freedom and reason

From what I know about Andreĭ Sakharov, I don’t dislike him. He was a socialist and a humanist. He once wrote in The New York Times (1968), “Only universal cooperation under conditions of intellectual freedom and the lofty moral ideals of socialism and labor, accompanied by the elimination of dogmatism and pressure of the concealed interests of ruling classes, will preserve civilization.” I find myself in agreement with these sentiments.

However, like most of Sakharov’s philosophical and moral assertions, the statement is rather obvious. Less positive is his influence on those who sought to establish a free market in the wake of the destruction of the Soviet political system, a project to which he was committed. Destruction rather than transformation plunged Russians into deep poverty and uncertainty, ruled by crony capitalists, robbers protected by a corrupt police state. Of course, we can’t blame all this on Sakharov’s idealism. One wonders how he would feel today look at the plight to his countrymen.

Because of his politics, Sakharov was the victim of state repression. I was reminded of this during a recent discussion about the relative merits of capitalism and socialism. The man who argued the case against socialism, a colleague, used the Sakharov case, as well as Sakharov’s criticisms of the Soviet Union, to argue that socialism is a terrible system. His argument was very revealing of the problematic of ideology. His convenient blindness of repression in the United States, far worse than that suffered by Sakharov, as well as the hierarchical and unequal character of the United States, provides a lesson for us to see how dogma incapacitates reason in an otherwise rational man.

The exchange began when I formed an off the cuff commentary, agitated by the recent events at the Texas Board of Curriculum, about my son’s high school economics text, which, in the chapter on capitalism and socialism, represented capitalism in bright color pictures featuring joyous and materially well-off citizens, while representing socialism in black and white photos that depicted shabbily dress victims of bread lines. My comment was that the photos amounted to a distortion of the realities of both situations. Neither picture represented the reality for every citizen of the respective countries. The economist responded by asking me the standard question: “Have you ever lived in a socialist country?” Of course, I could only answer, as I have so many times before, “No.” In fact, I have never even visited a socialist country, I noted earnestly. 

My colleague then proceeded to tell his audience that he had lived under socialist rule twice. However, he did not talk about his experience. Instead, he talked about something he read by Andreĭ Sakharov. He told me about how Sakharov had been the victim of Soviet police repression (about which I knew) and told me of Sakharov’s opinion concerning hierarchy and inequality in the Soviet system (again, I knew this). He explained that Sakharov wrote about how the Soviet system was divided into two groups, a small elite, around 10 percent of the population, and a large majority. The majority, he claimed, worked to support the small elite. It was an unbearable situation, he added.

Whenever anybody brings up Sakharov and his relocation to the semi-closed city of Gorky, I am reminded of Geronimo Pratt, the former propaganda minister for the Black Panthers who was framed by the FBI during the COINTELPRO years for the 1968 kidnap and murder of Caroline Olsen, a crime for which he spent 27 years in prison, eight of which were in solitary confinement. The injustice of his false imprisonment was finally ended when his conviction was vacated and he released in 1997. The goal of the FBI’s efforts against Pratt, to use the agency’s own words, was to “neutralize Pratt as an effective BPP functionary.”

If the claim is that Sakharov’s ordeal (he was sent to Gorky in 1980 for his protest against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and allowed to return to Moscow in 1986) is the paradigm of a totalitarian society, then what does Pratt’s false imprisonment for political reasons signal. Pratt isn’t the only political prisoner in the United States. Nor was Sakharov the only case in the Soviet Union. But who is more well known?

Therein resides the point perhaps? I talk to people in the US all the time who haven’t a clue who Pratt is. But they know about Sakharov. And they know about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They know about these individuals because anti-communist propagandists proclaim their suffering to illustrate police state terrorism and the gulags. They don’t know about Geronimo Pratt the political prisoner or Fred Hampton the victim of state assassination, or any of the other many instances of state repression of dissent in the United States. This is because of dogma, ideology, and propaganda.

Likewise, the suggestion that communist ministers were rewarded or behaved as capitalists and their managers in western nations obfuscates reality. Michael Parenti writes in Black Shirts and Reds,

The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West, as were their personal incomes and life styles. Soviet leaders like Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed mansions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most US leaders possess.

There are few socialist countries left to visit, so it is not easy to find one to travel to. I suppose I could and should travel to Cuba. But this is beside the point. I don’t need to travel anywhere to read the voluminous studies of the capitalist and socialist experience, both of which are highly variable in the concrete. I have written about the Soviet Union on this blog, as well as in other outlets. There is much to appreciate about the experiment. The goal of constantly highlighting the abuses of the state bureaucracy is to distract people from that.

An institutional analysis can focus on only almost any corporation or industry and identify ways in which that subject detrimentally affects individual freedom conceptualized in concrete terms as choice, health, and safety.

Let’s consider the private health insurance industry and its business model. At the core of it is this calculation: the medical loss ratio. This figure refers to the amount of money insurance companies have to pay out for medical care. The higher the medical loss ratio, the worse off is the company’s bottom line and the less excited are the owners about the company’s stock. Despite the widespread notion that the purpose of health insurance is to cover persons in need of medical care, actually covering medical care is a bad thing from a business standpoint.

Looking at a range of data publicly available, the average medical loss ratio in the insurance industry ranges from around 75 to around 60 percent. The latter number is the more attractive number from the point of view of the investor. If I am looking to invest my money in one of the fastest growing industries in the country, and I want to maximize my return, then I am looking for companies with something like a 60 percent medical loss ratio.

UnitedHealthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealthGroup, whose “mission is to help people live healthier lives,” is one of the largest health insurance company in the United States. United has a medical loss ratio of 74 percent. This means means that less than three-quarters of every dollar customers pay United to help them “live healthier lives” is actually spent on medical care. The rest of the dollar goes to the bureaucracy, including executive pay (United CEO Stephen Hemsley makes more than $100,000 per hour), and income for shareholders (quarterly revenues for UnitedHealthcare are in the quarterly 20 billion dollar range and growing).

That 74 percent number could be lower from an investor standpoint. If I were the executive for a company like UnitedHeathcare, I would find ways of reducing that figure and make my company more profitable for the stockholders, thus attracting more investment in the company, which would in turn allow me to raise my salary, earn bigger bonuses, and buy more stock on Wall Street (what I would do with my more than $100,000 per hour would be my business).

In order to make this happen, I need to eliminate sick people from the rolls and roll back coverage for paying customers. It’s the sick people who need medical care; they’re the main cause of medical losses for my company. And many of these tests the doctors in network are ordering will need to be rationalized as unnecessary.

One strategy I use is called “policy rescission.” I instruct my employees to scour the policies of sick persons to find evidence of minor illnesses and pre-existing conditions that I can use to justify canceling policies. If, for example, a policyholder has Barrett’s esophagus, that person is more likely than a person without it to develop cancer of the esophagus. Esophageal cancer is a very costly cancer (although the patient usually dies quickly, so it’s not as bad as it could be). For an insurance company, this “more likely” part suggests a potentially higher medical loss ratio. The policyholder with Barrett’s esophagus has to go.

Another strategy I use is called “purging.” When I identify an industry where there are too many sick persons relative to healthy persons on the rolls (and I determine this by looking at the medical loss ratio), I raise rates for that industry to very high levels that I know policyholders can’t afford. The more customers drop off the rolls, the more my medical loss ratio improves.

Another strategy I use is to instruct my employees to delay payments for procedures with the expectation that some customers won’t have the time to devote to challenging those decisions and thus cover this or that cost out of pocket. Hassling customers is a good way of getting off the hook for covering their health care needs even when the policies they hold cover those services. I go after the smaller payouts with this stratgy. Four hundred dollars here, eight hundred dollars there. Is it really worth the time and effort to make my company pay up? Hassling involves a range of tactics: making customers file multiple appeals (and the state regulations my lobbyists obtained prevent customers from suing my company until they have done so – and good luck beating me in court), “losing” referrals and other paperwork, dropping calls, re-routing the customers to nowhere, etc.

My company also spends a lot of money making sure that the government doesn’t regulate the insurance industry too aggressively. If the government mandates a medical loss ratio of 85 or 90 percent, and prevents me from using rescission and other strategies to cut costs, then my stockholders may look for other avenues of investment and my salary won’t be as high and the bonuses will be less. I can’t earn less than $100,000 dollars an hour.

Even worse, the government could move to a single-payer system or something like Medicare for everybody, programs that would have bureaucratic costs of five percent or less, since they’re not-for-profit. Such developments would be terrible for my industry. So a good chunk of revenues, instead of going to cover the medical needs of my customers, is dedicated to lobbying the government to not force me to cover the medical needs of my customers. This way narrow private interests can prevail over broad public ones. We call that the “free market.”

The effects of this for-profit health insurance dynamic on individual freedom are significant. Those in need of medical services often find themselves without coverage, paying higher premiums to keep their coverage (and going without in other areas of their lives), and spending an inordinate amount of time struggling with insurance company representatives to get them to pay for the services they are supposed to cover. The number one reason for bankruptcy in the United States is medical bills.

Often those who lose their coverage can’t get coverage elsewhere and wind up in emergency rooms with more costly illnesses. And sometimes those without insurance, because they lost it or because they can’t afford it, die from their situation. According to a Harvard Medical School study, nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year – one every 12 minutes – because they lack health insurance and cannot get good care. That’s more that those who die from drunk driving and homicide combined.

As I have said all along, the Tea Party “movement” is Republican theater (see The Tea Party: A Corporate-Funded Astroturf Project). The function of the organization is to incorporate angry citizens who were alienated by the disaster that was the Republican government during the 2000s in the Republican Party, spend a year mobilizing the anger, then bring their delegates together in an event advancing the agenda of the Republican party and the conservative movement.

FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and American Solutions for Winning the Future organize Tea Party events. These corporate-funded organizations provide logistical support and public relations assistance to protesters, whom they recruit, and industry confederates, who are trained to direct activities on the ground. FreedomWorks, which Dick Armey heads, coordinates conference calls among protesters, teaches them how to plan events and write press releases, provides them with how-to guides on how to deliver clear messages, and gives them templates for sign construction. The organization has established several Internet domain addresses, making them appear as the work of amateurs, to promote the protests. ASWF, with Newt Gingrich as leader, provides tea partiers with toolkits of talking points and sends e-mails to supporters instructing them to go to the tea party events and help direct the protests. Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, a partner in Ralph Reed’s lobbying firm Century Strategies (the parent company of Millennium Marketing, a commercial PR firm).

Americans for Prosperity is funded by Koch family foundations. Koch Industries is the second largest privately-held company in the United States. It is the largest privately owned energy company in the country. Koch industries made most of its money in the oil refining business, but also hold interests in chemical, fertilizer, and forest products. Americans for Prosperity is also connected to ExxonMobil. Remember the “grassroots” movement “Drill Here, Drill Now” protests? That was the work of Americans for Prosperity. Gingrich’s outfit is heavily funded by polluting corporations, as well. Peabody Energy (which used to be Peabody Coal), is one of the ASWF’s major contributors. ASWF pays average-looking Americans to stand around chanting about how great coal is. The “clean coal” meme has successfully penetrated mainstream consciousness, despite the fact that burning coal is by definition dirty.

The Tea Party astroturf campaign is aided by the corporate media, particularly Fox News, which has been exposed organizing protesters and leading them in anti-government chants. What we have here is a disinformation machine, comprised of political front organizations, funded by corporations, designed to undermine the interests of working people, while advancing the interests of state monopoly capitalism, by organizing disaffected, scared, and confused elements of the working class into reactionary cells. The purpose is to create the appearance of a mass movement opposing progressive government policies, as well as channel anger away from an authentic working class alternative (which the left has failed to build) and towards the Republican Party and conservative moment which offers something workers otherwise find valuable: religion, patriotism, and white ethnonationalism. Without this project, there would be no mass uprising against the idea that the government should help working families.

Peter Arnett is perhaps best known for reporting the utterance of a US major during the Vietnam War: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Maybe we haven’t always heard it said so honestly about democracy, but we have definitely heard it in spirit. Here’s the way we usually hear it: Because communists seek to establish a totalitarian state, democracies must restrict the freedom of speech of and association with communists.

In 1948, twelve members of the Communist Party were convicted under the Smith Act of “conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence.” Gus Hall, a leader of the Party, spent eight years in the penitentiary at Leavenworth. More generally, the radical sides of the labor and civil rights movements were suppressed (often violently) during the Cold War because they represented a threat to the social order necessary to defend democracy from totalitarianism.

Although the Soviet Union no longer exists, the desire to restrict democracy by manufacturing threats and appealing to military and police security has not evaporated, revealing that anti-communism was always more about popular control and the advancement of capitalism than security. The new threat—international terrorism—is an even better than communism. Terrorists are mysterious and ubiquitous. Because they do not advance a political economic ideology, the violent suppression of their activities, which is a pretext for inserting troops into peripheral countries and territories, does not automatically reflect the capitalist imperative.

Manufacturing threats, like almost everything in a capitalist society, is driven by the profit motive. If health care were free to the public, there would be no drive to create pandemics in order to sell vaccines. If everybody had good paying jobs there would no need to for crime wars to herd the surplus population. If workers ran the country there would be no drive to create foreign enemies in order to justify depriving citizens of civil rights at home and invading and occupying other countries.

The rational solution to terrorism is to remove the conditions that motivate the terrorists to action. The very act of controlling terrorism by going to war against it winds up fueling terrorism. The war on drugs created powerful drug cartels that are slowing taking over regions of countries in Mexico, Columbia, and Afghanistan. Likewise, the war on terrorism has caused terror organizations to spread out, become more sophisticated, and adjust their tactics. No amount of military or police force will make these problems disappear. There is no violent solution. Only a paradigm shift promises to change the situation.

The way to make the world safe is by making it more secure, not through military force and police presence, but by political and economic security. When those living in the periphery of the world capitalist economy are secure from the invasion of their lands by foreign corporations and militaries, which are destroying the culture and the conditions of their existence, then they will no longer be moved to retaliate.

This is for certain: some among the colonized will always strike back at the colonizer. Why sacrifice everybody’s freedom because a handful of super rich individuals want to exploit other peoples and their land?

This is the story of capitalism, which is why the rational solution is unattainable under the current world order: capitalists need oil, gas, land, and labor. They make us need these things, too. Terrorism is a consequence of capitalist exploitation. The ideology associated with terrorism emerges from the struggle. It is warped by religious belief, a deep ideology itself the product of power and control of the many by the few, but this is also the reflection of the underlying structure of the prevailing world epoch.

In his tour de force Late Capitalism, Ernest Mandel periodizes the development of capitalism into three stages: (1) market capitalism (1700 to 1850), marked by growth of industrial capital in domestic markets; (2) monopoly capitalism (1950-1960s), marked by imperialism, the development of international markets and the exploitation of colonial territories; and (3) late capitalism (1960s-onward), dominated by transnational corporations, mass consumption, globalized markets and labor pools, and transnational flows of capital, a process often called globalization.

Some talk of “de-industrialization” and claim that the late capitalist stage is the “post-industrial” stage, but as Mandel points out, it’s not that industry has disappeared, just that industry has moved to different parts of the world and that automation, mechanization, and scientific management are replacing and displacing human labor. For example, manufacturing jobs have been disappearing in the United States even though manufacturing output has been holding steady since at least 1947. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than 9 percent of the workforce is now employed by manufacturing.

So where do the displaced workers go? They won’t be going into agriculture. When industrial production emerged in the United States in the second half of the 19th century, some 70-80 percent of the population worked in agriculture. Last year, that figure was 2-3 percent. In real terms, of the some 150 million employed workers in the United States in 2008, fewer than one million were agricultural workers. We have almost completely mechanized farming. The sectors that have been absorbing surplus workers over the past several decades have been service and government. The service sector is not monolithic in terms of income opportunity. Non-government service sector jobs are the low paying food, retail, and other service work. The business-financial sector employment has grown the fastest because of the vast expansion of the finance side of capitalism (the cause of increasing instability in the global economy and the direct cause of the recent financial crisis). However, the rational principles that drove disemployment in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors are now being applied to this sector (for example through self-service—which is unpaid labor).

These trends explain why, combined with diminishing progressivity in the tax code and decline in union density, despite manufacturing output remaining stable long term, inequality and poverty (as shown in numerous charts supplied to you this semester) have risen so sharply in the United States independent of the recessions (but of course compounded by them). Manufacturing jobs, with their average of 18 dollars an hour, are the foundation of what the corporate media likes to refer to as the “middle class.” Agricultural jobs average around seven dollars an hour, much less than half of the manufacturing average.  For service sector work along the lines of food preparation and services, personal care and service occupations, administrative support and retail occupations, and grounds keeping and maintenance wages range from nine to eleven dollars an hour in 2008 (unionizing this sector would dramatically raise wages and benefits). Wages in management in the financial and business service sectors are obviously higher than the wages for all these jobs. This also explains growing inequality, as income is shifting upwards into nonproductive sectors that control labor power. 

This is why corporations rationalize: to reduce the quantum of value produced by the worker going towards wages so that the capitalist and managerial classes can capture a greater proportion of the value (or exploitation). What propels the development of capitalism through these stages is, in major part, the contradiction between maximizing surplus value production in the short term and realizing that surplus in the form of profits, and the battle between capital and labor over the surplus value.  This is the twin process of capitalist accumulation and class struggle.  In order to maximize surplus value, capitalists must rationalize production—that is, make workers work harder for the same or less money or make them more productive by implementing machines and scientific management strategies (i.e. increase rates of exploitation).  When workers organize to raises their income, capitalists deploy even more labor saving strategies, in addition to busting unions and moving factories overseas. 

The latter method is called relative surplus value production, and this is the dominant method for accumulating capital beginning in the industrial era. The problem with this method is that when you make workers more productive, you need fewer of them. This is the source of a phenomenon unique to capitalism: the industrial reserve army of labor.  The industrial reserve is always present, but its ranks swell during periodic crises of capitalism, what we call business cycles. aggregate productivity can rise while aggregate wages fall. On top of this, rational strategies are applied sector to sector with shifts in labor costs.  Given that services now dominate, that’s where the bulk of labor costs are now, and this is why the customer is doing more and more of the labor, which, obviously, the customer is not being paid to do.  The result is labor displacement in the service sector and more growth in the industrial reserve. Manufacture is closing in on near-full automation.  Next in line is effectively automating the service sector. 

Rationalization of production is what lies behind the falling rate of profit in capitalist economies; as more workers are eliminated from paid production, aggregate demand decreases, which leaves commodities sitting on store shelves, unrealized as profit. This is a realization crisis, which in turn leads to a crisis of overproduction/underconsumption. Robots and machines don’t buy products.  They also don’t produce any value. Put another way, the rational behavior of firms to make profits causes systemic instability and human suffering. The government then moves to bail out the capitalists with tax payer dollars or by printing more money. This problem has been compounded in the United States by the globalization of manufacture, a process in which capital-intensive high-wage work is shipped overseas to take advantage of countries without labor and environmental standards and repressive political regimes that prevent unionization. But the more fundamental problem is that of capitalism eliminating high paying  (and even low paying) jobs through rationalization.

The effects of the rationalization process have been devastating not only in the United States, but around the world. The International Labor Organization predicts that, during 2009, the number of unemployed persons globally will rise between 29 million and 59 million. This increase comes on top of hundreds of millions already disemployed by rationalization. For example, the number of unemployed persons in the Asia Pacific region alone will likely reach 112 million people. In East Asia, between 40 and 49 million persons will be jobless. In South Asia between 33 and 37 million unemployed. And this is where much of the US industrial base went.  The total number of persons unemployed world wide at the start of 2009 was estimated to be between 210 and 239 million (it is much higher now with the continuing deteriorating global economic situation).

Widespread structural unemployment isn’t the only problem caused by late capitalism. Vulnerable employment, that is unstable and low-wage jobs, will likely rise 52 million in 2009, which would bring the total to more than 1.1 billion persons with vulnerable employment. In South Asia, the number of vulnerable workers will rise to almost 79 per cent of all workers or 493 million people. In South East Asia and the Pacific, the share of workers in vulnerable employment could rise to around 64 per cent, or 182 million people, and in East Asia to 57 per cent, or 458 million people. These are massive numbers and they underscore the problem with an economic system that strives to find ways to eliminate and marginalize workers. The number of people working in Asia Pacific but living in households that survive on less than $1.25 per person per day could rise to 589 million. The consequences of unemployment and vulnerable employment is widespread poverty.

While the Third World is getting our manufacturing jobs (and then capitalists are rationalizing those third world workers into the surplus population), the US Labor Department projects that from 2008 to 2018, service-providing industries will add 14.6 million jobs, or 96 percent of the increase in total employment.  Goods-producing employment as a whole is expected to show virtually no growth. And the US will see declines in manufacturing of some 1.2 million more workers. This means that even more workers who used to work at good-paying manufacturing jobs will be shifted into low-wage services.  Approximately one-third of the work force wasn’t working or was working only part time when this crisis started. And the current 10 percent unemployment rate masks a lot of suffering.  When we disaggregate that number, we find that unemployment for minorities is much higher than 10 percent, especially for African Americans, who have long been relegated to the reserve army (as well as to prison).

I used Asia and the United States to give the reader a comparative point.  Africa and South and Central America are also experiencing extraordinarily high rates of unemployment. Europe is experiencing some unemployment, as well, but because of the extensive social safety net most Europeans enjoy, the effects on their well being are not nearly as severe as for the United States and the Third World. Strategies used in European societies are good for capitalism because they redistribute income through taxation providing for higher incomes and therefore more stable of aggregate demand and profit realization patterns.  Germany, for example, wasn’t much harmed by the recent global economic meltdown because of the high standards of living enjoyed by its citizens. This is the benefit of democratic government.

One of the ways the managers of the US economy have kept alive the illusion that the nation continue to have an affluent middle class is by promoting debt financing. Fifty years ago, citizens had considerable savings. They were encouraged to save so there would be money for banks to lend for investment. At times, citizens were even required to save. Now citizens—as consumers—are urged to use debt financing as a way to spend beyond their means, which are dwindling with anemic and or declining real income. The United States now has the lowest savings rate of the advanced capitalist economies. In fact, we save now at the lowest rate since the Great Depression. There has been a dramatic acceleration in this debt since globalization moved into high gear.  As late as 1984, the private savings rate was more than 10 percent of national income. Americans are compensating for the loss of real wages by using credit cards to by the things they don’t need. Most families live and die in the red. It’s unsustainable, as the current crisis is trying to tell us.

In his book, Mandel wondered what would happen if all necessary labor were eliminated from production. “Imagine for a moment a society in which living human labor has completely disappeared, that is to say, a society in which all production has been 100 per cent automated,” he writes; “let us imagine that this development has been pushed to its extreme and human labor has been completely eliminated from all forms of production and services. Can value continue to exist under these conditions? Can there be a society where nobody has an income but commodities continue to have a value and to be sold?” These are rhetorical questions. Mandel writes, “A huge mass of products would be produced without this production creating any income, since no human being would be involved in this production. But someone would want to ‘sell’ these products for which there were no longer any buyers!”

For those in the back: “It is obvious that the distribution of products in such a society would no longer be effected in the form of a sale of commodities and as a matter of fact selling would become all the more absurd because of the abundance produced by general automation. Expressed another way, a society in which human labor would be totally eliminated from production, in the most general sense of the term, with services included, would be a society in which exchange value had also been eliminated. This proves the validity of the theory, for at the moment human labor disappears from production, value, too, disappears with it.”

Ludwig von Mises once sad, “It is not capitalism which is responsible for the evils of permanent mass unemployment, but the policy which paralyzes its working.” Wrong. It is capitalism that is responsible for permanent mass unemployment. It’s the nature of the beast. Mass unemployment is an essential feature of the capitalist mode of production. But what is more significant about what that great apologist of capitalism said is this—he admits that there is this problem of permanent mass unemployment. You don’t have to be left or right to recognize this. But you have to be left to fix it.

Ernest Mandel, in his tour de force Late Capitalism, published in the 1970s, periodized the development of capitalism in three stages: (1) market capitalism (1700 to 1850), marked by growth of industrial capital in domestic markets; (2) monopoly capitalism (1950-1960s), marked by imperialism, the development of international markets and the exploitation of colonial territories; and (3) late capitalism (1960s-onward), dominated by transnational corporations, mass consumption, globalized markets and labor pools, and transnational flows of capital (as well as people), a process often called globalization. This blogs carries forward Mandel’s analysis to understand the contemporary situation.

Some talk of “de-industrialization” and claim that the late capitalist stage is the “post-industrial” stage, but as Mandel points out, it’s not that industry has disappeared, just that it has moved to different parts of the world, and automation, mechanization, and scientific management are replacing and displacing human labor. This trends continues. Manufacturing jobs have been disappearing in the United States as output in this sector has been holding steady since at least 1947. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than 10 percent of the workforce is now employed by manufacturing.

Where do displaced workers go? Not into agriculture. When industrial production emerged in the United States in the second half of the 19th century, some 70-80 percent of the population worked in agriculture. Last year, that figure was 2-3 percent. In real terms, of the some 150 million employed workers in the United States in 2008, fewer than one million were agricultural workers. Capitalists have almost completely industrialized farming. And where they needs hands, capitalists seek them among selected immigrant groups. There are to jobs in this sector for native workers to return to.

The sectors that have been absorbing surplus workers over the past several decades have been service and government sectors. The service sector is not monolithic in terms of income opportunity. The financial sector employment has grown the fastest because of the vast expansion of the money side of capitalism (the cause of increasing instability in the global economy and the direct cause of the recent financial crisis). But this line of work is rather exclusive.

The largest sector is labor-intensive services, comprised of low wage food, retail, and similar work. However, the rational principles that drove disemployment in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors are now being applied to the service sector. These trends explain why, combined with diminishing progressivity in the tax code and declining union density, despite manufacturing output remaining stable long term, inequality and poverty have risen in the United States relatively independent of recession.

Manufacturing jobs, with their current average of 18 dollars an hour, are the foundation of what the corporate media likes to refer to as the “middle class” (really, the working class). Agricultural jobs average around seven dollars an hour, much less than half of the manufacturing average. For service sector work along the lines of food preparation and services, personal care and service occupations, administrative support and retail occupations, and grounds keeping and maintenance wages range from nine to eleven dollars an hour in 2008 (unionizing this sector would dramatically raise wages and benefits). Wages in management in the financial and business service sectors are obviously higher than the wages for all these jobs, which, in part, explains growing inequality, as income distribution is shifting upwards into nonproductive sectors that control labor power.

Corporations rationalize production to reduce the quantum of value produced by the worker going towards wages so that the capitalist and managerial classes can capture a greater proportion of the value (exploitation). What propels the development of capitalism through its stages is, in major part, the contradiction between maximizing surplus value production in the short term and realizing that surplus in the form of profits, and the battle between capital and labor over the surplus value.

This is the twin process of capitalist accumulation and class struggle: In order to maximize surplus value, capitalists must rationalize production, i.e., make workers work harder for the same or less money or make them more productive by implementing machines and scientific management strategies (i.e. increase rates of exploitation). When workers organize to raises their income, capitalists deploy even more labor saving strategies, in addition to busting unions and moving factories overseas. The latter method is called relative surplus value production, and this is the dominant method for accumulating capital beginning in the industrial era. The problem with this method is that, when you make workers more productive, you need fewer of them. At least it’s a problem for workers.

This dynamic is the source of a phenomenon unique to capitalism: the industrial reserve army of labor. The industrial reserve is always present, but its ranks swell during periodic crises of capitalism, or the business cycles. Aggregate productivity can rise while aggregate wages fall. On top of this, rationalization strategies are applied sector to sector with shifts in labor costs. Given that services now dominate, that’s where the bulk of labor costs are now, and this is why the customer is doing more and more of the labor, which, obviously, the customer is not being paid to do. The result is labor displacement in the service sector and more growth in the industrial reserve. Manufacture is closing in on near-full automation. Next in line is effectively automating the service sector.

Rationalization of production is what lies behind the falling rate of profit in capitalist economies; as more workers are eliminated from paid production, aggregate demand decreases, which leaves commodities sitting on store shelves, unrealized as profit. This is a realization crisis, which in turn leads to a crisis of overproduction / underconsumption. Robots and machines don’t buy products. They don’t produce any value.

As the rational behavior of firms to make profits causes systemic instability and human suffering, the government moves to bail out the capitalists with tax payer dollars or by printing more money. This problem has been compounded in the United States by the globalization of manufacture, a process in which capital-intensive high-wage work is shipped overseas to take advantage of countries without labor and environmental standards and repressive political regimes that prevent unionization.

But the more fundamental problem is that of capitalism eliminating jobs through rationalization. The effects of the rationalization process have been devastating not only in the United States, but around the world. The total number of persons unemployed world wide at the start of 2009 was estimated to be between 210 and 239 million. It is much higher now with the continuing deteriorating global economic situation. The International Labor Organization predicts that, during 2009, the number of unemployed persons globally will rise between 29 million and 59 million. This increase comes on top of hundreds of millions already disemployed by rationalization. For example, the number of unemployed persons in the Asia Pacific region alone will likely reach 112 million people. In East Asia, between 40 and 49 million persons will be jobless. In South Asia between 33 and 37 million unemployed. And this is where much of the US industrial base went.

Widespread unemployment isn’t the only problem caused by late capitalism. Vulnerable employment, that is unstable and low-wage jobs, will likely rise 52 million in 2009, which would bring the total to more than 1.1 billion persons with vulnerable employment (a number I gave in class yesterday). In South Asia the number of vulnerable workers will rise to almost 79 per cent of all workers or 493 million people. In South East Asia and the Pacific, the share of workers in vulnerable employment could rise to around 64 per cent, or 182 million people, and in East Asia to 57 per cent, or 458 million people. These are massive numbers and they underscore the problem with an economic system that strives to find ways to eliminate and marginalize workers. The number of people working in Asia Pacific but living in households that survive on less than $1.25 per person per day could rise to 589 million.

The consequences of unemployment and vulnerable employment is widespread poverty. While the Third World is getting our manufacturing jobs (and then capitalists are rationalizing those third world workers into the surplus population), the US Labor Department projects that from 2008 to 2018, service-providing industries will add 14.6 million jobs, or 96 percent of the increase in total employment. Goods-producing employment as a whole is expected to show virtually no growth. And the US will see declines in manufacturing of some 1.2 million more workers. This means that even more workers who used to work at good-paying manufacturing jobs will be shifted into low-wage services.

Approximately one-third of the work force wasn’t working or was working only part time when this crisis started. And the current 10 percent unemployment rate masks a lot of suffering. When we disaggregate that number, we find that unemployment for minorities is much higher than 10 percent, especially for blacks, who have long been relegated to the reserve army, idled in impoverished communities.

I used Asia and the United States to give the reader a comparative point. Africa and South and Central America are also experiencing extraordinarily high rates of unemployment. Europe is experiencing some unemployment, as well, but because of the extensive social safety net most Europeans enjoy, the effects on their well being are not nearly as severe as for the United States and the Third World.

Strategies used in European societies are good for workers because they redistribute income through taxation providing for higher incomes and therefore more stable patterns of aggregate demand. Germany, for example, wasn’t much harmed by the recent global economic meltdown because of the high standards of living enjoyed by its citizens. This is the benefit of democratic government.

One of the ways the managers of the US economy have kept alive the illusion that the nation continues to have affluent middle strata is by promoting debt financing. Fifty years ago, citizens had considerable savings. They were encouraged to save so there would be money for banks to lend for investment. At times, citizens were even required to save. Now citizens—as consumers—are urged to use debt financing as a way to spend beyond their means, which are dwindling with anemic and or declining real income.

The United States now has the lowest savings rate of the advanced capitalist economies. In fact, we save now at the lowest rate since the Great Depression. There has been a dramatic acceleration in this debt since globalization moved into high gear. As late as 1984, the private savings rate was more than 10 percent of national income. Americans are compensating for the loss of real wages by using credit cards to by the things they don’t need. Most families live and die in the red. It’s unsustainable, as the current crisis is trying to tell us.

Decades ago, Mandel wondered what would happen if all necessary labor were eliminated from production. 

Imagine for a moment a society in which living human labor has completely disappeared, that is to say, a society in which all production has been 100 per cent automated. Of course, so long as we remain in the current intermediate stage, in which some labor is already completely automated, that is to say, a stage in which plants employing no workers exist alongside others in which human labor is still utilized, there is no special theoretical problem, since it is merely a question of the transfer of surplus value from one enterprise to another. It is an illustration of the law of equalization of the profit rate. Bu let us imagine that this development has been pushed to its extreme and human labor has been completely eliminated from all forms of production and services. Can value continue to exist under these conditions? Can there be a society where nobody has an income but commodities continue to have a value and to be sold? Obviously such a situation would be absurd. A huge mass of products would be produced without this production creating any income, since no human being would be involved in this production. But someone would want to “sell” these products for which there were no longer any buyers! It is obvious that the distribution of products in such a society would no longer be effected in the form of a sale of commodities and as a matter of fact selling would become all the more absurd because of the abundance produced by general automation. Expressed another way, a society in which human labor would be totally eliminated from production, in the most general sense of the term, with services included, would be a society in which exchange value had also been eliminated. This proves the validity of the theory, for at the moment human labor disappears from production, value, too, disappears with it.

Ludwig Von Mises once remarked, “It is not capitalism which is responsible for the evils of permanent mass unemployment, but the policy which paralyzes its working.” But it is both capitalism and policy that are responsible for permanent mass unemployment. Unemployment is an intrinsic and indeed essential feature of the capitalist mode of production. Policy, to the extent that it serves the narrow interests of powerful corporations, exacerbates the problem of permanent mass employment. Capitalism is, indeed, in its late phase of development. It’s a terminal phase.

The “tea party” protests are part of a corporate-funded political project. It’s what the industry calls “astroturf,” or fake grassroots organizing, designed to advance corporate interests over the public interest. As such, the tea party phenomenon is an excellent illustration how corporate power and ideology are used to manipulate people and public opinion. Astroturf has proven to be an extremely successful tactic for industry. I wrote about astroturf in my article “The US Anti-Environmental Countermovement,” published in 2002 by the Sociological Spectrum, so you can seek out that article for more detail.

In one of the more notorious expressions of the phenomenon, the Republican Party organized a mob to harass vote counters and disrupt the vote count in the 2000 election in Florida. They succeeded in shutting down the Miami-Dade County count, which would have produced more votes for Gore (there were 10,750 previous uncounted ballots in a heavily Democratic district). Bush only led by fewer than 600 votes. The 2000 presidential election was a stolen election. That is the power of fake grassroots.

Much of the media portrayed the mob as “spontaneous,” manufacturing the illusion that there was a popular rebellion against counting votes. The “rioters” were in fact Republican Party operatives. The common sense notion that people do not spontaneously riot over counting votes in a democracy did not seem to count in the minds of most journalists covering the story. They did not find this suspicious. (At least they did not let on that they did.) And even those media sources that reported the truth had no effect because the cable and network news media didn’t put it in the echo chamber. The votes were never counted (nor were thousands of other votes in Florida), and George W. Bush was installed as US president by the Supreme Court. In other words, democracy did not happen in the 2000 presidential election in part because of an astroturfed event. And none of the perpetrators were ever punished for violating election law.

The tea party (or “tea bagger”) protests are only the latest venture of organized corporate power to manufacture the illusion of popular support for pro-corporate policies when the real mission is to thwart democracy. 

The tea party is organized by several corporate-backed and staffed groups, but foremost among them are FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and American Solutions for Winning the Future. These organizations provide logistical support and public relations assistance to protesters, who are joined by industry confederates to direct activities on the ground. FreedomWorks coordinates conference calls among protesters, teaches them how to plan events and write press releases, provides them with how-to guides on how to deliver a clear message, and gives them templates for sign construction. FreedomWorks has established several Internet domain addresses—making them appear to be the work of amateurs—to promote the protests. Americans for Prosperity and American Solutions for Winning the Future engage in the same types of activities.

FreedomWorks is run by Dick Armey, former high ranking Republican congressman who left politics to work for industry public relations. Armey is a right-wing extremist. I could give you several examples of his extremism, but here’s an obvious one that goes straight to the matter of his ideological worldview. In a recent debate with Joan Walsh on Chris Matthews television program Hardball, Armey mocked Walsh saying, “I am so damn glad that you can never be my wife cause I surely should not have to listen to that prattle from you every day.”

Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, a partner in Ralph Reed’s lobbying firm Century Strategies (the parent company of Millennium Marketing, a commercial PR firm). Phillips is a long-time Republican Party operative, as is Reed. Americans for Prosperity is funded by Koch family foundations. Koch Industries is the second largest privately-held company in the United States. It is the largest privately owned energy company in the country. Koch industries made most of its money in the oil refining business, but it holds interests in chemical, fertilizer, and forest products. Americans for Prosperity is also connected to oil giant ExxonMobil. Remember the “grassroots” movement “Drill Here, Drill Now” protests? That was the work of Americans for Prosperity. 

Also organizing the tea baggers is former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. He heads up the American Solutions for Winning the Future. Gingrich was part of the same Congressional leadership team as Armey when they were Republican Party officials. They engineered the “Contract with America” campaign of the 1990s that aimed to slash government programs for vulnerable populations. Republicans pushing the agenda in the House compared poor children to “alligators” and “wolves.”

Like Armey, Gingrich is a right-wing extremist. In his Reinhardt College address, “Renewing American Civilization,” on January 7, 1995, Gingrich said in explaining why women shouldn’t serve in combat: “If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don’t have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they’re relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn’t matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.”

Gingrich provides tea partiers with talking points and sends e-mails to his supporters instructing them to go to the tea party events and help direct the protests. Gingrich’s outfit is heavily funded by polluting corporations, as well. Peabody Energy, which used to be Peabody Coal, is one of the ASWF’s major contributors. This explains why ASWF is so big on laying astroturf around burning coal (a major source of global warming pollution). Have you seen this campaign? They get a bunch of average-looking Americans standing around chanting about how great coal is. Right, that happens all the time. Next we will see rallies for nuclear reactors.

The tea party astroturf campaign is heavily pushed by the corporate media, particularly Fox News, which has been exposed organizing protesters and leading them in anti-government chants. Here’s a sampling of the broader Fox News PR campaign for the tea bag protests put together by Media Matters. Note how Fox News commentators admit that Fox News got the map from Newt Gingrich. 

The other news organizations cite conservative numbers of millions and liberal numbers of thousands and chalk up the discrepancy to ideological bias, leaving the viewer to suppose that maybe the millions number could be correct. But the new media is supposed to report the facts, and the fact is that these rallies are small compared to, say, anti-war rallies, which are almost never covered by the corporate news media. 

The numbers of the largest tea bag rally, which was the march on Washington, was somewhere between 25,000 and 60,000 persons. That’s respectable numbers, but nowhere near millions or even hundreds of thousands of people claims. Pictures were floated on the Internet showing the massive tea party crowd with the claim that there is no way this could only be tens of thousands. However, the photos turned out to be more than a decade old, taken in 1997 and had nothing to do with the tea baggers (they were quickly exposed as fakes because they don’t include the National Museum of the American Indian, which is located on the corner of Fourth Street and Independence Avenue, which did not open until late 2004).

If we think about it for a moment, we shouldn’t expect that right-wing rallies would be the equivalent of the massive rallies we see emerging from the left in quality or quantity. Protests and movements supporting corporate interests and opposing popular democratic desires are not naturally emergent mass phenomenon; they therefore must be organized. It would be odd indeed for any significant proportion of the majority of humanity—workers, women, persons of color—to rise up and oppose their own interests. Indeed, when such movements wane, we wonder why the people have become passive. Movements—or more accurately countermovements on the right, represent the interests of a small proportion of the population and therefore have to be concocted by and mass marketed by elite groups like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. 

I think we would all recognize that a pro-war rally would almost always have to be a manufactured thing. Organically speaking. Drives for war are elite-manufactured phenomenon (which is why we don’t debate them). So why would it strike anybody who spent any time thinking about it that ordinary Americans would in any great numbers naturally protest against universal health care and environmental protection, two things broadly and consistently supported by the public?

To be sure, the right can often make their projects appear successful because of the amount of money power and wealth its members possess. Corporations manufactured the New Right movement—with its network of foundations and think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation—that, once in power, dismantled much of the New Deal. It was major corporations that backed the neoconservatives who manufactured the threats that politicians used to justify invading other countries and limiting our civil rights. It wasn’t like the masses were going to tear down the good stuff or desire to invade countries that had never attacked us or give up their Constitutionally-protected freedoms, so corporations had to do it.

This is easy to see if we look at other moments in history. Under feudalism, for example, the king’s interests were obviously contrary to the interests of his subjects; but, because of his power and wealth, he could be heard, and he could always find a mob to defend his interests against popular forces seeking greater freedom. The illusion was that the king had the numbers on his side. But the reality is that he didn’t have greater numbers on his side, or especially the majority on his side. He had a lot of power to deceive people so he could exploit them more. And he had this power because he, and the nobility he served, controlled the wealth the serfs produced with their labor. This is a general principle of class-based societies: the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. When you control the material means of production, you control the ideological means of production.

It is worth noting that similar tactics were used by corporations in Germany and Italy during the fascist countermovement. Corporations funded gangs of disaffected citizens, coordinated by right-wing intellectuals, and legitimated by former army officers and small business owners, to harass labor union meetings and disrupt progressive political rallies. Some of these groups eventually organized themselves around notions of military rank and discipline, for example the paramilitary Blackshirts in Italy and the Brownshirts in Germany. There are always reactionary members of the working class that can be mobilized by right-wing forces to thwart popular democracy. Tragically, a lot of good-hearted people get caught up in these things.

Studying the tea party events reveals that unwitting participants typically have a poor and frequently confused understanding of political and economic power, process, and history. For example, one of the claims made at the rallies—you see it written all over the signs—is the claim that Obama is a “socialist.” Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production—resources, tools, machines, buildings, investment capital, etc.—are owned and controlled by the working people to their benefit. Under socialism, corporations go away. Under socialism, the president doesn’t hand over taxpayer money to big financial institutions. Socialists don’t assemble a team of Wall Street insiders to serve as advisers to the president. The notion that Obama is a socialist is ludicrous on its face when you have an understanding of the idea and the history of socialism.

Another claim made by tea baggers is that Obama is a “fascist.” The signs often claim Obama is simultaneously a socialist and a fascist. Pictures of socialist leaders appear alongside Hitler’s picture. Obama’s pictures are modified to make him look like Hitler. Again, if you know the idea and history of fascism, you know that these depictions are absurd (you also know that fascism and socialism are opposites). Fascism is a right-wing corporatist capitalist ideology and practice. Fascists were organized and bankrolled by big industry and big finance capital to smash the left, the labor movement and democratic parties. And while it is true that state monopoly capitalism in the Untied States presents with fascistic elements—military patriotism, perpetual warfare, oppressive criminal justice system, white supremacy—the Democrats are political centrist or center-right, not right wingers. Ever since Woodrow Wilson, Democrats have been establishment progressives. Democrats support rights for gays and lesbians, minorities, women, and immigrants—all causes opposed by the right. Whatever Obama may be, he is not a fascist.

What we are looking at here is a disinformation machine, one that dispenses images of Obama and the Democrats that are erroneous, organized by political front organizations for big corporations, designed to undermine the interests of working people, while advancing the interests of monopoly capitalism, while integrating disaffected and reactionary elements of the working class into anti-democratic reactionary cells. The purpose of all this is to send flak in the direction of the Democrats to constrain their ability to do the things they were elected to do, as well as create the appearance of a mass movement of people opposing progressive government policies, so that viewers at home will think, “Where’s there’s smoke there’s fire, so maybe I should jump on board this tea party thing.” That’s astroturf in a nutshell.

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine (Seven Stories Press 1999) grew out of a three-part series of articles published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. Gary Webb’s work concerned the nexus of terrorists, known as the Contras, who were backed and trained by the White House and the CIA and organized crime figures involved in cocaine trafficking. The network smuggled large shipments of cocaine into the United States through various points. Los Angeles was the receiving point. From Los Angeles, cocaine was distributed throughout the United States. Cocaine profits were funneled to the Contras to fund their terrorist operations. The CIA-Contra traffic was the primary source of the growing cocaine problem in the United States during the second half of the 1980s. This followed on the heels of the drug war that sent, and continues to send, thousands of young black men to prison. Webb’s investigation revealed – his facts and conclusions independently corroborated – the role of CIA and evidence that Reagan/Bush administration protected traffickers and dealers by shielding them from prosecution. The White House pursued this illegal route because the Boland amendments, passed between 1982-1984, restricted government funding of Contra activities.

Under intense flak from the government and Contra backers, as well as the big corporate news, The San Jose Mercury News distanced themselves from the story and Webb in 1997. The attacks on Webb’s work by major news corporations was particularly effective in marginalizing Webb. Webb understood what was going on. “The government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post,” Webb told FAIR in 1998. “They use the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. If you work through friendly reporters on major newspapers, it comes off as the New York Times saying it and not a mouthpiece of the CIA.” The attacks on Webb effectively ended his career as a journalist. In 2004, Webb was found dead, twice shot in the head. The coroner ruled his death a suicide. Since his death, it has become generally accepted by corporate media that Webb’s reporting was accurate (reporters had known about CIA-Contra drug trafficking before Webb took on the story, but stayed away from it because they worried it would ruin their careers).

Drug trafficking by elements in the United States government is well documented. Alfred W. McCoy, who spoke on this campus a few years back, and who has documented the extensive use of torture by the Bush/Cheney administration, wrote the landmark work on CIA-heroin trafficking in The Political of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Lawrence Hill Books, 2003). More recent US involvement in drug trafficking has been documented by, among others, Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall in Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (University of California Press, 1998), Castillo Celerino and Dave Harmon in Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras, and the Drug War (Sundial, 1994), Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (Verso, 1999), and Gary Webb in the aforementioned Dark Alliance .

What Webb exposed is one of the more stunning examples of political crime by the state. In a nutshell: The Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages/arms-for-cash/drugs-for-cash operations involved the United States government, led by Reagan and Bush Senior, selling advanced weaponry to entities in Iran (an official enemy of the United States at the time) in exchange for hostages and money. The weapons were sold through channels in Israel, one of the many US client states in the region. Revenues from weapons sales were funneled to the Contras operating in Nicaragua from bases in Honduras. The Contras were organized as death squads and terrorist cells striving to undermine the popular Sandinista government, which had charted a path away from its imperialist master towards sovereign independence, a democratic effort that caused it to become designated by government propagandists as a “communist menace.”

After tens of thousands of Nicaraguan civilians had been tortured and murdered by the Reagan/Bush crime network, fourteen administration officials were eventually charged with crimes. Eleven officials were convicted. As noted in my previous post, the World Court found the US government guilty of intentional terrorism. However, due to legal technicalities and pardons from George H. W. Bush, none of the convicts served any prison time. Bush pardoned six felons associated with the scheme: Elliot Abrams, Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George, Robert McFarlane, and Caspar Weinberger. Other major criminal actors involved were Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Otto Reich. The underlying crimes of treason, murder, and terrorism were never prosecuted. And, as explained earlier, the US prevented any action by the international community with its veto on the UN Security Council.

Despite their involvement in illegal weapons sales to an enemy nation, cocaine trafficking, and terrorism, several of the named officials continued to serve in government. Elliot Abrams became the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs under the George W. Bush. Otto Reich, the head of the Office of Public Diplomacy, the chief propaganda unit under Reagan, served under George W. Bush. John Negroponte served as Ambassador to Iraq, the National Intelligence Director, and Deputy Secretary of State under G. W. Bush. You can see him sitting behind Colin Powell while Powell lies to the UN Security Council about weapons of mass destruction in the run up to the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Six-time felon Poindexter served under Bush as Director of the Office of Information Awareness, Bush’s major domestic spying operation.

The Israeli military says that 1,166 people were killed in Operation Cast Lead, 60 percent of whom were “terrorist operatives.” The state of Israel shamelessly lies in defense of war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian civilians who live under its thumb. See the Goldstone report and the findings of the international, Palestinian, and Israeli-based human rights organizations that establish the truth of Israel’s aggression against Palestinian civilians, including hundred of children killed in Operation Cast Lead.

According to the state of Israel, Operation Cast Lead was intended to stop rocket attacks into Israel. Some 270 rockets and mortar rounds have been fired from Gaza into Israel since the end of the operation. Operation Cast Lead, besides being an international crime, was a failure in its “intended” purpose. I think it’s clear at this point that no move by Israel short of either making peace with Palestinians or eliminating every Palestinian from Gaza will stop rocket fire or some other sort of violence from at least a handful of Palestinians against Israeli towns within range.

If human rights matter, there is no military solution to this conflict. To be sure, British settlers in North America justified massacring Indians on the grounds that Indians responded violently to colonization. But that didn’t make any less obvious the true source of the violence. Nor did it make the violence morally justifiable. Today, it is not only morally unjustifiable to make war on civilian populations – it is illegal under international law.

Israel will have to make peace, and that peace will have to based on something resembling a just settlement concerning land, property, and resources. The minimum acceptable for something like this is Resolution 242, unanimously adopted by the UN in November 1967, stating that no nation can legitimately acquire territory by war under international law, that Israel must withdraw its forces from territories occupied during the 1967 war, that Israel must terminate its state of belligerency, that Israel must recognize the right of vessels to navigate through international waterways, that Israel negotiate a just settlement of the Palestinian refugee problem.

Realizing the demands of Resolution 242 requires withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the 1967 war and the occupied territories, dismantling all settlements in these areas and the occupied territories, and compensation and/or right of return to expelled Palestinians. The means the removal of Israel forces and settlers to behind the 1949 armistice lines.

More just would be a return to the UN partition map of 1947 established in Resolution 181. Even more just would be the establishment of a single democratic country in Palestine without any ethnic or religious character. These last two options will not happen because of the recalcitrance of Israel and its defender the United States. The first option will likely never happen for the same reason, but it has to be the bottom line or else Israel will continue to consume all of Palestine.

The Fatah constitution contains the following articles: “Article (7) The Zionist Movement is racial, colonial and aggressive in ideology, goals, organisation and method.” And “Article (8) The Israeli existence in Palestine is a Zionist invasion with a colonial expansive base, and it is a natural ally to colonialism and international imperialism.” If the Fatah constitution is wrong, then why does Israel continue to engage in colonial activities? Settlements are the hallmark of colonial expansion. If Zionism is not racist, then why does the Israeli state define itself in specific ethnic terms? Why does the dominant ethnic Jewish population systematically privilege Jews, particularly Ashkenazi Jews (Europeans), and disadvantage Arabs and Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, those of non-European origins? It isn’t a matter of opinion these characteristics of Zionism and Israeli behavior. They are matters of fact. If the leaders and citizens of Israel do not wish be defined in such a manner, then why, instead of pretending that the facts aren’t what they are, do they not change their policy and behavior?