The Misguided Left Attempt to Mobilize Support for President Obama

President Obama is under constant attack from the far right for the Affordable Care Act and many other actions of his administration. Some leftists are now calling on us to support him against that attack. That call is irresponsible and makes no sense. During the great depression, much of the left gave support to FDR who was genuinely wringing concessions from the rich and powerful in order to save capitalism. That made sense. Unfortunately, that is not the case with Obama. Obama is a right of center Democrat who seems to see his job as to wring concessions from the poor and downtrodden in favor of the rich and powerful. A strong majority of Americans in poll after poll support single payer healthcare. Obama responded with the Affordable Care Act which was crafted by insurance companies, came out of a conservative Republican think tank, and implemented first in Massachusetts by Mit Romney. The ACA is a piece of crap. It makes a few improvements, such as pre-existing conditions and coverage for adult children, but it doesn't address the hundreds of billions in profit and waste, including unnecessary administrative costs, siphoned out of our healthcare dollars by the insurance companies. Obama deserves no credit for passing the ACA, even if its rollout had been smooth as silk. In fact, the misguided left has made it easy for Obama to capitulate to the right because it has given him support instead of confrontation. The Occupy movement showed that confrontation could shift the discourse and put pressure on the government. Instead of learning that lesson, some in the left continue their huge mistake of supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012. If we are to have any influence on the direction of the USA, we have to be bold in fighting for our ideas. We cannot do that and at the same time support a president who shows no sign of having a single progressive bone in his body. Our response to the ACA should be to raise the demand to expand Medicare to all. Our response to the ongoing financial crisis should be to demand the takeover (not bailout) of failing banks and other financial institutions and the prosecution of criminal financiers. Our response to calls for austerity, such as cuts to Social Security and Medicare, should be to call for increased taxes on the rich and the corporations. These are all very popular ideas among the American public. One of the jobs of the left is to articulate and to fight for those ideas. It is not our job to be co-opted by the moribund Obama administration.

The Brainwashing of Israel and the Spillover into the United States

Israeli universities separate Jewish history from the rest of history, and it is not subject to the normal kind of scholarly review which is customary at universities. This is because the Jewish history they teach is based on false myths which are easily refuted. That would be bad enough, but this same falsified history is also taught to Israeli schoolchildren. Israeli education authorities have even tried to impose this falsified history on their Palestinian citizens, though this has so far been resisted. As a result, the Israeli public, and especially its youth, have beliefs which are ahistorical, racist, and very dangerous. In ancient history, for example, Israeli Jewish history teaches that the Romans exiled the Jews. In fact, there is zero historical evidence that such an exile ever occurred, and it would have been totally out of character for the practices of Roman rule. By and large, the small number of Jews who left ancient Palestine did so as merchants. The vast majority of Jewish communities in the world were descended from converts, for which there is ample evidence, such as the mass conversions in ancient Yemen, in the 9th century Khazar empire, and by Berbers in north Africa, some of whom went to Spain. However, the most dangerous falsification is that which treats Palestinians as foreigners in Israel because this underlies the strong and growing Israeli movement to continue the theft of Palestinian land and for expulsion of more Palestinians from Palestine, whether in the West Bank or inside Israel. Even Palestinian nomads in the Negev, who are not only Israeli citizens but who, along with the Druze, serve in the army are being displaced by the tens of thousands even as I write. Only a tiny group of Jewish Israelis opposes these acts and exposes the blatant lies at the root of Israeli education. Another way to put it is that Israelis are educated to believe in delusions, and the result is a psychotic society, which is willing to take extreme measures to carry out its government's insane policies.

Let's shift gears now and note that Israeli psychotics like Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have broad access to the media in the United States. That spreads the brainwashing to the American public, who generally believe many easily refuted myths about Israel. One of the most blatant effects is that the fact that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons combined with a very aggressive military policy against its neighbors is almost totally ignored in the US media. It never comes up, for example, in the current coverage of the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Note that existing US law prohibits any aid to a country with nuclear weapons and does not sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which is clearly the case with Israel. That coverage is filled with easily refuted claims. For example, Iran offered an even better deal in 2003 when it completely halted its nuclear weapons program. That deal was rejected. Nobody has claimed, let alone produced any evidence, that Iran currently has a nuclear weapons program. Therefore, the heavy sanctions imposed on Iran have really had no purpose or effect except to feed the false narrative which comes from Israeli and Western governments and the media. This insanity would be dangerous enough if it only affected public opinion, but much more dangerously it is used as the rationale for insane government policies. It is well past time for responsible citizens to educate themselves and their fellows and reject the nonsense which passes for analysis and history spewing from all this brainwashing.

Films

A friend of mine gave me this idea by publishing a list of films he saw last year. I'm going to list some of the more obscure but great films I've been finding on Netflix for my reference and for the use of others. Here goes.

Akira Kurasawa  (all his films are great)

The Bad Sleep Well 1960: Toshiro Mifune creates mayhem in a large corporation after his father dies.

Stray Dog 1949: Toshiro Mifune plays a young police detective whose gun is stolen on a bus.

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams 1990: Eight short stories including one about a nuclear power plant explosion ("They said it was safe. They lied to us.")

Madadayo 2000: about a retired professor.

Drunken Angel 1948: Toshira Mifune is a young doctor who tries to save a gangster.

Other directors:

Kolya 1996: a Czech cellist ends up caring for a 5-year-old Russian boy.

Cinema Paradiso 1988: a boy in love with the movies. However, this version has about an hour cut from the full film, which I have still yet to see.

Gate of Flesh 1964: Japanese prostitutes band together during the US occupation after WW II.

Comizi D'Amore 1964: Pier Paolo Pasolini documentary about love and sex in Italy.

Mama Roma 1962: Pasolini film about a prostitute trying to leave that life.

Accatone 1961: Another Pasolini film about the dark side of life.

Oedipus Rex 1967: Pasolini's take on the Greek story.

The Hawks and the Sparrows 1964: Another Pasolini classic

Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die 1981: Documentary about the murder of Pasolini in 1975

Brokedown Palace 1999: American teens become entangled in smuggling drugs in Thailand

Free Zone 2005: Natalie Portman gets a tour of Jordan with an Israeli cab driver

Teorema 1968: Pasolini has Terence Stamp visit a wealthy Italian family and seduce each one.

Day for Night 1973: Godard plays a director making a film with Jacqueline Bisset and Jean Pierre Leaud

Elevator to the Gallows 1957: Louis Malle directs Jeanne Moreau in a suspense thriller

The King of Masks 1999: Chinese performer buys a child to learn his skills

Goodbye, Lenin! 2003: a woman falls into a coma before the Berlin Wall comes down and wakes up afterward

La Bete Humaine 1938: Jean Renoir directs Jean Gabin as a murderer trying to cover up his crime

Pepe le Moko 1939: Jean Gabin is a criminal on the run in Algiers

Onegin 1999: English version of Pushkin's masterpiece

Dangerous Beauty 1998: story of a courtesan in 16th century Venice

Divided We Fall 2000: Czech couple shelter a Jewish concentration camp escapee

Underground 1995: Yugoslavs continue making arms in an underground factory because they are not told that the war ended.

Elena and Her Men 1957: Jean Renoir directs Ingrid Bergman as a Polish beauty who drives men mad

Le Corbeau 1943: Clouzot manages to make a searing film under Nazi censorship.

The Saga of Gosta Berling 1924: the Swedish film that made Greta Garbofamous

The Politics of the Ridiculous

The history of the United States is a history of political strife, often bitter arguments about what to do and which way to go. While the current period may not be unique historically speaking, it might have reached a level of division which is a new low water mark. I am referring to what I think is the fact that many Americans, perhaps a significant majority, believe that the program of the right, as represented by the Republican Party, is simply ridiculous.

The media and the Democratic Party treat Republican "ideas" as if they are somehow viable alternatives, but we, the people, see them as total nonsense and lacking in either factual basis or rational underpinning. Let's start with the economy. The mantra is that the budget cannot be balanced without cutting "entitlements," Medicare and Social Security. The first nonsense here is that the United States does not have unmanageably large budget deficits. That is just a fact and one which they make no attempt to refute. The second nonsense is the idea that Social Security has any relationship to the budget deficit. It doesn't, and everyone knows that it doesn't. Concerning Medicare, it's well-known that moving to a comprehensive single-payer system which cuts out insurance company profits and negotiates much lower costs for prescription drugs would address most, if not all, of the issues of our runaway medical costs. Finally, we can certainly reduce budget deficits by slashing the bloated military budget and ending the ridiculous war in Afghanistan. Such steps would actually increase our national security and not diminish it. On taxes, although they successfully fought a holding action, the ridiculousness of Republican talk of "job creators" is so obvious that they had to give in on modest tax increases for the superrich.

Let us next look at global warming. The Republican attack on science has made them a laughingstock. Not only do they block investment in green technology, but they also use their rejection of science to try to deny rights to women such as the right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy or not. The chair of the House Science Committee is so ill-educated on science that he spouted total nonsense during the 2012 campaign.

We have had many figures who make careers in exposing the ridiculous from Mark Twain and Will Rogers to George Carlin to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. But that can be undone when ridiculous ideas are treated as if they are sensible by the news media, not just Fox and CNN but also NPR. To report on ridiculous assertions and not say they are ridiculous is irresponsible and isn't journalism at all. To report on claims which are obviously contrary to well-known facts and not to say so is to engage in partisan journalism.  Responsible journalists, when confronted with policians saying ridiculous things, should also expose the ridiculous. Our national political discussions have sunk to a low level, indeed, when the ridiculous is treated as if it were serious.

On Violence, Crazy People, and Gun Control

I posted the following on Facebook and wanted to save it here as well as to add a bit.

I have to say that while I agree with the call for more regulations on gun ownership, that is only part of the problem. We live in a society which glorifies violence and which relies on violence to achieve its objectives, both internationally, where drones are only one of the ways the US government is slaughtering innocent people, and domestically, where heavily armed police terrorize communities 

they are sworn to protect. The glorification goes on in the news media, in films, in tv shows, etc. In such an atmosphere, one would expect individuals to be much more likely to resort to violence to deal with real or perceived complaints, and statistics show that to be the case. For example, long ago, I interviewed two Israeli women from a group called Women against Occupation. They told me that the incidence of violence against Israeli women is very high, and they attributed it to Israeli soldiers returning home after committing atrocities against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. If you train people that violence is a good way to resolve problems and if you glorify violence, you should not be surprised when the society becomes imbued with violence. So, by all means, let us try to clamp down on assault rifles and other firearms, but do not be fooled into thinking that that will eliminate or minimize the violence which is endemic in US society.

I also read the passionate plea which is circulating by the mother of a young boy who has frequent episodes of intense violent rage. All human societies and all countries have such people, and current medical knowledge does not have effective treatment for them. So, the question is what can be done to minimize the damage and why do we see so much more of it in the USA than in other developed countries. The phony austerity campaign which has infected the world has certainly cut back on funds and facilities to treat individuals prone to senseless violence, and the USA has been a leader in austerity for decades. That means first of all that mentally disturbed people are much more prevalent here, particularly outside of any kind of socially supportive environment which could help to minimize violence. Second, the promotion and glorification of violence that I discussed above makes it more likely that people with real or perceived grievances will turn to violence. Third, the availability of weapons such as assault rifles makes it easier for violence to become catastrophic violence.

The first two factors are highly intertwined with the agenda of contemporary capitalism and would require a massive revolution in our society to change them. The third is more of a reform, and it is conceivable that we could fight for it and win. Many people are discussing, for example, banning the sale of weapons that are only of use in slaughtering people and the ammunition that they use. That is certainly a rational thing to do so long as we realize that the larger factors would be left untouched. A very large number of such weapons are already in circulation, and it seems unlikely that most of them could be confiscated. Even if one of these tragedies is prevented by such actions, it is still worth doing. However, we can expect that there will continue to be such human disasters, and we should be prepared for the opponents of gun regulation to use them to undercut regulation. I can already hear them saying: You see. You regulated gun ownership and use and you did not stop mass killings with guns. It will be difficult to prove that we cut the number from 7 a year to 5, for example since these are essentially random events with some nonrandomness stirred in, such as copycats, for example.

In summary, there are some things we can do short of rebuilding human society from scratch, but those things will have limited effect. Whether even those limited actions can be done depends on us. I like to refer to a statement by the character Mother Courage in Berthold Brecht's play. She observes that there is hot anger, which quickly fades away, and cold anger which fuels real activism and which lasts until something real is achieved. The days after a tragedy like this one are filled with statements of hot anger, which may provide some release to powerful emotions but do not have any long-term effect. What we need now is sustained cold anger which prods and prods until some real change, however small, is achieved.

On Economic Democracy

I was just listening to a recent speech by Marxist economist Richard Wolf given last month in Berkeley in which he outlines the history leading up to the present crisis and then discusses solutions. He makes a compelling presentation about the new Left party in Germany and then discusses how democracy in the workplace can solve our problems. I fundamentally agree with Richard Wolf, but I want to discuss one thing he said about economic democracy. He said that neither capitalism in the US nor socialism in the Soviet Union has tried it. (I think he goes on to talk about the Mondragon cooperative in Spain later in the same speech.)

Wolf is certainly correct about American capitalism. However, he is glossing over the history of the Soviet Union, which is particularly interesting on this point. I understand that the details are probably too lengthy for the kind of presentation he was making. Still, Soviet history is very instructive. The very word "Soviet" means council, and, at the time of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, there were soviets of workers and soldiers. The Bolsheviks participated in and led them. Let us note, in a slight digression, that the Bolshevik party practiced what they called "democratic centralism." By that, they meant that while making a decision, there was full democracy to argue for and against all proposals, but once a majority voted for the decision, everyone, including those who had voted against it, was required to implement it. Lenin explained that it was profoundly undemocratic to participate in such a process and then try to sabotage the will of the majority. I mention this because Lenin lost a vote of the leadership of his party to start the revolution but decided to do it anyway. The purpose of this digression will become clear soon.

So, in its earliest days, the Soviet Union was a union of workers' and soldiers' soviets in many cities. They elected representatives who became the government. However, at this time, the Soviet Union was under fierce internal (White Russian) and external (the USA joined the attackers) attack, and its economy needed to be jumpstarted both to feed the population and to defend against these attacks. Accordingly, there was a period called war communism, in which the Bolsheviks led by command rather than by implementing soviet democracy. I am certainly not trying to second guess what they did, what they felt they had to do, but I am pointing out how the initial democratic experiment was, in their view, interrupted but, in fact, stopped and never resumed. After war communism, the Bolsheviks came up with what they called a New Economic Program, which encouraged a mix of public and private enterprises to try to revive the moribund economy. That also did not implement democracy at the enterprise level.

As a result of war communism and the NEP and perhaps as a result of Lenin's death and Stalin's ascension to power (we can only speculate about what Lenin might have done had he lived and led longer), the soviets of workers and soldiers lost power and essentially disbanded, and peasants were never really organized in this way. So, Wolf's statement that the Soviet Union did not dare to try economic democracy is not precisely correct. What is correct is that they felt forced to abandon it in the face of attack and economic crises. We will never know whether they would or could have re-established soviet power later when the Soviet Union became stronger. We only know that they didn't and that the worldwide depression of the 1930s and World War II brought on new crises. No other socialist or postcapitalist country, to date, has tried decentralizing both economic and political power.

So, while I agree with Richard Wolf that economic democracy is worth fighting for and offers a way out of the myriad crises we now face, including economic crisis, massive unemployment, global warming, etc., the very name of the Soviet Union should remind us that the intent of the Bolshevik revolution was to institute economic and political democracy together. In 2012, we do not face the severe challenges of 1917--our challenges are heavy but not so severe as that--and we can afford to fight for genuine economic and political democracy. This is not a new idea, but perhaps it is an idea whose time has finally come.

The Chicago Teacher's Strike and the 2012 Presidential Elections

Throughout history, there have been events which sharpen and clarify the historical epoch in which they occur. A few examples are the American and French revolutions, the 1848 uprisings, the US civil war, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik revolution, the Spanish civil war, an so on. In the current period, we could add the Wisconsin battles over collective bargaining for public workers, the Occupy movement, and now the Chicago teacher's strike. One of the things these events do is to reveal the fracture lines in society, in particular the class divisions which underlie the events as they occur.

The Chicago teacher's strike is one of these clarifying events both because of the issues at stake and the particular people who have provoked the strike. Let us look, for example, at Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan. Emmanuel has not only provoked the strike by insisting on continuing unreasonable evaluation and retention policies for teachers based on standardized test scores of their students, he is also the point man in attacking the teacher's union--and the community that supports it. Duncan has taken the lead in promoting the disastrous policy of charter schools, which incidentally started in Chicago, and which is draining money and thus quality from the American educational system.

It hardly needs to be stated that Emmanuel and Duncan are both close associates of President Barack Obama. Emmanuel was his first chief of staff and is still an important adviser to Obama, and Duncan was appointed by Obama. How ironic that Mit Romney is "accusing" Obama of supporting the teacher's union when exactly the opposite is true. Romney's strange frame tries to pit teachers against students when, in fact, teachers, students, and the community are uniting in Chicago (the new teacher's union leadership there was elected precisely to do that). Treating teacher's better, hiring more teachers, etc. is one of the keys to reversing the downward slide in education in the United States. The point to emphasize,  however, is that it is Obama's people, not Romney or Wisconsin Republicans, who are the stalking horses for the most reactionary, retrogressive, austerity-driven strategy in Chicago. In Chicago, Obama is Romney, that is, he and his cronies are doing precisely what those who say they fear a Romney administration would do.

In these circumstances, I have decided that I have been too easy on my progressive friends who argue to vote for Obama to stop Romney. In 2012, such a position is untenable, dangerous, and destructive because it disarms those who would resist the assault on the vast majority of the American people, the drive for "austerity," and the destruction of the limited prosperity that a significant proportion of the population has enjoyed up to now. To support Obama and his policies in any way is to become complicit with his catastrophic agenda, which he or Romney will push regardless of which is elected. To focus on differences between Romney and Obama when they agree on much more which will be disastrous for the people of the USA and the world is to deceive and disarm. To support Obama is to abandon class struggle and resistance, which only allows the dominant class to pursue its programs with minimal opposition.

We should instead take our lead from Iceland, Greece, and France, in each of which the electorate has shifted its support from the austerity parties to parties of resistance. Until American progressives have the courage to do that, they will be part of the downward spiral and complicit in it. Much is at stake, and the time to take sides is now.