Global Power Elite

The Sacramento Bee has a column today , April 12, 10 Tough Political Calls Obama has to make, by David Rothkopf , author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making.

He frames one of his questions as follows,
“will he (Obama) be willing to increase taxes on the middle-class taxpayers – or exacerbate class tensions by continuing to place all the burden on the most affluent Americans?”

What a preposterous statement.

We are in an economic crisis directed by Rothkopf’s Global Power Elite. In the U.S. after over three decades of stagnant wages for working people, the banking and corporate elite have received over $700 billion in taxpayers’ money.

These are class tensions. The rich, with the assistance of the Federal Reserve, have looted the banks and causing severe unemployment and economic recession. This is class conflict- and the rich are winning.


Although Rothkopf’s essay uses a frame to support the views of the Power Elite, the questions which he proposes are correct.

The fundamental questions are will the policies of the new Obama Administration side with the interests of the vast majority of the people- over 80% of the electorate, or will the Administration side with the Global Power Elite?

Dr. Duane E. Campbell
Democracy and Education Institute
www.democracyeducationinstitute.org/

Which Side Are you On?

Which Side Are You On?
100 Days
By Christopher Hayes

This article appeared in the April 6, 2009 edition of
The Nation. March 18, 2009.

Legislative fights in Washington rarely break down
neatly along class lines. Often, the coalitions on
either side of an issue are unwieldy and eclectic, with
one sector or industry battling another. The notable
exception is the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which
would reform a broken labor elections system, making it
easier (one might say possible) for workers to
unionize.

On March 10 the bill was reintroduced in the House and
the Senate, ushering in the final act in a six-year
legislative battle that has become the most bruising
and intense in Washington, one that--literally--pits
Capital against Labor.

For the GOP the politics are straightforward. Woven
into the DNA of the modern conservative is opposition
to unions and unionism of any kind. Defeating the bill
has become a kind of jobs program for right-wing hacks:
no fewer than sixteen groups are raising money,
mobilizing constituents, running ads and lobbying
senators to kill it.

But for a Democratic Party that for several decades has
awkwardly attempted to be the party of both business
and labor, it's a very difficult circle to square. "It
comes at a bad time," says a wealthy, business-friendly
Democratic donor. "[Democrats] are blaming bankers,
blaming lots of people, and it sounds like these people
are anti-business.... A lot of us warned the guys
working for Obama that [EFCA] would be a problem. They
said, Don't overreact to this--it's a long way from
becoming law, blah, blah, blah."

In this particular fight, class solidarity--if I may
use a phrase that has long since gone out of
fashion--seems to trump partisan loyalties.

Obama supporter and advocate of progressive taxation
Warren Buffett has come out against the legislation.
And according to that wealthy Democrat I talked with,
he's not alone: "I think a lot of Democratic donors are
downright pissed off," he told me. His fellow
well-heeled Democratic donors, he said, are complaining
that "this is the danger of having Democrats control
Congress and the White House." The head of a large
progressive nonprofit echoed the point. The act, he
said, "happened to come up a few times" recently with
donors. He was surprised by how intense their
opposition is. "The passion of it threw me off a bit,"
he added.

Part of the source of these tensions is the fact that
the disgraced financial sector (which increasingly
leans Democratic in its donations) has largely thrown
its weight behind opposing the bill--despite the fact
that these same businesses are being kept on life
support by the government. A Citibank retail analyst
downgraded Wal-Mart's stock for fear that the bill
would pass; the next day she hosted an "informational"
conference call featuring a representative from the US
Chamber of Commerce, who spent the entire call warning
darkly about EFCA. (After the Huffington Post broke the
news of the anti-EFCA call in mid-March, Citi hurriedly
hosted a call with members of the United Food and
Commercial Workers.)

"This is the biggest battle between labor and
corporations in this country since the Taft-Hartley Act
of 1947," the AFL-CIO's organizing director, Stewart
Acuff, told me. What makes the battle especially
intense is that while both sides have attempted to
shape public opinion, polls show that the issue doesn't
amount to even a blip on voters' radar. A recent poll
found majority support for a bill that would make it
easier to organize, but only 12 percent of respondents
said they were following the EFCA bill "very closely."

That means victory will ultimately come not from
shaping public opinion but from pressuring the handful
of swing senators. Each side is ferociously organizing
constituents in those senators' states.

A few of these red state Democrats--in a kind of parody
of squishy centrism--have hinted they'd like to find
some legislative compromise. "This legislation is not
perfect," Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor said recently.
"And while I have been supportive in the past, I will
consider amendments to make it better if and when it is
considered by the Senate." Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson
said he thinks that "there'll be a major effort to
modify it before it ever comes up for consideration,
and I'll have to take a look and see what it is then."
Some senators have floated compromises, such as
extending the amount of time management would have to
negotiate a first contract before binding arbitration.

If Senate Democrats think an amendment will give them
political cover, they're fooling themselves. Just ask
big business. Speaking on the Citi conference call,
Glenn Spencer of the Chamber of Commerce said, "There
is no amendment you could make to this bill to make it
acceptable. From top to bottom it's a bad piece of
legislation. You'd have to start with scrapping this
bill."

Labor also sees EFCA as a black and white issue and is
eager to take away the middle ground. Acuff says the
fundamental question is, "Are you for unions or are you
against unions? If you're against this legislation,
you're against unions. You can't say you're for unions
if you don't think workers should be able to form
unions without fear of retaliation."

Sometime in the next few months, every Democratic
elected official is going to have to answer a very old
question that in a post-meltdown world is newly
resonant: Which side are you on?


About Christopher Hayes Christopher Hayes is The
Nation's Washington editor. His wife works in the White
House Counsel's office.

______________________

Socialism: lets use the terms correctly

Socialism Without a Soul
Posted on Mar 10, 2009

By Robert Scheer

Newt Gingrich is right: “It is European socialism transplanted to Washington.” How else to describe an economy in which the government controls the entire financial center and is now supplying life support for the auto industry? That’s on top of the existing socialist economy run by the military-industrial complex, which, thanks to George W. Bush, now absorbs upward of 60 percent of the non-entitlement federal budget.

Although we still have a way to go to catch up with the good parts of the European system, including universal health care, high-quality public education and decent working conditions, we do have a system that is now as socialist in budget size as Europe’s. That part I get when I listen to the right-wingers on Fox News bemoaning the reversal of the Reagan Revolution. But what I don’t understand is how in the world they can blame this startling turn of events on Barack Obama.

The vast majority of money allocated so far on President Obama’s watch is an extension of Bush’s banking bailout, which has committed trillions to failed Wall Street conglomerates. I certainly don’t want to defend the bailout and personally think the banks and stockbrokers deserve to go belly up, but what does that mess have to do with Obama, who was in college when the Reagan Revolution launched the deregulation that allowed Wall Street to run wild?

Didn’t Obama inherit the current financial meltdown less than two months ago from the Republicans, who for eight years under Bush assured us that the markets were not in any need of tighter regulation? Wasn’t it GOP congressional members led by folks like Gingrich who pushed though the deregulation legislation that enabled the growth of “too big to fail” financial institutions that now have to be saved by the taxpayers?

Nor has Obama demanded anything more in the way of accountability from those Wall Street swindlers than had the Bush administration. Under both presidents a total of $170 billion was given to insurance giant AIG, and, as The Wall Street Journal reported, at least $50 billion of that money was passed on to top foreign and domestic banks without any public accounting. Indeed, the second in command at the Fed told a Senate committee last week that he wouldn’t reveal the names of the banks that grabbed our money.

Nor has there been any serious demand put on the banks to use the hundreds of billions in federal funds they received to increase liquidity. Indeed, the banks are raising interest rates and cutting limits on credit cards at a time when the government is hoping consumers will use those cards to pump some life into the retail market. As bank industry analyst Meredith Whitney wrote in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed article, consumer credit card lines “were reduced by nearly $500 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008 alone.” She estimates that credit card limits for consumers will be halved over the next year, mostly on consumers who have not done anything wrong. This will take “credit away from people who have the ability to pay their bills,” she notes.

So what we have here is socialism without even the pretense of a soul. Certainly that has been the case with the abject refusal of the banks that received government bailouts to be more aggressive in preventing home foreclosures. And the Obama administration has made it clear that it has no intention of taking over the operation of any of the mega-companies that are in trouble, even when, as in the case of AIG, the government already owns 80 percent of the shares. The reason? Because that would be viewed as nationalization.

So what exactly would Obama’s critics do differently? Nothing on the bailout side. Instead, they have settled for carping criticism of the stimulus package, playing games by nitpicking lesser-cost programs while ignoring the big items that most governors, be they Republican or Democrat, eagerly want. The great fear of the GOP seems to be that some of the stimulus program might actually prove helpful to struggling Americans, but the Republicans can’t just come out of the closet and say so.

What they have picked up on instead is that Obama’s tax cuts provide some redistribution of income to favor the rapidly disappearing middle class at the expense of the super-wealthy, who have profited wildly from Bush tax cuts. Which brings us back to Gingrich’s complaint that Obama is importing European socialism. If that means a system of governance in which a robust middle class is rewarded for work with a strong social safety net supported by higher taxes on the most affluent, well, let’s get it on.

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.

Bill Moyers on Socialism: http://www-tc.pbs.org/moyers/rss/media/249essay.m4v

Class and Schools

“If as a society we choose to preserve big social class differences, we must necessarily also accept substantial gaps between the achievement of lower-class and middle class children. Closing the gap requires not only better schools, although those are certainly needed, but also reform in the social and economic institutions that presently prepare children to learn in radically different ways. It will not be cheap.”
(Rothstein, 2004) Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap. Teachers College Press.

Currently, our schools work for some students and do not work for others. As Berliner and Biddle well demonstrated in The Manufactured Crisis, (1995) schools for middle class Black, Latino and European American children fundamentally fulfill their purposes. But the schools for poor African American, Latino and European American children fail. And while this failure effects all children, it disproportionately impacts the children of African Americans and Latinos. Fully half of all their children are in failing schools.
In 2005 on the NAEP assessment, nationally over 58% of Black and 54% Latino children score below basic in Reading levels in 4th. Grade. (Reading Report Card of the National Center for Educational Statistics.(2005) Differences in math scores are similarly stark.
That is to say, we do not have a general education crisis in the nation, we have a crisis for Black, Latino, Asian and poor white kids. We are not providing these children of the new majorities with what W.E. B. du Boise called ," a fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be."

Duane Campbell