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Why The Germans Didn’t Stop Fascism

August 18, 2018
democracy, history, politics, strategy
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In my lifetime (1940-so far, so good) the biggest historical question has always been, “Why didn’t the German people stop fascism?”

nazis-people2

Book Review: Erik Larson, “In the Garden of Beasts,” Crown, New York, 2011

When we meet people from Germany, we start looking for the right opportunity to, politely, ask them. When we read the histories, it’s what we want to know. “In the Garden of Beasts” relates the personal histories of the four family members of Professor William E Dodd, Ambassador to Germany 1933-37.

Worldwide attitudes toward the Nazis ranged from admiration to revulsion when Dodd moved to Berlin. Like most people, his family fell somewhere in between. Dodd felt that his role was to be an intermediary without strong bias. That changed over time and the course of this book.

Probably the most detailed account comes from vivacious daughter Martha Dodd. That may be because she wrote the most and lived the longest. It may also have been because she was more involved with more people and with people of more disparate political views. One of her lovers was a communist who worked in the Soviet Embassy; another headed the Gestapo, and there were several in-between.

Hitler had already been elected to high office before the Dodd’s arrived, and his popularity was already rising to fanatic levels. But he didn’t really consolidate all his power until the period that the Dodd’s experienced up close and personally. While they were there, he murdered some of his rivals and outlasted General Hindenberg, the only single person who could have stopped him.

Interestingly, Dodd had his detractors within the State Department all along. Especially after he began to condemn the Nazis, powerful Americans wanted him removed and finally had their way. His successor was still apologizing for Hitler at the end of the book. According to this author’s account, President Roosevelt supported Dodd’s view, but was forced to acquiesce in getting rid of him.

After Dodd returned to the United States, he toured the country to warn about fascism. Martha, too, worked against the fascists, but, like many others, she had to seek exile during the post-war witch hunt.

So, why didn’t the Germans stop Hitler? The best answer I got by asking came from a World War II veteran (their side, not ours) living in Dallas. He said, “The Nazis got people jobs.” Hitler came to power during the great worldwide depression. German unemployment was 25%. That’s why it was so easy for the relatively wealthy National Socialist Party to recruit young men into their Stormtroopers. After they took power, the Nazis started their great military building, which eventually overcame the worst of their unemployment problem. That’s a partial answer to the question, but not a fully satisfying one.

The real answer may never be found by asking individual Germans or reading history books. The real answer has to do with comfort zones, lack of understanding, lack of organization, miseducation, and lack of will. The reasons the German people didn’t stop fascism, even though they could see it, are the same reasons that the people of the United States have not yet stopped the trend toward fascism here. Let’s start asking about that!

–Gene Lantz

I am on KNON radio’s “Workers Beat” program every Saturday at 9 AM Central Time. Podcasts are on Itunes. If you want to know what I really think, check out my personal web site

 

What’s “Normal” in Economics?

August 7, 2018
democracy, economy, history, politics, unions
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Book Review:

Galbraith, James K “The End of Normal. The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth.” Simon & Schuster, New York, 2014. Dallas library 330.90511 G148E 2014

Some economists, and certainly those dominating the thinking in the labor movement, believe that the period 1945-1973 was “normal” and that our subsequent problems came about because of bad policies. Most notably, we blame Reagan, Reaganomics, and “trickle down” economics. Our intentions are the best, but our economic analysis is way wrong according to the last few economics books I’ve read, especially this one.

The postwar boom was not normal. It was an extremely unusual period of capitalist history during which the United States dominated the economic world. Capitalists reluctantly shared some of their largesse with a powerful and demanding labor movement. By 1973, it was pretty well over. What happened before and what is now happening afterward is normal capitalism: slow growth, rising inequality, international competition, and inevitable crises.

Some economists treat their discipline like a religion. In religion, God has a purpose for everything. He/She tends to restore balance in a world that makes sense. When things seem to go terribly wrong, God is just moving a few things around with balance and purpose His/Her ultimate goal. Religious people think that the universe has some kind of stasis, and everything within it has a natural balance that we will understand someday after we’re dead. “Farther along, we’ll know all about it. Farther along, we’ll understand why” as the song says.

This religious commitment to balance and purpose is contradicted by everything that happens. The universe has no balance: some stars collide with others, planets come and go. Our lives have no balance: we may be growing cancer cells right alongside the healthy ones.

Things aren’t balanced and purposeful. In fact, things aren’t even whatever we think they are. Everything is changing from one type of thing to another. The only “normal” is change. That’s true of economic systems as well. It’s not a religion, and there is no balance and purpose to be “restored.”

galbraithquote

Galbraith seems to know that, and he lashes the many conventional economists whose conclusions are tailored to suit the desires of their employers. You really have to appreciate Galbraith for that.

The author teaches at UT Austin. He’s a wonderful writer. Whether or not he’s a great economist, I suppose, will be revealed over the next few years because, unlike most, he does not believe that America will ever return to the growth period from around 1945 to the 1970s. He recommends that we adjust our policies for an extended period of slow growth. His recommendations are a lot like those of Bernie Sanders.

I wonder what he said two weeks ago when President Trump announced that growth in the 2nd quarter of 2018 had exceeded 4%? If they are able to sustain that kind of growth, then Galbraith was simply wrong, but that one quarter could easily be a fluke. I wrote him an email to ask.

Some of his more contemporary remarks, from January 2018, are on-line:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/economist-james-k-galbraith-isnt-celebrating-dow-25000-2018-01-08 He correctly predicted that corporations would not invest their ill-gotten gains from the December, 2017 tax giveaway. He says they will just buy back their own stock and drive up stock prices, and that is certainly what happened over the next 8 months.

This is a good book well worth reading.

OTHER REVIEWS:

‘The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth’ reviewed by Hans G Despain

Reviewed by Hans G Despainent

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James K Galbraith’s The End of Normal, recently published, is a spectacular achievement in political economy generally, as a philosophical critique of the practice of economics and public policy in particular, and for its comprehensive and totalizing explanation of global monopoly-finance capitalism.

…Galbraith contends that not only does financialization generate massive inequality and instability (see Galbraith 2012), but generates opportunities for colossal fraud. Galbraith contends we must “stipulate that the Great Financial Crisis was rooted in a vast scheme of financial fraud”

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18144111-the-end-of-normal

Today, four factors impede a return to normal. They are the rising costs of real resources, the now-evident futility of military power, the labor-saving consequences of the digital revolution, and the breakdown of law and ethics in the financial sector.

 

MY NOTES:

Pg10: That bastard Richard Fisher

17 He begins his tale in 1945

21 Effect of communism. At the last chapter, he gives an interesting summary of the economic collapse of the Soviet Union from being a great power to being a total bust

57 Financialization

64 Economists are like monks in a monastery. He handles metaphors very adeptly

67 Capitalism = perfection

68 Stochastic – it means “random”

99 Could this be an error? He says that no gain results from variable costs. Does he think profit comes from fixed costs?

100: Does he think surplus value is produced from energy? Business cycles are caused by technology. Tractors basically caused the great depression by supplanting all the farmers, mules, and horses. Anyway, he thinks resource costs are a big problem. He thinks technology is not going to save us.

164 Explaining the Great Recession: “…fraud took over the financial system because it was expedient to allow it.” The basis for growth ended in the 1970s.

Somewhere in here, he mentions that nobody cares if people move from California to Colorado. I think he’s pointing out that immigration within the Economic Union is a really big problem, but it’s easy within the United States.

222 Cutting Social Security would not help the economy, as they are just transfer payments redistributing wealth but not creating or destroying any

238 There are four obstacles to achieving high growth and full employment:

  1. Energy markets remain high cost and uncertain (this was 2014)
  2. World economy is no longer under the effective financial and military control of the United States and its allies.
  3. Digital technology replaces a lot more jobs than it creates
  4. The private financial sector has ceased to serve as a motor of growth

Pg 241: Why not live in a “no growth” world? He says that our store of capital would not get replenished so productivity would fall continuously

The Soviets were a great powerhouse by the 1960s, but they did not rebuild and replenish their productive abilities and, eventually, lost the technology race. Their production got more and more costly and less and less quality. After the government collapses, the economy really went to hell. GNP dropped by half, life expectancy dropped from 72 down to 58 (pg 259).

He doesn’t think cutting the working hours would be as good as just letting people retire earlier.

Picking on Piketty

August 5, 2018
economy, history, politics, strategy
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Book review:

Piketty, Thomas: Capital in the 21st Century, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2014. 332-041 P636C in Dallas Public Library

The library had to renew this book twice before I could finish its 577 pages. Like other books about economics, it is full of Greek symbols, formulas, graphs, and statistics.

inequality

Piketty claims to have accumulated more economic data than any work before him. His facts and numbers go back into the 18th century. His best data is from his home country, France, but he has a lot from U.S., Britain, Germany, Italy. A little data from other countries and a little data from other times going back to the Romans. This book shook the world. His information base is far more comprehensive than anything else I’ve seen or heard of.

It is difficult to argue against someone who has the data, so I won’t argue over facts. But I will argue against his interpretation of the data, and I will argue even more strongly against his suggestions for future action. First, a bit about what he says:

It was very gratifying to see that he doesn’t think that economics can stand as an independent science. It has to be combined with other disciplines, especially politics, to be of any use.

Piketty’s graphs show that the period from roughly 1914 to 1973 was very different from before or after. Inequality was rampant before, it’s rampant now, but it wasn’t so dire during 1914-1973. I’ll call that the abnormal period. Capitalism is now “normal,” that is, it is creating devastating inequality. Piketty asserts strongly that the best solution is a global tax on wealth, not for revenue, but to redistribute wealth and lessen inequality.

During the abnormal period, the author says, there were two world wars and a depression. Governments established strong central banks to deal with the world depression. To pay for their wars, they implemented progressive taxation, especially of income and inheritance. As for the cause of these developments and the subsequent lessening of inequality, Piketty just calls the wars and depression “shocks.”

Were “Shocks” the Cause?

That’s not how I interpret the abnormal period that Piketty revealed. Something else happened 1914-1973 besides a depression and two world wars.

I note that 1914 marked the upsurge of the workers movement worldwide, not just in Russia. In America, for example, socialists were being elected to office, including to the U.S. Congress. I also note that 1973 marked the Sino-Soviet split (Nixon’s trip to China) the beginning of the downturn for the USSR in particular and the worldwide workers’ movement in general. One book I read said that the American labor movement died during Nixon’s campaign for a second term (they didn’t support McGovern). At any rate, the American labor movement’s weakening was certainly visible by 1973.

Inequality was indeed lessened by progressive taxation during the abnormal period, but it wasn’t because of “shocks.” It was because the workers’ movement was waxing strong. During World War I, the Bolsheviks took power and inspired the world movement. During the depression, communists argued that the Soviet Union was the only untouched major economy in the world. After World War II, communists were politically strong because they had led the resistance movements in occupied territories such as France, China and Vietnam; not to mention that the USSR defeated Hitler.

Of course the big capitalist nations raised taxes and granted health care and retirement to workers during the abnormal period! In the face of the threatening workers’ movement, what else could they have done?

But by 1973, the workers’ movement was on the wane in the U.S. and elsewhere. At that point, capitalist nations began to take back what they had allowed, to further undermine the workers, and to drive the Soviets into insolvency.

What drives history?

To put it bluntly: the motor force of history is the class struggle, not various “shocks.”

Now, as for Piketty’s remedy for runaway inequality and eventual disaster: He knows, and says so several times, that his worldwide tax on wealth is not feasible. It would take far more transparency than capitalists will allow to even know who to tax and how much. To think that democracy can impose itself on the capitalist class is to assume that the workers’ democracy movement is strengthening and the capitalist power is diminishing, when Piketty knows the opposite is true.

As inequality increases, and it is increasing greatly, probably far more than Piketty could have predicted when he wrote this great book in 2014, then the power of the wealthy increases as well. They are not just piling up wealth; they are also piling up power. As long as they are in power, they will never allow Piketty’s pipe dream to come true. He knows that.

Disaster Lies Ahead

But Piketty’s assertion that inequality will continue to rise and will become intolerable is irresistible. He must be right. When this certainty becomes clear to everyone, that the rich are getting almost everything and the rest of us are moving close to starvation, the situation will indeed be intolerable. Only three outcomes are possible: devastating world war, fascism or revolution.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio 89.3 in Dallas every Saturday at 9 AM Central Time. Podcasts are available through the “events” tab. What I really think is on my personal site.

NOTES:

Uses several Latin and French terms:

A priori – “from before” used to mean that no proof is necessary

“Cadastral” (of a map or survey) showing the extent, value, and ownership of land, especially for taxation.

“Belle Epoque” – Period ending 1914

“a fortiore” used to express a conclusion for which there is stronger evidence than for a previously accepted one.

Pg1 (bottom) He says we need to regain control over capitalism. He’s going to tell us how by the end of this book.

13 Kuznet’s curve says that capitalist growth will even out inequality without any need for anybody to do anything. The market and invisible hand will care for us.

50 Beta = capital/annual income. Usually 6

52 (top) Economics cannot stand alone. Must be combined with politics and other kinds of studies before it yields useful knowledge

52 First law of capitalism Theta = rate of growth times (Capital/annual income)

Theta is capital’s share of national income

r is rate of return on capital

52 Karl Marx quite wrong. My question: Not all capital is invested

Pg86: “They decided to work less” – He ignores class struggle altogether!

87 on consumption. Does he realize that older societies produced and consumed agreat deal that never reached a market? They made their own clothes, for example.

Pg166: Beta = s/g =The 2nd law of capitalism

203 Corporations invented circa 1850

222 Steady rise in Beta and Theta

250: Middle “class” – he means income

270: Measurement is “never neutral.”

275 War & rent control mentioned but not USSR

279 “Income from labor.” I think he is including CEO pay. It’s interesting that he doesn’t seem to know that CEO pay is skyrocketing because CEO’s command the corporate boards that set CEO pay. In other words, CEO pay isn’t “labor,” it’s income from capital.

332 (bottom) CEO Pay

355 Fiscal Competition – nothing so far on class struggle, but I think it explains the first half of 20th century even though he attributes it to “shock.”?

358 Inequality causes political reaction

409 (middle) In the 1970s, people thought that inequality was defeated

423 “rent is not an imperfection”

439 tax on capital

471 “…it was the wars of the twentieth century that, to a large extent, wiped away the past and transformed the structure of inequality.”

why not the class struggle?

471 war, disaster, or Piketty’s global tax on wealth?

473 “The crisis of 2008 was the first crisis of the globalized patrimonial capitalism of the twenty-first century. It is unlikely to be the last.”

474 New instruments needed

475 graph of social spending (class struggle again)

484 Social mobility lower in U.S.

488 Privatizing Social Security?

497 Taxes growing more regressive. Tax competition mentioned over and over. Too bad he wrote this before the Republican tax giveaway of 2017!

500 Bolsheviks. Progressive taxes

509 International competition

514 “No hypocrisy is too great”

518 Capital tax not for revenue but for wealth redistribution

519 Top centile’s growth goes on indefinitely.

Transparency needed

521 How could this be done without a world government? It couldn’t and he knows it

529 Italian was voted out for having invented a wealth tax

534 He is against protectionism and says it creates no value. All this before Trump!

539 “Temptations of defensive nationalism and identity politics…” sounds like he was anticipating Trumpism

541 Public debt solutions: taxes on capital, inflation, austerity

Pg 558 his solution to European public debt is for all the EU to pool their debts and make a common solution. Utopian!

Pg 560 “…the Eurozone cannot do without a genuine parliamentary chamber…” more utopia

560: “Tax competition” used throughout the book. Described here as the various nations lowering their corporate taxes in order to compete with one another. I’ve been calling this “inter-imperialist competition” for years.

His solutions throughout the book are worldwide inter-nation solutions, when he knows that won’t happen. Also, he wrote this before the Brexit vote began a chasm in the EU. He’s assuming more cooperation between nations, not less as we are already seeing.

562: “…without such a European political union, it is highly likely that tax competition will continue to wreak havoc. The race to the bottom continues in regard to corporate taxes…”

566: He agrees with me about bond elections: “…debt often becomes a backhanded form of redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich…” The wealthy should be taxed instead of allowed to loan money and collect interest.

567 “…debt must be reduced as quickly as possible, ideally by means of a progressive one-time tax on private capital or, failing that, by inflation….”

569: his solution: Economic transparency and democratic control of capital. Neither one of which currently exists.

572: The right solution

574: “Political economy” is the term he prefers

577 (last page) “…economic and political changes are inextricably intertwined and must be studied together.” He prefers “political economy” to “scientific economics.”

The last line of the book: “Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.”

OTHER REVIEWS:

Synopsis: https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts

Piketty’s Inequality Story in Six Charts

By John Cassidy

March 26, 2014

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/05/04/thomas-pikettys-capital-summarised-in-four-paragraphs

The Economist explains Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarized in four paragraphs.

A very brief summary of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/05/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/

Why We’re in a New Gilded Age

Paul Krugman

MAY 8, 2014 ISSUE

http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-why-are-economists-giving-piketty-cold-shoulder

Boston Review: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder?

MARSHALL STEINBAUM

May 12, 2017

“his work on inequality is an agenda-setting and generation-marking intellectual achievement, potentially as explosive (albeit with a longer fuse) in academia as it has been outside of it.”

The Coming Economic Crash

July 25, 2018
democracy, economy, politics, strategy
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Book Review:

Thomas Hartman, The Crash of 2016. Twelve, the Hachette Book Group, New York,  2013

us-economic-collpase

If there really had been a crash in 2016, Hartman would have been considered a great genius. As there wasn’t, he ends up with some egg on his face. Further unfortunately for Hartman, some of the problems he points out were already reversed by the Trump administration, specifically tariffs and China-bashing. So his argument for the crash of 2016 is further undermined.

However, a ‘great crash’ within the present time frame would nevertheless redeem him and people would only say that he missed it a few years. The book is a good, exciting, read, but I would have to put it into the category of well-written alarmist narrative rather than serious economic study. Like all of the books written before Piketty (2015 in English) that I have read, they consider 1945-1979 “normal” and everything subsequent as “abnormal.’ I consider this wrong, and so does Piketty. The abnormal period was 1945-1979. Before and after that short “American century,” what happened and is happening is just capitalism.

Hartman puts most of the fault for the disastrous 1979-to-present period on mental states and subjective attitudes rather than historical and economic developments. FDR was a good guy, the “economic royalists” were bad guys with questionable sanity. In fact he calls them psychopaths. The rest of us are guilty of mental lapses, too, as new generations go through a “great forgetting” that causes us to repeat previous economic errors.

As Hartman doesn’t understand the cause of the present economic problems, he doesn’t have a very good handle on solutions, either. Some of his hopes are presently being carried out by Donald J. Trump and are not likely to bring long-term economic benefit to the populace.  He also proposes things that aren’t likely to happen given current trends. After the “crash of 2016” that he predicts, he wants us to reinvigorate democracy through election reform. He wants the labor movement to be encouraged by government. Most of all, he seems to want worker cooperatives to replace the giant corporations as the main economic engines.

How any of that could happen, Hartman doesn’t say.

some notes:

Pg15: Good quote from Grover Cleveland in 1888: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor. As we view the achievements of aggregate capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

20: The Business plot: General Smedley Butler blew the whistle on a plot to bring an army of 500,000 men into DC to oust FDR. The front man for the businessmen and banksters was Gerald MacGuire.

26: Moyers quote on plutocracy on 2011: “Our democracy is dysfunctional…. We no longer have a government of, by, and for the people– representative democracy. We have government by plutocracy– the rule of the rich for the rich by the rich…. Plutocracy has one purpose, which is to protect wealth.”

Pg34: Powell memo outlined how Republicans could take over. Lewis F Powell Jr in 1971 went to Nixon. Nixon made him Supreme Court Justice. His memo, written to the United States Chamber of Commerce just before his nomination, recommended a militant political action program ranging from the courts to the campuses. He wanted to undo the New Deal.  Powell called on corporate leaders to launch an economic and ideological assault on college and high school campuses, the media, the courts, and Capitol Hill. The objective was simple: the revival of the Royalist-controlled so-called ‘free market’ system. (page 37)

pg40 Roger Ailes prepared the way for Fox news misrepresentation

pg43: lobbying mushroomed. ALEC formed

44: CATO and Heritage foundation come out of Koch Brothers

48: Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United

52: “Trickle down” economist Milton Friedman advises the fascists in Chile. Terrible economic results

71: He credits FDR and “good “ politics for 1945-1979 good times. Unlike Piketty, who says it was the “shocks” of two world wars.

88: He is pro-tariffs. This is before Trump imposed them

93: Psychopaths. He says that banksters and other filthy rich are basically psychopaths. In fact, a lot of Hartman’s analysis has to do with mental states. He thinks that generations go through a “great forgetting,” for example, that causes us to repeat previous economic errors.

95: Getting sillier. He thinks madness is part of evolution.

96-7: Oligopoly

101: On China, he seems to be agreeing with Trump again. Lots of China bashing here

122: Tillman Act under Theodore Roosevelt stopped corporate electioneering

151: Corporations, especially Railroad Corporations, made many efforts to get legalization in Supreme Court decisions. They always lost until “Citizens United.”

207: He gives recommendations for after the crash of 2016. It’s all reformism of capitalism. He espouses value of co-operatives.

273: Author is described as a talk show host with several important books before this one.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on the “Workers Beat” talk show on radio KNON in Dallas at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. Podcasts are available under the “events” tab. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.

Workers and the Texas Democrats

June 23, 2018
democracy, elections, politics, strategy, unions
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I liked a great deal of what I saw at the Texas Democratic Party convention in Ft Worth on June 22, but not everything.

conv-laborcaucuscrowd

The first thing we attended was the Labor Caucus. Texas AFL-CIO President Rick Levy presided over a completely packed meeting with people standing three deep along the back and sides. I caught Levy’s opening remarks on “Facebook Live” where you can see them at https://www.facebook.com/gene.lantz.7.

Just about every critical candidate in Texas was there seeking union help. Levy could only recognize most of them briefly due to time constraints. The ones that he introduced to the podium were the most critical statewide candidates such as Lupe Valdez for Governor.

candidate-lupevaldez

I noticed at least two unions had bought ads in the Democrats’ brochure: CWA and UAW. The Texas AFL-CIO booth in the Exhibit Hall was abuzz with activity. They took polaroids of people posing in front of their big slogan, “I’m union, I fight, I vote!’ It has a “big fist” image, to show power and commitment.

Labor’s big impact on the Democrats was evident everywhere. It doesn’t mean that labor is in their pocket, it actually means the opposite. Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa likes to say that Labor and the Democrats are “joined at the hip,” but in truth labor’s activities are very much our own. In this photo, you can see Texas AFL-CIO President Rick Levy thinking carefully while Hinojosa speaks to the Labor Caucus.

conv-levy-gilbertohinojosa

The deep polarization in America is causing working families to support Democrats. Recent news reports show Republicans trying to implement $6 trillion in cuts that would affect working people, less than a year after their big tax giveaway of more than a $trillion$ to the wealthy. The Texas Republican Party’s platform, just finished June 18, is a kick in the face to working families, and especially to our children.

On the downside

In their exuberance, the first dozen or so speakers at the Democrats’ convention emphasized two main themes: immigration and gun violence. These are hot-button issues today, to be sure, but they are issues that the Democrats already own. The Republicans have generously donated those issues and those voters to the Democrats.

But what about fighting the corporate takeover? What about America’s three ongoing wars and attempts to coerce and undermine other nations? What about America’s disgraceful top-of-the-world prison population? What about taking concrete steps to end the health care hodgepodge and support Medicare for All? What about saving the state’s environment in the face of rampant oil well fracking and nuclear waste dumping? I didn’t hear those issues, except for some vague emotional appeals here and there.

The inescapable conclusion is that the Democrats are not ready to forego big corporate campaign donations any more than the Republicans are.

What will you do?

I realize that many of America’s best activists have adopted the age-old goal of trying to take over the Democratic Party. I hope they do, but history tells us that it isn’t likely.

Supporting working families, not candidates nor parties, is the way to go. It may be true that nearly all of labor’s candidates in 2018 will be democrats, and it may be true that an individual activist can be more effective short-term working directly for candidates than he/she might be while working for the AFL-CIO, but that would be a major long-term mistake.

The electoral arena is only one of many, and we must choose labor in every one!

If the goal is to make serious change, activists must recognize that only workers can do that. They are the only ones who can stand up to capitalists. A few years ago, one could not have been blamed for feeling that the AFL-CIO and unions in general were not rightfully the leaders of the working class, but that is no longer true and has not been true since 1995. The AFL-CIO today truly works for the entire class and strives to organize everybody.

That’s the team we should join!

–Gene Lantz

I’m still on KNON radio 89.3FM in Dallas at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. The “events” tab on the web site leads to recent podcasts. If you want to know what I really think, check out my personal web site.

 

 

 

 

When The Economy Began Failing

June 11, 2018
economy, history, politics
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Book Review:

Levinson, Marc, “An Extraordinary Time. The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy.” Basic Books, New York, 2016. Dallas Public Library 330.9045 L665E

keynes-quot-inflation

The unusual economic period was the third quarter of the 20th century, also known as the Post War Boom, or the Golden Era. That’s when many people made good livings and some made fortunes. The “ordinary economy” in the title is what we have now – basic capitalism where some still make great fortunes but everybody else is struggling.

He takes an international approach. He points to a few national economies that did OK while the majority foundered, but mostly he shows the similar problems that the wealthy nations suffered after 1973. His point of departure was the oil crisis, but it might just as well have been the failure of the Bretton Woods international financial agreement 1945-1973.

I particularly enjoyed the way Levinson deflated the claims of various schemes of government intervention. He quotes figures to show that none of the much-vaunted “new” approaches actually did much to help after 1973. Reaganism was just as big a bust as any other “new” theory. Actually, they weren’t even new.

His international approach is far superior to what we usually read in American newspapers and political campaign advertisements. They only talk about what happened in America without regard for world changes. His way is better. For example, suppose an economist said that a certain new technology should have greatly improved manufacturing production in America. Maybe the reason it didn’t is because some other country did it better or cheaper. That’s pretty much what actually happened to American manufacturing, not some mistaken priorities within our own economy.

What limits this economics book is its commitment to capitalism. He dispenses with the Soviet Union’s economic travails in two pages. The rest is about the major capitalist economies. Nowhere in the book could one even ask the essential question of economics, “If we can produce enough for everybody, then why isn’t everybody doing OK?”

The set of statistics most critical for Levinson is those on productivity. He says that the Golden Age was golden because of high productivity in the wealthy nations. The crisis that began in 1973 and continues now was marked by substantially lower productivity. If productivity could be restored to high levels, everything would be just fine, according to Levinson. At the same time, he offers no suggestion as to how that could be done.

You might as well say, and I think Levinson does say, in so many words, “The Golden Age was just a fluke. Misery is the norm.” I recommend this book for its open-minded analysis and despite its conclusions.

–Gene Lantz

I’m still on KNON radio 89.3FM in Dallas at 9 Central Time every Saturday. Podcasts can be found under the “events” tab. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.

Trade: Free, Fair, and Misleading

June 10, 2018
democracy, economy, environment, history, politics, strategy, unions
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President Trump is the champion of fair trade for American workers. Or is he destroying the hopes of all workers for a peaceful and beneficial world? Or does he even know what he’s doing?

me-nonafta

A lot of working families were won over by Trump’s promise to renegotiate so-called “trade” agreements and restore American jobs. People, including a lot of union people, are still hoping he will. Yesterday, he poked his finger into the eyes of several world leaders at the G7 meeting in Canada. He said he was representing American workers.

What’s “Fair,” What’s “Free?”

For decades, since the Clinton Administration at least, American unions have been campaigning on the slogan “Fair trade, not free trade.” We always say “We’re not against trade — we just want it fair.” But it’s been very hard for union leaders to resist xenophobia and isolationism, because those “isms,” — right along with nationalism and racism — are also against the trade deals that America negotiated since Clinton.

The people that knew what they were talking about presented the argument that the so-called “free trade” deals were only “free” for big transnational corporations — not for the working families in America or any other country. Big corporations received “freedom” to pay low wages and pollute, nobody else got anything. That’s why we opposed NAFTA and all the others leading up to the “Trans Pacific Partnership” that was still an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.

The people that knew what they were talking about actually favored trade deals if they included wage and environmental protection. But not everybody is so sophisticated. They hate the trade deals anyway. That’s why so many of them voted for Trump.

There’s a History to “Free Trade”

I recently read a complete history of Britain and found an interesting reference. When Britain “ruled the waves” and ruled the world, their slogan was “free trade.” From the time they defeated Napolean until World War I, the English favored what they called “free trade.” They didn’t , at least not immediately, necessarily open their own markets, but they wanted everybody else, especially their many colonies in Asia and Africa, to open theirs.

In other words, “free trade” meant, then and now, the “freedom” of one country’s corporate rulers to exploit everybody else. Another word for it is modern imperialism.

After World War I, and especially after World War II, when the United States took over world trade, corporations wanted “free trade” for the exact same reasons. But the “freedom” was always for the exploiters and never for the exploited, then and now.

Everything Ends

There are different ways to look at the Trump program on trade issues. Economists and pundits are arguing that he’s destroying the world and setting us back centuries. Trump and his supporters say he is restoring fairness. Xenophobes and racists are rooting for him, as they have all along.

But there’s another, more interesting way to look at Trump’s trade wars. American economic domination is coming to an end. It actually ended in the 1970s, according to some. Since then, international leaders have simply agreed to keep the system in place even though the United States is living on credit and has been for decades. The post-war system put in place by the United States after WWII has actually fallen apart. Donald Trump is just an opportunist trying to turn the situation to his own benefit.

A Real Solution to the Trade Wars

Modern nations were created by capitalism. Each nation is run by and for the bosses. Their economic and political decisions are made for the benefit of the dominant class — the capitalist class. That includes much more than trade deals and treaties. It also includes global pollution, war and genocide.

It is theoretically possible that the various governments, as presently constituted, could cooperate on trade in a way that would benefit the inhabitants of the various nations. But that’s only in theory. It has never worked that way because the inhabitants, us, were never in charge. We still aren’t, and there will be no solution until we are.

–Gene Lantz

I’m still on KNON radio 89.3FM in Dallas at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. The “events” tab on the web site leads to recent podcasts. If you want to know what I really think, check out my personal web site.

 

 

 

Economic Dreams and Dreamers

May 31, 2018
economy, history, politics, strategy
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Book Review: Barlett, Donald L, and Steele, James B. “The Betrayal of the American Dream.” Public Affairs, NY, 2012 Dallas library 330.973 B289B 2012

mlk-quot-capitalism

If recent economic developments have not already terrified you, this might be a good book to absorb. It is very much like “Runaway Inequality,” the book promoted by the Communications Workers of America that I reviewed earlier.  It has some of the same dire warnings and suggested solutions as the classes that the AFL-CIO conducted under the name “Common Sense Economics.”

The authors really hate “free trade,” tax giveaways to the rich, deregulation, or capitalist-directed globalization.

Here is the message in a nutshell: “Something terrible happened in America in the 1970s. Since then, virtually all new economic developments have been bad for the working people and crazy good for the very rich. Inequality is rampant. We need to bring back some of the more reasonable practices that were in place before the disaster struck.”

In my review of “Runaway Inequality,” I pointed out that our recent period isn’t the odd one. The odd one was the third quarter of the 20th century. The reasonably good times when some of the productivity gains streamed into workers’ paychecks were not normal. They were just weird.

Today, when the capitalists grab everything in a runaway train ride to oblivion, that’s what’s normal. Trying to go back to the practices of the 1950s is a lot harder than it looks, because the ruling rich are dead-set against it.

Why weren’t the rich dead set against equitable economic practices in 1950? I can think of at least three good explanations. 1) They ruled the world. They had almost no international competition because they had destroyed every other country during the war. 2) American labor was very strong after a tremendous upsurge 1935-1947. 3) The Soviet Union was still seen as a viable alternative to capitalism, and it was important to buy and/or destroy any pro-Soviet sentiment. None of those things were true in America by the time Ronald Reagan was elected.

Even though this book has great reporting on economic events, and even though it has very intelligent prescriptions for making economic things the way they used to be, I don’t think their hopes for the future are likely to happen. The book is great at explaining, but not so useful as a guide to action.

Actually, I began to be skeptical in the introductory pages when they said, “…we define the ‘middle class’ strictly by income….” They could have just said “middle income” instead of “middle class.” The problem with trying to rally middle-income people is that they aren’t really a class. A class is defined by political interests, and middle-income people are all over the map in their interests. Some of them are workers, some of them are lawyers, some of them are trust fund babies, some of them are shopkeepers. 

If someone is serious about making change, they need to start thinking about the working class.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on radio KNON FM89.3 in Dallas at 9 AM central time every Saturday. Podcasts can be found from the “events’ tab on the web site. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.

Solidarity, Far & Wide, at Exxon Protest

May 30, 2018
environment, politics, strategy, unions
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About 25 people from all over Texas and three guys from Australia protested Exxon/Mobil’s shareholder meeting in Dallas on May 30.

exxon-australia

The sometime biggest, and sometime second biggest, corporation in the world has its headquarters right outside Dallas. They hold their annual shareholders’ meetings in the luxurious Meyerson Symphony Hall downtown. Across the street, labor and environmental activists revealed corporate crimes to newspersons and the world at large.

The surprise group came from Victoria’s Gippsland Basin, Australia, where Exxon has 23 offshore installations. Their spokesperson, Troy Carter, spoke on Facebook Live for seven minutes. He said that 230 members of the Australian Workers Union and the Electrical Trades Union were terminated 343 days earlier. The next day, they were offered their jobs with a 40% pay cut! They have been protesting every day since.

The Australian’s printed materials were meant to explain to Exxon stockholders that the corporation was spending a lot more on union busting than it would have cost them to keep their well-trained workforce. But the corporation would not let them into the symphony hall; consequently they had to disseminate their message broadly.

In the United States, the Australian’s tour is being helped by the United Steelworkers of America. The Australians plan to meet with Dallas AFL-CIO leader Mark York before heading to Austin to talk with Texas AFL-CIO leaders. Their Texas tour will end in Houston, where there are many petrochemical workers.

Speakers talked about the danger to our planet from fossil fuels. A woman from Corpus Christi, on the Texas coast, said that her organization was trying to stop Exxon from building the biggest plastics factory in the world. “Do you want more plastic in your oceans?” “Do you want more plastic in your air?” “Do you want more plastic in your bodies?” she asked.

A man from Waco, in Central Texas, talked about special environmental problems caused by Exxon in his hometown.

Herb Keener of Communications Workers 6215 and Gene Lantz of United Auto Workers Local 848 spoke for the “blue” section of the “blue/green” (labor/environmental) alliance. Keener’s talk was captured on Facebook Live. He mentioned that he expected Exxon to follow other major corporations in spending their windfall from last December’s giant tax giveaway by purchasing their own stock. These financial maneuvers enrich stockholders without any benefit to employees nor to the general economy.

The protest had a long list of sponsors: 350 Dallas, Society of Native Nations, Dallas Peace and Justice Center, CodePink Dallas, Communications Workers of America/CWA Local 6215, Dallas Sierra Club, Downwinders At Risk, Dallas Palestine Coalition, Pax Christi Dallas, Our Revolution North Texas, Texas Drought Project, Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS), Solidarity Texas – Dallas Chapter, System Change Not Climate Change, Veterans For Peace North Texas, Waco Friends of Peace and Climate, Texas Coalition for Environmental Awareness, and more.

–-Gene Lantz

I’m still on KNON radio 89.3 FM in Dallas at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. Podcasts are available from the “events” tab on the site. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.