Manufacturing fear of Muslims: freaking out about the Boston Marathon bombings

At a recent press conference, the president of the United States found it necessary to defend the efforts of law enforcement agencies to monitor the two Boston bombing suspects during the year before the attacks. He said that protocols were being reviewed in an effort to “further improve and enhance our ability to detect a potential attack.” Obama thus reinforced the expectation that the US guarantees to keep every citizen safe from any possible “terrorist” attack, no matter from what source, and no matter how much the government overrides the citizens’ own personal freedoms.

The US public’s sense of personal safety and identity is bound up with this state assurance of immunity from terrorist attacks (as opposed to run of the mill natural and social disasters). This expectation is incomprehensible to Europeans – as Michael Cohen commented in the Guardian: “Londoners, who endured IRA terror for years, might be forgiven for thinking that America over-reacted just a tad to the goings-on in Boston. They’re right – and then some. What we saw was a collective freak-out like few that we’ve seen previously in the United States.” Clearly the response to the bombings expressed an ideological mindset specific to the US.

The Republican effort to embarrass the state department over its failure to prevent the attacks in Benghazi that killed four diplomats is part of the ongoing campaign to renew this mindset. It aims to ensure public acceptance of an even more militarized homeland by increasing fear of terrorism while maintaining the fiction that it is possible for the state to achieve domestic and global invulnerability for US citizens.  At the same time, it diverts attention from US foreign policies that are creating resentment and resistance.

What made the Boston bombings shocking was that the Marathon is a symbol of inclusivity, a democratic ideal of people from all walks of life and levels of ability running the same race on a traditional Massachusetts holiday. The unexpected explosions that killed three and injured hundreds undermined confidence in the state’s ability to assure personal safety: to shore up its credibility, the media and political establishment rushed to describe the explosions as a terrorist rather than criminal act before any evidence had been gathered about the suspects and their motives.

The effort and resources then spent by the security forces on detecting and locating the two suspects contrasts with the authorities’ acceptance that the explosion in a Texas fertilizer plant that killed 14 people two days later was accidental – despite the fact that the plant had broken every regulation governing storage of explosive materials.

Steven Rosenfeld pointed out in Alternet: “By labeling the bombing as terrorism, the government and mainstream media elevated one exceptionally violent act to a level that is not accorded to the everyday violence that afflicts American society.” Political (as opposed to racial) violence is thought of as being outside of the American experience, while industrial catastrophes and daily gun killings are as American as apple pie.

Currently security agencies and the press are working full-time to try and establish a link between the Tsarnaev brothers and sympathizers of al-Qaeda. Analyzing the responses of the mainstream media, Gary Leupp notes its fixation with the brothers’ foreign contacts rather than their concerns about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  “Either way the issue becomes merely us versus ‘radical Islam’—leaving the wars unmentioned, as though they played only a marginal role in the boys’ ‘radicalization’.”

However, the New York Times reported that former top FBI counterterrorism official Philip Mudd was struck by the brothers’ lack of sophistication, and considered they had as much in common with white supremacists or rightwing anti-government extremists as with al-Qaeda. “They’re angry kids with a veneer of ideology that’s about skin-deep,” he said.

The traditional definition of terrorism is a violent act by a non-state actor for political ends against an overwhelmingly powerful imperial state. But while these acts aim at terrorizing a population, not all violent acts are recognized as terrorism. The US, for example, justifies exceptional violence by political groups like the Mujahedeen-e Khalq it supports in Iran and death squads it trained in Latin America. Terrorism is not defined by a state in relation to its effects but only in relation to its own interests: the FLN undoubtedly carried out acts of terror in Algeria and France, but today’s Algerian state would not describe them as terrorism.

Michael Brenner notes in Counterpunch: “The United States government has passed laws (e.g. The Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that are grounded on broad formulations of what constitutes terrorist acts. They include an encompassing category of aiding and abetting terrorism. These statutes are so loosely drawn that, as a practical matter, a terrorist is anyone the authorities want to declare a terrorist.”

But it’s not a completely arbitrary process – in defining its enemies, a state also defines itself. Glenn Greenwald observes that the US definition of terrorism is “a Muslim who commits violence against America and its allies,” unlike similar violent acts by non-Muslims. By demarcating its other as specifically Muslim resistance, the US projects itself as a militarized society geared for war to defend its control over oil and energy sources. “Terror” is the ideological justification of a militarized state that increasingly restricts citizens’ personal rights, while needing to retain citizens’ loyalty and obedience to its laws.

Henry Giroux comments: “[T]he American public has been schizophrenically immersed within a culture of fear and cruelty punctuated by a law-and-order driven promise for personal safety, certainty, and collective protection that amounted to a Faustian bargain with the devil, one in which Americans traded constitutional rights and numerous civil liberties for the ever expanding presence of a militarized security and surveillance state run by a government that has little regard for human rights or the principles of justice and democracy.”

Each un-prevented attack destabilizes the Faustian bargain. However, it’s not a one-way street: the Boston lockdown did not have to be enforced by the authorities, but was self-imposed by Bostonians who wanted above all for the perpetrators to be caught. Although the two brothers were identified from intensive analysis of video surveillance, the subsequent lockdown of the city and mobilization of huge numbers of police to search the area did not find suspect #2 until a watchful homeowner noticed blood on the tarp of his boat. All the military hardware assembled in the name of Homeland Security did not prevent the bombings nor facilitate the bombers’ capture.

The reason Americans freak out when faced with these attacks is because of a continuing political strategy by the ruling elite to manufacture fear of Muslims and depict them as the epitome of everything unknown, alien and evil. But this underscores the fact that the legitimacy of the militarized state is tenuous; it is balancing between what it can get away with under the cover of public safety and what infringements on their democratic rights citizens will strongly resist.

UPDATE: Rep. Darrell Issa confirms the importance of this semantic distinction for Washington, criticizing Obama’s initial characterization of the Benghazi attacks as an “act of terror.” During an interview with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, Issa claimed:  ”… an act of terror is different than a terrorist attack. The truth is, this was a terrorist attack, this had al Qaeda at it …”

UPDATE 2: Jane Powers and Frank Ascasco noted the same issue when Obama initially refused to describe the Boston bombings as terrorism before “we have all the facts.”  ”Laudable though his goal was,” they wrote, “implicit in Obama’s use of the term is that terrorism can only be committed by Muslim people. …  in the language of Washington, terrorism has such a warped meaning that it can’t even be identified unless we know it was a Muslim person who did it.”

No Nostalgia for Thatcher, but a Tribute to the Welfare State by Ken Loach

The muted protests at Thatcher’s funeral on Wednesday gave the world a glimpse of the deeply-felt divisions in British society. She did not create this social cleavage, which at root is part of an international process: a shift of manufacturing out of Europe and the U.S., and a rapid expansion of speculation in financial centres like London and New York. What she is responsible for is ending the ruling elite’s Keynesian commitment to the mitigation of regional and social inequities.

Although her death evoked few tears in Britain’s industrial heartland, there was more than a little interest in showings of Ken Loach’s new documentary about the Attlee Labour government, “The Spirit of ‘45”. I was fortunate enough to see it while in the UK recently, and my own feelings were mixed: my childhood was spent under the wing of the welfare state, so I took state-provided health and education for granted, and share Loach’s affection for the cradle-to-grave policies that characterized the period.

The interviews with people who were children in the 1930s and 1940s were very moving. They remembered the harsh and degrading conditions of that time and the optimism for a better future after the 1945 election, articulating the general disaffection with prewar society and the determination that things were going to be different.

The interviewees vividly recounted the social impact of the Labour government’s nationalization and house-building program. The experience of state-directed industry during the war had established the feasibility of state intervention to achieve social goals. There was a huge sense of pride and ownership of the newly-nationalized industries, especially the National Health Service, which brought free health care to working-class families who had never been able to afford it. The government channeled state resources into solving the immediate problems of poverty, unemployment, and bad health. Housing for millions of families living in slums or private boarding houses was made a priority.

The weaker part of the film was the final segment, which showed participants urging a return to the collectivist spirit of the postwar era. While Thatcher was the clear villain of the piece, the discussion gave the impression that she imposed privatization and unemployment from above, an arbitrary political decision that could be reversed by a revived social-democratic party in Britain.

But the world has changed since Labour’s manifesto was written in 1945.  Globalization has made national forms of struggle increasingly ineffective in resisting corporate power. What troubled me was the message that the younger generation should look to the history of the Attlee government for an alternative to austerity, which amounts to advocating old solutions to qualitatively new problems.

The achievement of a welfare state after World War II was essentially a political compromise between an organized and homogeneous working class and a capitalist class that had survived the war and needed to restart capital accumulation. This cemented the priorities of the Labour leaders to the recovery of British-based capital within the economic boundaries of the old empire.

The Labour electoral landslide was not the result of some mass revolutionary wave, as some on the left like to think, but rather came from a popular determination to continue the state planning established during the war. State technocrats were more enthusiastic about nationalization than the government, which never intended to change the balance of power in industry, and obsolete production relations were kept intact along with antiquated machinery.

While making a huge difference in people’s lives by alleviating the prewar degradation of the working class, nationalization also released capital bound up in older industries with more than generous compensation to the former owners. Later Conservative governments continued the social compromise, while full employment and expanding markets gave shopfloor militancy leverage to gain a larger share of the surplus being produced. As production rapidly accelerated, the focus of capital accumulation shifted from the national arena to the global. The revival of the German and Japanese economies intensified competition in the world market, and the boom began to falter.

Signs of the erosion of the postwar political compromise were evident by the time of the Heath government, with a wave of inflation and industrial slowdown in 1973; national control of the economy dissolved with the IMF loan to the Callaghan government in 1976. As Michael Hudson explains it: “Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan made a token attempt to address [problems of the economy] by requesting an IMF loan in 1976 to finance tangible industrial re-investment as bridge financing until the UK’s North Sea oil could begin generating foreign exchange. But US Treasury Secretary Bill Simon read him the riot act. IMF and U.S. policy was to provide credit only to pay bondholders, not to build up the real economy. Britain would be advanced loans only if it reoriented its economy to let high finance do the planning.”

At the same time, industries based on new technology were expanding in the south of England, dividing the country socially and politically, and intensifying existing class divisions which had been left unchanged even after thirty years of the welfare state. This created the upwardly-mobile forces Thatcher was able to mobilize to champion populist capitalism against the Keynesian compromise. Her neoliberal agenda corresponded to the changes in international production and exchange that had weakened the unions and enabled her to change the ideological climate within the British ruling elite to toleration of the harsh monetarist doctrines shared by U.S. capital.

She did not set out to empower bankers, but that was the inevitable result of lifting restraints on capital as soon as she took office. As Hudson puts it: “Attacking central planning by government, she shifted it into much more centralized financial hands – the City of London, unopposed by any economic back bench of financial regulation and ‘free’ of meaningful anti-monopoly price regulation. … The Iron Lady was convinced she was rebuilding England’s economy, while in reality it was only getting richer from London’s outlaw banks.”  Her administration was the last to stridently claim an independent nationalism before later governments succumbed to the dictates of international finance – there is no pretense today that British foreign or economic policy is anything but dependent on the US and the City bankers.

Like the rest of Europe and the US, Britain has moved to a low-waged, service economy dominated by global corporations. The labour movement is faced with finding new ways of organizing and fighting in line with the realities of this globalized economy. That is why signs of international resistance to global capital are significant. US workers are flying to Europe to take on their Dutch supermarket owners. Striking immigrant McDonalds workers are returning to their homelands from the US determined to spread the campaign for a living wage. Bangladeshi survivors of the Tazreen factory fire and Nicaraguan victims of antiunion assaults are in New York to confront Walmart board members. And US unions are creating non-traditional ways to organize workers who have no recognized union at their workplace; the AFL-CIO affiliate, Working America, now claims 3.2 million members and is planning to establish chapters in every state in the USA.

I made this brief sketch of events in the years not covered by Ken Loach’s film to give some historical context to Thatcher’s administration, and to argue that the revival of a social-democratic perspective, necessarily limited to winning concessions from a nationally-based state, would not be productive. I believe that activists should focus on connecting with workers in the international supply chain feeding commodities into Western markets, which is corporate capital’s weakest point.

Nostalgia for the welfare state is understandable, but we need to learn from the creative solutions of the international labour movement in order to defend those reforms that remain from the past.

Conservative icon and much-hated politician Margaret Thatcher is dead

The demise of Margaret Thatcher, for 11 years prime minister of Britain, has attracted eulogies from the conservative right and condemnation from the left. She is not entirely deserving of either.

Although credited with destroying the welfare state, her role was much smaller than her public persona made it appear. The “Iron Lady” was a carefully cultivated media image of single-minded ruthlessness for a woman who in actuality limited herself to the politically possible. Obama is mistaken when he says that she was able to shape history with her “moral conviction, unyielding courage and iron will.”

The social consensus of postwar Britain had already been eroded in the 1970s by changes in the economy deriving from technological innovations like automation and the emergence of international capital markets. When Thatcher took on the miners’ union in 1984, the labour movement had been weakened both by economic decline and the removal of legal immunity for damages resulting from strikes. She unleashed the forces of the state to crush the political opposition of miners fighting to keep their jobs in the pits: however, their union was isolated by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and faced a legal and physical onslaught against their pickets. The miners were unable to counter the state’s strategic build-up of coal reserves imported from Poland in preparation for the conflict.

What Thatcher really did was to dispense with the role of the TUC in government. Since 1945 the union leaders had worked to keep disputes within a legal framework, while workers in shop floor organizations had become increasingly militant, in effect bringing down the Heath government in 1971 and undermining the Callaghan government after 1974. She abrogated this arrangement and took on the most militant union for political effect, similar to the way she attacked Argentina in 1982 – sending a naval task force to retake an old coaling station off the South American coast – and to when she allowed Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands to die rather than concede political status for IRA prisoners.

She hardly deserved to be a world figure. Her outlook was distinctly parochial and small-minded. What gave her international influence was her relationship with Ronald Reagan, who recognized in her an ideological kinship. Thatcher later wrote: “I knew that I was talking to someone who instinctively felt and thought as I did, not just about policies but about a philosophy of government, a view of human nature.”

Although she claimed the mantle of Churchill, her politics were closer to those of Neville Chamberlain: she appeased dictators and was viciously hostile to unions. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out: “She played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as ‘terrorists’, something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto…”

Author John Mortimer described Thatcher’s political achievement as snatching the Conservative party from “the privileged but often well meaning old upper-class gentlemen, and giv[ing] it to the shopkeepers, the businessmen, the people in advertising and anyone she considered ‘one of us.’ ” Historian Kenneth O. Morgan elaborates: “The Thatcher background was one of entrepreneurial, upwardly-mobile, self-sufficient, middle-class neoliberalism. … The roots of Thatcherism lay in acquisition rather than in production. It sought to create a business, perhaps a rentier culture.” [The People’s Peace, Oxford 1990:443]

What Thatcher gave to many parts of Britain, especially in the formerly industrialized north, was mass unemployment, collapsing public services, and urban decay. But decline in manufacturing coincided with a boom in technologically sophisticated smaller industries located mainly in the south, and this more than anything else sustained her base.

She was able to get public support for the privatization of nationalized industries and council houses by doing so in a way that seemed to advantage workers who bought shares in the initial offerings. Later, of course, the real profits accrued to the banks and businessmen who were able to buy these assets at prices considerably lower than their valuations.

Her political legacy has to be seen as that of a neoliberal transition from the consensus politics of the postwar years to a country dominated by financial institutions. She spearheaded a state assault on unions, the public sector, and local government from an ideological free-market position, and met her political end after attempting to impose a “poll tax” which would have hit the poor the hardest. The monetarist philosophies that had apparently revived the economy were failing, and by 1990 Thatcher’s belligerent but idiosyncratic style was rejected by the Conservative party itself and she was booted out of office.

Thatcher’s agenda was a counterpart to the globalization of production and exchange that had weakened and undermined the national compromise embodied in the welfare state. So to regard her as destroying it single-handedly, as some on the left imply, is mistaken. Movements of resistance now have to take on international capital, and are no longer confined to what was possible within a relatively closed national economy. Although many in places like Merseyside and Tyneside will be drinking extra pints tonight, Thatcher merely pushed over an edifice whose foundations had already decayed.

Plutocrats vs. Public: Judicial Over-Reach Threatens Overturning Civil Rights

Right-wing plutocrats have succeeding in destabilizing the constitutional checks and balances of the U.S. political system. Their bankrolling of conservative think-tanks and fake grassroots movements like the Tea Party has shifted political discourse far to the right and has alienated Washington politics from ordinary Americans.

Libertarian Rand Paul’s filibuster of John Brennan’s appointment as CIA chief, opposing the government’s justification of drone warfare, resonated with sections of the public already unnerved by the apparent removal of limits to government power. It also opened up a fissure within the Republican party between Paul’s right-wing constituency and hawks like McCain. Exacerbating this fracture is the tension between Tea Partiers and establishment Republicans who are concerned that their party’s right-wing shift will result in electoral defeats in the near future.

These Republicans fear being linked to austerity policies enforced through the Congressional stalemate over increasing the national debt, but are committed politically to opposing any compromise that includes tax increases on the rich. On the other hand, while Obama is willing (and has proposed) to make cuts in Social Security and Medicare, he cannot agree to cuts alone without at least token tax increases or he will lose his Democratic base.

As Washington Post correspondent Greg Sargent commented: “From the point of view of Democrats, the sequester cuts are preferable to replacing them with entitlement cuts. There is no imaginable scenario under which Dems would agree to replace the sequester only with entitlement cuts. Such a thing could never be sold to rank and file Democratic officials, let alone to the base.”

While Congress is deadlocked, the other branches of government are freed from restraints by elected representatives. This has widened the political space for leading conservative operatives and funders to step up legal attacks on constitutional protections and get support from the judiciary.

The US Supreme Court last week considered a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, a landmark achievement of the Civil Rights movement, which in a supreme irony the court heard on the same day and only a few yards away from where Obama was unveiling a statue of Rosa Parks.

The importance of the section of the law being challenged, Section 5, is that it puts the onus on the states to prove they are not discriminating by race, rather than on the victims who are unlikely to have the funds for costly legal proceedings. The Act specifically singles out nine southern states and parts of seven others to submit any changes in local voting rules to the Justice Department for prior review, and was most recently renewed in 2006 after months of deliberations and thousands of pages of testimony proved that the covered jurisdictions were still enacting discriminatory rules. The Senate confirmed it by 98 to 0; the House, 390 to 33.

Why is this bipartisan consensus being questioned now? According to Ari Berman, writing in The Nation, “The current campaign against the [Voting Rights Act] is the result of three key factors: a whiter, more Southern, more conservative GOP that has responded to demographic change by trying to suppress an increasingly diverse electorate; a twenty-five-year effort to gut the VRA by conservative intellectuals, who in recent years have received millions of dollars from top right-wing funders, including Charles Koch; and a reactionary Supreme Court that does not support remedies to racial discrimination.”

The challenge was mounted by Shelby County, a white-flight suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, but it was recruited to the lawsuit by a conservative activist and ex-stockbroker, Ed Blum, who has spent much of his life fighting the Act. He has been able to obtain funding for his campaign from wealthy conservative backers through Donors Trust, a non-profit which does not have to disclose its sources.

In oral argument, Scalia picked up the Republican idea that the US had moved into a post-racial period in which the Act was irrelevant and ran with it. In a deliberately provocative statement, he described the Act as a “racial entitlement” which society could not alter through the normal political process. “This is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress,” he asserted, implying that members of Congress only voted for it because they wanted to be reelected.

More dangerous than Scalia’s open contempt for democratic institutions is the fact that the other conservative justices appeared to be less interested in people’s voting rights than in the rights of the states to define voting rules. They suggested that Section 5 of the Act was overly targeted at places where discrimination had been reduced and could be adequately replaced by other sections of the law. Kennedy, usually a swing vote, seems to have taken this position and in the past has described Alabama and other states as “independent sovereign” entities.

While Justice Sotomayor indirectly responded to Scalia,  mounting a strong defense of the Act in her questioning of the Shelby County lawyers, social realities did not penetrate far into the insularity of the court. As Berman blogged: ”The justices did not hear, for example, that six of the nine fully covered states under Section 5 passed new voting restrictions since 2010, including voter ID laws (Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia), limits on early voting (Georgia) and restrictions on voter registration (Alabama and Texas), compared to only one-third of noncovered jurisdictions during the same period.”

Although oral arguments are not always a reliable guide to how justices will vote, their conservative inclinations are displayed in the fact that the majority rejected an appeal by the ACLU to even consider a challenge to the constitutionality of the government’s claim for unchecked power to monitor international phone calls and emails. They accepted the administration’s position that the plaintiffs lacked “standing” to even allow their case to be tested in court, since they couldn’t prove they had been targets of the program – because the targets are secret!

Lower courts have also been judicially active. Three Republican-appointed judges on the DC circuit issued a ruling in January significantly narrowing presidential powers to make recess appointments. This was specifically aimed at the National Labor Relations Board, making Obama’s appointment of three NLRB members in 2012 illegal, and strengthening employers who break the law by firing workers for joining unions. Eventually, this issue may also make it to the Supreme Court.

The gulf between the right-wing judiciary and the social movement that reelected Obama is palpable. Judicial overreach is increasing the divide between society and state, delegitimizing the state and preventing it assuming a mediating role. As the sequester bites on the poor and middle class, Obama will have to struggle politically to contain resistance while still satisfying the requirements of rationalizing state power.

More significant are signs of splits within the state itself. This is why whistleblowers like Bradley Manning are being so zealously prosecuted, and why an individual like ex-LA cop Christopher Dorner was hysterically man-hunted. These cases evoke the ruling elite’s fear of the disintegration of state forces when faced with mass opposition to impoverishment and the reemergence of protests like the Occupy movement.

Vigilantism Reborn in the Manhunt for Christopher Dorner

The hellish climax of the manhunt for Christopher Dorner, the former police officer who waged a one-man vendetta against the LAPD, has generated a significant backlash from sections of the American public that object to his apparent execution without trial when the cabin where he was hiding was burnt to the ground.

On Saturday, February 16, dozens of protesters gathered outside police headquarters in Los Angeles with signs calling for the clearing of his name. According to the LA Times, they believed Dorner’s claims of racism and unfair treatment, and were protesting police corruption and the conduct of the manhunt.

Michael Nam, a former Marine, held a sign showing a tombstone and the words “RIP Habeas Corpus.” He told the LA Times he was disturbed that Dorner was given no chance to surrender after he had barricaded himself in the cabin and that it was “pretty obvious” police wanted him dead.

A Facebook page “We Stand with Christopher Dorner” has gathered over 27,000 likes to date and has over 77,000 talking about it. Other Facebook and Twitter posts, while not condoning his revenge killings, express support for Dorner’s stated aim to expose racism and corruption in the LAPD.

The manhunt for Dorner involved more than 1,000 police from more than a dozen local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. The Guardian reported: “Twitchy police shot up two vehicles thinking Dorner was inside, hitting a 71-year-old woman in the back and slightly injuring two other innocents. Hundreds of other police guarded 50 colleagues and their families believed to be on the fugitive’s hitlist.”

Due vigilance became vigilantism by the LAPD, shown in the fusillade of shots they unleashed on the senior woman’s truck. The LA Times reported that that at least seven officers fired their weapons, striking the truck at least a dozen times as well as nearby cars, trees and garage doors.

An Instagram of an African-American man wearing a T-shirt that said “Not Chris Dorner. Please Do Not Shoot,” went viral while the search was underway. BAGNews commented: “You wouldn’t have a picture like this go viral … unless American citizens were worried about ‘the man’ and the militarization of our ‘civil defenders.’ In that regard, I look at a photo like this (speaking truth to power through public signs and statements) as a continuation of what drove the Occupy/ ‘We are the 99%’ movement.”

Although police denied intentionally burning down the cabin, deputies fired at least seven incendiary teargas grenades through its windows. One deputy was overheard on a police scanner shouting “Burn that fucking house down!” Another voice exclaimed “Fucking burn this motherfucker!” The deputies were apparently concerned that Dorner could be hiding in the basement, and decided to let the fire burn completely so that there would be no chance he survived.

When photos of the burnt-out cabin were released, BAGNews noted: “If there is anything to be gleaned from the photos from Big Bear, with the smoldered foundation and the military vehicles, it’s that the scene could as well be a photo of a drone strike. And the authorities are surprised by the sympathy for Dorner as extra-judicial killing comes home.” An MSNBC reporter asked a witness: “Were you worried when you learned that Christopher Dorner was so close to your house?” The witness replied: “Actually, I was just afraid of the cops.”

Dorner’s claim that he was fired for reporting incidents of police brutality and the rampant racism that permeates the LAPD, which he said had gotten worse since the police beating of Rodney King in 1991, has resonated with the public. In his online manifesto Dorner describes how he reported a fellow officer for kicking a suspect in the head after he was handcuffed. But the department then retaliated by claiming that Dorner lied about the incident. Although the panel that heard his case was compromised by the inclusion of officers who were personal friends of the reported individual, it refused to recuse them and terminated his employment.

His account of how his complaints about racist comments isolated him is compelling: “While traveling back to the station in a 12 passenger van I heard Magana refer to another individual as a nigger…. I told Magana not to use that word again. I explained that it was a well-known offensive word that should not be used by anyone. He replied, ‘I’ll say it when I want’.

“Officer Burdios, a friend of his, also stated that he would say nigger when he wanted. At that point I jumped over my front passenger seat and two other officers where I placed my hands around Burdios’ neck and squeezed. I stated to Burdios, ‘Don’t fucking say that’. At that point there was pushing and shoving and we were separated by several other officers. … The sad thing about this incident was that when Detective Ty from internal affairs investigated this incident only (1) officer (unknown) in the van other than myself had statements consistent with what actually happened. The other six officers all stated they heard nothing and saw nothing.”

Other former LAPD officers have published statements confirming Dorner’s allegation that the department’s disciplinary system retaliates against those who try to expose misconduct. One former officer, Joe Jones, said he experienced the same kind of racist harassment by the department. Another, Brian Bentley, was fired after publishing a book detailing misconduct and racism in the department and told EUR web that he not only believed Dorner’s claims, he had lived through the same experiences. “When the department terminated you, they intentionally tried to ruin your life,” he said.

Dorner joined the US Navy and then the LAPD out of idealism, wanting to make a difference in his community. It was because he actually believed in the American Dream that the shattering of his career when he refused to participate in racist discrimination and cover-ups led to his turning to a vengeance crusade. As Dorner points out in his manifesto, minorities are only integrated within state forces if they internalize and participate in racist violence themselves.

Dormer’s case is a watershed moment: extra-judicial killings have now been imported back into the U.S. from the so-called War on Terror. It remains to be seen how the segment of American society that re-elected Obama will attempt to contain the militarized police departments across the country that mirror the vigilantism of the Wild West, terrorizing and not protecting those within the community that they theoretically serve.

Yes, Virginia, Arbitrage Capitalism Is Still Capital versus Labor

I’ve been mulling over a December op-ed by Paul Krugman, “Robots and Robber Barons,” in which he wonders why corporate profits are at a record high in today’s depressed economy while wages are down. My attention was drawn by his question: “The pie isn’t growing the way it should ­– but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense. Wait – are we really back to talking about capital versus labor? Isn’t that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of date in our modern information economy?”

“As best as I can tell,” he goes on to say, “there are two plausible explanations, both of which could be true to some extent. One is that technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the other is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in monopoly power.“

In a response to Krugman’s column, Alternet writer William Lazonick holds that automation is not the problem. “As part of a process that could reconnect profits and prosperity, the US economy needs more, not less, corporate investment in automation. … Companies that invest in automation have to build organizations to ensure steady supplies of high-quality materials, improve and maintain machinery, and capture sufficiently large market shares to achieve economies of scale. These investments in the development and utilization of automated facilities create lots of high-value-added jobs,” he argues. Then he asks “why US corporations are failing to reinvest these profits in new products and processes that can create large numbers of new high value-added employment opportunities in the United States.”

The problem with both points of view is that they retain the conception that corporations are still large, vertically-integrated units that manufacture products and sell them to the retail channel via wholesalers. However, since the early 1990s, major structural changes have taken place that have drastically hollowed out the domestic economy.

Barry Lynn, in his 2005 book End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation, writes that the kind of self-contained organizations most of us think of when we hear the names Dell, GE, Cisco, IBM, Cargill and Boeing, for example, have been systematically taken apart and actual production outsourced to smaller entities, many of them offshore, leaving only the company name and marketing functions intact.

The recent issues with the Boeing Dreamliner’s batteries catching fire attest to some of the risks inherent in this outsourcing model. But these are being ignored in favor of high and immediate corporate profits. Lynn writes: “By placing erstwhile internal operations on the other end of a contract or series of contracts, these lead firms gain much greater overall leverage vis-à-vis the individual supplier, worker, and government. … Today’s arbitrage-oriented firms … are designed to focus much more on using their power over their production systems to wring out wealth immediately, rather than to devote resources to technologies that might create wealth years from now.”

The poster child of this arbitrage business model is Walmart, whose role in Bangladesh, as in other countries, was to strip value from producers to the point where basic safety was compromised and a disastrous fire took place. A more telling example, however, is Apple Computer.  In the early 1990s Apple had two major plants in the U.S. turning out desktops and Powerbooks. Demand was high, but mismanagement at Apple meant that profits were sagging. Even though their production plants were working efficiently, Apple sold them in 1996 to an outsourcing specialist called SCI Inc. who kept on producing Macintoshes for Apple.

In 1998, Steve Jobs, who had experience with outsourced production for his NeXt computer, moved manufacturing completely offshore. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer,  “The move to China came about quietly and was little noticed at the time because of the way Apple went about creating its offshore presence. Rather than build plants that proudly displayed the Apple name, as it did in California and Colorado, the company turned to outsourcing firms that partnered with the Chinese to establish plants where the products are made. Apple’s plants in mainland China bear the name of their Chinese contractor, but inside they are making Apple products.”

In a 1997 paper which specifically examined the sale of Apple’s plants to SCI, MIT scholar Timothy Sturgeon wrote: “The evidence provided here suggests that American electronics firms are developing new ways of exerting substantial market power without the fixed costs of building and supporting a gigantic corporate organization. The strategy for brand-name systems firms is to outsource all of those functions that do not have direct relation to the establishment and maintenance of market power. Brand names, product definition and design, and marketing are being kept in-house, while manufacturing, logistics, distribution, and most support functions are being outsourced.”

Market power is the key to the lead system firm’s dominance over producer firms. By its control over design specifications, distribution and retail, the lead company can exert considerable pressure on its suppliers, who have no direct access to the consumer, to meet harsh production targets and price points. Cutbacks in orders can destroy the profitability of suppliers, who have already invested heavily in automated technology to manufacture components and need to keep production levels over a breakeven point. As a result of this unequal power relation, the lion’s share of surplus value in the commodity chain goes to the lead company. In the case of an iPhone or iPad, only about 2% of the value added (about $10) is retained by assembly companies in China, and 5-7% by Korean companies who supply display and memory chips, compared to between 30-60% going to Apple and its shareholders.

The push by the one percent for continued high share prices and profits means that corporate capital has been directed to the control of market share at all costs, and diverted away from investment in the development of automated facilities. Even if manufacturing were to return to the U.S., it would not create the kind of jobs that sustained a growing middle class after World War II. The answer to Krugman’s and Lazonick’s questions is that it is the way monopoly power has been able to reorganize the economy around globalized production that enables corporations to keep wages low, not as a separate factor from automation, but interacting dynamically with it. It’s still capital versus labor, but in a different configuration.

No amount of money thrown at the banks, or even bringing supplier companies back into the U.S., will undo this reality. While resistance has been quiet around the period of Obama’s reelection, discontent lies just below the surface and determined efforts by low-waged workers to organize are harbingers of major battles ahead. Rather than making workers in America or other countries unemployed, control of corporations must be taken out of the hands of the plutocracy and put in the hands of the people

Obama’s Second Term: The Real Promise of America

The inherent strength of the social movement that reelected Obama in November was perceptible in the spectacle of his second inauguration. The event was designed to be symbolic in a way that both coopted and validated social change in America.

Some of Obama’s liberal critics were surprised by its tone: immigration activist Sarah Uribe “was taken aback by the diversity displayed: an almost surreal portrait of progress and equality. I beamed while watching supreme court Justice Sonia Sotomayor swear in Vice-President Biden; I was thrilled to hear gay, Latino poet Richard Blanco’s ode to working-class people; and my jaw nearly dropped when I heard the Reverend Luis Leon partially recite the benediction in Spanish. And, of course, the historic significance of hearing our African-American president speak on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday was not lost.”

The rhetoric of his inaugural speech aligned Obama politically with this movement, making many references to “We, the people,” leveraging the language of the constitution, Lincoln, and the Civil Rights movement against the philosophy of radical individualism.  He defended the role of government, articulating popular frustration with legislative gridlock in order to undermine Reagan’s “welfare queen” ideology and send a message to Congressional Republicans that the balance of power between executive and legislature had changed.

But while Obama’s themes were squarely in line with popular sentiment, they didn’t include any major initiatives. Former Obama official  Kenneth Baer pointed out in the Washington Post that the speech sounded progressive only because the Republicans have moved political discourse so far to the right. “Defending the idea of a social safety net to guard against the vagaries of life is hardly radical,” writes Baer.

Obama’s commitment to maintaining Medicare and Social Security hinges on reducing the cost of health care and the size of the deficit. This is where the devil is in the details, for if a semblance of equality can be achieved by increasing taxes on the rich, Obama may well agree to cuts in social programs when negotiations resume over the debt ceiling in March.

This possibility is indicated by a major contradiction between Obama’s promises of equality of opportunity and reality. Although he declared: “We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class,” major changes in the relation between state, banks and corporations are needed to stop middle-class jobs from disappearing because of the way the economy has been hollowed out through outsourcing. While more manufacturing jobs have been created in the last four years, they are non-union, low-wage jobs that won’t sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

According to the New York Times, “For millions of workers, wages have flatlined. Take Caterpillar, long a symbol of American industry: while it reported record profits last year, it insisted on a six-year wage freeze for many of its blue-collar workers. … Corporate America’s push to outsource jobs — whether call-center jobs to India or factory jobs to China — has fattened corporate earnings, while holding down wages at home. New technologies have raised productivity and profits, while enabling companies to shed workers and slice payroll. … From 1973 to 2011, worker productivity grew 80 percent, while median hourly compensation, after inflation, grew by just one-eighth that amount, according to the Economic Policy Institute …”

What was also notable in Obama’s speech was his omissions from its narrative. He invoked the images of Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall, but ignored present-day struggles for collective bargaining or for a living wage – let alone the contribution of the labor movement to the creation of a large middle class. This omission of any contemporary challenge to corporate America is a sign that, despite the appointment of a former prosecutor to the SEC, Obama is not serious about curbing the power of the financial industry. From Lehman Brothers to HBOS, major banks and their CEOs have gotten away with fraud and criminal conduct which Holder’s Justice Department refuses to prosecute. Changes at the SEC come too little, too late to put any well-heeled bank executives in jail.

Obama’s role is to rationalize the state on behalf of the political class, which means making sure opposition to cuts in entitlement spending is confined to pressure on Congress rather than riots in the street. That’s what he means by calling on citizens to “shape the debates of our time.” However, his validation of the ideal of equality carries the potential of extending it to the fight for economic as well as political equality.

This is why the movement of low-waged workers is more crucial than ever. It has spread from Walmart warehouse and store workers to subcontracted cleaners at Target who are filing charges that they were regularly locked into Minneapolis stores overnight. Walmart itself is trying to head off organizing efforts by introducing a monitoring system for working conditions in its warehouses – no different in principle from its monitoring of factories in Bangladesh, which did nothing to prevent the tragic fire killing over 100 garment workers. And in New York City, school bus drivers are in the tenth day of a strike against the loss of union protections for drivers on special education routes.

Although the Occupy movement is no longer highly visible, it made an indelible contribution to the popular notion of a pluralist society in America. The struggle of low-waged workers for union organization, GE factory workers against outsourcing, communities against evictions, and of the majority against cuts in social security, will mount a real challenge to  corporate privilege. And this is the promise of America as Obama’s second term begins.