The Last Labor Day?

please see the full article at:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_labor_day_20110904/

Posted on Sep 4, 2011

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil—the phrase itself seems antique—as worthy of genuine respect.

Imagine a Republican saying this: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the tea party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861. Will President Obama dare say anything like this in his jobs speech this week?

As for the unions, they are often treated in the media as advocates of arcane work rules, protectors of inefficient public employees and obstacles to the economic growth our bold entrepreneurs would let loose if only they were free from labor regulations.

So it would take a brave man to point out that unions “grew up from the struggle of the workers—workers in general but especially the industrial workers—to protect their just rights vis-a-vis the entrepreneurs and the owners of the means of production,” or to insist that “the experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an indispensable element of social life.”

That’s what Pope John Paul II said (the italics are his) in the 1981 encyclical Laborem exercens. Like Lincoln, John Paul repeatedly asserted “the priority of labor over capital.”

That the language of Lincoln and John Paul is so distant from our experience is a sign of an enormous cultural shift. In scores of different ways, we paint investors as the heroes and workers as the sideshow. We tax the fruits of labor more vigorously than we tax the gains from capital—resistance to continuing the payroll tax cut is a case in point—and we hide workers away while lavishing attention on those who make their livings by moving money around.

Consider that what the media call economics reporting is largely finance reporting. Once upon a time, a lively band of labor reporters covered the world of work and the unions. If you stipulate that the decline of unions makes the old labor beat a bit less compelling, there are still tens of millions of workers who do their jobs every day. But when the labor beat withered, it was rarely replaced by a work beat. Workers have vanished.

But we are now inundated with news (and “news”) about the world of capital. CNBC and the other financial media are for investors what ESPN is for sports junkies. We cheer the markets, learn the obscure language of hedge fund managers, and get to know some of the big investors in off-field interviews. Workers are regarded as factors of production. At best, they’re consumers; at worst, they’re “labor costs” cutting into profits and the sacred stock price.

They have faded away in both high and popular culture, too. Can you point to someone “who makes art out of working-class lives by refusing to prettify them”?

The phrase comes from a 2006 essay by the critic William Deresiewicz, who observed that we no longer have novelists such as John Steinbeck or John Dos Passos who take the lives of working people seriously. Nor do we have television shows along the lines of “The Honeymooners” or even “All in the Family,” which were parodies of an affectionate sort. “First we stopped noticing members of the working class,” Deresiewicz wrote, “and now we’re convinced they don’t exist.”

[....]

From "Shoplifters of the World Unite"

Please see the full essay at

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite

[....]

But weren’t the Arab uprisings a collective act of resistance that avoided the false alternative of self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism? Unfortunately, the Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of revolution, a time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated. Its gravediggers are the army and the Islamists. The contours of the pact between the army (which is Mubarak’s army) and the Islamists (who were marginalised in the early months of the upheaval but are now gaining ground) are increasingly clear: the Islamists will tolerate the army’s material privileges and in exchange will secure ideological hegemony. The losers will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak – in spite of the CIA funding they are getting – to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the true agents of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has been trying to set up a network of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminists. The rapidly worsening economic situation will sooner or later bring the poor, who were largely absent from the spring protests, onto the streets. There is likely to be a new explosion, and the difficult question for Egypt’s political subjects is who will succeed in directing the rage of the poor? Who will translate it into a political programme: the new secular left or the Islamists?

The predominant reaction of Western public opinion to the pact between Islamists and the army will no doubt be a triumphant display of cynical wisdom: we will be told that, as the case of (non-Arab) Iran made clear, popular upheavals in Arab countries always end in militant Islamism. Mubarak will appear as having been a much lesser evil – better to stick with the devil you know than to play around with emancipation. Against such cynicism, one should remain unconditionally faithful to the radical-emancipatory core of the Egypt uprising.

But one should also avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause: it’s too easy to admire the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. Today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over? In this context, the manifesto of the Spanish indignados, issued after their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that meets the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone: ‘Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook that we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.’ They make their protest on behalf of the ‘inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.’ Rejecting violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.’ Who will be the agents of this revolution? The indignados dismiss the entire political class, right and left, as corrupt and controlled by a lust for power, yet the manifesto nevertheless consists of a series of demands addressed at – whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet) claim that no one else will do it for them, that they themselves have to be the change they want to see. And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably owing to the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which disappeared in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime). But even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.

USA Corporate Fascism

Financial Terrorism in America
Please see the full report at
http://ampedstatus.org/exclusive-analysis-of-financial-terrorism-in-america-over-1-million-deaths-annually-62-million-people-with-zero-net-worth-as-the-economic-elite-make-off-with-46-trillion/
[....]

IV :: Declining Income

While the cost of living from 1990 – 2010 increased by 67%, worker income has declined. According to the most recent available IRS data, covering the year of 2009, average income fell 6.1%, a loss of $3,516 per worker, that year alone. Average income has declined 13.7% from 2007 – 2009, representing a $8,588 loss per worker.

The decline in worker income is due to the dramatic increase in CEO pay. CEO pay has consistently increased year-over-year since the mid-1970s. From 1975 – 2010, worker productivity increased 80%. Over this time frame, CEO pay and the income of the economic top 0.1% (one-tenth of one percent) of the population quadrupled. The income of the top 0.01% (one-hundredth of one percent) quintupled.

To understand the affect CEO pay increases have had on workers’ declining share of income on an annual basis, after analyzing 2008 tax data, leading tax reporter David Cay Johnston summed up the situation with these revealing statistics:

“Had income growth from 1950 to 1980 continued at the same rate for the next 28 years, the average income of the bottom 90 percent in 2008 would have been 68 percent higher…. That would have meant an average income for the vast majority of $52,051, or $21,110 more than actual 2008 incomes. How different America would be today if the typical family had $406 more each week…”

As shocking as that is, over the last two years, workers have lost an even higher share of income to CEOs. In the last year alone, CEO pay skyrocketed by 28%. Looking at 2009, according to a recent Dollars & Sense report, workers lost nearly $2 trillion in wages that year alone:

“In 2009, stock owners, bankers, brokers, hedge-fund wizards, highly paid corporate executives, corporations, and mid-ranking managers pocketed—as either income, benefits, or perks such as corporate jets—an estimated $1.91 trillion that 40 years ago would have collectively gone to non-supervisory and production workers in the form of higher wages and benefits.”

As bad as these numbers are, consider that the attack on American workers has increased significantly since 2009. From 2009 to the fourth-quarter of 2010, 88% of income growth went to corporate profits (i.e. CEOs), while just 1% went to workers.

As the NY Times reported in an article entitled, “Our Banana Republic,” from 1980 – 2005, “more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.” Again, as bad as that was, since 2005 it has gotten even worse, as Zero Hedge recently reported, labor’s current “share of national income has fallen to its lowest level in modern history.” This chart shows how workers’ percentage of income has been rapidly declining:

The bottom line, as statistics clearly demonstrate, these trends are getting worse and the attacks against us, as severe as they have been over the past four years, are dramatically escalating.

Part Two :: The Economic Elite

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class,
the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
– Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway
[....]

Part Four :: Fascism in America

Other than driving large segments of the American population into poverty, and pushing the majority into massive debt and a state of financial desperation, there is an ever darker side to what is unfolding today. The Economic Elite have turned America into a modern day fascist state.

Fascism is a very powerful word which evokes many strong feelings. People may think that the term cannot be applied to modern day America. However, as Benito Mussolini once summed it up: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” In the early 1900s, the Italians who invented the term fascism also described it as “estato corporativo,” meaning: the corporate state.

Very few Americans would argue the fact that corporations now control our government and have the dominant role in our society. Through a system of legalized bribery – campaign finance, lobbying and the revolving door between Washington and corporations – the most power global corporations dominant the legislative and political process like never before. Senator Huey Long had it right when he warned: “When fascism comes to America, it will come in the form of democracy.”

As President Franklin D. Roosevelt once described fascism: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes strong than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”

The most blatant modern example of this was the bailout of Wall Street, when the “too big to fail” banks got politicians to promptly hand out trillions of tax dollars in support and subsidies to the very people who caused the crisis, without any of them being held accountable.

XI :: Modern Day Slavery

Another shocking example of how far we have descended into fascism is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is a group of corporate executives who literally write government legislation. They have gone as far as setting up a system that imprisons the poor and then puts them to work, instead of paying living wages to non-imprisoned workers. Make no mistake, this is a modern day system of slavery unfolding before our eyes.

At the leadership of ALEC and various other Economic Elite organizations, poverty has essentially become a crime. To demonstrate these attacks against the poor, there was $17 billion cut from public housing programs, while there was an increase of $19 billion in programs for building prisons, “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the poor.” Before laws began to be rewritten in 1980, with direct input from ALEC, we had a prison population of 500,000 citizens. After laws were rewritten to target poor inner city citizens with much more severe penalties, the US prison population skyrocketed to 2.4 million people.

We now have the largest prison population in the world. With only 4% of the world’s population, we have 25% of the world’s prison population. As I reported previously, in a report entitled, “American Gulag: World’s Largest Prison Complex“:

“The US, by far, has more of its citizens in prison than any other nation on earth. China, with a billion citizens, doesn’t imprison as many people as the US, with only 308 million American citizens. The US per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000. In the Middle East, the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia imprisons 45 per 100,000. US per capita levels are equivalent to the darkest days of the Soviet Gulag.
[....]

Slavoj Žižek The world’s hippest philosopher

By Helen Brown

Please see the full interview at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/7871302/Slavoj-Zizek-the-worlds-hippest-philosopher.html

[....]

It follows that 21st-century fundamentalists do not want their beliefs “tolerated” by a liberalism they want to destroy. “Can we even imagine the change in the Western 'collective psyche’ when (not if but precisely when) some 'rogue nation’ or group obtains a nuclear device, or powerful biological or chemical weapon, and declares its 'irrational’ readiness to risk all in using it?” he writes in Living in End Times. The premise of this wide-ranging, often revelatory, frequently bewildering work is that the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point.

“Its four riders,” he writes, “are comprised of the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.”

From the ashes, he argues, we should be able to build a new communism. “The standard liberal-conservative argument against communism is that, since it wants to impose on reality an impossible dream, it necessarily ends in terror. What, however, if one should nonetheless insist on taking the risk of enforcing the Impossible onto reality? Even if, in this way, we do not get what we wanted and/or expected, we none the less change the coordinates of what appears as 'possible’ and give birth to something genuinely new.”

But the book offers no clear idea of how its readers might begin to go about doing this. When I ask Žižek if there are any pointers I’ve missed, he explodes one final time: “I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep s--- you are in!”

Noting with relief that our hour is up, he tells me he must to get back to work on his “megabook” on Hegel. “Because time is running out. I am 61, I have diabetes.”

He holds out a slippery paw and shakes my hand with warmth and vigour. “This is all? My God! Good. Goodbye!”

The civilian victims of the CIA's drone war

A new study gives us the truest picture yet – in contrast to the CIA's own account – of drones' grim toll of 'collateral damage'

• 
• • Clive Stafford Smith
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 August 2011 20.30 BST
  • larger | smaller


Sameeda Gul, 6, who was injured in a drone strike in Pakistan in 2009. Photograph: Getty Images

I would not deny that the pilotless plane, flying bomb, or whatever its correct name may be, is an exceptionally unpleasant thing, because, unlike most other projectiles, it gives you time to think. What is your first reaction when you hear that droning, zooming noise? Inevitably, it is a hope that the noise won't stop. You want to hear the bomb pass safely overhead and die away into the distance …

– George Orwell, "As I Please", Tribune, 30 June 1944

George Orwell wrote of V2 attacks on London in 1944. Yet, there are many more in Britain who identify with that voice, speaking 67 years ago, than with events that are a regular reality in Pakistan today.

This week, a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism gives us the best picture yet of the impact of the CIA's drone war in Pakistan. The CIA claims that there has been not one "non-combatant" killed in the past year. This claim always seemed to be biased advocacy rather than honest fact. Indeed, the Guardian recently published some of the pictures we have obtained of the aftermath of drone strikes. There were photos of a child called Naeem Ullah killed in Datta Khel and two kids in Piranho, both within the timeframe of the CIA's dubious declaration.

The BIJ reporting begins to fill in the actual numbers. It's a bleak view: more people killed than previously thought, including an estimated 160 children overall. This study should help to create a greater sense of reality around what is going on in these remote regions of Pakistan. This is precisely what has been lacking in the one-sided reporting of the issue – and it doesn't take an intelligence analyst to realise that vague and one-sided is just the way the CIA wants to keep it.

The BIJ's study is everything that the CIA version of events is not: transparent, drawn from as many credible sources as possible and essentially open. It is clear about where its material comes from and what the margin of error may be. You should look, and you should engage, not just with the bare numbers, but also some of the stories: the attack on would-be rescuers by drones that had lingered, circling over the site of a previous strike, and opened fire – on the cruel assumption that any Good Samaritan must be a Taliban Samaritan; or the teenager who lost both legs when his family home was hit.

Sadaullah was 15 when the missiles, aimed at a militant leader who was never there, struck a family gathering, killing his wheelchair-bound uncle and two cousins. When he woke up in hospital, he was missing both legs and an eye. "The injured who survive with their severed limbs, they often tell me, 'you cannot really call me lucky'," says his lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar. "This is not London or Islamabad. There are no facilities for the disabled in Waziristan; such people can have zero opportunities ahead of them in life."

The primary question the CIA should answer is how it comes to be conducting an undeclared and illegal war in Pakistan, which is nominally a US ally. But beyond this, every time we read news of the latest drone strike in Pakistan, we need an honest assessment of the civilian casualties – and of whether we feel comfortable with an unaccountable spy agency carrying out killings on a military scale (the CIA's strikes now outweigh the firepower used in the opening round of the Kosovo war).

We also need to think about what it is like for ordinary people to live under George Orwell's circling threat, wondering whether it is going to strike, or to die away into the distance. And to note what lengths the CIA will go to silence human rights lawyers such as Akbar, who are trying to break the cycle of violence by bringing victims' cases against the CIA through the courts.

Or we could think in terms of enlightened self-interest: what do these strikes do to people's views of the US and its allies? Sixty-seven years after Orwell warily wondered whether he would be the next victim, how many angry relatives of a Waziristan child are plotting an attack on London or Washington, DC?

The BIJ study begins to bring the CIA's covert war out of the shadows. Since we may all become collateral damage, we should be grateful to them.

"Dance with Laibach," lyrics in English:

we all are obsessed we all are cursed
we all are crucified and all are broken
by attractive technology, by economy of time
by quality of life and philosophy of war
one, two, three, four, little brother dance with me
one, two, three, four, both my hands I am giving you
one, two, three, four, come and dance with me my friends
one, two, three, four, round around this is not difficult

we dance Ado Hynkel - Benzino Napoloni
we dance Schiekelgrueber
and dance with Maitreya
with totalitarianism and with democracy
we dance with fascism and red anarchy
one, two, three, four, comrade come and dance with me
one, two, three, four, both my hands I am giving you
one, two, three, four, German people dance with me
one, two, three, four, round around this is not difficult

we dance and we jump
we bounce and we sing
we fall or rise we give or take
American friends and German comrade
we dance well together we dance to Baghdad
one, two, three, four, little brother dance with me
one, two, three, four, both my hands I am giving you
one, two, three, four, dance with me my friends
one, two, three, four, round around this is not difficult
one, two, three, four.