Pubic hair removal has serious consequences

Shaving your pubic hair has risks

When was war declared on pubic hair? It must have happened sometime in the last decade because the amount of time, energy, money and emotion both genders spend on abolishing every hair from their genitals is astronomical.

The genital hair removal industry, including medical professionals who advertise their specialty services to those seeking the “clean and bare” look, is exponentially growing.

But why pick on the lowly pubic hair? It has something to do with cultural trends spawned by bikinis and thongs, certain hairless celebrities and a desire to return to childhood

Is it a misguided attempt at hygiene or being more attractive to a partner? Are we so naïve as to be susceptible to fashion trends and biases?

It is a misconceived war. Long ago surgeons figured out that shaving a body part prior to surgery actually increased rather than decreased surgical site infections.

No matter what expensive and complex weapons are used [razor blades, electric shavers, tweezers, waxing, depilatories, electrolysis] pubic hair, like crab grass, always grows back and eventually wins.

In the meantime, the skin suffers the effects of the scorched battlefield.

Pubic hair removal naturally irritates and inflames the hair follicles left behind, leaving microscopic open wounds. Frequent hair removal is necessary to stay smooth. But it causes regular irritation of the shaved or waxed area.

When that irritation is combined with the warm moist environment of the genitals, it becomes a happy culture media for some of the nastiest of bacterial pathogens.

These include roup A streptococcus, staphylococcus aureus and its recently mutated cousin methicillin resistant staph aureus (MRSA).

There’s an increase in staph boils and abscesses. Incisions have to be made to drain the infection, resulting in scarring that can be significant. It is not at all unusual to find pustules and other hair follicle inflammation papules on shaved genitals.

Constant pubic hair removal can cause cellulitis (soft tissue bacterial infection without abscess) of the scrotum, labia and penis from the spread of bacteria from shaving or from sexual contact with strep or staph bacteria from a partner’s skin.

Some clinicians find that freshly shaved pubic areas and genitals are also more vulnerable to herpes infections due to the microscopic wounds being exposed to virus carried by mouth or genitals. There may be vulnerability to spread of other STIs as well.

Pubic hair provides a cushion against friction that can cause skin abrasion and injury. It’s the visible result of puberty. Surely something to be celebrated.

Why Gender Inequality Exists; What Conservatives Don't Want You to Know!

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The True Reason For Women's Oppression

(hint, it's not biological)

With the current Republican, 'War on Women' being waged, this article seems timely. Often you will hear, amongst the many right-wing advocates, the need for a return to, traditional, values; almost always patriarchal in nature.
They often argue that the inferiority of women arises out of the biological dictations of nature. However, there is no evidence of this, when we explore the earliest signs of women's oppression in ancient society.

In fact, the patriarchal society arises out of an ideology and a class system. Ultimately women's oppression became a natural form of societies following the patriarchal function (note: form follows function).

Women's oppression began when ancient societies shifted from horticulture (a communal based method of farming) to agriculture (which became a more individual based system of farming). The important thing to note here, is the shift from communal property, towards individual property. And by property, I do not mean that private property did not exist in horticultural societies (because it did), but rather, the private ownership over the major sources of production (primarily food production).

I think it's high time we began bringing back the classics. I strongly suggest everyone read Friedrich Engels'  The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. A sample of the preface by Pat Brewer is included below,

The shift into intensive agriculture both for food and secondary products became increasingly important. Men abandoned hunting and were absorbed into the new tasks in agriculture and herding.
This shift was also characterised by social and economic divisions which were much more significant than previously — divisions of wealth and poverty as well as land ownership.
Ehrenberg outlines five significant factors and implications of this shift.7
1. Once large-scale herding was established then cattle-raiding as a variation of hunting developed. This was the origin of warfare. For the first time there existed ownership of a resource which was both worthwhile stealing and easy to steal.
2. Individual plough agriculture heralded the shift in gender control of farming. Men controlled the agriculture and herding and women spent more time in food preparation, making craft products like textiles and child rearing.
3. Although less land was need for the same amount of production than horticulture, plough agriculture is far more labour intensive especially where the land is of poor fertility and the question of population growth pressured the most arable land available. Therefore women need to produce more children for more workers and this would put more emphasis on what was seen as their major role. This would also lead to greater value beginning to be put on male children as women withdrew from farming activities and contributed less to the daily production of food which had been their major role and the basis of their equal social status.
4. This had implications for the social organisation of communities and a shift from matrilinial and matrilocal organisation to patrilineal and patrilocal organisation which laid the basis for the replacement of the clan system by individual and husband-headed family units. Male farmers and herders would teach their sons the necessary skills and techniques in the process of intensive farming. This would pressure the inheritance through sisters’ sons of the matrilineal system. In women-dominated horticulture, women teach their daughters who stay with them so inheritance is not a problem. In horticulture property is communally owned and less tools and equipment is needed therefore there is less at stake in inheritance. The dominance of men in production of food and secondary products becomes a source of contradiction to matrilineal and
matrilocal systems of social organisation. Pressure builds up on communal ownership when communal methods of collective labour are broken down by the more individual labour of men in plough farming and herding.
5. Large increases in related tasks and the growth in the range of material possessions through intensive farming and food preparations over time leads to craft specialisation and exchange. In the first instance these were part of the normal range of settlements but given the time and energy involved and the growth of food surpluses, specialisation and exchange occurred, increasing the division of labour.
Trade and commodity exchange were mainly carried out by men on behalf of the household or clan. Increasingly this would put pressure on them to subsume the products of their own agricultural work with the products of the household and would add to the tendency to shift to individual ownership and control over all products.
Material possessions and inheritance led to accumulation generationally which increased wealth and social hierarchy of class, status and power. The wealthy became powerful by lending to poorer clan families who in return gave services such as labour or combat duties. The divide between wealthy and poor widened with the poor becoming more indebted and having less time to spend in the production of their own subsistence. This context sets the framework where people as well as products, animals, goods and land become objects of value for exchange. In this context children or women could be given for labour or reproduction to pay off obligations incurred by the poor.

So while Engels’ theory has had some of its assumptions shaken by the expansion of evidence available today, the overall thesis of a social explanation of the oppression and exclusion of women stands the test of time and evidence well.
A Marxist explanation of the social development of private property and the oppression of women makes sense of the data. There is no evidence to back up biological determinist theories, nor do they rely on evidence. Such theories are ideological, given credence in order to distort, undermine and discourage attempts to eliminate gender inequalities.
It is extremely useful for anyone who is committed to the elimination of gender and class inequality to understand the social basis for such inequality. Engels’ classic work is essential in developing such an understanding. It helps show us the way to advance today’s struggles and move ahead to the liberation of women and society.

It's funny to think but, after reading this, you can't help but just see this theory emphasized and reenforced in just about every traditional social, religious, economic, way of living.

Until then, do all you can to share this book with as many people as you can.

A Religious Look at the Failed Blunt Amendment

The Blunt Amendment has failed, thankfully. It was a bill, sponsored by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo), to provide for employers to deny their employees healthcare coverage costs based on religious moral objections.
At first, the bill would have only applied to religious based employers, but Republicans later demanded that it be made to apply to any employer, religious or no, who had a moral objection to paying for any medical costs they found objectionable.

The discussion focused mainly on how the bill would allow an employer to deny a woman access to contraception, which was initially how the entire thing got started, when a Catholic employer had objections to paying its employees' medical costs for contraception. Though, while such a topic was justified, it was also just a little but narrow, because technically, the bill would've allowed any employer to deny any kind of medical coverage to any of its employees for any moral objection.

So, now that the bill has been defeated, we can all breath just a little bit easier.

But for any of you out there with strong moral convictions who may be wondering how to resolve the mental conflict, some words of thought for you,

As an employer it is absolutely none-of-your-business to know what an employees medical expenses are going toward. Nor are you accountable for what an employee pays for with their money/medical insurance. Even if the employee chooses to use their medical insurance for something you find objectionable, you cannot be held responsible for what someone else does in their own private life. Furthermore, once the employee has submitted their labor, all that money is now technically theirs and no longer yours because they've earned it. So, in a way, it is really the employee who is paying for the medical insurance, and not you, because the employee has earned that medical insurance with their labor. Ergo, what they do, with their money, and their insurance, is none-of-your-business.

More reading here,
 Employment-Based Medical Insurance and Ethical Concerns

The Bourgeois Dictatorship Grows Increasingly Insecure

What the, "war on terror" really means is,

'Look and anyone but me.'

 
Third (Communist) International

1. Faced with the growth of the revolutionary movements in many countries, the bourgeoisie and their agents among the workers are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defense of the rule of the exploiters.
Condemnation of dictatorship and defense of democracy are particularly prominent among these arguments. The falsity and hypocrisy of this argument, relentlessly repeated by the capitalist media are obvious to all who refuse to betray the fundamental principles of socialism.
2. Firstly, this argument employs the concepts of ‘democracy in general’ and ‘dictatorship in general’, without posing the question of the class concerned. This non-class or above-class presentation, which supposedly is popular, is an outright travesty of the basic tenet of socialism.
Namely, its theory of class struggle, which socialists who have sided with the bourgeoisie recognize in words but disregard in practice. For in no civilized capitalist country does ‘democracy in general’ exist; all that exists is bourgeois democracy.
And its not a question of ‘dictatorship in general’, but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, i.e., the proletariat, over its oppressors and exploiters, i.e., the bourgeoisie, in order to overcome the resistance offered by the exploiters in their fight to maintain their domination.
3. History teaches us that no oppressed class ever did, or could, achieve power without going through a period of dictatorship, i.e., the conquest of political power and forcible suppression of the resistance always offered by the exploiters – a resistance that is most desperate, most furious, and that stops at nothing.
The bourgeoisie, whose domination is now defended by the socialists who denounce ‘dictatorship in general’ and extol ‘democracy in general’, won power in the advanced countries through a series of insurrections, civil wars, and the forcible suppression of kings, feudal lords, slaveowners and their attempts at restoration.
In books, pamphlets, congress resolutions and propaganda speeches, socialists everywhere have explained thousands upon millions of times to the people the class nature of these bourgeois revolutions and this bourgeois dictatorship.
That is why the present defense of bourgeois democracy under cover of talk about ‘democracy in general’ and the present howls and shouts against proletarian dictatorship under cover of shouts about ‘dictatorship in general’ are an outright betrayal of socialism.
They are, in fact, desertion to the bourgeoisie, denial of the proletariat’s right to its own, proletarian, revolution, and defense of bourgeois reformism at the very historical juncture when bourgeois reformism throughout the world has collapsed and the war has created a revolutionary situation.
4. In explaining the class nature of bourgeois civilisation, bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system, all socialists have expressed the idea formulated with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels.
The most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists.
There is not a single revolutionary, not a single Marxist among those now shouting against dictatorship and for democracy who has not sworn and vowed to the workers that he accepts this basic truth of socialism.
But now, when the revolutionary proletariat is in a fighting mood and taking action to destroy this machine of oppression and to establish proletarian dictatorship, these traitors to socialism claim that the bourgeoisie have granted the working people ‘pure democracy’, have abandoned resistance and are prepared to yield to the majority of the working people.
They assert that in a democratic republic there is not, and never has been, any such thing as a state machine for the oppression of labour by capital.

 

Feminism Has Been Hijacked by The Bourgeois!

Feminism crushes workers, identifying freedom with paid labor.

by Hester Eisenstein

And, by identifying freedom with paid work, mainstream feminism offered the perfect cover to multinational corporations exploiting women’s labor in free trade zones.

In short, feminism became the language of capitalist modernization.

Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World, by Hester Eisenstein weaves a compelling account of how the central ideas of “hegemonic feminism” have legitimized the corporate capitalist assault on the working class in the United States and on small farmers and workers, both urban and rural, in the global South.
In this way, she argues, mainstream feminism has served as unwitting handmaiden to the capitalist class. Situating her analysis of mainstream feminism in a broader context of the economics of capitalist globalization, Eisenstein connects changes in the gender order to the rise of neoliberalism.
By hegemonic feminism, she means that certain liberal feminist ideas have become part of the “commonsense” of U.S. culture. In particular, she argues, the notion that paid work, in itself, represents liberation for women is widely accepted.
Second-wave feminism included a strong tradition of socialist/anarchist feminism, third-world and women of color feminism, as well as radical feminism.
But the dominant ideas of the movement emphasized individual achievement and the possibilities for self-actualization inherent in the competitive, free-for-all marketplace and political system.
Liberal feminism addressed many different issues, but focused overwhelmingly on women’s right to compete with men on equal terms in the labor market.
While purporting to represent all women, mainstream feminism has primarily advanced the interests of women with higher education, so that after forty years of feminist activism, there is now an enormous class divide among women workers.
To understand how and why this has happened, Eisenstein traces the history of feminist ideas and politics in the context of the fundamental restructuring of the global economy and the rise of the neoliberal political order.
Taking globalization as the framework for describing this “sea change” in the world capitalist political economy, Eisenstein identifies deindustrialization, the rise of export processing zones in the global South.
Also, the growth of the service sector, the explosion of the financial sector, and the employers’ offensive against unions as key to the transformation of women’s relation to waged labor.
In the North, globalization entailed a precipitous decline in men’s wages, marking the end of the “family wage” for men who had often provided sole financial support in traditional male breadwinner marriages. At the same time, the rise of the service economy opened up a huge demand for low-wage, female labor.
In the South, the “new enclosure” movement threw women into an expanding labor market. Insofar as mainstream feminism had lauded paid employment for women as a route to escape the oppression of patriarchal marriage, feminism in the United States helped to create a new pool of labor that capitalist employers could use to cut costs.
Women’s willingness to enter the workforce in massive numbers allowed corporations to resist the pressure for wage increases.
And, by identifying freedom with paid work, mainstream feminism offered the perfect cover to multinational corporations exploiting women’s labor in free trade zones.
In short, feminism became the language of capitalist modernization.

Porn and Capitalism, We All Sell Ourselves For Money

...just a little.

Exploitation & Porn reflect our society

By Sadie Ryanne.

Mainstream porn is exploitative and degrading. But it’s more complicated than that.

We should be focused on dismantling a society that forces us to sell ourselves, not one particular industry within that society – especially an industry that is currently (for better or worse) the livelihood for some of the most vulnerable people in our culture

A few months ago I signed up for a workshop for sex worker activists at HIPS and presented with the Red Umbrella Project.

It’s called “Personal Storytelling for Social Change” and encourages sex workers to tell their/our stories in the face of widespread ignorance about the realities of sex work.

I see it as claiming space within a dialog that is overwhelmingly dominated by non-sex workers, especially white, middle class, cis [on the same side] Christians and feminists.

So, I was thinking about what I would say about my experience in the industry. Then, my Facebook displayed an advertisement for an organization called “Porn Harms.”

It’s just another group dedicated to exposing the negative impact of porn on women (presumably by perpetuating sexist ideas) and men (presumably by degrading their morality/masculinity).

The website is full of questionable research about how porn is addictive and obligatory appeals to how it “destroys families” and “corrupts children.”

Can porn perpetuate sexist/racist/cissexist/transphobic ideologies? Absolutely.

Is most porn ethically bankrupt? Of course.

Can it be fun and empowering? Sometimes.

Some sex-positive activists — particularly relatively better-off ones who do sex work purely by choice — focus on this last one.

They talk about how porn can be reclaimed, and even make anti-oppressive porn that is by and for female, queer, and trans people. (Can you tell I had a subscription to Crash Pad?)

I think it’s amazing that we have stuff like Doing it Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project working to portray trans women’s sexuality in a realistic way, and not based only on some cis guy’s fantasies.

We desperately need more of that. You should probably buy that movie, and then go make your own. (If you want to.)

But the reality is that a lot of mainstream porn is exploitative and degrading. A lot of people do it purely for money. If we only defend porn that is understood as “queer” or “empowering”, we still leave ourselves open to attack from the right and from anti-porn feminists.

If pro-porn activists only focus on queer/liberating porn, the right’s accusations about mainstream porn (and the people who work in it) will go unchallenged.

If we don’t speak explicitly about mainstream porn (the oppressive, cis supremacist kind), they will keep dominating the discourse on this type of porn.

And by extension, the people who depend on it for a livelihood. People who have worked in mainstream porn should be allowed to tell the story from our points of view.

So, yes, mainstream porn is exploitative and degrading. But it’s more complicated than that.

This got me thinking about other shit I’ve done to survive under a capitalist economy. I would say all of it is exploitative and degrading in some way or another.

Under a capitalist economy, we’re all forced to sell ourselves somehow. Judging or focusing on one group of marginalized and oppressed people (a) makes no sense and (b) perpetuates the harm done to them.

The same moral condemnation used against porn is directed at prostitution and other forms of sex workers, who often have it a lot harder than people like me who aren’t working dark alleys with anonymous strangers at night.

Porn performers have to deal with stigma and certain levels of fear, while street-involved sex workers face the brunt of physical violence. (The contrast is no accident, by the way. Porn is legal and regulated.

“Prostitution” is criminalized. Abusive photographers can be reported. Abusive pimps get away with it precisely because the cops are just as abusive.)

But it is the same whorephobia underlying both kinds of oppression. The prudish voices that condemn porn are usually the same voices (even the “feminist” ones) decrying the “moral depravity” of prostitution.

And that’s the idea behind the criminalization of prostitution: policies that put more sex workers on the streets, behind bars and in danger.

We should be focused on dismantling a society that forces us to sell ourselves, not one particular industry within that society — especially an industry that is currently (for better or worse) the livelihood for some of the most vulnerable people in our culture.

We should be trying to build a world where, instead of working for the profit of others, we work for pleasure and for the benefit of ourselves, our communities and our planet.

Focusing on porn, and ignoring the larger context of capitalism, only serves the interest of those in power and harms those with the least power.

Dr. King is Under Attack, And He Will Be To The End of Time

You see Dr. King, he was a real pro-war advocate, he really spoke out against all those radical anti-war anti-Vietnam activists.

What's the matter, don't you remember it that way?

Neither do I. 

Funny how all of a sudden Dr. King supports

whatever anyone wants him to.

Usurpers of Dr. King's message

Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been 82 this month. His assassination occurred nearly 43 years ago. As we get further and further from that time, memories get fuzzy and a kind of collective amnesia sets in, some of it deliberately promoted.

In 1968 he took a brave stance against the war in Vietnam, in a speech in New York City’s Riverside Church, that cost him some of his liberal supporters.

He criticized the injustices of capitalism: persistent poverty, inadequate aid to workers and the poor, and growing wealth disparity. Let us remember he died demanding not simply integration, but labor rights for striking sanitation workers in Memphis.

Remembering King’s legacy is remembering the dangers of political repression and vitriolic persecution. Recent events in Tucson come to mind.

King lived under a constant fear of assassination because his visibility and outspokenness made him a target. But something else made him a target, too.

The way in which his critics vilified him, attributed sinister motives to his actions, called him un-American and a danger to the traditional values of our nation.

Those people are called extremists now, but they weren't seen as outliers in King’s time. They were politicians and editors, civic leaders and sheriffs.

The violent rampage that left six people dead in Arizona last week and many others injured was carried out by one troubled man.

However, he chose a political event and targeted a politician. And he did so in a climate where that same politician had been a literal bulls-eye on political hit list. When violent metaphors are used to “target” opponents we should not be surprised when one disturbed person takes the bait.

But here is a sad and troubling irony: Tea party organizers can bring guns to rallies and put their political rivals under bulls-eyes on websites and have that accepted as legitimate political activity, while non-violent activists who criticize government policy are under attack by the FBI.

That refers to the Supreme Court decision in June against the Humanitarian Law Project, which essentially criminalized their efforts to offer conflict resolution training to people immersed in violent conflicts around the world.

This decision made it a crime to provide “material support” to any organization the government designates a terrorist group, but established a ridiculously broad definition of support.

The ruling has been the basis of FBI raids on the homes of activists who support Palestinian rights and oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The people the FBI is targeting do not advocate the use of guns or even own them; they advocate peace and justice.

King, too, was a peace activist who supported anti-colonial struggles and was under constant FBI surveillance. His phone was tapped, his mail was opened, he was followed and watched. People he trusted were enlisted to spy on him. Government agents plotted how to undermine his leadership, especially as he moved more toward the left.

Woman Now "Owns" The Sun, Says She'll Charge Usage Fee

Capitalism stand in the way of alternative energy

By Paul M. Sweezy

Though it is neither written nor marketed as such, Who Owns the Sun? by researcher/activists Daniel Berman and John O’Connor, is a devastating indictment of capitalism.

As it has developed in the last two centuries, this system is an enormous user of energy, most of it derived from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas).

An additional—and in some parts of the world increasing—source is nuclear fission. Both of these forms of energy are dangerous and environmentally destructive to life on the planet.

Burning fossil fuels generates almost all of the greenhouse gasses that have already begun to change the planet’s climate and, if continued at anywhere near the present rates, will trigger a chain reaction of lethal disasters, not in some vaguely distant future but in the next century or so—historically a relatively short span of time.

Nuclear fission leaves a legacy of radioactive waste that cannot now, or perhaps ever, be safely disposed of.

Clearly if humanity, not to speak of other forms of life, is to have a future, nothing could be more important than phasing out these sources of energy. So much, I believe, is what can be appropriately called ecological common sense.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is an available, renewable, and unlimited source of energy to take the place of fossil fuels and nuclear fission: solar power.

This is truly not only in theory but also, given the present state of our scientific knowledge and technological know how, in practice. Why, then, are we not already living in the period of transition from a proven deadly to a proven safe form of energy production?

The short answer is capitalism. This is in two complementary senses. First, in capitalist society power is in the hands of capitalists and their acolytes. They cannot be assumed to be ignorant of the energy situation and the dangers it portends for the future.

Yet they have never used that power to take remedial action. Second, when faced with the energy crises of the 1970s and the widespread popular reaction, they did their best to confuse the real issues and limited themselves to making soothing promises.

They then promptly forgot and obviously never intended to honor them when things calmed down.

By the late 1980s what had seemed to be a snowballing popular movement for an energy new deal was effectively scotched and by now is hardly more than a fading memory.

Capital won that battle hands down. But the issue will not go away. As the catastrophes of environmental degradation unfold, the need for an energy revolution will become increasingly obvious and urgent.

In Who Owns the Sun? Berman and O’Connor have made a straightforward, hard-hitting contribution to the understanding of the issue. And, by implication, of the lessons to be learned from the rich experience of the last few decades.

An energy revolution is both possible and necessary, but it will be achieved only as part of a broader revolution that takes power away from capital and puts it in the hands of the people where it belongs.

Tea Party Focuses on Wrong Target

 Capitalism is the word, of the neocons, have you heard?

 By Henry A. Giroux

Tea Party candidates express anger over government programs, but say nothing about a government that provides tax breaks for the rich, allows politicians to be bought off by powerful lobbyists, contracts out government functions to private industries and guts almost every major public sphere necessary for sustaining an increasingly faltering democracy.

Tea Party members are outraged, but their anger is really directed at the New Deal, the social state and all those others whom they believe do not qualify as "real" Americans.

At the same time the American public is awash in a craven and vacuous media machine that routinely tells us that people are angry, but offers no analysis capable of treating such anger as symptomatic of an economic system that creates massive inequalities, rewards the ultra rich and powerful and punishes everybody else.

liberal pundits argue that the rich and powerful are indifferent to poor people and, of course, he is right, but only partly so. In actuality, it is much worse.

Today's young people and others caught in webs of poverty and despair face not only the indifference of the rich and powerful, but also the scorn of the very people charged with preserving, protecting and defending their rights.

We now live in a country in which the government allows entire populations and groups to be perceived and treated as disposable, reduced to fodder for the neoliberal waste management industries created by a market-driven society in which gross inequalities and massive human suffering are its most obvious byproducts.

Banker's Scaming You Yet Again

Bankers find way to capitalize on hardships

By Andrew Leonard

Nearly a dozen major banks and hedge funds, anticipating quick profits from homeowners who fall behind on property taxes, are quietly plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into businesses that collect the debts, tack on escalating fees and threaten to foreclose on the homes of those who fail to pay.

Here's how it works. A homeowner fails to pay property taxes on time, and gets a tax lien slapped on them by the county tax collector.

But local government doesn't have the resources or manpower to effectively enforce the proliferation of tax debts in the current distressed economic environment. So it bunches them up together and sells them off to the highest bidder at online auctions.

The winner of the auction then proceeds to do its best imitation of a loan shark, slapping on additional fines, charging high interest rates on the debt, and eventually initiating foreclosure proceedings.

Years ago, the big banks left the buying of owed taxes largely to local real estate specialists and small-time investors.

These days, banks and hedge funds, stung by the failure of many speculative investments, see the loan-shark business as a relatively safe option that can yield returns of around 7 percent.

It's so typical of the decayed state of capitalism. The banks that aided and abetted a frenzy of dubious mortgage loans then proceeded to get badly burned by their investments in mortgage-backed securities when it became clear that underlying mortgages were crap.

The ensuing economic crash pushed millions of Americans over the financial edge. And now the banks have discovered that there's a safe, steady business model in cashing in on their hardship.

Privitizing Basic Social Services; Capitalism at its Harshest

They can just burn in flames for all they care.

Naomi Spencer

A family’s home was left to burn to the ground September 29 in Obion County, Tennessee over an unpaid annual fee of $75. Residents have responded angrily to the disaster, as city officials defend the policy.

The blaze could have easily been put out by the fire department if firefighters had been authorized to respond when emergency calls were first made. The fire broke out after a trash fire spread from a barrel into the yard of Gene and Paulette Cranick, the homeowners.

Gene Cranick called 9-1-1 several times and pleaded with the operator to send help. He offered to pay any amount for the fire to be extinguished, but was told it was too late, because he had not paid for service. The fee is imposed by the city of South Fulton on rural residents who need fire protection but do not live within the city limits.



The fire burned for several hours, and Cranick and neighbors tried desperately to battle the flames with garden hoses. It was not until an adjacent field of a neighbor who had paid the fee began to catch fire that the fire department responded.



Local NBC news affiliate Channel 6 sent a reporting crew to the scene, where they filmed the fire chief, David Wilds, standing by and allowing the Cranick home to burn. When a reporter asked him why, Wilds called the police to have the news team removed from the vicinity, then the fire trucks left.



South Fulton Mayor David Crocker defended the decision, comparing the fee to an automobile insurance policy. “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton,” he told Channel 6, “it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t.”



“Things of my mother’s, my grandmother’s, my great-grandmother’s, were all there in that house,” Paulette Cranick told the local news. She said she did not blame the firefighters. “They’re doing their job, they’re doing what they’re told to do. It’s not their fault.”



The community has expressed anger over the fire. The Cranick’s 44-year-old son was reportedly so distraught over the destruction of his parent’s home that he confronted Fire Chief Wilds at the station soon after the trucks returned there, and punched him in the face.



Gene Cranick was interviewed Monday night on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” from the yard in front of his destroyed home. “Everything we possessed was lost in the fire, even three dogs and a cat that belonged to my grandchildren was lost in it,” he said. “And they could have been saved if they’d put water on it, but they didn’t do it.”



The firefighters, he said, “put water out on the fence line here, they never said nothing to me, never acknowledged, just stood out here and watched it burn.”



“Insurance is going to pay for what money I had on the policy. But like everything else, I didn't have enough,” Cranick said. “The mayor up here said I refused to pay―I did not refuse to pay, I told him I would pay whatever it took. But I had forgotten this thing … and I had to suffer the consequences for it.”



Cranick noted that the fire department used to make exceptions for fires at residences with unpaid fees. “About three years ago in December, there was a fire up here in my boy’s house, and they waived the fee till the next day. We had the thing out before they got there,” he added, “but they waived the fee and I went in the next day and paid.”



Since that time, however, the South Fulton government has refused to put out fires if there are no people known to be inside the structure. Cranick commented that in the past few years, “They let three, and I heard four, burn. On the other side of Union City, they let a barn burn that had horses in it.”



The fire policies of South Fulton and an identical one in nearby Union City have long been a flashpoint between the residents and the local governments. Fatal fires are all too common in Tennessee, with the poor who live in mobile homes or doubled up in apartments, many without utilities, most at risk. In April 1996, a devastating house fire claimed the lives of six family members, including five children, in South Fulton. It took more than an hour for fire crews to respond, according to press reports at the time.



West Tennessee has seen a series of brush fires over the past decade, including more than 40 fires that swept across 15 counties in 2006, destroying 600 acres. Many of the blazes were attributed to outdoor trash burning, which is a common practice in poor rural areas.



On September 28, just a day before the fire that consumed the Cranick home, a fatal mobile home fire in nearby Atoka, Tennessee, killed five members of a family. Only a 12-year-old boy and his 6-year-old brother were able to escape by breaking the glass of a window; their mother, her boyfriend, two sisters and a grandmother died.



Tennessee ranks among the worst in the nation for fatal house fires. So far this year, at least 67 Tennessee residents and firefighters have died in blazes, according to data compiled by the non-profit Fire Team Tennessee.



After a South Fulton house was left to burn to the ground on July 2, 2008, the city government was compelled to hold a meeting to address public anger over the fire service fee, which was first imposed on rural residents in 1990. The home of Richard Cruse was allowed to burn uncontrollably, in spite of numerous calls to 9-1-1. The fire burned for at least 40 minutes, while residents sprayed the area with garden hoses. Firefighters were not given the go-ahead to intervene until the fire threatened to spread to two neighboring homes.



At the meeting, residents expressed outrage that the fire could have killed people. Then-Mayor Ronald Haskins commented, “hate they lost the house. But if I wrecked my car and I didn’t have insurance on it, they’re not going to pay for it and the city is not going to pay for it.” Articulating the widely felt frustration of residents, a physician who ran a clinic across the street from the Cruse home responded to the mayor that it wasn’t in her code of ethics to ask someone if they have insurance or can pay before she treated them. “I take care of the patient and hope I get paid.”



Fire services, like other basic infrastructure, have been starved of funds in communities throughout the country. Many rural areas of the US have only a patchwork of volunteer fire departments to rely on in emergency situations. The economic crisis has stripped local governments of the most minimal funds for services, both from the states that likewise are crippled by shortfalls, and from local tax revenue.

Making Money off Your Back - prt 2

Capitalism continues to exploit people

(Symptoms you're a Marxist pr2)

  By David S. Pena

Capitalists want to maximize profits, and they do this by exploiting the working class. The basic method of capitalist exploitation is to pay workers the lowest wage they can get away with (as close to mere survival as possible) while forcing their employees to do the maximum amount of work.

More specifically, capitalists try to maximize the value they get out of you, in the form of the product or service that you produce, by increasing the period of time that you have to work beyond the time it takes you to produce enough to cover your wage or salary.

For example, take an auto parts worker who's paid $50 per 8-hour day. He's able to produce $50 worth of product in approximately 3 minutes.

It took him an insignificant amount of time to produce enough value to cover the day’s wage. If you consider only those 3 minutes, it looks like an even exchange between the worker and the capitalist. The worker produced $50 worth of product and will be paid $50 in return.

But don’t forget, our factory worker has to stay on the production line for a much longer time—another 7 hours and 57 minutes, just to get the $50.

If this had been an even exchange, in which the wage equals exactly what the worker produces, the workday would have ended after those 3 minutes.

But if that happened the capitalist wouldn’t make any profit, and maximizing profit is the whole point of capitalist production.

Nearly $10,000 worth of surplus value was produced during the additional 7-plus hours that the worker was forced to remain at work.

The capitalist steals this value from the worker; the worker is never paid for producing it. This theft of surplus value is what is meant by the term “capitalist exploitation.”

In Marxist theory, the amount of time you must work to cover your wage or salary is called necessary labor time.

The time beyond that, during which you are forced to continue working in order to receive your wage, is called surplus labor time, and the value produced during that time is called surplus value.

During surplus labor time you are working for free because the capitalist steals the time and the resulting product from you without paying for it.

In order to maximize profit, capitalists try to minimize the amount of necessary labor time and maximize the amount of surplus labor time, so they can profit from the surplus value that results.

That is why capitalists are always trying to keep wages as low as possible, extend the length of the workday, and increase through speedup the amount of work that you have to do in any given period of time.

This intensification of work is what capitalists really mean when they speak so benignly about “improving productivity.”

...workers are exploited and are literally victims of theft on the job... Read the rest of this article.

Obama to American Corps, "Exploit Low Labor Costs"

Obama endorses more capitalist ideas

By David Sirota

Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of [exploit] the Asian subcontinent's low labor costs.

In recent months, Obama reversed his campaign promises on trade issues - first by dropping his pledge to renegotiate NAFTA and then by pushing to pass NAFTA-style trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia.
Now, with the unemployment crisis persisting, the key jobs question is once again front a center in American politics. Specifically: How do we create jobs here at home and build our most valuable 21st century industries?
The first and foremost answer is that our government should stop doing stuff like the program described in this stunning new report from Information Week:

U.S. To Train 3,000 Offshore IT Workers Despite Obama's pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $22 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.
Following their training, the tech workers from South Asia will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of [meaning exploit] the Asian subcontinent's low labor costs.
The outsourcing program is sure to draw the most fire from critics. While Obama acknowledged that occupations such as garment making don't add much value to the U.S. economy, he argued relentlessly during his presidential run that lawmakers needed to do more to keep hi-tech jobs in IT, biological sciences, and green energy in the country.

I'm all for a robust foreign aid budget - we don't do nearly enough to help the developing world. However, using foreign aid money to specifically help private corporations "take advantage of low labor costs" in the developing world - that's not "aid," that's rank taxpayer subsidization of for-profit exploitation.Right now, Even if we do not reform our atrocious trade policies that incentivize the ongoing wage-cutting race to the bottom, the least we should be doing is investing every single available dollar we have in job training and job creation here at home.
Doing the opposite - actually using public dollars to intensify that wage-cutting race to the bottom - is grotesque.
George W. Bush's administration was rightly criticized by progressives for publicly endorsing job outsourcing, and Obama's administration should be similarly taken to task for now putting taxpayer funds behind the previous administration's endorsement.

World is Our Garbage Can

Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent

Media's capitalist bias

Socialist Worker UK

TV and newspaper reporting reflect the existing power set-up in society. The mass media reproduces the ruling class’s view of what matters in the world. And quite often it deliberately sets out to paint a picture favorable to government and big business.

Almost every demonstrator has found that the press is against them, but what lies behind this in-built bias?

The media spreads the same old lies every time workers go on strike.

During strikes, like the recent ones at BA, the media constantly tell us that workers are powerless—yet at the same time that they are holding the country to ransom.

They act like unions are undemocratic, even though workers have voted to act collectively. The causes of a dispute are rarely explained.

Yet when bosses say we need cuts, they are rarely questioned. And when the police attack demonstrations, the media always reports their version of events.

This is because TV and newspaper reporting reflect the existing power set-up in society.

The mass media reproduces the ruling class’s view of what matters in the world. And quite often it deliberately sets out to paint a picture favorable to government and big business.

The revolutionaries Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the 19th century that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”.

Under capitalism a handful of rich and powerful people own the mass media. They form part of a ruling class—the tiny number of people at the top of society who own the factories, offices and other workplaces (see page 10).

Rupert Murdoch, for instance, owns over 175 print publications across the world, including the Sun, the Times and the News of the World in Britain. It is therefore not surprising they constantly reinforce the interests of the bosses.

The vast majority of the media is run for profit, so it’s not surprising it backs up a system based on profit.

They reflect the bias of normal capitalist life. So, they report it as “good news” if profits are up.

And, the media focus on what seems to matter in “official” politics in parliament, on the actions of celebrities, on crime and scandal.

Economics is reported separately from politics. Everything is put in different compartments. A picture of society as something that can be understood—and changed—as a whole is never presented.

Ordinary people’s lives—except as victims of crime or as things to be ridiculed—rarely appear. During a war much of the media often becomes a simple extension of the government propaganda machine.

According to Philip Knightley, the author of a book on war and the media, The First Casualty, “Every government wants to control the media in wartime to ensure public support for its war aims.

"If necessary it will lie in order to achieve this control. The media will usually go along with these lies because it considers it is in its best commercial interests in wartime to support the government of the day.”

This is at its most extreme during wars, but the coincidence of interests applies during peace time too.

People are rightly angry when a big demonstration gets little or no news coverage. But more than that, the recent anti-fascist demonstration in Bolton was repeatedly reported throughout the media as violent anti-fascist protesters attacking the police.

This was the exact opposite of what happened. The truth was readily available in video, photographs and accounts of police violence.

Does it matter? TV and newspapers are among the most important sources people have for gaining information about what’s going on in the world.

The media shapes our views of the world. But it does not control them.

As we are surrounded by messages that favour the bosses, we are still making judgments. For two decades the Sun newspaper told its readers to vote Tory.

Most carried on voting Labour. It now tells people to vote Tory again—but it won’t be the Sun that wins it. And the media is not a monolith.

The ruling class is not a homogeneous group. There are divisions within it—and the media reflects these. This is partly because of their competing commercial interests. In order to sell advertising they need viewers and readers.

That forces the media to at least be relevant to what people think. That can produce critical coverage which goes against the establishment.

For example, the Mirror opposed the Iraq war in the run up to it.

It reflected the fact that the ruling class was divided—but it also knew that there was an audience for an anti-war newspaper. The majority of people that the mass media is sold and marketed to are working class.

There is a huge gulf between the reality of their lives and the dominant ideology of capitalism. That gap can open up a space for that ideology to be questioned or even rejected.

If left wing ideas become stronger, then the media will have to respond to them. After all, if the number of people backing a transport strike with solidarity is large enough then there is no point interviewing the grumbling business class passenger.

Unequal Distribution of Wealth

Captialist Nature

By David Barber

David Barber is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He is the author of A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why it Failed (University Press of Mississippi, 2008).

American society’s fantastically skewed distribution of wealth stands as one of the main structural fault lines underpinning the Crash of 2008.

America’s richest one percent of the population own over forty percent of America’s wealth – exclusive of home ownership – in this, the most opulent society history has ever known. On the other hand, the bottom sixty percent of Americans own approximately one percent of all of America’s wealth.

If we picture an auditorium with one hundred people and one hundred seats, the single richest person would be able to spread out smartly over nearly forty-three seats. The poorest sixty people in the auditorium would have to make due squeezing into a single seat.

This mal-distribution of wealth does not bode well for a society based on the buying and selling of goods. Our super-rich plutocrats, after all, do not need more than five or ten automobiles or five or ten homes each.

This top one percent – 3 million people – certainly cannot purchase all the goods that the poorest 180 million Americans would be capable of purchasing had our society a more equal distribution of wealth.

And so debt has had to sustain our market economy: the more skewed the distribution of wealth has grown over time, the more frantically has the economy been forced to create a growing array of consumer debt mechanisms – subprime mortgages, payday loans, more and more intricately structured credit card debt – in order simply to maintain its functioning.

When a critical mass of poor and working-class Americans could no longer pay their fabulously expensive subprime mortgages and usurious credit card bills, this house of cards collapsed.

A number of the financial institutions built on this consumer debt foundered and the remainder required unprecedented injections of federal funds to remain afloat.

The housing market and new residential construction, the market for consumer goods – automobiles, appliances, electronics – all crumbled, taking down with them the jobs and retirement savings of millions of Americans.

The Crash, in short, was not an episode of mass hysteria or panic; it represented a structural crisis in part rooted in the grossly unequal distribution of wealth in this society. When millions of Americans could no longer buy goods, industry had to stomp on the brakes.

And what is true in the United States of the unequal distribution of wealth, and of the consequences of that unequal distribution, is true again on a world scale. Nearly half the world’s population lives on $2 per day or less.

This super-poor mass of humanity, from whose soil is ripped vast amounts of mineral and agricultural wealth, and out of whose labor the world’s manufactured goods increasingly come, are almost wholly excluded from participating in the world’s market economy.

These people, too, must depend upon debt, public debt in this case. More importantly, the survival of our world’s economic system, as it is currently configured, depends upon these people being both poor and indebted. But it is both the poverty and the debt which lead inexorably to the Crash.

They Believe in Greed

Disparity of class

  By Chris Floyd

This is the system, the creed, the extremist faith that "serious" players in all the "major" power factions on both sides of the Atlantic adhere to.

Their ideology is capitalism. Their god is greed. Both demand human sacrifices. So the poor must go to the wall. And to keep the system going, more and more people must be made poor.

First those in the "outer darkness" of faraway lands, then finally those in the sacred "Homelands" themselves. We have been watching the latter process play out slowly in the past few decades -- but it is accelerating now at dizzying speed.

News from the UK the disparity in death rates between the well-off and the poor in the UK is now greater than at any time since 1921.

The London Review of Books points to a new study by the British Medical Journal that shows that by 2997, "for every 100 people under the age of 65 dying in the best-off areas, 199 were dying in the poorest tenth of areas."

The Journal study said that the data suggest "it was only prolonged and enthusiastic state intervention" that kept the disparity from being greater.

On the other hand, the elite-coddling market jihadism of the Clintonian-Obamaish "New Labour" government helped stretch the yawning gap even further.

The few spare pence that the war criminals of the Labour government threw at the poor kept them from dying quite as fast as they would have done otherwise under the system of voracious corporate rapine that Labour entrenched and expanded after inheriting it from the Thatcherite Tories in 1997.

Now, even those few pence are being stripped away -- gleefully -- by what many say is the most extremist government Britain has ever seen, outstripping even Margaret Thatcher in the scope of its draconian cuts and the fervor of its market fundamentalism.

The savage cutbacks and vast, churning upheavals being pushed through, at breakneck speed, by the new Conservative government (and its truly pathetic coalition "partner," the lapdog Liberal Democrats) will send millions of people tumbling down into a permanent underclass.

Finally, after 60 years of trying, the Lib-Cons will gut the national health service with a stealth "Americanization" that will turn the operation of local doctors' offices over to private firms (many of them from the US) and privatize public hospitals.

They will be allowed them to "fail" if they don't produce enough cash for their elite shareholders.

Meanwhile, the schools are now in the hands of the arch-neocon Michael Gove. He's plotting with revisionist historian Niall Ferguson to impose a pro-Empire, pro-elite "national greatness" ideology on the young.

Gove is also using "emergency" legislative procedures to strip public schools away from the oversight of democratically elected local government and put them into the hands of unaccountable corporations, religious groups and wealthy elites.

This Revolution of the Rich is being justified by a carefully crafted, constantly stoked panic about budget deficits, pointing to the example of the perpetually weak government and economy of Greece as a horror story to be avoided at all costs.

Yet even if the Greek situation was as dire as the fear-mongers make out, the fact remains that the cuts which the Tory-LapDog coalition is making in the much stronger, much more stable UK are actually far in excess than those being imposed upon Greece.

As with the fear-mongering about "Iraqi WMDs," the "dangers of the deficit" are being exaggerated -- and manufactured -- in order to put into place a pre-existing (and transatlantic) ideological agenda: a neo-feudal oligarchy.

But in almost all of these measures, the Tory-LapDog government is only entrenching and expanding the "market-led reforms" imposed by New Labour. And "New Labour" was of course a close copy of the "New Democrats" of Bill Clinton and his clique of "triangulating" bagmen for Big Money.

Clinton, in turn, wasscarcely distinguishable from the Reagan-Bush faction that preceded them, and then succeeded them in the Bush dynasty's second turn in the White House.

And we all know that "continuity" is the byword of the Obama administration, which is chock-a-block with holdovers not only from strangulating triangulators of the Clinton era but also the imperial militarists from the two Bush reigns.

Thus for more than 30 years, the world-dominating Anglo-American alliance has been under the sway of factions which, for all their internal squabbling and hair-splitting, are strongly united in their steadfast, unshakable adherence to the perpetuation -- and expansion -- of elite power and privilege.

They have shown themselves willing and eager to degrade their own societies (and destroy many others) in the service of this brutal, barbaric, inhuman faith.

The poor have no place in this system, which is a retrograde, hi-tech, rhetorically sugarcoated revival of the laissez-faire fantasies of the past, as Jeremy Seabrook notes:

'Pauperism' long ago took on the colour of culpability. The distinction between the idle and improvident poor and the "deserving" goes back at least to the Elizabethan poor law. It took on a new force in the early industrial era, which saw an unprecedented growth in pauperism. The enthusiasts of laissez-faire capitalism concluded that the evil was compounded by efforts to relieve it, and helping the poor only increased their number.
Everything indicated that 'natural' processes should be allowed to take their course. In this version of the world, the market mechanism is as flawless a creation as the earth. It should remain untouched by the hand of meddlers, whose only effect is to upset its power to enrich us all.
It is remarkable that the establishment of laissez-faire itself in the early 19th century required an enormous amount of government intervention and regulation."

And so it is today. The "regulation" of the health care industry introduced by the Obama Administration is actually a gargantuan transfer of wealth, by force, from working people and the poor to a few huge corporations.

The financial "regulation" signed into law is yet another sham that will leave the rapacious fools and fraudsters who brought down the global economy -- and triggered the convenient "deficit crisis" by demanding massive bailouts of public money for their private businesses -- at large and in charge of the world's finances.

Meanwhile, more and more government regulations restrict the right of ordinary citizens to challenge the rich and powerful in court, or to register a public protest (herding them instead into the truly hideous "free speech zones").

Meanwhile, the state grants corporations extraordinary privileges to interfere with the political process with their vast resources and protects their leaders from personal accountability for the ravages they commit.

The government "intervention and regulation" on behalf of the industries and elites who service the endlessly expanding symbiosis of corporate, military and 'security' power -- stretching even to the countenancing and cover-up of torture and murder -- is one of the defining elements of our age.

As Glenn Ford writes,Obama is preparing to "regulate" the last tattered fragments of the social welfare system -- already decimated by the progressive's favorite good old boy, Bill Clinton -- right out of existence:

In April of this year, Obama once again reminded everyone that everything is and has always been 'on the table', as far as he's concerned, including Social Security. His so-called 'deficit commission' is stacked with rich sociopaths sharpening their knives to carve up, sell off or otherwise doom Social Security. It is a battle that safety net defenders thought they had won against George Bush.
Obama has picked up Bush's marbles and put them back into play. He is the right wing's most potent weapon, the one before which liberal Democrats throw up their hands in surrender without the dignity of a fight.
Obama, working in plain sight over the past 18 months, has constructed and rigged a deficit commission to render a kind of death sentence to the foundational program of Roosevelt's New Deal.

This is the system -- the creed, the extremist faith -- that all "serious" players in all the "major" power factions on both sides of the Atlantic adhere to.

Their god of greed demands human sacrifices: and so the poor must die. And to keep the system going, more and more people must be made poor.

First those in the "outer darkness" of faraway lands, then finally those in the sacred "Homelands" themselves. We have been watching the latter process play out slowly in the past few decades -- but it is accelerating now at dizzying speed.

Soft Left Sides With Wallstreet Rich

During a recession, soft left sides with big money

By blackandred

Liberals support fiscal austerity during the recession because they no longer care about economic performance, much less the interests of workers and the poor, but instead identify their interests with those of Wall Street and the upper middle class.

At the recently concluded G-20 meetings in Toronto, Canada the leaders of the major economies issued a communiqué pledging to cut their budget deficits in half over the next three years.

Instead of draconian fiscal austerity, what is needed is a massive, globally coordinated, fiscal stimulus to pull the economy out of the worst global recession in over eighty years.

In Greece, when PASOK was in opposition it called for pro-growth policies favoring middle income sectors. Now, as Prime Minister, Papandreou is presiding over policies even more draconian than those of the previous right wing government he and PASOK criticized. How does one explain this madness?

One possibility is that many in the economics profession have contracted amnesia and forgotten the most important economics lesson learned during the twentieth century.

Governments must spend more when the economy is depressed and save only after the economy has recovered -- and that center left, along with right wing politicians, have now made the mistake of embracing the advice from misguided establishment economists to do just the opposite.

Two Nobel Prize winning economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, who have not forgotten Keynes’ lesson believe this is exactly what has happened, and there is evidence to support their hypothesis.

Keynes was only able to successfully challenge the wisdom of traditional, balanced budget orthodoxy which requires governments to cut spending when recessions reduce their tax revenues with a powerful assist from practical experience during the Great Depression.

Even when conservative economists like Milton Friedman and right wing politicians like Richard Nixon were quoted saying “We are all Keynesians now” during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many economists and politicians remained uncomfortable with Keynesianism and were already hard at work organizing an economics counter revolution.

Over the ensuing decades establishment economists labored mightily to write Keynes out of their macroeconomic theories, models, and text books, and conservative politicians happily reverted to their pre-Keynesian, balanced budget orthodoxy.

These conservative politicians and their advisers focused on balanced-budgets and zero inflation in order to accomplish their real agenda -- decreasing the bargaining power of working people.

There was never any great mystery about why right wing political parties pushed an agenda designed to increase unemployment rates, weaken unions, and raise the cost to workers of being unemployed by cutting the social wage.

But now center left political parties are embracing the same economic policies and consorting with anti-Keynesian macro-economists, leaving the likes of Krugman and Stiglitz to wring their hands on the sidelines.

Is this simply an intellectual mistake on their part? What if we drop the assumption that the purpose of today’s economic policies is to rescue us from the Great Recession

We should put in its place the hypothesis that center left political parties are now aimed at benefiting higher income groups rather than promoting the interests of their former political constituencies.

After all, for decades prior to the financial crisis of 2008 and the onset of the Great Recession neo-liberal economic policies were championed by center left as well as right wing governments.

Not only Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but Tony Blair and Bill Clinton also claimed that neo-liberal policies would improve economic performance by removing unnecessary and counterproductive shackles on corporate creativity.

Privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, capital liberalization, and trade liberalization did not increase global growth rates or reduce poverty as advertised.

But these policies did greatly enhance corporate power, disempower workers, consumers, and citizens, and produce the greatest redistribution of income and wealth from poor to rich the world has ever seen.

It is now apparent that these neo-liberal policies which laid the groundwork for the present crisis were never about improving economic performance, but merely about redistributing power, income, and wealth.

So why should we now believe that the same center left political parties, following the advice of the same economic advisors, actually believe, or care if lavishing generous bailouts on banks without conditions while imposing fiscal austerity on workers and ordinary citizens will pull the global economy out of recession?

There is a more simple explanation for the behavior of today’s center left politicians, which is becoming more credible by the day.

Fiscal austerity and stalling financial reform in response to the worst financial crisis and deepest recession in eighty years is not about improving economic performance as its proponents claim.

These policies are simply about continuing to shift income and wealth from the poor to the rich, and from the manufacturing sector to finance, insurance, and real estate (known as FIRE) which have become increasingly ascendant in the US and Europe -- despite the fact that these policies will worsen the economic slump and make another financial crisis likely.

The claim that fiscal austerity during recession is “good economics” when it is actually “bad economics” is merely a “cover story” for public consumption.

As for why center left political parties and politicians now support this disastrous policy, the simple answer is these parties no longer care about economic performance.

They care much less about the interests of workers and the poor, but instead identify their interests with those of Wall Street and the upper middle class who appear to be the focus group for the Obama Administration and Nancy Pelosi.

Democratic Party politicians used to promise to press for policies to help workers, minorities, and the poor. They usually failed to do so, but that was their campaign rhetoric nonetheless.

But for many election cycles in the United States Democratic Party candidates have been promising instead to champion the interests of what they call middle-class Americans.

If center left politicians no longer make a secret of pretending they are concerned about unemployed workers and the poor, why should we be surprised when they adopt policies detrimental to their interests?

Voters in the UK already sent Gordon Brown and the Labor Party packing. Will other center left politicians and their parties -- Zapatero and the Socialist Party in Spain, Papandreou and PASOK in Greece, and Obama and the Democrats in the US -- who agree to impose fiscal austerity also be punished at the polls by voters who know we did not create the crisis and are furious at governments who subject us to counterproductive austerity?

When center left politicians echo false hopes that the economy is recovering promoted by right wing think tanks and the corporate owned media who shout “green shoots” whenever the prices of bank stocks or an index of consumer confidence stabilize momentarily.

They do this while unemployment and home foreclosure rates hold steady or worsen. One can only hope they badly miscalculate their own political self-interest.

But it is apparent that more and more center left politicians are quite willing to gamble that they can bamboozle a guileless public into thinking that fiscal austerity is necessary and wise and avoid voters’ wrath.

It is also increasingly apparent that center left political parties are more afraid of angering Wall Street and upper middle class funders by opposing policies that continue to redistribute income and wealth their way than they are of angering ordinary people who have traditionally voted center left because the right wing alternative is even worse.

However, people know when either they or some relative or friend has lost their job or home. And they will eventually turn on those who persist in telling them that the economy is recovering when they know it is not.

The question is where voters will turn when they abandon traditional center left parties who have abandoned them.

What is needed are social movements and new political parties who answer to and are led by those whose interests are being trampled on, who fight for policies which actually do generate high employment and greater economic equality, and who say no to counterproductive fiscal austerity, trickle down economic nonsense, and corporate sponsored globalization.

We need to build movements and parties which will take power back from multinational corporations and Wall Street, and launch the kind of Green New Deal needed to address the economic and ecological crises which otherwise will continue to worsen by the day.

Unfettered Capitalism for the Rich

Rich fight to return workers to poverty

By Barry Grey

The past several months have witnessed a shift in social policy by the international bourgeoisie even further to the right, marked by a turn from economic stimulus policies to brutal austerity measures.

In the name of deficit reduction, the ruling classes of all the major capitalist countries are carrying out a frontal assault on the past social gains of the working class. The long-term aim of these policies is to eliminate the welfare state, reestablishing the competitiveness of the older capitalist powers by slashing workers’ living standards to the level of their impoverished counterparts in emerging economies like India and China.

That the living standards of the world’s people are to be equalized downward, rather than upward, is an indictment of the capitalist system.

The “Big Society” speech delivered Monday by British Prime Minister David Cameron exemplified this shift. It was a manifesto for a return to Dickensian conditions of working class poverty.

Seeking to camouflage the brutal implications of his plan to impose between 85 and 100 billion pounds in social cuts over the next four years, Cameron described his “Big Society” as a “huge cultural change” that will “empower” and “liberate” people. It will supposedly achieve this by privatizing and gutting government-run social services.

There has been a shift from the stimulus policy of 2008-2009, centered on the plundering of national treasuries to bail out the banks, without providing any serious relief to the working class.

The austerity programs of today coincided with the 750 billion euro bailout fund announced in May by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The fund was established to stave off default by euro-zone countries such as Greece, Portugal and Spain and the threatened collapse of the euro.

It represents yet another massive transfer of public funds to the big banks. As Mohamed El-Erian of the bond investment firm Pimco put it:

“Through the ECB [European Central Bank], EU and IMF, the official sector has stepped in with its balance sheet to assume liabilities previously held by the private sector, thereby allowing private investors to exit in an orderly fashion.”

When the fund was established, the major European governments agreed that the cost of offloading the banks’ bad debts would be borne by the working class in the form of savage cuts in social programs, jobs, wages and pensions. Talk of stimulus to continue the “recovery” was dropped and replaced by the universal demand for “fiscal consolidation.”

The shift was signaled at the G20 finance ministers meeting the first week of June and formally ratified at the G20 summit meeting held at the end of the month in Toronto.

In working out its class policy, the bourgeoisie was emboldened by the experience in Greece, where the social democratic PASOK government has been able to push through a series of austerity measures in the face of massive popular opposition.

In Greece, the ruling class has relied on the trade unions to contain and dissipate working class resistance by means of token one-day strikes and protests.

The trade union bureaucracy has, in turn, been provided crucial assistance by the petty-bourgeois “left” organizations such as the Stalinist Communist Party and Syriza, which have insisted that popular opposition to the social cuts be subordinated to the unions.

The experience has been the same in Portugal and Spain, where social democratic governments have announced one set of social cuts, layoffs and wage cuts after another, and mass working class opposition has been suppressed by the unions.

A series of political changes have been carried out corresponding to the shift in economic and social policy and reflecting the growth of international tensions. In May, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government headed by Cameron was installed in Britain.

At the beginning of June, the same week as the G20 financial ministers meeting, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama resigned and was replaced by Naoto Kan.

He immediately announced an austerity program that includes a doubling of the 5 percent sales tax, combined with a cut in the corporate tax rate from 40 percent to 25 percent.

At the end of June, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was ousted in a coup within the Labor Party apparatus and replaced by Julia Gillard.

In addition to reaffirming Australia’s commitment to the US occupation of Afghanistan, Gillard immediately scrapped a proposed tax on Australian mining companies and announced a turn to austerity policies.

In Europe, sweeping budget-cutting programs have been announced from Ireland in the west to Eastern Europe and Russia. Germany, economically the strongest European state, is imposing 80 billion euros in cuts. France has announced sweeping cuts in pensions and a 10 percent reduction in local government budgets.

The 750 billion euro rescue package and the launching of austerity programs to make the working class pay for it have revived the European bourgeoisie’s self confidence—at least for the present.

The euro, which fell 15 percent in relation to the US dollar in the first six months of 2010, has rebounded sharply over the past two months. Hovering around $1.30, it has recouped 10 percent of its loss.

While the Obama administration has been at odds with Europe over the timing and pace of European austerity measures, it has made a similar shift from stimulus to deficit reduction.

It has abandoned even its paltry proposals for new federal aid to the states. The weeks-long delay in extending federal jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed is the preparation for ending them completely.

The administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress are tacitly encouraging a “debate” on jobless benefits.

Aid to the unemployed is being depicted as a “disincentive to work” and a “new entitlement.” This PR ofensive is an attempt to condition public opinion for depriving millions of laid off workers of any source in cash income.

In the US and internationally, mass unemployment is being used to bludgeon workers into accepting poverty wages and brutal speedup.

The international bourgeoisie is proceeding in a highly conscious manner to intensify its war against the working class.

It is keenly aware of the crucial service provided by the trade unions in stifling the resistance of the working class.

In his recent television interview over the Bettencourt scandal, French President Nicolas Sarkozy made a point of praising the unions for their “responsible” role in the economic crisis.

The ruling class is likewise well aware of the critical political role played by the various petty-bourgeois pseudo-left organizations, such as the Communist Party and Syriza in Greece.

Tere's also the CP and New Anti-Capitalist Party in France, the Left Party in Germany, the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, and the International Socialist Organization in the US.

The central concern of these organizations is the danger that the working class will enter into struggle outside of and to the left of the social democratic, “labor party” and trade union bureaucracies. They are above all determined to prevent such a development.