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The War on Terrorism & the New Police State
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Essays on U.S. Politics and Economics |
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The North American Auto Industry in Crisis The current financial crisis marks a series of turning points in the history of the North American auto industry. First, the iconic “Big Three” have been downsized to “The Detroit Three.” Once the global symbol of U.S. productivism and consumerism, they now teeter on the brink of bankruptcy and, in the process, profound questions are being raised about the decline of U.S. manufacturing jobs more generally. Second, the auto unions, themselves once emblematic of what workers could achieve within capitalism, have been reduced to lobbying to save “their” companies, and a decades-long trend in private-sector labor negotiations has now confirmed collective bargaining as having shifted from demands by workers to demands on workers. This highlights the broader crisis of labor: if labor cannot find a way to renew itself it could fade into irrelevancy. And third, the environment—which the industry so rapaciously disregarded and the unions so short-sightedly ignored—seems to have forced itself onto the agenda. June 2009 Marxism, the United States, and the Twentieth Century The previous century now seems to be drawing away from us at an increasing speed, especially in the global society’s existing superabundance of communications. Readers of Monthly Review know that the basics have remained the same in the all too physical world of capitalism and neocolonialism, as much as they might have changed in terms of resistance and apparent alternatives. Still, as the graying of the 1960s generation continues, and the New Deal era draws ever further into a kind of archeology, a summing up of some points is useful and may even be fun. May 2009 What Race Has to Do With It Who could have imagined the 2008 presidential campaign? March 2009 A New New Deal under Obama? With U.S. capitalism mired in an economic crisis of a severity that increasingly brings to mind the Great Depression of the 1930s, it should come as no surprise that there are widespread calls for “a new New Deal.” Already the new Obama administration has been pointing to a vast economic stimulus program of up to $850 billion over two years aimed at lifting the nation out of the deep economic slump. The possibility of a new New Deal is to be welcomed by all of those on the left, as promising some relief to a hard-pressed working population. Nevertheless, it raises important questions. What are the real prospects for a new New Deal in the United States today? Is this the answer to the current economic crisis? What should be the stance of the left? February 2009 The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending The United States is unique today among major states in the degree of its reliance on military spending, and its determination to stand astride the world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the postSecond World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged U.S. national defense spending has increased by almost 60 percent in real dollar terms to a level in 2007 of $553 billion. This is higher than at any point since the Second World War (though lower than previous decades as a percentage of GDP). October 2008 Never Forget the Class—or the Racial—Struggle Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 256 pages, hardcover, $40.00. May 2008 The Health Care Crisis in the United States Michael Moores film, Sicko, dramatically illustrated how problems in access to health care in the United States have escalated to the point of a crisis for all but the richest Americans. The problems include the fact that many citizens are uninsured, health care costs are increasing faster than inflation and wages, and more of those costs are being passed on from employers to employees. Many indices of health care effectiveness show that the United States fares very poorly in comparison to other developed capitalist countries. Almost all the other developed capitalist countries have universal health care. All their citizens are insured and their per capita costs are much lower. February 2008 Wage Stagnation, Growing Insecurity, and the Future of the U.S. Working Class The most important promises used to justify capitalism are that your children will have a better life than you do, and in President Kennedy’s famous words, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” meaning everyone benefits from the accumulation of capital. These promises ring hollow in a period in which the relative position of the working people of the United States is declining and its ruling class is able to appropriate an increasing share of the national income. This pattern of accumulation and appropriation has become evident to many Americans and this awareness is beginning to affect political consciousness. June 2007 The End of Retirement An esteemed colleague read three paragraphs of news clip on employer pensions before he realized it was from the satirical newspaper The Onion. The tip off was the interview with an eighty-seven-year-old machine shop worker struggling with widowhood, high stress, and early stage Alzheimer’s at General Electric. Early stage Alzheimer’s was the first clue, not the eighty-seven-years of age. Satire writers must have a holy grail of seconds before the earnest reader starts chuckling; my colleague’s delay might be a record. It takes three seconds to know “Cindy Sheehan loses second son in Katrina” is a lampoon. The reason it took so long to laugh at a news story that GE was adopting a new policy of “lifetime” jobs and a new forty-five-year vesting period for their pensions is that it is credible; the signs of the end of retirement are all around. May 2006 The NAFTA Corridors: Offshoring U.S. Transportation Jobs to Mexico Capital’s relentless search for cheap labor constantly alters the flow of surface transportation in North America with widespread consequences. The end-of-century deindustrialization of the United States and importation of cheap commodities from the Far East through the West Coast reversed historical east-west transportation patterns and established Los Angeles and Long Beach as the largest ports in the nation. To minimize transportation costs, which for many products are higher than the cost of production, intermodal transportation of containerized imports was developed. Manufactured goods are packed into mobile shipping containers at factories in the Far East and travel by ship, train, and truck to distribution centers and, ultimately, consumer outlets across the United States. Currently, intermodal transportation of cheap imported commodities is the lifeline of the American economy. In 2004, the Port of Los Angeles processed 7.3 million container units and Long Beach handled 5.8 million. These two ports alone accounted for 68 percent of the West Coast total and are, by far, the largest employers in California. U.S. workers, who have seen so many lucrative manufacturing jobs moved overseas, assumed that import transportation and distribution jobs could not be offshored and were, therefore, relatively secure. February 2006 What Was The Matter With Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Belt It was a fittingly ironic end to an election full of grotesque twists: When George W. Bush was narrowly reelected president of the United States, it was the electoral votes of the state he had harmed most that gave him the final nudge across the finish line. Ohio went for the second election in a row to the Republican clown prince. But if the first Bush victory was tragedy, the one in 2004 was surely farce: has world history ever turned before on the artful elevation of gay bashing to an electoral tactic? January 2006 Targeting Disability In addition to old-age benefits, it is often forgotten that Social Security provides survivor and disability insurance protections as well. The privatization debate has overlooked the fate of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) as a part of the program’s family of benefits. April 2005 REVIEW OF THE
MONTH The twentieth century’s dominant myth was that of a “rational capitalism.” The two economists who did the most to promote this idea were John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Both were responding to the great historical crisis of capitalism manifested in the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. In the wake of the greatest set of horrors the world had ever seen, accompanied also by the rise of an alternative, contending system in the Soviet Union, it was necessary for capitalism following the Second World War to reestablish itself ideologically as well as materially. In terms of the ideological requirement, the two economists who accomplished this most effectively were Keynes and Schumpeter—not simply because they epitomized the best in bourgeois economic ideology, but also because they were the leading representatives of bourgeois economic science. What they set out in their analyses were the requirements of a rational capitalism and at least the hope that these requirements would be achieved. March 2005 The Right Not to
Work: Power and Disability I have a confession to make: I do not work. I am on SSI. I have very little work value (if any), and I am a drain on our country's welfare system. I have another confession to make: I do not think this is wrong, and to be honest, I am very happy not working. Instead I spend the majority of my time doing the activity I find the most rewarding and valuable, painting. March 2004 REVIEW
OF THE MONTH For a long time now, the U.S. economy and the economies of the advanced capitalist world as a whole have been experiencing a slowdown in economic growth relative to the quarter-century following the Second World War. It is true that there have been cyclical upswings and long expansions that have been touted as full-fledged “economic booms” in this period, but the slowdown in the rate of growth of the economy has continued over the decades. Grasping this fact is crucial if one is to understand the continual economic restructuring over the last three decades, the rapidly worsening conditions in much of the underdeveloped world to which the crisis has been exported, and the larger significance of the present cyclical downturn of world capitalism. April 2002 REVIEW
OF THE MONTH The unlikely postelection contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush, which ultimately led to the anointing of Bush as president by the Republican majority on the US Supreme Court (despite the fact that Bush received fewer popular votes than Gore both in the United States as a whole and most likely in Florida as well—the state that gave Bush his electoral college win), has tended to erase all other developments associated with the election. But all of this should not cause us to forget that the Ralph Nader Green Party campaign for the presidency was arguably the most extraordinary phenomenon in US left politics in many years. On election day he drew nearly three million votes, representing about 3 percent of the vote. Even former Vice-President Henry Wallace did not fare so well in his third-party run for the presidency in 1948, the last progressive third-party presidential campaign of this nature and magnitude. Although exit polls show that Nader received few racial minority votes (a major weakness of his campaign), he nonetheless drew his strongest support from those without a college education, those with incomes less than thirty thousand dollars a year, and those without full-time employment. Until the intense scare campaign instigated by the Democrats in the final two weeks before the election, Nader was getting as much as 7 percent in some tracking polls. February 2001 REVIEW
OF THE MONTH Social Security was the crowning achievement of Roosevelt's New Deal. It has been the most successful and still remains the most popular of all U.S. government programs. More than a pension program, Social Security provides for workers and their families in the case of early death and disability, in addition to retirement. In 1997, it provided about twelve trillion dollars worth of life insurance alone, more than that of the entire private life-insurance industry. Furthermore, it does all of this in the form of social insurance, in which the distribution and the amount of benefits provided are determined by family relationships and basic economic rights—factors that private insurance and pension plans ignore. Nearly one-fifth of the elderly in the United States rely on Social Security as virtually their sole source of income, while two-thirds of all recipients depend on it for at least half of their income. Almost half of all white seniors would be classified as poor without their Social Security benefits; nearly half of all black and Latino elderly depend on it for 90 percent or more of their income (Business Week, June 26, 2000, p. 34). For many years it was drummed into the heads of the working population that their Social Security benefits were sacrosanct; they had paid for them and they were owed them. Beware the politician who attempted to take them away. October 2000 Working-Class
Households and the Burden of Debt It is an old axiom, common to both Marxian and Keynesian economics, that uneven, class-based distribution of income is a determining factor of consumption and investment. How much is spent for consumption goods depends on the income of the working class. Workers necessarily spend almost all of their income on consumption, with relatively little left over for savings or investment. Capitalists, on the other hand, spend only a small percentage of their income for personal consumption. The overwhelming proportion of the income of capitalists and their corporations is devoted to investment. It follows that increasing inequality in income and wealth can be expected to create the age-old contradiction of capitalism: on the one hand, sluggish consumer demand narrows the marketability of the goods that capital needs to sell; on the other, profitable investment opportunities depend ultimately on vigorous growth in the effective demand for consumer goods. It is not possible—in the words of the early-twentieth-century U.S. economist J. B. Clark—simply to "build more mills that should make more mills for ever" in the absence of sufficient consumer demand for the products created by these mills May 2000 |
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After Seattle: The "Seattle Shock"—as Business Week called it in an editorial that warned of a popular backlash against "our very economic system"—reflects heartfelt indignation by the financial press at the intrusion of mass democracy into an elite discourse. In the New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman raged at anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protesters, whom he presents as "flat-earth advocates" duped by knaves like Pat Buchanan. Friedman, perhaps the most obtuse of the big-time columnists, complains that "What's crazy is that the protesters want the WTO to become precisely what they accuse it of already being—a global government. March 2000 For a thorough historical understanding of the social security crisis, the editors recommend the two essays below: Social Security:
The Phony Crisis In a recent speech, the head of the main government workers union in the United States accused the Reagan administration of “bleeding” the nation in order to finance defense spending and tax breaks for the rich. It is now clear that one cherished national social institution which is scheduled by the Reagan crowd for a major blood-letting is the Social Security System. February 1983 The Struggle to Save
Social Security Jacob Morris has effectively exposed the attack on Social Security for what it is, and he has done this within the framework of the existing system. The underlying assumption is that Social Security must be paid for out of an accounting reserve supported by payroll taxes. Based on this premise, generally accepted by liberals and conservatives alike, the financial integrity of the reserve is taken as equivalent to the integrity of Social Security itself. But the real questions are different. Why use an accounting reserve and why apply the test of financial integrity? No such tests are applied to any other part of the federal budget, surely not to the enormous armaments expenditures. Basically, what is at issue here is not a financial but a social problem. This was spelled out in a recent communication we received from Irving Kaplan, an economist friend of ours who has been a student of the Social Security program from its very inception: February 1983 |
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