by Billy Wharton
from the Socialist Webzine

A recent New York Times article “A Tale of Two Continents: The US Chose a Better Path to Recovery” trumpets the idea that “there can be little doubt that the American government handled the problems of the last year far better than did its European counterparts.”  The scope of the article extends far beyond 2011, it seeks to defend nearly all aspects of the US state-directed bailout of the private sector in the post-2008 period.  To do so, the areas of consideration are restricted to the three favorites of capitalist-inspired economists – the official unemployment rate, manufacturing production and stock prices.

The grim reality for most of us – the group the Occupy movement refers to as the 99% – is that we don’t live our lives inside these numbers.  The official unemployment hides the number of people who have given up looking for work.  The increase in manufacturing has mostly been a jobless one.  And the rise in stock prices is a primary concern only for 1%’ers and those being chained to them by retirement funds.

In reality, the reality most of us live in, conditions have gotten substantially worse since 2008.  Food insecurity has reached all-time highs.  In 2010, 14.5% of US households were food insecure, in other words, members of the household were not sure where their next meal would come from.  This number includes 16 million children and is the highest recorded since the Department of Agriculture began tracking hunger trends.

Public funds handed over to private enterprises through the Bailout programs have not furthered the hiring of many more workers.  A recent Wall Street Journal article indicated that businesses have made heavy investment on capital – especially machines and software – and have gone light on hiring.  Since 2009 spending on infrastructure has increased by 31% while hiring has increased by only 1.4%.  This trend was furthered by 100% write-off the US government offered on machine investments as part of a tax-break program.

The deeper social effects of this “recovery from above” are hard to fully measure – they go beyond a simple statistical analysis of the stock prices of the top 500 companies in the US.  For instance, mental illness is clearly on the rise.  Today in America, 1 in 5 people in the United States experience some form of mental illness.  A survey of a smaller sample of those affected by mental illness reported that an alarming 43% did not receive mental health care because of the cost of that care.  This has resulted nearly 1 million suicide attempts in 2010 alone.  This number includes an estimated 10,000 calls a month to the Veteran’s Administration suicide hotline.

Although the causes of mental illness are quite complex – divided between physiological and environmental factors – the degraded conditions and anxiety producing uncertainty inherent in life under capitalism strip away the nurturing sense of community essential to mental health.

The next time the New York Times or any other establishment newspaper throws the economic numbers of the 1% at you do something radical – put them into a broader context that better captures the way regular people experience them.  This is not to say that European style capitalism is better than American capitalism.  Or that the economic decisions of EU politicians and bankers were any smarter or more foolish than those of Obama and the banksters in the US.  What I mean to argue, is that this system cannot and will not satisfy the human needs of the vast majority of people – those of us in 99%.  We need a new way of living that places the full development of humanity at the center of decisions about things like the economy, war, healthcare and housing.  There can be “little doubt” that neither the current European or American governments are well equipped to handle such a task.</>

***

Billy Wharton is a writer, activist and co-chair of the Socialist Party USA. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the NYC Indypendent, Spectrezine and the Monthly Review Zine. He can be reached at whartonbilly[at]gmail[dot]com.

by Charlie Kerr
from the Socialist Webzine

Today during a non-violent action against tuition hikes, NYPD surveillance of Muslim students, privatization, and the massive, police-state security apparatus on campus, Brooklyn College Campus Police, led by the NYPD, assaulted peaceful student demonstrator’s outside of the office of the university’s president. The mood on campus today had been grimly authoritarian since morning; multiple campus security guards were posed at each entrance, religiously checking ID’s, and a van full of NYPD officers was waiting just off of campus, in view of our quad.

The action began on the quad with street theatre, speakers, the people’s mike, and even free pizza. The mood was relaxed and jovial, with one campus security officer even reporting back that, “Everything is quiet.” Suddenly however, an anonymous activist draped a red banner out of the 5th story window of Boylan Hall, our central building. The banner read:”1,2,3,4, tuiton hikes are class war, 5,6,7,8, students will retaliate!”

Students organizers leading the action then began chanting the words from the banner, forming a column of roughly 30-40 students who marched into Boylan Hall to the second floor office of our president, Karen Gould. Six students, including myself, made a human chain in front of the door of her office and sat down, while a group of roughly thirty students and professors began using the people’s mike to lead chants and speak-outs in the hallway. The NYPD and campus security slowly encircled the demonstrators, and after warning those of us sitting-in that we would be arrested if we did not move, they announced that they had to clear the hallway.

The crowd failed to disperse, but parted to allow people through. The police entered the aisle created by the crowd and were standing by to begin arresting the sit-in. Suddenly, the crowd started to move and the hallway filled with yelling as the NYPD violently shoved the people on the edges of the crowd on both sides down the hallway and ordered them to disperse. The officers then used the ensuing chaos to begin dragging away those of us who were sitting in, starting with me, on the end. I and the others sitting down were grabbed by the officers and dragged to the doorway of the nearest stairwell, at which point I was told to “just get the hell out of here,” and shoved into the doorway, opening it with my face. A few others were tossed through the doorway after me, we re-grouped in the stairwell and joined the demonstrators on the other side of the hallway, who were not allowing the police to move them down the hallway, soft-blocking them and doing a decent job of holding the line.

This prompted the officers to begin grabbing students and attempting to drag them behind the police line. However, the students would not allow this to happen, and managed to pull the police off of every person they attempted to snatch away. This resistance prompted a melee of police brutality, including multiple students being slammed against walls, knocked to the floor, manhandled, and injured. Personally, I was grabbed by the arm and shoulder and slammed into a wall by a cop after helping to pull him off of another protestor. Most disgusting however was the assault on a disabled protestor by a group of NYPD and BC-PD officers, who took her cane and attempted to drag her behind their lines to be arrested, which was only thwarted by the efforts of multiple other demonstrators to physically separate her from the officers.

We managed to make a tactical retreat outside; losing the hallway but suffering only one arrest. That student, an organizer who had been pushed to the ground by a cop with enough force that her eyes were cloudy after her head hit the floor, was carried out of Boylan and off of campus by three NYPD officers. A second student was arrested attempting to separate her from the officers. While today was a shocking spectacle of police state brutality, it was also a show of force and solidarity by the student body that will not be easily forgotten by Gould or the NYPD.

Statement of the Socialist Party USA National Action Committee

Simultaneously, Socialists can proudly proclaim our support for two ideas that have fueled Occupy – horizontalism and direct action. Democratic socialism is horizontalism. If, for a moment, we think backwards we will find that at the origins of the Socialist movement at the turn of the 20thcentury, anarchists and socialists worked closely together to create a vibrant anti-capitalist movement. Subsequent efforts at the “vertical” organization of socialism during the revolutions of the 20thcentury extinguished much of the democratic impulse of early socialism. Those of us in the democratic socialist side of the movement have always kept this horizontal vision of early socialism alive. We share that value with Occupy and we should look to collaborate with other socialists interested in pushing this idea forward.

And, Socialist Party USA members have always been at the forefront of direct action initiatives. Non-violent civil disobedience has always been a hallmark of first, the Socialist Party of America and then the SP-USA. Think Eugene Debs protesting World War I, or A. Philip Randolph leading the Civil Rights movement or David McReynolds protesting the Vietnam War or, more recently, members of the SP-USA engaging in direct actions to protest war, or anti-union legislation. If horizontalism is our goal, non-violent civil disobedience is our democratic weapon to get there.

We will need all the momentum and enthusiasm that OWS has inspired, because in important ways the future also looks quite bleak. Capitalism has transitioned from the public looting that defined the immediate aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008 to the politics of austerity that are being imposed all over the world. Austerity has swept across Europe, decimating a once significant social safety net and driving millions of people into unemployment and previously unheard of levels of deep poverty. The same is true in other parts of world, as capitalist governments roll back all manner of supports.

This global trend is sure to hit the US in a significant manner after the 2012 Presidential elections. Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have dedicated themselves to the politics of austerity. Romney with a cruel glee and Obama behind a public relations mask that offers empty claims of “hope” and “change.” Socialists can begin to resist this drive towards austerity today by involving themselves in local movements against budget cuts and by putting their energy into the Socialist Party Presidential campaign of Stewart Alexander and Alex Mendoza. Though the pair will not win the elections, their campaign represents the clearest socialist voice in the elections against the coming capitalist cutbacks. This effort should work seamlessly with the existing campaigns against the cuts.

So, on this May Day, Socialists can raise our banners high in the streets, we can join with the OWS protests and we can encourage others to join us in resistance. Though we can find inspiration and intellectual sustenance in the past, ours should be a movement with an eye toward the future. As the old Civil Rights slogan reminds us, “keep your eyes on the prize.” And, in this case, the prize is a new society where a job for all, housing for all, education for all and freedom for all becomes the norm. Long live May Day!

by Yotam Marom 
from Waging Non violence 

“The Tombs” is the less-than-endearing nickname for New York City’s Central Booking, the jail you get sent to if you are arrested in Manhattan and set to be arraigned before a judge. This spiraling dungeon below the courthouse at 100 Centre Street is about as ominous as it sounds. Above, the court itself is pristine and immaculate, adorned in mahogany and full of quiet, proper, well-dressed people. But all you have to do is open a door to the back of the courtroom to reveal an underground complex made up of filthy jail cells, violent correctional officers and hundreds of (mainly) poor people (mainly) of color, awaiting their arraignment for anywhere between 10 and 72 hours.

Everything about the Tombs is awful. It’s cold even when the weather is warm and summery outside. The lights maintain their piercing, head-splitting fluorescence even at night, and the bars jut out just so you can’t lean on them comfortably. You eat stale cheese sandwiches and drink milk, though dairy is probably the last thing you want during a 40-hour stay in a mass cell with one toilet. You are stripped of most things about you that make you human — your ability to manage your own affairs, to move around, to communicate with the outside world, to be productive, to identify yourself. And of course, as you sit there, you realize this is only the tip of the iceberg of the kind of repression the state is capable of, or the kind of violence it heaps on working class communities of color every day. All the while, you are still supposedly presumed innocent.

From occupying Liberty Square and marching in the streets without permits, to carrying out targeted acts of direct action against the banks that crashed the economy or the courts that auction off people’s homes, winding up in places like this has been an integral part of the Occupy Wall Street’s life since its birth. Yet we’re only at the very beginning of understanding our civil disobedience — the ways in which it grows but also shrinks the movement, the positive and negative impacts it has on the movement’s internal culture, and the challenging but ultimately vital role it plays in the struggle for liberation.

The whole world is watching

The mass arrests and pepper-spraying that took place in New York City on September 24 drastically changed the course of the movement. The NYPD dragged us kicking and screaming, in handcuffs, into the headlines. It won sympathy and solidarity from a lot of people who were — until then — watching from the sidelines, trying to decide if the movement was worth supporting, identifying with and joining. The arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge a week later did even more of that, catapulting the movement into the national and international arena. Those events dramatically inflated our numbers, deepened our resolve, and won us tremendous popular support. We were unstoppable. The whole world was watching. We were winning.

Many of us in the movement have gotten used to thinking that it’s always a good thing to appear in the paper getting arrested in large numbers, as long as we can practice nonviolence and come out of it looking innocent. But there’s another side to it. What if the politicians and bankers don’t actually care if we are in the news? What if the NYPD doesn’t care if the violence looks like it’s their fault or ours? Maybe to them it doesn’t matter whose fault it is, as long as what is being communicated is that anyone who sets foot in the streets with the Occupy movement has a good shot at ending up in the Tombs, or worse. In fact, they might be thinking that the more people who see those gruesome images on the cover of the Daily News, the better.

Getting arrested is difficult for anyone, but some of us are privileged enough to emerge from our 40 hours in the Tombs without much damage done, feeling even more die-hard, confident that we will be greeted and taken care of by fellow activists, friends and the National Lawyers’ Guild. But, of course, we all have different calculations to make –based on race, class, gender, sexual identity, educational background, access to systems of support, family obligations and other things — that put us in a better or worse position to take risks in the movement. Make no mistake about it: The people most affected by the injustices we fight have always been the backbone of any mass movement for social change. But the consequences aren’t the same for everyone, and people are most inclined to lay it on the line when the things at stake are real, critical and pressing. So while the images of activists being beaten and arrested might win sympathy, even solidarity, they might just as well prevent many people from actively participating.

On the one hand, it’s incredibly important to be drawing connections between Wall Street and the police, between capital and the state. When police drag indebted students out of a bank lobby they are occupying, or when a family is forcibly evicted from a foreclosed home so it can be handed over to a bank, it drives home the point that the state plays a very particular role in this economy, and vice versa. We need to unmask that, to show the system’s nakedness, its willingness to resort to violence to maintain order and profit. Civil disobedience is one way to shine a spotlight on the struggles people face under systems of oppression, the ways these systems are intertwined and the things ruling groups do in order to protect them.

We don’t always choose when we are arrested, and we don’t always have control over how it is depicted in the press, but we do have some power over what kinds of battles we choose to wage and how we choose to wage them. While the image of the police arresting protesters reveals some things, it can obscure others. Sometimes we contribute to this problem ourselves, for instance when we take the bait and narrow our focus to fights over public space or the right to protest in and of themselves. The interviews many activists give then become focused on the abuse they suffer from violent cops and no longer about the issues that brought us into the streets. People organize self-indulgent actions, such as the recent march that commemorated the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. In better moments, we respond to the violence used on us with a broader stand against police brutality as a whole, with an emphasis on its wildly disproportionate use on communities of color. But even these long, fiery marches in solidarity with victims of state violence eventually wind down and become, again, a tired standoff with the cops themselves.

A culture of arrest

For many people inside Occupy Wall Street, getting arrested has become a rite of passage. In a lot of ways that’s very reasonable; getting arrested is an important educational experience for an activist to go through. When we are arrested, we learn to take one for the team in a disciplined way. We show solidarity toward people we don’t even know. We experience the interconnectedness of the state and the economy, race and class, patriarchy and violence. Most importantly, many of us — particularly those of us who are younger and have lived relatively privileged lives — learn about our place in the world. We learn to explain ourselves to people who come from different backgrounds from us, and we are reminded that we have much to learn from the life stories of the others. We learn to shut up about how bad the sandwiches are, because we will come out to an army of cheering friends bearing gifts of all kinds, while many others in the Tombs will come out alone and downtrodden, returning to their lives with a day’s less pay, while others won’t come out for months or years. These remind us why we’re in the struggle in the first place, and they’re all incredibly valuable lessons.

But the culture of arrest in the movement has troubling aspects to it as well. Although many people in the movement practice civil disobedience without any ego and at great personal risk, it still often contributes to a macho, largely hetero-normative dynamic that compels people to constantly ante up, to compete for street cred or to want a cool arrest picture to put on Facebook. What emerges is a more-radical-than-thou culture that unconsciously but visibly elevates those of us who carry out actions in the streets over those who maintain the office or work in the kitchen, giving more power and recognition in the movement to those willing to take a bust (or talk about it), while leaving largely unrecognized the work behind the scenes that makes all of it possible. It also compels people to take unnecessary risks, leading many young activists to rack up dangerous police records in very short periods of time, with the charges getting increasingly more serious. Let’s not forget that the more successful we are, the more of a threat we will be, and the more repression we will face — particularly those groups in the movement and in society who are most threatened as it is.

In many ways, the civil disobedience we practice with our arrests has left the realm of tactic or tool and has become an impulse, a band-aid, a knee-jerk reaction, a way to define oneself, something to cultivate for its own sake. But as problematic as that may be, still, it must continue to be an integral and critical part of any resistance movement. The question is not if we should practice civil disobedience, but how we can do it in ways that push the struggle forward in effective and healthy ways.

Know your enemies

Civil disobedience is a natural response to a world like ours; it means refusing to be a bystander to the apparent trajectory of the social order. We don’t think twice about the direct action of stopping traffic to protect a child who wandered into it unknowingly; we would practice civil disobedience any day in situations like that, never thinking of standing by or waiting for a majority vote. The same is true in our movement. We know this system is broken, we know it doesn’t have to be this way and we know there is an alternative. So we stop traffic. The question is not whether we should use civil disobedience as part of our movement’s arsenal — but how, for what and when.

Civil disobedience isn’t principally about the cops (unless it is about the cops, for instance, because they shot another black kid for being black), although it clarifies the role police play to protect the interests of the status quo. It’s not about public space in itself, although public space is one of many tools for building a movement that is capable of being both an alternative and a staging ground for a struggle. Getting arrested isn’t the only way to be radical or courageous, nor is it worthy of more praise than so much of the other work that takes place in the movement. It is not always a winning media strategy, and it does not always use our resources most effectively. It should not come at the cost of continuing to develop and popularize a variety of methods for struggle. It is not a good in itself.

Civil disobedience is a tool, one we employ to win real things and push the struggle forward, as part of a broader strategy to transform society. It should be thought-out and well-timed, carefully employed on a worthy target and led by those people who are most affected. We must practice it with vision and precision, and highlight the real issues that brought this movement to life. We should use it to stand directly in the way of the systems of oppression around us and those who govern them — to block their roads and their ports, to shut down their conferences and their conventions, to clog their banks and their governments, to take back our schools, our workplaces and our homes. We must use it wisely and intentionally, but fiercely and passionately. We must make business as usual simply and utterly impossible, prying open — bit by bit — space for the world we are creating.

Socialists of America, Unite! on May 1, 2012

Occupy spread like wildfire, setting America ablaze. From large cities like New York City and Los Angeles to small towns like Martinsburg, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama, occupiers are consistently organizing, planning, discussing, and taking direct action for the 99%.

Not since the 1960s and 1930s have so many people taken militant action against the state and capital.

No matter what we think of Occupy’s calls for a general strike on May 1, the important thing is that those calls are resonating on a scale not seen since the days of the free speech fights and the call for “One Big Union” by the Industrial Workers of the World.

It is with this in mind that we, the undersigned, call on all socialists, regardless of organizational affiliation or lack thereof,
to unite in joint action on May 1, 2012.

In places where there will be large permitted May Day marches like New York City, there will be a multi-tendency contingent with socialists from a variety of organizations and independent socialists as well. In places without May 1 marches, mass meetings or socials to celebrate May Day might be more appropriate.

Regardless what form it takes, on May 1, 2012 we should act together.

To be clear, we are not saying that socialists who are in unions, campus groups, or other organizations leave or separate from the
contingents/actions those organizations are planning.

We are saying that whatever locally based action socialists take on May 1 should be united in order to maximize our visibility, impact, and influence.

Any individual or organization may sign this call by emailing may1socialistunity@gmail.com and/or “liking” our Facebook page.

For more information on how to link up with this initiative or organize a joint action in your area, contact
may1socialistunity@gmail.com.

Signed*:

Ben Campbell, Occupy Wall Street

Bhaskar Sunkara, Editor, Jacobin magazine

Billy Wharton, Socialist Party USA

Bob Turansky, Solidarity

Clay Claiborne, Venice filmmaker and The North Star

Chris Cutrone, Platypus Society

Chris Maisano, Democratic Socialists of America

Carl Davidson, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

Dan La Botz, Solidarity

Jason Schulman, New Politics magazine, Democratic Socialists of America

Fernando Gapasin, Freedom Road Socialist Organization

Manuel Barrera, independent revolutionary socialist

Michael Hirsch, New Politics magazine

Steve Early, Labor journalist, organizer, and member of Newspaper Guild/CWA

Warren Davis, Labor Working Group, Occupy Philly

Zak, Occupy Wall Street Class War Camp

*Organizations listed for identification purposes only.

Organizational endorsements: John Reed Society; Platypus Affiliated Society

Invited Organizations:
American Party of Labor
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
Communist Party USA
Democratic Socialists of America
Freedom Road Socialist Organization (freedomroad.org)
Freedom Road Socialist Organization (frso.org)
Industrial Workers of the World
International Socialist Organization
Internationalist Group
Party for Socialism and Liberation
Progressive Labor Party
Revolutionary Communist Party
Socialist Action
Socialist Alternative
Socialist Labor Party
Socialist Party USA
Socialist Viewpoint
Socialist Workers Party
Solidarity
U.S. Marxist-Leninist Organization
Workers International League
Workers World Party

by Billy Wharton
from the Socialist Webzine

The growing resistance to capitalism is not confined to relatively spectacularly mobilizations carried out by Occupy Wall Street. Later this week, voters intent on transforming an economic system that is poised to unleash savage austerity will go to the polls in France. And, if early polling is any indication, a large percentage of the country will be casting their vote for Jean-Luc Melenchon, the Presidential candidate of the Left Front. The spirit of this political awakening was brought to New York recently as French Left Party representative Ramzi Kebaili presented on the new Left Front, an electoral coalition made up of many French left wing organizations, at a Regional meeting of the Socialist Party USA.

The day began with a scene that might have been quite familiar to Kebaili – a street demonstration in support of a worker’s struggle. Saturday also marked the launching of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) new campaign to demand a raise from the chain restaurant Chipotle. CIW represents farmworkers in Florida who pick the tomatoes that grace the plates at the restaurant. The workers are demanding one cent more for each bushel of tomatoes picked. Kebaili joined the picket line as a representative of a party that will be demanding much more during French national elections.

Melenchon is running on a solid far-left platform. He has proposed not only raising the minimum-wage in the country, but also creating a maximum salary. Any wages, the Left Front representative demands, above the amount of 300,000 euros would be taxed at 100%. This, combined with a Legal mandate that the salary of a CEO be no more than 20 times that of a worker, would put a serious crimp in the lifestyle of 1%’ers in France. Kebaili also reported that Melenchon, ironically, is also campaigning for President with the idea of abolishing the Presidency – a position he feels leads to a dangerous personalization of politics.

Kebaili was sure to demystify any of the confusion that might have existed in the room. The Left Front is now the main challenger to the French Socialist Party. However as he stated, “the Socialist Party in France is not like the Socialist Party in the US.” He documented the way in which the French SP had systematically implemented a neoliberal agenda thereby alienating their left-wing base in French society. Melenchon himself was once an elected representative of the SP who soon found himself on the left of the party and ultimately led a group that broke away from the organization to form the French Left Party.

The inspiration for this break came from Germany as Melenchon and other dissident SP members observed the successful left break from the Social Democratic Party of Germany that led to the formation of the Die Linke party. Conditions in France, Kebaili argued, were far more ripe for such a new left formation since the new party could rely on the long tradition of left organizing and electoral activity among poor and working class people in France.

Despite this optimism, things seemed rather bleak in the last election cycle. The far-right National Front party made serious gains at the polls while the Left seemed hopelessly splintered. At least half a dozen small left groups presented candidates in the 2007 Presidential elections, each carving out a single-digit chunk of voters to the detriment of all. The Left Front itself managed to poll only 6%. While the far-right became the darlings of the media, the left seemed permanently trapped in the little ghettos it had created for itself.

The launching of the Left Front for the 2012 elections marks a break from this self-imposed isolation. The French Left Party, the Communist Party of France, the United Left, radical ecological and radical Republican groups all have agreed to collaborate in the Front during the elections. This has served to reduce the number of competing candidates and increased the amount of resources afforded to the campaign. Kebaili reported that even the New Anti-capitalist Party of France candidate for President used his time at the podium during the national debates to say that it would be fine if voters voted for Melenchon.

Kebaili insisted that running left wing candidates in elections was “a good way to fight the system.” He mentioned three ways in which Melenchon has already won the elections. First, he has managed to crowd the far-right out of the media – often lampooning them to the press. Second, he has forced the other mainstream parties to address the issues he is presenting. For instance, the SP candidate claimed that he might support an 75% tax on income above 1,000,000 euros. And, finally, the campaign has served to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people against the impending austerity plans sure to be offered by a Sarkozy or SP government. Nearly 100,000 people came out to a raucous rally in Marseille last week alone.

There are certainly many lessons to be learned from the latest chapter of anti-capitalist resistance in France. When asked whether it was difficult to create a coalition between such different groups, Kebaili said no, that the issues of difference were minor and the parties held many programmatic points in common. Similar sentiments seems to be rising in the US as the dynamic role of the Occupy movement forces left organizations into contact and conversation with one another. Though conditions are quite different, especially in terms of electoral laws, there might be something for American leftists to celebrate next week as French voters cast their ballots for an anti-capitalist alternative.

***
Billy Wharton is a writer, activist and co-chair of the Socialist Party USA. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the NYC Indypendent, Spectrezine and the Monthly Review Zine. He can be reached at whartonbilly[at]gmail[dot]com.

from the Socialist Webzine

We, academics, intellectuals, writers, artists, leaders of political forces, trade unions as well as citizen and social movements, are engaged in the construction of political and social, democratic and popular fronts, to combat the social and ecological devastation of globalized capitalism and its oligarchies. This is taking place in our respective countries as well as at the international level.

All over, we observe that resistances and struggles are multiplying and taking form. They are contributing to the emergence of a vast global movement of ideas. This is already inspiring, in Latin America, forms of regional construction based on solidarity and popular sovereignty, as well as governmental measures that are breaking with neo-liberalism.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, Europe, the pillar of global capitalism and its globalitarian agenda, has become the epicentre of the global crisis. Its peoples are subject to brutal structural adjustment policies that are, in all respects, similar to those that the countries of the South, among others, were exposed to in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The actors are in part the same: conservative or social-democratic governments and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The latter has been joined by the European Commission and the European Central Bank to form the sinister and all-powerful “troika” which now administers its cruel remedies to populations.

History teaches us that when Europe tumbles, the world can topple. To prevent it from sinking into perpetual austerity, widespread recession and an authoritarian and reactionary political project, the rise, in France, of the Front de Gauche, alongside other European progressive forces, is good news, as well as a necessity. Moreover, France is a voice that counts in the world, when it follows in the tradition of the Enlightenment, the 1789 Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Popular Front and the French
Resistance.

The Front de Gauche embodies all of the renewed potential of this great tradition of historic socialism, social emancipation, progress and construction in the general interest of humankind. It also takes into account the 21st century issue of understanding the unicity of our ecosystem and the urgency of preserving it through ecological conversion on a global scale that takes into consideration the ecological debt that industrialized countries have in relation to other countries.

With the Front de Gauche, France can significantly contribute to the construction of a different Europe and a different type globalisation. That is why, after having learned from the failure and the collapse of state communism, as well as from the conversion of social-democracy to socialliberalism, accompanying and tinkering with the globalised
capitalist system, the issue of forming another left in France is crucial. It is crucial for France and for Europe, but also for the rest of the world.

We believe that the success of the Front de Gauche and its candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in the presidential election on the 22nd of April and the 6th of May 2012 can contribute to the renewal and strengthening of internationalism in the fight against globalised finance. For this reason, we wish every success to the Front de Gauche and express our solidarity with its candidate.

by Richard Wolff
from rdwolff.com

Government budget deficits and the national debt are occasions more for demagogues to preach than for serious analysis. The usual suspects, conservatives and liberals, are gearing up for the election. Each side uses the large federal budget deficits and fast-accumulating national debt to beat its tired ideological drums. Conservatives insist that deficits and debts require huge cuts in government jobs and job benefits (especially pensions) and in social programs (especially Medicare and Medicaid). Liberals push for less drastic cuts in federal employment and programs because “the economy still needs stimulus.” Liberals promise that when prosperity returns and Washington’s tax revenues rise, we can painlessly use them to reduce the accumulated debt.

The two sides have been promoting these positions for decades, long before the current deficits and debts arrived. The latter are just opportunities exploited by both sides to repeat old sermons to their faithful. However, there are important political lessons to learn by connecting deficits and debts to the demagogues using them these days.

What are the actual causes of recent years’ high deficits that have boosted the national debt? The first cause is the capitalist crisis. When millions are fired, their lost income means lower individual income taxes flowing to Washington. When businesses lose sales, their incomes also drop and thus also their income tax payments to Washington. Lower sales mean lower sales taxes flowing to state governments. Our collapsed housing market lowers property values, and that drops the property taxes on which local governments depend.

Second, even as government revenue shrank because of the crisis, Washington undertook extremely costly bailouts of large banks and other corporations as part of stimulating a crisis-ridden capitalist economy. Washington also sent more money to states and localities to offset a part of their revenue loss because of the crisis. Crisis-induced revenue losses plus crisis-induced expenditure increases are the major causes of today’s large deficits and national debt increases.

The third major cause of federal deficits and debts has been huge reductions in corporate income taxes and individual incomes taxes on the richest Americans. At the end of World War II, for every dollar paid to Washington in individual income taxes, corporate profits’ taxes amounted to $ 1.50. Today, the ratio is very, very different: for every $1 paid in individual income taxes, corporations pay $ 0.25. Despite the effects on statistics of S corporations and other tax loopholes for businesses and executives, the bottom line shows a massive shift of the federal tax burden from business onto individuals. Over the same period, the top rate of the federal individual income tax fell from 94 percent to 35 percent: a massive federal tax break for the richest Americans.

The result was and remains obvious: the middle of the income distribution – the majority that is not rich and not (or not yet) really poor – had to pick up the burden. No wonder that majority of the population is upset, angry, talks endlessly about “tax revolts” and deeply distrusts politicians of all stripes who imposed the twin massive tax shifts upon them. The majority correctly fears being driven down into the mass of the poor. As that process unfolds, the majority becomes increasingly resentful and angry and looks for whom to blame.

The job of the demagogues is to deflect that anger onto a credible scapegoat. Their goal is to protect corporations and the rich (1) from the return of the tax rates they paid in the past; (2) from paying for the crisis since 2007 that they helped to cause; and (3) from paying for the government bailouts they demanded, received, and that saved them from very serious, crisis-induced problems.

The demagogues’ preferred scapegoat is the public sector of our economy. So, they attack government employees and the public services they provide. Chief among their current targets are the pensions paid to retired public employees. These are denounced as primary causes of the deficits of local, state and federal budgets. Democrats and Republicans agree to cut those pensions as a way to reduce the deficits.

Yet, this scapegoating is easy to expose. Public employee pensions have not risen in any dramatic way over recent years, so they could not and did not cause the government budget deficits to zoom upward. Those pensions did not cause our national debt suddenly to soar. Capitalism’s second-worst crisis in 75 years and the government’s bailout program for large corporations and the stock market, that’s what caused the deficits and the exploding national debt.

Attacking workers’ pensions is preferred because it protects corporations and the rich from blame in this time of mounting economic difficulties for most people. It pits government workers against private-sector workers. Attacking public workers’ pensions undermines retirement programs to which they contributed, benefits they accepted in place of wage increases from their employer. Conservatives use lower pensions in the private sector to argue for parallel reductions in public employees’ pensions; next they will use reduced public pensions as arguments to lower private-sector pensions.

Cutting public employees’ pensions makes workers pay for a crisis they did not cause and for the massive government bailouts they did not get. How convenient for corporations and the rich that Democrat and Republican demagogues are “concerned about the problem of government pensions.” Instead of scapegoating public workers, they could remember the lessons of the last time US capitalism crashed.

In the 1930s Great Depression, powerful unions, socialist and communist parties got the government to raise taxes on corporations and the rich. Those tax revenues helped fund a New Deal for most Americans by (1) creating the Social Security system for the millions over 65, (2) creating the unemployment compensation system for the millions without jobs and (3) creating and filling over 12 million federal jobs.

As corporations and the rich rolled back the New Deal over recent decades, they created conditions for another massive crisis. Now, they aim to turn their crisis into another chapter in that roll back. When capitalism delivers these results, it has outlived its usefulness for all but the few beneficiaries of that system.

by SPUSA National Action Committee April 4, 2012
from the Socialist Webzine

George Zimmerman used a 9 millimeter gun to murder a 17 year old young man named Trayvon Martin. Martin was unarmed, wielding only a bag of skittles he had just purchased from a convenience store. Eyewitnesses say that Zimmerman is guilty. The 911 tapes say that Zimmerman is guilty. Police surveillance tapes showing a calm Zimmerman after the shooting say that he is guilty. Even Zimmerman admits that he is guilty of shooting Martin. Despite all of this, Zimmerman is not in jail, he is not being questioned and he is not facing the wrath of a criminal justice system that has been used against so many young African-American males. Trayvon Martin is dead – left only as a symbol of the oppression faced by young African-Americans all across America that makes them targets for homicidal racists, the police and the prison system.

Trayvon Martin faced the reality that haunts millions of young African-Americans – the assumption of guilt because of racial profiling. The trigger for Zimmerman’s racial violence was Martin’s hoodie – a symbol, in his mind, that converted the young man from a fellow resident of Sanford, Florida into a threat. Armed with a gun, a racist motivation and a Florida “Stand your Ground” law that encourages vigilante violence, Zimmerman felt empowered to end the life of Trayvon Martin.

Many commentators focus on the 911 call that Zimmerman made when he spotted Martin. The operator on the call instructed him not to pursue the young man and to wait for the police. If only, these commentators say, Zimmerman had waited for the police to arrive everything would have been fine. This begs the question of what fate Trayvon Martin might have faced had the police showed up.

If trends around the country are any indication, Martin might have faced just as much of a threat from the police as he did from Zimmerman. The assumption of guilt when it comes to young African-American males drives police policies all across the country. There’s no better example than the Stop and Frisk policy enforced by the New York Police Department (NYPD). In just two years, 2010 and 2011, 1.2 million people were stopped by the NYPD. Although African-Americans make up only 25% of the overall population in the City they were targeted for more than 50% of the stops. The result of this policy has reverberated across the nation leading to police abuses, deaths and institutional fuel for the idea that every young African-American is a threat to society.

Such police abuses are just one aspect of a larger social policy based on institutionalized racism that centers on the mass incarceration of people of color. The prison system has become the primary tool used to discipline urban areas that have been devastated by neoliberal economics. Today, more than 6 million people are under some form of “correctional supervision” in America. This includes more than 50% of African-American males who do not hold a high school diploma. Such a stunning level of incarceration is a direct result of the combination of an economy that serves the interests of the 1% and a society with a deeply embedded racial mindsets and racist institutions.

Had, Trayvon Martin escaped from the violence doled out by an individual racist with a gun, he would still have had to navigate through this racial minefield of 21st century America. Socialism does not have all the answers to such complex problems. Yet, a democratic socialist society would allow us to change some of the questions. For instance, a full employment economy would relieve some of the terrible burden created by long-term unemployment. Free and open education would begin to create spaces for equal opportunity. Radical democracy at our worksites and in the creation of public budgets might give us a chance to curb things like the environmental racism and unequal access to public services that capitalism breeds. More simply, a socialism for the 21st century must root itself in an understanding of how race and class work together to produce oppression.

Today, we must continue the push to get some amount of justice for Trayvon Martin. George Zimmerman must be arrested and prosecuted for this crime. To allow him to continue to walk free is an outrage that will only encourage
further acts of racial violence. Pressure through mass protests and civil disobedience should be escalated until Zimmerman is tried before a court of law on charges of murder. Energy from this movement can spill over into larger
efforts to end racist police policies such as Stop and Frisk and feed into a broader movement to challenge the disciplinary power of the prison system.

Consider the murder of Trayvon Martin as a challenge to all people who are interested in creating a democratic society. Capitalism has flourished through maintaining a variety of forms of racial domination. Whether it’s chattel slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, or mass incarceration, it’s clear that we live in society based on racism. A democratic revolution aims at destroying these racist institutions and replacing them with institutions based on socialist values of solidarity, compassion and respect. Such a society would value the potential held by a young person like Trayvon Martin instead of seeing him as a target for racial fear, social suspicion and acts of violence.

Justice for Trayvon Martin! Build a Movement Against Racism and Class Oppression!