What Sanders Can Accomplish by Not Acting

"The game is rigged." Doesn't sound much like a "market" to me. And "capitalism" isn't the word you're looking for either.

by Gaius Publius

(This is part one of several pieces on what Bernie Sanders can accomplish if elected president. At the end I offer an example of a Sanders-like "What I will never do" speech. Scroll down or click the link to go directly to the speech.)

I recently wrote about British politician Tony Benn's speech, a "ten-minute history of neoliberalism." Near the beginning Benn says, "This country and the world have been run by rich and powerful men from the beginning of time." If the "beginning of time" means the start of humanity's post-Stone Age history, that's a period more than 5,000 years long. A brief window opened in the mid-1800s, with the beginning of trade unionism and, in the U.S., the New Deal, when "rich and powerful men" were no longer as in charge as they have always been. That brief window, the blink of an eye compared to the rest of human history, is now closing.

Then we looked at a recent Noam Chomsky interview and noted as he does that the "economic system" being evolved in that closing window, what I've called "modern capitalism" — "capitalism" as practiced today — isn't capitalism at all, but merely theft, the adult equivalent of bullies taking lunch money, or the Roman ruling class enslaving most of Europe to work the land, which only the ruling class owns.

Nor is "modern capitalism" a market in any sense that matters. Is a monopoly on all essential products a market? Only in the most reduced sense; only in the sense that "0" is a number. Only in the sense that one person, living alone, is a family. Only in the sense that a man in a meadow talking to silent birds is a conversation.

In other words, that closing window brings us back to Tony Benn's original description, a world "run by rich and powerful men." Period. Those pieces are here and here, and they set up the following.

Can Sanders Reopen that Closing Window?

In his speech, Tony Benn said not to despair:

It's very important to keep optimism. ... Progress has always been made by two flames burning in the human heart. The flame of anger at injustice. And the flame of hope you can build a better world.

In his own piece, though, Noam Chomsky is less optimistic, at least when it comes to the "Bernie Sanders" electoral solution (my emphasis in italics):

[Q] Let’s imagine for example that Bernie Sanders won the 2016 presidential elections. What do you think would happen? Could he bring radical change in the structures of power of the capitalist system?

[Chomsky] Suppose that Sanders won, which is pretty unlikely in a system of bought elections. He would be alone: he doesn’t have congressional representatives, he doesn’t have governors, he doesn’t have support in the bureaucracy, he doesn’t have state legislators; and standing alone in this system, he couldn’t do very much. A real political alternative would be across the board, not just a figure in the White House.

It would have to be a broad political movement. In fact, the Sanders campaign I think is valuable — it’s opening up issues, it’s maybe pressing the mainstream Democrats a little bit in a progressive direction, and it is mobilizing a lot of popular forces, and the most positive outcome would be if they remain after the election.

It’s a serious mistake to just to be geared to the quadrennial electoral extravaganza and then go home. That’s not the way changes take place. The mobilization could lead to a continuing popular organization which could maybe have an effect in the long run.

While I agree that a broad movement is needed and helpful, I disagree with Chomsky on these three points:

• The electoral majority that puts Sanders in the White House, if it does, would represent a mobilizing of popular forces.
   
• If Sanders carries through (unlike Barack Obama in 2009) on the opportunity he would have, his election would represent much more than a "quadrennial electoral extravaganza." He could, in fact, lead the ongoing political revolution he says he wants.
   
• Bernie Sanders could accomplish an enormous amount without Congress. He wouldn't be acting alone; he'd have control of the whole of the Executive Branch — or most of it (more on that last later).

Let's look at what Sanders could accomplish without Congress. I want to divide these accomplishments into two groups — "What I will never do" and "What I will absolutely do, starting day one." This piece is about the first list, some of the "actions" you will never see from a successful Bernie Sanders. I'll offer the second list, "I'll do this on day one" actions, another time.

A "What I Will Never Do" Presidential Speech

Consider how much time and energy was drained from the progressive community in fighting against Barack Obama's wrong-headed neo-liberal initiatives. Think of the enormous effort to stop Fast Track (which failed). The long effort to stop the Keystone Pipeline (which may succeed, but with a huge expenditure of energy). The effort to constantly, year after year after year, block cuts to Social Security and Medicare (which have so far succeeded, but the fight is far from over).

And on and on, going all the way back to the beginning, 2009, when the progressive community (and progressives in Congress) got stiffed by the Affordable Care Act, first because it turned its back on a single-payer solution, and then by its lack of a public option, which our community fought and fought to retain (a fight that failed).

In fact, the progressive community has been in constant battle with "our" Executive Branch on what I've called Obama's four big "legacy" items, his want-list:

1. Health care “reform” — a privatized alternative to Medicare expansion
2. A “grand bargain” in which social insurance benefits are rolled back
3. Plentiful oil & gas (burnable carbon), and passage of the Keystone Pipeline
4. Passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement

Obama has been very good on many things, including peace with Iran, but not on these. Thousands of capable progressives have used hundreds of thousands of uphill hours resisting Obama's constant attempts to roll neo-liberal boulders down the hill at them.

What could be done if we could have those hours back, hours we could use in a different way, use on proactive goals, instead of constantly playing defense against "our" president? This is not a trivial problem. Under a real progressive president — a President Sanders who kept his word, for example — you would never have to fight those things. Would that please you? Would it feel like a gift to be handed that freed-up time? Would if feel like a Sanders accomplishment if he gave it to you?

Here's the first part of my imagined, Sanders-like "what I will accomplish" speech. It's entitled "What I Will Never Do." Keep in mind, this is me and my imagined progressive talking. But also keep in mind how relieved you would feel to hear these words from someone who meant them.

If you elect me president, here's what I will never do —

    ▪ You can count on me never to push a plan to cut Social Security and Medicare. Not one person outside of government will have to spend one minute trying to prevent me from privatizing — or cutting in any way — these vital programs. Not one minute. And if Congress proposes these cuts and it reaches my desk, you won't have to spend one minute asking me to veto that proposal. It's vetoed the minute it arrives.

    ▪ I will never negotiate a so-called "trade" deal that sends American jobs across our borders. No one will have to spend one minute asking me to stop a deal that hurts American workers. I will support only trade deals that increase American jobs, that create new workers in this country, that increase our balance of payments, and nothing less.

    ▪ No one will have to spend one minute stopping me from granting coal, oil and gas leases on lands or in waters controlled by the Department of the Interior. Not one minute. Drilling in the Arctic? You won't even have to ask. The answer is already No. New coal leases? Not one. Dangerous and deadly-to-the-climate offshore drilling leases? Those days are over.

    Soon I will tell you what I will do to aggressively bring down carbon emissions. But if I don't start here, with what I won't do, how will you know I'm serious?

    ▪ You will never see me even contemplate extending tax breaks for the very rich, as we saw all too often in our recent past — for example, during the negotiations to extend the Bush tax cuts, or negotiations at the end of the last fiscal year. Any such deal that reaches my desk will go straight back to Congress for renegotiation.

    If Congress wants a bill, they can give me one I can sign. If they want to shut down the government over tax breaks for the very very wealthy, they will shut it down, and I will explain it that way to the American people. If they want me to sign a bill, any bill, they need to understand — tax breaks for the rich can never be a part of it.

In other words, you'll never have to lobby me to not do what I said I would never do. You can spend your precious time, your precious energy, in other ways. There are many things I will do as well. Some I will do alone, using the power of the Executive Branch. And some I will ask your help to do because we need help from others. But the things I listed above, and many more besides, will never be contemplated.

I hope you agree that sparing you the constant effort to stop these wrong acts is indeed an accomplishment, and one you'll be glad, even eager, to have. It's one I'll certainly be glad and eager to give you.

Thank you.

Yes, there's much a president like Sanders, if he really carries through, can refuse to do, acting completely alone. This list shows just a few of the "wrong acts" you would be spared from resisting. I'm sure you can add others of your own. Soon I'll list some of what a president like Sanders can proactively do, deeds that can be done, even acting totally alone.

Stay tuned. Supporting a president like Sanders is by no means a waste of your time. (If you like, you can help Sanders here; adjust the split any way you wish at the link.)

GP

What's Called "Capitalism" Is Far from Any Model of Capitalism or Market

Predators and prey. The homeless and left-behind are at the bottom ("decomposers"). Most of everyone else is in the next layer up ("producers"). The rest, from the well-off to the wealthy, are "consumers." Interesting how that language works, isn't it? (source)

by Gaius Publius

A recent piece I did on the British Labour politician Tony Benn featured a speech that offered a "history of neoliberalism" (click here to read and listen). Near the beginning of the speech, Benn said, "This country and the world have been run by rich and powerful men from the beginning of time." Consider that for a moment, what that means about the arc of human history.

Near the end of his short talk, referencing the Thatcher (and Reagan) counterrevolution against the great populist gains of the 19th and 20th centuries, he said that this is "what the whole [modern] crisis is about, the restoration of power to those who've always controlled the world, the people who own the land and the resources and all the rest of it."

That radical re-transformation of the world back to control by its original and longtime owners, "rich and powerful men," was begun in England by Margaret Thatcher and several deliberate policies. Benn (my emphasis): "So privatization is a deliberate policy, along with the destruction of local democracy and the destruction of the trade unions to restore power back to to where it was."

Benn also mentions the role of crushing personal debt in the Thatcher de-democratization of her society:

What she said, and this is very clever, "You can buy your council house so you'll be a property owner. You may not be able to get a wage increase, but you can borrow." And the borrowing was deliberately encouraged because people in debt are slaves to their employers."

Notice that this re-transformation back to what was, this re-transfer of power to society's original owners, isn't about any ideology, any set of theories, any academic anything about "invisible hands" or mathematically correct economic models. This is about one group — "rich and powerful men" — reasserting control of the world, a control they've enjoyed since the virtual "beginning of time," since the first day "property" meant more than just personal property (what I carry and wear) and included ownership of fields, buildings and land itself.

That period, which started the day the first city-state, the first temple-state arose, lasted more than 5,000 years. For almost all of the time since humanity left the Stone Age, the mass of humans have been ruled by the rich and powerful, until the opening of a very brief window initiated, as Benn tells it, by the trade union movement of the mid-1800s.

That small window is now closing. We're watching the end, if we allow it, of this one-time-only freshwater teardrop in time, as it falls into the deep well of our salt-water civilized past. (And don't be confused. If that small window, the 250-year period of relative freedom, closes — if "rich and powerful men" regain full control as they have almost already done — they will also end the 5,000-year window of human civilization. Because, climate.)

Please don't take a short view of the times we inhabit together. This is what's at stake, now, this year, this election cycle, this decade — at most, this quarter-century, which is more than half over. To help with that larger orientation, I showed you Tony Benn's brief history, and also Tony Benn's optimism (scroll to the end for that). Now I want to show you two contributions on this subject by Noam Chomsky — a piece of analysis, presented here, and his pessimism, presented later, which I will try to counter.

Today, the analysis.

What's Called "Capitalism" Is Far from Any Model of "Capitalism" or "Market"

Simply put, we're not living in a "capitalist" economy, and present economic activity is not properly described by the word "market." To see and say that completely misses the facts. The economic "theory" we're guided by, if it can be called a theory at all, is what Benn described at the start of his speech: "This country and the world have been run by rich and powerful men from the beginning of time." The closest I can come to describing this "theory" is "predators and prey." For more than 5,000 years the predators — "rich and powerful men" — enjoyed complete control. "Capitalism" is what they're calling today's reassertion of that control.

But it's not by any stretch "capitalism," not even close. Noam Chomsky, in a recent interview with Jacobin magazine, says it quite well. First, from the introduction to the interview (my emphasis):

Throughout his illustrious career, one of Noam Chomsky’s chief preoccupations has been questioning — and urging us to question — the assumptions and norms that govern our society.

Following a talk on power, ideology, and US foreign policy last weekend at the New School in New York City, freelance Italian journalist Tommaso Segantini sat down with the eighty-six-year-old to discuss some of the same themes, including how they relate to processes of social change.

For radicals, progress requires puncturing the bubble of inevitability: austerity, for instance, “is a policy decision undertaken by the designers for their own purposes.” It is not implemented, Chomsky says, “because of any economic laws.” American capitalism also benefits from ideological obfuscation: despite its association with free markets, capitalism is shot through with subsidies for some of the most powerful private actors. This bubble needs popping too.

The interview ranges widely (feel free to read it all). I want to point to just one section, in which Chomsky characterizes what we insist on calling and defending as "capitalism" (my emphasis in italics):

[Q] How do you think that the capitalist system will survive, considering its dependence on fossil fuels and its impact on the environment?

[Chomsky] What’s called the capitalist system is very far from any model of capitalism or market. Take the fossil fuels industries: there was a recent study by the IMF which tried to estimate the subsidy that energy corporations get from governments. The total was colossal. I think it was around $5 trillion annually. That’s got nothing to do with markets and capitalism.

And the same is true of other components of the so-called capitalist system. By now, in the US and other Western countries, there’s been, during the neoliberal period, a sharp increase in the financialization of the economy. Financial institutions in the US had about 40 percent of corporate profits on the eve of the 2008 collapse, for which they had a large share of responsibility.

There’s another IMF study that investigated the profits of American banks, and it found that they were almost entirely dependent on implicit public subsidies. There’s a kind of a guarantee — it’s not on paper, but it’s an implicit guarantee — that if they get into trouble they will be bailed out. That’s called too-big-to-fail.

And the credit rating agencies of course know that, they take that into account, and with high credit ratings financial institutions get privileged access to cheaper credit, they get subsidies if things go wrong and many other incentives, which effectively amounts to perhaps their total profit. The business press tried to make an estimate of this number and guessed about $80 billion a year. That’s got nothing to do with capitalism.

It’s the same in many other sectors of the economy. So the real question is, will this system of state capitalism, which is what it is, survive the continued use of fossil fuels? And the answer to that is, of course, no.

By now, there’s a pretty strong consensus among scientists who say that a large majority of the remaining fossil fuels, maybe 80 percent, have to be left in the ground if we hope to avoid a temperature rise which would be pretty lethal. And it is not happening. Humans may be destroying their chances for decent survival. It won’t kill everybody, but it would change the world dramatically.

If you click that last link and scroll down, you'll get his sense of where we're headed as a species, in particular with respect to habitability and climate.

But your takeaway should be this. Economic predation by the powerful is not an economic system in any sophisticated sense, any more than organized bullies stealing every child's lunch money the minute she enters the building is a "system" in any complex sense. It's not even a "racket" if that term implies misdirection and a multi-step process. It's just boots on the neck and hands in the pocket.

Nor is such theft a "market" by any definition. It's simply theft, backed by the power of the bullies themselves, their fists, their clubs, and the power of the state that enables them for a cut of the prize.

Feel free to defend (or not) what this "system" is becoming. Just don't misdescribe it. It's not capitalism by any definition. Nor is it a market, unless a factory farm with a slaughterhouse at one end is a market. Don't confuse others; don't confuse yourself.

When we next return to Chomsky's speech, why he's wrong about Bernie Sanders.

GP

Tony Benn's Ten-Minute History Lesson on Neoliberalism

Margaret Thatcher, drinking your milkshake (source)

by Gaius Publius

I had a different piece set up for the next few days, revolving around a recent interview by Noam Chomsky (which Howie wrote about here) that touches on our so-called "capitalism" and also on the Bernie Sanders candidacy. But this video sets that up nicely. It's a ten-minute speech by long-time British politico and Labour Party member Tony Benn, sadly recently deceased.

Our thanks to the people at Naked Capitalism for bringing this to our attention. There it's presented without comment. I'd like to print some of the text, just to emphasize some of its points.

First the video. (I've bumped the start to about two minutes in, but you can back it up if you like.)

And now from a self-made transcript. You've seen all of these points before, but to see them assembled and rounded back to where it all begins is quite striking. My emphasis below:

This country and the world have been run by rich and powerful men from the beginning of time. ... The only real wealth in the world is land, and resources that lie under it, and the people. ...

In 1834, only 2% had the right to vote ... Out of trade unionism came the change ....

The [20th century] slumps were not acts of god ... but a direct result of too much economic power in the hands of too few men who behaved like a totalitarian oligarchy in the heart of our democratic state. The had and they felt no responsibility to the nation. ...

In wartime there are no economic arguments at all. I've never heard a general say, "I can't bomb Baghdad this month because I've exceeded my budget." In wartime you do whatever is required. We should adopt the principle that in peacetime you do whatever is required. People want jobs, they want homes, want a decent income, a good education, health care ...

When you come to the Thatcher period, this is what's so interesting. Thatcher was a much cleverer woman than we give her credit for. She knew perfectly well the strength of the labor movement lay in three sources of power. One was the trade union movement. So she took on the miners ...

What she said, and this is very clever, "You can buy your council house so you'll be a property owner. You may not be able to get a wage increase, but you can borrow." And the borrowing was deliberately encouraged because people in debt are slaves to their employers. That's how the whole thing began. The borrowing was a deliberate policy ...

She also attacked local government ... Local councilors now are agents of the Treasury. They can only spend money the Treasury give them on things the Treasury tells them they can spend it on. ...

And she attacked the public sector and privatized it. And this privatization is international. I met an old friend of mine, Kenneth Kaunda, the president of Zambia. ... He said, "We had a great debt and the IMF came along and said, 'We'll lift your debt if you sell off all your schools and hospitals to multinational corporations.'"

So privatization is a deliberate policy, along with the destruction of local democracy and the destruction of the trade unions to restore power back to to where it was. And what we're now back in, that's what the whole crisis is about, the restoration of power to those who've always controlled the world, the people who own the land and the resources and all the rest of it. And that is something we need to understand. ...

There's more in the speech besides just this. Check out his action as Postmaster (at 8:00). And his plan for the banks. And his statement about how popular his ideas are among actual voters. (Reminds us that Sanders has the same wind at his back; actual wishes of the people.)

There really is only one story in this country — the "flow of funds" story, the massive passing of money to the rich from everyone else. Whatever else we've been made to suffer, and are going to be made to suffer, comes from that one story. With that in mind, I'd like to close where Benn closes, and to ask you to return to these comments as we consider Noam Chomsky's remarks later in the week.

Benn:

It's very important to keep optimism. ... Progress has always been made by two flames burning in the human heart. The flame of anger at injustice. And the flame of hope you can build a better world.

Exactly. We'll come back to this when we turn to the Chomsky interview.

GP

RIP- Tony Benn

As a young socialist in Brooklyn and Long Island, I looked around for role models and heroes. The Democratic Party weren't offering but across the Atlantic, England had Tony Benn. He died today, age 88, at his home in London. Born into the aristocracy, Benn-- formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate-- renounced his titles, the first peer to ever do so, and served in the House of Commons for 50 years and was a Cabinet Minister under two Labor Prime Ministers, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. He was the leader of the left wing faction of the Labor Party and eventually lost out to the conservative wing of the Labor Party-- think New Dems.

When I was a young man, Benn, a cabinet minister, was becoming radicalized. In his book, Out of the Wilderness, he explained that he had learned 4 lessons that pushed him further left. All 4 apply to our own politics as well as to the UK's.

• how "the Civil Service can frustrate the policies and decisions of popularly elected governments"

• how the centralized nature of the Labour Party allowed to the Leader to run "the Party almost as if it were his personal kingdom"

• how "the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against a Labour Government"

• how the power of the media, which "like the power of the medieval Church, ensures that events of the day are always presented from the point of the view of those who enjoy economic privilege."

Sound familiar? Later Benn, at one time the most popular political leader in Britain-- among regular people, not the elites-- "came to be regarded as an anti-establishment voice for democracy," according to The Guardian's announcement of his death today.

After a successful cabinet career under Wilson in the 70s, he swung to the left politically and challenged Denis Healey for the Labour deputy leadership-- only losing by the narrowest of margins after one of the key unions switched sides at the last minute.

He then became instrumental in using Labour party machinery to develop a leftwing manifesto on which Michael Foot fought the 1983 election.

He was also central to the campaign to make Labour MPs more accountable to their constituencies through automatic re-selection, a reform hated by many Labour MPs at the time but now regarded as wholly uncontroversial.

After Foot's defeat and the emergence of Neil Kinnock as party leader in 1983, the party shifted to the centre, and Benn began to lose his direct political influence over the party. He was heavily defeated when he stood against Kinnock for the party leadership in 1988 and left parliament in 2001, after the first term of the Blair government, to "spend more time on politics."

…He became known for his campaign against the invasion of Iraq, addressing the UK's biggest ever demonstration during the Stop the War rally of 2003.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said: "The death of Tony Benn represents the loss of an iconic figure of our age. He will be remembered as a champion of the powerless, a great parliamentarian and a conviction politician.

"Tony Benn spoke his mind and spoke up for his values. Whether you agreed with him or disagreed with him, everyone knew where he stood and what he stood for.

"For someone of such strong views, often at odds with his party, he won respect from across the political spectrum.

"This was because of his unshakeable beliefs and his abiding determination that power and the powerful should be held to account."

He campaigned to abolish the British monarchy, nationalize the big banks and to rid Britain of nuclear weapons. I counted myself a Bennite and was disgusted with how Tony Blair turned the Labor Party into a Conservative-lite operation, selling out the working class from which it sprung. Benn didn't have much use for him either. "New Labour’s prime object is to destroy old Labour. But you can’t just wish away a movement, a history, with a soundbite. You just can’t do it."

Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor began a paean to Benn this morning with a quote: "I'm harmless now."

That's how Tony Benn summed up his own transformation from the man many in the Labour Party blamed for making them unelectable to the nation's political grandfather-- whose stories and speeches mesmerised those who listened to him even when they scarcely agreed with a word he said.

Tony Benn joked that unlike many radicals he'd become more left wing as he'd grown older. Harold Wilson quipped that Benn had "immatured with age."

He began his political career as the slick, presentable TV face of Labour in the 1960s but ended it by campaigning against pretty much all that New Labour stood for.

...He had become disillusioned with Labour's failure to change society complaining later that it had, instead, changes people to make them accept society as it was.

…Tony Blair's New Labour was, in essence, a complete repudiation of Benn-ery. It led Tony Benn out of parliament and onto the streets to campaign for socialism. As he was seen less on our TV screens he was seen more at protests, rallies and campaign meetings.

To many he was a voice of inspiration, with his warnings against globalisation, corporate power and American adventurism.

His ability to draw deeply from British history-- whether the Levellers or the suffragettes-- and to range widely-- from the global politics of the Arab street to that of your local estate-- made him a far bigger figure than the adviser turned politician PR-schooled technocrats who followed him.