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Structural Crises and Union Busting

A very good friend of mine retired as a high school teacher at age 55, and lives on a pension/social security income that amounts to pre-tax around $55,000/yr. He taught for thirty or so years. Did he earn it? Sure. He's a brilliant and highly responsible man. He worked hard for his pension. But, writ large, unless we start to take back some of the massive amounts of money given the rich via tax breaks, he and his fellow retirees, including another very good friend of many years, are bankrupting us. Not he, but the great changes in the structure of the American economy, are to blame. Given falling rates of profit and the increasingly disproportionate distributions of income that are starving the middling and lower classes while enriching those at the top, moneys to the state funds are not keeping pace with locked in state pension and other outflows of money. The chief crisis hitting states, especially NJ, is tied up with state employee benefits, be they to present employees or pension/medical to those retired. (See, by the way, Matt Bai's article on Chris Christie in February 27, 2011New York Times Magazine. The article is quite supportive of Christie's complaints of union superpower. But take a look as well at the chart comparing state crises across the country. NJ is in real trouble. But look at Wisconsin!)

Anyway, the issue is structural, and requires a massive alteration in the way state administrations and employees do business. But union busting is not the way to go. First, of course, collective bargaining is a right.It ensures that employees, e.g., teachers like my friend, be decently remunerated; it protects them from arbitrary and capricious treatment by superiors; it protects workers from onerous working conditions, either by ensuring against them or, should something arise, via grievance machinery.

On the other hand, something may have to be done to ensure a separation between union funds and funding legislative and gubernatorial candidates so that elections are virtually bought.. But that must be true for corporate an other such funding. A new McCain-Feingold law? I know that's anathema to the conservative US Supreme Court majority, but it may be a way out. Let's remain with teachers and educational policy: I am the first, having watched the horrible decline of college preparedness of freshmen from 1965, when I started to teach at the college level, to now, 2011, to argue for a radical curricular reform, including more mathematics; more, and earlier, foreign language instruction; more reading, and of whole books; geography; social science, including political science, and history. Why have we a crisis in education? Who is to blame? First, the parents, who don't read and don't encourage their kids to read. And second, anti-scientific authoritarian and secular interest groups that have inordinate power to push their agendas. And next, the sclerosis caused by those in the Educational Establishment who are in charge of the curricula. Busting up the power of those interest groups and intransigent forces would be most salutary. But I would never suggest that those interest groups, or educational administrators associations or teachers unions be broken up. A strong governor could really set in motion great reforms. And he or she can accomplish much without destroying rights of workers that have a pedigree going back to 1932 Norris-LaGuardia and the NLRA. One need not be retrograde and reactionary to create real reform and to overcome a structural financial crisis. That's what statesmanship is all about.

The Real Logic Behind Union Busting

The union busting drive that is underway in Wisconsin and elsewhere has an overarching goal: the redistribution of income to those in the $300,000 - $350,000,000+income classes.

The goal is realized in a number of ways: lowering corporate tax rates while raising middle and lower worker tax rates with cries of 'we must all shoulder the burden"; union busting which of course brings down incomes of public sector teachers, social workers, and as well those of private sector service workers; and the effect of layoffs: an abundance of dis-employed workers enters the job market, thereby "disciplining," that is, frightening those lucky enough to have jobs with layoffs for any infraction of employer demands . Disemployment of state workers means as well, cuts in social services to those in the various working classes: these cuts lower middling and lower class social wages and thus disposable incomes. The redistributions of incomes and wealth from lower and middling to the top will now run unabated. Expect to see privatization of social security programs back on the table. Tea party members and their sympathizers who are tired of "government on their backs," who want to "return to the Constitution as originally intended" etc., are either gainers from this overarching program or are duped ignoramuses. The birther movement is, of course, a convenient ally: it doesn't take much Freud to understand that worries about Obama's birthplace are really outrage at Obama's birthrace. These "worries" only delegitimate liberal-New Deal values, and ensure that banking deregulation and other policies that make for a better "business climate" (read: that redistribute incomes and wealth upward) are forthcoming. .

This is the America we are moving into as the overall long term rates of profit are falling; as key investment decisions are moving from the NYSE to Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere (while the NYSE itself becomes a German subsidiary and an extension of German financial power, even as the German-led EU fades with the US); as the yen becomes a chief global currency. (See current stories in the Wall Street Journal).(Just wait until Chinese naval ships begin to patrol oil shipping lanes in Persian Gulf and Somalian waters, or Chinese military forces sett up camp in Central Asia to ensure pipeline security from the Caspian Sea to China, etc. As these signs of the diminution of American hegemony become apparent; as the squeeze on profits here accelerate while they climb in China, and we can expect some real jingoist warmongering with demands for new military spending requiring patriotic "belt tightening" by ... guess whom?

The scramble is on for the dollars earned and/or still coming here, and GOP strategy is to ensure that those dollars are heading to those at the top. The logic is there: all that is needed are a new breed of Cato Institute/Murdoch/Koch Bros. et. al.inspired politicos like Scott Walker, Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie, to put these policies into effect, and the goal is within reach. Scapegoating the unions is a first, and very major, opening round attack.

The Truth about Al Gore and the Internet

Since 2000, Al Gore has been maliciously maligned by many in the Republican Party and the media for supposedly claiming that he invented the internet. He never claimed such. What he claimed was that he was "instrumental in creating the internet." Moreover, as Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, the scientists who in fact did invent the internet note, Gore was very much instrumental in getting the internet going, and making it accessible to the world. The following two items should dispel the malicious propaganda that has spilled forth from Gore's political opponents and members of the press all to willing to destroy a man's reputation.

For Cerf and Kahn:

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

and see as well this excellent article by UCLA professor Phil Agre:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040603092645/commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore.and.the.Inte1.htm

Huffington Post article of interest:

I'm interviewed by Alan Jalon in his article, "LEONARD BERNSTEIN BOYCOTTS THE KOCH" in the Huffington Post of November 10, 2010:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-m-jalon/arts-lust-haunted-by-lenn_b_784392.html

On Gatrhorne-Hardy's Gerald Brenan

I have just finished a superb biography, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's Gerald Brenan: The Interior Castle (NY: WW Norton, 1992). I first became acquainted with Brenan by reading his Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1943, and still in press) while writing my doctoral dissertation in 1968. Now, some forty two years later, I've learned about Brenan's rich life (1894-1987) from this magnificent work. Gathorne-Hardy had at his disposal massive numbers of letters between Brenan and his friends -- many of them members of the Bloomsbury crowd -- Brenan's papers, those of his wife, Gamel, memoirs of those who knew him, plus the author's personal knowledge of Brenan, at least late in Brenan's life, that permitted him to write with great insight into his subject. Brenan had a knack for characterization. So too has his biographer, for Brenan is alive in these six hundred and four pages, and by alive I mean his inner life, his relations with others, his passions, his Spain. Made vivid too are his lovers, his wife, his friends, his era. When Brenan dies, the reader dies a little himself.

Tea Party: It Could Have Been Worse

So how did the Tea Party and its leader Sarah Palin do in this last, November 2, 2010 election? Tea Party candidates won many seats in the House of Representatives. But as regards the Senate, Sharron Angle lost; O'Donnell lost; Tancredo lost; Buck lost; looks like Miller has lost. And granted that Paul and Rubio won, nevertheless the Tea Party's expectations of taking over the Republican Party, not to mention the Republic itself, have been severely blunted. The establishment Republicans who now control the House will have to work with Democrats in order to pass legislation that business interests are demanding; otherwise they will look like obstructionists and hand Obama his second term victory in 2012. Tea Party threats to overwhelm moderate Republicans will be countered by the knowlege that Angle's and O'Donnell's promises to get rid of Social Security not only defeated them, but kept the Senate in the hands of the Democrats.

On the tragic side: among many other good congresspersons who went down was Alan Grayson. Ah the pity of it.

Rage on the Right

I recommend Sasha Abramsky's "Look Ahead in Anger" in the July 11, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education. Abramsky argues that the rage that is fueling the Tea Party must be understood as a new example of what Hofstatdter called the "paranoid style in American politics" (see my entry of December 9, 2009), but Abramsky does not reduce the present rhetoric on the right to just another appearance of a cyclical phenomenon. The present rage is rooted in economic decline, but the present decline is not a simple recession: it will in fact endure as wealth and power are increasingly leaving the US and accumulating in China. Meanwhile Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, Gingrich, and certain leading members of the Republican establishment, paint Obama as a socialist and/or in racist language, as a deployer of an anti-American "Kenyan" ideology. Abramsky goes on to note that many American far-rightists are using an old technique, the "stab in the back" that Hitler used to portray Jews and liberals as traitors responsible for Germany's loss in the first World War, in the present moment rightists blaming Obama for the loss of wealth and power that afflicts American society. Abramsky points out that these kinds of attacks are not new: for example, the John Birch Society used them, starting in the sixties, to condemn liberals as communists boring from within American institutions to turn this country into a dictatorship. But the Birchites and other such reactionaries of that earlier period were isolated ideologically and regionally. Today they are becoming mainstream. (See Jane Mayer, "Covert Operations" in the September 22, 2010 issues of The New Yorker.) Abramsky's essay is worth reading and studying.

Audiobook

My book, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician, is now available for downloading as an audiobook. You can purchase and download it at Amazon.com at this website or the following website:
http://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Barry%20Seldes

Four Recent Memoirs

I must recommend four memoirs. The first two bring to life New York's downtown art scenes of decades ago. Suze Rotolo's A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, recounts her life with Bob Dylan amidst the folk music world of the early sixties, with Dylan on the cusp of his leap into fame. But her book does more than that, for her subtitle is exact. Despite the tragedy of out of sight rentals destroying the Manhattan artist communities, one can still see much of the Village of the sixties, made vivid by this memoir.

Patti Smith, in her Just Kids, is her memoir of the years she spent with Robert Mappelthorpe, from 1967, when they met, penniless and virtually homeless kids of twenty one, and how, over the following years, in the Village and in Chelsea, lived, loved, and created their art, he ultimately becoming the photographer who would capture in striking blacks and white s/m tableaux vivants among others, and she, the plastic artist, poet and punk-rock performer. They separated physically as Mappelthorpe discovered his homosexuality and Smith went on to marry and start a family, but they were never apart in their hearts and sensibilities. Her recounting his coming down with AIDS and dying in 1989 is terribly poignant. Smith's writing is poetic, tender, sublime.

A rather different memoir is Norris Church Mailer's Ticket to the Circus, in which one learns much about Ms. Mailer's colorful life in Arkansas, where she got to know the young Bill Clinton, how she met Norman Mailer, became his sixth and, as she let people know, his last wife, and became virtual mother of his many children. But Ms. Mailer was no stay-at-home mom: she has had her own career as a writer. This memoir, fun in its own right, will provide Norman Mailer fans with insight into the foibles and as well as the moral strengths of a good man, our late, great novelist and essayist.

Christopher Hitchens' Hitch-22 is a reliving of his childhood, university, and political and journalistic life. A lifelong man of the left, Hitchens seeks to justify what compelled him to support the American invasion of Iraq. Agree with him or not, this brilliant essayist (see especially his 2000 collection, Unacknowledged Legislation) writes with force and great wit. To many on the political left, Hitchens has become a notorious apostate. But one should follow J.S. Mills' dictum, that by reading someone you know a priori is dead wrong you may very well wind up with your position punctured or, if you can muster your arguments, strengthened. You decide. Meanwhile I recommend this book to every thinking person, left and right.

Recommended Fiction

Here's a recommended selection of books, all new save for Fallada's 1947 but recently translated Every Man Dies Alone.

Stuart Archer Cohen, The Army of the Republic.
Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone.
David Goodwillie, American Subversive.
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole.
P.F. Kluge, Gone Tomorrow.
Simon Mawer, The Glass Room.
David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet.

Beckism/Palinism

Apropos of yesterday's posting regarding Beckism/Palinism and terrorism, here is evidence of terrorism delivered against members of Congress over the last two days.

Those familiar with the history of the acceleration of violence by fascists in Weimar Germany just before Hitler's ascension to power and in Spain just before Franco's invasion in 1936 will find awful analogies to our own conditions. No doubt that our case is much different; but what is not different between fascists then and now is the growing confidence of our own rightist terrorists, inspired by the trumpeting of patriotic symbols by their charismatic darlings, Beck and Palin.

Polarization Politics: Terror from the Beckian Right

This entry follows others on this blog that deal with the potential for polarizing politics in the US.

Some days before the Health Care Reform Act was passed by the House of Representatives, I wrote a friend the following:

"The US is at a turning point with the health care bill. I've never felt that the US is so imperiled by polarization as it is today. Parliamentary deadlock has always preceded breakouts of violence. If the health care bill passes, then what? The Tea Party folk have driven themselves into a frenzy, and they carry guns. I think the Hannity/Beck Tea Party people are more dangerous than the John Birchers of yesteryear. Those far right-wingers were isolated from the rest of the country regionally; they had no national presence. Today FOX News gives the Tea Party and other such ilk 24/7 national exposure and 24/7 inspiration to take action. Beck is particularly dangerous because he aims at the 90-95 IQ levels, where most of the Tea Party masses are, at least politically, judging from the abysmal ignorance about the health care plan that most of them betray when expressing themselves, levels where immediate, non-reflective connection between incoming message and knee-jerk emotional response is most likely. And, to reiterate, they carry guns. "

This was written, as I note, a few days ago. Meanwhile, Beck's inflammatory remarks e.g., his boorish fantasy of doing violence to Nancy Pelosi, have given birth to a lot more. See the next posting.

More Reports from the Neanderthal Front: Nixon vs. Leonard Bernstein and Lincoln Center

From ABC News of 11 January 2010 comes a story of vintage Richard Nixon, railing back in November, 1970 against Leonard Bernstein, modern art in general and Lincoln Center in specific:

"Nixon Papers Reveal War on Media, Kennedys and Modern Art: Nixon's Penchant for Political Espionage Evident in Latest Release of Papers

"In a memo to Haldeman, [Nixon] writes that 'those who are on the modern art and music kick are 95 percent against us anyway. I refer to the recent addicts of Leonard Bernstein and the whole New York crowd. When I compare the monstrosity of Lincoln Center with the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, I realize how decadent the modern art and architecture have become. This is what the Kennedy-Shriver crowd believed in, and they had every right to encourage this kind of stuff when they were in. But I have no intention whatever of continuing to encourage it now.’"

"’P.S."’, Nixon added, ‘I also want a check made with regard to the incredibly atrocious modern art that has been scattered around the embassies of the world.’"

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Of utmost relevance for coming to grips with the fanaticism on the right is Richard Hofstadter's great essay of 1954, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." That this short work remains so important a half century later only testifies to a chronic condition lying deep within the American social matrix: the tendency for those of a long standing ideological discomfort to join others who are suddenly facing marginalization and/or dispossession, and then to divide the world into two. They see, on the one hand, that their troubles are caused by an enemy conspiracy (at one time or another, the Catholics, the Masons, the Jews, and now, the Liberals, who, present day believers claim are, in fact, dreaded Marxist Socialists), led by an agent of virtually apocalyptic evil, (in today's version, bent on centralizing and concentrating power in the executive branch of the federal government*). They see themselves, on the other hand, in a mirror image of their foe, this time, an in-gathering of the faithful, led a clarion caller** who will form them into an army of the righteous while announcing the coming if not arrival of a messianic deliverer** ready to lead them into an Armageddon-like struggle that will end in victorious reconquest of what was, and now again will be, "our America."

As Kurt Vonnegut would have said, "And so it goes."

*These very same persons, by the way, see no contradiction in their anger about supposed Obama-led concentration of power with their support for the Bush-Cheney idea of the unified executive. This latter would surely bring about a massive alteration of constitutional values,for it would place the president above the law. Why? Because the attorney general would no longer serve the constitution, only the president, and thus could never seek an indictment for presidential usurpation of power. And there goes John Locke, Jefferson, and the US Constitution.

**Today, an amalgam of Christian and American revolutionary imagry: Glen Beck, who thinks of himself as a modern Tom Paine, as Sarah Palin's John the Baptist; the faithful now organized into updated 1773 Boston Tea Party units, minute men-like patriots (some already armed), ready, in Beck's words, to "take back our America."

Decency on the Right: Andrew Sullivan

It is most useful to remember that right-populist demogogery has traditionally found enemies within conservative as well as liberal circles. Indeed, American conservatives whose ideas have their provenance in the writings of Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson are reacting to the cheapening and vulgarization of American political discourse by the demogogues about us. No finer example of the power of solid and authentic conservative thinking is Andrew Sullivan's. Please reflect on his heartfelt credo, "Leaving the Right," posted Dec. 1, 2009,on the Atlantic website.

For those on the Obama left, read Howard Kurtz's commentary on both Sullivan's and progressives' outlooks.

Politics of Polarization in America?

Is it possible that the vicious rhetoric and the threats of violence coming from demogogues such as Glenn Beck, and the organized mobs known as Tea Parties, are potential prelude to a politics of violence? John Naar, an artist and political activist for most of a century, has coined the term "Weimarization" to stand for just what might be happening to American society. The historian Fritz Stern, who lived through the Weimar era in Germany, saw the rise of Nazism but escaped to the US to survive into the present, has just published a letter in the November 9, 2009 New York Times to offer a similar point of view. The cleavages between the political parties are growing, with the Beck/Palin partisans ousting moderate Republicans and thereby pushing the Republicans, who are always more disciplined than the Democrats, into a unified position on the far right. Think of the many proto- and not so proto-fascist parties, e.g., the French Poujadistes; Le Pen's followers; the late Haider's in Austria; and so many others, that had a similar rightwing-militant lower middle class anti-tax, anti-immigrant, racist, outlook. History offers too many lessons about the formation of a social base of the angry, the disenfranchised, and the alienated, all set for a neo-fascist politics that leads by its very nature into mob violence.

Current Fiction

I’ve been reading some fiction, most current, most but not all with political tones or overtones:

Horacio Castellanos Moya, SENSELESSNESS
Stuart Arthur Cohen, THE ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC
Mohsin Hamid, THE RELUCTANT FUNDMENTALIST
Michel Houllebecq, PLATFORM; ATOMIZED; POSSIBLITY OF AN ISLAND
Ferenc Karinthy, METROPOLE
P.F. Kluge, GONE TOMORROW
Jonathan Lethem, CHRONIC CITY
Boualem Sansal, THE GERMAN MUJAHID
Kamila Shamsie, BURNT SHADOWS
Mario Vargas Llosa, THE BAD GIRL.