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Why Occupy?

February 22nd, 2012

From: http://peoplesworld.org/why-occupy/

by Scott Hiley

The following is excerpted from introductory remarks given at a teach-in by Eric Ruder on the history of NATO and the G8, at Northwestern University, 2/15/12.

Members of the Evanston and Northwestern community, brothers and sisters, comrades, I’m addressing you tonight not as a professor, and more emphatically not as a representative or officer of the University on whose campus we have gathered. I’m speaking to you as a worker, as an intellectual, as a citizen of the world; as an Occupier, nothing more and nothing less.

The common wisdom, handed down by venerable elders with a bemused smile and a world-weary sigh, is that young people are idealistic; that you (or we, depending on how old you think I am) want to change the world, but that we will one day “grow up,” make the wrenching transition from innocence to experience, and come to the realization that things are as they are, and that the best one can hope for is to play by the rules, tailor one’s expectations to the ugly reality of the world, and surround oneself with what joy and comfort one can muster.

This is a lie.

The world is changing. It changes every day, by pressure from above (which we call the status quo) and by pressure from below (which we call resistance, dissidence, uprising, and insurrection).

Two examples here will suffice. In Greece, the cradle of western democracy, the troika of the EU, the IMF, and the ECB have imposed yet another series of draconian austerity measures designed to protect bank profits by shredding the social protections of workers.

The austerity plans, which have been accompanied by humiliating demands for German and European supervision of Greek finances, met first with protests, and now meet with open riots. Over the weekend, Athens burned, and workers have decided that if they cannot be heard at the ballot box, they will be heard in the streets.

In Wisconsin and Ohio, Republican governors and Republican-dominated legislatures tried to ram through bills gutting the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively about their working conditions. In both cases, workers mobilized by the tens and hundreds of thousands.

In Wisconsin, after months of miltant action in the state capitol, over one million voters signed petitions calling for a recall election of Governor Scott Walker-the largest portion of a state electorate ever to petition for the recall of a governor. In Ohio, workers petitioned for a referendum on the anti-worker legislation, which was then defeated by an overwhelming majority of the state’s voters.

To this list we might add the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring (however contradictory their results), mass protests of Israeli and Palestinian youth in the streets of Tel Aviv, the Bolivarian movement in South America, the experiments with workers’ collective self-management in Argentina…

The world has entered a moment where millions of people are coming to believe that radical change is not only possible, but necessary: a moment like the great labor struggles of the 20s and 30s, which won the New Deal reforms here in the United States; a moment like the fight for civil rights in the 50s and 60s. While it is hard to predict, in any sort of programmatic way, how radical change will happen and what it will entail, I think we can say a couple of things with certainty.

First of all, radical change will come through radical democracy. The common thread running through every mass uprising on the current world stage-from Tahrir Square to Wall Street and Wisconsin-is the demand that the people themselves, all of them, be vested with control over their own political existence. This means not puppet democracy, not regime change at gunpoint or under the boots of an invading army, not corporate oligarchy masquerading as a representative republic, but real, sovereign, popular, participatory democracy.

Second, because of its thorougly democratic nature, radical change will take place on a class basis. The demand for a fair voice in democratic institutions is indissociable from the demand for policies that address the real concerns of the masses of working people: jobs, economic security, dignity in the workplace, and access to education based on the desire to learn rather than ability to pay.

These two demands-for real democracy and for an economy that serves workers-are neatly summed up in the motto of the Occupy movement: “We are the 99 percent.”

Indeed, to my mind, Occupy (whether Wall Street, Chicago, or Northwestern) has no other demands except those expressed in the very form of our organization, the general assembly: we want a public, democratic political culture in which all people can participate meaningfully, and we fight for the social and economic changes such a political culture will make possible.

We fight for our right, the right of the global 99 percent, to build a world that meets our needs.

So why do we Occupy Northwestern? More importantly, why should you? First of all, I would say, because we all Occupy Northwestern already. We are members of the community.

Moreover, for the students in attendance, you have the time, training, and resources for serious political engagement. You are preparing for positions of leadership in law, government, business, and intellectual life. You have the ability to change the world, which carries with it the responsibility to change it for the better.

Whatever issue speaks to you-peace, democracy, economic justice, the struggles against racism, sexism, and homo- and transphobia-get involved. Vote, organize, study, argue, protest, put up flyers and circulate petitions. Make demands. Occupy. Begin building a better, fairer world, rather than simply accepting the one we’ve been given. We are the 99 percent, and we can do amazing things when we stand together.

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America’s last hope: A strong labor movement

February 22nd, 2012

From: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/19/americas_last_hope_a_strong_labor_movement/singleton/

by Dorian Warren

To achieve economic justice in the 21st century, we need to fight for democracy in the workplace

 

The 99 Percent Plan is a joint Roosevelt Institute-Salon series that explores how progressives can shape a new vision for the economy. This is the third essay in the series.

The fate of the labor movement is the fate of American democracy. Without a strong countervailing force like organized labor, corporations and wealthy elites advancing their own interests are able to exert undue influence over the political system, as we’ve seen in every major policy debate of recent years.

Yet the American labor movement is in crisis and is the weakest it’s been in 100 years. That truism has been a progressive mantra since the Clinton administration. However, union density has continued to decline from roughly 16 percent in 1995 to 11.8 percent of all workers and just 6.9 percent of workers in the private sector. Unionized workers in the public sector now make up the majority of the labor movement for the first time in history, which is precisely why — a la Wisconsin and 14 other states — they have been targeted by the right for all out destruction.

The urgency is striking. Instead of being fundamentally discredited, the oligarchs and plutocrats who crashed our economy are raking in record profits and acting even more aggressively to bury the American labor movement once and for all. Over the last year, several labor leaders have told me that they believe unions have only about five more years left if they don’t figure out some kind of breakthrough strategy.

The complete collapse of unions would have devastating consequences. The labor movement has played a crucial role in advancing economic justice in the workplace and in politics. Union membership raises median weekly earnings and reduces race- and gender-based income gaps, and union workers are much more likely to receive health care and pension benefits than workers who are not members of a labor union. The decline of organized labor is directly linked to the rise in economic inequality over the last 40 years and the onset of a “Second Gilded Age.” The decline in union density coupled with the decline in the real value of the minimum wage explains one-third of the dramatic growth in wage inequality since the early 1970s.

Over the past 30 years, American employers have become even more aggressive at violating their workers’ rights to organize under a toothless and outdated labor law regime. Contrary to the intent of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which made it national policy to encourage and promote collective bargaining, the NLRA now provides incentives for employers to break the law routinely and ignore any compulsion to negotiate collective agreements. When there is little outrage for the daily violations of workers’ liberty (employers fire workers illegally in 1 in 3 union campaigns for attempting to exercise freedom of association), our democracy is in peril.

As worker power has eroded in the workplace, the labor movement’s political clout has also declined. Measured by both members and money, unions are  still the most influential and resourceful left-wing constituency in American politics. Organized labor also remains the most powerful core of the national Democratic Party by several measures, including campaign contributions, grassroots mobilization efforts, lobbying and setting the party’s legislative agenda. Indeed, the labor movement spent a record amount of money to help get a Democrat elected to the White House in 2008.

With a labor-friendly White House and a Democratic Congress, organized labor began strategizing about how and when to push for its No. 1 priority, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Labor law reform would not only help the flagging movement survive but also offer an indirect solution to our growing problems of economic inequality and the catastrophic Great Recession. By leveling the playing field between workers and employers, higher union density decreases wage inequality in the American labor market while increasing purchasing power of consumers.

But the move to pass EFCA failed, revealing just how weak organized labor has become. Now, with no hope for labor law reform in sight, is the time to rethink the role of the labor movement in the 21st century. Progressives need a strong and vibrant labor movement that focuses not just on workers’ rights, but can also act as a democratizing force advancing social justice and expanding worker, citizen and resident power in the workplace and in their communities.

The labor movement is the critical anchor and enabler of democracy grounded on a notion of freedom. Most people have an intuitive understanding of what democracy means: rule by the people (as opposed to rule by the few or an elite). Yet, as Corey Robin so eloquently points out in his book on fear, Americans give up their individual freedom and democratic voice every single day they walk into work. The workplace is an authoritarian dictatorship, and we accept this as legitimate.

Now is the time to challenge that feudal relationship. We need to call into question the assumption that Americans believe democracy stops at the workplace door. If we would not stand for a despot to rule over us with impunity, why do we let the boss do so every day of the workweek? Any progressive advance needs a strong labor movement to achieve a fully free and democratic workplace and society. This vision of freedom and democracy manifests in two domains: the workplace and the southern region of the country.

First, labor’s role must be made much more central at the workplace and in the economy more broadly. Labor can, and should, be a governing co-partner with business and government in the economy. What labor brings to the table is a vision of growth with equity. And there are already examples of this kind of union and worker organizational influence in the economy at the regional level. The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) and Working Partnerships USA, both in California, have shown how labor can become a governing partner in economic decision-making at the regional level.

Another aspect of centralizing labor’s role in the economy and advancing workplace democracy is to expand workers’ voice and power at the bargaining table.  A 21st century vision of the American labor movement is one that destroys the divide between labor and community that has long governed the politics and practices of unions. What the emergence of new forms of worker organizations have taught us is that workers are also residents in communities, while residents are also workers, and there are organizational models available that take all workers’ identities into account.

While labor law constricts the scope of issues that unions can negotiate at the workplace, it doesn’t prevent worker organizations from bargaining in the political arena for affordable housing, equitable development, local, regional and national economic policy, criminal justice, or the wide range of issues that affect poor and working class people. Stephen Lerner, among others, has outlined what a wider scope of collective bargaining might look like. Imagine, for instance, that the United Auto Workers could negotiate over the environmental standards of the cars they produce instead of just wages and benefits. Such a vision requires a far-reaching campaign to redefine the scope of collective bargaining and workers’ voices at work. This is a 10- or 20-year effort to be sure, but one that will be crucial to any future the labor movement has in the U.S.

Directly related to expanding labor’s role in the economy and expanding the scope of collective bargaining is advancing freedom in the workplace. In short: democracy, over autocracy, at work. This would go beyond the softer slogan of the AFL-CIO’s “voice at work.” This is an admittedly long-term project. But several concrete demands arise out of the broad notion of a workplace democracy. For instance, the Employee Free Choice Act would have allowed workers a modicum of political liberty at the workplace; it aimed to restore workers’ rights to freedom of association. But a deeper and even more controversial demand proposes an end to management prerogative over all workplace decisions. Workplace democracy means truly giving workers a “voice” at work. Whether through work committees or required seats for employee representatives on the company’s board of directors, a deeper vision of workplace democracy enables workers’ voices to have a real impact.

The second domain for a 21st century labor movement is geographic: finally democratizing the South through the building of a Southern labor movement. After the CIO’s Operation Dixie failed to organize Southern workers in the late 1940s, with a few exceptions mostly in the public sector, organized labor gave up on the South. We’ve been suffering the consequences ever since. The Southern, Walmart model of low-wage labor markets is being imported to the North. We only have to look at the attack on public sector workers in Wisconsin and Michigan and the recent passage of Right-to-Work legislation in Indiana to understand that Northern governors and the Republican Party are trying to turn their states into Yankee versions of Southern Right-to-Work (for less) states.

Instead of retreating to a defensive posture, organized labor should launch an ambitious and bold campaign to organize the South. A Southern labor movement would galvanize workers in the region who, contrary to popular belief, would like to become dues-paying union members. Given the dramatic demographic changes occurring in the South involving increased migrations of people of color who tend to be the most pro-union and pro-worker organization (see the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ recent victory over Trader Joe’s), the opportunity for organizing and building a Southern labor movement is greater today than even 60 years ago under Operation Dixie. This effort would not only transform the low-wage economic model of the South, it would prevent the race to the bottom from North to South, and most important, it would transform the politics of the region and fundamentally the country.

What grounds this vision of a 21st century labor movement is the core idea of extending what Americans claim to cherish in politics and civil society to the workplace: democracy, liberty and freedom. The consolidation of income, wealth and political power by the 1 percent over the last several decades is directly related to the decline of workers’ voice and power. Rebuilding a truly countervailing (and democratic) power, as the labor movement did in the 1930s and 1940s, will require a bold and convincing vision of workplace democracy and freedom. Workers and their organizations have historically played this anchoring role for progressive politics throughout American history. Now is the time to reclaim this historic charge for the 21st century.

Dorian T. Warren is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is also an Assistant Professor of Political Science & Public Affairs at Columbia University. You can follow him on Twitter @dorianwarren.More Dorian Warren
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How the government enables Wall Street parasites to cash in on the crisis

February 22nd, 2012

From: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/feb2012/pers-f22.shtml

by Andre Damon and Barry Grey

As the Obama administration concludes a settlement with five major banks, quashing state investigations into rampant fraud related to home foreclosures, speculation in the mortgage-backed securities that caused the 2008 meltdown is once again picking up.

Saturday’s New York Times reported that Greg Lippmann, a former Deutsche Bank trader who made millions of dollars personally and $1.5 billion for Deutsche Bank by betting against mortgage-backed securities, at the same time his bank was selling them to clients, is back in business buying and selling these toxic assets.

The article noted that others resuming trading in these assets include American International Group (AIG), the insurance giant that was bailed out by the government to the tune of $100 billion, and a former mortgage team from Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank whose collapse triggered the global financial panic on September 15, 2008.

Lippmann, who was the head collateralized debt obligation (CDO) trader at Deutsche Bank during the housing bubble and its implosion, has now started his own hedge fund, LibreMax Capital, and succeeded in raising over a billion dollars to speculate in mortgage-backed securities. (CDOs are complex securities comprised of mortgage-backed securities, which are themselves assembled from pools of home loans).

Thus, three-and-a half years after the financial crash that triggered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the same speculators whose swindling caused the banking meltdown have not only been bailed out by the government, they have been put in a position to make a new financial killing by the government’s policy of cheap credit and its refusal to carry out serious bank reform or pursue criminal prosecutions.

Lippmann’s activities during the meltdown were described in a 600-plus page report on the Wall Street crash released last April by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. That report, which detailed fraudulent and illegal actions by Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Washington Mutual and the complicity of the ratings agencies and federal bank regulators, was quickly buried by the media and has remained a dead letter.

It noted that Lippmann referred to mortgage-backed securities like the ones Deutsche Bank was selling at the time as “crap,” and predicted that they would plummet in value. It stated: “At one point, Mr. Lippmann was asked to buy a specific CDO security and responded that it ‘rarely trades,’ but he ‘would take it and try to dupe someone’ into buying it. He also at times referred to the industry’s ongoing CDO marketing efforts as a ‘CDO machine’ or ‘Ponzi scheme.’ ”

Deutsche Bank, according to the Senate report, went on to sell toxic mortgage-backed securities “without disclosing to potential investors that its global head trader of CDOs had extremely negative views” about the securities, or that, according to the bank’s models, the assets had recently lost billions of dollars in value.

Despite earning millions through his documented involvement in what he himself called a “Ponzi scheme,” Lippmann is neither doing time in prison nor fending off federal investigations. Rather, he is back to his old business of placing bets on toxic assets.

And business is booming. The New York Times article observes that there has recently been renewed interest by banks and hedge funds in the very mortgage-backed securities that were instrumental in the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, as these assets, despite falling in value, were never decommissioned and continue to trade.

The revived interest is partly attributable to low prices, which, amid a housing market that shows little sign of recovery, have continued to plunge. At the current prices, the article notes, people like Lippmann stand to make lucrative profits on the securities even if home values continue to fall.

Among the factors the Times cites as creating a favorable environment for renewed mortgage speculation is the settlement with the major banks on foreclosure violations announced February 9 by the administration. President Obama hailed the agreement as a boon to homeowners and a sharp rebuke to the banks.

It was nothing of the kind. It was a windfall for the banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial—relieving them of the prospect of untold billions in fines and damages related to the state probes that were closed down. In return, they were required to make a wrist-slap cash payment of $5.9 billion and pledge another $25 billion in supposed home loan principal write-downs and other forms of relief for distressed homeowners.

And as the Financial Times reported last week, the bulk of the cost of the settlement will be covered by taxpayer funds. At the insistence of the Obama administration, the banks will be allowed to make use of an existing federal program, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which provides public funds to banks that agree to reduce the principal on troubled home loans. Nearly two-thirds of the value of any write-downs the five banks make will be recompensed with funds from this program.

In effect, the value of mortgage-backed securities will be underwritten by government subsidies, opening up a wide vista for profiteering by Lippmann and his cohorts.

The case of Lippmann exemplifies how the policies of the Bush and Obama administrations have enabled the financial elite to cash in on the crisis amid the social ruins left by its criminal activities. While millions of people have lost their homes, either through fraudulent foreclosures or as a result of predatory mortgage practices, the financial parasites continue to rake in millions.

These developments expose, first, the boundless cynicism and dishonesty of Obama, who seeks to present right-wing, anti-working-class and pro-Wall Street policies as “populist” measures designed to lower unemployment and help families stay in their homes.

More fundamentally, they demonstrate that the entire political establishment and both parties, the Democrats as well as Republicans, are instruments of a financial aristocracy that is steeped in criminality and antithetical to the most basic needs of the people.

The political system cannot be reformed. It must be replaced by a government of, by and for the working class committed to ending unemployment and poverty and establishing social equality. A mass socialist movement must be built to close down the Wall Street casino, expropriate the ill-gotten wealth of the speculators, and place the major levers of economic life under public ownership and democratic control.

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Defend public education!

February 22nd, 2012

From: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/feb2012/educ-f22.shtml

by Phyllis Scherrer, Socialist Equality Party candidate for Vice President

As a schoolteacher for the past 15 years, I share the outrage felt by millions of teachers and other school workers over the ongoing assault on public education. Budget cuts at the local, state and federal level have devastated school funding, and hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs have been eliminated in the last three years. The Obama administration has taken a leading role in this attack, promoting charter schools, privatization and attacks on wages, working conditions and job security for teachers.

This week marked a new stage in this attack, with one of the Republican presidential candidates, Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, openly opposing the basic principle of universal public education as an “anachronism.” He denounced what he called “factory schools”—schools where all children, not merely the children of the privileged, have access to education, from basic literacy to the heights of human culture.

Santorum is only venting in the most disgusting and reactionary fashion the hatred that the ruling class of multimillionaires feels for the principles of democracy and equal rights for working people. They are creating a nightmare America that replaces “of the people, by the people and for the people” with “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.”

Both of the parties that serve corporate America, the Democrats and the Republicans, are responsible for the deterioration of conditions in the schools. In Pennsylvania, where I have taught for the past 15 years, I have seen education systematically undermined under both Democratic and Republican governors and Democratic and Republican presidents.

The Bush administration devised its “No Child Left Behind” program to promote over-testing of children and punitive closing of schools as a bipartisan measure with the leading liberal Democrat, Senator Edward Kennedy. This has been succeeded by Obama’s “Race to the Top” program, which uses financial grants to a handful of states to promote school privatization and mass firings of teachers as in Central Falls, Rhode Island.

The assault on public education is an outcome of the growth of social inequality in America, which, in turn, is the product of the historical decay of American and world capitalism. The immense and growing chasm between the top 1 percent of society and the broad mass of the population is incompatible with democratic principles and the social reforms of the past, including the establishment of public education.

The expansion of public education in the 19th and 20th centuries was driven by a profound belief that in a democracy, every citizen should be literate and have access to culture, and that every child—whether their parents were former slaves, day laborers or immigrants who spoke no English—was educable. Moreover, it was well understood that cold, hungry and needy children could not learn as well as their peers. For this reason, educators fought for social reforms to provide a minimal safety net to children and families in poverty.

This fundamental social gain of working people is under attack as never before. In Pennsylvania, where I live, the state government under Republican Governor Tom Corbett has just enacted its second round of major budget cuts in education funding, for a total cut of nearly $1.2 billion over two years. This is an openly class-based policy that has changed the funding formula that once provided additional funds for the poorest school districts. As a result, more than a dozen school districts may be forced to close their doors entirely, and teachers in one poor district, Chester Upland, are now working without pay.

The Democrats are no different. At Obama’s State of the Union address last month, where he praised the Race to the Top program for K-12 education and proposed a similar measure for higher education, a teacher from the Chester Upland district, Sara Ferguson, was seated near Michelle Obama as a guest of the White House. The Obama administration declared these teachers “heroes” because they agreed to continue working for free after the district ran out of funding.

The conditions in the Chester Upland are the direct consequence of the policies supported by the Obama administration. Some 45 percent of students now attend two charter schools, diverting funding from public schools, forcing the layoff of half the public school work force, and creating an average class size of over 40 students in some schools. How is it possible to teach under these circumstances?

The two teachers unions, the NEA and AFT, have already endorsed Obama and will campaign for him in 2012, telling teachers that he is the defender of education. This only demonstrates the completely useless and rotten character of these old organizations. Working people, including teachers and parents of school children, need a new political party and a new political perspective to defend the right of public education.

The Socialist Equality Party is the only political movement fighting for the working class, to take hold of the reins of society and utilize the abundant resources available and created by it, for the benefit of all. A high-quality education, a right fought for by the working class over two centuries of struggle, is an absolute necessity.

In our election campaign the SEP will fight for teachers, students and parents to defend public education in a political struggle against the Obama administration, the Democrats and Republicans, and the capitalist system, which they all defend. I urge you to join this fight and support the SEP candidates for president and vice president.

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Cooperatives Over Corporations

February 22nd, 2012

From: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/22-4

by Jim Hightower

We’re being told by today’s High Priests of Conventional Wisdom that everyone and everything in our economic cosmos necessarily revolves around one dazzling star: the corporation.

This heavenly institution, the HPCW explain, has such financial and political mass that it is the optimal force for organizing and directing our society’s economic affairs, including the terms of employment and production. While other forces are in play (workers, consumers, the environment, communities and so forth), they are subordinate to the superior gravitational pull of the corporate order. Profits, executive equanimity and a healthy Wall Street pulse rate are naturally the economy’s foremost concerns.

How nice. For the wealthy few. Not nice for the rest of us, though. We’re presently seeing the effect of this enthronement of self-serving corporate elites. Millions of Americans are out of work, underemployed and tumbling from the middle class down toward poverty. Yet excessively paid and pampered CEOs (recently rebranded as “job creators” by fawning GOP politicians) are idly sitting on some $2 trillion in cash, refusing to put that enormous pile of money to work on job creation.

The Powers That Be keep us tethered to this unjust system of plutocratic rule only by constantly ballyhooing it as a divine perpetual wealth machine that showers manna on America. Any tampering with the hierarchical control of the finely tuned machinery of trickle-down corporate capitalism, they warn, will cause a collapse and crush American prosperity.

Ha! Prosperity for whom? The corporate order itself has come crashing down on the prosperity of America’s workaday majority — and the people are no longer fooled about the system’s “divinity.” From the Wisconsin rebellion to the outing of the Koch brothers’ efforts to impose their plutocratic regime on us, from the Occupy movement to the spreading grassroots campaign to get corporate cash out of our elections, we commoners have finally peeked behind the curtain to see the fraud being perpetrated by the wizards of wealth inequality.

Yet, tightly clutching their wealth, the wizards retort that the only alternative is the hellish horror of government control, screeching “socialist” at all critics to scare off any real change.

But wait. The choices for our country’s rising forces of economic and political democracy are not limited to corporate or government control. There’s another, much better way of organizing America’s economic strength: The Cooperative Way.

Cooperatives can (and do) provide a deeply democratic, locally controlled, highly productive, efficient percolate up capitalism.

Co-ops are wholly in step with the values, character, spirit and history of the American people.

While socialism has been cast by the corporatists as a destroyer of our sainted free-enterprise system, the cooperative approach is not an -ism at all, but a democratic structure that literally frees the enterprise of the great majority of Americans — which is why the co-op movement is fast spreading throughout our country.

While it’s rarely mentioned by the conventional media, completely missing in the political discourse, not considered by economic planners and chambers of commerce and not known by most of the public, there are 30,000 cooperatives in America (with 73,000 places of business). A 2009 survey by the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Cooperatives (www.uwcc.wisc.edu) found that these energetic enterprises have 130 million members, registering $653 billion in sales and employing more than 2 million people.

There are several types of co-ops, including those owned by workers (there are 11,000 of these, with 13 million worker-owners). Also, there are cooperatives owned by consumers, producers, local businesses, artists and communities, as well as hybrids of those categories. They function in every sector of our economy — manufacturing, health care, transportation, banking, farming and food, media, massage, child care, funeral services, interpreting and translating services, advertising, home building, high tech, engineering, energy … and even a strip club in San Francisco.

Co-op businesses do everything that a corporation can do, but with a democratic structure, an equitable sharing of income and a commitment to the common good of the community and future generations.

You might be surprised to learn that such national brand names as ACE Hardware, Best Western Hotels, Organic Valley, REI and True Value Hardware are organized as co-ops, rather than as corporations. The strength of the movement, however, is in the limitless number of local cooperatives flowering all across the country. From Union Cab of Madison (http://www.unioncab.com/) to KOOP Radio in Austin (http://www.koop.org/), from Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland (www.evergreencoop.com) to Circle Pines Center in Michigan (www.circlepinescenter.org), citizen co-ops are highly prized for their unique personalities, human scale, democratic values and community focus.

Cooperatives are a big, structural reform that ordinary Americans can implement right where they live, giving small groups a pragmatic and effective way to push back against the arrogance and avarice of the centralized, hierarchical corporate model. Not only do co-ops work economically, they also make people important again, offering real democratic participation and putting some “unity” back in “community.”

© 2012 Creators.com

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

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When Does Violence Matter?

February 22nd, 2012

From: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/22-2

by Tom Engelhardt

In December 2001, 110 of 112 revelers at a wedding died, thanks to a B-52 and two B-1B bombers using precision-guided weapons to essentially wipe out a village in Eastern Afghanistan (and then, in a second strike, to take out Afghans digging in the rubble).  The incident got next to no attention here.   It wasn’t, after all, a case of American “violence,” but a regrettable error.  No one thought to suggest that the invasion of Afghanistan should be shut down because of it, nor was it discredited due to that mass killing.

It had been a mistake.  As would be the case with those other weddings obliterated by U.S. air power in Iraq and Afghanistan in the years to come.  As were the funerals and baby-naming rites blasted away in those later years.  As have been, more recently, the more than 60 children killed by CIA drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the funerals hit by those same drones, and the recently documented secondary strikes — as in that December 2001 attack — on rescuers trying to pull the wounded out of the rubble.

None of this, of course, gets significant attention here.  Despite the pleas of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, few here suggest shutting down U.S. and NATO air operations in that country because of violence against civilians.  There are few cries of horror for the eight Afghan sheepherders, none out of their teens, one possibly as young as six, who were killed by a NATO air strike in Kapisa Province just the other day.  There are no major editorials or front-page media stories calling for the U.S. and its allies to mend their violent ways or change their policies because of them.  It’s certainly not popular to suggest that such acts might discredit American policy abroad.

Yet, as Rebecca Solnit points out, “violence” within and by the Occupy movement in this country — we’re talking about several sexual assaults in Occupy camps, a suicide, drug use, and a small amount of property damage, bottles thrown, and the like by outliers at Occupy demonstrations — has in certain quarters somehow been enough to discredit the movement, even in some cases to paint it as a kind of living nightmare.  Such violence, minimal as it might have been, instantly discredited Occupy on the American landscape.

This, mind you, in a society in which 14,000 murders were committed in 2011, in which more than 30,000 people died in traffic accidents, in which a recent Pentagon report indicated that violent sexual crimes in the military have risen by 64% since 2006 (95% against women, even though they make up only 14% of the force’s personnel).  And yet somehow, neither weapons, nor cars, nor the U.S. military is discredited by such violence.

It would, in fact, be surprising to imagine that a movement whose camps actually welcomed, housed, and fed those essentially thrown away by this society would lack problems. In truth, Occupy should have been hailed for its assault on violence at every level in this society. Nothing could be more striking in Solnit’s latest piece, “Mad, Passionate Love — and Violence,” than the statistic she cites on the remarkably unnoticed drop in violence in Oakland, California, in the weeks before Occupy Oakland itself was violently assaulted by that city’s police force.

Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book is the The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books). Previous books include The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His most recent book is  (Haymarket Books.)  To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

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Calling Afghanistan what it is: A drug war

February 21st, 2012

From: http://www.salon.com/2010/03/31/afghanistan_as_drug_war/singleton/

by Alfred McCoy

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com

In ways that have escaped most observers, the Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.

After a year of cautious debate and costly deployments, President Obama finally launched his new Afghan war strategy at 2:40 am on Feb. 13, 2010, in a remote market town called Marja in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. As a wave of helicopters descended on Marja’s outskirts spitting up clouds of dust, hundreds of U.S. Marines dashed through fields sprouting opium poppies toward the town’s mud-walled compounds.

After a week of fighting, U.S. war commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal choppered into town with Afghanistan’s vice-president and Helmand’s provincial governor. Their mission: a media roll-out for the general’s new-look counterinsurgency strategy based on bringing government to remote villages just like Marja.

At a carefully staged meet-and-greet with some 200 villagers, however, the vice-president and provincial governor faced some unexpected, unscripted anger. “If they come with tractors,” one Afghan widow announced to a chorus of supportive shouts from her fellow farmers, “they will have to roll over me and kill me before they can kill my poppy.”

For these poppy growers and thousands more like them, the return of government control, however contested, brought with it a perilous threat: opium eradication.

Throughout all the shooting and shouting, American commanders seemed strangely unaware that Marja might qualify as the world’s heroin capital — with hundreds of laboratories, reputedly hidden inside the area’s mud-brick houses, regularly processing the local poppy crop into high-grade heroin. After all, the surrounding fields of Helmand Province produce a remarkable 40 percent of the world’s illicit opium supply, and much of this harvest has been traded in Marja. Rushing through those opium fields to attack the Taliban on Day One of this offensive, the Marines missed their real enemy, the ultimate force behind the Taliban insurgency, as they pursued just the latest crop of peasant guerrillas whose guns and wages are funded by those poppy plants. “You can’t win this war,” said one U.S. Embassy official just back from inspecting these opium districts, “without taking on drug production in Helmand Province.”

Indeed, as Air Force One headed for Kabul Sunday, National Security Adviser James L. Jones assured reporters that President Obama would try to persuade Afghan President Hamid Karzai to prioritize “battling corruption, taking the fight to the narco-traffickers.” The drug trade, he added, “provides a lot of the economic engine for the insurgents.”

Just as these Marja farmers spoiled Gen. McChrystal’s media event, so their crop has subverted every regime that has tried to rule Afghanistan for the past 30 years. During the CIA’s covert war in the 1980s, opium financed the mujahedeen or “freedom fighters” (as President Ronald Reagan called them) who finally forced the Soviets to abandon the country and then defeated its Marxist client state.

In the late 1990s, the Taliban, which had taken power in most of the country, lost any chance for international legitimacy by protecting and profiting from opium — and then, ironically, fell from power only months after reversing course and banning the crop. Since the U.S. military intervened in 2001, a rising tide of opium has corrupted the government in Kabul while empowering a resurgent Taliban whose guerrillas have taken control of ever larger parts of the Afghan countryside.

These three eras of almost constant warfare fueled a relentless rise in Afghanistan’s opium harvest — from just 250 tons in 1979 to 8,200 tons in 2007. For the past five years, the Afghan opium harvest has accounted for as much as 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and provided the prime ingredient for over 90 percent of the world’s heroin supply.

The ecological devastation and societal dislocation from these three war-torn decades has woven opium so deeply into the Afghan grain that it defies solution by Washington’s best and brightest (as well as its most inept and least competent). Caroming between ignoring the opium crop and demanding its total eradication, the Bush administration dithered for seven years while heroin boomed, and in doing so helped create a drug economy that corrupted and crippled the government of its ally, President Karzai. In recent years, opium farming has supported 500,000 Afghan families, nearly 20 percent of the country’s estimated population, and funds a Taliban insurgency that has, since 2006, spread across the countryside.

To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: In poor nations with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation for all politics, binding villagers to the government or warlords or rebels. The ultimate aim of counterinsurgency strategy is always to establish the state’s authority. When the economy is illicit and by definition beyond government control, this task becomes monumental. If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.

Opium is an illegal drug, but Afghanistan’s poppy crop is still grounded in networks of social trust that tie people together at each step in the chain of production. Crop loans are necessary for planting, labor exchange for harvesting, stability for marketing, and security for shipment. So dominant and problematic is the opium economy in Afghanistan today that a question Washington has avoided for the past nine years must be asked: Can anyone pacify a full-blown narco-state?

The answer to this critical question lies in the history of the three Afghan wars in which Washington has been involved over the past 30 years — the CIA covert warfare of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s (fueled at its start by $900 million in CIA funding), and since 2001, the U.S. invasion, occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns. In each of these conflicts, Washington has tolerated drug trafficking by its Afghan allies as the price of military success — a policy of benign neglect that has helped make Afghanistan today the world’s No. 1 narco-state.

CIA Covert Warfare, Spreading Poppy Fields, and Drug Labs: the 1980s

Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert war against the Soviets, the last in a series of secret operations that it conducted along the mountain rim-lands of Asia, which stretch for 5,000 miles from Turkey to Thailand. In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was revving up, the United States first mounted covert probes of communism’s Asian underbelly. For 40 years thereafter, the CIA fought a succession of secret wars along this mountain rim — in Burma during the 1950s, Laos in the 1960s, and Afghanistan in the 1980s. In one of history’s ironic accidents, the southern reach of communist China and the Soviet Union had coincided with Asia’s opium zone along this same mountain rim, drawing the CIA into ambiguous alliances with the region’s highland warlords.

Washington’s first Afghan war began in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded the country to save a Marxist client regime in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Seeing an opportunity to wound its Cold War enemy, the Reagan administration worked closely with Pakistan’s military dictatorship in a 10-year CIA campaign to expel the Soviets.

This was, however, a covert operation unlike any other in the Cold War years. First, the collision of CIA secret operations and Soviet conventional warfare led to the devastation of Afghanistan’s fragile highland ecology, damaging its traditional agriculture beyond immediate recovery, and fostering a growing dependence on the international drug trade. Of equal import, instead of conducting this covert warfare on its own as it had in Laos in the Vietnam War years, the CIA outsourced much of the operation to Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which soon became a powerful and ever more problematic ally.

When the ISI proposed its Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as overall leader of the anti-Soviet resistance, Washington — with few alternatives — agreed. Over the next 10 years, the CIA supplied some $2 billion to Afghanistan’s mujahedeen through the ISI, half to Hekmatyar, a violent fundamentalist infamous for throwing acid at unveiled women at Kabul University and, later, murdering rival resistance leaders. As the CIA operation was winding down in May 1990, the Washington Post published a front-page article charging that its key ally, Hekmatyar, was operating a chain of heroin laboratories inside Pakistan under the protection of the ISI.

Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA’s covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world’s largest heroin producing region. As mujahedeen guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.

Once the Afghan guerrillas brought the opium across the border, they sold it to hundreds of Pakistani heroin labs operating under the ISI’s protection. Between 1981 and 1990, Afghanistan’s opium production grew tenfold — from 250 tons to 2,000 tons. After just two years of covert CIA support for the Afghan guerrillas, the U.S. attorney general announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already the source of 60 percent of the American heroin supply. Across Europe and Russia, Afghan-Pakistani heroin soon captured an even larger share of local markets, while inside Pakistan itself the number of addicts soared from zero in 1979 to 1.2 million just five years later.

After investing $3 billion in Afghanistan’s destruction, Washington just walked away in 1992, leaving behind a thoroughly ravaged country with over 1 million dead, 5 million refugees, 10-20 million landmines still in place, an infrastructure in ruins, an economy in tatters, and well-armed tribal warlords prepared to fight among themselves for control of the capital. Even when Washington finally cut its covert CIA funding at the end of 1991, however, Pakistan’s ISI continued to back favored local warlords in pursuit of its long-term goal of installing a Pashtun client regime in Kabul.

Druglords, Dragon’s Teeth, and Civil Wars: the 1990s

Throughout the 1990s, ruthless local warlords mixed guns and opium in a lethal brew as part of a brutal struggle for power. It was almost as if the soil had been sown with those dragons’ teeth of ancient myth that can suddenly sprout into an army of full-grown warriors, who leap from the earth with swords drawn for war.

When northern resistance forces finally captured Kabul from the communist regime, which had outlasted the Soviet withdrawal by three years, Pakistan still backed its client Hekmatyar. He, in turn, unleashed his artillery on the besieged capital. The result: the deaths of an estimated 50,000 more Afghans. Even a slaughter of such monumental proportions, however, could not win power for this unpopular fundamentalist. So the ISI armed a new force, the Taliban and in September 1996, it succeeded in capturing Kabul, only to fight the Northern Alliance for the next five years in the valleys to the north of the capital.

During this seemingly unending civil war, rival factions leaned heavily on opium to finance the fighting, more than doubling the harvest to 4,600 tons by 1999. Throughout these two decades of warfare and a 20-fold jump in drug production, Afghanistan itself was slowly transformed from a diverse agricultural ecosystem — with herding, orchards, and over 60 food crops — into the world’s first economy dependent on the production of a single illicit drug. In the process, a fragile human ecology was brought to ruin in an unprecedented way.

Located at the northern edge of the annual monsoon rains, where clouds arrive from the Arabian Sea already squeezed dry, Afghanistan is an arid land. Its staple food crops have historically been sustained by irrigation systems that rely on snowmelt from the region’s high mountains. To supplement staples such as wheat, Afghan tribesmen herded vast flocks of sheep and goats hundreds of miles every year to summer pasture in the central uplands. Most important of all, farmers planted perennial tree crops — walnut, pistachio and mulberry — which thrived because they sink their roots deep into the soil and are remarkably resistant to the region’s periodic droughts, offering relief from the threat of famine in the dry years.

During these two decades of war, however, modern firepower devastated the herds, damaged snowmelt irrigation systems, and destroyed many of the orchards. While the Soviets simply blasted the landscape with firepower, the Taliban, with an unerring instinct for their society’s economic jugular, violated the unwritten rules of traditional Afghan warfare by cutting down the orchards on the vast Shamali plain north of Kabul.

All these strands of destruction knit themselves into a veritable Gordian knot of human suffering to which opium became the sole solution. Like Alexander’s legendary sword, it offered a straightforward way to cut through a complex conundrum. Without any aid to restock their herds, reseed their fields, or replant their orchards, Afghan farmers — including some 3 million returning refugees — found sustenance in opium, which had historically been but a small part of their agriculture.

Since poppy cultivation requires nine times more labor per hectare than wheat, opium offered immediate seasonal employment to more than a million Afghans — perhaps half of those actually employed at the time. In this ruined land and ravaged economy, opium merchants alone could accumulate capital rapidly and so give poppy farmers crop loans equivalent to more than half their annual incomes, credit critical to the survival of many poor villagers.

In marked contrast to the marginal yields the country’s harsh climate offers most food crops, Afghanistan proved ideal for opium. On average, each hectare of Afghan poppy land produces three to five times more than its chief competitor, Burma. Most important of all, in such an arid ecosystem, subject to periodic drought, opium uses less than half the water needed for staples such as wheat.

After taking power in 1996, the Taliban regime encouraged a nationwide expansion of opium cultivation, doubling production to 4,600 tons, then equivalent to 75 percent of the world’s heroin supply. Signaling its support for drug production, the Taliban regime began collecting a 20 percent tax from the yearly opium harvest, earning an estimated $100 million in revenues.

In retrospect, the regime’s most important innovation was undoubtedly the introduction of large-scale heroin refining in the environs of the city of Jalalabad. There, hundreds of crude labs set to work, paying only a modest production tax of $70 on every kilo of heroin powder. According to U.N. researchers, the Taliban also presided over bustling regional opium markets in Helmand and Nangarhar provinces, protecting some 240 top traders there.

During the 1990s, Afghanistan’s soaring opium harvest fueled an international smuggling trade that tied Central Asia, Russia and Europe into a vast illicit market of arms, drugs and money-laundering. It also helped fuel an eruption of ethnic insurgency across a 3,000-mile swath of land from Uzbekistan in Central Asia to Bosnia in the Balkans.

In July 2000, however, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar suddenly ordered a ban on all opium cultivation in a desperate bid for international recognition. Remarkably enough, almost overnight the Taliban regime used the ruthless repression for which it was infamous to slash the opium harvest by 94 percent to only 185 metric tons.

By then, however, Afghanistan had become dependent on poppy production for most of its taxes, export income, and employment. In effect, the Taliban’s ban was an act of economic suicide that brought an already weakened society to the brink of collapse. This was the unwitting weapon the U.S. wielded when it began its military campaign against the Taliban in October 2001. Without opium, the regime was already a hollow shell and essentially imploded at the bursting of the first American bombs.

The Return of the CIA, Opium, and Counterinsurgency: 2001-

To defeat the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA successfully mobilized former warlords long active in the heroin trade to seize towns and cities across eastern Afghanistan. In other words, the Agency and its local allies created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban’s opium ban and reviving the drug traffic. Only weeks after the collapse of the Taliban, officials were reporting an outburst of poppy planting in the heroin heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar. At a Tokyo international donors’ conference in January 2002, Hamid Karzai, the new prime minister put in place by the Bush administration, issued a pro forma ban on opium growing — without any means of enforcing it against the power of these resurgent local warlords.

After investing some $3 billion in Afghanistan’s destruction during the Cold War, Washington and its allies now proved parsimonious in the reconstruction funds they offered. At that 2002 Tokyo conference, international donors promised just $4 billion of an estimated $10 billion needed to rebuild the economy over the next five years. In addition, the total U.S. spending of $22 billion for Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007 turned out to be skewed sharply toward military operations, leaving, for instance, just $237 million for agriculture. (And as in Iraq, significant sums from what reconstruction funds were available simply went into the pockets of Western experts, private contractors, and their local counterparts.)

Under these circumstances, no one should have been surprised when, during the first year of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan’s opium harvest surged to 3,400 tons. Over the next five years, international donors would contribute $8 billion to rebuild Afghanistan, while opium would infuse nearly twice that amount, $14 billion, directly into the rural economy without any deductions by either those Western experts or Kabul’s bloated bureaucracy.

While opium production continued its relentless rise, the Bush administration downplayed the problem, outsourcing narcotics control to Great Britain and police training to Germany. As the lead agency in Allied operations, Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department regarded opium as a distraction from its main mission of defeating the Taliban (and, of course, invading Iraq). Waving away the problem in late 2004, President Bush said he did not want to “waste another American life on a narco-state.” Meanwhile, in their counterinsurgency operations, U.S. forces worked closely with local warlords who proved to be leading druglords.

After five years of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan’s drug production had swelled to unprecedented proportions. In August 2007, the U.N. reported that the country’s record opium crop covered almost 500,000 acres, an area larger than all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 185 tons at the start of American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan now produced 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53 percent of the country’s GDP and 93 percent of global heroin supply.

In this way, Afghanistan became the world’s first true “narco-state.” If a cocaine traffic that provided just 3 percent of Colombia’s GDP could bring in its wake endless violence and powerful cartels capable of corrupting that country’s government, then we can only imagine the consequences of Afghanistan’s dependence on opium for more than 50 percent of its entire economy.

At a drug conference in Kabul this month, the head of Russia’s Federal Narcotics Service estimated the value of Afghanistan’s current opium crop at $65 billion. Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan’s farmers, $300 million to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance “to the drug mafia,” leaving ample funds to corrupt the Karzai government in a nation whose total GDP is only $10 billion.

Indeed, opium’s influence is so pervasive that many Afghan officials, from village leaders to Kabul’s police chief, the defense minister, and the president’s brother, have been tainted by the traffic. So cancerous and crippling is this corruption that, according to recent U.N. estimates, Afghans are forced to spend a stunning $2.5 billion in bribes. Not surprisingly, the government’s repeated attempts at opium eradication have been thoroughly compromised by what the U.N. has called “corrupt deals between field owners, village elders, and eradication teams.”

Not only have drug taxes funded an expanding guerrilla force, but the Taliban’s role in protecting opium farmers and the heroin merchants who rely on their crop gives them real control over the core of the country’s economy. In January 2009, the U.N. and anonymous U.S. “intelligence officials” estimated that drug traffic provided Taliban insurgents with $400 million a year. “Clearly,” commented Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “we have to go after the drug labs and the druglords that provide support to the Taliban and other insurgents.”

In mid-2009, the U.S. embassy launched a multi-agency effort, called the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, to cut Taliban drug monies through financial controls. But one American official soon compared this effort to “punching jello.” By August 2009, a frustrated Obama administration had ordered the U.S. military to “kill or capture” 50 Taliban-connected druglords who were placed on a classified “kill list.”

Since the record crop of 2007, opium production has, in fact, declined somewhat — to 6,900 tons last year (still over 90 percent of the world’s opium supply). While U.N. analysts attribute this 20 percent reduction largely to eradication efforts, a more likely cause has been the global glut of heroin that came with the Afghan opium boom, and which had depressed the price of poppies by 34 percent. In fact, even this reduced Afghan opium crop is still far above total world demand, which the U.N. estimates at 5,000 tons per annum.

Preliminary reports on the 2010 Afghan opium harvest, which starts next month, indicate that the drug problem is not going away. Some U.S. officials who have surveyed Helmand’s opium heartland see signs of an expanded crop. Even the U.N. drug experts who have predicted a continuing decline in production are not optimistic about long-term trends. Opium prices might decline for a few years, but the price of wheat and other staple crops is dropping even faster, leaving poppies as by far the most profitable crop for poor Afghan farmers.

Ending the Cycle of Drugs and Death

With its forces now planted in the dragon’s teeth soil of Afghanistan, Washington is locked into what looks to be an unending cycle of drugs and death. Every spring in those rugged mountains, the snows melt, the opium seeds sprout, and a fresh crop of Taliban fighters takes to the field, many to die by lethal American fire. And the next year, the snows melt again, fresh poppy shoots break through the soil, and a new crop of teenage Taliban fighters pick up arms against America, spilling more blood. This cycle has been repeated for the past ten years and, unless something changes, can continue indefinitely.

Is there any alternative? Even were the cost of rebuilding Afghanistan’s rural economy — with its orchards, flocks, and food crops — as high as $30 billion or, for that matter, $90 billion dollars, the money is at hand. By conservative estimates, the cost of President Obama’s ongoing surge of 30,000 troops alone is $30 billion a year. So just bringing those 30,000 troops home would create ample funds to begin the rebuilding of rural life in Afghanistan, making it possible for young farmers to begin feeding their families without joining the Taliban’s army.

Short of another precipitous withdrawal akin to 1991, Washington has no realistic alternative to the costly, long-term reconstruction of Afghanistan’s agriculture. Beneath the gaze of an allied force that now numbers about 120,000 soldiers, opium has fueled the Taliban’s growth into an omnipresent shadow government and an effective guerrilla army. The idea that our expanded military presence might soon succeed in driving back that force and handing over pacification to the illiterate, drug-addicted Afghan police and army remains, for the time being, a fantasy. Quick fixes like paying poppy farmers not to plant, something British and Americans have both tried, can backfire and end up actually promoting yet more opium cultivation. Rapid drug eradication without alternative employment, something the private contractor DynCorp tried so disastrously under a $150 million contract in 2005, would simply plunge Afghanistan into more misery, stoking mass anger and destabilizing the Kabul government further.

So the choice is clear enough: we can continue to fertilize this deadly soil with yet more blood in a brutal war with an uncertain outcome — for both the United States and the people of Afghanistan. Or we can begin to withdraw American forces while helping renew this ancient, arid land by replanting its orchards, replenishing its flocks, and rebuilding the irrigation systems ruined in decades of war.

At this point, our only realistic choice is this sort of serious rural development — that is, reconstructing the Afghan countryside through countless small-scale projects until food crops become a viable alternative to opium. To put it simply, so simply that even Washington might understand, you can only pacify a narco-state when it is no longer a narco-state.

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, “From the Cold War to the War on Terror.” Later this year, “Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State,” a forthcoming book of his, will explore the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security measures here at home. More Alfred McCoy
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We Are All Greeks Now

February 21st, 2012

From: http://www.truth-out.org/we-are-all-greeks-now/1329836573

by J.A. Myerson

They chanted, “We. Are. The 99 percent” with Greek accents in Zuccotti Park on Saturday. Greek-Americans, nationals and immigrants were joined by Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters in a show of solidarity with the people of Greece, thousands of whom took to the streets to protest the latest round of International Monetary Fund-imposed austerity cuts. A week earlier, Greeks had rioted, setting dozens of Athenian buildings ablaze.

One of the Zuccotti Park protesters, Costas Panayotakis, is an associate professor of sociology at City College of Technology and author of “Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy [4].” “Greece is just a more extreme example of what’s going on around Europe and around the world,” he said in an interview with Truthout, explaining the impetus behind the solidarity demonstration.

Christa Calbos, a student activist who goes to Manhattanville College and who has spent time in Greece, agreed that the solidarity stems from people worldwide seeing their own situation in the Greeks’. “It is important for Americans,” she said, “and all citizens of the world fighting against austerity to show solidarity because the challenges Greece now faces are not unique to Greece.”

“There is a growing global consciousness that has resulted from the crisis,” Panayotakis elaborated. “There are global movements. The Occupy movement itself is part of the global movement going back to the occupations in Spain and Athens and even before that, of course, in Tahrir Square in Egypt. There is a global growth in solidarity, because what we have is the failure of global neo-liberalism has become manifest during the crisis and so has the failure of the political and economic elites that have been administering this neo-liberal project.”

The Greek government, in order to shore up its fiscal health – its debt to private foreign banks is expected to reach 129 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2020 – has repeatedly had to accept bailouts [5] from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the German-run European Central Bank (ECB). The austerity the IMF and ECB insist on imposing as a condition of the bailouts resembles similar measures imposed throughout the global South in recent decades – privatization of the commons, deep cuts to social services, dismemberment of labor unions, the imposition of a greatly lowered standard of living on the average Greek citizen. Calbos noted this similarity. “These words that have become so common after the start of OWS such as ‘austerity,’ ‘free market,’ ‘bail-outs,’ ‘debt relief.’ The true meaning and impact of these words have been understood and felt within the developing world for decades. Countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia have been bailed out – or bought out rather – by the IMF, World Bank, and other international financial institutions. When this happens, of course, it does away with a truly democratic government and any form of public social services.”

Panayotakis indicated that these phenomena are closer to home than the third world, saying, “There is a very brutal assault on people’s living standards. There is a liquidation of labor rights that go back more than 50 years. And of course we’ve seen similar kinds of things going on even in the U.S., with the attack on labor rights of the public sector workers in Wisconsin and other parts of the country.”

This bringing-home of third-world conditions has ignited a radical spirit here, said Calbos. “It was easy for the west and the 1% to stomach this happening in the developing world,” she said. “They could paternalistically blame it on lack of education. However, Greece has suddenly now shown us that the white, western, middle class is not immune to the damaging effects of the neo-liberal economic system. This should be a wake up call, a call to action, a perfect example of how capitalism and democracy are not inextricably intertwined but rather at odds with each other.”

Almost no one in Greek society has suffered during the past few years as desperately as students. Said Calbos, “Students in Greece are at the heart of resistance, and I believe this is also important to the Occupy movement here in the U.S. In Greece, 50% of the population under 25 is currently unemployed. With incredible student debt, tuition hikes, and an ever-difficult job market, we in the U.S are facing many of the same obstacles.”

Rather than defaulting on the banks, the Greek government has decided to default on its people. “Basically there is an effort to push the cost of the crisis on the people least responsible for it,” said Panayotakis. “The priority in responding to the crisis has been to protect the banks and the financial sector. This is what we see in Greece and in Europe and the people who get penalized the most are ordinary workers and ordinary citizens.”

Greece, where democracy originated, was thrust into so deep a crisis by the financial crash that it abandoned democracy, turning its government over to a “technocrat” (read: banker), Lucas Papademos, formerly an ECB vice president. The result of this bloodless coup (i.e. whether Papademos’ government can bring Greece back from the precipice of collapse) will reverberate worldwide, said Panayotakis. “What happens in Greece, of course, has great repercussions obviously for the European economy and, via the European economy, on the American economy and therefore the global economy.” This largely depends on the willingness of the German government, the economy of which is still strong, to help out, he explained. “There is a joke that the most dangerous opponent of President Obama is Angela Merkel. Her policies are threatening to basically throw the European economy into a meltdown, which of course would affect the rest of the world.”

And the whole world, they say, is watching.

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Why the Media Love the Violence of Protesters and Not of Banks

February 21st, 2012

From: http://www.thenation.com/article/166394/why-media-loves-violence-protesters-and-not-banks

by Rebecca Solnit

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com [1]. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com [2].

When you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them—or if all goes well, struggle, learn and bond more strongly because of, rather than despite, them. The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter.

Until they did.

Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares.

All sorts of other equalizing forces were present, not least the police brutality that battered the privileged [3] the way that inner-city kids [4] are used to being battered all the time. Part of what we had in common was what we were against: the current economy and the principle of insatiable greed that made it run, as well as the emotional and economic privatization that accompanied it.

This is a system that damages people, and its devastation was on display as never before in the early months of Occupy and related phenomena like the “We are the 99 percent” website [5]. When it was people facing foreclosure, or who had lost their jobs, or were thrashing around under avalanches of college or medical debt, they weren’t hard to accept as us, and not them.

And then came the people who’d been damaged far more, the psychologically fragile, the marginal and the homeless—some of them endlessly needy and with a huge capacity for disruption. People who had come to fight the power found themselves staying on [6] to figure out available mental-health resources, while others who had wanted to experience a democratic society on a grand scale found themselves trying to solve sanitation problems.

And then there was the violence.

The Faces of Violence

The most important direct violence Occupy faced was, of course, from the state, in the form of the police using maximum sub-lethal force on sleepers in tents, mothers with children, unarmed pedestrians, young women already penned [7] up, unresisting seated students [8], poets, professors, pregnant women [9], wheelchair-bound occupiers [10] and octogenarians [11]. It has been a sustained campaign of police brutality from Wall Street to Washington State the likes of which we haven’t seen in forty years.

On the part of activists, there were also a few notable incidents of violence in the hundreds of camps, especially violence against women [12]. The mainstream media seemed to think this damned the Occupy movement, though it made the camps, at worst, a whole lot like the rest of the planet, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, seethes with violence against women. But these were isolated incidents.

That old line [13] of songster Woody Guthrie is always handy in situations like this: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.” The police have been going after occupiers with projectile weapons, clubs and tear gas, sending some of them to the hospital and leaving more than a few others traumatized and fearful. That’s the six-gun here.

But it all began with the fountain pens, slashing through peoples’ lives, through national and international economies, through the global markets. These were wielded by the banksters, the “vampire squid [14],” the deregulators in DC, the men—and with the rarest of exceptions they were men—who stole the world.

That’s what Occupy came together to oppose, the grandest violence by scale, the least obvious by impact. No one on Wall Street ever had to get his suit besmirched by carrying out [15] a foreclosure eviction himself. Cities provided that service for free to the banks (thereby further impoverishing [16] themselves as they created new paupers out of old taxpayers). And the police clubbed their opponents for them [17], over and over, everywhere across the United States.

The grand thieves invented ever more ingenious methods, including those sliced and diced derivatives, to crush the hopes and livelihoods of the many. This is the terrible violence that Occupy was formed to oppose. Don’t ever lose sight of that.

Oakland’s Beautiful Nonviolence

Now that we’re done remembering the major violence, let’s talk about Occupy Oakland. A great deal of fuss has been made about two incidents in which mostly young people affiliated with Occupy Oakland damaged some property and raised some hell.

The mainstream media and some faraway pundits weighed in on those Bay Area incidents as though they determined the meaning and future of the transnational Occupy phenomenon. Perhaps some of them even hoped, consciously or otherwise, that harped on enough these might divide or destroy the movement. So it’s important to recall that the initial impact of Occupy Oakland was the very opposite of violent, stunningly so, in ways that were intentionally suppressed.

Occupy Oakland began in early October as a vibrant, multiracial gathering. A camp was built at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, and thousands received much-needed meals and healthcare for free from well-organized volunteers. Sometimes called the Oakland Commune, it was consciously descended from some of the finer aspects of an earlier movement born in Oakland, the Black Panthers, whose free breakfast programs [18] should perhaps be as well-remembered and more admired than their macho posturing.

A compelling and generous-spirited General Assembly took place nightly and then biweekly in which the most important things on Earth were discussed by wildly different participants. Once, for instance, I was in a breakout discussion group that included Native American, white, Latino and able-bodied and disabled Occupiers, and in which I was likely the eldest participant; another time, a bunch of peacenik grandmothers dominated my group.

This country is segregated in so many terrible ways—and then it wasn’t for those glorious weeks when civil society awoke and fell in love with itself. Everyone showed up; everyone talked to everyone else; and in little tastes, in fleeting moments, the old divides no longer divided us and we felt like we could imagine ourselves as one society. This was the dream of the promised land—this land, that is, without its bitter divides. Honey never tasted sweeter, and power never felt better.

Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19 percent [19] in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland,” the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.

The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city. “You gotta give them hope, “ said an elected official across the bay once upon a time—a city supervisor named Harvey Milk. Occupy was hope we gave ourselves, the dream come true. The city did its best to take the hope away [20] violently at 5 a.m. on October 25, 2011. The sleepers were assaulted, their belongings confiscated and trashed. Then, Occupy Oakland rose again. Many thousands of nonviolent marchers shut down [21] the Port of Oakland in a stunning display of popular power on November 2.

That night, some kids did the smashy-smashy stuff that everyone gets really excited about. (They even spray-painted “smashy” [22] on a Rite Aid drugstore in giant letters.) When we talk about people who spray-paint and break windows and start bonfires in the street and shove people and scream and run around, making a demonstration into something way too much like the punk rock shows of my youth, let’s keep one thing in mind: they didn’t send anyone to the hospital, drive any seniors from their homes, spread despair and debt among the young, snatch food and medicine from the desperate, or destroy the global economy.

That said, they are still a problem. They are the bait the police take and the media go to town with. They create a situation a whole lot of us don’t like and that drives away many who might otherwise participate or sympathize. They are, that is, incredibly bad for a movement and represent a form of segregation by intimidation.

But don’t confuse the pro-vandalism Occupiers with the vampire squid or the up-armored robocops who have gone after us almost everywhere. Though their means are deeply flawed, their ends are not so different than yours. There’s no question that they should improve their tactics or maybe just act tactically, let alone strategically, and there’s no question that a lot of other people should stop being so apocalyptic about it.

Those who advocate for nonviolence at Occupy should remember that nonviolence [23] is at best a great spirit of love and generosity, not a prissy enforcement squad. After all, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who gets invoked all the time when such issues come up, didn’t go around saying grumpy things about Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.

Violence Against the Truth

Of course, a lot of people responding to these incidents in Oakland are actually responding to fictional versions of them. In such cases, you could even say that some journalists were doing violence against the truth of what happened in Oakland on November 2 and January 28.

The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported [24] on the day’s events this way:

Among the most violent incidents that occurred Saturday night was in front of the YMCA at 23rd Street and Broadway. Police corralled protesters in front of the building and several dozen protesters stormed into the Y, apparently to escape from the police, city officials and protesters said. Protesters damaged a door and a few fixtures, and frightened those inside the gym working out, said Robert Wilkins, president of the YMCA of the East Bay.

Wilkins was apparently not in the building, and first-person testimony recounts that a YMCA staff member welcomed the surrounded and battered protesters, and once inside, some were so terrified they pretended to work out on exercise machines to blend in.

I wrote this to the journalists who described the incident so peculiarly: “What was violent about [activists] fleeing police engaging in wholesale arrests and aggressive behavior? Even the YMCA official who complains about it adds, ‘The damage appears pretty minimal.’ And you call it violence? That’s sloppy.”

The reporter who responded apologized for what she called her “poor word choice” and said the piece was meant to convey police violence as well.

When the police are violent against activists, journalists tend to frame it as though there were violence in some vaguely unascribable sense that implicates the clobbered as well as the clobberers. In, for example, the build-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the mainstream media kept portraying the right of the people peaceably to assemble as tantamount to terrorism and describing all the terrible things that the government or the media themselves speculated we might want to do (but never did).

Some of this was based on the fiction of tremendous activist violence in Seattle in 1999 that the New York Times [25] in particular devoted itself to promulgating. That the police smashed up nonviolent demonstrators and constitutional rights pretty badly in both Seattle and New York didn’t excite them nearly as much. Don’t forget that before the obsession with violence arose, the smearing of Occupy was focused on the idea that people weren’t washing very much, and before that the framework for marginalization was that Occupy had “no demands.” [26] There’s always something.

Keep in mind as well that Oakland’s police department is on the brink of federal receivership for not having made real amends for old and well-documented problems of violence, corruption and mismanagement, and that it was the police department, not the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, which used tear gas, clubs, smoke grenades and rubber bullets on January 28. It’s true that a small group vandalized [27] City Hall after the considerable police violence, but that’s hardly what the plans were at the outset of the day.

The action on January 28 that resulted in 400 arrests and a media conflagration was called Move-In Day [28]. There was a handmade patchwork banner that proclaimed “Another Oakland Is Possible” and a children’s contingent with pennants, balloons and strollers. Occupy Oakland was seeking to take over an abandoned building so that it could reestablish the community, the food programs and the medical clinic it had set up last fall. It may not have been well planned or well executed, but it was idealistic.

Despite this, many people who had no firsthand contact with Occupy Oakland inveighed against it or even against the whole Occupy movement. If only that intensity of fury were to be directed at the root cause of it all, the colossal economic violence that surrounds us.

All of which is to say, for anyone who hadn’t noticed, that the honeymoon is over.

Now for the Real Work

The honeymoon is, of course, the period when you’re so in love you don’t notice differences that will eventually have to be worked out one way or another. Most relationships begin as though you were coasting downhill. Then come the flatlands, followed by the hills where you’re going to have to pedal hard, if you don’t just abandon the bike.

Occupy might just be the name we’ve put on a great groundswell of popular outrage and a rebirth of civil society too deep, too broad, to be a movement. A movement is an ocean wave: this is the whole tide turning from Cairo to Moscow to Athens to Santiago to Chicago. Nevertheless, the American swell in this tide involves a delicate alliance between liberals and radicals, people who want to reform the government and campaign for particular gains, and people who wish the government didn’t exist and mostly want to work outside the system. If the radicals should frighten the liberals as little as possible, surely the liberals have an equal obligation to get fiercer and more willing to confront—and to remember that nonviolence, even in its purest form, is not the same as being nice.

Surely the only possible answer to the tired question of where Occupy should go from here (as though a few public figures got to decide) is: everywhere. I keep being asked what Occupy should do next, but it’s already doing it. It is everywhere.

In many cities, outside the limelight, people are still occupying public space in tents and holding General Assemblies. February 20, for instance, was a national day [29] of Occupy solidarity with prisoners; Occupiers are organizing on many fronts and planning for May Day [30], and a great many foreclosure defenses from Nashville [31] to San Francisco [32] have kept people in their homes and made banks renegotiate. Campus activism [33] is reinvigorated, and creative and fierce discussions [34] about college costs and student debt are underway, as is a deeper conversation about economics and ethics that rejects conventional wisdom about what is fair and possible.

Occupy is one catalyst or facet of the populist will you can see in a host of recent victories. The campaign [35] against corporate personhood seems to be gaining momentum. A popular environmental campaign [36] made President Obama reject [37] the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada, despite immense Republican and corporate pressure. In response to widespread outrage, the Susan B. Komen Foundation reversed [38] its decision to defund cancer detection at Planned Parenthood. Online campaigns have forced Apple to address its hideous labor issues, and the ever-heroic Coalition of Immokalee Workers at last brought Trader Joe’s into line [39] with its fair wages for farmworkers campaign.

These genuine gains come thanks to relatively modest exercises of popular power. They should act as reminders that we do have power and that its exercise can be popular. Some of last fall’s exhilarating conversations have faltered, but the great conversation that is civil society awake and arisen hasn’t stopped.

What happens now depends on vigorous participation, including yours, in thinking aloud together about who we are, what we want and how we get there [40], and then acting upon it. Go occupy the possibilities and don’t stop pedaling. And remember, it started with mad, passionate love.

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The Definition of Insanity: Deregulating Over and Over and Expecting Different Results

February 21st, 2012

From: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/20-9

by Paul Buchheit

A cynic might argue that business leaders and their friends in Congress weren’t expecting different results.

In either case, we’ve become a bipolar nation, 1% manic and 99% depressive. Our affliction is caused by a 30-year experiment in the dismal economics of delusion. Deregulation for corporations and tax cuts for the wealthy have defined conservative policy since the 1970s, when University of Chicago economist Arthur Laffer convinced Dick Cheney and other Republican officials that lowering taxes on the rich would generate more revenue.

Ronald Reagan complied in the 1980s by dramatically reducing the top marginal tax rate. And while declaring government “the problem” he eased a half-century of protective regulations on mortgage lending.

In the Clinton years, Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan and Phil Gramm and others lobbied against regulations on the derivatives that evolved into toxic assets a decade later. A lonely voice of opposition, Commodities Trading Commission head Brooksley Born, was denounced by the powerful Treasury men, who were shocked by her affront to the nation’s “financial stability.”

The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 removed long-held protections for commercial bank deposits, as the newly liberated financial institutions now coveted the unprecedented profits in high-risk investments. Soon after, the 2000s brought us the Bush tax cuts, which have cost the nation over two trillion dollars, and a further assault on the Securities and Exchange Commission by Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions committed to “self-regulation.”

So what’s the result of all this? The financial collapse of 2008, of course. But it goes way beyond that. Tax cuts and deregulation led to the worst inequality since the Great Depression, with the top 1% nearly tripling their income while wages leveled off. The richest 10% own 80% of the “unearned income” that gets taxed at rates lower than those for teachers or health care workers. Corporate profits are at a record high, having accounted for 88% of the recovery after the 2008-9 recession.

Yet taxes on corporate income have been shrinking dramatically. The total tax revenue derived from corporate taxes has dropped from about 20% in the 1960s to under 9% in 2010. From 2008 to 2010, the top 100 U.S. corporations paid only 12.2% of their income in taxes, and thirty of them paid nothing at all.

The lack of SEC regulation has also allowed corporate America to seek tax dodges beyond our borders. Citizens for Tax Justice reports that the 280 most profitable U.S. corporations sheltered half their profits from taxes between 2008 and 2010. The “Ugland House,” a single building in the Cayman Islands, is now the ‘home’ of 18,857 corporations. While the worldwide average corporate profit per employee is $40,000, in Bermuda in 2007 it was $5.4 million per employee.

But corporate heads, especially in the financial sector, keep lobbying for more deregulation, often infiltrating the regulatory agencies with former employees to get their point across. The Washington Post reported on the clamor by business leaders to link regulations to job losses. Congress listens. “Dodd-Frank obviously is a disaster,” proclaimed Ron Paul. “But Sarbanes-Oxley costs a trillion dollars, too. Let’s repeal that, too!”

Ironically, even earnest attempts at regulation can be foiled by big business. The Daily notes that “Stringent regulations tend to protect incumbent firms from…innovative start-ups that could drive them out of business…Google, Apple and other technology giants, for example, have spent billions of dollars on software patents to defend themselves against pointless litigation. Shoestring entrepreneurs can’t even begin to do the same, so many new tech firms are never established.”

We don’t have the political will to regulate greed in a reasonable and effective manner. Instead, wealthy Americans continue to insist that more for them is better for everyone, and that the system will work if we just leave it alone. As Rachel Marsden said, “If capitalism is perceived to not be working in America…it’s because the system isn’t capitalist enough.”

After 30 years of economic devastation for most Americans, it’s sad to watch our rapid fall from sanity.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of “American Wars: Illusions and Realities” (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

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