. Thomas Malthus famously saw ecological disaster ahead, with poverty and famine as the only check against rising population. Nor did Adam Smith – far more optimistic than Malthus about the scope for overall social progress – entertain much hope that the fruits of economic development would be equitably distributed; Smith (1776, p.232) wrote that: “Whenever there is great prosperity, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.”

Golem XIV - Thoughts: Euro downgrades and looting

Golem XIV - Thoughts: Euro downgrades and looting

What will happen now? Well the IMF vulture is circling. Last Friday the IMF, ECB and EU had a meeting with Greece and said publicly that the Greek government should "recalibrate its assets". Which they explained meant Greece should now sell some of its assets to pay off its debts. In other words sell things that belong to the Greek people to pay off the debts of Greek bankers in order to save French and German banks.

Ireland already had this same advice, so did Hungary and in the UK the Tory boys were all set to sell off every woodland they could get their hands on. A pattern here?

The European Banks are NOT healed. The governments who have been bankrupting their people to save their banker friends are running in to trouble. Too much debt and still the banks are not solvent. The decision to 'share' the losses with some bond holders is now rippling out. We will see downgrades in France and elsewhere in the next week.

One thing that would help the banks is if their friends in government could get all sorts of assets in to their hands for fire sale prices. Such assets would bolster the banks in ways far more immediate than making a few good loans. Banking takes time to make a return. Looting is wonderfully quick.


We are heading for another event. Ireland, Greece and Portugal are on point. The pressure on the 'core' nation banks will grow. That will put pressure on the politicians to speed up the looting and or bring forward another cash injection.

Imperial hypocrisies | SocialistWorker.org

Imperial hypocrisies | SocialistWorker.org

THE DAY before Hosni Mubarak officially became Egypt's ex-president, John Negroponte, the U.S. diplomat who has been deployed to war zones from Honduras to Iraq, took to the airwaves to defend his community.

The U.S. intelligence community, that is.

Foreign policy analysts were asking why CIA chief Leon Panetta had spread the word on Thursday, February 10, that Mubarak was about to step down, only to be embarrassed hours later when Mubarak announced his intention to stay, bringing an abrupt end to the celebration that had already begun in Tahrir Square.

Negroponte had just come from the region--in fact, from Cairo just before the demonstrations against Mubarak began on January 25. But Negroponte's full-throated defense of intelligence agencies is interesting because it offers a glimpse into the world view of the ruthless characters who make up the U.S. foreign policy establishment:

When I was in Egypt three weeks ago, it wasn't at all obvious that this was going to happen. Events were occurring in Tunisia...Tunisia was the spark...I don't think this is some kind of an intelligence failure. I think it's a problem that the people and the government of Egypt have with the adequacy of their government, which has been in power for 30 years--an authoritarian regime which they would like to see changed. And what we are watching is a rather messy process by which this now seems to be unfolding.

So Negroponte, who was director of national intelligence just four years ago, was in Cairo as a popular uprising brought the Tunisian dictatorship to its knees--yet he had no idea that a similar movement could develop in Egypt where the bulk of the population has felt nothing but hatred for a regime notorious for harassment and torture. Now there's a public employee who truly is overpaid!

But the really remarkable aspect of Negroponte's "analysis" is the idea that the Egyptian revolution is nothing more than a matter between the people of Egypt and the government of Egypt--as if every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter hasn't had a smiling photograph snapped with Mubarak. The U.S. government is very much a part of what's taken place in Egypt, having backed every last repressive act of the regime with money, guns and other military hardware.

Kairos in Cairo: Seizing the Moment of Moral Courage | Common Dreams

Kairos in Cairo: Seizing the Moment of Moral Courage | Common Dreams

Published on Saturday, February 12, 2011 by Chris Floyd
Kairos in Cairo: Seizing the Moment of Moral Courage
by Chris Floyd

I was among the million people who marched through London on February 15, 2003, to protest the imminent invasion of Iraq. I don't think anyone in the crowd thought a single march would stop the Anglo-American coalition from launching a war of aggression, but most felt it was important that the widespread anger and dismay at this murderous course of action be embodied, literally, on the streets, by a broad cross-section of the public.

This was done. And it was not totally unimportant, as an act of bearing witness. But now, years later, the people of Egypt -- especially the young people -- have shown us what a small, feeble act that 2003 march really was, and how we all let thuggish leaders play us for fools. We showed up, we marched, we massed -- then we quietly went home, back to our lives, and let the brutal machinery of aggressive war roll on.

What would have happened had we possessed the courage and commitment that the Egyptians are demonstrating today? What if we, like them, had refused to go home, and had stood our ground, thronged in the center of London, day after day, railing against a regime bent on aggressive war: "the supreme international crime, only different from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of all the others," as Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal put it. (It also added: "To initiate a war of aggression is a crime that no political or economic situation can justify.")

Day after day after day, the Egyptians have withstood the blows of a vicious police state, the savage attacks of paid goons, the strain, exhaustion and deprivation of constant vigil under threat of arrest or death -- and still they are standing there, more and more of them all the time, in a remarkable, near-miraculous display of moral courage that will undoubtedly topple the criminal regime, despite the desperate, clueless delaying tactics that Hosni Mubarak pulled on Thursday night.

But in London on that long-ago day, which now lies behind us across a surging river of blood choked with the bodies of a million innocent dead, we simply melted away in the course of an afternoon. A single day; a few hours; a few speeches -- then nothing. How Blair and Bush and all the militarist apparatchiks must have laughed at that! "Let them have their little march. Who gives a shit? Give them their permits, redirect the traffic for them, let them wave their signs. What does it matter? When it's over, they'll just go home, and we can get on with our business."

But what if we had stayed? By the tens of thousands if not the hundreds of thousands? What if we, like the Egyptians, had gotten in the way of business as usual, and brought more and more pressure to bear on the system, forcing the issue of aggressive war on the public consciousness, unavoidably, day after day -- and by this, as in Egypt, forcing officials of the system to declare where they stood? How badly would the power structure and its functionaries have been shaken? How many of the latter would have been emboldened to begin at least asking questions and demanding more information about the senseless rush to war? How many indeed might have voted "no confidence" in a government so deeply enmeshed in a scheme of deliberate deception aimed to perpetrate mass murder?

Maybe it would not have stopped the war. There's no way of knowing now. But we have seen in Egypt and Tunisia how an explosion of mass moral courage -- and physical courage -- can tear a hole in the zeitgeist and make a space for new realities, for transformations which seemed unthinkable only days before. Such kairotic moments (to borrow Tillich's phrase) are rare, and if they are not seized, the window closes. There we were, a million people in the center of London, of all classes, all races, all creeds, all professions, united against war. Kairos hung heavy in the air, like the invisible pressure before a thunderstorm.

But we turned away. We let it go. The moment passed. "And the war came."

That's why February 15 will remain nothing more than a brief footnote in a long, still-churning saga of atrocity and slaughter, while January 25, the day the Egyptians first took to the streets -- and stayed in the streets -- will be honored for generations as a landmark of human liberation.
© 2011 Chris Floyd

Manchin co-sponsors budget-trimming bill� - News - The Charleston Gazette - West Virginia News and Sports -

Manchin co-sponsors budget-trimming bill� - News - The Charleston Gazette - West Virginia News and Sports -

The late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va, one of the most vocal opponents of that line-item veto legislation, delivered 14 speeches, beginning on May 5, 1993, warning of its dangers. His speeches were published in a book titled, "The Senate of the Roman Republic."

Byrd stressed the importance of protecting the Senate's power from attempts by the White House to expand executive power.

"In times of crisis, when the foundations of a society begin to shake and old certainties topple, there seems to be something in a man that loves a Caesar," Byrd said in his last speech in the series, delivered on Sept. 20, 1993. "Something inherent, innate, and seemingly genetic yearns for the superman ... to whom one can turn for national salvation and security."

Byrd said: "Give to any president of the United States the power over the purse, and we will have proved ourselves faithless to our oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, just as the Roman Senate proved itself faithless to the constitution of the Roman republic when it surrendered the power of the purse to the Roman 'Caesars' and the Roman emperors 2,000 years ago."