As I wrote a week-and-a-half ago (www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/02/1107935/-Anti-Capitalist-Meetup-Working-Class-Self-Activity-Leading-the-USA-to-Democracy, the concept of self-activity was introduced to me by my first intellectual mentor, labor historian George P. Rawick, a lifelong left activist who edited The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, a definitive, 41-volume collection of oral history interviews with former slaves taken during the 1930s under the auspices of the WPA. In his book on slavery, From Sundown to Sunup: The World the Slaves Made, Rawick emphasized the self-activity of American slaves, which he defined as that which exploited people do in coping with and resisting the conditions of their exploitation. He was especially interested in their strategies to (1) undermine the system of exploitation (e.g., tool-breaking) and (2) assert their human dignity in the face of a system that denies it (e.g., slave family life).

As my study of Marxian socialism has progressed, I’ve come to understand that self-activity is central to the humanist core of Marx’s thinking, and that it represents nothing less than the active, creative aspect of humanity. Creative human activity, aka work or labor, is how we express our deepest selves and how we ensure our survival, but under capitalism labor becomes an activity alien to ourselves, directed and controlled by another, something that degrades us rather than exalting us.

Marx’s concept of man is rooted in Hegel’s Idealist philosophy. Hegel starts with the proposition that appearance and essence are not the same, and that the purpose of dialectics is to grasp the relations between the two, or in other words, between essence and existence.

How to do that? Unlike René Descartes, who wrote “cogito ergo sum” and thus embraced a proto-positivistic conception of thought-grounded identity, for Hegel, essence is realized not in passive contemplation, but through a subject’s active process of existence: “facio ergo sum” (I act therefore I am). (I’ve no idea if Hegel ever wrote that, but he could have.)

However, Hegel’s system is inherently abstract, as the Subject that actively unfolds its essence is the “Idea,” and its dialectical processes take place in the realm of the intellect, then to be expressed in the material world. Thus “Freedom” realizes itself through successive stages of history, but Hegel was not especially interested in the actual struggles of real people for freedom, and was politically quite conservative, supporting the Prussian state and its established Lutheran church.

Nevertheless, Hegel’s Idealist conception of “self-activity” formed the basis of Marx’s materialist dialectic and in particular his understanding of self-activity of the working class. It is not the purpose of this essay to explore Marx’s materialist dialectics in detail, nor to explore how he developed them out of Hegel’s Idealist system.

As a materialist, Marx took his subject to be humanity, i.e., human beings as intelligent mammals actively engaged in producing and reproducing the conditions of their survival: food, shelter, defense, child-raising. The activities in which humanity engages itself Marx called “labor,” synonymous with “life activity.”

“For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity.”

Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, “Estranged Labour” (1844).

Nor was this mere philosophical flourish of the young Marx. He wrote very similarly in 1867:

“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention.”

Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 7, 1867.

Because under capitalism the labor process yields a wage to the worker but the product belongs exclusively and totally to capital, the latter also holds authority over the details of the production process. Whereas the pre-capitalist artisan or small farmer owned his own means of production (tools, raw materials, land, animals) he also controlled them and the labor process. Over several centuries prior to the last one, capital gradually took ever greater control over production itself, but even at the beginning, the initial development of the division of labor under manufacture, the alienated character of labor under capitalism became clear, and precipitated much of the labor activism from then on.

“This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. … The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. … The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.”

Marx, E&PM, 1844.

Alienated activity is thus the opposite of self-activity.

The same dynamic applies to political activity, for human beings engage in politics, understood broadly as power relations throughout a social formation, and create political movements just as they do everything else: via the materialist dialectic of making their life activity itself the object of their will and their consciousness as they engage & reproduce the world, both natural and social, around them. To oversimplify: learning by doing.

And what do working class women and men learn when they engage in politics, whether at the workplace, or at the ballot box, or in the streets? The dominant lesson throughout the history of capitalism has been that collective action is necessary for working people to have even a chance of success in pressing their interests, which are often learned to be collective in nature: higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, more control over the work process.

That is why, despite the forceful and fatal efforts by capitalist governments for centuries, workers spontaneously form unions and engage in collective action against capital: the nature of capitalism renders this the only possibly effective route to influence for the mass of people.

Such institutions and activism may become the schools for working class self-activity, where the ideological hegemony of capital may be challenged. However, as we have seen, the institutions of labor are quite vulnerable to capture, whether total (company unions) or partial (conservative trade unions). At such times, the union itself may temporarily become a more important locus for self-activity than the workplace.

For an excellent example of working class self-activity in relation to OWS, there is the recent struggle by restaurant workers at the Upper East Side location of the “Hot and Crusty” chain, who recently organized a union and extracted a promise from their employer to bargain in good faith.

“After enduring below minimum wage pay and verbal and sexual harassment, the workers reached out to labor organizations and began attending Occupy Wall Street meetings last fall. With the support of OWS and the Laundry Workers Center, a volunteer organizing group, the workers organized an independent union, the Hot and Crusty Workers Association, this spring. They won thousands of dollars in backpay and safer workplace conditions.”

According to Marx, human beings are productive and creative by nature, and when forced to produce and create under conditions that alienate them from the creative process and its results, they will create ideas and activities that are opposed to those alienating conditions and the economic system that requires them. It doesn’t mean they will win, but they will fight. That’s why the struggle continues. Not solely because of the imperatives of capital, but because the imperatives of the creative human spirit demand it.

Cross-posted on Voices on the Square

People may be thinking that London under Occupation may be a little over the top to describe the situation for Londoners living under Olympic rule for the next 18 days, but that is in many way an understatement. Between the rights of corporate sponsorship, the occupation by security and armed forces, and a government that is hell-bent on prioritising the needs of sponsors and security concerns over the rights of citizens for freedom of speech and the right to live in peace, the term “under occupation” is an excellent description of the situation.

From the perspective of the population having the Olympic Games in London comes at a rather high cost. This is not only referring to access to tickets where few, if any, were set aside for those living in the boroughs (Newham, Waltham Forest, Hackney and Tower Hamlets) surrounding the main stadium. These boroughs are composed of mostly poor and working class people with large percentages of people of colour; they are incredibly racially and ethnically diverse boroughs.

Tickets were sold by bidding in a lottery which meant that locals could not afford to bid and win tickets. Moreover, given the fact that tickets are literally impossible to get and that there are large numbers of empty seats for venues which many people would love to get, one can only assume that these are in the hands of corporate sponsors whose workers were not interested in the seats. Supposedly, the locals’ gains would arise from the construction jobs (that didn’t work out) and now the many retail and part-time jobs the Olympics would provide. For all the talk about gains by small shopkeepers due to suspension of Sunday trading laws, in most cases this means that their families (they are often family owned and run shops) would need to work the extra hours. Also, they were unable to sell anything connected with the Olympics not obtained from corporate sponsors. No replications of Olympic materials could be sold unless they were able (at high cost) to open accounts with official sellers.

However, the general problem with the Olympics affects us on a daily level; this is due to the bombardment of corporate advertising, the creation of an up-market mall (where most locals can only look but not afford to purchase; certainly Prada is not hiring us), the introduction of special Olympic lanes where Olympic bigwigs can be ferried to and from events, overcrowded public transport, the militarisation of the city both due to the use of military and private security forces, the placement of SAMs in residential areas, the aircraft carrier stationed in the Thames and the pre-emptive arrests of graffiti artists, the arrests of protestors and the denial of protest permits. In a city where the poor and working class are facing cuts in benefits, the introduction of forced labour as part of welfare reform, job losses (being replaced by part-time low paid jobs), and service cuts (libraries, after-school clubs, cultural centres, education cuts, police department cuts), corporate sponsors were granted complete access and tax breaks as part of the deal for the Olympics being brought to the country.

According to the Financial Times (“A need-go-know guide to London 2012,” 27/08/12, p. 3 ) the costs alone of the Olympic venues start with £40m for a temporary Basketball arena (they are hoping to sell the materials onwards to Brazil), £87m for the Velodrome, £251m for the Aquatics Centre, £295m for the media and broadcast centre, £428m for the Olympic stadium and £935m for the Olympic Village (this will be reconfigured by a Qatari based consortium into 2,800 properties, some of which will be sold for housing for key workers and the rest to create a gentrified area complete with luxury mall; nothing for the desperately needed social housing in the area of Newham). The Olympics were originally set to cost £2.4bn, but it is now estimated that they will cost £9.3bn. According to Al Jazeera, the latest government figures on the costs of the 2012 London Olympics have now risen to $14.5bn of public sector money, and expectations that it could be far higher. Of that current amount, $860m alone will be for Olympic security and this includes the use of 18,200 soldiers to help with security for the games. Interestingly, according to the Financial Times, the public budget for the Olympics was provided by a combination of lottery (£2.2bn), central government (£6.2 bn) and the Greater London Assembly and the London Development Agency (£0.9 bn). British companies won contracts amounting to £7.3 bn and there have been 8.8m event tickets sold. In terms of human presence, there are 10,500 athletes, 70,000 volunteers (hopefully real volunteers, not poor people forced into service) and 21,000 journalists. This is a huge amount of money that is being made available for this event in a country where they are trying to force disabled people off of disability benefit to save money.

The economic benefits of the Olympics look like they may restricted to the corporate sponsors than anyone else. But there is even more interesting news and that is from a business perspective; it seems that London’s top hotels and restaurants seem to find themselves with vacancies. This may be due to the fact that they have upped prices so much, that they cannot find people stupid enough to pay for them; 23% vacancy rates are nothing to sniff at (http://www.bighospitality.co.uk/Trends-Reports/London-2012-Olympics-23-of-London-s-hotel-rooms-currently-vacant-for-The-Games; http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/blog/2012/jul/24/hotels-properties-olympics) especially in an economy which is currently continuing along in recession. In fact, it has shrunk by 0.7% between April and June … which of course they have absurdly blamed on the Jubilee (the extra bank holiday) and bad weather, and of course, Europe, rather than their economic policies. Since they had claimed that the former would be a boost, I am a bit confused again.

In Great Britain, the use of hollowing-out policies (introduced in the US under Bush) has been introduced as part of the austerity measures to destroy the state sector; as such, services that used to be performed by the state sector (like secretaries working for the police) are no longer done by civil servants, but rather private companies. This is affecting not only the NHS and local council provision, but also policing and the military. The number of police officers is at an all-time low due to cutbacks (down 10,000), but volunteer special policemen numbers are up 10.4% to 20,343; this is at the same time that they are being called on to do an increasing number of things, like help with the Olympics security. It is interesting in that most right-wing governments are usually aware that if they are going to introduce draconian economic measures on their populations, having the police and army on your side could prove extremely useful if inevitable problems arise (as they have in Greece and Spain for example); this may be a case of arrogance on the part of the government or again they simply think that the British poor, working and middle classes are so beaten down that nothing could get them angry enough to resist the destruction of their social welfare state; divide and rule is proving a useful tool in alienating private sector workers from the demands of public trade unions given that the former have already suffered substantially in terms of the attacks on their pensions.

I. Commercialism and Branding

For those unaware of what happens when your city is “lucky” enough to win the Olympic Games, there are immediate rules that guarantee sponsors exclusive access to advertising and sales at the Olympics. In fact, you cannot “win” the Olympics without agreeing to these rules. These sponsors contribute money to the Olympics and get a lot of money back in return; Coke for example has contributed anywhere from £53-75m pounds, in return they get exclusive sale of their products at the Olympics and exclusive advertising rights during the Olympic games.

“Corporations can legally become associated with the London 2012 Games in two ways: First, multinational firms may seek exclusive marketing rights through The Olympic Partner program (TOP). The other option is through agreements with the LOCOG, the local British organization. But plenty of non-sponsors will attempt to correlate their brand with the Games, which is widely known as ambush marketing—something the IOC and LOCOG take very seriously.

The Olympic Marks and Imagery Usage Handbook defines ambush marketing as “a planned attempt by a third party to associate itself directly or indirectly with the Olympic Games to gain the recognition and benefits associated with being an Olympic Marketing Partner.” To suppress this type of activity, the IOC established comprehensive guidelines and has engaged in several initiatives to enforce them. For instance, the IOC requires that the host city—London, in this case—takes special measures to control ambush marketing during the course of the Games in and around Olympic venues “in order to preserve the Olympic brand.”

When London was first appointed as the host city for the 2012 Games, the government passed a new law, the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 (the Act), to supplement the existing laws relating to intellectual property in the UK. Together with the Olympic Symbol (Protection) Act of 1995, these laws protect the sponsors and partners from unauthorized advertising. […] To ensure that local businesses comply with the trading and advertising laws and to protect the Olympic brand and sponsors, nearly 300 Olympic enforcement officers will patrol around venues before and during the games. But local, non-sponsor businesses aren’t the only ones who have to abide by strict rules. Even the paying partners who have privileges and rights have to comply with certain guidelines. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2012/07/24/olympic-hurdles-for-advertisers-the-games-unique-rules-and-restrictions/)”

There are several different types of Olympic advertisers depending on how much they spend, but in addition to exclusivity of sale and advertising, there is also the benefit of temporary tax “breaks” from UK corporate tax for foreign-based MNC sponsors and their workers (who are given a temporary UK income tax break.

This is happening in a country where austerity measures have been introduced by the government that are destroying jobs, the state sector and our social welfare state and that this is justified due to high levels of government debt; the decrease in corporate taxes and the elimination of the 50% tax on those with the highest income is reprehensible. But to add insult to injury, the fact that MNC Olympics sponsors had taxes on profits earned at the Olympics written off is not only pouring salt on the wounds of the majority, it is a demonstration that the needs of corporations and revenue of the Olympics takes priority over the needs of the citizens and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the government’s term of “The People’s Olympics” is not just a joke for people to laugh about, but a slap in the face of those facing impoverishment and job loss. The idea of corporations, those that work for them and Olympic athletes not having to pay taxes for their profits or advertising contracts is simply disgusting.

“New tax rules ushered in as part of the winning Team GB bid include ‘a temporary exemption from UK Corporation Tax and UK Income Tax for certain non-resident companies’.

The legislation is written to include ‘partner’ organisations such as McDonald’s and Visa. Both, along with other ‘partners’, look set to make a tax-free fortune. The former will a monopoly on vending branded food and the latter a total monopoly on venue and ticket payment methods.

The new legislation also exempts all foreign nationals working on the games in the UK from paying income tax on any earnings. Thousands will be exempt from taxation from competitors to media workers (including journalists, technicians and producers) to representatives of official Games bodies and technical officials (including judges, referees and classifiers) along with the athletes themselves (http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/commentanalysis/corporatewatch/thegreatolympictaxswindle.aspx).”

An incredibly successful campaign started by 38 Degrees was launched in response to this article targeting companies that were tax avoiding due to their sponsorship of the Olympics Games.

The responses to the campaign on the part of the targeted multinational corporate sponsors are telling as every corporation responded. All 14 multi-national corporations (MNCs) (including Coca Cola, Proctor and Gamble, Dow Chemicals, and McDonalds) that were targeted by 38 Degrees, have waived their Olympic sponsor tax break or explained that they were not eligible (http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/1143282/Adidas-EDF-join-top-sponsors-waiving-Olympic-sponsor-tax-break/; http://www.tax-news.com/news/(htOlympic_Sponsors_To_Turn_Down_UK_Tax_Breaks____56452.html).
The seriousness with which exclusivity of advertising is taken by the Olympics committee can be demonstrated in a row which erupted last week when the chair of The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), Lord Seb Coe, announced mistakenly that people who were wearing the wrongly branded clothing could be denied entry to the Olympics Games irrespective of their holding tickets to the various events (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jul/20/coe-olympics-sponsorship-row; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2176383/London-2012-Olympics-Seb-Coe-lays-law-branding-Games.html). Having images of barefoot and bare-chested people at Olympic events going through my head upon hearing the story when it erupted, it was of little consolation that Seb was actually wrong about this absurd position. What actually concerned me was that clearly Seb Coe did not see a problem with the position he had taken on this issue; Seb has history of making absurd comments on things on which he has little or no information specifically when these relate to corporate sponsorship.

One of the most contentious corporate sponsorships is actually Dow Chemical and a campaign has been waged on several fronts protesting their choice as an Olympic sponsor.

Last week, 6 protestors were arrested after a fake medal ceremony in Trafalger Square where green custard was poured on fake representatives of Olympics corporate sponsors BP, Dow and Rio Tinto that were chosen as the worst Olympics sponsors; clearly performances criticising Olympic sponsors are not deemed amusing .

Anger at the acceptance of sponsorship by a MNC in an Olympics in which supposedly ethical and environmental considerations are constantly talked about is not a small inconsistency. Opposition to Dow derives not only from the catastrophe in Bhopal in which there are lawsuits still underway. Raising the issue of Bhopal has run the gamut from petitions, to an exhibition to a staged die-in by members of the Bhopal Medical Appeal on July 26th.

The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam (of which there are estimated 4.8 m victims, many of them children) had also been raised to question Dow’s sponsorship of the Olympic Games. Seb Coe once again demonstrates his ignorance in response to an appeal concerning Dow by the Vietnam Women’s Union, as John Pilger reports:

“In his reply, Coe describes Agent Orange as “a highly emotional issue” whose development and use “was made by the US government [which] has rightly led the process of addressing the many issues that have resulted.” He refers to a “constructive dialogue” between the US and Vietnamese governments “to resolve issues.” They are “best placed to manage the reconciliation of these two countries.” When I read this, I was reminded of the weasel letters that are a specialty of the Foreign Office in London in denying the evidence of crimes of state and corporate power, such as the lucrative export of terrible weapons. The former Iraq Desk Officer, Mark Higson, called this sophistry “a culture of lying.” (http://www.opednews.com/articles/Blair-War-Olympic-Deals-by-John-Pilger-120719-735.html)”

As Pilger points out, there has been no constructive dialogue between the US and Vietnam on the use of Agent Orange, no recompense paid to the Vietnamese victims, no war-crimes tribunal for the use of chemical weapons that not only destroyed people’s lives over generations, but defoliated the rice bowl of Asia and poisoned the land and water tables. Really, the people that write PR should certainly be bothered to check their facts before letting Seb makes statements that are so blatantly inaccurate. When Seb Coe says things of this nature to justify the inclusion of sponsorship for one of the MNCs that manufactured dioxin for use by the US government, the terms ethical behaviour and environmental concerns are demonstrated as lies; it is money that is relevant and all other concerns not even of secondary importance.

II. Olympic Security and the Militarisation of London

A seriously disturbing thing has been the whole discussion on Olympic security which has several equally unpleasant components. In many senses the level of concern about London Olympic security is part and parcel of the legacy of the “war on terror” that has been used to justify so much of the attack on civil liberties and the strengthening of the power of the security forces both public and private (reading the Government’s security preparations for the Olympics is rather instructive). ”Security” is a big industry these days and Olympic security provides a perfect excuse for the suspension of civil liberties and the payment of big money. We are all hoping this will all go away after the Olympics like the government promises; but one must take into consideration the numbers of CCTV cameras all over Great Britain which record our every action and pray that the abnormal does not once again become “the normal.”

A. G4S

In March 2011, consistent with the whole neoliberal approach that defines recent British government policy, the government hired G4S to cover Olympics security. G4S is a private security concern with a questionable (let’s call this understatement) human rights record to handle security. It is a multinational corporation operating in a number of countries. In the UK, G4S runs 3 immigrant detention centres to house illegal immigrants before deportation (often taking quite some time to complete); it has received 700 complaints, including allegations of assault and racism. There is the additional “issue” of the death of an Angolan deportee, Jimmy Mubenga, in 2010 in their custody after being restrained by G4S agents in a BA flight (for more detail on their history, see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9405046/G4S-previous-controversies.html). They also run security in Britain’s private prisons and there is the story of the loss of the master keys leaving prisoners locked up for 24 hours in their cells in 2011; there are also more problems with which they have been associated in their running of security in private prisons.

Then there is their relationship with the Israeli government (http://www.whoprofits.org/company/g4s-israel-hashmira; http://stopthewall.org/g4s-israeli-occupation-palestine-and-emergence-g4s-brazil), Israeli settlers to whom they provide security for illegal settlements on the West Bank and the abuse of Palestinian prisoners.

Putting aside for this moment the obvious point about the privatisation of security, the choice of this company which has a notorious history combined with grotesque failures, is pretty impressive.

Part II of the G4S story is that they were unable to fulfil their contract which is an interesting story on its own.

“A confidential report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) warned about concerns over security 10 months ago, leading Games organisers Locog to increase the number of security guards to be supplied by G4S from 2,000 to 10,400 while the value of the contract more than trebled from £86 million to £284 million (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/g4s-cant-get-olympics-guards-to-turn-up-7946500.html).”

Reading through various accounts of allegations of responsibility for the insufficient numbers recruited and turning up for work, the cause of the difficulties in fulfilling their contract seems to be a combination of increased demands by the UK government in terms of numbers needed, the company’s insistence that while they trained sufficient numbers (reportedly 20,000 were accredited and trained to cover 10,400 posts), there was a failure on the part of the workers to turn up. The last is disputed by workers who claim that there was a lack of information from the firm telling these recruits where and when they were needed.

One additional point that has been raised is the pay rates for recruited workers: it is unclear who set the wage rates at £8.50/hour. The company insists it was the government that set the wage levels and the government insists that it budgeted for £9-12/hour depending on seniority and level of responsibility. The company insists that it was the government that pointed out the obvious that if you pay workers less, you get a higher profit. The question is whether that constitutes government advice or pointing out the obvious to a company that is in the business of providing labour (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18898646). I find it odd, that they would not understand one of the basic rules of capitalism. You make more profit if you pay workers less (heck, that was obvious to Adam Smith in 1776), but the other part of the equation is if the job is really crappy, you may not get people to take the jobs irrespective of the level of desperation of the working class. Perhaps that is why the government is working so hard to lower the levels of unemployment benefits and introducing forced labour for the long-term unemployed. Removing as many possibilities of survival without having to work for wages that barely compensate effort and free training is clearly a problematic that must be solved if the flexible labour market that the ConDems are trying to consolidate can be a success.

An obvious question arises that no one seems to have discussed is whether this was a classic scenario which often occurs in a bad jobs market. The company claims to have recruited and trained 20,000 workers to cover 10,400 positions. Given that the jobs only last 18 days at a pretty basic pay for unpleasant work, one wonders if people knew that too many were recruited and trained, decided to cut their losses and try to find a job that they knew they could get and which lasted for a longer period. I was speaking to the cabbie driving me to escape the Olympic who told me a story about a woman that was applying for a job as a sales clerk at a low level retail firm specialising in baby clothes. After spending £400 for cab fares for various interviews and going through the training, it turned out that there were 25 different people recruited for a single job. After spending her savings trying to obtain a part-time minimum wage job, she simply gave up in disgust.

The last question that has yet to be answered by the government is how much G4S will lose from its contract for failing to provide what it promised. We are still waiting to hear clarification from the government about this little thing.

B. The British Military to the Rescue?! Of whom?!

The use of the British military as a component of Olympics security forces was planned in the beginnings; but they were supposed to be supplementary services for G4S and involved in very specific roles for London security (like manning the missiles that they placed in residential areas of London and on the attack helicopters and in the air in Typhoon fighters to shoot down invading Martians over residential areas of London). The fear that G4S would now run around willy-nilly and recruit just anyone to fulfil their security contract has prompted the government to draft in large numbers of British military forces as the main component of security. Many of these members of the armed forces were back in the country as part of a break from tours of duty overseas in Afghanistan.

“[…] British officials said they’d activate another 1,200 military personnel to fill the shortfall, bringing the total of British troops who will work the Olympics to 18,200. For comparison, Britain deploys about 9,500 in Afghanistan (http://www.stripes.com/news/europe/2005-attack-helped-shape-security-planning-for-london-olympics-1.183907).”

Having a choice of a private security firm with a dubious human rights record and the British armed forces to do security for the Olympic Games is truly being caught between a rock and a hard place. Does the consolation of the latter being forced to uphold the Geneva conventions make things better?! But there is an additional concern. On the day in which it was stated that there would be an increased military presence to cover for the failings of G4S, the following story (treated as unrelated) was also released raising increased violence on the part of soldiers returning home from war zones:

“One in eight soldiers has attacked someone after coming home from a combat deployment, according to a Ministry of Defence funded study of 13,000 personnel.
The study by Dr Deirdre MacManus, at The Kings Centre for Military Health Research, found an association between soldiers’ experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, and violent behaviour at home.
A survey of around 5,000 Iraq veterans found that nearly 581 were involved in assaults, domestic abuse, and other violence soon after returning to the UK (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18965076).”

Given this report, perhaps it is better that these people are given support and assistance rather than being sent in as security at the Olympic Games? I surely cannot be the only person thinking that this may not be a good idea.

C. The Militarisation of London

Finally, there is the militarisation of London itself due to surface-to-air missiles being located in some residential areas, attack helicopters on standby, the aircraft carrier and other warships being stationed in the Thames in London, and the use of spy drones. As an understatement this has disturbed many.

In the midst of all the insanity of the Olympics security plans, the one that disturbs me the most is the stationing of SAMs in 6 areas of London. Two of these are on top of populated housing blocks in the middle of residential areas. I am certainly not the only person truly concerned by this piece of insanity; a whole campaign built around stopping the placement of the London Missiles was organised. A lawsuit was filed trying to prevent the installation of missiles by residents of the Fred Wigg tower (just up the street from where I live) by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) making the obvious point that the introduction of these missiles literally turned these places into military targets if there was actually a terrorist attack and raised whether this was a violation of their human rights to live peacefully and securely.

David Forsdick, appearing on behalf of the MoD argued:

“The MoD, intelligence agencies and the Metropolitan Police do not consider there is any credible threat to the Fred Wigg Tower from terrorism (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18765062).”

Let me repeat that statement: he argued that the credibility of the threat of these buildings becoming military targets was not sufficient to warrant concern. Moreover, that this had been signed off by the Prime Minister David Cameron, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, home Secretary Teresa May and the Defence Secretary (not certain whether this is the current one Phillip Hammond or the previous one Liam Fox) in “Defence of the Realm” is not particularly comforting as none of these people live anywhere near where these missiles are being deployed and quite honestly given the way they treat the poor and working class in Great Britain, they are the last people I would trust to cover our interests. If the threat is not credible, why the hell would anyone think that putting missiles on the top of residential blocks is a good idea?

The ruling on the part of the judge was rather interesting. On the one hand, he argued that there was not only sufficient consultation of residents, but what occurred was “immaculate” and that the military was under no obligation to do that anyhow. But the second point was more disconcerting, the judge, Mr Justice Hadden-Cave stated that the tenants had not understood correctly the situation. That is typical, clearly the stupid and uneducated working class simply are too unsophisticated to understand the notion of deterrance! What Mr Justice Hadden-Cave does not understand is that we most certainly do understand the notion of deterrance; however, we simply do not want them stationed on the roofs of our apartment buildings … perhaps they can put them in Westminster or in Mayfair where the rich live?! Perhaps the rich and famous can understand the need for deterrance more than the working class?

D. Civil Liberties

To end our odyssey into the nightmare of security measures of the London Olympics, we need to address the impact on our civil and human rights. We have already mentioned the arrests of protestors following the fake awarding of medals to the worst of the Olympic sponsors. There is the additional question of the policy of pre-emptive arrests by the Metropolitan and Transport Police. Announced on June 2nd, Scotland Yard has said that they are planning to pre-emptively arrest those that are planning “criminal activity” at the Olympics, specifically groups of thieves and pickpockets. However, the police said that this would not be used against lawful demonstrators asking them to notify them beforehand to protect their right to protest.

But that raises an interesting point which relates to the pre-emptive arrests of 4 graffiti artists to prevent damages to the city. One of those arrested, Darren Cullen, actually has done work legally for Adidas, one of the Olympic sponsors and for other major corporations. Mr Cullen also tries to get graffiti artists to work legally. Yet somehow he has been pre-emptively arrested, bailed, and forbidden from having spray paint cans, using public transport and going within a mile of the Olympics venues:

“These arrests come in light of Wednesday’s court ruling by Lord Justice Richards and Mr Justice Openshaw said that police pre-emptive strikes for Prince William’s wedding a year ago were not unlawful. Human rights activists have voiced concerns about what affect this ruling will have on Games security.

All four have been released on bail, with restrictions forbidding them from holding any spray paint, riding any of the public trains around London, or being within a mile of any Olympic Games venues (http://www.tntmagazine.com/news/london/police-raid-homes-and-arrest-graffiti-artists-in-pre-emptive-olympic-swoop). “

While the Metropolitan police have insisted that they will not stop legal protestors from stating their grievances using pre-emptive arrests, the arrests at Trafalgar Square and the extension of a banning order for two years prohibiting Simon Moore from going within 100 yards of the Olympic torch relay, the games themselves or anything relating to the diamond jubilee. The extension of Mr Moore’s banning order really belies the police’s claim that they will not infringe upon freedom of protest. Moore was originally arrested for blocking access to a building site while opposing the placement of an Olympic practice basketball court in Leyton marshes in April 2012. So, they won’t pre-emptively arrest you, they will arrest you after the fact and extend banning conditions against you.

Finally, remember the point about not stopping your right to protest when the police announced their pre-emptive arrest policy? Well, letting the authorities know when we are planning a protest is clearly insufficient to guarantee your right to protest; quelle surprise! The borough of Tower Hamlets had refused the Counter Olympics Network the right to make speeches at the end of the march scheduled for the 28th of July resulting in Tower Hamlets council being threatened with being taken to court. The march was able to go ahead as scheduled (with the final release of information on July 26th, two days before the demonstration (http://counterolympicsnetwork.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/final-arrangements-for-march-and-event-on-july-28th/), but the whole point of the council doing this is to disrupt the ability of organisers to coherently organise protests; the tactic of first giving permission, then taking it away the right to have speeches, then cancelling the demo and finally allowing it under pressure is all part of the game to prevent people from getting out large numbers as protestors do not know what will happen. Welcome to the games, they take all forms in Great Britain these days!

Reposted from Daily Kos.

The likely Republican presidential candidate and quintessential vulture capitalist, Mitt Romney, chided President Obama for not being sufficiently fearful of Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chávez Friás last week. In the conservative Daily Telegraph Mitt is quoted as saying:

“The idea that this nation, this president, doesn’t pose a national security threat is simply naive and an extraordinary admission on the part of this president to be completely out of touch with what is happening in Latin America,” Romney said of Chavez in an interview Wednesday with Fox News.

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Yes, socialist Venezuela, the country which was recently ranked the 5th happiest in the world, following four social democratic countries, presents a threat to Mitt’s vulture business model and his support base, who largely come from the 92,000 wealthy individuals who sequester their wealth in “tax havens” such as Switzerland the Cayman Islands. (See rt. com for its report on “The Price of Off Shore Revisited”.

After President Chavez was elected to office in 1998, Venezuela has had currency controls in place to prevent its national wealth from being looted and sent to extra-territorial banks, a model which defeats the efforts of would-be off shore tax evaders in Venezuela. Other countries have allowed themselves to be systematically raped of their needed tax revenues.

Venezuela also jailed its criminal banksters for speculating with their depositors money. Here, Mitt, you would likely be in jail for creating tax-evading investment vehicles in the Cayman Islands. No, socialist Venezuela, under President Chavez, is definitely not a vulture-capitalist friendly country. That is why it is now thriving.

But other countries are being systematically robbed. Thus, in a study commissioned by the The Tax Justice Network campaign group, leaked to The Guardian, and reprinted by today’s rt.com news cited above, we discover that:

Wealthy tax evaders, aided by private banks have exploited loopholes in tax legislation and stashed over $21 tn in offshore funds, says a report. The capital drained from some developing countries since 1970 would be enough to pay off national debts. The findings show the gap between the haves and the have-nots is much larger than previously thought…

The report provides the most detailed valuation of the offshore economy to date. The document cites the world’s leading private banks as cherry-picking from the ranks of the uber-rich and siphoning their fortunes into tax-free havens such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

The wealth of the super-rich is “protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy.”
Henry writes that a large part of the trillion dollar hoard belongs to around 92,000 individuals, an elite class of super-rich who make up 0.001 percent of the global population.

Romney, the consummate professional enabler, who has bragged about the efficiency with which his Bain companies have served his financial interests and those of his wealthy investors, has also been quoted as admitting that Bain created investment vehicles in the Cayman Islands, protected from U.S. taxes, in order to attract wealthy foreign investors, like those from El Salvador.

Indeed, Romney founded his vulture capitalist private equity investment firm, Bain Capital, largely on the wealth of elite foreign investors from impoverished South and Central American third world countries.

Some 40% of his firm’s initial funding came from the oligarchs of South and Central American dictatorships, those who with the help of U.S. funding, helped themselves to the resources of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen by using U.S. trained death squads (many graduates of the U.S.’s infamous “School of the Americas”) to kill off those in their countries who sought the equitable allocations of their countries’ resources and thus to terrorize the rest of the population into meek submission to their iron-handed rule.

<a href=”Tanfani, Mason and Gold report in a recent L.A. Times article that some of these Bain funders were the “powers that be” in El Salvador, well connected with the right-wing government, whose activities they funded:

The group (of Bain investors) included some of El Salvador’s wealthiest people: coffee grower Miguel A. Dueñas; members of the De Sola family, also coffee exporters; and Ricardo Poma, whose family conglomerate now owns car dealerships and luxury hotels across Central America. [...] Most of the money they put into Bain Capital was through corporations set up in Panama … Among the Bain investors were Francisco R.R. de Sola and his cousin Herbert Arturo de Sola, whose brother Orlando de Sola was suspected by State Department officials and the CIA of backing the right-wing death squads, according to now-declassified documents. Orlando de Sola, who has denied supporting the death squads, is now serving a four-year prison term for unrelated fraud charges.

Jon Wiener, writing in “Bain Capital’s Ties to Salvadoran Death Squads” in The Nation. reports that:

When Bain Capital was founded in 1984, Romney and his partners had trouble raising funds for their initial investments. “$9 million came from rich Latin Americans,” the Times reports, “including powerful Salvadoran families living in Miami.… At the time, U.S. officials were publicly accusing some exiles in Miami of funding right-wing death squads in El Salvador. Some family members of the first Bain Capital investors were later linked to groups responsible for killings…

The civil war in El Salvador lasted from 1980 to 1992 and killed more than 70,000 Salvadorans. It started after Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated while giving a mass shortly after he published an open letter to President Carter asking him to cut off US military aid to the Salvadoran military regime.

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Four members of the de Sola family were among the original Bain investors, or “limited partners” in the company, the Boston Globe reported. Their relative and “one-time business partner,” Orlando de Sola, was an important figure in El Salvador. A well-known right-wing coffee grower with an (in his words) “authoritarian” vision for the country, de Sola spent time living in Miami but was also a founding member of the right-wing Arena party, led by a U.S.-trained former intelligence officer named Roberto D’Aubuisson, also known as “Blowtorch Bob”, due to his frequent use of a blowtorch in interrogation sessions.

Justin Elliott, writing in the July 20, 2012 article,“The roots of Bain Capital in El Salvador’s civil war”, notes that:

The war, which pitted leftist guerrillas against a right-wing government backed by the Reagan administration, ultimately left over 70,000 people dead in the tiny nation before a peace deal was brokered by the United Nations in 1992. The vast majority of violence, a UN truth commission later found, was committed by rightist death squads and the military, which received U.S. training and $6 billion in military and economic aid.

Bain investor, Richard Poma, owner of the Roble Group, was likewise implicated in a series of tourist area bombings in Cuba in 1997 when his security chief was arrested for a series of bombings there. The bombings were planned by Luis Posada Carriles, 70, U.S. former CIA operative and longtime militant anti-Cuban exile, who openly admitted arranging the bombings. Posada was then living in El Salvador, which refused to deport him back to Cuba.

Thus Romney’s founding El Salvadoran investors, who likely had reached their power and wealth before 1984 by originally extracting it from the blood, sweat and tears of poor El Salvordoran workers, who used that wealth to gain political power and to remain in power by funding their chosen right-wing politicians, protected by military assistance and training from the U.S., including the U.S.’s “School of the Americas” (otherwise known as “School of the Assassins” and still in operation under a new, more neutral name), likewise funded the cruel “Death Squads” that tortured and assassinated anyone who dared to demand equitable distribution of their countries’ wealth.

Thus these founders were appropriate models for the cut-throat business decisions taken by Mitt Romney on behalf of his Bain companies, who bought up American companies, looted them, threw their workers into the street, and collected massive fees for Romney and Bain for their efforts.

True, Mitt’s efficient army of enablers, the lawyers, accountants and managers who comprised his “assassination squads”, didn’t have to stoop to using chain saws to decapitate and draw and quarter rebellious workers, as did the El Salvadorian death squads, they simply worked them long hours for low pay, raided their pension funds and then terminated them, leaving the U.S. taxpayers to clean up their deadly but bloodless mess by supplying the missing pension money.

Little wonder, with the biggest banks engaging in laundering the money from drug cartels, while the private equity funds like Bain, make vast profits for their tax-evading investors, that the U.S. has come to look just like the third world countries such as El Salvador.

The Washington Post reports:

The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate (In the U.S.) will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest since 1965.

Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

“I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I’m here, applying for assistance because it’s hard to make ends meet. It’s very hard to adjust,” said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.

In contrast, the people in Socialist Venezuela are seeing vast improvements in their living conditions.

Thus Eva Golinger, writing in today’s venezuelanalysis:

Poverty has been reduced by more than 50% since Chavez came to power in 1998. The inclusionary policies of his government have created a society with mass participation in economic, political and social decisions. His social programs – called missions – have guaranteed free medical care and education, from basic to advanced levels, and provided basic food items at affordable costs, along with tools to create and maintain cooperatives, small and medium businesses, community organizations and communes. Venezuelan culture has been rescued and treasured, recovering national pride and identity, and creating a sentiment of dignity instead of inferiority. Communication media have proliferated during the last decade, assuring spaces for the expression of all.

The oil industry, nationalized in 1976 but operating as a private company, has been recuperated for the benefit of the country, and not for multinationals and the elite. Over 60% of the annual budget is dedicated to social programs in the country, with the principal focus on eradicating poverty.

Caracas, the capital, has been beautified. Parks and plazas have turned into spaces for gatherings, enjoyment and safety for visitors. There’s music in the streets, art on the walls and a rich debate of ideas amongst inhabitants. The new communal police works with neighborhoods to battle crime and violence, addressing problems from the root cause.

As a five year resident of Venezuela, I have see that the government has invested billions of dollars from its oil resources into providing universal medical care, public education to the post-doctoral university level, subsidized food markets and restaurants, low (or no) interest loans to purchase new housing (the government is building two million new homes for those who are inadequately housed), financial assistance in starting worker-owned cooperatives and small business, government paid job training and placement, and massive programs to assist the elderly and disabled with a variety of social services, including in-home doctor visits, nursing assistance and home renovations and repairs.

All school children receive one or two free meals a day, and even government-provided computers and internet training. Stay-at home care-takers receive stipends and women are now protected under an extensive anti-domestic violence law which provides for psychiatric care and job training for abused household members. Social security has been extended to hundreds of thousands of people who did not previously qualify.

Yes, Venezuela is a real danger to Mitt and his fellow vulture capitalists. It presents a replicable model of a society that cares about the needs and aspirations of its members, rather than stealing labor from its people to generate profits for a few already wealthy individuals, those 92,000 people, the 0.001 percent who, like Mitt, make their wealth by stealing it from the vast majority of the world’s population.

I write today to, hopefully, start a dialogue and ongoing series about the concept of decolonization. I’m fairly new to the term. Some of the concepts have been in me for a while, but I did not have connection to a philosophy or political movement, much less a name. So, I’ll share my entry point and early thoughts about decolonization. I invite you to share yours.

When I left my house in Boston and headed to New York City to be present in Liberty Square last September, I was going as an “Occupier”, I suppose, since the action was called “Occupy Wall Street”. So many of us felt so strongly that the message about the deep layers of corruption in our economic and political systems resonated, that we didn’t even think about the word defining this burgeoning movement.

For me, the Occupy movement was connected to Arab Spring and the Encampanadas of Spain and even the Green movement in Iran. And Palestine.

Palestine. How could I even think for one moment that “occupying” was a good thing? Well, clearly, I didn’t think.

It didn’t take long, though, for some to realize that the corruption wasn’t just about banking and money in politics. The corruption goes to the core of the culture we’re living in. Some of the very tenets we base our value system on are unjust. Built right into what we believe is an acceptance of being the generators of pain and suffering for others. What we’re seeing in the blatant exploitation and inhumanity of the financial crimes is reflective of something in all of us: a predatory nature. A predatory nature that we socially codify through memes such as “possession is 9/10ths of the law” and “survival of the fittest” and “competitive edge” and “independence” and “free market”. That it is radical to suggest that a culture, which measures profit-making as the key indicator of it’s health, is based on something ugly, tells us that we have deeply rooted ways of being which foster the corrupt systems we live within.

I’ve had these thoughts for a long time. In my youth I was a very competitive athlete. I had a prosperous early career as a computer programmer in the 1980s. I have multi-faceted, ‘pedigreed’ American ancestry. A direct ancestor was celebrated for being the leader of the people who “forged the first great pathway west” through Kentucky and Tennessee. Family documents show them celebrating their colonizing efforts. (ironically, another branch of my family is quite likely related to Cherokee Chief Ross who led his people along the Trail of Tears.) In short, I was a yuppie, happily thriving in the world created by colonization.

I always had a bit of a “radical” edge, I suppose. Once, while I was at a business luncheon, in my fancy, $900, Donna Karn suit, a glass of champagne was sent to me with a note, “from one closet punk to another.” I looked around the room at all the other suits and knew who sent that drink. A moment of subversive solidarity. Still, I was pursuing “The American Dream” until I went to business school. There, when faced with the founding principles of capitalism, I wholly rejected them. Everything was cold and with zero concern for a just and sustainable existence for all people. War terminology applied to business practices. I could not adopt that. I had gone to school to “boost my resumé” and, presumably, my career. I ended up turning down offers to join venture capital firms. I would go on to run the first urban composting company in the United States, a very mission-oriented pursuit. Everything I have done since then has been mission-oriented.

Still, I didn’t have the words for how I perceived things. I no longer felt good about the concept of “competition”. Competitions have winners and losers. A society built on “competitive spirit” requires losers. Far more losers than winners. Only one person claims the title at the end of a tennis tournament. Everyone else is some varying degree of loser. It rankles me to no end that someone who is second best in the world at what they do is “suffering a disappointing loss” at The Olympics when they receive their silver medal. Moreover, I feel great pain about the history of our culture. It’s a living history. Here in the United States, we have committed and continue to commit genocide against The First Peoples. The early settlers came here for economic opportunity and they generated their successes by dragging millions from their homelands and enslaving them to get free labor and greater profits for themselves. Every single aspect of what this country is would not exist without slavery and genocide. Yet, we continue to call this “exceptional” and we continue to state that the lifestyle we have become accustomed to is a good and normal thing that we should continue to aspire to and convince, well force, everyone else in the world to aspire to.

I could articulate my perceptions, but I didn’t have a name for it until I entered the world of Occupy and encountered an already existing movement called “Decolonize”. (Though I can’t attend often due to a scheduling conflict, I am eternally grateful for the Decolonize to Liberate working group at Occupy Boston.)

Decolonize. That word seems to scare people. Almost every time I utter it in front of people, there is someone who will ask, “do you expect everyone to leave here and go to Europe?”

The political act of decolonizing is not about rearranging where everyone lives. Even if you did that, people would still have a mindset, an ethical compass, which would lead to new colonizing and new systems of oppression. Decolonizing is about rearranging the way we think and how we treat each other. What does “justice for all” really mean? Have the vast majority of people living on this land experienced justice?

We know the answer to that question. Injustice has plagued this land. “Freeing” slaves whilst keeping the rewards of their labor was not justice. Giving native peoples barely survivable land land that you claim they have sovereignty over, which you do not honor, is not justice. Breaching every treaty we ever made with those same people is certainly not justice.

Those are obvious examples of injustices and we do hear lip service given, culturally, to these “historical” events. (We’re breaching treaties to this day and the 13th Amendment has an exemption to the banning of slavery, which we are taking full advantage of in our private prison system. So, this is not just history. It’s contemporary.) What we don’t discuss much or in a way which might actually lead to justice, is how the very tenets of “The American Way”, the very things we honor as almost sacred truths, generated and continue to generate these injustices. We’re like the child who says, “Sorry for leaving my trash on the floor, mom”, but doesn’t pick up the trash and continues to leave trash on the floor. It’s a superficial acknowledgement of wrongdoing without any righting of the situation or commitment to prevention of further harm.

With our very ways of being, we cause harm and promote injustice every day. We cheer on the “winning” little league team without a concern for what the message of “life has winners and losers” implants in our children. We buy cheap food without making sure no one was abused to get it to us. We wear clothing made in sweat shops. We let children “cry it out” and put them in “time out” to show them they will be ostracized when they don’t ‘behave’, where ‘behaving’ means adopting the feelings and perceptions of an authority figure. We hug our children when they “make us proud” or “look so cute” or entertain us. Every aspect of our beings is shaped through a system of reward and deprive. And we’re willing deprive people of food, shelter, clothing and healthcare if they haven’t ‘behaved’. We are willing, in other words, to kill them. We kill people all the time. Our president now has a “kill list”. I don’t believe for a moment that we’re killing people as revenge for those killed in 2001. We’re killing anyone who dares to threaten the public perception that we are exceptional and democratic and harbingers of peace. We have the most weapons and an exponentially larger army than anyone on the planet has ever had and we dare to claim we are bringing peace. We are exceptional, yes. Exceptional at cognitive disconnect and self-deception in the name of glorifying ourselves and getting what we want, regardless of who pays what price.

But, it’s also micro. When we’re in a meeting and someone expresses a feeling about something and the first response is a rebuttal, we’re participating in the devaluing of someone. We tell them “don’t feel that. Don’t see that.” We do it to each other all the time. We compete over feelings. We compete over ideas. We normalize the concept that he who speaks with the most force gets to be ‘right’ and everyone else is silenced or ostracized. We see no room for simultaneous co-existence of multiple ideas, emotions and peoples. It happens in the workplace, in political dialogue, in families and even in the most intimate of relations. From the most subtle of interactions to the most tense, its all about who is best at dominating. We give up our agency in micro-moments everyday and hand our power to those who are most comfortable dominating.

Domination is the name of the game. It’s our “Manifest Destiny“. Our nationalism and self-proclaimed exceptionalism and sense that it is all part of a divine plan within which we are the chosen people, are all part of that ‘destiny’ and the Doctrine of Discovery. Most of us have probably never used those words. It’s not something we discuss often. We don’t have to. It’s the inherent axiom we embody. And it’s the sine qua non. We can’t generate a truly just and sustainable world until we purge ourselves of it.

That purge is supremely challenging. We must find a way to question every thing we do, the way we are in every moment, every assumption we have about what is ‘natural’ and ‘right’ and ‘acceptable’. We must do this without so destroying our own dignity that we either can’t bear to live or can’t bear to look or need to attack the dignity of others in order to feel better. Of any revolutionary movement out there, the resistance to this will be the strongest because we are rising up against ourselves.

I would argue that we are not rising up against our true selves, though. We are rising up against the selves we have been molded to become. From the moment we were born we were trained and brainwashed and ‘normalized’. A particular lens was fused to our eyes through which we are forced to perceive the world. Underneath all that is an original self, who can still look at the world in our innately natural way if we can remove those lenses. There isn’t a nice laser-surgery process to remove them in a few moments with some anesthesia to ease the way. It’s going to be painful. Yet, it will be freeing. We will be freed of the burden of supporting, and being weighed down by, the systems of oppression we’re existing in. And the connections we make to each other will be far more rewarding and joyous, as they are free of the guilt of achieving those connections at the expense of others. It will be liberating because we will not be forced to eradicate our true selves in order to survive.

I am trying to decolonize myself, my own mind. By doing so, I am creating space for something else. Cooperation. Collective. Interdependence. Exquisite joy.

In that vein, here are some of the ways I have challenged myself:

1) be willing to be wrong in every moment.
2) don’t allow someone to convince me I am wrong. If I don’t feel it, don’t just ‘cave’.
2) offer any power I have to those who have less
3) be willing to be threatened and to risk safety for the sake of justice.
4) always speak my truth with compassion, even if it creates tension with those I care about.
5) be willing to be uncomfortable in ‘mainstream’ society; reject coersion
6) be willing to share any material gains I may have

The list will grow, but those are a starting point.

Have you ever considered decolonization? What does it bring up for you? How do you challenge yourself?

Some links for your reading pleasure:
United Nations Declaration on the rights of inDigenous PeoPles

What UNDRIP can mean for the future

Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues: Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery

Colonization of the Mind: Normalize This!

Colonizing and Decolonizing Minds by Marcelo Dascal, Tel Aviv University

“The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active army of workers during the periods of over-production and feverish activity, it puts a curb on their pretensions. The relative surplus population is therefore the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work. It confines the field of action of this law to the limits absolutely convenient to capital’s drive to exploit and dominate the workers (Marx, 1867, Capital, volume I, Penguin edition, p. 792).”

Introduction

This post is part I of a series discussing the labour market under capitalism. In this part, I am addressing the issue of persistent unemployment in capitalism and the introduction of workfare in the UK specifically. I am addressing both economic and political inconsistencies of the introduction of workfare under Capitalism and Bourgeois Democracy. I conclude this post by addressing the crisis of bourgeois democracy that is exemplified by the contradictions between the introduction of forced labour and human rights, one of the strongest weapons belonging to the ideology of bourgeois democracy.

Workfare, a welfare to work scheme, which forces welfare recipients to work to earn their benefit, has existed for some time in the US (see: 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act); and for a comparison between state workfare programmes in the US see: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~gwallace/Papers/%288%29.pdf). Originally introduced in the UK by Labour in 1998 and insultingly called the “The New Deal” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal_%28United_Kingdom%29), it enabled penalties for those that refused “reasonable work” and established courses and volunteer work to get those on benefits into work and provided tax credits for working families to keep them working.

However, the attempt by the current government in the UK to extend it has led to both legal action and resistance on the part of those being forced to labour. The 2010 “Work for your Benefits Pilot Scheme” (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2010/1222/pdfs/uksiem_20101222_en.pdf) and the extension of the “Mandatory Work Activity scheme” (2011: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/688/pdfs/uksiem_20110688_en.pdf; 2012:http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-vote-office/June_2012/12-06-12/13.DWP-Mandatory-Work-Activity.pdf) which is supposedly for those that are not on board with the shift from welfare to work strategy of the government) in numbers of “customers” forced to labour without pay and in light of severe criticism in terms of the introduction of forced labour as well as the known ineffectiveness of these schemes is more than questionable. However, it is certainly consistent with the policies and beliefs of the current government.

The second part of this series will concentrate on workfare in the UK and the actions that are part of the fight-back against the extension of workfare and this will go up tomorrow at 12 noon eastern.

One of the most important contradictions in the capitalist economic system lies in the nature of the labour market itself. On the one hand, capitalism requires free labour; that is, free in the sense that it is no longer tied by law to specific aristocrats that provided subsistence in exchange for labour on their land as serfs or tied to specific masters as slaves. In fact, the existence of slavery and indentured servitude in the US arose initially due to the insufficient number of labourers; it continued due to racism and the usefulness of divide and rule amongst working people. While not denying the importance of morality and human decency, when it started to be an impediment with the development of the domestic market, capital moved to eliminate it. Free labour means that instead labour is free to sell its labour to obtain subsistence. On the other hand, the dependence upon wages earned through labour means that they are subject to the vagaries of the labour market itself and the needs of profitability and capital accumulation within the system itself. However, from its earliest, capitalism and unemployment go hand in hand. The numbers of workers needed by the system depends essentially on profitability criterion; full employment is a fantasy, even in periods of rapid economic growth.

I. Capitalism’s reserve army of labour

“On the basis of capitalism, a system in which the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labour, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the conditions for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words, the self-valorization of capital. The fact that the means of production and the productivity of labour increase more rapidly than the productive population expresses itself, therefore, under capitalism, in the inverse form that the working population always increases more rapidly than the valorization requirements of capital (Marx, 1867, op. cit., p. 798).”

This leads to a serious problem. On the one hand, the idea that labour must labour to earn its subsistence is a fundamental perspective that exists in ideology prior to the existence of capitalism; you can even find it in the Bible (see e.g., Genesis 3:17). It is based upon an essential truth that the majority somehow needed to labour in some way to survive. Perhaps one of my favourite defences of the link of labour with subsistence is from Bentham; in fact, he goes so far as to demand the linkage of relief to labour (in houses of industry, workhouses). Listening to what the current government is saying one cannot help wonder if Iain Duncan Smith (the secretary of works and pensions) got lost reading Bentham and never found his way out. In fact, there are strong similarities in Bentham’s discussion of deserving and undeserving poor (which he spends ages on differentiating and then proposes the same remedy to deal with; yep, labour):

“To a person labouring under total and absolute want of ability with regard to work, relief must be administered, without any condition in respect of work, since otherwise he must be left to perish.

To a person possessed of adequate ability, no relief ought to be administered, but on condition of his performing work: to wit such a measure of work as, if employed to an ordinary degree of advantage, will yield a return in value, adequate to the expence of the relief (Bentham, 1796, Essays on the Subject of the Poor Laws, Essay II, sec. III, pp. 44-45).”

Irrespective of his distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor above, Bentham says the following:

“A person deprived of all his limbs, or the use of all his limbs, may still possess ability sufficient to the purpose of serving as inspector to most kinds of work, so long as mental faculties, and sight for observing, and voice for questioning are possessed by him in sufficient vigour (Bentham, op. cit., pp 46-47).”

However, high levels of productivity under capitalism means that less and less labour is needed both relatively and absolutely to satisfy needs and wants. In fact, the introduction of machinery in production of workers consumption goods has reduced the amount of labour necessary to feed the population. The large majority of the working day and production is done for the purposes of production of surplus value, that part of the value of the product going towards profits and rents. However, it has created high amounts of unemployment of labour which cannot and will not be needed due to the profitability criteria under which capitalist production is undertaken.

If the system is such (and capitalism is unique in this sense compared to other economic systems) that persistent unemployment is a by-product of production decisions relying on profitability criteria, addressing unemployment and the subsistence of the unemployed becomes essential. Moreover, there are different forms of unemployment, some of which are essential to production; for example, agriculture has periods of seasonal unemployment and these people must be available for the periods in which they are needed. Additionally, unemployment rises and falls due to the cyclical periods of capitalist growth and crisis; people are drawn in and released from production … this is a relative reserve army of unemployed. They must be available to be drawn into production when needed. Then, there are those that are long-term unemployed that are victims of a system. Increasingly, these numbers are rising in the advanced capitalist world due to the impact of high levels of productivity, the introduction of machinery to replace labour, the decline of industrial and manufacturing sectors in these countries and the general lack of revival of employment due to the nature of economic growth following crises (those jobless recoveries).

“We can now understand the foolishness of the economic wisdom which preaches to the workers that they should adapt their numbers to the valorization requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation itself constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of constantly expanding strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight of pauperism (Marx, 1867, op. cit., p. 798).”

II. Dealing with Persistent Unemployment:

In many senses, the discussions on how to deal with poverty and unemployment created by the capitalist system have gone in waves. For those that do not outright reject public relief for the poor (like Malthus), there are essentially two main positions:

1. there is either an assertion of the insistence between the link of labour and subsistence (e.g., Bentham, 1834 Poor Law Reform);
2. or there is a recognition that unemployment of various forms exists and provision for the poor and unemployed must simply be provided (e.g., 1795-7 Poor Law Amendment, Social Welfare State).

At the moment, we are going through a period both in the US and UK where there is an insistence (irrespective of reality) of the link between labour and subsistence. This has introduced further contradictions in terms of the political dynamic of bourgeois democracy and the discussion of human rights and economic contradictions between free labour and forced labour that has been and continues to be introduced.

A possible way to deal with persistent unemployment is, of course, permanent job creation programmes by the state sector, including nationalisation of not only key industries (like health, agriculture, energy, water, electricity, and natural resources) but other sectors like airlines, and automobiles. Again, these are essentially subsidised sectors that should be expected to be non-profitable as their purpose is to provide jobs and incomes for working people as well as the goods and services themselves. Of course, these types of policies have been progressively abandoned in the advanced capitalist world by countries that initiated them in favour of privatisation from the late 1970s forwards to give the market alternative potential areas of profitability as the profitability in industry and manufacturing in the advanced capitalist world has waned and to destroy the power of the unions in these sectors. Essentially, the need for profitability and growth which are the motivating forces of the capitalist system did not, and could not allow, these sectors to exist outside of the control of the market.

The other obvious solution of reduction of working hours while maintaining incomes is inconsistent with profit maximisation criteria and has not led to increased employment in places where this has been done (see France for example); capital moved overseas to where wages are lower and/or machinery was introduced rather than labour employed. For this solution to work, we need to abandon profit maximisation criteria and capitalism. Without the need of production of surplus value and surplus products to sustain growth and profitability in the context of capitalism, high levels of productivity of labour can easily satisfy the needs and wants for all worldwide and the impoverishment of the majority and destruction of the planet can be ended.

III. The Workhouse and Workfare

I will conclude the economic part of the piece with a discussion examining the similarities and differences between the current workfare system and the 1834 Poor Law Amendment which forced the poor into workhouses.

People have questioned the legitimacy of raising the old workhouses for the poor when discussing workfare. Unquestionably, there are differences between the two systems of dealing with the unemployed through forced labour. No one’s liberty in terms of where they reside is at stake in the modern version; workfare is outdoor relief in the sense that no one is forced into a workhouse to obtain it.

While acknowledging the loss of liberty by the poor, Bentham notes that being confined to a specific place arises due to many types of employment; it holds for those that work in the military and as domestic servants in that they are specifically tied to the physical places of employment. He raises that loss of friends and community would arise if they needed to take a job in another location. Finally, he also states that the loss of individual liberty occurs simply due to being part of society or to the existence of government (Bentham, op. cit., pp. 35-36). His justification for forcing people into the workhouse relates to the importance of maintaining control over the poor and the dispensation of relief ensuring that it was tied to labour. For anyone that has read Bentham’s Panopticon (http://cartome.org/panopticon1.htm), control is very important for Bentham; given that he is a liberal, his lack of trust in human nature is impressive and hearkens back to Hobbes rather than to later enlightenment thinkers:

“Where, in a house where no food can be obtained which is not administered by, or by order, of a master, the administering of a meal’s meat is postponed till the work in consideration of which it administered is done, whether the motive employ’d in this case be the nature of a punishment or the nature of reward, or of both together, is a question of words, not worth insisting on for the present purpose. […] What is more, it is consonant not only to the meaning, but to the very words of scripture, letter as well as spirit. ‘Even when we were with you,‘ says St. Paul to the Thessalonians, even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that, if any would work, neither should he eat.’ Is there any place in which the expedient is more certain in point of efficacy or more practicable than in a House of Industry? (Bentham, op. cit., p. 32)”

Following WWII, forced incarceration if one has not committed a crime (and being poor is still not a crime) is considered unacceptable on a moral level. Irrespective, there are strong similarities to the arguments that underlie and justify the two systems.

The most important similarity is the assumption that people are unemployed voluntarily; that humans are inherently lazy, dissolute, immoral. The fact that the vast majority of the unemployed are so due to lack of employment opportunities does not seem to matter to these people. A second similarity is the notion of deserving and undeserving poor which is being used to adjudicate those that are capable and incapable of labour. Finally, there is the insistence of the linkage between labour and subsistence. The modern system replaces the threat of being in a workhouse with loss of benefits to compel labour and it is done under a system of private employers being subsidised by the government while also gaining unpaid labour (see here for the amount of subsidy they obtain for getting people into work: http://www.cesi.org.uk/keypolicy/work-programme). In many senses, workfare creates far more problems for waged labour than the old workhouse system.

While in the 19th century, putting people in workhouses did not impact upon the general labour market in the sense of lowering wages, the modern version of forced labour in the US prison system and in workfare at least in the UK is directly impacting upon the market for waged labour.

In order to obtain benefits, unemployed people are being forced to work under the lie that this is training for work as they do not have the discipline learned by regular labour due to long term unemployment. As a result, companies are using forced labour instead of hiring new workers or granting overtime to those already employed. These forced labourers do not have the job protection of paid labour, they do not have the rights to refuse to work or not, the safety conditions afforded to paid labour are not guaranteed to these people. Given that the labour is unskilled, the argument that this is work training is absurd; how much training is needed to learn to stack shelves? Moreover, studies have indicated that being forced to work does not improve your chances of finding paid labour, so that argument is also fallacious (http://unfairworkfare.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/government-report-concluded-that-workfare-reduces-chances-of-future-employment/). In fact, it is worse than that, participation in workfare can reduce chances of finding paid work and it is extremely ineffective for those with multiple barriers (think of those with disabilities, single mothers, parents with children to support, and caring for extended families). A report commissioned by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) in 2008 concluded the following in terms of effectiveness of workfare programmes in the US, Canada and Australia conducted by Richard Crisp and Del Roy Fletcher of The Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR):

• Effectiveness in improving employment outcomes
  – There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even reduce employment chances by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers.
  – Subsidised (‘transitional’) job schemes that pay a wage can be more effective in raising employment levels than ‘work for benefit’ programmes.
  – Workfare is least effective in getting people into jobs in weak labour markets where unemployment is high.
  – Levels of non-participation in mandatory activities are high in some workfare programmes.
• Effectiveness for clients with multiple barriers
  – Workfare is least effective for individuals with multiple barriers to work.
  – Welfare recipients with multiple barriers often find it difficult to meet obligations to take part in unpaid work. This can lead to sanctions and, in the most extreme cases, the complete withdrawal of benefits that leaves some individuals with no work and no income.
  – Some states in the US have scaled down large-scale, universal workfare programmes in preference for ‘softer’ and more flexible models that offer greater support to those with the most barriers to work. This includes a greater reliance on subsidised jobs that pay wages rather than benefits to participants (http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/rports2007-2008/rrep533.pdf).

Forced labour is being compelled to compete with free waged labour and is being used to undermine wages and it is undercutting paid employment in a situation where there are larger numbers of unemployed people both due to the economic crisis as well as long-term unemployed due to the destruction of the manufacturing and industrial sectors.

This is creating serious inconsistencies and they do not only have economic implications, they have serious political implications for bourgeois democracy and the ideological legitimation of the system in the face of measures being used to support the capitalist system itself.

IV. A political crisis

The resort to forced labour is creating a political inconsistency with bourgeois democratic notions (or ideology) of liberty and rights of citizens. The notion of human rights is intimately connected to the development of bourgeois democracy; indeed, forced labour is inconsistent with Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees the following:

• (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
• (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
• (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
• (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a23).

In the European Convention on Human Rights, there is a clear divergence from the noble principles espoused above, but Article 4 prohibits slavery, servitude and forced labour with the following exemptions:

Article 4 prohibits slavery, servitude and forced labour but exempts labour:
• done as a normal part of imprisonment,
• in the form of compulsory military service or work done as an alternative by conscientious objectors,
• required to be done during a state of emergency, and
• considered to be a part of a person’s normal “civic obligations” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_Rights#Article_4_-_servitude).

It is the definition of forced labour (or unfree labour) that is important for the discussion of workfare and it is that which calls into question the introduction of workfare and also raises the issue of prison labour which is considerably more difficult to address due to civil law in countries where it exists contradicting human rights law:

“Unfree labour[…] is a generic or collective term for those work relations, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will by the threat of destitution, detention, violence (including death), lawful compulsion, or other extreme hardship to themselves or to members of their families.

Many of these forms of work may be covered by the term forced labour, which is defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as all involuntary work or service exacted under the menace of a penalty. Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, and related institutions (e.g. debt slavery, serfdom, corvée and labour camps) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour).

So theoretically, forced labour is forbidden by the EU convention on human rights. But if you think about it seriously, the linkage between labour and subsistence that underlies workfare (and for that matter, forced labour in prisons) is based exactly on the notion of people being employed against their will by threat of destitution and extreme hardship to themselves or members of their families. While people are not being forced into workhouses, their ability to refuse to work is prevented by their fear of destitution and hardship. Yet that has neither stopped signatories to the UN Declaration on Human Rights (e.g., the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK), or the UK which is a member of the EU introducing workfare.

Moreover, in many senses, the whole capital-labour relationship is based upon the fact that if people do not work they will be destitute in the absence of a social welfare state. In fact, the social welfare state itself broke the link between subsistence and labour; these policies which attempt to revive it on the backs of the poor and unemployed are reintroducing something which is essentially inconsistent with both notions of bourgeois democracy as well as the idea of free labour: forced labour. Even more so, the introduction of these policies in the context of both an economic recession and the existence of long-term unemployment due to capitalist profitability criteria demonstrates clearly both the political and economic crisis that we are experiencing.

The threat to paid labour of forced labour is clear to the British trade union movement which has strongly opposed workfare (http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-21054-f0.cfm).

“Unions believe that workfare is a failed policy. It exploits the people who take part by paying them much less than the minimum wage. It is unfair to other workers because it threatens their jobs and pay rates. It is unfair to other businesses if their competitors are being subsidised by the government in this way. […] All workers are threatened by workfare but the poorest and weakest are threatened most because it is at the bottom end of the labour market that workers in real jobs are most likely to find themselves in competition with those on workfare, as the Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Solow has pointed out (http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-21054-f0.cfm).”

For those who are tied to the rights and obligation perspective, the question arises whether labour is a civic obligation; that is, is your right not to be forced to labour counterbalanced by your civil responsibilities? But that raises the exact point as to whether your lack of labour is your choice or is a result of the economic system, such that your responsibilities are counterbalanced by the fact that there is no paid labour? If unemployment is involuntary as the vast majority of the unemployment actually is, can it be said that the unemployed are not fulfilling their civil responsibility or rather is it the case that civil society is actually failing in its responsibilities to them?

There is an even more fundamental question at stake which I want to raise here; this relates to the inalienable right to life (for human beings) which is independent of the question of rights and responsibility. If people are ineligible to get welfare benefits because they refuse to participate in workfare schemes are you condemning them to either slow death or forcing them to theft to ensure their lives? This will be addressed in more detail in part II of this series where Locke, for example, links the right to subsistence to the inalienable natural right to life in early bourgeois democratic theory.

References:

Bentham, Jeremy (1796) “Essays on the Poor Laws” in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Writings on the Poor Laws, Volume I, Oxford, 2001.

Marx, Karl (1867) Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy, Penguin, 1990.

As I entered the reception for the opening evening of the 5th National Worker Cooperative Conference (as compared to consumer cooperatives which most of us are more familiar with) I experienced a kind of euphoria.

After all, we had just finished the keynote speech by Congressman Chaka Fattah, a nine-term progressive leader from Pennsylvania, who introduced The National Cooperative Development Act into Congress. When passed, the bill will considerably improve government support for developing a cooperative economy here in the States and bring us more in line with Europe. Moreover, the Small Business Administration had just agreed to provide some funding for cooperatives and –wait for it — the UN had declared this the UN Year of the Coop! We had arrived! No longer were we a little side note of Utopian idealist organic food coops — we had gone mainstream!

The creation of a society based on democratic, grassroots cooperatives as an antidote to capitalism has been a dream many of us have worked toward. The cooperative movement began with the 1844 Rochdale cooperative experiment in England (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Society_of_Equitable_Pioneers), continued through the anarcho-syndicalist cooperative movement beginning in the 1880s (frequently associated with Emma Goldman and the IWW), was energized by the farmer’s populist rebellion in the 1930s in the United States, and in recent years the Mondragon model formed in Spain in the 50s (100,000 workers and 12 billion in assets) and the industrias recuparadas in Argentina in the 1990s. But for the first time– perhaps more through objective necessity as we globalize and shift from an industrial economy to a digital economy–it seems to be a vision whose time has come and is actually within our grasp.

So I was prepared to enjoy the kind of movement simpatico and joie de vivre that revitalizes all us activists when we get away for the weekend with like minded souls when we are in a period of radicalization– and, to manage, of course, to gather new information and contacts to bring back to the struggle.

After Rep. Fattah’s presentation — which he finished by noting that both he and his wife were active supporters of REI (Recreational Equipment Incorporated which is a world famous consumer cooperative geared to hikers, runners, and other outdoor types) — I sat down with a plate full of delicious organic and vegetarian food. Next to me sat an enthusiastic young blonde who just happened to be the treasurer of the finances at the Occupy Wall Street site. She was discussing an educational cooperative venture that she and her boyfriend were planning to establish on their farm in New Hampshire. They would bring inner city kids out for an educational experience combined with a practicum in farming to help counteract the decaying educational system in New York City. How wonderful I thought.

But be careful what you wish for. It was just at that point that the discussion started to get tricky. The first group of kids for their cooperative project, it turns out, were going to be from a charter school in New York City. The school was given $250,000 by Walmart. When I and another community organizer sitting next to me seemed taken aback that they would partner with the charter schools and Walmart, the woman acknowledged the problem but noted that they would not be in any way beholden to Walmart and they hadn’t been able to find any other way of funding the project.

Forget the fact that one of Walmart’s primary goals is to privatize education while still ripping off public resources (private charter schools, which have no accountability or oversight, are frequently housed in public school buildings at public cost, leaving less room and resources for the “less fortunate” who did not get into a “charter” school). Forget that this mirrors Walmart’s modus operandi in their stores where Walmart bad mouths unions as it accumulates its billions, yet pays it’s employees so little that the employees must apply for Medicaid and Food Stamps to survive (government programs which Walmart also bad mouths).

The young couple seemed unaware that by simply accommodating Walmart’s funding of the charter school model, they were furthering privatization of public education. Before we condemn the ignorance and gullibility of the young couple too much, we have to remember that Bill Gates, Obama and Al Sharpton support the charter school program as well. However, the young woman’s general lack of awareness of the struggle over Walmart and her obliviousness to the consequences of their choices did make me question how their coop project would fit in with the broader intent and principals of the cooperative movement.

Read the rest of this entry →

“When the madness is directed towards the likes of you and me,
Then our blindness may be lifted and we might begin to see.
For when others are afflicted, with the scourge that has no end,
Then we practice our denial — and the purging, we defend.

 

So the powers and the peoples of the nations of this Earth
Could be fully in connivance — or denial of the hurt…
And even, in our hubris, in our information age,
We are blinded by our bias — and at petty issues rage.

 

So the workers were divided and they voted Nazis in,
And so many were the workers, who paid dearly for this sin!
And we see now in Wisconsin, there’s a Walker riding high,
And there’s cash enough from coffers to propagate the lie.”
(excerpted)
Arjun Jalah

Sometimes you would give anything not to be right! When I started writing this diary three weeks ago, I predicted that Scott Walker would win the recall election for governor in Wisconsin. Walker, with unlimited corporate money, was challenged by a massive people’s movement when he outlawed most collective bargaining rights in what was usually considered a progressive state. I knew, with the certainty of a cynic that that much money would out-weigh people power. It was the fight between John Henry and the steel driving machine all over again. Yet, there I was, Tuesday night, praying that the people power would, in the end, win. Not. Walker beat Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate 53%-46%, winning by a whopping 6% points. As Ed of the Ed Show so colorfully pointed out, there was no way to put lipstick on that pig. Or as Chris Hedges had said a couple of weeks earlier: “We lost. They won.”

HOW DID THIS COME ABOUT?

Much of the blame was placed on the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 08-205 (2010), 558 U.S. ––––, 130 S.Ct. 876 (January 21, 2010) In this convoluted 5-4 decision designed to expand corporate rights and often referred to as the “corporations are people” decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot restrict most corporate spending in elections. Using several of the most treasured democratic protections to turn our own Constitution against us, the Supreme Court held the following:

 

1) prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations violates the First Amendment’s political protection of free speech. Because corporations are “groups of individuals,” the corporate form must receive the same free speech privileges as individual citizens. The court’s rationale for the Citizen’s United decision is based on the concept that a corporation, is an organization that acts, for legal purposes, as an individual or a “person”. “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” In a particularly inverted bit of logic, the Citizens United decision reinforced an expanded an earlier decision under the 14th amendment which guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law. The 14th amendment was originally passed to protect freed slaves after the Civil War. However, in this case, the Court argued that if we, the people, have free speech rights, then corporations, as “persons” must be given the same rights under the equality clause.

 

2) The Court, likewise, argued that independent expenditures are a form of speech, and limiting a corporation’s ability to spend money also limits its ability to speak. At the same time it overruled that portion of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, 540 U.S. 93 (2003) that upheld the restriction of corporate spending on “electioneering communications”. The Court’s ruling effectively freed corporations to spend unlimited money both on “electioneering communications” and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates (although not to contribute directly to candidates or political parties). Combined with the court’s decision to strike down restrictions on corporate spending in elections, this gives the corporations unlimited power in the sphere of communications which, next to finance and the military, is the dominant form of control in our modern society. If we look at the historical efforts of our society to provide an electorate with the necessary information for a free and fair choice, it is clear that the corporate “persons” are winning at our expense.

 

3) Finally the Court overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U.S. 652 (1990) which allowed a union’s right to advocate and contribute to political elections while restricting contributions of commercial corporations. In striking down this distinction, they argue that the First Amendment does not tolerate prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. This further blurs the lines between economic and political democratic rights in elections since a commercial corporation’s members often do not have voting rights and, when they do, the voting rights are based on the number of shares a shareholder owns whereas in a union voting is based on the democratic principal of one person one vote. The present court argued that Austin was based on an “equality” rationale – trying to equalize speech between different speakers – that the Court had previously rejected as illegitimate under the First Amendment in Buckley v. Valeo. It is here that we most clearly see the confusion between, or the merging of, the concept of individual human social rights and the concept of individualism in the economic sphere which is based on the accumulation of wealth. In Citizens United, the majority argued that the First Amendment purposefully keeps the government from interfering in the “marketplace of ideas” and “rationing” speech, and it is not up to the legislatures or the courts to create a sense of “fairness” by restricting speech.

 

4) As a secondary corollary to the concept that they couldn’t distinguish between types of corporations, they criticized Austin’s reasoning that the “distorting effect” of large corporate expenditures constituted a risk of corruption arguing that the government had no place in determining whether large expenditures distorted an audience’s perceptions, and that the type “corruption” that might justify government controls on spending for speech had to relate to an individual transaction, not a “general perception”. According to the majority, “there is no such thing as too much speech.”[19] The public has a right to have access to all information and to determine the reliability and importance of the information.” Additionally, they did not believe that reliable evidence substantiated the risk of corruption or the appearance of corruption.

WE ALL KNEW IMMEDIATELY THAT CITIZENS UNITED WAS ABSURD

As we watch the drama unfold, the vision of the behemoth contributions made by corporations competing with the contributions of small, individual donors is, indeed, an overwhelming thought that turns our most cherished beliefs in an individual’s individual rights, democracy and equality on its head.

If there was any question, that Citizens United would not unleash the corporate hoards loose to buy elections it was crushed by the empirical data after the 2012 primary results. Let’s just give one “general perception.” In the first 3 months of 2012, outside private contributors spent approximately 800 times more in the last six months than in all the previous election years since 1990 combined. Mitt Romney — the biggest spender of them all — won handily over his opponents although nobody seemed to like him.

The June 5th recall election of Scott Walker in Wisconsin was just the coup de grace. The failure of one the most popular grassroots people’s movement we have seen in years to recall Gov. Walker can be attributed, at least in large part, to the fact that Walker’s corporate sponsors from out of state (and a good portion from just two ultra right-wing brothers, the Koch brothers) spent 60 million compared to the populist movement’s 4 million.

There are a couple of caveats to this analysis:

1) Many folks also blame the rather “lukewarm” middle of the road approach of the Democratic Party’s DNC and the President for dragging down the support for the populist recall. But this, too, can be attributed to the influence of large financial donors to the DNC or the threat of the loss of such donations.

2) In a particularly paranoid view, the fact that Wisconsin has many of the “new” voting machines that can be hacked and where it is next to impossible to prove the fraud, there were “warning alerts” and some are arguing that the election was stolen. Again, it is the corporate powers that be that generally determine the types of voting machines we use and, as they say, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

THE ENEMY IN OUR OWN HEADS

In the end, the Citizen’s United decision was just the final nail in the coffin in a long line of government decisions that buried our aspirations for the democracy and individual freedoms promised us in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. But the worst betrayal may be the betrayal we perpetrate on ourselves. As we helplessly watch corporate money takeover our elections, we pretend it isn’t happening.

Oh, we might talk the good game about fighting back. We start talking about a Constitutional Amendment that “corporations cannot be persons” — but how would we get it passed when most of our congress people, at both the federal and state levels, who must pass or ratify such an amendment, are susceptible to, if not outright paid for, by corporate wealth?

Or we could target our corporations directly through our votes as shareholders. The fact is small investors do not hold enough of the shareholder wealth to make many inroads. And in large, multinational corporations the decision making is so removed from the shareholders that even where we might control a large block of stock (i.e., our pension funds) we have little or no control over the decision-making process.

Although more and more of us understand the fact that we live, not in a democratic republic (as we were taught in school), but under a plutocracy, most still suffer from what Richard Grossman and Ward Morehouse in Revoking the Corporation, call the “colonization of our minds”, the corollary of which is the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) phenomenon.

According to Grossman and Morehouse, the fact is there are alternatives to this “way of life”. But in order to change this society we must transform our own conditioned thinking from that of programmed consumer into liberated citizen. And this requires an understanding of how we have been “programmed.”

First, corporate person-hood is simply a legal construct conferred upon corporations exclusively under the law of the United States. Corporations were given certain rights and responsibilities similar to those of an individual so they could do certain economic transactions. However, there is a question about which rights afforded to natural persons should also be afforded to corporations as legal persons.

Much of the confusion in how to deal with the current corporate takeover is a result of the historical fusion between individual political rights described in the Declaration of Independence as the pursuit of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the role of an individual’s economic rights such as the right to private property, upward mobility and the accumulation of wealth associated with capitalism that were developing at the same time. It is interesting to note that Locke, who put forth the original bourgeois democratic enlightenment treatise of natural rights defined it as the pursuit of “life, liberty and property.”

Most of us are programmed to think of America as the land of the free, of democracy and opportunity. Much of that opportunity is economic as well as political. If we want free speech, we also harbor the belief that we, too, can become Bill Gates. If we want equality, we also want upward mobility. The American dream is signified by owning a home of our own. The dream of democracy ties Democracy and Freedom to the free market capitalist system. And we are reluctant to give up that dream. We aspire to be part of the great “middle class.” (Even the Wisconsin movement was defined as a “Middle Class” movement (which allowed the right wing to divide the “Middle Class” from the less fortunate members of the working class and might have been one reason for Scott Walker’s victory).

There is no denying that capitalism has, historically given many people the opportunity of upward mobility in its early stages. Over the years, however, the promise of capitalism as a system that provides freedom and democracy is withering. The United States in fact has the greatest disparity of wealth between the 1% and the 99% (to use the Occupy framework)and the least social mobility of any industrialized country.

Economic individualism is the flip side of our individual political or public rights. The role of individual capitalist competition, in the long run, does not result in greater freedoms. In its pursuit of profit, it results in winners and losers, a drive toward monopoly, the increased accumulation of private property in the hands of a few and unequal accumulation of wealth. A look at the history of corporations in the United States makes this clearer.

A HISTORY OF HOW CORPORATIONS ARE GOBBLING UP THE WORLD

British Crown Corporations began operating in North America with the start of European settlement. The creation of corporations expanded empire and made the aristocracy wealthy. Colonial anger and resentment against corporate power grew as the English Parliament introduced measures that protected trade by Crown corporations over that of local colonial merchants.

After the American Revolution sovereign power was allegedly transferred from a monarch to “We the People.” Of course, “We, the People,” was still, at that time, the merchant class and constituted only 10% of the population — excluding slaves, property-less people, people of color, women, etc. The corporate form, however, still had a certain utility for the merchant class in aggregating capital for large scale projects, which is why “the people” allowed them to exist at all. In 1819, the Supreme Court of the United States (Dartmouth College v. Woodward) recognized corporations as having the same rights as natural persons in the economic sphere to make and enforce contracts.

Of course the concentration of capital that goes along with the establishment of corporations also brings with it inherent risk for the populace. For this reason the formation of corporations was restricted to parameters set up by state constitutions and constrained by specific limitations in the state codes. The early 1800s frequently reiterated the fact that corporations could only be created for public benefit.

When we look at the history of our states, we learn that citizens intentionally defined corporations through charters–the certificates of incorporation. In exchange for the charter, a corporation was obligated to obey all laws, to serve the common good, and to cause no harm. Early state legislators wrote charter laws and actual charters to limit corporate authority, and to ensure that when a corporation caused harm, they could revoke its charter. Having thrown off English rule, the revolutionaries did not give governors, judges or generals the authority to charter corporations. Only state legislators (closest to the people) could charter corporations. Up to the mid-1800s:

•The amount of capitalization a corporation could have was limited.
•The corporation had to be chartered for a specific purpose — not for everything, or anything.
•The shareholders (even though it was still based on the amount of share, not a one person, one vote rule)had a lot more rights than they have today, for major decisions such as mergers; sometimes they had to have unanimous shareholder consent.
•There were no limitations protections on liability — managers, directors, and shareholders were liable for all debts and harms and in some states, doubly or triply liable.
•The states reserved the right to amend the charters, or to revoke them, even for no reason at all.
•Corporations had limited duration, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.They were not given forever, like corporate charters are given today.
•The amount of land a corporation could own was limited.

Still, as the 19th century matured, manufacturing in the U.S. became more complex as the Industrial Revolution generated new inventions and business processes. The favored form for large businesses became the corporation because the corporation provided a mechanism to raise the large amounts of investment capital large business required, especially for capital intensive yet risky projects such as railroads.

The Civil War accelerated the growth of manufacturing and the power of the men who owned the large corporations. Businessmen such as Mark Hanna, sugar trust magnate Henry O. Havemeyer, banker J. P. Morgan, steel makers Charles M. Schwab and Andrew Carnegie, and railroad owners Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould created corporations that influenced legislation at the local, state, and federal levels as they built businesses that spanned multiple states and communities. Beginning in the 1870s, corporate lawyers became bolder about using the Webster/Marshall theory that corporations could exercise the rights of their shareholders, arguing that as such they were entitled to some of the legal protections against arbitrary state action accorded also to natural persons.

In the late 19th century, railroads were among the most politically powerful corporations in the country as the corporate officers had to work with federal and state legislatures in order to obtain land grants for rights of way and the legislatures. One of the most egregious examples of railroad magnates exploiting the public coffers for private gain was that most of the land offered for free under the Homestead Act for poor landless farmers toward the end of the civil war was in fact gobbled up by the railroads.

As railroads increased their size, a number of conflicts between various states and the railroads began to surface. In four cases that reached the Supreme Court (94 U.S. 155, 94 U.S. 164, 94 U.S. 179, 94 U.S. 180 (1877) railroads tried to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment prevented states from regulating the maximum rates they could charge. These cases did not rely on just an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, but also on the Interstate Commerce clause. In each case, however, the Court based its decision on the Interstate Commerce clause. While the social contract has expended to many groups over the centuries, the corporations have also consolidated their power. In every case where the social project conflicted with the commercial project, the capitalist commercial project used its wealth to prevail.

Throughout the 1800s but especially after the Civil War, pressure from industrialists and bankers resulted in a handful of judges giving corporations more rights in property than human beings enjoyed. The biggest blow to citizen constitutional authority came in 1886. The US Supreme Court, in a statement that was accepted as part of the ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, that a private corporation was a “natural person” under the US Constitution, sheltered by the 14th Amendment which requires due process in the criminal prosecution of “persons.”

Following this ruling, huge, wealthy corporations were allowed to compete on “equal terms” with neighborhood businesses and individuals. “There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view,” Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas wrote 60 years later. Once corporations were legally defined as “natural persons”, they automatically were endowed with the same “Bill of Rights” as human beings, and so came to possess and then exploit with devastating consequences, the same “rights” of the freedom of speech, and the ability to participate in elections and lobby elected officials.

RECENT DECISIONS LEADING UP TO CITIZENS UNITED

In more recent decisions prior to Citizens United, a similar shift of citizens control to corporate control has been occurring in the communications sector, much as the manufacturing sector was taken over during the industrial revolution. In the more modern cases, a shift from legislative control to control through the Executive branch and its agencies and the courts, where corporate influence can more easily be applied, enabled the corporate takeover. Two examples are the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Rule.

For example, The Fairness Doctrine was a policy of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was, in the Commission’s view, honest, equitable and balanced. The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented.

In 1985, under FCC Chairman Mark S. Fowler, a communications attorney who had served on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign staff in 1976 and 1980, the FCC released a report stating that the doctrine hurt the public interest and violated free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. In August 1987, under FCC Chairman Dennis R. Patrick, the FCC abolished the doctrine by a 4-0 vote, in the Syracuse Peace Council decision, which was upheld by a panel of the Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit in February 1989.[13] The FCC suggested in Syracuse Peace Council that because of the many media voices in the marketplace, the doctrine be deemed unconstitutional, stating that:

“The intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of [the Fairness Doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters … [and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists.”

In August 2011 the FCC formally removed the language that implemented the Doctrine.

A similar fate was met by the equal-time rule which specifies that U.S. radio and television broadcast stations must provide an equivalent opportunity to any opposing political candidates who request it. This means, for example, that if a station gives one free minute to a candidate on the prime time, it must do the same for another candidate. However, there are four exceptions: if the air-time was in a documentary, bona fide news interview, scheduled newscast or an on-the-spot news event the equal-time rule is not valid. Since 1983, political debates not hosted by the media station are considered news events, thus may include only major-party candidates without having to offer air time to minor-party or independent candidates. Talk shows and other regular news programming from syndicators, such as Entertainment Tonight, are declared exempt from the rule by the FCC on a case-on-case basis.

IS THERE HOPE?

Ward Morehouse, speaking in Palo Alto this past January 29th, spoke of “The Seven Challenges” we face in order to get out of the mess we are currently in. While some of them seem to presume we can still control the actions of our elected officials by working inside the existing Capitalist Plutocracy, they are still worth some thought:

1. We have to come to grips with is how to overcome this colonization of our minds and to recognize that there are alternatives to a society dominated by giant corporations.
2. Our second challenge involves taking a lesson from the play book of the corporations who [...] have spent the last century or more consolidating their power and insulating themselves from meaningful democratic control. We need therefore to try to change a body of legal doctrine rather than fight case after case after case of corporate transgression.
3. Our third challenge is to resist the temptation for co-optation and accommodation and not to accept as “victories” those which leave corporate power unchallenged and intact.
4. Our fourth challenge is to recognize the myth of American democracy and to overcome the plutocracy with which we live. All societies have myths about themselves. Ours is no exception.
5. The fifth is to understand that we will never win in this struggle if we play by their rules because they wrote the rules.
6. Our sixth is to determine how we know when we really have won in the struggle against corporate power, and I would submit to you that we only really win when there is a fundamental shift in power from corporations back to the people where it was in the first place, and should be again [Can we really go back to regulated corporations like we had in the "good old days", long before we had global multinationals or must we move forward to some new formation?]
7. The seventh challenge is to take to heart the big lessons of 20th century history, and not to be discouraged by the challenges that indeed do confront us. It was said no where better or more eloquently than by Howard Zinn in one of his recent books, when he wrote that, “[t]he struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money, and who seem invincible in their determination to hold onto it. That apparent power has again and again proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, ingenuity, courage, patience. Whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Viet Nam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.”

Morehouse then went on to present tactics for establishing democratic control over corporations. [Some of which I think might also be tactics for a more far reaching evolution to a different economic system]. Here is an eleven-point program for doing just that:

1. We can start by revoking the charters of especially harmful corporations who have inflicted mass harm on innocent people. There are provisions for the revocation of charters in 49 of the 50 states. They have some provisions similar to that in the New York Business Corporation Law, Section 1101, which specifies that corporations that act contrary to the public policy of the state are subject to dissolution.
2. We can recharter corporations to limit their powers and make them entities subordinate to the sovereign people. For example by granting charters (as used to be the case) for limited time periods, requiring that there be a conscious, deliberate act of approval by communities and workers for corporations to continue beyond the initial time in which they have been chartered. For making corporate managers and directors liable for the harms done by corporations. (If this can be done through a referendum which we have in many states, instead of the state legislature, this might be a real possibility, especially if we only approve charters for corporations where shareholders have voting rights based on one shareholder, one vote.)
3. We can address what is a fundamental obstacle to democratic control over corporations, which is their sheer size. Many of you are well aware that the largest corporations today are larger than most nation-states. General Motors has gross income greater than the gross domestic product of Denmark. So we need to reduce the size of corporations by breaking them into smaller units with less power to undermine democratic institutions. For those of you who think this is a wild flight-of-fancy, I would remind you that as an issue in public policy, this has historical precedence in the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 which did just that: it said certain public utility companies will divest themselves because they may not be larger than a given set of criteria determined through a democratic process. (Maybe — but it woud be a much bigger struggle today with the degree of corporate control and a global economy.)
4. We need to establish effective worker and community control over production units in order to protect the “reliance interest”, an important, if not fully developed, legal doctrine which workers and communities acquire over time in the actions, the activities, and indeed the assets of corporations. This could be done in a variety of ways including prohibitions in the charter of the corporation in the future, prohibitions for the hiring of replacement workers (scabs in other words), requiring independent health and safety audits by experts chosen by workers in the affected communities, required voting rights in corporations based on one worker, one vote, and so on.
5. We can initiate referendum campaigns, or take action through state legislatures and the courts, to end constitutional protections for corporate persons.
6. We can prohibit corporations from making campaign contributions to candidates in any elections, and from lobbying any local, state, and federal government bodies. If you think this is off-the-wall, you should be aware that in the state of Wisconsin, up until a couple of decades ago, it was a felony for corporations to make political contributions. (Why do you think the right wing spent the last couple of decades buying Presidential candidates and making sure they got Supreme Court Justices who would pass Citizens United?)
7. We can stop subsidy abuse and extortion by corporations through which large corporations rake off billions of dollars from the public treasury. Please let us not call it “corporate welfare”. Welfare should be a positive concept. This is extortion and subsidy abuse and we need to stop it.
8. We need to launch campaigns to cap salaries of corporate executives, and tie them to a ratio of average compensation for production workers (say, five or ten to one).
9. We can encourage worker and community-owned and -controlled cooperatives and other alternatives to conventional limited liability profit-making corporations. They need not be the only game in town, in fact they are not the only game in town. But we need to work hard to expand alternative types of enterprises that will subject themselves to genuine democratic control.
10. We can prepare model state corporation codes based on the principle of citizen sovereignty, and begin the campaign for their adoption, state-by-state.
11. We can invigorate, from the grassroots up, a national debate on the relationship between public property and private property — including future value – and the rights of natural persons, communities, and other species when they are in conflict with those corporations. This whole subject of how we define property rights is at the heart of much of the accumulation and codification of corporate power. ←THIS IS WHERE I’M STARTING!

REFERENCES:
1. “Summary Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Docket No. 08-205)”. Cornell University School of Law. http://topics.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/08-205.
2. Liptak, Adam (2010-01-21). “Justices, 5–4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html.
3. CounterPunch, 4 February 2010, Chucking Precedent at the High Court
4. Syllabus : Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Supreme Court of the United States. “How Corporate Money Will Reshape Politics: Restoring Free Speech in Elections”. The New York Times blog. 2010-01-21.
5. http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/how-corporate-money-will-reshape-politics. Retrieved 2010-01-21.
6. Remsen, Nancy (December 8, 2011). “Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., offers constitutional amendment on corporate “citizenship”. The Burlington Free Press. http://blogs.burlingtonfreepress.com/politics/2011/12/08/sen-bernie-sanders-i-vt-offers-constitutional-amendment-on-corporate-citizenship/
7. Nader, Ralph (2010-01-22). “The Supremes Bow to King Corporation”. CounterPunch. http://www.counterpunch.org/nader01222010.html.
8. Sullivan, Kathleen (2010). “Two Concepts of Freedom of Speech”. Harvard Law Review 124: 143–177. http://www.harvardlawreview.org/issues/124/november10/Comment_7328.php.
9. Andre, Steven J. (2010). “The Transformation of Freedom of Speech: Unsnarling the Twisted Roots of Citizens United v. FEC”. John Marshall Law Review 44 (1): 69–127. http://works.bepress.com/stevenjandre/11/.
10. Ocean Beach Rag. July 6, 2011.
11. Movement to Abolish Corporate Personhood Gaining Traction. Boulder Weekly July 14, 2011.
12. Boliek, Brooks (August 22, 2011). “FCC finally kills off fairness doctrine”. POLITICO. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61851.html.
13. Rendall, Steve (2005-02-13).”The Fairness Doctrine: How We Lost it, and Why We Need it Back”. Common Dreams (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0212-03.htm. Retrieved 2008-11-13.
14. FCC Video, NBC Universal (1987) (“Today we reaffirm our faith in the American people. Our faith in their ability to distinguish between between fact and fiction without any help from government.”) “FCC 1987″; see Robert D. Hershey, Jr.,
15. F.C.C. Votes Down Fairness Doctrine in a 4-0 Decision, New York Times, August 5, 1987 [http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/05/arts/fcc-votes-down-fairness-doctrine-in-a-4-0-decision.html]
16. Robert D. Hershey, Jr., F.C.C. Votes Down Fairness Doctrine in a 4-0 Decision, New York Times, August 5, 1987
17. Gardner, Eriq (2 December 2011). “Anderson Cooper’s Talk Show Is a News Program, FCC Rules; The government regulators have determined the talk show qualifies as news and is thus exempt from obligations to giving political candidates equal air time.”. Hollywood Reporter. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/anderson-cooper-talk-show-269175. Retrieved 24 December 2011.
18. Smith, Bradley. “Corporations Are People, Too”. NPR. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112711410. Retrieved 2011-01-
19. Hartmann, Thom (2010). Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “”People”" –and How You Can Fight Back. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Http://books.google.com/books?id=zAmgOl5YT2QC.
20. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Corporate_personhood&oldid=487673157
21. Model Amici Curiae Brief to Eliminate Corporate Rights, by Richard L.
Grossman, Thomas Alan Linzey, & Daniel E. Brannen, 9/23/03
22. Revoking The Corporation, a discussion with Richard Grossman & Ward Morehouse, transcribed by rat haus reality press, 1996.
23. Richard Grossman &. Ward Morehouse, ASSERTING DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OVER CORPORATIONS: A CALL TO LAWYERS, The NATIONAL LAWYERS Guild Practitioner, volume 52, number 4, fall 1995, p. 101.
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/Call2Lawyers.html#coom1
24. If you aren’t sure Citizens United gave rise to the super PACs, just follow the money. By Richard L. Hasen|Posted Friday, March 9, 2012, at 2:56 PM ET
25. Berle, Adolf and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932.