The Last Optimist No Longer Optimistic

William Greider is one of the most optimistic progressive writers in the U.S., seeing silver linings when everyone else sees only clouds. So it takes a lot for him to say this:

Political events of the past two years have delivered a more profound and devastating message: American democracy has been conclusively conquered by American capitalism. Government has been disabled or captured by the formidable powers of private enterprise and concentrated wealth. Self-governing rights that representative democracy conferred on citizens are now usurped by the overbearing demands of corporate and financial interests. Collectively, the corporate sector has its arms around both political parties, the financing of political careers, the production of the policy agendas and propaganda of influential think tanks, and control of most major media.

What the capitalist system wants is more—more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct, unless government intervened to stop it. The objective now is to destroy any remaining forms of government interference, except of course for business subsidies and protections...When the choice comes down to society or capitalism, society regularly loses...

In these terms, the administration of Barack Obama has been a crushing disappointment for those of us who hoped he would be different...Once again, Republicans are mounting an assault on liberalism's crown jewel, Social Security, only this time they might succeed, because the Democratic president is collaborating with them...

Obama has set himself up to make many more "compromises" in the coming months; each time, he will doubtless use the left as a convenient foil. Disparaging "purist" liberals is his way of assuring so-called independents that he stood up to the allegedly far-out demands of his own electoral base. This is a ludicrous ploy...

The power shift did not start with Obama, but his tenure confirms and completes it...Society faces dreadful prospects and profound transformation. When both parties are aligned with corporate power, who will stand up for the people? Who will protect them from the insatiable appetites of capitalist enterprise and help them get through the hard passage ahead? One thing we know for sure from history: there is no natural limit to what capitalism will seek in terms of power and profit. If government does not stand up and apply the brakes, society is defenseless.

Read the rest. It's much like what I said a few days ago here.

Anyway, I guess it's time to rerun this again:

It was a creed written into the founding DNA of a politics designed by billionaires.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by red-faced, round-shouldered, self-hating Lockheed lobbyists who knew no matter who lost the election, they would win.

Yes we can.

It was sung by hedge fund CEOs, eating organic, cruelty-free sashimi on their Gulfstream G550 to Singapore, smiling as they realized their good-hearted Brattleboro librarian opponents had abso-fucking-lutely no idea what they're up against.

Yes we can.

We have been told we cannot do this, by a chorus of gentle graphic designers forwarding that video to all 78 of their Facebook friends. We've been told we cannot betray 20-year-old daughters of corporate lawyers, who want to vote in a way that finally lets them live in Scarsdale and feel good about themselves. We've been told we can't create a system in which someone who began as a decent human being must be utterly broken and perverted by his burning lust to climb to the top of the slipperiest pole on earth.

Yes we can.

Now the hopes of the Viacom executive who used to be in an indie band are the same as the gay investment banker who paints still-lifes as a hobby, the same as the dreams of the Brown Literature Professor who's secretly furious when her Salvadoran maid doesn't clean the bathroom properly. We will remember that there are no nations; there are no peoples. There are no Russians; there are no Arabs; there is no West. There is only one holistic, vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of money. We will begin the next great chapter of human submission with three words that will ring across the universe:

YES WE CAN.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Bad News

From Joe Bageant:

Dear friends, associates and fellow travelers,

As you may or may not know, I have been struck down by an extremely serious form of cancer. Presently I am back in the United States receiving treatment through the U.S. Veterans Administration hospital system. Due to the nature of the massive internal tumor, I am currently unable to even carry on email correspondence or Skype conversations.

Right now I am at a hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia. Once a treatment program has been designed and set in motion, I will probably be transferred back to the Veterans Administration facility near my home in Winchester, Virginia. The condition is inoperable, but it is hoped that with chemotherapy plus the use of a pain killer such as OxyContin, I will be able to resume my online work.

The rest.

P.S. Thanks to Nell for this interview with Joe Bageant from a few years ago:

—Jonathan Schwarz

Life's Funny That Way

There may not be any political author in the U.S. with more pure writing talent than Walter Russell Mead. His first book, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition, was published in 1987. It's incredibly funny, incredibly knowledgeable about history, and incredibly enjoyable to read. (I swiped the Averell Harriman quote here from it.)

It unfortunately never got much recognition, partly because it was honest about U.S. history and partly because Mead made one badly-timed mistake, and predicted the Soviet Union would be around indefinitely.

But here's what he wrote about the foreign policy of the reinvigorated U.S. right during the Reagan administration. This part does seem to have been fairly, uh, prescient:

No less than American blacks, the people of the Third World can recognize their enemies. The right's economic program for the Third World can be summed up like this: pay off your foreign loans, cut back on your social spending, and allow the continued exploitation of your labor and raw materials by foreign-owned companies. It can be no surprise that a government with such a program [i.e., the Reagan administration] is desperately worried about the spread of international terrorism...if we cannot call this policy prudent, we can at least acknowledge its consistency, and in that respect, perhaps, it is superior to a policy of liberal illusion.

In domestic politics, the administration chose a collision course with black America in the belief that it had little to lose. It has made the same judgement with respect to the Third World—an ill-defined but huge entity that grows better armed with every year. How long the United States can sustain this policy of unyielding hostility to the hope of most of the world's people cannot be predicted; nor can we say what options, if any, we will have when events make this course untenable. A mistaken sense of America's invulnerability undergirds this policy of confrontation; here as in its economic policy the reliance of the right on inappropriate ideological thinking leads it into dangerous territory. With banners flying and trumpets sounding, the right charges on into the unknown, like Custer on the route to Little Big Horn.

And here's the horrifying punchline: something went very wrong in the past 23 years, and Walter Russell Mead went on to become the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. And that's not even the worst part.

I don't know, maybe Walter Russell Mead and Bernie Aronson have the same manager.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Twenty Dollar Sunday

Five Dollar Friday is once again late, this time by two days, so $20 is going to support Race for Iran, the website of Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. If they get $500 by the end of the day on Thursday, an anonymous donor will give them another $500, so I hope you can consider contributing yourself. I don't agree with everything they say, but I appreciate how unusual it is for people from such high levels of the U.S. foreign policy establishment to be non-insane.

On the same subject, sort of, at 0:45 below you can see John Lennon describing the people who run the U.S. as "insane." You don't get much of that these days from giant pop stars:

I think all our society is run by insane people for insane objectives...We're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends...I think they're all insane. But I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

—Jonathan Schwarz

The 20th Century, Now in Reruns

From what I can tell, the last few centuries of history have gone like this: first, capitalism showed up and changed everything, in both good ways and bad. The good ways were very good (undermining kings and state religions, encouraging the development of new technologies, genuine new wealth) and the bad ways were very bad (massive exploitation and deprivation, genocide in European and U.S. colonies...and more!).

Lots of people looked at this and wondered: can we keep the good parts and get rid of the bad parts? They were communists, or socialists, or Georgists, or whatever. What they weren't were people who were thrilled by the idea of enslaving humanity under the rule of Joseph Stalin. They were simply willing to perceive the reality that capitalism has a lot of downside.

Meanwhile, capitalism seemed to have an extremely difficult time reforming itself in any meaningful way. When anyone suggested that maybe six-year-old workers shouldn't be forced to actually stand in the vat of benzene, the robber barons should have said: "That's a great idea! Any money I'll lose on the vat thing I'll more than make back by not having to constantly train new six-year-olds after the previous ones drop dead!" But they didn't. Instead, they took the person who made the suggestion out behind the factory and shot them.

You can argue how much capitalism had to do with the outbreak of World War I, particularly how conscious the upper crust was about stimulating insane nationalism to avoid dealing with class conflict. But when the war came they thought it was exactly what they needed. A British politician famously said England was "at war quite irrespective of party or class." The German Kaiser was just as happy: "I see no parties anymore, I see only Germans."

Things went so well that they ended up creating exactly what they feared most: a Bolshevik revolution. Hooray!

At this point the capitalists and the remnants of the old aristocracy could have learned their lesson and started to compromise and heal the giant societal wounds caused by capitalism. Instead, they were so resistant to sharing money and power that—especially during the Depression—they preferred supporting fascism to doing anything that would take the wind out of the sails of their most radical opponents.

The result, World War II, was so catastrophic that it penetrated even the thick titanium skulls of the world's economic royalty. For about thirty years they seemed to have accepted that (particularly with communism as an actually existing alternative in the Soviet Union) they had to give a little ground.

Averell Harriman is an interesting example of this evolution. Born in 1891, he was the son of railroad tycoon Edward Henry Harriman and, after graduating from Stutts, inherited the largest fortune in America. In other words, he was just the kind of vicious scumbag who would get into business with the Nazis, and that's exactly what he did via Brown Brothers Harriman.

However, the greatest bloodshed in human history made an impression on Harriman, and he became part of the liberal elite that figured out that allowing the teeming millions to eat every now and then was actually good for business. By 1970 he even had good things to say about social democracy (in a book called America and Russia in a Changing World):

Our social and economic system is working perhaps toward Swedish socialist concepts but not toward Soviet Communism. The government in Sweden has overcome poverty, achieved decent housing and medical services for all, but Sweden has in no way compromised the principle of representative government and concern for civil liberties.

Capitalism had even less to fear by this point from its equal-and-opposite-reaction, communism, since communism had proven itself to be just as capable as capitalism of committing genocide and oppressing huge swaths of humanity. (This suggests to me at least that the real villain in both cases is industrialization, and that it can't happen under any system without gigantic bloodshed.)

Then communism collapsed, taking with it 40 years of intense nuclear terror.

If America had an intelligent upper class, they would have looked at all this and thought: Holy crap we're lucky we got out of the 20th Century alive. We must at all costs avoid making those mistakes again.

Instead, the actual American upper class—with no more Harrimans with a living memory of the Depression and World War II—looked at it and thought: Let's make EVERY SINGLE MISTAKE AGAIN.

That's what's happening right now. Rather than understanding that the problem of the 20th Century was the refusal of capitalism to compromise with human beings, they think the problem of the 20th Century was the few compromises capitalism did make. In fact, even the European upper classes seem to have now forgotten what their grandparents learned via the most direct experience possible.

So they're getting rid of the compromises as quickly as they can. Their goal is apparently to rewind the clock to 1900 and see if history turns out differently this time.

This is so monstrously cruel and stupid it seems beyond the ability of even David and Charles Koch. So why is it happening? I have no intention of ever reading anything written by Karl Marx, but here's how Robert Heilbroner, in The Worldly Philosophers, describes Marx's perspective:

Marx recognized that the economic difficulties of the system were not insuperable. Although anti-monopoly legislation or anti-business-cycle policies were unknown in Marx's day, such activities were not inconceivable: there was nothing inevitable in the physical sense about Marx's vision. The Marxist prediction of decay was founded on a conception of capitalism in which it was politically impossible for a government to set the system's wrongs aright; ideologically, even emotionally impossible...

It is just this lack of social flexibility, this bondage to shortsighted interest, that weakened European capitalism—at least until World War II...It is frightening to look back at the grim determination with which so many nations steadfastly hewed to the very course that he insisted would lead to their undoing. It was as if their governments were unconsciously vindicating Marx's prophecy by obstinately doing exactly what he said they would.

But since Heilbroner was writing in 1980 instead of now, he goes on to say this:

Yet out of the American milieu came a certain pragmatism in dealing with power, private as well as public; and a general subscription to the ideals of democracy which steered the body politic safely past the rocks on which it foundered in so many nations abroad.

It is in these capacities for change that the answer to the Marxian analysis lies. Indeed, the more we examine the history of capitalism, especially in recent decades, the more we learn both to respect the penetration of Marx's thought and to recognize its limitations.

If Heilbroner were still around (he died in 2005), I'm pretty sure he'd be suggesting that Marx may be getting the last laugh. Capitalism looks more and more as though it truly does have a self-destruct mechanism built in. Last time around it took a genocidal war and the threat of nuclear obliteration to get capitalism to submit to a few measures to save it from itself. This time around I think we can be pretty sure that we won't survive whatever would be necessary for capitalism to come to its senses.

Happy New Year!

—Jonathan Schwarz

Five Dollar Christmas Eve

For today's Five Dollar Friday I'm giving $5 to Just Foreign Policy in gratitude for them pushing the work of Stephen Kinzer. I read his book All the Shah's Men a long time ago, but it's still the best treatment I've ever seen of the 1953 coup in Iran. And largely due to Just Foreign Policy, I'm in the middle of reading Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, which is a masterpiece in the genre of uncovering lost history.

I have to admit that even someone like me, who spends every waking second trying to destroy Christendom and install an Islamic Caliphate in America, didn't know much of what's in Overthrow. Moreover, Kinzer writes history in a way that's far more human than (say) Noam Chomsky. Everyone Kizner writes about is recognizably human, with human foibles and human choices, rather than just a pawn of Inexorable Grinding Forces (even though Kinzer gives the IGFs their due).

Here's part one of a Just Foreign Policy video with Kinzer. Four more parts to this are available here.

Merry Imperial Christmas!

—Jonathan Schwarz