GBS—“In Praise of Guy Fawkes”

Neglecting society is the cause of the political mess we find ourselves in. Capitalist society encourages individualism to the neglect of society, and the US’s irrational hatred of communism, fomented by its richest people and their lackeys in academia and the media, has led to “social” becoming a dirty word. The same rich elite buy politicians, so that we no longer have people dedicated to the good of society, but greedy sycophants dedicated to bringing home the bacon for rich men’s dishonest corporations. Look at Murdoch’s News Corp.

We abandon our societies to idle rich dilettantes, overambitious superannuated grocers and car dealers, and the class of three card tricksters and glorified bookmakers who now call themselves bankers, who take our money, giving us little of nothing for leaving it with them, but charging us large amounts of interest to borrow it, and meanwhile gamble with it thereby making the rich richer still without investing a penny themselves. As George Bernard Shaw said, “they are expert in nothing but making private fortunes and doing the other fellow down”!

GBS spoke to the UK Fabian Society in 1932 “In Praise of Guy Fawkes”, whom he thought was before his time for his perception of the need to end Parliament “by an explosion of the hot air which is its chief output”. Hot air is currently being spouted from both benches of Parliament about the riots and arson all over the UK being nothing but theft and thuggery, as if government policies of destroying the future chances of many of our youth through exporting their jobs, exhorbitant educational charges and savagely cutting social services and amenities has nothing to do with it.

The dishonest bought men we call politicians support not just riots but rebellion in countries the rich cannot profit from while ignoring the plain fact that our home brewed riots commonly arise when the burdens of society are being piled on to those who can least afford it. When society is perceived to be blatantly unjust our own youth can take their cues from the cues our grasping hypocritical politicians have given to rioters in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and especially Libya! If rioting and rebellion can be admirable there, then why cannot it be here?

Where then is the modern Guy Fawkes that Shaw praised to the Fabians all those years ago. Certainly, he is not to be found among the Fabians, for most of them now aspire to making themselves prominent enough to be bought like their hero—not Bernard Shaw!—Tony Blair, accumulating his rewards for supporting the rich oilman's attempt to take over Iraq. Guy Fawkes objected to the government of his day for scapegoating Catholics. All the mini-Guys today object themselves to being scapegoated by our government. When society is unfair, anyone among the oppressed underclasses can become a Guy Fawkes.

That goes for the US even more!

China’s Competitive Advantages Grow While the US Borrows War Bucks!

Writing in the current issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Strategic Management, Jack McCann of Lincoln Memorial University, in Tennessee, says that China has witnessed an average annual growth of about 10% for nearly two decades and has been uniquely stable in the present world economic crises. Indeed, China’s merchandise trade has been growing three times faster than world trade at about 14%. China currently produces nearly two thirds of the world’s bicycles, a third of its television sets and air conditioners, and half of the world’s microwave ovens. China has become the world’s second largest oil consumer after the US. McCann says:

On paper, globalization poses the long term potential to raise living standards and reduce the costs of goods and services for people everywhere. … China’s pool of cheap labor may dominate world labor markets for decades, giving it a monopoly on cheaply manufactured goods

Globalization has wrought new opportunities for many nations. China is no different from how the US was, and how any other nation is in attempting to make the most of its advantages, cultivating friendships with third party countries. Meanwhile shamelessly greedy US politicians try to support enormous war spending without frightening the rich with taxation! Instead the US trade deficit with China increases year after year into the hundreds of billions of dollars. What will happen if the Chinese decide to release the dollars they hold on to the market? The dollar will be devalued and the US bankrupted.

So tax the rich to pay US workers for what they do best—make excellent products that the world wants to buy. Rebuild our decaying cities and infrastructure. Use our technical knowledge to improve labor productivity at home, instead of outsourcing abroad! Compete!

LA Dodgers a Microcosm of American Society

The LA Dodgers are bankrupt. They do not have the cash to pay their employees’ wages. We are talking about a community here. The Dodgers are a baseball team much loved by its many patrons, as sports teams usually are, whether big or small. And the Dodgers are bankrupt despite recent success—they made the play offs as recently as 2008 and 2009. Why then has this catastrophe engulfed the team? Andrew Gumbel of the UK Observer has explained it.

The fact is that the owner of the team has sucked them dry for his own aggrandisement. It should be a lesson for Americans, especially those who persistently defend the mega rich, people whom they do not know and never will, and people who are richer than they can ever imagine—America’s plutocrats, the corrupt and greedy rich.

Frank McCourt, not the deceased Irish novelist but a car lot magnate, bought the team and bled it dry to support a life of luxury for himself and his family. McCourt bought the Dodgers from News Corp, who had used it to build up a regional sports network. To do it, McCourt borrowed $150m from Bank of America, $75m from Major League Baseball and $196m from Fox, so he had not spent a penny of his own money.

McCourt then sliced off what was most profitable, the stadium car park and the ticket office as his own operations, which charged the Dodgers rent, and, in turn, giving McCourt security to borrow more dollars. He paid himself $5m a year, his wife, Jamie, $2m pa as chief executive, and their two children $600,000 each—one was a student at Stanford University and Goldman Sachs employed the other. McCourt also enjoyed a private jet and four luxurious houses in Hollywood and Malibu. In typical robbing financier style, the money and debt were spread among, and constantly moved between McCourt’s shell companies and subsidiaries to hide what was going on.

And what was going on was that the assets of the team were being stripped and moved into the personal accounts of a single family and a few hangers on.

Yes, it ought to be a lesson for the average American, whether poor and unemployed or middle class and imagining that they are well off. You just do not have a clue, especially you Tea Partiers taken in by rich men’s stunts to keep you on side. The invisible über rich of the USA are taking you all for the same sort of ride as McCourt took the community that supported the LA Dodgers. They are robbing you silly, and too many of you are defending them!

You cheer because they are sending your boys to distant lands to get maimed and killed, and they make money out of armaments and the vast support industry of the military-industrial complex that supports it. Often you don’t even get a badly paid job out of it. They manufacture more and more abroad in low cost countries. You lose your jobs, or the threat is used to keep wages down or to get concessions from the city and the state treasury, and all of it goes into pockets just as McCourt’s did. You don’t know what is going on because they are like McCourt experts in hiding it, and have a gigantic publicity service called the media to feed you anything to keep you confused and divided.

Get real! You Yankees are like the Dodgers fans—being conned!

US Credit Worthiness, Tax Hikes and the Balancing of the Federal Budget

Krishna Tummala, director of Kansas State’s public administration program and professor of political science simply explains the reason for the nation’s burgeoning debt:

People demand more services but are not always willing to pay taxes. The politicians promise more services without telling them the cost and that they must be paid for. Instead, they use the so-called painless way to go about this by allowing deficit budgets. This means not only the politicians must educate themselves on the issues, but their constituents as well.

He adds that the argument that the federal government should live like we do, within our means, is hypocritical. The personal debt of Americans is close to $2 trillion, so effectively we all live in debt. The federal government just is behaving like we do. Moreover, it has the responsibility for the common welfare and general defense, as the Constitution requires. Yet state governments, 48 of which require a balanced budget by law, are favorably compared to the federal government. But state governments differ in their budgeting compared to the fed. The federal government has only one budget, but each state has two, a current account and a capital account. Only the state’s current account—effectively its day to day running costs—must be balanced. The capital account is the place for major project expenditures, and they have to be carried forward annually.

The federal government borrows money through Article I of the US Constitution, and had it not been able to, it could not have borrowed $15 million from Britain in 1803 to complete the Louisiana Purchase. It doubled the size of the country, made it possible for it to be united coast to coast, and without it, it perhaps would never have become the world power it is. Now the national debt is $14 trillion, but it is not owed to the British. The Chinese have around $3 trillion of it.

People who want a balanced budget, many of them Republicans, have to realize that it will need taxes to be raised. Cutting expenditures will not be enough, and will shut down the country first. But Republicans will not condone tax hikes because the people with the money are leading Republican donors. So, cooperation between the parties has been lacking, only quarreling, a lot of posturing and little dialogue. The deadline for increasing the debt ceiling is 2 August, with the country’s credit worthiness at stake. If the debt ceiling is not extended, the country will default, hitting the economy of the whole world, everything now being so interconnected.

The country’s credit worthiness underpins the financing of debts. Foreign countries must have confidence in the US economy or they will not be willing to lend. Of course, credit ratings agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s can evaluate the soundness of the US economy but the ratings agencies were giving excellent ratings to the financial sector “before it went belly-up”, Tummala wryly concluded!

Is the US Ambassador in Kabul a Liar or an Idiot?

Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador in Kabul, was quoted in the UK Guardian by Jonathan Steele (The Taliban’s wishlist, 21 June, 2011) as solemnly pronouncing:

America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world. We are a good people.

This is staggering. Americans incessantly complain that the rest of the world hates them, and always want to do them harm, even though they are “good people”. Are these Americans, blind, or deluded, or are these just neocon lies to feed the self righteous ignorance of the US public?

Eikenberry is a diplomat and sits in the center of a ten year long war against the present occupation of Afghanistan by the US and its sycophantic allies. Nor can he be unaware that the US just fought a terrible war for no obvious moral cause in Iraq, dividing and devastating the country, and still occupy it with tens of thousands of soldiers. They have just joined with France and the UK via NATO in an unjustified attack on Libya, which has again divided the country and will require another occupying force to prevent a civil war if Gaddafi is ousted.

Richard Carter, replying to Eikenberry in the Guardian adds the following historical synopsis of significant US occupations, omitting minor ones:

There’s Honduras (seven times between 1903 and 1989), Nicaragua (seven times between 1894 and 1933, not to mention the support for the Contra terrorists in 1981-90), China (six times between 1894 and 1949), Cuba (five times between 1912 and 1933), Haiti (five times between 1891 and 2005), the Dominican Republic (four times between 1914 and 1966), El Salvador (twice: 1932, 1981-92), Mexico (twice: 1913, 1914-18) and Vietnam (once, but for 15 years)….

Isn’t it about time that the US public caught on—they have a problem with their leaders, and that means with their much vaunted democracy. These wars do not and cannot help the ordinary US citizen whether poor or middle class. Only the rich profit out of them, and the US has been ruled on behalf of this rich minority for the whole of the time R Carter surveyed.

Are Americans Sick Of War?

A poll by “Pulse Opinion Research” shows that 72 percent of likely voters in the US think that the country is fighting too many wars abroad. Operations continue incessantly overseas and new ones always arrive when old ones seem to be getting settled, like Libya after Iraq. The US people increasingly want to know when the military will finally listen to the people and step back.

Americans see the country deep in hock, and millions unemployed and underemployed, while millions more, even middle class people, worry about the possibility of getting the bullet—fired! Or their compensation slashed in some economy drive. Yet administrations always have plenty of money to fight foreign wars. Something Americans can do without in these allegedly hard times is their tax dollars wasted on useless wars.

With Americans wanting out, this administration is doing little. Yet Obama campaigned under the banner of “Change”, of which ending war was one prominent constituent part, but like Clinton he has broken every promise and spinelessly has bent over to the militarists and the armamaments manufacturers, introducing the US into more wars on his watch. Even a Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul, thinks these wars “endless” and “unwinnable”.

Is Paul doing the same as Obama? Codding the voter? Elections in the USA are an utter fraud. It does not matter who wins, the same policies—aimed at keeping the military and industrial barons and their financiers in banking and insurance swimming in profits—are retained, and the professional lobbyists in Washington with their bucketloads of bribery dollars can always get their own way with grasping representatives. They all have their price, and it isn’t high for the filthy rich minority with enough megabucks to control the USA.

Yankees threw off the yoke of the English, but now they'll have to throw off the yoke of their home grown oppressors. The Brits had to do the same. They threw out the king in the seventeenth century, but kings returned. In the nineteenth century, they had to strike and riot to get the two reform acts passed that pulled the greedy rich into some order for a couple of centuries. Now the British will have to do it again, too!

Jane Hirschmann of “Jews Say No!” Says “No!” to Israel’s Gaza Policy

In November 2008, the ceasefire ended—Israeli soldiers broke it in a cross-border raid killing six members of Hamas. In response, rockets were launched into Israel, so Israel, fortified with American weaponry, attacked the people of Gaza. Approximately 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed compared to 13 Israelis. Gaza was pulverized. Judge Richard Goldstone and his team reported there was no doubt that the people of Gaza were disproportionally affected.

Right after the invasion in Gaza I became one of the organizers of “Jews Say No!” in New York City. We wanted to make clear that the Israeli government did not speak in our name as they claimed. I began reading about the occupation, settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the building of the separation wall, Jewish-only streets for Israeli settlers, special identity papers for Palestinian citizens of Israel—one step away from wearing a yellow star—and the other indignities endured by the people of Palestine on a daily basis. And I saw the total collusion by the US government—its unconditional support no matter what the Israeli government did, including giving them 30 billion dollars over a 10-year period for weaponry—F16s, Apache helicopters, white phosphorus, Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in Bedouin encampments—used ruthlessly against the Palestinians. This was intolerable for me.

I understand the fears and frustrations of Israelis being fired upon by rockets and the resultant deaths and injuries. But what about the thousands of Palestinians being killed and whose homes, schools, hospitals, farms, mills, factories and infrastructure are being destroyed? What about a people living under a brutal occupation who are being denied the right to live with dignity in their own homeland? The siege and blockade of Gaza continue. The Israeli government controls the land, sea and air of this small area (25 miles long and roughly six miles wide) where 1.6 million people live.

Lightly edited extract from Counterpunch. Jane Hirschmann is a member of “Jews Say No!” in New York City and one of the national organizers of the US Boat to Gaza. Hirschmann has been active in anti-war efforts for the past four decades. She is a psychotherapist and the co-author of three books. More information about the The Audacity of Hope is available at www.ustogaza.org.