Friday 31 January 2014


WASHINGTON — On Sunday, El Salvador will hold elections for a new president. In Washington, some on the right are raising alarms that the party of El Salvador’s onetime leftist guerrilla army, the F.M.L.N., will win re-election, with a former guerrilla commander as the new president. The drumbeat started early this month when Elliott Abrams, who oversaw the Reagan administration’s Central America policy during El Salvador’s civil war, warned in The Washington Post of the dangers of an F.M.L.N. victory. He cited the party’s connections with the Colombian leftist movement FARC, and accusations of its involvement in the drug and arms trades. Other conservatives have echoed his warning. Implicit is a threat that if Salvadorans make the wrong choice, America will reduce its support.
From 1985 to 1988, I worked closely with Mr. Abrams at the State Department. I respect his honesty, but I believe he is wrong in this case. I travel often to El Salvador on business. I have seen how much the country, and the F.M.L.N., have changed in the 22 years since the war ended in 1992. I believe those spreading fear are stuck in the past.
I served as the American ambassador during the final three and a half years of the war, and the first months of peace. I know well how grisly that war was; the State Department protected me with Delta Team security, believing I was high on the F.M.L.N.’s hit list. But a lasting peace was negotiated in 1992, and in 2009 the F.M.L.N., relying on the ballot box, fairly won the right to govern.
That year, the party chose Mauricio Funes, a television journalist, as its candidate, precisely to reassure voters that the F.M.L.N. would not reignite old conflicts. But presidents are limited to one term, and after five years of mixed reviews, the F.M.L.N. has nominated Salvador Sánchez Cerén, who is considered a far more orthodox F.M.L.N. representative, as its flag-bearer. His campaign promises a more rigorous, but lawful and peaceful, effort to address the F.M.L.N.’s core issues — the corrosive inequality and social injustice that underlaid the civil war.
It is not my place to assess the merits of Mr. Sánchez Cerén. This is 2014, not 1992. He and his party have earned a fair chance to let El Salvador’s voters decide. The peace agreement 22 years ago ended one of the bloodiest civil wars in Latin American history. On one side was a right-wing government that had used every tool at its command, including American assistance, in a vain effort to crush the F.M.L.N. insurgency. Both sides used terror, but government forces and civilian right-wing militias were among the most promiscuous by far. Few Salvadorans can forget the bodies, the disappearances, the torture of loved ones carried out by American-supported security forces, all in the name of defeating Communism. But in the aftermath, F.M.L.N. perpetrators who were judged to be terrorists were placed on blacklists by the United States, while right-wing terrorists seldom were. Even today, most former F.M.L.N. commanders remain ineligible for American visas while right-wing terrorists are seldom so identified. A similar imbalance between left and right characterizes the accusations of corruption and criminality.
In 1992, there were understandable concerns regarding the intentions of the F.M.L.N. Salvadoran voters gave Arena, the party of the right, three successive victories. But now, after five years in power, the F.M.L.N. has played down leftist rhetoric and has come to realize — enthusiastically and publicly — that El Salvador needs to work with the United States to confront its problems. Lawlessness, corruption, poverty and narcotics trafficking all worsened during the years of Arena rule, and little was done to improve the lives of the poor.So when Americans demonize former F.M.L.N. commanders like Mr. Sánchez Cerén, either for their activities during the war or for accepting assistance from the Castro regime or from the political heirs of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, they are making a big mistake. The Salvadoran people view Venezuelan assistance as a blessing. American assistance has dwindled, even though an estimated one-fifth of people born in El Salvador now live in the United States. Salvadoran migrants send home $4 billion or so in remittances each year — 90 percent of it from the United States. These payments account for more than 16 percent of El Salvador’s gross national product, more than any other source. And narcotics trafficking, gang violence and money laundering are problems all shared with the United States. We should welcome the F.M.L.N.’s statements of good faith and cooperate with it.
Mr. Abrams did get one important point right: Corruption, criminality and violence all undermine democracy. That is what makes Central America a hot spot posing a threat to our national security. Do some in the F.M.L.N. wish the United States ill so long after the war? Yes. Are some engaged in corruption? Certainly. But in both cases, the same could be said of some players on the right. So should the United States pay close attention to this election? Yes. But we should not fear the prospect of another five years of F.M.L.N. rule.
I am neither predicting, nor advocating, an F.M.L.N. victory, though polls suggest it is likely. But Salvadorans must be able to make their choice free of veiled suggestions that one or another outcome will lead to a worsening of United States-Salvadoran relations. If the majority deem an F.M.L.N. victory better for them than the alternatives, we must respect that choice.
William G. Walker, a retired career diplomat, was the United States ambassador to El Salvador from 1988 to 1992.

Monday 20 January 2014

Oxfam: 85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of the world

Oxfam: 85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of the world

As World Economic Forum starts in Davos, development charity claims that growing inequality has been driven by a 'power grab' by wealthy elites
The InterContinental Davos luxury hotel in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos
The InterContinental Davos luxury hotel in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos. Oxfam report found people in countries around the world believe that the rich have too much influence over the direction their country is heading. Photograph: Arnd Wiegmann/REUTERS
The world's wealthiest people aren't known for travelling by bus, but if they fancied a change of scene then the richest 85 people on the globe – who between them control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together – could squeeze onto a single double-decker.
The extent to which so much global wealth has become corralled by a virtual handful of the so-called 'global elite' is exposed in a new report from Oxfam on Monday. It warned that those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1tn, as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population.
Working for the Few - Oxfam reportSource: F. Alvaredo, A. B. Atkinson, T. Piketty and E. Saez, (2013) ‘The World Top Incomes Database’, http://topincomes.g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/ Only includes countries with data in 1980 and later than 2008. Photograph: Oxfam
The wealth of the 1% richest people in the world amounts to $110tn (£60.88tn), or 65 times as much as the poorest half of the world, added the development charity, which fears this concentration of economic resources is threatening political stability and driving up social tensions.
It's a chilling reminder of the depths of wealth inequality as political leaders and top business people head to the snowy peaks of Davos for this week's World Economic Forum. Few, if any, will be arriving on anything as common as a bus, with private jets and helicoptors pressed into service as many of the world's most powerful people convene to discuss the state of the global economy over four hectic days of meetings, seminars and parties in the exclusive ski resort.
Winnie Byanyima, the Oxfam executive director who will attend the Davos meetings, said: "It is staggering that in the 21st Century, half of the world's population – that's three and a half billion people – own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all fit comfortably on a double-decker bus."
Oxfam also argues that this is no accident either, saying growing inequality has been driven by a "power grab" by wealthy elites, who have co-opted the political process to rig the rules of the economic system in their favour.
In the report, entitled Working For The Few (summary here), Oxfam warned that the fight against poverty cannot be won until wealth inequality has been tackled.
"Widening inequality is creating a vicious circle where wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs from the top table," Byanyima said.
Oxfam called on attendees at this week's World Economic Forum to take a personal pledge to tackle the problem by refraining from dodging taxes or using their wealth to seek political favours.
As well as being morally dubious, economic inequality can also exacerbate other social problems such as gender inequality, Oxfam warned. Davos itself is also struggling in this area, with the number of female delegates actually dropping from 17% in 2013 to 15% this year.

How richest use their wealth to capture opportunites

Polling for Oxfam's report found people in countries around the world - including two-thirds of those questioned in Britain - believe that the rich have too much influence over the direction their country is heading.
Byanyima explained:
"In developed and developing countries alike we are increasingly living in a world where the lowest tax rates, the best health and education and the opportunity to influence are being given not just to the rich but also to their children.
"Without a concerted effort to tackle inequality, the cascade of privilege and of disadvantage will continue down the generations. We will soon live in a world where equality of opportunity is just a dream. In too many countries economic growth already amounts to little more than a 'winner takes all' windfall for the richest."
Working for the Few - Oxfam reportSource: F. Alvaredo, A. B. Atkinson, T. Piketty and E. Saez, (2013) ‘The World Top Incomes Database’, http://topincomes.g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/ Only includes countries with data in 1980 and later than 2008. Photograph: Oxfam
The Oxfam report found that over the past few decades, the rich have successfully wielded political influence to skew policies in their favour on issues ranging from financial deregulation, tax havens, anti-competitive business practices to lower tax rates on high incomes and cuts in public services for the majority. Since the late 1970s, tax rates for the richest have fallen in 29 out of 30 countries for which data are available, said the report.
This "capture of opportunities" by the rich at the expense of the poor and middle classes has led to a situation where 70% of the world's population live in countries where inequality has increased since the 1980s and 1% of families own 46% of global wealth - almost £70tn.
Opinion polls in Spain, Brazil, India, South Africa, the US, UK and Netherlands found that a majority in each country believe that wealthy people exert too much influence. Concern was strongest in Spain, followed by Brazil and India and least marked in the Netherlands.
In the UK, some 67% agreed that "the rich have too much influence over where this country is headed" - 37% saying that they agreed "strongly" with the statement - against just 10% who disagreed, 2% of them strongly.
The WEF's own Global Risks report recently identified widening income disparities as one of the biggest threats to the world community.
Oxfam is calling on those gathered at WEF to pledge: to support progressive taxation and not dodge their own taxes; refrain from using their wealth to seek political favours that undermine the democratic will of their fellow citizens; make public all investments in companies and trusts for which they are the ultimate beneficial owners; challenge governments to use tax revenue to provide universal healthcare, education and social protection; demand a living wage in all companies they own or control; and challenge other members of the economic elite to join them in these pledges.
• Research Now questioned 1,166 adults in the UK for Oxfam between October 1 and 14 2013.

Saturday 18 January 2014

"We've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Trumpet of Conscience

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/17/remembering-the-officially-deleted-dr-king/

Remembering the Officially Deleted Dr. King

by PAUL STREET
Last summer I happened upon a neat find in a used book store. I found an original edition of Martin Luther  King’s posthumously published book The Trumpet of Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) – a compilation of five lectures King gave over the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) during November and December of 1967, just five months before his assassination (or execution) in Memphis. The CBC had invited King to talk about anything he considered relevant not only in the U.S. but around the world.
The Trumpet of Conscience does not jibe well with the conventional domesticated and whitewashed image of King that is purveyed across the nation ever year during and around the national holiday the bears his name.  That image portrays King as a moderate reformer who wanted little more than a few basic civil rights adjustments in a mostly benevolent American System – a loyal supplicant who was tearfully grateful to the nation’s leaders for finally making those adjustments.
The official commemoration says nothing about the Dr. King who studied Marx sympathetically at a young age[1] and who said in his last years that “if we are to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism”[2]. It deletes the King who wrote that the “real issue to be faced” beyond superficial matter was “the  radical reconstruction society of society itself.”[3]
In his first talk (“Impasse in Race Relations”), King reflected on how little the black freedom struggle had actually attained beyond some fractional changes in the South. He deplored “the arresting of the limited forward progress” blacks and their allies had attained “by [a] white resistance [that] revealed the latent racism that was [still] deeply rooted in U.S. society.”
“As elation and expectations died,” King explained, “Negroes became more sharply aware that the goal of freedom was still distant and our immediate plight was substantially still an agony of deprivation. In the past decade, little has been done for Northern ghettoes. Al the legislation was to remedy Southern conditions – and even these were only partially improved” (p.6).
Worse than merely limited, the gains won by black Americans during what King considered the “first phase” of their freedom struggle (1955-1965) were dangerous in that they “brought whites a sense of completion” – a preposterous impression that the so-called “Negro problem” had been solved and that there was therefore no more basis or justification for further black activism. “When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend to the second rung of the ladder,” King noted, “a firm resistance from the white community developed….In some quarters it was a courteous rejection, in others it was a singing white backlash. In all quarters unmistakably it was outright resistance” (p.6).
The White Man Does Not Abide by Law”
Explaining the remarkable wave of race riots that washed across U.S. cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967, King made no apologies for black violence. He blamed “the white power structure…still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality intact” for the disturbances. He found the leading cause of the riots in the reactionary posture of “the white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,” which” produc[ed] chaos” by telling blacks (whose expectations for substantive change had been aroused) “that they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor” (9-10, emphasis added).
King also blamed the riots in part on Washington’s imperialist and mass-murderous “war in [here he might have better said “on”] Vietnam.” The military aggression against Southeast Asia stole resources from Johnson’s briefly declared and barely fought “War on Poverty.” It sent poor blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It advanced the notion that violence was a reasonable response and even a solution to social and political problems.
Black Americans and others sensed what King called “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit,” King said in his second CBC lecture, adding that he “could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor” (p. 23).
Racial hypocrisy aside, King said that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense [here he might better have said “military empire”] than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom” (p.33).
Did the rioters disrespect the law, as their liberal and conservative critics alike charged? Yes, King said, but added that the rioters’ transgressions were “derivative crimes…born of the greater crimes of the…policy-makers of the white society,” who “created discrimination…created slums. [and] perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty….[T]he white man,” King elaborated, “does not abide by law in the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provision of public services. The slums are a handiwork of a vicious system of the white society.” (p.8).
Did the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King said in his fourth lecture, but noted that their aggression was “to a startling degree…focused against property rather than against people.” He observed that “property represents the white power structure, which [the rioters] were [understandably] attacking and trying to destroy” (pp. 56-57). Against those who held property “sacred,” King argued that “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround with rights and respect, it has no personal being”
The Roots are in the System”
What to do? King advanced significant policy changes that went against the grain of the nation’s corporate state, reflecting his agreement with New Left Radicals that “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations” (p.40). King advocated an emergency national program providing either decent-paying jobs for all or a guaranteed national income “at levels that sustain life in decent circumstances.” He also called tor “demolition of slums and rebuilding by the population that lives in them” (p. 14).
His proposals, he said, aimed for more than racial justice alone. Seeking to abolish poverty for all, including poor whites, he felt that “the Negro revolt” had come to challenge what he called “the interrelated triple evils” of racism, economic injustice/poverty (capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism). It had “evolve[ed] into more than a quest for desegregation and equality” by becoming “a challenge to a system that has created miracles of production and technology to create justice.”
If humanism is locked outside the system,” King said in his opening lecture, “Negroes will have revealed its inner core of despotism and a far grater struggle for liberation will unfold. The United States is substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only the evils of racism but the scourge of poverty and the horrors of war….” (pp. 16-17, emphasis added).
There should be no doubt that King meant capitalism when he referred to “the system” and its “inner core of despotism.”[4]
They Must Organize a Revolution…. Against the Privileged Minority of the Earth”
No careful listener to King’s CBC talks could have missed the radicalism of his vision and tactics. “The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both White and Negro – live in a cruelly unjust society,” King said in his fourth lecture. “They must organize a revolution against that injustice,” he added (p. 59)..
Such a revolution would require “more then a statement to the larger society,” more than “street marches” King proclaimed. “There must,” he added, “be a force that interrupts [that society’s] functioning at some key point.” That force would use “mass civil disobedience” to “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force” by “dislocate[ing] the functioning of a society.”
“The storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth,” King added for good measure. “The storm will not abate until [there is a] just distribution of the fruits of the earth…” (p. 17). As this reference to the entire earth suggested, the “massive, active, nonviolent resistance to the evils of the modern system” (p. 48) that King advocated was “international in scope,” reflecting the fact that “the poor countries are poor primarily because [rich Western nations] have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism” (p. 62).
In the Trumpet of Conscience you read a democratic socialist mass-disobedience world revolution advocate who the guardians of national memory don’t want you know about when they honor the official, doctrinally imposed memory of King.
Regression, Betrayal, and “The Mendacity of Hope”
The threat posed to that official memory by King’s CBC lectures – and by much more that King did and said and write in the last three years of his life – is not just that they show an officially iconic gradualist reformer to have been a radical opponent of the profits system and its empire. It is also about how clearly King analyzed the incomplete and unfinished nature of the nation’s progress against racial and class injustice, around which all forward developments pretty much ceased in the 1970s, thanks to a white backlash that was already well underway in the early and mid-1960s (before the rise of the Black Panthers) and to a top-down corporate war on working class Americans that started under Jimmy Carter and went ballistic under Ronald Reagan.
The “spiritual doom” imposed by militarism has lived on, with Washington having directly and indirectly killed untold millions of Iraqis, Central Americans, South Americans, Africans, Muslims, Arabs, and Asians in many different ways over the years since Vietnam.[5] Accounting for half the world’s obscene military expenditure, the U.S. maintains Cold War-level “defense” (empire) budgets to sustain an historically unmatched global killing machine (which operates from more than 1000 bases located in more than 100 “sovereign” nations) even as the current record-setting number of officially poor Americans remains stuck at 46 million, a very disproportionate number of whom are black and Latino/a.
It is ironic that Barack Obama keeps a bust of King in the White House’s oval office to watch over his regular betrayal of the martyred peace and justice leader’s ideals. Consistent with Dr. Adolph Reed Jr.’s early (1996) dead-on description of the future President as “a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics”[6], President Obama has consistently backed top corporate and financial interests (whose representatives have filled and dominated his administrations, campaigns, and campaign coffers) over and against those who would undertake serious programs to end poverty, redistribute wealth (the savage re-concentration of which since Dr. King’s time has produced a New Gilded Age in the U.S.), constrain capital, and save livable ecology as it approaches a number of critical tipping points on the accelerating path to irreversible catastrophe. Thus is that one of Obama’s supporters was moved in late 2012 to complain that a president “whose platform consists of Romney’s health care bill, Newt Gingrich’s environmental policies, John McCain’s deficit-financed payroll tax cuts, George W. Bush’s bailouts of filing banks and corporations, and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rate” was still being denounced as a leftist enemy of business by the Republicans.[7]
Obama has opposed calls for any special programs or serious federal attention to the nation’s savage racial inequalities, so vast now that the median of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households. He has done this while the fact of his ascendency to the White House has deeply reinforced white America’s sense that racism is over as a barrier to black advancement and has generated its own significant white backlash that only worsens the situation of less privileged black Americans. He has made it clear that what Dr. King called (white) America’s unpaid “promissory note” and “bad check” to black America [8] will remain un-cashed under his watch – consistent with his preposterous 2007 campaign claim (at a commemoration of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March) to believe that blacks had already come “90 percent” of the way to equality in the U.S.[9]
Completing the “triple evils” hat trick, Obama – he of the of personally approved Special Forces Global War on (of) Terror Kill List – has embraced and expanded upon the vast criminal and worldwide spying and killing operation he inherited from Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bush. He has tamped down their spent and failed ground wars only to ramp up and inflate the role of unaccountable special force and drone attacks in the spirit of his dashing and reckless imperial role model John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In waging his deadly and disastrous air war on Libya, he did not even bother with the pretense of seeking Congressional approval. Meanwhile he has far outdone the Cheney-Bush regime when it comes to repressing antiwar dissenters, not to mention those who oppose the rule of the 1 percent – smashed by a coordinated federal campaign in the fall of 2011.“As all kinds of journalists have continuously pointed out,” Glenn Greenwald notes, “the Obama administration is more aggressive and more vindictive when it comes to punishing whistleblowers than any administration in American history, including the Nixon administration.” [10]
“A Calling Beyond National Allegiances”
Thinking of the FTBP’s imperial record, I am reminded of something King said in his second CBC lecture. Explaining why he had turned against the Vietnam War, King noted that “a burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964: I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission – a commission to work harder that I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’ This is a calling which takes me beyond national allegiances …to the making of peace” (p.25).
In answering that call, King stood to the portside of leading U.S. 1960s social democrats like Bayard Rustin, A Phillip Randolph, and Michael Harrington.  These and other left leaders (e.g. Max Shachtman and Tom Kahn) were unwilling to forthrightly oppose the US-imperial assault on Indochina because of their misplaced faith in pursuing the fight against poverty in alliance with the pro-war Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO [11] Besides opposing the war on moral grounds, King understood very well that expenses of crushing Vietnam were precluding and cancelling out anti-poverty spending.
A Testament of Radical Hope
Perhaps the Obama experience is at least a lesson on how progressive change is about something much bigger than a change in the party or color of the people in nominal power. That is certainly something King (who would be 85 today) would have thought has been able to witness the endless mendacity of the the nation’s first half-white president first-hand. “The black revolution,” King wrote in a posthumously published 1969 essay titled “A Testament of Hope” – embracing a very different sort of hope than that purveyed by Brand Obama in 2008 – “is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of out society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction society of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”[12]
Those words – words you will not hear via “mainstream” media during the national King Day celebrations– ring as true and urgent as ever today, as it becomes undeniable that the profits system’s inner core of despotism is driving humanity over an environmental cliff and that it has become eco-“socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky.”
Paul Street (paul.street99@gmail.com) is the author of many books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), Segregated Schools (Routledge, 2005) and They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014).
Selected Endnotes
1. Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr, A Life (New York: Penguin, 2002), 25
2.  David J.Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council(HarperCollins, 1986), 41-43.
3.  See note 12, below.
4. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 382, 591-92; Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (Free Press, 2000), 87-88.
5. A useful review is William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Common courage Press, 2005). See also Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (South End Press, 1993) and Ward Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (AK Press, 2003),
6. And with my description of Obama’s commitment and career in my book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm 2008, written in 2007). See Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Curse of Community,” Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York, 2000), 10-13.
7. Ezra Klein, “Block Obama!,” New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012, quoted in Perry Anderson, “Homeland,” New Left Review 81 (May-June 2013).
8. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream…” (1963),http://www.archives.gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf
9. Paul Street, “The Pale Reflection: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Meaning of the Black Revolution,”  Black Agenda Report (March 20, 2007),http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/pale-reflection-barack-obama-mlk-and-meaning-black-revolution
11. For a detailed and remarkable account, see Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil; Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review, 2013).
12, Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Testament of Hope” (1969) in James Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King. Jr (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 315.
by PAUL STREET
Last summer I happened upon a neat find in a used book store. I found an original edition of Martin Luther  King’s posthumously published book The Trumpet of Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) – a compilation of five lectures King gave over the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) during November and December of 1967, just five months before his assassination (or execution) in Memphis. The CBC had invited King to talk about anything he considered relevant not only in the U.S. but around the world.
The Trumpet of Conscience does not jibe well with the conventional domesticated and whitewashed image of King that is purveyed across the nation ever year during and around the national holiday the bears his name.  That image portrays King as a moderate reformer who wanted little more than a few basic civil rights adjustments in a mostly benevolent American System – a loyal supplicant who was tearfully grateful to the nation’s leaders for finally making those adjustments.
The official commemoration says nothing about the Dr. King who studied Marx sympathetically at a young age[1] and who said in his last years that “if we are to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism”[2]. It deletes the King who wrote that the “real issue to be faced” beyond superficial matter was “the  radical reconstruction society of society itself.”[3]
In his first talk (“Impasse in Race Relations”), King reflected on how little the black freedom struggle had actually attained beyond some fractional changes in the South. He deplored “the arresting of the limited forward progress” blacks and their allies had attained “by [a] white resistance [that] revealed the latent racism that was [still] deeply rooted in U.S. society.”
“As elation and expectations died,” King explained, “Negroes became more sharply aware that the goal of freedom was still distant and our immediate plight was substantially still an agony of deprivation. In the past decade, little has been done for Northern ghettoes. Al the legislation was to remedy Southern conditions – and even these were only partially improved” (p.6).
Worse than merely limited, the gains won by black Americans during what King considered the “first phase” of their freedom struggle (1955-1965) were dangerous in that they “brought whites a sense of completion” – a preposterous impression that the so-called “Negro problem” had been solved and that there was therefore no more basis or justification for further black activism. “When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend to the second rung of the ladder,” King noted, “a firm resistance from the white community developed….In some quarters it was a courteous rejection, in others it was a singing white backlash. In all quarters unmistakably it was outright resistance” (p.6).
The White Man Does Not Abide by Law”
Explaining the remarkable wave of race riots that washed across U.S. cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967, King made no apologies for black violence. He blamed “the white power structure…still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality intact” for the disturbances. He found the leading cause of the riots in the reactionary posture of “the white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,” which” produc[ed] chaos” by telling blacks (whose expectations for substantive change had been aroused) “that they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor” (9-10, emphasis added).
King also blamed the riots in part on Washington’s imperialist and mass-murderous “war in [here he might have better said “on”] Vietnam.” The military aggression against Southeast Asia stole resources from Johnson’s briefly declared and barely fought “War on Poverty.” It sent poor blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It advanced the notion that violence was a reasonable response and even a solution to social and political problems.
Black Americans and others sensed what King called “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit,” King said in his second CBC lecture, adding that he “could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor” (p. 23).
Racial hypocrisy aside, King said that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense [here he might better have said “military empire”] than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom” (p.33).
Did the rioters disrespect the law, as their liberal and conservative critics alike charged? Yes, King said, but added that the rioters’ transgressions were “derivative crimes…born of the greater crimes of the…policy-makers of the white society,” who “created discrimination…created slums. [and] perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty….[T]he white man,” King elaborated, “does not abide by law in the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provision of public services. The slums are a handiwork of a vicious system of the white society.” (p.8).
Did the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King said in his fourth lecture, but noted that their aggression was “to a startling degree…focused against property rather than against people.” He observed that “property represents the white power structure, which [the rioters] were [understandably] attacking and trying to destroy” (pp. 56-57). Against those who held property “sacred,” King argued that “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround with rights and respect, it has no personal being”
The Roots are in the System”
What to do? King advanced significant policy changes that went against the grain of the nation’s corporate state, reflecting his agreement with New Left Radicals that “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations” (p.40). King advocated an emergency national program providing either decent-paying jobs for all or a guaranteed national income “at levels that sustain life in decent circumstances.” He also called tor “demolition of slums and rebuilding by the population that lives in them” (p. 14).
His proposals, he said, aimed for more than racial justice alone. Seeking to abolish poverty for all, including poor whites, he felt that “the Negro revolt” had come to challenge what he called “the interrelated triple evils” of racism, economic injustice/poverty (capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism). It had “evolve[ed] into more than a quest for desegregation and equality” by becoming “a challenge to a system that has created miracles of production and technology to create justice.”
If humanism is locked outside the system,” King said in his opening lecture, “Negroes will have revealed its inner core of despotism and a far grater struggle for liberation will unfold. The United States is substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only the evils of racism but the scourge of poverty and the horrors of war….” (pp. 16-17, emphasis added).
There should be no doubt that King meant capitalism when he referred to “the system” and its “inner core of despotism.”[4]
They Must Organize a Revolution…. Against the Privileged Minority of the Earth”
No careful listener to King’s CBC talks could have missed the radicalism of his vision and tactics. “The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both White and Negro – live in a cruelly unjust society,” King said in his fourth lecture. “They must organize a revolution against that injustice,” he added (p. 59)..
Such a revolution would require “more then a statement to the larger society,” more than “street marches” King proclaimed. “There must,” he added, “be a force that interrupts [that society’s] functioning at some key point.” That force would use “mass civil disobedience” to “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force” by “dislocate[ing] the functioning of a society.”
“The storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth,” King added for good measure. “The storm will not abate until [there is a] just distribution of the fruits of the earth…” (p. 17). As this reference to the entire earth suggested, the “massive, active, nonviolent resistance to the evils of the modern system” (p. 48) that King advocated was “international in scope,” reflecting the fact that “the poor countries are poor primarily because [rich Western nations] have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism” (p. 62).
In the Trumpet of Conscience you read a democratic socialist mass-disobedience world revolution advocate who the guardians of national memory don’t want you know about when they honor the official, doctrinally imposed memory of King.
Regression, Betrayal, and “The Mendacity of Hope”
The threat posed to that official memory by King’s CBC lectures – and by much more that King did and said and write in the last three years of his life – is not just that they show an officially iconic gradualist reformer to have been a radical opponent of the profits system and its empire. It is also about how clearly King analyzed the incomplete and unfinished nature of the nation’s progress against racial and class injustice, around which all forward developments pretty much ceased in the 1970s, thanks to a white backlash that was already well underway in the early and mid-1960s (before the rise of the Black Panthers) and to a top-down corporate war on working class Americans that started under Jimmy Carter and went ballistic under Ronald Reagan.
The “spiritual doom” imposed by militarism has lived on, with Washington having directly and indirectly killed untold millions of Iraqis, Central Americans, South Americans, Africans, Muslims, Arabs, and Asians in many different ways over the years since Vietnam.[5] Accounting for half the world’s obscene military expenditure, the U.S. maintains Cold War-level “defense” (empire) budgets to sustain an historically unmatched global killing machine (which operates from more than 1000 bases located in more than 100 “sovereign” nations) even as the current record-setting number of officially poor Americans remains stuck at 46 million, a very disproportionate number of whom are black and Latino/a.
It is ironic that Barack Obama keeps a bust of King in the White House’s oval office to watch over his regular betrayal of the martyred peace and justice leader’s ideals. Consistent with Dr. Adolph Reed Jr.’s early (1996) dead-on description of the future President as “a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics”[6], President Obama has consistently backed top corporate and financial interests (whose representatives have filled and dominated his administrations, campaigns, and campaign coffers) over and against those who would undertake serious programs to end poverty, redistribute wealth (the savage re-concentration of which since Dr. King’s time has produced a New Gilded Age in the U.S.), constrain capital, and save livable ecology as it approaches a number of critical tipping points on the accelerating path to irreversible catastrophe. Thus is that one of Obama’s supporters was moved in late 2012 to complain that a president “whose platform consists of Romney’s health care bill, Newt Gingrich’s environmental policies, John McCain’s deficit-financed payroll tax cuts, George W. Bush’s bailouts of filing banks and corporations, and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rate” was still being denounced as a leftist enemy of business by the Republicans.[7]
Obama has opposed calls for any special programs or serious federal attention to the nation’s savage racial inequalities, so vast now that the median of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households. He has done this while the fact of his ascendency to the White House has deeply reinforced white America’s sense that racism is over as a barrier to black advancement and has generated its own significant white backlash that only worsens the situation of less privileged black Americans. He has made it clear that what Dr. King called (white) America’s unpaid “promissory note” and “bad check” to black America [8] will remain un-cashed under his watch – consistent with his preposterous 2007 campaign claim (at a commemoration of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March) to believe that blacks had already come “90 percent” of the way to equality in the U.S.[9]
Completing the “triple evils” hat trick, Obama – he of the of personally approved Special Forces Global War on (of) Terror Kill List – has embraced and expanded upon the vast criminal and worldwide spying and killing operation he inherited from Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bush. He has tamped down their spent and failed ground wars only to ramp up and inflate the role of unaccountable special force and drone attacks in the spirit of his dashing and reckless imperial role model John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In waging his deadly and disastrous air war on Libya, he did not even bother with the pretense of seeking Congressional approval. Meanwhile he has far outdone the Cheney-Bush regime when it comes to repressing antiwar dissenters, not to mention those who oppose the rule of the 1 percent – smashed by a coordinated federal campaign in the fall of 2011.“As all kinds of journalists have continuously pointed out,” Glenn Greenwald notes, “the Obama administration is more aggressive and more vindictive when it comes to punishing whistleblowers than any administration in American history, including the Nixon administration.” [10]
“A Calling Beyond National Allegiances”
Thinking of the FTBP’s imperial record, I am reminded of something King said in his second CBC lecture. Explaining why he had turned against the Vietnam War, King noted that “a burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964: I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission – a commission to work harder that I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’ This is a calling which takes me beyond national allegiances …to the making of peace” (p.25).
In answering that call, King stood to the portside of leading U.S. 1960s social democrats like Bayard Rustin, A Phillip Randolph, and Michael Harrington.  These and other left leaders (e.g. Max Shachtman and Tom Kahn) were unwilling to forthrightly oppose the US-imperial assault on Indochina because of their misplaced faith in pursuing the fight against poverty in alliance with the pro-war Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO [11] Besides opposing the war on moral grounds, King understood very well that expenses of crushing Vietnam were precluding and cancelling out anti-poverty spending.
A Testament of Radical Hope
Perhaps the Obama experience is at least a lesson on how progressive change is about something much bigger than a change in the party or color of the people in nominal power. That is certainly something King (who would be 85 today) would have thought has been able to witness the endless mendacity of the the nation’s first half-white president first-hand. “The black revolution,” King wrote in a posthumously published 1969 essay titled “A Testament of Hope” – embracing a very different sort of hope than that purveyed by Brand Obama in 2008 – “is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of out society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction society of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”[12]
Those words – words you will not hear via “mainstream” media during the national King Day celebrations– ring as true and urgent as ever today, as it becomes undeniable that the profits system’s inner core of despotism is driving humanity over an environmental cliff and that it has become eco-“socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky.”
Paul Street (paul.street99@gmail.com) is the author of many books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), Segregated Schools (Routledge, 2005) and They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014).
Selected Endnotes
1. Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr, A Life (New York: Penguin, 2002), 25
2.  David J.Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council(HarperCollins, 1986), 41-43.
3.  See note 12, below.
4. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 382, 591-92; Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (Free Press, 2000), 87-88.
5. A useful review is William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Common courage Press, 2005). See also Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (South End Press, 1993) and Ward Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (AK Press, 2003),
6. And with my description of Obama’s commitment and career in my book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm 2008, written in 2007). See Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Curse of Community,” Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York, 2000), 10-13.
7. Ezra Klein, “Block Obama!,” New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012, quoted in Perry Anderson, “Homeland,” New Left Review 81 (May-June 2013).
8. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream…” (1963),http://www.archives.gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf
9. Paul Street, “The Pale Reflection: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Meaning of the Black Revolution,”  Black Agenda Report (March 20, 2007),http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/pale-reflection-barack-obama-mlk-and-meaning-black-revolution
11. For a detailed and remarkable account, see Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil; Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review, 2013).
12, Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Testament of Hope” (1969) in James Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King. Jr (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 315.

Friday 17 January 2014

Elections in Venezuela and Chile Advance Left Agenda and Latin American Economic Integration

Jan 16 2014
Roger Burbach
Roger Burbach is the director of the Center for the Study of the Americashttps://nacla.org/news/2014/1/16/elections-venezuela-and-chile-advance-left-agenda-and-latin-american-economic-integra
2358 Photo Credit: Prensa Presidencial (www.noticias24.com)
The elections in Venezuela and Chile in December provided new momentum for the left-leaning governments in Latin America and the ascent of post-neoliberal policies. Over the past decade and a half, the rise of the left has been inextricably tied to the electoral process. In Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, under the governments of Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa, the electorate has gone to the polls on an average of once a year, voting on referendums, constituent assemblies as well as elections for national offices.
In late November, it appeared the right might be taking the initiative, as the oligarchy and the conservative political parties in Honduras backed by the United States used repression and the manipulation of balloting to keep control of the presidency. And in Venezuela, it was feared the right would come out on top in the December 8 municipal elections. After Maduro's narrow victory margin of 1.5% in the presidential elections in April, the opposition went on the offensive, declaring fraud and waging economic war. If the opposition coalition had won in the municipal elections, or even come close in the popular vote, it was poised to mount militant demonstrations todestabilize and topple the Maduro government. But the decisive victory of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in the municipal elections gave a boost to the presidency of Nicolas Maduro, enabling him to advance the twenty-first century socialism of his predecessor, Hugo Chavez. The PSUV and allied parties won control of 72% of the municipalities and bested the opposition in the popular vote by 54% to 44%.
A class war is going on that is focused on the economy, particularly over who will control the revenue coming from its large petroleum resources that account for over 95% of the country's exports. With no new electoral challenge until the parliamentary elections in late 2015, Maduro now has the political space to take the initiative in dealing with the country's economic problems and to pursue a socialist agenda. As Maduro said on the night of the elections, “we are going to deepen the economic offensive to help the working class and protect the middle class....We're going in with guns blazing, keep an eye out.”

At the other end of the continent, Michele Bachelet one week later won a resounding victory in the Chilean presidential race with 62% of the vote. She has put forth an ambitious package of proposals that would increase corporate taxes from 20% to 25%, dramatically expand access to higher education, improve public health care and overhaul the 1980 Constitution imposed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Chile has the highest level of income inequality among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 34 member countries. Within her first hundred days, Bachelet has promised to draft legislation to increase tax revenues by about 3 percent of gross domestic product. On election night Bachelet proclaimed: "Chile has looked at itself, has looked at its path, its recent history, its wounds, its feats, its unfinished business and thus Chile has decided it is the time to start deep transformations," Bachelet proclaimed on election night." There is no question about it: profits can't be the motor behind education because education isn't merchandise and because dreams aren't a consumer good."
If these policies are implemented, they would shake the neoliberal paradigm that has been followed by every government since the Pinochet dictatorship, including Bachelet's during her first presidential term from 2006 to 2010. Like most presidential candidates before they take office, the actual changes may fall far short of what she is promising. But the student uprising and the resurgence of the social movements over the past four years has led to a popular movement in the streets that is unprecedented since the days of Pinochet. Militants on the left have already made it clear they will challenge her from the first day she takes office. According to Reuters, right after the election, hackers posted a message on the education ministry's website saying: "Ms. President we will take it upon ourselves to make things difficult for you. Next year will be a time ofprotests."
The elections in Venezuela and Chile also set the stage for a challenge to the latest U.S.-backed trade initiative, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes a dozen Pacific rim nations. Ever since Chavez became president, Venezuela has led the way in opposing U.S. efforts to dominate hemispheric trade starting with the Free Trade Area of the Americas that George W. Bush launched in April, 2001. The FTAA was dealt a fatal blow at the 4th Summit of the Americas in Argentina in 2005 under the leadership of Chavez, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, who advocated Latin American integration without the United States.
With the victory in the municipal elections behind him, Maduro was in a position to play a central roll ten days later in the second summit of ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for Our America (ALBA) and PetroCaribe, a bloc of 18 nations receiving oil at concessionary prices. (Five of the members are overlapping.) ALBA, founded in 2004 by Venezuela and Cuba, is based on the principal of “Fair Trade, not Free Trade.” Now including Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua as well as five more Caribbean nations, they met with the nations of PetroCaribe, a concessionary oil trading arrangement, to put forth a program to create a “special complementary economic zone” between the member countries of both groups to eradicate poverty in the region. Maduro proclaimed the economic zone “is a special plan...in order to continue advancing the food security and sovereignty of our peoples, and to share investments, experiences, and actions that promote [agricultural]development.” The action plan to implement the proposal includes cooperation with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. An executive committee to coordinate the regional plan is being set up in Ecuador.
Maduro will take the document for the creation of a complementary economic zone to the January 31 meeting of Mercosur in Caracas “to advance in the great zone Mercosur-PetroCaribe-ALBA.” In all these economic and trade endeavors Venezuela plays a strategic geo-economic role. It is Latin America's largest oil producer, and it is located on the southern flank of the Caribbean Basin and on the northern end of South American continent. Venezuela is already a member of MercoSur along with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, while Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Guyana, Ecuador, Peru, and Suriname are associate members. As Bolivian president Evo Morales said at the conclusion of the ALBA-PetroCaribe summit, “We should never stop strengthening our integration, the integration of anti-imperialist countries.”
A key question is around the role that Chile, led by Bachelet, will play in the growing movement for Latin American integration. Under Bachelet's billionaire predecessor, Sebastian Pinera, Chile has been involved in setting up the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and is a founding member of the Pacific Alliance, a trade and investment group that includes Columbia, Peru, and Mexico. The United States has observer status.

Bachelet has given signs that a pursuit of these trade groupings alone is not in Chile's interest, and that she intends to breach the Pacific versus the Atlantic/Caribbean divide. Her campaign manifesto stated: "Chile has lost presence in the region, its relations with its neighbors are problematic, a commercial vision has been imposed on our Latin American links." She is particularly interested in closer relations with Brazil, where she identities with Dilma Rousseff, who also fo­rged her political identity as a young clandestine activist jailed and tortured under a repressive dictatorship. It is notable that in 2008 during her last presidential term, Bachelet convened an emergency session of UNASUR (the Union of South American Nations), to support Evo Morales against a right wing “civic coup” attempt that received direct material support from the U.S. embassy.
It is of course impossible to predict where Bachelet will wind up in the growing continental divide. Her commitment to the Pacific Alliance and to TPP may undermine domestic and international challenges to neoliberalism. The militancy of internal mobilizations to pressure her at every turn is critical. In Venezuela, Maduro faces daunting economic problems as he tries to bring inflation and the black market under control, while dealing with serious corruption problems in and outside of the government. However, the December municipal elections have opened up a space for Maduro to deal with these issues in the coming year, while playing a leadership role in advancing Latin American integration in opposition to U.S. initiatives.

Roger Burbach is the director of the Center for the Study of the Americas, and co-author with Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes of Latin America's Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty-First Century SocialismTo order, see: www.futuresocialism.org