Pedestrian Seriously Injured in Safari Bus Accident

CUTTING SOCIAL SECURITY

t sounds like something Glenn Beck would cook up: a powerful cabal of right-wing ideologues hatches a secret plan to force cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and they're on the verge of succeeding. ¹ But it's true.

Right now, the stars are aligned for conservatives who've spent decades trying to cut Social Security—the heart of the New Deal. They're focusing public anxiety over the economy on the deficit—and even though the deficit is almost entirely a result of Bush cutting taxes for the rich while waging two wars, the "deficit hawks" want us to cut the programs vulnerable Americans rely on to survive—Social Security and Medicare. ²

And instead of articulating a progressive response, Democrats seem frozen, like deer in the headlights.

Against this backdrop, the President has appointed a "deficit commission" stacked with deficit hawks. Right after the election Congress will vote on the commission's recommendations.

Right now, this threat isn't even on most of our radar screens. So we have a special request: will you help us fund a major campaign to keep this from happening? We'll use every tool at our disposal, and the combined voices of 5 million MoveOn members, to demand that Congress deal with the deficit the right way—by helping the middle class get back on their feet and making Wall Street pay its fair share. And we'll show wavering politicians that cutting Social Security will cost them at home.

To do it, we need to raise $185,000. That means we need 52 people in Portland to make a contribution. Can you chip in $5?

https://pol.moveon.org/donate/deficit_commission0.html?bg_id=hpc5&id=21110-11496133-ned4TAx&t=3

Why does the deficit commission pose such a threat? Because almost all of its members have interests in seeing cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other safety net programs.

Here's an introduction to some of the folks on the Commission that we're up against ³:

• Erskine Bowles, Co-Chair: An investment-banking millionaire who now sits on the Board of Directors for Morgan Stanley and General Motors. Bowles was Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, where he was called "Corporate America's Friend in the White House" as he negotiated with Newt Gingrich for how best to cut safety net programs.
• Alan Simpson, Co-Chair: A GOP power player during the Conservative movement's heyday, he led Clinton-era attacks on Social Security and is already crusading publicly for cuts to Social Security and Medicare to address the deficit.
• David M. Cote: CEO of Honeywell, a defense contractor making millions from the Department of Defense and responsible for costing us millions of dollars in misconduct—including failing to test bulletproof vests sent to US troops.⁴

And they're just the tip of the iceberg.

We're planning a full-court press. Washington has to hear the stories of the real people who will be hurt by cuts. We'll run ads and organize in home districts of members of Congress considering cuts, work with progressive policy experts to push real solutions, and respond to the conservative propaganda wherever we can.

But we need to get started. Can you chip in $5 to make it crystal clear to lawmakers how the American people feel about Social Security cuts?

https://pol.moveon.org/donate/deficit_commission0.html?bg_id=hpc5&id=21110-11496133-ned4TAx&t=4

Thanks for all you do.

–Nita, Daniel, Duncan, Amy, Stephen, and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. Obama's Deficit Commission: No Friend Of Social Security? Campaign for America's Future, April 2, 2010
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=88886&id=21110-11496133-ned4TAx&t=5

2. "Whacking the Old Folks," The Nation, June 7, 2010
http://www.thenation.com/article/whacking-old-folks

3. "Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Looters," AlterNet, March 28, 2010
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=88887&id=21110-11496133-ned4TAx&t=6

4. "U.S. sues Honeywell over bullet-proof vests," Reuters, June 5, 2008
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0537404620080605

Scapegoating unions

Jean Peery wrote: “We, the private sector, plug along with less and less and so should the union’s employees.’ (“Contracts can be broken,” Letters, June 9). I would ask Peery if she ever stops to wonder why the private sector has to plug along with less and less while union employees don’t.

Over the past 30 years, wealthy corporatists have eviscerated worker rights, beginning with Ronald Reagan firing the air traffic controllers. The National Labor Relations Board refused to deal with even the most egregious cases for the past 10 years and the Supreme Court ruled against Lily Ledbetter in a case of blatant gender discrimination.

34

0

0Share

In 1983, Alan Greenspan and his cronies claimed to have fixed Social Security: They doubled the amount we contribute and raised the age of retirement. Then they spent the savings on tax cuts for themselves, spending every penny and turning a surplus into a huge deficit.

Next corporations eliminated pensions and told us to invest in the stock market via a 401(k) or an IRA. Wall Street took all that money we invested and rather than using it to fund innovations and new businesses, created financial instruments that gambled it away. Adding insult to injury, they bet against us and made a profit while we watched our retirement money and our tax dollars disappear: We lost everything, they got a big fat bonus.

Not to mention the shell game that turned home mortgages, a previously secure investment, into a game of three card Monte. And this is what you got if your job wasn’t outsourced to Mexico or India where someone will do it for much less money in countries with even less worker protection.

Peery is a victim of groupthink and media feedback. Conservative think tanks put out statements blaming union pensions for state deficits, the media picks it up and, since modern media is not journalism, it gives opinion equal weight with facts. The statement gets repeated, and the political echo chamber makes the same argument over and over.

The corporatists have squeezed every penny they can out of workers in the private sector. They took our pensions, our Social Security, our investments, even our homes and our jobs. They got obscenely rich on our backs. But that isn’t enough for them: Now they are going after the pensions and wages of the last group of workers who still have the protections we all enjoyed 30 years ago, simply because they don’t want to pay taxes for the common good.

And as long as they fool working people into blaming unions and state workers for the ills imposed on them by the wealthy, the corporations and Wall Street, they have a good chance of succeeding.

--KATHLEEN SCHULTZ, Southeast Portland

THE GREAT FRED REED

Link to original story

Commentator's Disease

Letting Them Eat Cake

When I read columnists or listen to talking heads on the lobotomy box, they strike me as delusional. What are these decapitated crania prattling about? From what morgue did they escape? What country are they from? Certainly not the America I grew up in.

I conclude that they suffer from Commentator’s Disease, which consists in the confluence of several disabilities, the first being high intelligence. Washington, being a center of power, politics, graft, and corruption, attracts the very bright. An acquaintance once said, “Inside the Beltway, you assume that everyone is in the ninety-ninth percentile.” She meant that in the circles in which she moved, this was true. The city is rife with the very bright, most of them being invisible: campaign planners, pollsters, lawyers, scientists from NIH. The class includes many of the talking heads, the Pat Buchanans and Charles Krathammrs. They may be liberal or conservative, depending on their individual defects of character, but they are way smart.

The exceedingly intelligent form a social class seldom mentioned but inordinately influential. They are not recognized as what they are because they do not append IQs to their by-lines. As a quite ordinary example, consider the magazine The American Conservative, with many of whose writers I have some familiarity. The publisher, Ron Unz, studied theoretical physics at Stanford after graduating from Harvard. Bill Lind, Pat Buchanan, Taki, Steve Sailer, Kara Hopkins, John Derbyshire—I doubt that there is an IQ below 140 in the bunch. The same could be said of many other political slicks, left or right.

These people are not intellectual snobs. In the crowd they run with, they are average. The problem with them is that they hang out together. People tend to associate with those with whom they have things in common. At a hole-in-the-wall in DC like the Zoo Bar on upper Connecticut you may find a table of eight people in jeans and running shoes—Washington is about power, not style—consisting of a biochemist, an editor of a technical newsletter, a talking head you’ve seen, and so on, all highly educated. This clustering together by intelligence is sometimes called “cognitive stratification.” It exists, big time. The clusterers are by and large decent people, not full of themselves, and mean well.

But.

But they don’t know what they are talking about in important respects. They think the Beltway contains America.

The second symptom of Commentator’s Disease is relative prosperity. The nature of Washington is that the very bright usually do well financially. I don’t mean that they are rich, though some are, but that they manage to find secure jobs in government or with law firms or they invest wisely or, in the case of commentators, angle for well-paid gigs with syndicates or networks. Usually there is nothing crooked in this. They are simply smart enough to work the system, and they live where the system is.

The aggregate effect of their brains, security, and isolation is that they are out of touch with the country as it really is. They do not know the bleak strip-development of Route 1 South toward Fredericksburg, red dirt and franchised cholesterol chutes and roaring traffic. Here the diabetic veteran lives in a decayed residential motel and makes his way on crutches to the down-scale diner where he drinks beer and waits to die because he hasn’t got anything else to wait for. (The example is not hypothetical.) Here the aging waitress gets to the diner somehow, aching with arthritis. “Too tired to work, too poor to stop.” I knew this woman. She is much of America. You don’t see her at the Zoo Bar. She has never been to such a place.

I often see victims of Commentator’s Disease arguing against the minimum wage on abstract grounds of economic theory. It is what commentators do—bandy abstractions, railing for or against Keynes, assaulting their ideological opponents with pointed phrases. They have never had to do the arithmetic of forty times the minimum wage minus taxes minus bus fare minus rent and gotta pay the cable because it is the only thing they have after work. They have never had to choose between the electric bill and a new coat as winter comes on.

The commentators don’t realize that not everybody is like them. Those with IQs of 140 and up (130 gets you into Mensa, I think) unconsciously believe that anything is possible. Denizens of this class know that if they decided to learn, say, classical Greek, they could. You get the book and go at it. It would take work, yes, and time, but the outcome would be certain.

They don’t understand that the waitress has an IQ of 85 and can’t learn much of anything.

Conservatives think in terms of merciless abstractions and liberals insist that everyone is equal. Not even close. Further, people with barely a high-school education and low-voltage minds regard any intellectual task with utter discouragement.

Some commentators urge letting people invest their Social Security taxes in the stock market. To them it is a question of abstract freedom and probably the Federalist papers. The commentators are smart enough to invest money. I’ll guess that at least half the population isn’t. Go into the tit bar (does it still exist) in Waldorf, Maryland, and ask the dump-truck drivers and nail-pounders what NASDAQ is.

Liberal commentators want everyone to go to college, when about a fifth of people have the brains. Conservatives think that people can rise by hard work and sacrifice as certainly many people have. Thing is, most people can’t. Commentators only see those who made it.

The tendency of the Beltway 99th to live in an imaginary world, of conservatives to think that everybody can be a Horatio Alger, of liberals to believe that inequality arises from discrimination, guarantees wretched policy. Those who can do almost anything need to recognize the existence of those who can do almost nothing. Few of the latter are parasites. The waitress has worked all her life, as has the truck driver. They ended up with nothing.

Which is easy to do. A girl marries her high-school sweetheart in Busted Hump, Tennessee and he goes to work for the local pickle-bottling plant, which switches to hiring people as independent contractors to avoid paying benefits. Neither of the pair is real bright, just ordinary Americans trying to make a living. They live paycheck to paycheck because they don’t know how not to. Neither is lazy. They just don’t know how to start the next Microsoft. He dies of a heart attack at 45, she can’t make the mortgage, and…she is well and truly screwed.

At the Zoo Bar, they have great wings and some really good walk-in blues bands, and what you have to understand about Keynes is….

Commentator’s Disease.

GREEK CRISIS COMING TO A PUBLIC UNION NEAR YOU!

Pols turn on labor unions By: Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman June 6, 2010 07:03 PM EDT

Spurred by state budget crunches and an angry public mood, Republican and some Democratic leaders are focusing with increasing intensity on public workers and the unions that represent them, casting them as overpaid obstacles to good government and demanding cuts in their often-generous benefits.

Unlike past battles over the high cost of labor, this time pitched battles over wages and pensions are being waged from Sacramento to Springfield to New York City and the conflict is marked by its bipartisan tone, with public employee unions emerging as an intransigent public enemy number one in cities and state capitals across the country.

They're the whipping boys for a new generation of governors who, thanks to a tanking economy and an assist from editorial boards, feel freer than ever to make political targets out of what was once a protected liberal class of teachers, cops, and other public servants.

Republicans around the nation have cheered New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose shouting match over budget cuts with an outraged teacher—“You don’t have to” teach, he told her without sympathy—became a YouTube sensation on the right last week.

And even Democrats, like the nominee for governor in New York, Andrew Cuomo, have echoed the attacks on unions.

Christie is merely the most florid voice for a calculated, national effort to fundamentally reshape the debate on the labor costs that account for the bulk of government spending at every level. And at the core of the shift is a perception among many political leaders that public anger at civil servants is boiling over.

“We have a new privileged class in America,” said Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who rescinded state workers' collective bargaining power on his first day in office in 2006. “We used to think of government workers as underpaid public servants. Now they are better paid than the people who pay their salaries.”

“It's a part of a very large question the nation's got to face,” Daniels told POLITICO in an interview. “Who serves whom here? Is the public sector—as some of us have always thought—there to serve the rest of society? Or is it the other way around?”

The new focus on public workers is the product of a perfect storm of anti-labor factors.

First are the very real financial obligations imposed by their salaries, health benefits and—especially—their traditional, defined-benefit pension plans, which have been sweetened over the years in many states by legislators eager for the support of politically-powerful unions. This is particularly true in the northern and western states that allow public workers to organize. A recent study from the Pew Center on the States found that states are short $1 trillion toward the $3.35 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits states have promised their current and retired workers, the product of a combination of political decisions and the recent recession.

But the immediate cause of the new spotlight on public sector unions is the collapse in tax revenues that came with the 2008 Wall Street crash, something that union leaders bitterly note is not their fault.

“It’s outrageous to blame a librarian – to blame a fireman for the financial mess that we find this country it,” the president of the American Federation of State County, and Municipal Employees, the largest national public workers union, Gerard McEntee, said. “We are the scapegoats in the states.”

The revenue crunch coincides with a bipartisan national resistance against teachers’ unions and the power they wield over classroom instruction, an effort financed – ironically -- largely by Wall Street and championed by figures ranging from Barack Obama to Newt Gingrich, Mike Bloomberg to Al Sharpton.

Governors have made sporadic attempts over the last decade to fundamentally alter the spiraling pension costs that have consumed increasing shares of state budgets, and which legislatures in states like New York and California often sweetened as a gift to political allies.

The recent revenue crunch, though, has given governors and big-city mayors new leverage. The early initiatives have largely been stopgap measures: everything from furloughs in the two biggest states, New York and California, to initiatives like Bloomberg’s deal last week in New York City with teacher unions to cancel raises in exchange for avoiding layoffs.

Other executives have won larger, structural changes. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, signed into law last month a bill changing benefits for all five of the state’s pension systems, raising the retirement age, limiting pension raises, capping maximum benefits and ending public pensions for people who work another public job.

California, however, remains ground zero for pension fights, as the seat of both the nation’s highest-profile budget crises and some of its most powerful public unions. Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been fighting them since he took office, and they have handed him his most stinging political defeats. He failed in 2003 and 2004 to attack pension costs through the legislature, then in 2005 backed ballot initiatives to shift public workers to a 401(k)-style pension system, to cap spending and to roll back teachers’ tenure. But he was forced to drop the pension measure amid claims it would cut death benefits for police widows, and lost the other measures in an expensive, bruising political fight that was the worst defeat of his tenure.

Now, though, Schwarzenegger – in his final months as governor– is gearing up for what he views as a final, climactic battle over public sector pensions. And he told POLITICO in an interview that he feels the time is now ripe for elements of the fight he lost five years earlier.

“The atmosphere has changed,” Schwarzenegger said. “People understand that they have to lay off their workers or they don’t have the money for their family. What they don’t like is when there is a certain group that doesn’t like to make the sacrifices.”

Schwarzenegger said he “will not sign” a budget without pension reform.

“I will hold up the budget. It doesn’t matter how long it drags—into the summer or fall or into November or after my administration—and I think the people will support that,” he said.

Schwarzenegger’s political judgment reflects a growing national consensus that public sector unions may be at their most vulnerable point ever.

“The public mood is clearly changing regarding these issues,” said Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. Pawlenty, a likely 2012 presidential candidate, boasts of weathering a 44-day bus strike in 2004, the longest in the nation’s history, and recalled that during that “knockdown, drag-out brawl,” he shored up support by telling the public that “bus drivers under one version of their contract could get retirement benefits for the rest of their lives after working for just 15 years.”

“If you inform the public and workers in the private sector about the inflated benefits and compensation packages of public employees, and then you remind the taxpayers that they’re footing the bill for that – they get on the reform train pretty quickly,” he told POLITICO.

The assault has caught the giant national unions that represent public employees largely flatfooted, and many leaders concede privately that they find themselves on defense.

“The Al Shankers and the Victor Gotbaums .....they're not around any more,” said Norman Adler, the former political director of the New York City public workers union , referring to public sector union leaders who battled through the crises of the 1960s. “The people who have replaced them are either not as sophisticated or not as talented as the old guard was.”

But another consultant to major unions pointed to a different, more structural shift: Public sector unions are increasingly the face of American labor, and they have prospered as private sector unions disappeared and workers’ wages stagnated.

"The face of labor today is now public employee unions whose wages and benefits largely outstrip those of average Americans,” said the consultant.

But union leaders they also express outrage at what they see as the fundamental opportunism of politicians whose own Wall Street supporters caused an economic collapse using it to attack middle-class union members.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, for instance, blamed “the hedge fund folks” who, she said, are “trying to use charters as a way of demonizing public school teachers.

Democrats from Obama on down, however, have backed the pressure on teachers’ unions to drop inflexible work rules and accept private-sector style merit pay. But the sharp attacks on the workers and their leaders remain largely a Republican theme. Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, for instance, who won a major victory over unions in the pension changes (which start applying only to workers hired next January) distanced himself from the Republican rhetoric.

“I don’t get involving in that kind of scapegoating – I don’t think it’s right,” he said, after hearing Daniels’ remarked about a “privileged class. “I respect public employees, I respect teachers, and I think they deserve a pension,” he said.

Quinn noted that pension liabilities had blossomed under the Republicans who governed Illinois from 1977 to 2002, and indeed, local Republicans from coast to coast have often accepted the support of unions and defended their perks. That day appears to be over, at least for now. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, campaigning to replace Schwarzenegger, has promised to cut 10 percent of the state work force, or 40,000 jobs.

The lingering question, however, is whether the turn against public sector unions is here to stay. Union leaders hope that rising state revenues will ease the pressure, while Republicans insist that there has been a deep shift in the perception of public workers and even of the typically popular teachers.

“The question now is, is there going to be a paradigm shift,” said E.J. McMahon, the director of the conservative Empire Center for New York State Policy.

“Or are the unions simply going to hunker down, let the wave wash over them, and emerge stronger than ever?”

SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT THE DEFICIT?

By David Camfield and Daniel Serge
for New Socialist Group in Canada

Deficits are the difference between what governments spend and what they take in. Governments often claim deficits are the fault of social spending that's too high. But in fact deficits always grow when capitalist economic activity slows down or contracts because tax revenue falls while state spending rises.

The global economic crisis that began in 2008 has caused deficits to grow. States have had to spend around $20 trillion to prevent a melt-down of the international banking system and "stimulate" the economy. This has staved off an economic collapse like the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it's led to big deficits and growing debt.

In the Canadian state, federal and provincial deficits have risen but the federal deficit is, in fact, much smaller relative to the level of economic activity than in any other country of the G-7 (the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada).

Aren't growing deficits a problem we all have to be concerned about?

No. Big deficits are a problem for the ruling class, but working people shouldn't shoulder any responsibility for solving their problem.

When a country's deficit is large, the cost of financing state debt by issuing bonds often goes up, since the government has to offer higher interest rates on bonds in order to attract buyers. Speculation on currency markets can also lead to a fall in the value of the country's currency.

Big deficits often lead to higher inflation. This eats into the value of interest income, which is bad news for bankers and other ultra-rich people who own lots of interest-paying assets. Capitalists fear that higher inflation will lead workers to demand higher wages to maintain the value of their wages.

Higher levels of inflation also allow less-competitive firms to take advantage of the fluctuating prices of inputs and outputs. These firms can then survive without investing in the newest technology and ways of organizing work.

These are problems for capitalists, governments and top civil servants trying to steer a country's economy on the stormy seas of global capitalism (an impossible challenge, since the global capitalist economy is beyond the ability of any state to control).

When ordinary people accept the idea that the deficit is our problem too, it leads to support for the "solutions" proposed by capitalists and pro-capitalist political parties: cuts to spending on education, health care, social assistance and other government programs, along with privatization and higher college and university tuition and other user fees.

We've seen what this means: in the mid-1990s, the Liberal federal government headed by Jean Chretien cut 45 000 jobs, privatized CN Rail and Petro Canada, slashed funding to the provinces for social programs and weakened unemployment insurance, all in the name of lowering the deficit. If either Harper's Tories or Ignatieff's Liberals had a majority government, we could well see another massive round of cuts. Some European governments are starting to implement big cuts in the name of deficit reduction.

Is the deficit just a scam?

Some on the Left who rightly reject the idea that the deficit is everyone's problem and therefore spending cuts are needed, argue that the deficit isn't really a problem for anyone. They say deficit-cutting is just a scam made up by right-wing ideologues to justify the harmful policies they want to inflict on us.

Is this true? Another way of putting it would be to ask does capitalism ever go into real crisis?

According to mainstream economists, the answer is No. Capitalism represents the purest expression of human nature -- rational self-interest -- and the market is a self-regulating mechanism to express it. When crises do occur, they're because of too much government interference -- for instance, spending on social programs. Or they occur according to a natural business cycle that no one can really do anything about.

Further to the left, social democrats say that yes, capitalism does go into crisis and governments can have real problems paying off their debts. But it's not terminal: the supply and demand of labour and goods can be regulated by government spending. This is called Keynesianism, and right-wing governments across the world rediscovered Keynesianism in 2008, when the banks came begging, cap in hand. Give money to the banks, and they could write off all their bad loans; newly solvent again, they'd start lending money, which would kick-start the economy.

We know how this worked: financial institutions have returned to their predatory ways, there's been a fragile recovery, governments have spent all their rainy-day funds, and trillions of dollars of toxic debt are still being kicked around from lender to lender, waiting for someone to fumble.

Some left-wing Keynesians have said that the problem wasn't stimulus itself, but that it was given to the banks. Had it been given to green businesses, ethical investors and so on, it could have created a new, gentler capitalist economy.

The socialist perspective is different. Crisis is inherent in capitalism, because the system has to expand or die. It's not because governments interfere, don't interfere enough or interfere in the wrong ways. The problem lies in how production takes place in a capitalist society. Every time a capitalist makes money, other capitalists rush into the same business to make money too. The technological changes associated with this process increase the amount of machinery involved - which lowers the amount of actual work, the source of value, going into production. Profits fall, and capitalists look to save money to stay afloat -- both by attacking workers' wages directly, replacing more workers with machines (which only makes the problem worse) and finding cheaper workers elsewhere. Finally, capitalists also pressure governments to reduce the "social wage": social programs, unemployment benefits and all the other things that allow workers to hold out for longer, before being forced to work for less.

The institutions repackaging debts into derivatives make this process worse: at every stage of new debts being created, the expectations of profits become higher. Meanwhile the actual prospects for profits become lower. Something has to burst.

Government stimulus can postpone that bubble, or make its explosion smaller. And indeed it has -- hence larger deficits. These deficits are a result of capitalism's crisis.

What role do financial speculators play?

Speculators actually provide an essential service to capital, by advancing credit necessary to create new businesses before those businesses have a chance to turn a profit.

When speculators buy public bonds, which governments sell to raise funds to cover deficits, the speculators are shifting the burden of having to make a profit to governments. Speculators try to get returns on investments that are higher than what bonds pay now.

In effect, speculators tell governments "You have to create the conditions for profitability, by encouraging a 'friendly business environment'." In a recession, that means lowering taxes on businesses, raising taxes on workers, weakening regulations that protect jobs, social services and the environment - and making sure the police and courts are ready to deal with any unrest this austerity provokes.

People opposed to the evils of financial speculation should demand new, democratic public financial institutions that invest in ways that are geared to meeting human needs, not to exceeding average profits.

Their problems and ours

Deficits are real. The crisis of state finances is genuine, because capitalist states have to do certain things to maintain capitalist rule: providing infrastructure, legal regulations, a police force that can control the population, military forces and so on. States also provide education, health care and other services that working people use. If the state stopped financing everything tomorrow, the result would be social collapse, not a utopia. So finding a way to finance some state activities is essential.

However, this does not mean that deficits are our problem. We should not accept the priorities of capitalist governments! If we demand that our governments refuse to make payments on their debts, it means telling governments to stop managing the affairs of capital and to stop meeting the profit expectations of speculators. Naturally enough, capitalist governments will almost always refuse to do this. So fighting austerity inflicted on us in the name of deficit reduction poses the question: should public authorities serve the needs of capital or the vast majority?

It's all about priorities. A great deal of what states spend is, from the perspective of the working class, useless - just think of the military and 'national security' budget, interest payments to bond-holders and the many subsidies and bailouts to corporations. By fighting against austerity, we're also fighting for what we really do need.

Our problem is what capitalist governments do to try to deal with their problems. Layoffs and cuts to social programs and government services are the problem we should take seriously.

Our response to what governments and other public sector employers are doing in the name of cutting deficits and restraining costs should be inspired by how many workers in Greece have responded to the package of layoffs, cuts and tax increases that the social democratic Greek government has brought in: general strikes by public and private sector workers, marches, rallies and occupations of buildings.

Such a movement should not only oppose deficit reduction measures that hurt ordinary people. It should demand that the government repudiate the debt, impose controls on capital flows and nationalize the financial system, converting banks and other financial institutions into democratically-run public institutions (cutting out speculators in the process).

It is utterly irrational for people to suffer harm in the name of reducing deficits. This is one of the ways in which capitalism is irrational -- just like famine in a world that produces more than enough food to feed everyone and the refusal of governments to take drastic action to reduce the carbon emissions that are causing the climate change crisis even though low-carbon transportation, heating and power-generating technologies exist. Like famine and climate change, the demand that people sacrifice for the sake of deficit reduction is a good reason for people to reject capitalism and fight for a democratic reorganization of society geared to the needs of people, not profit.

David Camfield is one of the editors of the New Socialist webzine. Daniel Serge is a budding bourgeois economist.

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY !!

In this guest essay, Dr. Gary G. Kohls recounts his personal concern about today’s troubling message from Memorial Day:

During my rural Minnesota growing up years, I rarely missed a Memorial Day parade or the traditional civic service honoring the war dead that followed the parade.

The parade was always led by a WWII veteran honor guard with their flags, uniforms, ribbons and rifles and followed by the high school band and a couple of floats.

Immediately following the parade, there was the solemn gathering that always began with one of the town’s clergymen blessing the occasion with the “benediction.” Somewhere in the program we all sang “God Bless America” and/or the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and that was followed by a boring patriotic speech delivered by some politician or retired military officer.

Then the (usually) mercifully short service ended with the pastor praying a prayer for the dead and also for world peace.

Later on during my maturing college years of the 1960s, I was confronted by the harsh reality of the “overwhelming atrocity” that was the Vietnam War. I became aware of the fact that covered-up (and therefore unpunished) international war crimes were being committed by all sides in that war and had been committed in every war in history, no matter which side was fighting the so-called “just war.”

I gradually learned that innumerable conscienceless corporations and members of the wealthy investor class profited greatly from wars.

I found out that wars were decreed by the powerful and wealthy with their saber-rattling; wars were embraced by wrapped-in-the-flag old men; and they were fought by easily indoctrinated, brain-washable macho adolescent boys who would eventually know better – but not until it was too late - than to obey suicidal orders in a pseudo-patriotic war.

I found out that these unaware young men who went through basic training had to be de-spiritualized, brutalized and re-programmed in order to kill without questioning why and to be willing to be killed.

I finally understood what “cannon fodder” meant. I learned that the lowly soldier who pulls the triggers and who suffers the most psychologically, spiritually and physically, never profits from the wars. The benefits go to “chicken hawk” corporate executives and to their friendly politicians.

Later in my medical practice years, I found out from the traumatized veterans of wars and their secondarily traumatized loved ones what were the deadly acute and chronic consequences of participating in homicidal violence, either as a combatant, bystander or innocent civilian victim.

Much later, as I studied the ethical teachings of Jesus and the first few centuries of his followers in the early church, I discovered that war and killing were forbidden for the followers who consistently refused to join Rome’s military in the defense of the Empire.

Despite the suffering they experienced for their faith, the early Christians saw their nonviolent religion gradually grow to be the largest in the Empire, before the Church was ultimately absorbed into Rome’s power structure.

In more recent times, the nonviolent teachings of Jesus also have been lost in America’s increasingly pro-war and militaristic Memorial Day celebrations. The voices of peacemakers are rarely permitted at such events.

Memorial Day was no longer a lament for the past suffering of young men sent off to die for some political miscalculation or some corporation’s profits.

Instead, the various branches of the military often sent impressive weaponry to the parades, which were transformed into recruiting tools for impressionable minds and into propaganda exercises to ensure future political support for war-making.

American military dominance – and the well-hidden goals of American Empire – are now intrinsic parts of every Memorial Day weekend.

So I stopped going. It took me a long time, but I eventually saw through the subterfuge. I could no longer endure the hypocrisy.

My understanding of history had changed my politics and theology, and I couldn’t envision myself being a part of war-mongering activities again.

Two years ago, around Memorial Day 2008, Chris Hedges wrote a long and sobering 11-page essay that will resonate with many open-minded readers who sense that a creeping Friendly American Fascism is coming. Hedges wrote:

“I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were African-American or Native American or of Japanese descent in World War II or poor or gay or a woman or an immigrant, but it was a country I loved and honored.

“This country gave me hope that it could be better. It paid its workers wages that were envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions.

“It offered good public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law, and respect for human rights. It had social programs from Head Start to welfare to Social Security to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly and the destitute.

“It had a system of government that, however flawed, was dedicated to protecting the interests of its citizens.

“It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a media that was diverse and endowed with the integrity to give a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to explain ourselves to ourselves.

“I am not blind to the imperfections of this America, or the failures to always meet these ideals at home and abroad. I spent 20 years of my life in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent reporting in countries where crimes and injustices were committed in our name, whether during the Contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces.

“But there was much that was good and decent and honorable in our country. And there was hope.

“The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains.

“America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father, and his father’s father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country’s founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable.

“Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish political elite, a small and privileged group which governs on behalf of moneyed interests. We are undergoing, as John Ralston Saul wrote, ‘a coup d’etat in slow motion.’

“We are being impoverished-legally, economically, spiritually and politically.

“And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs, where the American dream will be no more than that-a dream, where those who work hard for a living can no longer earn a decent wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweat shops in China or the decaying rust belt of Ohio, where democratic dissent is condemned as treason and ruthlessly silenced.

“I single out no party. The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the Republicans. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally.

“Workers, he insisted, would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, he argued, to take corporate money. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton’s leadership, had virtual fundraising parity with the Republicans. Today the Democrats get more. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.

“The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico.

“But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the curious effect of reversing every one of Clinton’s rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans for Mexican farmers, they had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States.

“The Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At least 2 million Mexican farmers have been driven off their land since 1994. And guess where many of them went?

“NAFTA was great if you were a corporation. It was a disaster if you were a worker.

“While the Democrats have been very bad, George W. Bush has been even worse. Let’s set aside Iraq - the worst foreign policy blunder in American history. George Bush has also done more to dismantle our Constitution, ignore or revoke our statutes and reverse regulations that protected American citizens from corporate abuse than any other president in recent American history.

“The Bush administration has gutted environmental, food and product safety, and workplace safety standards along with their enforcement. And this is why coal mines collapse, the housing bubble has blown up in our face and we are sold lead-contaminated toys imported from China.

“Bush has done more than any president to hand our government directly over to corporations, which now get 40 percent of federal discretionary spending. Over 800,000 jobs once handled by government employees have been outsourced to corporations, a move that has not only further empowered our shadow corporate government but helped destroy federal workforce unions.

“Everything from federal prisons, the management of regulatory and scientific reviews, the processing or denial of Freedom of Information requests, interrogating prisoners and running the world’s largest mercenary army in Iraq has become corporate.

“The assault on the American working class is nearly complete. The U.S. economy has 3.2 million fewer jobs today than it did when George Bush took office, including 2.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs.

“A total of 15 million U.S. workers are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to job hunt, according to the Labor Department. There are whole sections of the United States which now resemble the developing world.

“And the assault on the middle class is now under way. Anything that can be put on software - from finance to architecture to engineering - can and is being outsourced to workers in countries such as India or China who accept a fraction of the pay and work without benefits.

“And both the Republican and Democratic parties, beholden to corporations for money and power, allow this to happen.

“Take a look at our government departments. Who runs the Defense Department? The Department of Interior? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? Who runs the Department of Labor? Corporations.

“And in an election year where we are numbed by absurdities we hear nothing about this subordinating of the American people to corporate power. The political debates, which have become popularity contests, are ridiculous and empty. They do not confront the real and advanced destruction of our democracy. They do not confront the takeover of our electoral processes.

“Corporate entities dominate, for example, a bloated and wasteful defense industry which has become sacrosanct and beyond the reach of politicians, most of whom are left defending military projects in their districts, no matter how redundant, because they provide jobs.

“This has permitted a military-industrial complex, which contributes lavishly to political campaigns, to spread across the country with virtual impunity. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions on the planet.... More than half of federal discretionary spending goes to defense.

“The defense industry is able to monopolize the best scientific and research talent and squander the nation’s resources and investment capital. These defense industries produce nothing that is useful for society or the national trade account.

“The corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by every president since, has destroyed the public and private institutions that protected workers and safeguarded citizens.

“Only 7.8 per cent of workers in the private sector are unionized. This is about the same percentage as in the early 1900s. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called ‘near poverty.’ Our health care system is broken.

“But we do not hear these stories of pain and dislocation. News reports do little more than report on trivia and celebrity gossip.

“Our political decline came about because of deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to a capital economy. This understanding led Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 29, 1938, wrote:

“ ‘The first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism-ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.’

“The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the 20th century. …now that we have a state that is run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and perhaps terrifying political consequences.

“As the pressure mounts, as this despair and desperation reaches into larger and larger segments of the American populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. It is not accidental that with the rise of the corporate state comes the rise of the security state.

“This is why the Bush White House has pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of ‘extraordinary rendition,’ the warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting.

“It is part of a package. It comes together. It is not about terrorism or national security. It is about control. It is about their control of us.

“We are fed lie after lie to mask the destruction the corporate state has wrought in our lives. We are one, maybe two, terrorist attacks away from a police state. Time is running out.

”George Bush lied to us and to the rest of the world. There are tens of thousands, perhaps a few hundred thousand people, who have been killed and maimed in a war that has no legal justification, a war waged in violation of international law, a war that under the post-Nuremberg laws is defined as ‘a criminal war of aggression.’

“We are waging a war that devours lives and capital, and that cannot ultimately be won. We are told we need to give up our rights to be safe, to be protected. In short, we are made afraid.

“We are told to hand over all that is best about our nation to those like George Bush and Dick Cheney who seek to destroy our nation. A state of fear only engenders cruelty; fear, insanity, and then paralysis.

“In the center of Dante’s circle the damned remained motionless. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage, indeed the militancy, to challenge those in the Democratic and Republican parties who herd us towards the corporate state, we will have squandered our courage and our integrity when we need it most.

Dr. Kohls is a retired physician who writes about issues of war and peace.

GREAT QUOTES

"When a honest man, honestly mistaken, comes face-to-face with undeniable and irrefutable truth, he is faced with one of two choices, he must either cease being mistaken or cease being honest." - Amicus Solo


"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." - John Maynard Keynes, A. D. 1919.

"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty-- and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies." -- H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 12, A. D. 1923

THE RON PAUL STORY

$2 Billion Operating Assistance Bill Introduced

$2 Billion Operating Assistance Bill Introduced

WASHINGTON, DC: Senator Christopher Dodd, D-CT, chair of the Senate Banking Committee, introduced the Public Transportation Preservation Act of 2010 * this afternoon. ATU Legislative Director Jeff Rosenberg is to be commended for helping craft the language in the bill which would provide $2 billion in emergency operating assistance for public transit in the United States.

In a statement released this afternoon, International President Warren S. George urged the public to support the legislation:

Affordable, convenient public transit keeps cars off the road, reduces traffic and congestion and improves the air quality in our communities. Since January 2009, six out of ten public transit systems in the U.S. have cut service, raised fares, or both; thousands of transit workers have been laid off; and millions of commuters have less access to public transportation. Without emergency action, the problem will get worse -- seven out of ten transit systems are facing deficits in the coming year.

Passage of the legislation is far from assured. The ATU Legislative Department is urging ATU members to call their senators immediately.

You can find your senators' telephone number online at:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Links: Final draft of the bill

Senate Media Release on the Bill

*This new bill is separate from the Sherrod Brown bill in the Senate and the Carnahan bill in the House which the ATU and TWU have been promoting as part of the Save Our Ride coalition. Those bills would allow all transit systems to use a portion of their federal dollars for operating expenses such as wages, rather than capital expenditures such as buses and transit stations.

Politicians Ignore Keynes at Their Peril

Published on Tuesday, May 18, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

by Dean Baker

John Maynard Keynes explained the dynamics of an economy in a prolonged period of high unemployment more than 70 years ago in The General Theory. Unfortunately, it seems very few people in policymaking positions in the United States or Europe have heard of the book. Otherwise, they would be pushing economic policy in the exact opposite direction than it is currently heading.

Most wealthy countries have now made deficit reduction the primary focus of their economic policy. Even though the US and many eurozone countries are projected to be flirting with double-digit unemployment for years to come, their governments will be focused on cutting deficits rather than boosting the economy and creating jobs.

The outcome of this story is not pretty. Cutting deficits means raising taxes and/or cutting spending. In either case, it means pulling money out of the economy at a time when it is already well below full employment. This can lower deficits, but it also means lower GDP and higher unemployment.

This might be OK if we could show some benefit from lower deficits, but this is a case of pain with no gain. Ostensibly, there will be a lower interest-rate burden in future years, but even this is questionable. First, the contractionary policy being pursued by the deficit hawks will slow growth and lead to lower inflation or possibly even deflation. It is entirely possible that the debt-to-GDP ratio may actually end up higher by following their policies than by pursuing more expansionary policy.

In other words, we may end up with smaller deficits and therefore accumulate less debt, but we may slow GDP growth even more. The burden of the debt depends on the size of the economy and in the scenario where we do more to slow GDP growth than the growth of the debt, then we end up with a higher interest-rate burden, not a lower one.

The other reason why we may not end up with a lower interest rate-burden is that we need not issue debt to finance the budget deficits. Countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom that control their central banks can simply have the central banks buy up the bonds used to finance the deficits. In this story, the interest payments on the bonds are paid to the central bank, which is in turn refunded to the government. This means that there is no interest-burden created by these deficits.

If that sounds impossible, then it's necessary to pick up Keynes again. The economies of Europe and the United States are not suffering from scarcity right now. They are suffering from inadequate demand. This means that if governments run deficits, and thereby expand demand, the economy has the capacity to fill this demand. The decision of central banks to expand the money supply by buying bonds simply leads to an increase in output, not to inflation.

The idea that there is a direct link between the money supply and inflation is absurd. Do any businesses raise their prices because the Fed has put money into circulation? How many businesses even have a clue as to how much money is in circulation? In the real world, prices are set by supply and demand. If any businesses tried to raise their prices just because the Fed has put more money into circulation they would soon find themselves wiped out by the competition - at least as long as we are in this situation of having enormous excess supply.

This story should be old hat to those who have studied Keynes. In a period of high unemployment, like the present, governments can literally just print money. Not only will this put people back to work, this process can also lay the basis for stronger growth in the future by creating better infrastructure, more energy-efficient buildings, supporting research and development of clean energy and improving the education of our children.

Unfortunately, our political leaders don't give a damn about mundane issues such as unemployment and economic growth. It is far easier for them to bandy about silly cliches about fiscal responsibility and generational equity, even though the policies they are pushing are 180 degrees at odds with anything that will help our children or grandchildren. Their main concern is pushing policies that keep the financial industry happy. And 10 million unemployed never bothered anyone at Goldman Sachs, just as Fabulous Fabio.

© 2010 Guardian News and Media Limited

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site.

Activists Brave Rain, Tell K Street Lobbyists: ‘We’re the Face of Democracy’

Under a sea of bobbing umbrellas, some 2,000 union and community activists—clad in a colorful array of T-shirts covered by rain ponchos, many improvised with trash bags—showed K Street lobbyists and Wall Street’s Big Banks “the face of democracy” today in Washington, D.C.

We staged the Showdown on K Street because it’s a notorious avenue of high-priced, influence peddling, Big Bank and corporate lobbyists. Speaking to the crowd, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler said our presence sent a clear message that Wall Street needs to pay for the jobs its reckless practices destroyed and to stop its $1.4 million a day bid to kill Wall Street reform legislation.

The 11 million jobs lost in this crisis are real jobs. But they weren’t really lost, were they? They were stolen. You might say that these jobs were collateral damage. The casualties of K Street and Wall Street.

We’re not going to stand for that. We need good jobs now. We need to invest in America now. And Wall Street needs to pay.

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler: K Street and Wall Street have been bleeding Main Street.

At the beginning of the rally on the K Street side of McPherson Square, the Rev. Eugene Barnes, director of National People’s Action, which co-sponsored the event with the AFL-CIO, SEIU and MoveOn.org, told the crowd:

“We’re here today to bust up the Big Banks.”

Joel Hirschey, a laid-off junior high school science teacher from North Syracuse, N.Y., said the Big Banks need to be held accountable for economic disaster they created that has rippled across the entire economy. The economic disaster is hitting especially hard on school districts. He said that while some 300,000 teachers have been or are facing layoffs, drastic education budget cuts mean “students end up paying the price,” in the form of crowded classrooms, elimination of vital programs and fewer resources.

With AFT members in the crowd handing out “Pink Hearts, Not Pink Slips” stickers, AFT President Randi Weingarten said:

“We need to save America’s kids. That’s why we need to keep teachers’ jobs.”

As the rally left the park and filled K Street curb to curb, marchers chanted, “Tell me what does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like,” and “We’re going to beat, we’re going to beat, we’re going to beat, beat back the Big Banks’ attack….”

A massive wheeled float led the march, atop of which stood a 40-foot tall greedy banker pulling the puppet strings of a member of Congress. At the intersections of K and 14th streets, the entire march came to a halt, kneeled and blocked the intersection for more than 30 minutes with the giant banner, “No Bank Is Too Big Jail,” soaring above.

Speaking through a bull horn, Kia Alvarez from American Democracy Project said:

Here in the belly of the beast and we are confronting the power of the Big Banks….Our communities are crumbling and we refuse to be quiet. Banks refuse to reinvest and they are making huge profits.

Undeterred by the steady and sometimes heavy rain, the marchers headed down several more blocks, chanting “Whose street? Our street” and “Bank of America. Bad for America.”

The crowd reached the doors of the Bank of America branch at Pennsylvania Avenue and 15th Street, just across from the U.S. Treasury building, where they shut down traffic again and called out Bank of America as one of the biggest Wall Street culprits and foe of Wall Street reform legislatio

5 Ways to Ensure Mediocrity in Your Organization

by Liz Ryan
Monday, May 17, 2010

provided by

The recession is no excuse for ignoring, misusing, or demeaning talent. But hey, if that's what you really want to do, follow these suggestions.

The last time I checked, the U.S. led the world in productivity per employee. That's the good news. The bad news is that much, if not all, of that boost in productivity has come on the backs of workers, especially salaried types viewed by too many management teams as infinitely elastic resources. As one management consultant told me: "The average company takes better care of its copiers than it does its talent."

More from Businessweek.com: • Ten Management Practices to Axe • Avoid Bad-Boss Confrontations • Bad Bosses: What Kind Are You?

Many chief executives use the tough competitive environment as a handy excuse to put off salary increases, tighten the screws on performance, and generally drop any pretense of creating a human-centered workplace. But the tough-economy picture has two sides. Only those companies that make the effort to keep their employees productive by treating them decently can expect to see continued productivity gains. Much of the workforce has tuned out, waiting for a more welcoming job market to make career moves. Those organizations that haven't wavered on their commitments to flexibility, recognition of talent, and transparent leadership will keep A-list players on board as the job market improves. Their competitors may be wishing they'd paid a little more attention to employee TLC as employees start peeling off for greener pastures.

Here are five of the most insulting leadership practices, the ones that virtually guarantee a business will end up with the most self-esteem challenged, optionless team members when the dust settles.

Popular Stories on Yahoo!: • What to Buy and Not Buy at Walmart • Dumbest Things You Do With Your Money • 7 Expenses You Can Ditch in Retirement More from Yahoo! Finance

1. If you desire a mediocre workforce, make sure your employees know you don't trust them.

Nothing spells "You're dirt to us" like a corporate culture that screams, "We don't trust you as far as we can throw you." I refer to company policies that require employees to clock in and out for lunch or software that tracks every keystroke and change of URL in case a molecule of nonwork-related activity squeaks into the workday. When employees know they're not trusted, they become experts at "presenteeism"—the physical appearance of working, without anything getting done. Congratulations! Your inability to trust the very people you've selected to join your team has cost you their energy, goodwill, and great ideas.

2. If you want to drive talented people away, don't tell them when they shine.

Fear of a high-self-esteem employee is prevalent among average-grade corporate leadership teams. Look how hard it is for so many managers to say, "Hey Bob, you did a great job today." Maybe it's a fear that the bit of praise will be met with a request for a pay raise. Maybe it's the fear that acknowledging performance will somehow make the manager look weak. Whatever the reason for silence, leaders who can't say, "Thanks—good going!" can plan on bidding farewell to their most able team members in short order.

3. If you prefer a team of C-list players, keep employees in the dark.

Sharp knowledge workers want to know what's going on in their organizations, beyond their departmental silos. They want some visibility into the company's plans and their own career mobility. Leaders who can't stand to shine a light on their firms' goals, strategies, and systems are all but guaranteed to spend a lot of money running ads on Monster.com. Marketable top performers want a seat at the table and won't stand for being left in the dark without the information they need to do their jobs well.

4. If you value docility over ingenuity, shout it from the rooftops.

I heard from a new MBA who had joined a global manufacturer. "They told me during my first week that I need a manager's signature to organize a meeting," he recalled. "They said I'm too low-level to call a meeting on my own, because unauthorized meetings of nonmanagers are against company policy." How fearful of its employees would a leadership team have to be to forbid people to gather together to solve problems? The most desirable value creators won't stick around to be treated like children. They'll hop a bus to the first employer who tells them, "We're hiring you for your talent—now go do something brilliant."

5. If you fear an empowered workforce more than you fear the competition, squash any sign of individualism.

When you go to college, you learn about Economic Man, but in the corporate workplace we see that real people don't always act rationally. Lots of individual managers and plenty of leadership teams fear nothing more than the idea that a self-directed employee might buck authority. That's equivalent to shaking the organizational power structure to its foundation, possibly a fate worse than death. Leaders who want the most docile, sheep-like employees more than the smartest and ablest ones create systems to keep the C players on board and drive the A team out the door. They do it by instituting reams of pointless rules, upbraiding people for miniscule infractions ("What? Twenty minutes late? Sure you worked here until midnight last night, but starting time is starting time.") and generally replacing trust with fear throughout their organizations. Companies that operate in fear mode will never deliver great products and services to the marketplace. Their efforts will be hamstrung by their talent-repelling management practices.

How long will it take these enterprises to figure out they're shooting themselves in the foot? It doesn't matter—you'll be long gone by then.

Liz Ryan is an expert on the new-millennium workplace and a former Fortune 500 HR executive.

Blowback: Why They Try to Bomb Us

By David Sirota

Imagine, if you can, an alternate universe.

Imagine that in this alternate universe, a foreign military power begins flying remote-controlled warplanes over your town, using onboard missiles to kill hundreds of your innocent neighbors.

Now imagine that when you read the newspaper about this ongoing bloodbath, you learn that the foreign nation’s top general is nonchalantly telling reporters that his troops are also killing “an amazing number” of your cultural brethren in an adjacent country. Imagine further learning that this foreign power is expanding the drone attacks on your community despite the attacks’ well-known record of killing innocents. And finally, imagine that when you turn on your television, you see the perpetrator nation’s tuxedo-clad leader cracking stand-up comedy jokes about drone strikes—jokes that prompt guffaws from an audience of that nation’s elite.

Ask yourself: How would you and your fellow citizens respond? Would you call homegrown militias mounting a defense “patriots” or would you call them “terrorists”? Would you agree with your leaders when they angrily tell reporters that violent defiance should be expected?

Fortunately, most Americans don’t have to worry about these queries in their own lives. But how we answer them in a hypothetical thought experiment provides us insight into how Pakistanis are likely to be feeling right now. Why? Because thanks to our continued drone assaults on their country, Pakistanis now confront these issues every day. And if they answer these questions as many of us undoubtedly would in a similar situation—well, that should trouble every American in this age of asymmetrical warfare.

Advertisement

Though we don’t like to call it mass murder, the U.S. government’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan is devolving into just that. As noted by a former counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and a former Army officer in Afghanistan, the operation has become a haphazard massacre.

“Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders,” David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum wrote in 2009. “But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed.”

Making matters worse, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has, indeed, told journalists that in Afghanistan, U.S. troops have “shot an amazing number of people” and “none has proven to have been a real threat.” Meanwhile, President Barack Obama used his internationally televised speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner to jest about drone warfare—and the assembled Washington glitterati did, in fact, reward him with approving laughs.

By eerie coincidence, that latter display of monstrous insouciance occurred on the same night as the failed effort to raze Times Square. Though America reacted to that despicable terrorism attempt with its routine spasms of cartoonish shock (why do they hate us?!), the assailant’s motive was anything but baffling. As law enforcement officials soon reported, the accused bomber was probably trained and inspired by Pakistani groups seeking revenge for U.S. drone strikes.

“This is a blowback,” said Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi. “This is a reaction. And you could expect that ... let’s not be naive.”

Obviously, regardless of rationale, a “reaction” that involves trying to incinerate civilians in Manhattan is abhorrent and unacceptable. But so is Obama’s move to intensify drone assaults that we know are regularly incinerating innocent civilians in Pakistan. And while Qureshi’s statement about “expecting” blowback seems radical, he’s merely echoing the CIA’s reminder that “possibilities of blowback” arise when we conduct martial operations abroad.

We might remember that somehow-forgotten warning come the next terrorist assault. No matter how surprised we may feel after that inevitable (and inevitably deplorable) attack, the fact remains that until we halt our own indiscriminately violent actions, we ought to expect equally indiscriminate and equally violent reactions.

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “H

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/blowback_why_they_try_to_bomb_us_20100513/

Outlawing Latinos’ Heritage

By Eugene Robinson

At least we don’t have to pretend anymore. Arizona’s passing of that mean-spirited new immigration law wasn’t about high-minded principle or the need to maintain public order. Apparently, it was all about putting Latinos in their place.

It’s hard to reach any other conclusion following the state’s latest swipe at Latinos. On Tuesday, Gov. Jan Brewer signed a measure making it illegal for any course in the public schools to “advocate ethnic solidarity.” Arizona’s top education official, Tom Horne, fought for the new law as a weapon against a program in Tucson that teaches Mexican-American students about their history and culture.

Horne claims the Tucson classes teach “ethnic chauvinism.” He has complained that young Mexican-Americans are falsely being led to believe that they belong to an oppressed minority. The way to dispel that notion, it seems, is to pass oppressive new legislation aimed squarely at Mexican-Americans. That’ll teach the kids a lesson, all right: We have power. You don’t.

Arizona is already facing criticism and boycotts over its “breathing while Latino” law, which in essence requires police to identify and jail undocumented immigrants. Now the state adds insult to that injury.

The education bill begins with a bizarre piece of nonsense, making it illegal for public or charter schools to offer courses that “promote the overthrow of the United States government.” Then it shifts from weird to offensive, prohibiting classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” that “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group” and that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” When you try to parse those words, the effect is chilling.

Advertisement

Is it permissible, under the new law, to teach basic history? More than half the students in the Tucson Unified School District are Latino, the great majority of them Mexican-American. The land that is now Arizona once belonged to Mexico. Might teaching that fact “promote resentment” among students of Mexican descent? What about a class that taught students how activists fought to end discrimination against Latinos in Arizona and other Western states? Would that illegally encourage students to resent the way their parents and grandparents were treated?

The legislation has an answer: Mexican-American students, it seems, should not be taught to be proud of their heritage.

This angry anti-Latino spasm in Arizona is only partly about illegal immigration, which has fallen substantially in the past few years. It’s really about fear and denial.

About 30 percent of the state’s population is Latino, and that number continues to rise. This demographic shift has induced culture shock among some Arizonans who see the old Anglo power structure losing control. It is evidently threatening, to some people, that Mexican-Americans would see themselves as a group with common interests and grievances—and even more threatening that they might see themselves as distant heirs to the men and women who lived in Arizona long before the first Anglos arrived.

To counter the threat, solidarity among Mexican-Americans has to be delegitimized. The group itself has to be atomized—has to be taught to see itself as a population of unaffiliated individuals. The social, cultural and historical ties that have united people across the border since long before there was a border must be denied.

Every minority group’s struggle for acceptance is distinctive, but I can’t avoid hearing echoes of the Jim Crow era in the South. Whites went to great lengths to try to keep “agitators” from awakening African-Americans’ sense of pride and injustice. They failed, just as the new Arizona law will fail.

It’s important to distinguish between Arizona officials’ legitimate concerns and their illegitimate ones. The state does have a real problem with illegal immigration, and the federal government has ignored its responsibility to enact comprehensive reform that would make the border more secure. But Arizona is lashing out with measures that will not just punish the undocumented, but also negatively impact Mexican-American citizens whose local roots are generations deep.

The new education law is gratuitous and absurd. Arizona can’t be picked up and moved to the Midwest; it’s next to Mexico. There have always been families and traditions that straddle the two societies, and there always will be. Mexican-Americans are inevitably going to feel proud of who they are and where they came from—even if acknowledging and encouraging such pride in the classroom are against the law.

You know kids. They’ll just learn it in the street.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/outlawing_latinos_heritage_20100513/

Beyond Reasonable Suspicion

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/beyond_reasonable_suspicion_20100512/

By Marcia Alesan Dawkins

“You’ve been randomly selected for a search.” These are the words I heard as I was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection upon my return from a recent trip to Canada. The hourlong experience was harrowing—I was asked questions about where I was born, whether English was my first language, whether I had credit cards or cash, what I do for a living, why I was traveling, where I had gone, how my traveling companion and I knew each other, and what I was carrying in my pockets, purse and luggage. I was forbidden to stand, place my hands in my pockets, make phone calls and use the restroom without asking for permission. All of this I took in stride because I figured that it was being done in the interest of national security. Certainly, an hour of my time is well spent in helping to ensure the safety of my fellow citizens.

Though this was not how I envisioned I’d be spending a Sunday evening, it became a golden opportunity for me to think about and observe what would become a fiery issue exactly one month later when Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 into law. As written, “the provisions of this act are intended to work together to discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens and economic activity by persons unlawfully present in the U.S.”

This law has raised many questions. Some seem straightforward, like who is considered an “alien” and how “unlawful presence” is determined. Some questions are more complex, like what counts as “reasonable suspicion,” a “practicable” situation and “reasonable attempts … to determine immigration status.”

I decided to find some answers by interviewing two recent legal immigrants to Los Angeles, Susan, a 34-year-old from the United Kingdom, and Maria, a 33-year-old from Mexico. The conversation was fascinating. We talked about how Arizona dealt with the MLK holiday; Public Enemy’s now classic “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” performed to make the public aware of Arizona’s troubles with diversity, and the new song they’ve performed in protest against SB 1070 called “Tear Down That Wall”; and the state’s recent abolition of ethnic studies courses from state curricula. We moved on to criticisms they’d heard from the sports and entertainment industries, including how “Family Guy’s” Seth McFarlane is reported to have called the law a “slap in the face,” comparing the legislation to the Nazis’ tradition of requiring people to present their “papers” on demand. We discussed economic implications related to the Major League Baseball Players Association’s opposition to “this law as written” and how it “will consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of … [its] members.” We questioned whether the protest performed on Cinco de Mayo by the Phoenix Suns pro basketball team, wearing “Los Suns” on their jerseys to show solidarity with Latino communities, was effective. Then there was a heated debate about the violent and viral “Machete Trailer,” filled with A-list actors who oppose the law and its proponents (the clip currently has over 1 million YouTube hits).

More political issues soon arose. While both Susan and Maria agreed that illegal immigration is a growing and important problem for the U.S. economy and security, and both support aspects of the bill that pertain to employers’ responsibility and fines, both are deeply troubled by the ethnic and racial profiling permitted by the law’s ambiguous wording. Susan described herself as a “neutral-looking person that no one’s interested in” because of her physical appearance and British accent. She doesn’t believe she would create “reasonable suspicion” but she fears for the images of all immigrants that the law creates in the minds of law enforcement officers. Maria, who called the law “an exercise in mega-discrimination,” also described herself as “neutral-looking” but definitely felt targeted by the law because of her accent and family name. “If I were in Arizona I just wouldn’t feel safe, even if I were carrying all the appropriate documents,” she said. Then there’s the issue of paperwork backlogs. Both Maria and Susan wondered what might happen when a person who raised “reasonable suspicion” is here legally but government agencies have not fully processed her or his visa paperwork.

Advertisement

Arizona’s SB 1070 also reminded Maria of a law that eventually was declared unconstitutional, California’s 1994 Proposition 187, also known as the “Save Our State” initiative, designed to prohibit illegal immigrants’ access to social services, health care and public education. Maria’s fear is that Arizona’s law will force undocumented immigrants further underground and create a deeper subculture that brings with it just what the law is supposed to eliminate—more conflict and confusion. “Families, governments and communities will be further divided by this kind of law, not just geographically but politically and economically,” she said.

Surprisingly, Susan and Maria disagreed on the power of the proposed boycott of Arizona businesses. Susan was in favor of it; Maria was not. Maria was very concerned that further economic recession in the state would only serve to enhance the racial, ethnic and nationalist conflicts among citizens, legal immigrants and illegal immigrants.

For an expert word on the matter I turned to Dr. Ulli Ryder, a professor at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. According to Ryder, “the law is unconscionable and could very well prove to be unconstitutional. It is based on the assumptions of illegality and racial and ethnic profiling.” Ryder also pointed to the nation’s history of requiring people of certain racial and ethnic groups to carry papers that proved they were allowed to move about. “For instance, the enslaved were required to carry passes that showed they had permission to travel when questioned by whites at any time. This is where we get the term passing.” Enslaved persons who looked like they were white were able to “pass” through checkpoints without producing any papers at all. This tradition continued well into the segregation era and “helped to create many divisions among multiracial and African-Americans.” Like Maria, Dr. Ryder is afraid that Latino communities will suffer the same fate in the wake of this law.

So, where do we go from here? Do we grant amnesty to illegal immigrants as we did in 1986 with the Immigration Reform and Control Act? After much conversation I’m not sure that anyone really knows. One thing’s for sure: Arizona has taken a drastic step in attempting to find the answer. Perhaps now that Arizona has taken this step, it can also take Bishop Desmond Tutu’s advice and use the “opportunity to create a new model for dealing with the pitfalls, and help the nation as a whole find its way through the problems of illegal immigration.” A step in this direction might just remind all 50 states of the call sent out to the world: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”