Doug Dowd

Bologna, Italia

Dear old friends,

What follows here is offered in response to the election of Senator Obama as No. 44 and what it means we must do about it.

So Is There Reason to Hope?

There is little reason to be optimistic, but much reason to hope. As he was moving toward death in Mussolini’s prison, Gramcsi, the Italian left’s leader, admonished: “Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.” When Barack Obama ran for the Senate in Illinois (as racist as most states), there was every reason to be pessimistic. But his own hope inspired many others (mostly young) to activate themselves, and he won.

That done, he was able to activate many others to work for the really impossible — a black as president of the USA. There were certain elements of “good luck” that made that victory possible:

1. The McCain-Palin opposition was about as weak as could be hoped (and it would have been risible, a complete laughingstock, anywhere but here).

2. The (legally undeclared) war in Iraq, always more costly and seemingly endless, was still at least at the back of people’s minds.

3. Bush-Cheney were caught up in a series of stumbles. It is tempting to note that they were always caught up in gaffes, contretemps, brouhahas, and ideological falsifications of reality. Not to mention their substantive policies — which were rightly abhorred around the globe. As Alex Cockburn has wryly noted, the almighty U.S. superpower needed to be taken down a few notches, and these were just the people to do it. (“Superpowers don’t have allies — merely agents.” –Arundhati Roy)

4. Finally, and tellingly, the economy exploded into a crisis. This intensified the ongoing economic difficulties of a high percentage of voters — and an even higher percentage of nonvoters. Before the state of economic crisis was publicly aired, Obama was struggling. Given eight miserable right-wing years of Bush the Lesser and the insufferable right-wing ignoramuses on the Republican ticket, the contest should have been a walk-over. But Obama was not even convincingly ahead. Finally, however, the faltering economic picture convinced some people that maybe more Republican years would not really be in their best interest. Even if it meant electing an African-American. So they ditched the Repugs. Sen. Obama even carried benighted Indiana, whose only Democratic vote since 1940 was in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson won a landslide over Barry Goldwater. And this wasn’t 1964 or a landslide.

Though they helped (especially the economic crisis), these four items of luck certainly don’t tell the whole story. Significantly, the Demos had more campaign money — and even had the backing of Wall Street. But consider the people for Obama...The man from Illinois (and Hawai'i) would not have won either the Senate seat or the White House had it not been for an enormous number of people knocking on doors, distributing handouts, raising money (usually in small increments), and so on — a process without a precedent in its ways and means and numbers. And these people were energized by hope.

There is a lesson there for all of us; indeed more than one. First...

Hope energizes (and hopelessness paralyzes).

Second...

If there is to be a change in the structure of decision-making (that is, a change in the power structure), it will not be done from the top down. It must and can be brought about only from the bottom up.

“Bottom” in this respect does not refer to the understandably demoralized at the very bottom; but it does refer to all of who are angry, worried, reasonably well-informed, and who could find (or make) the time to become political. That said, it is important to say more about politics.

It’s Clean-Up Time

In facing the need to undo most of our ingrained habits of mind, one of the first places to begin is to overcome what it means to be political. That need is especially important for us: those ranging from the moderate center to left of center. Since the 1970s our tendency has increasingly become one of angry observers, while in those same years, various conservative-to-right-wing groups have become always more active in raising money and political participation. These are big business, gun lovers, Evangelical Christians, impassioned racists, sexists, and militarists and fascists. Their passions may not have been served by all of the policies of, say, a Reagan or Bush government, but they are served by keeping decent government pushed off into the weeds. They contribute the time and energy — and the political financing — that were once provided by the liberal-left before the 1970s. Meanwhile, all too many of us have read the news, grumbled and grunted, feared the future, and given up...hope.

Until Obama.

But let’s face it: Without substantial pressure and support from the bottom and the middle, Obama is unlikely to do what’s needed at home. Without this pressure from below, he and to continue the murderous U.S. militarism in the Middle East and Central Asia. In that connection, it is useful to recall the four presidencies of FDR. A centrist when elected in 1932, he continued the policies wanted by big business (e.g., the National Recovery Act, which legalized the overweening power of business [ultimately declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court]). Not until the Social Security Act (1935) and his last three terms in the White House was there the “the New Deal” and its numerous beneficial (but still inadequate) reforms. Not until just before his death in 1944 did he proposed his “Second Bill of Rights” (designed to ensure that all could meet our basic needs of nutrition, health care education, housing, and opportunity).

Now we need a “Third Bill of Rights” (and, for foreign policy, “A Bill of Wrongs”). To move in that direction, we much change the habits that place us before the TV (or computers) for hours hoping for a good laugh or even a good thought. We must push aside Big Business, Wall Street, and their racist, gun-loving, and their other assorted, heinous allies, and do so by doing what they have done, which is simply this: We must make a habit of continually working together. Only by our cooperative efforts are we ever to meet our needs and possibilities. Only by working together can we avert social, military, and environmental disasters. Otherwise they win — and, to quote my old friend Noam Chomsky, “the world won’t be a place where anybody would want to live.”

Toward a Better and Safer USA in a Better and Safer World

The need for a Third Bill of Rights is not new, but it is more intense now than ever; not only to forestall what might well become Great Depression No. 2, but to dig ourselves out of the cesspool created since the 1970s. That need has been strong for the past two or three decades (or, for that matter, if you don’t mind the anachronism of immediately following the first Bill of Rights with the third, since 1776).

But to have broached the subject before now would have been whistling in the dark. Today’s realities make it more likely that the at least some attempts will be made, because of at least two major differences between our past and this present: 1) The Obama presidency (of which, more later); 2) Whatever the troubles of the past two or three decades, neither the USA nor the world economies were faced with problems as severe as those today, with worse seen as around the corner. Those assertions require explanation.

What will be presented here is no more than a summary statement. The present crisis became evident to all sometime in 2008. As this is written in 2009 it has deepened and spread in ways that have already gone beyond even the first 3-to-4 years after 1929. Why that is so must be understood in several dimensions:

1. There was no globalization as we know it in the earlier period (that is, leading up to 1929). Beginning just before World War I, the limited (compared with now) world economy had begun to splinter. The always more intense nationalism of the interwar years meant more than splintering. It also gave us World War II.

2. The financialization of our time did not exist, nor did the technologies that allow it. Whatever their weaknesses, all economies were less fragile (and much less interwoven) than now.

3. Today’s consumerism and its tightly related consumer indebtedness (especially in the USA) have produced recklessness and instability that would not — could not — otherwise exist. For example, credit cards were born in the USA in 1950, but were effectively nonexistent until the 1960s (and much later elsewhere). Subprime mortgages were not born until the end of the 20^th century, and then only as a desperate way to feed the bottomless appetites of today’s financial world. (When, in the fall of 2008 the crisis was finally recognized, it was [almost] whimsical to note that Iceland’s economy had collapsed, and that credit cards there had become entirely unusable.) Here in the USA credit cards came to be universally used most dangerously as (and because) from the 1970s on good jobs were disappearing, average wages were declining, and consumerism had become a totem, a sacred cow, an entire religion unto itself.

4. By way of confirmation of today’s global economic severity, note the virtual collapse of shipping and trucking as their customers have disappeared (with an 89 percent drop in orders).

Now, midwinter 2009, the crisis has only just begun. Things will get worse before they get better. What must be done to resolve the crisis is to develop a strong set of governmental policies throughout the world. And the critical issue here: If the needed policies are to be created at all, not to mention if they are to function well, those in control should not be those who created the problem; namely, big business and “Las Vegas, Inc.”

Put differently (concentrating only on the USA), we must shove aside the “the power elite” of past and present and replace them with a functioning and genuine democracy. In that respect, it is important to understand that the social reforms initiated in FDR’s presidency and in the decade or so after World War II were worked hard for and realized through the efforts of two overlapping citizens groups: an always stronger set of workers’ unions (until the 1970s), and a significant percentage of others “from the bottom up” working against racism and sexism and war. As the 1960s faded away, those overlapping political efforts slid toward zero — somehow Dizzy Dean’s neologistic usage seems more graphic here: “slud to zero” — lubricated in the slide by the conscious politicization of the business world coupled with the depoliticization of the demoralized, consumeristic public.

We must see to it that these processes are reversed; we must do the political work that allows us to overtake and pass the powers of Big Business and its friends. In fact, it is likely that Obama would be pleased to be the spokesman for such a movement. Up to the present, however, most of the advice he has received has come from reps of the status quo (or worse), including essentially conservative economists. As for the latter, I turn now to the proposals of a leading, but conservative economist: Paul Krugman of Princeton University. For some years he fitted in more or less comfortably with the dangerous foolishness, the trained incompetency of the economics profession.

Finally (it seems), the indecency and dangers of recent years shoved him toward where he is now. (See below.) Krugman was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics — not for his current positions, but for some earlier utterly mainstream writings. Now he writes a regular and critical column for the New York Times, and has published many articles and books increasingly critical of the status quo (among the latest of which is Confessions of a Liberal). Prof. Krugman should be assisting Obama in the White House instead of those already chosen; for the latter have participated all too much in the very processes taking us to our present troubles.

What follows are excerpts from his long article in the current Rolling Stone: “What Obama Must Do.” (Also available at (http://www.truthout.org/011709Z?print)

The U.S. economy needs to add more than a million jobs a year just to keep up with population growth; instead, over the past year, we lost 2 million….By late 2009 we could be 10 million or more jobs short, with an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent (plus those who have given up looking, and/or those forced to take part-time jobs): Add all those together and we’re looking at real-world unemployment rate of around 15 percent: more than 20 million Americans frustrated in their efforts to find work. So? [In this year] as many as 10 million “middle class” Americans would be pushed into poverty, and another 6 million into “deep poverty” (when incomes are is less than the [official and understated] poverty level. Many...would lose their health insurance too, worsening the already grim state of U.S. health care and crowding emergency rooms with those who have nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, millions more Americans would lose their homes.

[After pointing out that FDR’s aims were fine but the results until World War II left the USA still with high unemployment, he goes on to propose a program for today, beginning with the amounts and kinds of government spending.]

It is probable that $800 billion a year is necessary to achieve a full employment recovery.” [And note that the $700 billion + “bailout” programs” of Bush’s Treasury Sec. Paulson were all focused on helping financiers, not for meeting social and human needs. So:] “Spending on roads, government buildings, ports, and other infrastructure are a very effective tool for creating jobs. But the USA probably has less than $150 billion worth of such projects that are ‘shovel-ready’ right now….so we have to find lots of other ways to push funds into the economy: as much as possible: projects of lasting value: for example, upgrade the electrical grid, improve information technology in the health care sector (a crucial part of any health care reform); provide aid to state and local governments to prevent them from cutting spending at precisely the wrong moment (already happening). Also, we can do well by doing good: those hit hardest by the slump are the long-term unemployed, families without health insurance, and the most likely to have to spend any money aid they receive. So add to the distressed increased health insurance, food stamps, health insurance subsidies, etc. Even if all that is done, however, it won’t be enough to offset the awesome slump in private spending. So it makes sense to cut taxes on a temporary basis, primarily to lower- and middle-income Americans; both because that ‘s the fair thing to do and because they are more likely to spend their windfall than the affluent. But let’s be clear: tax cuts are not the tool of choice for fighting an economic slump: there is no guarantee that consumers will spend their tax cuts [given their high debts]. Three hundred billion dollars of tax cuts would provide fewer jobs than $200 billion of public works.

[He then goes on to point out that FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights” policies were about] not just getting us through a depression and war, but...making us a more just and secure society. [In that spirit, the biggest, the most important legacy Obama] can leave to the nation will be to give us, finally, what every other advanced nation already has: guaranteed health care for all of our citizens. Health care tied to jobs can disappear all too easily.] Our current system is bad for business, too — the Big Three automakers wouldn’t be in as much trouble if they weren’t trying to pay the medical bills [of their former and current workers]….There is good reason to believe that health care reform will save money in the long run. Our system isn’t just full of holes in coverage, it’s also grossly inefficient, with huge bureaucratic costs — such as the immense resources the insurance companies devote to making sure they don’t cover the people who need health care the most.

As in the presidency of FDR, so it is now.

If there are to be badly needed and decent reforms they will occur only if the President of the USA is led to become the president of all the people instead of, as now, the tool of the rich and powerful, the war-lovers, the racists, and their pals. The emphasis of Krugman as quoted above leaves out much else he proposed concerning foreign policy, wars, and the environment. But his position is much the same as that put forth in these pages. If in different words, he has insisted that the time has come for the people of this richest of all nations to insure that they also be people whose basic needs for nutrition, housing, health care, education, and opportunity be met. They have never been nor will they ever be unless, in “democratizing” ourselves we see to it that the USA takes the steps which will make it a democracy in fact, rather than in rhetoric.

Assuming that domestic needs can be met more and more, there remain the always rising dangers “outside”: ongoing and potential wars and the environment. Both Obama and we must energize ourselves to avoid the horrors on their way in those respects.

It Is One World for All or no World at All

Until we and all others learn to see the whole earth as our home, any victories we might see as won are deceptive. Like it or not, the world will learn to sail safely or sink in the same boat. It was the early stage of what took us toward military and environmental disasters which led Marx and Engels to insist: “Workers of the world unite!” If in ways more diverse than in 1848, we are all “workers” today. That makes “united politics” all the more necessary and, although difficult, actually more feasible today than in the past: The technologies of the 19^th century were insufficient for either today’s wars or environmental disasters. On the brighter side, note that today’s communications were critical in assisting Obama’s move toward the presidency. What has been and is being done by consumerism can be – must be – taken over for the needs of all.

The ongoing economic crisis has its worst effects upon those at the bottom, but the effects of ongoing and future wars and environmental disaster will be universal and, all too probably, terminal. Despite assurances that “in a few months,” or “next year” the economy will begin its bounce back, every day’s news adds several pieces of bad surprises, whether as regards the USA, China, Ireland, or Germany; finance, industry, or shipping. However, whether as regards the economy, militarism, or the environment, those on today’s upper levels of power do not concern themselves with the average person regarding such matters; their “gut” response is with policies taking care of their brethren (as with the $700-plus billion financial bailout). Such policies may help their buddies on the top, but they allow (or cause) a bad situation to become worse for everyone else. If today’s threats and challenges are going to be dealt with constructively, what is required is the politicization of “ordinary people.” Otherwise, there will not be a solution, just more and more dangers until we slump down into prolonged depression, wars, and a fatally ill earth. We are “at the cliff’s edge” in all the realms noted above; we are sliding down it as regards Mother Nature.

What Can We Do...What Must We Do...With Whom...How...When?

The “when” is the easiest to provide: now, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

With whom and how? With those you know and those you can come to know if you search out existing and create new political groups. Such groups exist in great numbers in the USA (and elsewhere), especially but not only in cities. Almost all concentrate their efforts on a particular, relatively narrow aim: for universal health care, racial and gender equality, unionism, environmental safety; you name it. None of these groups seem to be narrow to their participants, and some who work hard in one also work hard in one or more of the others. All of are necessary; all need more members and more support than they now possess, and most will find it both possible and desirable to widen their focus: especially now, as the gap between human needs and reality widens for an always greater percentage of us.

The time has come to try, and try again, step by step on local and national levels, and on the diverse issues concerning which, ultimately we are all in the same boat. “In unity there is strength” is something of a truism; but it is also one that has only rarely been lived up to in the USA. Our tendency has become not to engage in political efforts; or when we do, to view other groups as competitors...as we sink together.

Most who read this will be too young to remember way back when. Things were different then. Before the making of the strong unions that took hold in the 1930s, U.S. workers had:

* NO minimum wage or maximum hour laws
* NO laws against child labor
* NO unemployment compensation
* NO paid vacations
* NO pensions
* NO employer-financed health care
* NO “voice” in Congress

In the USA today, the percentage of workers in effective unions has shrunk to a dangerously low level, mirroring the precipitous decline in the power of the rest of us have in our government.

That can and must be changed...by us. The working together of now separate unions and of now separate political groups is essential if we are to have an effective social movement working for the realization of our basic needs for food, housing, education, and health care — and as well, environmental safety — and finally, the transformation of the USA from being the world’s most warlike nation toward being a peacemaker.

Sounds good, but to achieve such goals “we the people” must substitute a cooperative spirit for our present subjection to competition. If becoming more cooperative means we must become “un-American,” so be it. To be cooperative doesn’t mean agreement on everything; we don’t do that even with our loved ones. It does mean probing for what is essential and what is not in working with others; essential for all of us as human beings and essential if we are ever to have the power as a people to “have a life.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

As with all my missives, books, and presentations, implicitly or explicitly, this letter has been an attack on capitalism. Does that mean it is a support for some other “ism”? If it were, my support would be for democratic socialism, but we have much political work to do if that is to be more than a long term goal. In the USA there has never been a substantial group working to that end; nor is one in sight. There could be, in the future, if and when our people become politically conscious and active. Our people could start by seeing to it that the resolution of the economic crisis veers to the center-left rather than staying stuck in the center-right. That’s a fine beginning.

Suffice it to say here that whatever degrees or kinds of democracy one can find in either the capitalist or other societies, the practice of democracy itself has been severely limited. Sadly also, the once-substantial socialist movements in Europe were bedazzled (which is to say, hornswoggled) by the brain-numbing lure of consumerism. Since the 1970s, they have substantially weakened or simply faded into the shadows.

As the ongoing global crisis continues and deepens, we run the risk of not paying attention. It should be an alarm going off in the night. If we do not heed it, we should expect to be caught up in one variation or another of “totalitarian democracy,” what Bertram. Gross called “friendly fascism.” We will have an oppressive society (fascism), but one requiring a minimum of raw force (friendly fascism). It will be assisted and maintained by an always more cooperative media, constant wars, and continuing dehumanization. We are already dangerously close to allowing that to creep up on us, by whatever name: McCain-Palin lost, but it was not (as noted above) by what should have been a landslide. The years of the Obama presidency may well be our last chance to turn away from horrors and back toward the ideals we have allowed to rust away.

Obama’s election gave us the breathing room that would have been an outer space-like vacuum had he lost to the Republicans. What we name the society we are working for (or what we call our “ism”) is unimportant. It’s what we work for that counts, and that must be a society democratic in all of its being — culturally, economically, politically, and socially. It must be a society that teaches us the need to see ourselves as part of nature, not as its heedless master, nonrenewably exploiting every possible resource for short-term profit. It must be a society that sees the people of other societies as having the same basic needs as ours and, given half a chance, the same possibilities as ours. Finally, it must be a society, for which war is not even a last resort.

Is that an idle dream? We have been conditioned — socialized — to think so. Don’t we carry in the back of our heads the notion that sure, it’s a nice idea, but it’s a pipe dream, that it’ll never wash in the cold, hard light of day, in “the real world”? Of course, it wasn’t too long ago that we were conditioned to accept the “fact” that slavery is in the natural order of things. And child labor is just fine. And the validity of white supremacy is intuitively obvious. And industrial capitalism means the end of history. Accepting this conditioning makes us all Manchurian candidates, zombies working against ourselves, our communities, country, and ultimately the world and every living being in it — conditioning constrains, mitigates, vitiates our very humanity. But we can transcend it! So the dream of a democratic society is not idle, it is simply as yet unrealized.

But to achieve a truly safe and sane and decent society — and we can – the society must be made by us, or else. Many decent and thoughtful people have been taught to think there is no reasonable alternative to our humanly, socially, and environmentally destructive society. There surely is, but only if we de-hypnotize ourselves, reject our conditioning, and dedicate ourselves to bringing it about.

The late and much loved Daniel Singer put it well in the closing words of his last book: Whose Millennium?

On the ground littered with broken models and shattered expectations, a new generation will now have to take the lead. Chastened by our bitter experiences, they can advance with hope but without illusions, with convictions but without certitudes, and, rediscovering the attraction and power of collective action, they can resume the task, hardly begun, of the radical transformation of society.

But they cannot do it on their own. We must follow their lead and, to the dismay of the preachers and propagandists shrieking that the task is impossible, utopian, or suicidal, and to the horror of their capitalist paymasters, proclaim all together: “We are not here to tinker with the world, we are here to change it!” It is also the only way in which we can prevent the future from being theirs: apocalyptic or, at best, barbarian.

If not now, when? If not us, who?