The Battle of Oakland from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.

A new historical vista is opening before us in this time of change. Capitalism as a system has spawned deepening economic crisis alongside its bought-and-paid for political establishment. Neither serves the needs of our society. Whether it is secure, well-paid and meaningful jobs or a sustainable relationship with the natural environment that we depend on, our society is not delivering the results people need and deserve. We do not have the lives we want and our children’s future is threatened because of social conditions that can and should be changed. One key cause for this intolerable state of affairs is the lack of genuine democracy in our economy as well as in our politics. One key solution is thus the institution of genuine economic democracy as the basis for a genuine political democracy as well. That means transforming the workplace in our society as we propose in what follows.

We are encouraged by The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement spreading across the United States and beyond. Not only does OWS express a widespread popular rejection of our system’s social injustice and lack of democracy. OWS is also a movement for goals that include economic democracy. We welcome, support, and seek to build OWS as the urgently needed, broad movement to reorganize our society, to make our institutions accountable to the public will, and to establish both economic democracy and ecological sanity.

1) Capitalism and “delivering the goods”

Capitalism today abuses the people, environment, politics and culture in equal measures. It has fostered new extremes of wealth and poverty inside most countries, and such extremes always undermine or prevent democratic politics. Capitalist production for profit likewise endangers us by its global warming, widening pollution, and looming energy crisis. And now capitalism’s recurrent instability (what others call the “business cycle”) has plunged the world into the second massive global economic crisis in the last 75 years.

Yet both Republican and Democratic governments have failed to bring a recovery to the great mass of the American people. We continue to face high unemployment and home foreclosures alongside shrinking real wages, benefits and job security. Thus, increasing personal debt is required to secure basic needs. The government uses our taxes to bring recovery from the economic crisis to banks, stock markets, and major corporations. We have waited for bailouts of the corporate rich to trickle down to the rest of us; it never happened. To pay for their recovery we are told now to submit to cuts in public services, public employment, and even our social security and Medicare benefits. The budget deficits and national debts incurred to save capitalism from its own fundamental flaws are now used to justify shifting the cost of their recovery onto everyone else. We should not pay for capitalism’s crisis and for the government’s unjust and failed response to that crisis. It is time to take a different path, to make long-overdue economic, social and political changes.

We begin by drawing lessons from previous efforts to go beyond capitalism. Traditional socialism – as in the USSR – emphasized public instead of private ownership of means of production and government economic planning instead of markets. But that concentrated too much power in the government and thereby corrupted the socialist project. Yet the recent reversions back to capitalism neither overcame nor rectified the failures of Soviet-style socialism.

We have also learned from the last great capitalist crisis in the US during the1930s. Then an unprecedented upsurge of union organizing by the CIO and political mobilizations by Socialist and Communist parties won major reforms: establishing Social Security and unemployment insurance, creating and filling 11 million federal jobs. Very expensive reforms in the middle of a depression were paid for in part by heavily taxing corporations and the rich (who were also then heavily regulated). However, New Deal reforms were evaded, weakened or abolished in the decades after 1945. To increase their profits, major corporate shareholders and their boards of directors had every incentive to dismantle reforms. They used their profits to undo the New Deal. Reforms won will always remain insecure until workers who benefit from the reforms are in the position of receiving the profits of their enterprises and using them to extend, not undermine, those reforms.

The task facing us, therefore, goes well beyond choosing between private and public ownership and between markets and planning. Nor can we be content to re-enact reforms that capitalist enterprises can and will undermine. These are not our only alternatives. The strategy we propose is to establish a genuinely democratic basis – by means of reorganizing our productive enterprises – to support those reforms and that combination of property ownership and distribution of resources and products that best serve our social, cultural and ecological needs.

2) Economic Democracy at the Workplace and in Society

The change we propose – as a new and major addition to the agenda for social change – is to occur inside production: inside the enterprises and other institutions (households, the state, schools, and so on) that produce and distribute the goods and services upon which society depends. Wherever production occurs, the workers must become collectively their own bosses, their own board of directors. Everyone’s job description would change: in addition to your specific task, you would be required to participate fully in designing and running the enterprise. Decisions once made by private corporate boards of directors or state officials – what, how and where to produce and how to use the revenues received – would instead be made collectively and democratically by the workers themselves. Education would be redesigned to train all persons in the leadership and control functions now reserved for elites.

Such a reorganization of production would finally and genuinely subordinate the state to the people. The state’s revenues (taxes, etc.) would depend on what the workers gave the state out of the revenues of the workers’ enterprises. Instead of capitalists, a small minority, funding and thereby controlling the state, the majority – workers – would finally gain that crucial social position.

Of course, workplace democracy must intertwine with community democracy in the residential locations that are mutually interactive and interdependent with work locations. Economic and political democracy need and would reinforce one another. Self-directed workers and self-directed community residents must democratically share decision-making at both locations. Local, regional and national state institutions will henceforth incorporate shared democratic decision-making between workplace and residence based communities. Such institutions would draw upon the lessons of past capitalist and socialist experiences.

3) Benefits of Workplace Democracy

When workforce and residential communities decide together how the economy evolves, the results will differ sharply from the results of capitalism. Workplace democracy would not, for example, move production to other countries as capitalist corporations have done. Workers’ self-directed enterprises would not pay a few top managers huge salaries and bonuses while most workers’ paychecks and benefits stagnate. Worker-run enterprises sharing democratic decision-making with surrounding communities would not install toxic and dangerous technologies as capitalist enterprises often do to earn more profits. They would, however, be far more likely to provide daycare, elder care and other supportive services. For the first time in human history, societies could democratically rethink and re-organize the time they devote to work, play, relationships, and cultural activities. Instead of complaining that we lack time for the most meaningful parts of our lives, we could together decide to reduce labor time, to concentrate on the consumer goods we really need, and thereby to allow more time for the important relationships in our lives. We might thereby overcome the divisions and tensions (often defined in racial, gender, ethnic, religious, and other terms) that capitalism imposes on populations by splitting them into fully employed, partly employed, and contingent laborers, and those excluded from the labor market.

A new society can be built on the basis of democratically reorganizing our workplaces, where adults spend most of their lifetimes. Over recent centuries, the human community dispensed with kings, emperors, and czars in favor of representative (and partly democratic) parliaments and congresses. The fears and warnings of disaster by those opposed to that social change were proved wrong by history. The change we advocate today takes democracy another necessary and logical step: into the workplace. Those who fear (and threaten) that it will not work will likewise be proven wrong.

4) An Immediate and Realistic Project

There are practical and popular steps we can take now toward realizing economic democracy. Against massive, wasteful and cruel unemployment and poverty, we propose a new kind of public works program. It would differ from the federal employment programs of the New Deal (when FDR hired millions of the unemployed) in two ways. First, it would focus on a “green” and support service agenda. By “green” we mean massively improving the sustainability of workplace and residential communities by, for example, building energy-saving mass transportation systems, restoring waterways, forests, etc., weatherizing residential and workplace structures, and establishing systematic anti-pollution programs. By “support service” we mean new programs of children’s day-care and elder-care to help all families coping with the conditions of work and demographics in the US today.

However, the new kind of pubic works program we propose would differ even more dramatically from all past public works projects. Instead of paying a weekly dole to the unemployed, our public works program would emphasize providing the unemployed with the funds to begin and build their own cooperative, self-directed democratic enterprises.

The gains from this project are many. The ecological benefits alone would make this the most massive environmental program in US history. Economic benefits would be huge as millions of citizens restore self-esteem damaged by unemployment and earn incomes enabling them to keep their homes and, by their purchases, provide jobs to others. Public employment at decent pay for all would go a long way toward lessening the gender, racial, and other job discriminations now dividing our people.

A special benefit would be a new freedom of choice for Americans. As a people, we could see, examine and evaluate the benefits of working inside enterprises where every worker is both employee and employer, where decisions are debated and decided democratically. For the first time in US history, we will begin to enjoy this freedom of choice: working in a top-down, hierarchically organized capitalist corporation or working in a cooperative, democratic workplace. The future of our society will then depend on how Americans make that choice, and that is how the future of a democratic society should be determined.

5) The Rich Roots Sustaining this Project

Americans have been interested in and built various kinds of cooperative enterprises – more or less non-capitalist enterprises – throughout our history. The idea of building a “cooperative commonwealth” has repeatedly attracted many. Today, an estimated 13.7 million Americans work in 11,400 Employee Stock Ownership Plan companies (ESOPs), in which employees own part or all of those companies. So-called “not-for-profit” enterprises abound across the US in many different fields. Some alternative, non-capitalist enterprises are inspired by the example of Mondragon, a federation of over 250 democratically-run worker cooperatives employing 100,000 based in Spain’s Basque region. Since their wages are determined by the worker-owners themselves, the ratio between the wages of those with mostly executive functions and others average 5:1 as compared to the 475:1 in contemporary capitalist multinational corporations.

The US cooperative movement stretches today from the Arizmendi Association (San Francisco Bay) to the Vida Verde Cleaning Cooperative (Massachusetts) to Black Star Collective Pub and Brewery (Austin, Texas), to name just a few. The largest conglomerate of worker owned co-operatives in the U.S. is the “Evergreen Cooperative Model” (or “Cleveland Model”), consisting e.g. of the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL), the Ohio Cooperative Solar (OCS), and the Green City Growers. These cooperatives share a) common ownership and democracy at the workplace; b) ecological commitments to produce sustainable goods and services and create “green jobs”, and c) new kinds of communal economic planning, mediated by “anchor institutions” (e.g. universities, non-profit hospitals), community foundations, development funds, state-owned banks or employee ownership banks etc. Such cooperatives are generating new concepts and kinds of economic development.

These examples’ varying kinds and degrees of democracy in the workplace all attest to an immense social basis of interest in and commitment to non-capitalist forms of work. Contrary to much popular mythology, there is a solid popular base for a movement to expand and diversify the options for organizing production. Workplace democracy responds to deep needs and desires.

If you are interested in getting further information about this proposal, in joining the discussion it engages, or in participating in activities to achieve its realization, please find us on Facebook at Economic Democracy Manifesto or email manifesto@rdwolff.com

“Economic Democracy Manifesto” Group

David van Arsdale 
Michael McCabe 
Costas Panayotakis
Jan Rehmann 
Sohnya Sayres
Richard D. Wolff

by Richard Wolff 
from The Guardian

Big announcements of breakthrough legislative deals during election campaigns should be taken with huge grains of salt. Generally more rhetoric than reality, they sometimes contain real concessions made by politicians seeking votes. So it is with Thursday’s Washington announcement of $25bn to help homeowners. Something significant is happening, but it lies below the surface of the headlines.

Typically, modern governments intervene in two ways when – as has been true since 2007 – free-enterprise capitalist economies produce particularly bad versions of their recurring economic “downturns”. One economic policy is aptly called “trickle down” economics. It involves throwing heaps of money at the top of the economic pyramid – to mammoth banks, insurance companies, and other corporations at or near economic collapse. Policy-makers hope that such help for these institutions will revive their activity and thereby trickle down – as credit and orders for medium-sized and small businesses, and then, finally, to jobs and maybe wage increases for the majority of workers.

The alternative is “trickle up” economic policy. It involves government financial aid aimed chiefly at helping the mass of workers. That policy’s goal is for the assisted workers to resume purchasing, which will, in turn, boost business revenues and so rebuild prosperity.

The historical record is quite clear: trickle down is no better or more effective a policy to end deep recessions and depressions than trickle up. In the last great capitalist downturn of the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration first tried trickle down. Its poor results, coupled with profound political pressures from below – the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) membership drives that brought new millions into labor unions and the surging socialist and communist parties – forced Roosevelt to add major trickle up policies. They worked better, but not well enough to overcome the Great Depression.

Of course, large corporations, their shareholders and stock markets prefer trickle down. They get bailed out and they “recover”, while the rest of us watch to see what may or may not trickle down. The US working class has been waiting for over four years. Precious little has yet trickled down. The majority of citizens prefer trickle up and for parallel reasons. Which kind of policy prevails depends on which side wields more power over the policy-makers.

Under Bush and Obama, trickle down has dominated overwhelmingly since the current crisis began in 2007. There were a few trickle-up measures: modest individual income tax cuts, repeated but very ineffective efforts to help those subjected to foreclosure, and extensions of unemployment compensation benefits. However, they were utterly dwarfed by what the Treasury and the Fed poured out in trickle-down bailouts. By 2011, it was clear that the Bush-Obama trickle-down policy had failed to end this second-worst economic downturn in a century.

The Obama team was beginning to learn what the Roosevelt team had learned sooner in their Great Depression. It turns out that bailouts for the top of the economic pyramid, which never trickle down, leave an economically depressed mass at the bottom. Governments that also try to pay for trickle-down policies by imposing “austerity programs” on the bottom only make matters worse. Sustained depression at the bottom eventually threatens the top: first economically and then also politically.

That happened sooner and more powerfully in the more depressed and more politically mobilized conditions of the 1930s. But the Tea Parties and the Occupy Wall Street movement, in their radically different ways, suggest something comparable unfolding now in the US. In Europe, the process is further along, as the Greek example shows.

The Obama team began in 2011 to supplement a wholly inadequate trickle-down approach with some limited trickle-up elements. The biggest of these have been the reductions in the social security deduction on paychecks. Another small step is this week’s modest help for homeowners facing foreclosures. It will not help the majority of those in such danger – for example, the 50% of mortgages owned by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are ineligible. It will help the rest, but not much.

Consider simply that the negative equity of US homeowners is estimated now at $ 700bn. That is how much more they owe on their homes than those homes are worth. This new bill proposes $26bn in aid for that problem. No such timidity attended the trillions provided for the trickle-down bailouts since 2007. The banks are happy with this proposed settlement’s low cost to them.

While the government’s help to homeowners is far from adequate or just, it represents a partial and late recognition of trickle-down economics’ inadequacy as policy. It further concedes the need for some trickle up. What happens next depends on the evolution of this crisis and of the political forces gathering strength.

Those factors will determine how long the beneficiaries of trickle-down economics can sustain the policy’s dominance and continue to shift its costs onto the mass of people through austerity programs. Those same factors will also determine whether we see next a further shift to trickle-up economics – or a more basic challenge to an economic system whose instability is so severe and so socially costly.

by the Wasatch Socialist Party 

What does right to work legislation actually mean? According to The Economic Policy Institute, right-to-work laws do not confer any sort of right to a job. Rather, they dilute union bargaining strength by making it harder for workers’ organizations to sustain themselves financially. Proponents argue that by weakening labor laws, RTW will lure outside companies—particularly manufacturers—into the state. Evidence shows that the claims of these proponents are completely without scientific foundation. As Utahns and Socialists we we have seen the effects of so called Right to Work laws.

Rigorous studies—using regression analysis to home in on the effect of RTW laws— show that RTW laws:

-reduce wages by $1,500 a year, for both union and nonunion workers,after accounting for different costs of living in the states (Gould and Shierholz 2011)

-lower the likelihood that employees get healthcare or pensions through their jobs—again, for both union and nonunion employees (Gould and Shierholz 2011)

-have no impact whatsoever on job growth (Lafer and Allegretto 2011)

To the extent that enacting RTW legislation ever served as an effective economic development strategy—and the evidence is weak on this point—globalization has rendered RTW irrelevant. In the 1970s and 1980s, companies may well have moved to RTW states in search of lower wages. But in 2012, companies looking for cheap labor are overwhelmingly looking to China or Mexico, not South Carolina. The impotence of right to work in the era of globalization is evident in the widespread job losses experienced by RTW states over the past 15 years. The loss of manufacturing jobs post-NAFTA has been felt in every state in the country. The highest rates of job loss have been in right-to-work states, with the Carolinas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida all losing a higher percentage of their manufacturing jobs than Indiana (Public Citizen 2011).

So who is behind this renewed push for Right to Work legislation? Disenfranchised workers? Nope. One need look no further than the Chamber of Commerce and organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, both which value profit over people.

The Socialist Party stands for the right of all workers to organize, for worker control of industry through the democratic organization of the workplace, for the social ownership of the means of production and distribution, and for international solidarity among working people based on common opposition to global capitalism and imperialism. We believe that the international organization of labor is the only way of combating the exploitation of workers in a global capitalist economy. Working people have no country, but rather an international bond based on class. Workers throughout the world have far more in common with each other across national boundaries than with their bosses in their own countries. Ultimately a socialist revolution must be an international revolution that cannot survive if confined to individual countries amidst capitalist imperialism. In the meantime we call for the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act which allows for so-called Right to Work laws.

To read the full report of the Economic Policy Institute go to: Working hard to make Indiana look bad:The tortured, uphill case for ‘right-to-work’

339 Lafayette Ave. (buzz#7) [get directions]
Friday, Feb 24, 7:30 pm

Open to public

For information call (718) 869-2279
or email us.

339 Lafayette Ave. (buzz#7) [get directions]
Friday, Feb 10, 7:00 pm

Open to public

For information call (718) 869-2279
or email us.

____________________________

UPDATE:

Thank you all for participating in the discussion. For those who could not make it, here is the taped audio:

(Full transcript of the discussion will made available soon.)

from the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute 

I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here this morning, to have the opportunity of standing in this very great and significant pulpit. And I do want to express my deep personal appreciation to Dean Sayre and all of the cathedral clergy for extending the invitation.

It is always a rich and rewarding experience to take a brief break from our day-to-day demands and the struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of goodwill all over our nation. And certainly it is always a deep and meaningful experience to be in a worship service. And so for many reasons, I’m happy to be here today.

I would like to use as a subject from which to preach this morning: “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” The text for the morning is found in the book of Revelation. There are two passages there that I would like to quote, in the sixteenth chapter of that book: “Behold I make all things new; former things are passed away.”

I am sure that most of you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled “Rip Van Winkle.” The one thing that we usually remember about the story is that Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years. But there is another point in that little story that is almost completely overlooked. It was the sign in the end, from which Rip went up in the mountain for his long sleep.

When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, the sign had a picture of King George the Third of England. When he came down twenty years later the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. When Rip Van Winkle looked up at the picture of George Washington—and looking at the picture he was amazed—he was completely lost. He knew not who he was.

And this reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain a revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of history—and Rip knew nothing about it. He was asleep. Yes, he slept through a revolution. And one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place. And there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, “Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away.”

Now whenever anything new comes into history it brings with it new challenges and new opportunities. And I would like to deal with the challenges that we face today as a result of this triple revolution that is taking place in the world today.

First, we are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.

Now it is true that the geographical oneness of this age has come into being to a large extent through modern man’s scientific ingenuity. Modern man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. And our jet planes have compressed into minutes distances that once took weeks and even months. All of this tells us that our world is a neighborhood.

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.

John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: “No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” And he goes on toward the end to say, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution.

Secondly, we are challenged to eradicate the last vestiges of racial injustice from our nation. I must say this morning that racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame.

It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.

Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church must share the guilt.

We must face the sad fact that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing “In Christ there is no East or West,” we stand in the most segregated hour of America.

The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism. And now if we are to do it we must honestly admit certain things and get rid of certain myths that have constantly been disseminated all over our nation.

One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, “Why don’t you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out.”

There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It can be used wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, “Wait on time.”

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years.

In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, “Now you are free,” but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.

Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, “You’re free,” and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

There is another thing closely related to racism that I would like to mention as another challenge. We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I’ve seen it in Latin America; I’ve seen it in Africa; I’ve seen this poverty in Asia.

I remember some years ago Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great country known as India. And I never will forget the experience. It was a marvelous experience to meet and talk with the great leaders of India, to meet and talk with and to speak to thousands and thousands of people all over that vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen.

But I say to you this morning, my friends, there were those depressing moments. How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes God’s children sleeping on the sidewalks at night? In Bombay more than a million people sleep on the sidewalks every night. In Calcutta more than six hundred thousand sleep on the sidewalks every night. They have no beds to sleep in; they have no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India’s population of more than five hundred million people, some four hundred and eighty million make an annual income of less than ninety dollars a year. And most of them have never seen a doctor or a dentist.

As I noticed these things, something within me cried out, “Can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?” And an answer came: “Oh no!” Because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation. And I started thinking of the fact that we spend in America millions of dollars a day to store surplus food, and I said to myself, “I know where we can store that food free of charge—in the wrinkled stomachs of millions of God’s children all over the world who go to bed hungry at night.” And maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.

Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying.

I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Whitman County, the poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money. The federal government hadn’t funded them, but they were trying to carry on. They raised a little money here and there; trying to get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little something.

And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they unemployed, they didn’t get any kind of income—no old-age pension, no welfare check, no anything. I said, “How do you live?” And they say, “Well, we go around, go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits. And that’s about it.”

And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, “The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair.” She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, “How much do you pay for this apartment?” She said, “a hundred and twenty-five dollars.” I looked, and I thought, and said to myself, “It isn’t worth sixty dollars.” Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, “Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives.”

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world—and nothing’s wrong with that—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to Washington in a Poor People’s Campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect. We are going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives.

We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

Great documents are here to tell us something should be done. We met here some years ago in the White House conference on civil rights. And we came out with the same recommendations that we will be demanding in our campaign here, but nothing has been done. The President’s commission on technology, automation and economic progress recommended these things some time ago. Nothing has been done. Even the urban coalition of mayors of most of the cities of our country and the leading businessmen have said these things should be done. Nothing has been done. The Kerner Commission came out with its report just a few days ago and then made specific recommendations. Nothing has been done.

And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind of soul force brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will make the difference.

Yes, it will be a Poor People’s Campaign. This is the question facing America. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.

One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power.

It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, “That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.” That’s the question facing America today.

I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy said on one occasion, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” The world must hear this. I pray God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war.

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.

It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.

Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that can’t hardly live on the same block together.

The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and a few others.

This is where we are. “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind,” and the best way to start is to put an end to war in Vietnam, because if it continues, we will inevitably come to the point of confronting China which could lead the whole world to nuclear annihilation.

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

This is why I felt the need of raising my voice against that war and working wherever I can to arouse the conscience of our nation on it. I remember so well when I first took a stand against the war in Vietnam. The critics took me on and they had their say in the most negative and sometimes most vicious way.

One day a newsman came to me and said, “Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?” I looked at him and I had to say, “Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup Poll of the majority opinion.” Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “We ain’t goin’ study war no more.” This is the challenge facing modern man.

Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair. I’m going to maintain hope as we come to Washington in this campaign. The cards are stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with the problems, and go on with the determination to make America the truly great America that it is called to be.

I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America.

Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. Before the beautiful words of the “Star Spangled Banner” were written, we were here.

For more than two centuries our forebearers labored here without wages. They made cotton king, and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. And yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to grow and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face will surely fail.

We’re going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And so, however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are, and however violent explosions are, I can still sing “We Shall Overcome.”

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

We shall overcome because Carlyle is right—”No lie can live forever.”

We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right—”Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.”

We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right—as we were singing earlier today,

Truth forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne.

Yet that scaffold sways the future.

And behind the dim unknown stands God,

Within the shadow keeping watch above his own.

With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair the stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

Thank God for John, who centuries ago out on a lonely, obscure island called Patmos caught vision of a new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God, who heard a voice saying, “Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away.”

God grant that we will be participants in this newness and this magnificent development. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy. God bless you.

Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968. Congressional Record, 9 April 1968.

from KPFA’s Against the Grain

by Chuck Hamilton 
from Notes From the Ninth Circle

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” (Johann Wolfgang van Goethe)

To paraphrase Ben Martin in “The Patriot”, when the United States was founded, we traded one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away. A national legislature made up of “Commons”, but not actual common people. The Third Estate as our French cousins called it.

From medieval to early modern times, legislatures of European governments were divided into three distinct categories, more or less the same in all countries with only a few variations. In the Estates General of France, for example, the First Estate was the clergy, particularly the higher clergy. The Second Estate was the hereditary nobility. The Third Estate was the “commoners” as a collective body, dominated by the wealthiest of the wealthy, almost all of them town-dwellers, or “bourgeoisie”, but including rich rural landholders and rentiers of the other-than-hereditary-aristocrat variety.

In Scotland, the Community of the Realm was divided into Prelates, Lairds, and Burghers, the latter being the same as the Third Estate. In England, Parliament was made up of Lords Spiritual, Lords Temporal, and Commons, in this case including knights without other title along with burghers from the towns. The Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire included Clergy, Nobility, and Burghers.

You can readily see the theocratic nature of European society at the time these legislatures were first composed in the fact that the first order was clerical in all cases. As for the Third Estate, to give a general name for the same class in all countries, it and its electors were confined to the richest non-aristocrats, corresponding to what in ancient Rome became the equites, the richest of the rich plebes, equal in all but DNA to the patricii.

The same sort of men who belonged to the Third Estate in Europe made up the colonial legislatures in America as well as their entire electorate. In truth, the only effective change in regime between the colonies under the United Kingdom and the new government of the United States was the abandonment of recognition of hereditary nobility. Since all the hereditary nobility was several thousand miles across the Atlantic, the real change in that case was virtually nonexistent.

Now, with the Constitution of 1789 and the Bill of Rights of 1791, the First Estate (the clergy) and its influence were forever barred from government. That was indeed a significant advance for humanity, though in practical terms, the clergy in most of Europe took very little actual hands-on role in government by this time, the exceptions being Spain and Italy (in France their main influence was as landlords).

So, the “new nation, conceived in liberty”, founded on the principle of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” and based on the foundation that “all men are created equal”, was actually ruled by a tiny minority of extremely wealthy trade merchants and slave-holding plantation owners (the two of which easily fit the parameters for inclusion in France’s Third Estate) who had little more than contempt for and often great fear of its toiling “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

Read the essays in The Federalist Papers written by Alexander Hamilton and John Jay (as opposed to those written by James Madison), and you will see exactly what I mean. The future Secretary of the Treasury had, in fact, spearheaded an attempt to make the nation a constitutional monarchy with Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart pretender to the throne of the United Kingdom formally known as Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart, as its titular ruler.

In his aborted venture, Hamilton had the full support of the Continental Congress and of the most prominent man politically in the former colonies, the future first President of the United States His Excellency George Washington. To be sure, there were voices of a much more genuinely democratic nature such as Thomas Paine, who failed to see Washington’s true colors until his own imprisonment and near-execution during the Reign of Terror in France, but these were the rare exception rather than the rule.

(To be fair, George Washington did lean toward republican sympathies, but he was most certainly a man of his own class rather than of the people.)

In other words, the overwhelming 99% majority of persons inside its borders of the brand new United States of America were without franchise, with no Estate, and virtual outcastes, or untouchables if you will, in their own land, at the mercy of the 1% above them.

Along with many other people, I have often wondered about where the iconic division of society into 1% over 99%, much-repeated since the Occupy Wall Street movement was launched, came from. Since it’s been nearly three decades since I graduated the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), not too much of what I studied in my sociology classes is bubbling up close to the surface. It was only when I was reviewing articles on social class in America that I realized that nearly all sociologists commenting on the subject identify a class of people at the top comprised of approximately 1% of the population.

No matter how they divide up the rest of the population, and no two sociologists agree on the number of classes, what to name them, what characteristics make up the members of each level, all agree that there is a 1% group atop a pyramid of the other 99%. What to call this elite clique none can agree on, however, some sociologist using the designation “the upper class”, others calling it “the super-rich”, some by the quasi-Marxist name “the capitalist class”.

These are the people Marx and Engels called the “bourgeoisie”, or sometimes more specifically the “haute-bourgeoisie” to distinguish them from their admirers and would-be imitators, the petite-bourgeoisie. The word “bourgeoisie” had already acquired a meaning similar to the one with which the two founders of Marxism used it. Originally, the word simply meant “town-dweller”. Later, particularly after monarchs began to gather together assemblies of notables from around the country, its definition became more restricted, eventually confined to something resembling today’s “1%”.

For Marx and Engels, the term bourgeoisie referred almost exclusively to industrial capitalists, the owners of the means of production as private property. Though they both occasionally referred to “finance capitalism” and “rentier capitalism”, for the two of them the primary struggle was against industrial capitalists, so the undifferentiated word bourgeoisie meant them.

“Private property”, by the way, does not refer to a person’s house (no matter how grandiose) or car or clothes or silverware or computer or books or anything of the kind. All those objects are personal property. As opposed to public property, private property is anything from which capital can be used to make a profit that is owned by one or more private individuals. Now public property, its opposite, is anything collectively owned by the greater body of citizenry for the benefit of all its members, whether it be government buildings, parks, roadways, or public corporations indistinguishable from their private counterparts.

No socialist of any reputable and non-extreme variety has at any time recommended the abolition of personal property.

The narrow focus of Marx and Engels on industrial capitalism, i.e. that involving industrial manufacturing, obscured the role of the capitalist financial system in creating the conditions under which both industrial capitalism and rentier capitalism flourished. Lenin dealt with it more extensively, but even though he correctly acknowledges that by his time finance capitalism had surpassed the former, he shared their mistake in making the latter its child rather than its parent.

Incidentally, Lenin also came up with the concept of imperialism as a latter-day stage of capitalism, and some less flexibly minded advocates of Leninism argue that imperialism did not exist before the capitalistic “Age of Imperialism”, which lasted 1870-1914.

First, let’s be clear about the three different capitalisms.

Industrial capitalism is the use of man-made goods to produce other man-made goods of higher value derived primarily from the labor put into their manufacture with that surplus value primarily used as profit to the bourgeois owner(s) of the private property.

Rentier capitalism, by the way, involves the bourgeoisie in question receiving income primarily from real property-based sources in rent, intellectual property rights, dividends, fees, and capital gains. You know, the way Mitt Romney gets all his income.

Finance capitalism, the “mother” of all other capitalisms and of the bourgeoisie in the modern sense of the term, refers to individuals deriving their income from buying, selling, and/or investing in stocks, bonds, futures, other derivatives, currencies, and the loan of money at interest. Insurance companies also fall under this heading.

Needless to say, a member of the bourgeoisie can benefit from any two or all three varieties of capitalism and most do so.

The roots of modern capitalism go back to what might be called among the most medieval of circumstances. Except for the Inquisition, the Crusades were among the most barbaric, narrow-minded, and superstitious of actions carried out by the West. On the other hand, they were instigated by the appeal in 1095 of the Roman emperor at Constantinople, Basileus Alexios I Sebastos, to Pope Urban II at the Lateran Palace for help against the Seljuk Turks who by now occupied much of Anatolia.

Similar to the appeal 1169 of Dermot MacMurrough to Richard de Clare (Strongbow) for help regaining his kingdom of Leinster from which he had been deposed by Rory O’Connor, the High King of Ireland. Look how that turned out for the Irish.

Constantinople had been the primary capital, now sole capital, of the Imperium Romanum or Basilea Rhomain since the time of Diocletian. Its emperor, bureaucracy, and population considered it and themselves Roman, every bit as much as their Western counterparts still considered themselves. Even their primary enemies, the Seljuk Turks, thought of them and their territory as Roman, using the name Rhum.

The Crusades lasted 1095-1291, and during that time the powers-that-be needed to move huge amounts of men and material across vast spaces and several international borders, and therefore needed a system to arise since none then existed. In addition, once territories were established in the Levant, pilgrims and tourists needed both protection and a way to shift money without it being vulnerable to theft.

Of the five military orders that arose to fight the Crusades, the Knights Templar were the largest and most diverse, with the widest holdings and the biggest coffers. Therefore, it is not too surprising that their ingenious brothers developed the system of finance which serves as the foundation for modern banking. They allowed others to deposit their wealth, issued letters of credit, and gave it back to them as needed, with, of course, fees for their services. They even exploited loopholes in Church law and of the various nations in Europe to lend money at interest.

Not surprisingly, this last improvement in their services eventually brought about the Templars’ downfall, due to massive outstanding loans made to leaders and governments across Europe, in particular to Philip IV of France and to the See of Rome. Its leadership was destroyed, its possessions seized, its wealth redistributed.

The Knights Hospitaller and other orders had been likewise dabbling in banking, but to a much lesser extent. They quickly divested themselves of those businesses.

Besides Philip IV and Pope Boniface VIII (and the Knights Hospitaller), the primary beneficiaries of the Templars’ demise were the Italian maritime republics of Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi, Florence, Ancona, and Ragusa. Independent, each had originated in the late 6th century as a ducatas (territory ruled by a dux) under the Roman Empire’s Exarchate of Italiae. By the 9th century, all had successfully broken away.

All these republics took over the financial system abandoned by the Templars upon their demise. They even enhanced some of its conveniences and methods of gaining profits, most especially inventing new legal fictions for charging credit. Their coastal locations and easy access to exploit maritime trade helped make the republics the richest “countires” in Europe and launch the Italian Renaissance.

More than any of the others, the Republic of Venice benefitted from the Crusades, with its holdings and sources of revenue greatly enhanced. With it in the unquestioned dominant role, Venice these coastal city-states in controlling nearly all the trade in the Mediterranean Sea and overland to the Far East. For that reason, nations desiring to cash in on trade from the East or bypass that trade to go directly to the source began searching the globe.

Thus began the Age of Exploration. A century and a half into this era, 250 men came together to share the financial risk of their attempt to bypass the similar stranglehold of the Dutch Republic on trade in the North Sea. Their aim was trade with Russia. Each of the 250 had a share of ownership proportional to their investment called a “stock”.

The company, chartered in 1553, was the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands, and a couple of years later it became the Muscovy Company. It is the first known joint-stock company. Several more followed, and in 1600 the London government issued a charter for the English (later British) East India Company.

The Dutch Republic followed with its own East India Company in 1602. Eventually so did Denmark (1616), Portugal (1628), France (1664), and Sweden (1731). The Dutch East India Company’s innovation was the stock exchange where people could trade shares, speculate about the company’s fortunes, etc.

Joint stock companies served as the primary means for financing the colonization of the Americas. The Virginia Company, Massachusetts Bay Company, and Hudson’s Bay Company for England, the New Netherlands Company, the West India Companies of the Dutch Republic, Denmark, Sweden, and France, the New Sweden Company, the Company of New France, France’s Mississippi Company, and Scotland’s Company of Trading to Africa and the Indies were all joint-stock capitalist companies for commerce and colonization of varying degrees of success.

Beyond question the most successful and profitable of them all, the British East India Company became the very epitome of the very worst features of capitalist imperialism and monopoly. It became a virtual private state unto itself, eventually holding in its grasp the entire Empire of India, with the full force of the crown backing it up.

Its monopoly over the triangular commerce in the Atlantic, as far as the United Kingdom’s American colonies were concerned, helped lead to the American Revolution. In particular, its monopoly over import-export trade and the London Parliament’s passage of the Tea Act on its behalf led to the First Boston Tea Party of 1773, Second Boston Tea Party of 1774, and Chestertown Tea Party of 1774.

With the victory of the American bourgeoisie, the aristocracy became extinct and the clergy irrelevant for the time being. Only the Third Estate remained. The new elite named its new capital New Rome, later changing it to what it is now. It named many of the features of the city for one’s in the ancient Rome, designed its Mall after the Forum, and made the rotunda in its Capitol building a replica of the Temple of Vesta. Congress first came to order on Christmas Day 1789, and the mail ran every Sunday until after the Civil War.

Gradually, however, the bourgeois elite realized they needed to pacify the proletarian majority and therefore began to enfranchise more of its members as well as give religion more free reign. In particular regarding the latter, religion became one of the chief justifications for the continuation of slavery, which in turn became one of the chief reasons why the South, once the least religious regions on the continent with inhabitants indifferent at best, became the Bible Belt it is now.

In spite of the increase in the franchise (i.e. right to vote), the average citizen has little more say in government than the holder of a life insurance policy has over the companies in which he holds a share by virtue of that policy. That and the myth (a la Horatio Alger) that America is a meritocracy where someone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, work hard, obey all the rules, and do well, serve to keep the 99% in place.

Should any attempt to protest that society is unfair, that too many resources are being wasted on profligate parasites pursuing personal pleasure and comfort and security regardless of the harm to the welfare of the general public, there is always the shame of being poor. The shame of having to admit that one is not, in fact, merely a temporarily embarrassed rich person. That you are merely one of the “wretched refuse” of America’s teeming shore, yearning to be free.

“Job creation has been and will continue to be the most obvious way that Obama has sold out working people throughout America.”

Obama’s State of the Union – Too Little Too Late

by Stewart Alexander, 2012 Socialist Party USA Presidential Candidate
from The Socialist Webzine 

The phrase that came to mind immediately upon hearing President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech is “too little, too late.” After spending the last few years coddling the banks and the richest 1%, Obama has the nerve to now call for “economic fairness.” To him, this means tweaking payroll taxes and making a rhetorical call to reverse the Bush tax cuts for the rich. For working people in America real fairness means the right to a job, a guarantee of healthcare for all and an end to the Military Industrial Complex. Obama won’t deliver this. That’s why I am running for President against him.

Job creation has been and will continue to be the most obvious way that Obama has sold out working people throughout America. These decisions were made early on in his administration when he made the conscious decision to pour billions of dollars into the Banks that had funded his campaign instead of using those funds to create an emergency employment program to put people back to work. The result is that Americans have experienced nearly three consecutive years of more than 9% unemployment and nearly double that when those workers who given up looking for jobs are counted. This has meant real human suffering for millions of people.

Although Obama has hailed the recent decline in these same unemployment rates, a closer look at the numbers reveal the hollowness of his claims. Economist Doug Henwood has paged through the Unemployment report and discovered that much of the reduction is due to the effects of holiday seasonal employment and, in particular, a shift to online purchasing for Christmas gifts. Of the 200,000 jobs created in December, some 42,000, or over 1/5, came from the hiring of extra couriers and messengers. Bars, restaurants and healthcare companies picked up the bulk of the rest of the new hires. Hardly the manner in which we want to grow the economy.

The jobs program that the Alexander/Mendoza 2012 campaign is proposing calls for the creation of a Full Employment economy. We have a three-pronged approach. First, we want to create an Emergency Jobs Program that will put millions of workers back to work immediately in fields like environmental cleanup, infrastructure creation and maintenance, and education. Second, we support proposals to publicly fund a worker owned and managed cooperative sector. This will serve to not only put people back to work, but to re-build the manufacturing capacity of our country. Finally, we want to fund job training programs that lead to job sharing or job splitting, where workers will work less yet retain the same amount of pay and benefits.

A serious restructuring of the tax code that allows us to take back the wealth created by our work and accumulated by the 1% is key to funding our job creation plan. We want more than Obama’s proposed payroll tax cut. We deserve more than just reversing Bush’s economically suicidal tax breaks for the rich. We need a radical restructuring of the way in which we think about wealth. The great riches of this society need to be put to use to help us all – to make life better for the 99% and create new opportunities for work, relaxation and community.

This is why we propose creating a progressive tax structure where the rich pay far more than the average working person. In a democratic socialist society neither Obama nor Romney would be allowed to pay an effective tax rate of 26% and 17% respectively. Corporate taxation, financial gains taxes and personal income taxes will be modernized – all loopholes will be closed and the rich will pay a steep tax on their income. This is what economic fairness looks like to a socialist.

If Obama’s proposals for “Economic Fairness” are hard to believe, his attempt to present his Presidency as one of peace is simply a farce. The hands of the Obama administration are dripping with blood. He has approved a brutal Drone war on the people of Pakistan that has resulted in massive civilian casualties. He has accelerated the war in Afghanistan, which has increased casualties among soldiers and terrorized the civilian population driving them into the political arms of the Taliban. And Obama has continued to take an aggressive political stance on Iran thereby moving the country closer to another war.

All this, plus a clear continuation of the Bush era security state policies. Obama’s approval of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) annihilates centuries of civil rights protections. The President now has the right to indefinitely jail any citizen in the America without having to work within the protections of habeas corpus. Added to the NDAA is the fact that, as I write this, Bradley Manning is rotting in a jail cell. Manning is Obama’s prisoner – a moral testament to the President’s commitment to continue the job of restricting civil liberties.

My campaign is staunchly anti-militarist. This means that I commit to bringing the troops home now through the elimination of all foreign occupations and the closing of all foreign military bases and I aim to dismantle the Military Industrial Complex. My campaign calls for an immediate 50% reduction in military spending. We think that democratic socialism offers the best hope for the creation of a world based on peace and solidarity. Eliminating the security state will move us a long way in that direction. America should be a model for civil liberties not a test case for how many rights can be restricted.

I am writing this also to encourage voters to take a serious look at my campaign. They will find that socialist politics are clearly distinct from the politics of the 1% peddled by politicians such as Obama, Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. Under their leadership, the State of the Union is neutered – reduced to an exercise in cheerleading for the politicians that have faithfully towed the line for their corporate benefactors. The proposals of the Alexander/Mendoza campaign are made in the interest of the 99%. We think Americans deserve a clear choice come November. We will be working hard to make that possible. Join us in making a demand for jobs, peace and freedom in 2012!

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