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Elijah Wald

17h  · 

Got the full "culture wars" experience yesterday at the South Philly Columbus Day parade and Italian American festival. Arrived just in time to hear a man telling a little girl, "I don't want to hear that 'Indigenous People's Day' crap -- they come across the border..." at which point I had walked out of earshot, marveling that Italian-American heritage celebrations can now be anti-immigration. But we are indeed there, especially in South Philly, where the city has put a plywood box around a Columbus statue that is a traditional gathering spot for the Italian community.

I fully recognize the importance of shifting our national discourse away from celebrating people who perpetrated genocide and slavery -- but the world is not a simple place, and I also recognize how that battle has been used to turn Italian working class folks who always voted Democratic into fervent Republicans and Trump supporters -- and also that the working class Italian Democrat voting bloc was the foundation for Frank Rizzo, who ran one of the most famously racist administrations outside the South.

Like I say, the world is not a simple place -- but we need to find ways to build coalitions with people who profoundly disagree with us about some important issues to deal with other important issues. The logic of rich folks' "divide and conquer" is not that the divisions among working folks are new; it is using longstanding divisions to make working people attack each other and ignore (or support) the people who are meanwhile robbing and impoverishing them.

I'm not going to pretend I know how to get past those divisions and build those coalitions -- but if I had to choose between winning a symbolic victory and getting universal health care, or child care, or a voting rights act, or a decent minimum wage, or cutting fossil fuels, or getting guns off the streets, or getting rent control, or good schools, or serious oversight of police... I would be willing to take the plywood off the Columbus statue in Marconi Park for another few years, until the current threat has passed.

Opening Pandora's Box

Socialists have long argued that capitalism is, by its very nature, theft. From the Robber Barons of the late 19^th century to the 1% today, the very wealthy have exploited the labor of the ordinary people, the working class, to amass great wealth and, on the flip side of the coin, create poverty for much of the rest of humanity.

The capitalist class defends their system with an ideology that claims that their wealth derives from hard work and innovation and that society as a whole, benefits from what they do. But, as the recently released Pandora Papers reveal (once again), the capitalist class is well aware that the wealth they accumulated is the product of society and should belong to all of us and as a result, they will go to great lengths to hide their ill-gotten gains. As the lyrics from CCRs “Fortunate Son" explain

Some folks are born silver spoon in hand
Lord, don't they help themselves, yeah
But when the taxman comes to the door
The house lookin’ like a rummage sale

The Pandora Papers consist of nearly 12 million documents, detailing the hidden wealth, secret dealings, and corruption of hundreds of world leaders, billionaires, public officials, celebrities, and others. Their activities in using offshore tax havens to hide their tax dodging make the Mafia’s money laundering look amateurish, only they can do it without the cement shoes. Let me qualify that: “without the cement shoes in their home countries”. Let me qualify that further: “without the cement shoes in their home countries, most of the time”.

You probably get my point. The capitalists will defend their wealth and their system of exploitation “by any means necessary”. They have proven this again and again.

One of the telling facts revealed in this sordid tale of real criminality, is that there are very few American billionaires included in the documents. Why? Well, it turns out in the US, the uber-rich tend to pay such low tax rates that they have less incentive to seek offshore havens. Their tax havens are right here at home. They are called Delaware, South Dakota and the US Congress.

All of this is perfectly legal, because they write the laws. Rob a bank with a gun and you’ll be hunted down, put in chains and sent to a maximum-security prison. But, when the bank robs millions of us (the 2008 financial crisis), well that’s a different story. “Lord, don’t they help themselves, yeah”, and at the public trough.

Defend yourself against an alleged rapist by shooting and killing him (the Maddesyn George case), and you end up in jail, particularly if you are a woman of color; murder 14 Iraqi civilians and you get off free (Blackwater security guards). Well at least the Justice Department said it was disappointed in that decision.

Sell a few ounces of pot on the street corner and you land in jail; own a huge pharmaceutical company that pushes OxyContin (the Sacklers) and kills countless numbers of your fellow citizens, and you get filthy rich and never have to worry about being charged, much less convicted, of a crime.

And now for the other bit of news that set me off. The lawyer who more than 20 years ago took on Texaco on behalf of indigenous people in the Amazon who had been poisoned by the “deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing waste into the Amazon” and won a huge settlement in a court in Ecuador, has been sent to jail for 6 months (after being under house arrest for almost 2 years) for refusing to provide Chevron (which took over Texaco) with privileged information about his clients.

We do not have a system of justice in this country. We have a system of laws designed to protect and defend capital, with police and prisons to maintain the “law and order” of the privileged class. As they indicate at the end of a proof in geometry, Q.E.D or Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Nobel or Ignoble?

 In case anyone cares, these names are not on the list of Nobel prize winners in economics: Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman. The list therefore is a farce! It probably pleases the 1% though! But the list does include the name Buchanan. Distinguished historian Nancy MacLean, in her marvelously informative & frightening book, Democracy in Chains, describes the work & connections of the Nobel winning economist at George Mason University, James M. Buchanan, and the involvement of the notorious Koch brothers.

The real criminals (continued)

 

A quick follow-up to my post on criminality.

A five-day course of molnupiravir, the new medicine being hailed as a huge advance in the treatment of Covid-19, costs $17.74 to produce, according to drug pricing experts at the Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London.

So how much is the drug company Merck charging for it?  $712 for a course of treatment, or 40 times the cost to produce.

The drug is administered in a pill making it easily accessible. But to be effective the drug needs to be taken in the period when the COVID symptoms first appear. Health officials estimate that the high cost of the drug will discourage many individuals from using it until it is too late.

It turns out that molnupiravir was developed, in part, using government funds. The US government provided more than $29 million to Emory University for basic research which was later used to develop the drug.

And what will Merck do with its obscene profits from selling the drug? It will reward its CEO with a “well deserved” pay raise, it will buy back some of its stock (rewarding its wealthy stockholders) and it will buy another few politicians in Washington.

Allowing more people to die in the COVID pandemic, when they could be saved, should be a crime. Under our current system it is rewarded rather than punished.

Who are the real criminals?

From The Intercept

"A trove of hacked documents has revealed that a network of right-wing health care providers has made millions of dollars selling unproven treatments for Covid-19 like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

"The data, shared with The Intercept by an anonymous hacker, includes hundreds of thousands of records and shows how a network of sites including a pro-Trump group called America’s Frontline Doctors is both fueling and profiting from misinformation about Covid-19."

I'm in a study group on modern abolition and we are reading Mariame Kaba's book, We Do This 'til We Free Us. There's a wonderful one-line observation that sums up the criminal injustice system and can be directly applied here: "All that is criminal isn’t harmful and all that is harmful isn’t necessarily criminal.”

In fact, the greatest purveyors of harm in our upside down world are rewarded with unimaginable wealth and privilege. The ninth circle of hell would be too good for these folks. 

No ifs, ands or buts...

“For every dollar of wealth owned by a single white man, a single white woman owns 54 cents, and a single Black or Latina woman owns 1 cent.” – The Color of Wealth – United for a Fair Economy

Now I keep up with issues of runaway inequality, but even I was amazed by this level of extreme inequality! Conservatives have long argued that inequality results from the fact that some people work harder and smarter than others and deserve more. By that logic, white men work 100 times harder and smarter than women of color. If anyone believes that they must live in another universe.

If we look the reality, it would appear that exactly the opposite is true. If you live in the US (or anywhere else on earth) you can easily observe that women of color work harder to earn their subsistence wages than do white men – much, much harder. Not to mention the fact of the unpaid domestic labor of women, particularly women of color.

The actual cause of this obscene inequality has nothing to do with hard work. It is in fact the consequence of systemic racism and sexism. It is a product of “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object … to reduce them under absolute Despotism…”

That despotism has benefited white men in a myriad of ways, particularly those who own and control the heights of our economy. If we are to challenge that ownership and control, we, and I’m speaking to white males myself included, must support the struggles of women and people of color as our first order of business. No ifs, ands or buts.

 

 

Why We need Democratic Socialism

I prepared the following for the Wilmington chapter of the DSA. We are planning on following this up with a series of articles to be used by the chapter to connect the anti-capitalist movements in our neck of the woods to the broader movement for socialism.

What do Democratic Socialist believe?

In the US today, we live in a society where a small group of people (the capitalist class) control both our economic system and our political system. They use that control to exploit the rest of us (the working class), taking the largest share of the products of our labor (profits) and paying us (wages) only enough for survival, although occasionally we can temporarily wrest a little more through collective action (unions and political struggle). These two classes, the capitalists and the working class, have totally different interests and are constantly engaged in struggle (class warfare). Unfortunately, for the past 40 years, it’s been a very one-sided war.

 

Capitalism is the source of the class division and of its consequences. Look around the world and you can see the results: from poverty and hunger to the failure to address to existential crisis of global warming; from wars fought to control resources to the failure to contain the current pandemic; from systemic racism to blatant misogyny.  In every case we can see the needs of the capitalists to maintain their power and wealth are the basis of our discontent.

 

But you might ask, “Isn’t possible to reform capitalism?” The answer is no. We have a two-hundred-year history which clearly demonstrates that, while temporary reforms can be achieved (and should be fought for), the capitalist class will find work-arounds to keep and increase their wealth and power. To understand this, we only need to recognize that wealth and political power are inexorably tied together. Even when we have free elections and the trappings of democracy, the capitalists can and do use their wealth to control the political system and ensure that their interests are protected.

 

We propose a different system – one that deals with the economic contradictions of capitalism (socialism) and the lack of political power of the working class (genuine democracy). Hence our name, Democratic Socialists. It is clear that, as the old song goes, “you can’t have one without the other.”

 

Why do we think that socialism must replace capitalism?

 

The ideas behind socialism didn’t arise out of thin air. Socialists came to understand why socialism must replace capitalism by studying capitalism itself. So, a little bit of economic and political history.

 

Capitalism hasn’t always existed! In fact, it arose in a few countries in Western Europe in the late 1700s, around the same time as the ideas of the French Revolution were challenging the political systems in existence there. The two revolutions, economic and political, seemed to reinforce each other. Capitalism required the breakup of serfdom and the end of chattel slavery to free a large work force and the Enlightenment ideas that every individual should be “free” to pursue their own destiny (extreme individualism) fit that need nicely.

 

The breakdown of the old order, both economically and politically unleashed the massive productive forces that created our modern world. But the new system, which we might call capitalist democracy also created two major contradictions. One was the contradiction between those who came to own these wonderful means of production and those whose only way of surviving was to work for the owners, the 1% and the 99%. As a result, while all wealth in capitalism is socially created (we work together to make things and provide services), it is not distributed socially. Capital (money invested in production) has first claim on that wealth; labor only gets what it can wrest from the capitalists.

 

The other major contradiction is that the capitalists need to constantly expand their system, to find new places and people to exploit.  When the capitalists in Europe and the US exhausted the easily available possibilities of exploitation in their own nations (as evidenced by a declining rate of profit and worsening economic contractions, aka depressions), they launched imperial empires to exploit other areas of the world. And the competition between capitalists of different nations who were expanding their empires resulted in the most horrendous wars the world has ever seen – WWI and WWII, the Cold War and the War on Terrorism, all in the last 100 years.

 

It’s not that individual capitalists are bad people, although some of them definitely are. It’s that the needs of the system drive what has happened over the past 200 years. That’s why capitalism must go.

 

We can say that capitalism solved the question of how we can produce enough to meet the needs of every human being on this planet without destroying the only world we have. But under their system, which is driven solely by the profit motive, we will never achieve either of those two goals.

 

The challenge of how to utilize this incredible productive capacity to meet those needs and save our planet at the same time is why we need democratic socialism.