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Tag Archives: Margaret Thatcher

Hillary Clinton, US/NATO Imperialism, & the Lynching of Gaddafi

03 Thu Mar 2016

Posted by ztnh in Africa, Anti-Imperialism, Libya, Presidential Election 2016

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Amy Goodman, Bernie Sanders, Democracy Now!, Democratic Party, Global Research, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Human Rights Watch, International Business Times, Jo Becker, Margaret Thatcher, Martha Raddatz, Muammar Gaddafi, Nermeen Shaikh, Peter Bouckaert, Scott Shane, The Libya Gamble, The New York Times, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, US/NATO Imperialism

NATO vs LybiaLUMPENPROLETARIAT—The New York Times has decided to take us all on a trip down memory lane by revisiting the imperialist resumé of Democrat Party presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton with the publication of a major two-part exposé entitled “The Libya Gamble” on Hillary Clinton’s role in the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011, as Obama’s Secretary of State.  We can imagine the nightmarish wrath a President Hillary would unleash on the world.

One thing we can be wary of is the hawkish lengths an aspiring first female president, such as Hillary Clinton, would go within the realm of patriarchy to prove she’s as tough as her male counterparts.  Think Margaret Thatcher on steroids.

By this metric, the American ruling class, particularly oil profiteers, must be pleased with Hillary Clinton’s record as Secretary of State when she provided President Obama the excuse he needed to destabalise Libya and create further pretext for endless US/NATO military predation everywhere, except inside the territories of its corrupt allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.

As The New York Times‘ Pulitzer Prize-winning Jo Becker explained, “when Colonel Gaddafi threatened to crush the Arab Spring protests in Libya, she helped persuade President Obama to join other countries in bombing his forces to prevent a feared massacre.”  Of course, the hypocrisy in this reasoning is blatant, for we recall that the Obama administration literally cracked skulls in the USA, as it crushed the Occupy Movement across the nation, even as it purported to defend the right to assemble and to petition one’s government for a redress of grievances abroad.

During the Democrat Party’s presidential debate in New Hampshire last year, moderator, and ABC News host, Martha Raddatz questioned Hillary Clinton about the vicious conquest of Libya.  Clinton’s main competitor for the Democratic presidential nomination and self-described socialist, Bernie Sanders, added this somewhat qualified stance on regime change, or US/NATO imperialism:

“The truth is, it is relatively easy for a powerful nation like America to overthrow a dictator, but it is very hard to predict the unintended consequences and the turmoil and the instability that follows after you overthrow that dictator. So, I think Secretary Clinton and I have a fundamental disagreement: I’m not quite the fan of regime change that I believe she is.”

Messina

***

DEMOCRACY NOW!—[3 MAR 2016] The New York Times has published a major two-part exposé titled “The Libya Gamble” on how then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed President Obama to begin bombing Libya five years ago this month. Today, Libya is a failed state and a haven for terrorists. How much should Hillary Clinton be blamed for the crisis? We speak to journalist Scott Shane of The New York Times.


TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript [by Democracy Now!]. Copy may not be in its final form.  [Accessed 3 MAR 2016  10:37 PDT]

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Five years ago this month, the United States and allied nations began bombing Libya, striking forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The Obama administration said the strikes were needed to enforce a no-fly zone and to protect Libyan protesters who took to the streets as part of the Arab Spring. Inside the Obama administration, there was a deep division over whether the U.S. should intervene militarily. One of the most hawkish members of Obama’s Cabinet was Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state.

The New York Times has just published two major pieces [part one, part two] looking at Clinton’s role pushing for the bombing of Libya. The special report is titled “The Libya Gamble.” In a moment, we’ll be joined by Scott Shane, one of the report’s co-authors, but first a video package produced by The New York Times.

JO BECKER: Hillary Clinton’s role in the military intervention that ousted Muammar Gaddafi in Libya is getting new scrutiny as she runs for president. The U.S. relationship with Libya has long been complicated. Colonel Gaddafi, who ruled from 1969 until 2011, was an eccentric dictator linked to terrorism. Still, when he gave up his nuclear program a decade ago and provided information about al-Qaeda, he became an ally of sorts. In 2009, when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, she welcomed one of Colonel Gaddafi’s sons to Washington.

SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: We deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya.

JO BECKER: But two years later, when Colonel Gaddafi threatened to crush the Arab Spring protests in Libya, she helped persuade President Obama to join other countries in bombing his forces to prevent a feared massacre.

SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: This operation has already saved many lives, but the danger is far from over.

JO BECKER: The military campaign ended up ousting Colonel Gaddafi, and Secretary Clinton was welcomed to Libya on a victory tour. A few days later, Colonel Gaddafi was killed by opposition fighters.

SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: We came, we saw, he died.

JO BECKER: But the new Western-backed government proved incapable of uniting Libya. And in the end, the strongman’s death led to chaos. When four Americans were killed by terrorists in Benghazi in 2012, it revealed just how bad things had gotten. Colonel Gaddafi’s huge arsenal of weapons has shown up in the hands of terrorists in places like Gaza, Syria, Nigeria and Mali. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have fled through Libya on boats. Many have drowned. And the power vacuum has allowed ISIS to build its most dangerous outpost on the Libyan coast. Today, just 300 miles from Europe, Libya is a failed state. Meanwhile, back at home, Mrs. Clinton has struggled to defend the decision to intervene.

HILLARY CLINTON: But I’m not giving up on Libya, and I don’t think anybody should. We’ve been at this a couple of years.

MARTHA RADDATZ: But were mistakes made?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, there’s always a retrospective to say what mistakes were made. But I know that we offered a lot of help, and I know it was difficult for the Libyans to accept help.

AMY GOODMAN: That video by The New York Times accompanies a major two-part series [part one, part two] on Hillary Clinton titled “The Libya Gamble,” written by Jo Becker and Scott Shane. Scott Shane is joining us now from Baltimore. He’s also author of a new book called Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone, about the first American deliberately killed in a drone strike, Anwar al-Awlaki. The book just won the 2016 Lionel Gelber Prize.

Scott Shane, welcome to Democracy Now! Let’s start with this two-part series, “Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall.” Talk about Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and how she led the charge, or what she advised President Obama in Libya.

SCOTT SHANE: Well, five years ago, there were—there was a question about what to do as Gaddafi’s forces approached Benghazi. The Europeans and the Arab League were calling for action. No one really knew what the outcome would be, but there was certainly a very serious threat to a large number of civilians in Benghazi. But, you know, the U.S. was still involved in two big wars, and the sort of heavyweights in the Obama administration were against getting involved—Robert Gates, the defensive secretary; Joe Biden, the vice president; Tom Donilon, the national security adviser.

And Secretary Clinton had been meeting with representatives of Britain, France and the Arab countries. And she sort of essentially called in from Paris and then from Cairo, and she ended up tipping the balance and essentially convincing President Obama, who later described this as a 51-49 decision, to join the other countries in the coalition to bomb Gaddafi’s forces.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Hillary Clinton has argued, in her defense, that it’s still too early to tell what the effects of the intervention have been, and that perhaps accounts for why she’s pushing for more military involvement in Syria. But Obama, on the other hand, as you point out in your piece, says the Libya experience has made him question each military intervention by asking, “Should we intervene militarily? Do we have an answer for the day after?” So, Scott Shane, can you lay out what you explain happened in Libya the day after, as it were?

SCOTT SHANE: Well, you know, for a few months, it looked like things might go reasonably well. There was some attention to restoring Libya’s oil industry. And the optimism was based in part on the idea that this is a relatively small country population-wise, about 6 million people. It did not have the Sunni-Shia split that you see in many Muslim countries, and it had plenty of money from oil to rebuild. So, briefly, there was this sort of moment of optimism. And Secretary Clinton made her visit. And they were—you know, her people were actually thinking this would be perhaps a centerpiece of her record as secretary of state.

But what happened was the militias that had participated in the fight against Gaddafi, you know, essentially aligned with different tribes in different cities, and it proved impossible for these mostly Western-educated—in some cases, somewhat detached—opposition leaders to pull the country together, and eventually it sort of dissolved into civil war.

AMY GOODMAN: You say—in that piece we just heard, the tape that caught Hillary Clinton saying, “We came, we saw, he died.” Explain.

SCOTT SHANE: Well, you know, in some ways, I think she would see that as unfair. She was giving a series of TV interviews, and that was in a break between interviews. The reporter for the next take was just sitting down in the chair, and an aide handed her a Blackberry with the news that Gaddafi—you know, first reports that Gaddafi might be dead. And that was her sort of, I think she would say, you know, exaggerated, humorous reaction. But, you know—but it did capture, I think, the fact that she had become very involved in this effort that first—that sort of began as protecting civilians and sort of evolved into overthrowing Gaddafi. And she was eager to see an end to what had become a surprisingly drawn-out affair, given the fact that this very large alliance of NATO and Arab countries were on the rebels’ side. So I think she was relieved and pleased that Gaddafi’s rule was over and that he was no longer around to make trouble.

AMY GOODMAN: During the Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire last year, ABC News host Martha Raddatz questioned Hillary Clinton about her support for the 2011 invasion of Libya, which toppled Muammar Gaddafi.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, I want to circle back to something that your opponents here have brought up. Libya is falling apart. The country is a haven for ISIS and jihadists, with an estimated 2,000 ISIS fighters there today. You advocated for that 2011 intervention and called it “smart power at its best.” And yet, even President Obama said the U.S. should have done more to fill the leadership vacuum left behind. How much responsibility do you bear for the chaos that followed elections?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, first, let’s remember why we became part of a coalition to stop Gaddafi from committing massacres against his people. The United States was asked to support the Europeans and the Arab partners that we had. And we did a lot of due diligence about whether we should or not, and eventually, yes, I recommended, and the president decided, that we would support the action to protect civilians on the ground. And that led to the overthrow of Gaddafi.

I think that what Libya then did by having a full free election, which elected moderates, was an indication of their crying need and desire to get on the right path. Now, the whole region has been rendered unstable, in part because of the aftermath of the Arab Spring, in part because of the very effective outreach and propagandizing that ISIS and other terrorist groups do.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Senator Sanders?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: The truth is, it is relatively easy for a powerful nation like America to overthrow a dictator, but it is very hard to predict the unintended consequences and the turmoil and the instability that follows after you overthrow that dictator. So, I think Secretary Clinton and I have a fundamental disagreement: I’m not quite the fan of regime change that I believe she is.

AMY GOODMAN: “I’m not quite the fan of regime change that … she is,” says Bernie Sanders in that debate with Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. Scott Shane, from Iraq and her vote for the war with Iraq, which of course did lead to regime change, to Libya, talk about the goal of Hillary Clinton and whether that was even different from the goal of President Obama, who she does wrap herself around now in all of her presidential campaigning.

SCOTT SHANE: I think what we found is that there is a subtle but distinct difference between President Obama and Secretary Clinton on the question of sort of activism and interventionism abroad. And, you know, in a situation like Libya, there are no good choices. It’s certainly conceivable that if she had tipped the other way, and the U.S. and the Europeans and others had not gotten involved, that perhaps Gaddafi would have slaughtered a whole lot of civilians, and we would be, you know, posing different questions to her today.

But, you know, what we found was that President Obama is, not surprisingly, very shaped by the Iraq experience, which he’s had to cope with the still ongoing aftermath of the decision to invade in 2003 all these years later. She, of course, has been in government longer, and I think she—you know, her aides say that she was also influenced by genocide in Rwanda, which taught her the cost of inaction in a situation like that, and by the experience in the Balkans, which sort of cut both ways. But, you know, I think she drew the lesson that intervention could prevent even larger massacres and do some good, as imperfect as the outcome was there. So they kind of look back to these different historical experiences and draw different conclusions.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, you report in your piece in the Times that shortly after the air campaign began in 2011, there was the possibility of a 72-hour ceasefire, potentially leading to a negotiated exit for Gaddafi. Why was that offer not taken seriously by the American military?

SCOTT SHANE: Well, you know, there were—there was a whole array of attempts to come up with some sort of soft exit for Gaddafi. Perhaps he would stay in Libya, perhaps he would go elsewhere. But I think the bottom line was that the Americans and the Europeans and the other Arab—and the Arab countries that were involved in this, all basically felt that Gaddafi, who was basically a megalomaniac, who had been in office for 40 years and sort of saw him as the savior of his country, just would not, when push came to shove, be willing to cede power. And they felt that any kind of ceasefire, he would use just to kind of regroup his forces and extend the fighting. Whether that was true or not, you know, history will judge.

AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of this being a failed state right now and Hillary Clinton’s responsibility here—of course, as is President Obama, but she was the secretary of state who was advising him, meeting with people on the ground, making her suggestions on pushing forward with war?

SCOTT SHANE: Yeah, I mean, you know, one reason we did that series is that it appears that intervention—when, how and whether to intervene in other countries, particularly Muslim countries—remains sort of a pressing question for American presidents. And since she’s running for the presidency, this is, you know, perhaps a revealing case study of how she comes out in these situations.

But, you know, there are—there is no good example of intervention or non-intervention in these countries since the Arab Spring and before that. I mean, you have Iraq, where we spent years occupying, a very tragic outcome. You have Libya, where we intervened but did not occupy and pretty much, you know, stayed out of it afterwards—not a good outcome. And you have Syria, where we have really not intervened, have not occupied, and you’ve had this terrible civil war with huge casualties. So, you know, some people in Washington are questioning whether there is any right answer in these extremely complicated countries in the Middle East.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, given the spread of ISIS in Libya, you report that some of Obama’s top national security aides are now pushing for a second American military intervention in Libya.

SCOTT SHANE: Yeah, I mean, one of the ironies here is that, you know, you’ve almost come full circle, but instead of targeting Gaddafi and Gaddafi’s forces, the U.S. is now targeting ISIS. And the—you know, in that debate, Martha Raddatz uses the number 2,000 ISIS fighters; now it’s up to 5,000 or 6,000. You know, on the coast of Libya, they have formed the most important outpost for the Islamic State outside Syria and Iraq, and the Europeans and the Americans are very worried about it. So, there was actually an airstrike on an ISIS camp in western Libya, where there were Tunisians responsible for some attacks in Tunisia, and now they’re looking at possible attacks on the major ISIS stronghold in Libya, which is in Sirte on the coast.

AMY GOODMAN: In your piece, you talk about the memo afterwards that highlights Hillary Rodham Clinton—HRC, as it’s put—role, talking about her leadership, ownership, stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from start to finish, with an eye to the presidential campaign. Can you talk about this, as you put it, this brag sheet?

SCOTT SHANE: Well, that memo was written in 2011, when Gaddafi had fallen. And, you know, it looked like—you know, they were holding this up as sort of an alternative to the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq, a coalition in which the U.S. was not even the leader and organizer, really, and it was a very broad coalition of nations that had intervened. They saw this as what she referred to as “smart power.” And they really thought this might be something they would hold up as a very successful part of her record as she ran for president. As we’ve seen, that did not happen, and, you know, you don’t hear them raise the subject of Libya on the campaign trail at all.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Shane, we have to end the show, but we’re going to do Part 2 of our conversation after the show about your new book, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone. Scott Shane, national security reporter for The New York Times. And we’ll link to this major exposé [part one, part two] you did on Hillary Clinton’s role in “The Libya Gamble.”

That does it for the show. We have this late, breaking news: Honduras—the Honduran indigenous and environmental organizer Berta Cáceres has been assassinated. She was one of the leading organizers for indigenous land rights in Honduras, winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize.

***

GLOBAL RESEARCH—[12 MAR 2015]  Libya, ISIS and the Unaffordable Luxury of Hindsight

Who are you?” the late Muammar Gaddafi once rhetorically asked in a famous speech of his towards the end of his reign; (rightly) questioning the legitimacy of those seeking to over-throw his government at the time, calling them extremists, foreign agents, rats and drug-addicts. He was laughed at, unfairly caricatured, ridiculed and incessantly demonized; a distasteful parody video poking fun at the late Libyan leader even went viral on social media; evidently the maker of the video, an Israeli, thought the Libyan colloquial Arabic word “Zenga” (which means an Alleyway) sounded funny enough that he extracted it from one of Gaddafi’s speeches, looped it on top of a hip-hop backing track and voila… he got himself a hit video which was widely (and shamefully) circulated with a “revolutionary” zeal in the Arab world. We shared, we laughed, he died.

But the bloody joke is on all of us; Gaddafi knew what he was talking about; right from the get-go, he accused the so-called Libyan rebels of being influenced by Al-Qaeda ideology and Ben Laden’s school of thought; no one had taken his word for it of course, not even a little bit. I mean why should we have? After all, wasn’t he a vile, sex-centric dictator hell-bent on massacring half of the Libyan population while subjecting the other half to manic raping sprees with the aid of his trusted army of Viagra-gobbling, sub-Saharan mercenaries? At least that’s what we got from the visual cancer that is Al Jazeera channel and its even more acrid Saudi counterpart Al-Arabiya in their heavily skewed coverage of NATO’s vicious conquest of Libya. Plus Gaddafi did dress funny; why would anyone trust a haggard, weird-looking despot dressed in colorful rags when you have well-groomed Zionists like Bernard Henry Levy, John McCain and Hillary Clinton at your side, smiling and flashing the victory sign in group photo-ops, right?

Gaddafi called them drug-addicted, Islamic fundamentalists; we know them as ISIS… it doesn’t seem much of a joke now, does it? And ISIS is what had been in store for us all along; the “revolutionary” lynching and sodomization of Muammar Gaddafi amid manic chants of “Allahu Akbar”, lauded by many at the time as some sort of a warped triumph of the good of popular will (read: NATO-sponsored mob rule) over the evil of dictatorship (sovereign state), was nothing but a gory precursor for the future of the country and the region; mass lynching of entire populations in Libya, Syria and Iraq and the breakup of key Arab states into feuding mini-statelets. The gruesome video of Colonel Gaddafi’s murder, which puts to shame the majority of ISIS videos in terms of unhinged brutality and gore, did not invoke the merest of condemnations back then, on the contrary; everyone seemed perfectly fine with the grotesque end of the Libyan “tyrant”… except that it was only the beginning of a new and unprecedented reign of terror courtesy of NATO’s foot-soldiers and GCC-backed Islamic insurgents.

The rapid proliferation of trigger-happy terrorist groups and Jihadi factions drenched in petrodollars in Libya was not some sort of an intelligence failure on the part of western governments or a mere by-product of the power vacuum left by a slain Gaddafi; it was a deliberate, calculated policy sought after and implemented by NATO and its allies in the Gulf under the cringe-inducing moniker “Friends of Libya” (currently known as the International Coalition against ISIS) to turn the north-African country into the world’s largest ungovernable dumpster of weapons, al-Qaida militants and illegal oil trading.

So it is safe to say that UNSC resolution 1973, which practically gave free rein for NATO to bomb Libya into smithereens, has finally borne fruit… and it’s rotten to its nucleus, you can call the latest gruesome murder of 21 Egyptian fishermen and workers by the Libyan branch of the Islamic State exhibit “A”, not to mention of course the myriad of daily killings, bombings and mini-civil wars that are now dotting the entire country which, ever since the West engineered its coup-d’etat against the Gaddafi government, have become synonymous with the bleak landscape of lawlessness and death that is “Libya” today. And the gift of NATO liberation is sure to keep on giving for years of instability and chaos to come.

Learn more at GLOBAL RESEARCH.

***

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES—[17 OCT 2012] Colonel Gaddafi ‘killed by bayonet stab to the anus’

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi died after being stabbed with a bayonet in the anus and not in a firefight as originally claimed by Libyan authorities, according to a report on the dictator’s last hours.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said Gaddafi was already bleeding from head wounds caused by blast shrapnel as he tried to flee Sirte, his hometown. The charity obtained unedited mobile footage that showed militants abusing Gaddafi as they took him into custody in October 2011.

“As he was being led on to the main road, a militiaman stabbed him in his anus with what appears to have been a bayonet, causing another rapidly bleeding wound,” the report said.

Gaddafi’s naked and apparently lifeless body was shown on mobile footage being put into an ambulance and driven to Misrata in a convoy. Earlier, fighters from Benghazi had claimed to have shot Gaddafi dead during a row with fighters from Misrata.

Gaddafi, his son Mutassim, defence minister Abu-Bakr Younis and other followers were buried in a secret place in the desert to prevent his grave becoming a shrine. A total of 103 members of the convoy died in the firefight. Evidence collated by Human Rights Watch suggested that some of the men were summarily executed.

The son of Gaddafi’s defence minister, also called Younis, who was present at the scene of the dictator’s capture, told Human Rights Watch of the confrontation with the rebels while trying to escape from Sirte.

Two Nato missiles forced the group to leave the cars and escape on foot, seeking shelter in a drainage ditch. A bodyguard hurled grenades at approaching militants but one grenade “hit the concrete wall and bounced back to fall between Muammar Gaddafi and Abu Bakr Younis”, Younis junior said.

“The shrapnel hit my father and he fell down to the ground. Muammar Gaddafi was also injured by the grenade, on the left side of his head,” he said.

“Our findings call into question the assertion by Libyan authorities that Muammar Gaddafi was killed in crossfire, and not after his capture,” Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, said.

Learn more at INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES.

***

Related Lumpenproletariat articles, regarding Hillary Clinton‘s 2015-2016 presidential campaign:

  • “Activist Berta Cáceres Assassinated“, 3 MAR 2016
  • “Historical Archive: Third Party Challenge to Unconstitutional Prop 14“, 2 MAR 2016
  • “My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (2015) by Doug Henwood“, 29 FEB 2016
  • “Hillary Clinton for USA Presidency: Pros and Cons“, 13 APR 2015

***

[Last modified 21:59 PDT  6 MAR 2016]

[Image entitlted “Khaddafi In Bredda” by Flikr user FaceMePLS used via Creative Commons]

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The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Professor Steve Fraser

26 Mon Oct 2015

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Civic Engagement (Activism), collective bargaining, Global Labour Movement, History

≈ Leave a comment

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A People's History of the United States, Bill Moyers, Black Lives Matter, Bob Marley, COINTELPRO, decentralisation of manufacturing, decentralization of manufacturing, deindustrialisation, deindustrialization, Howard Zinn, John Mayer, KPFA, Letters and Politics, Margaret Thatcher, Mitch Jeserich, Naomi Klein, National Labor Relations Act, National Labor Relations Board, NLRA, NLRB, Occupy Wall Street, Pacifica Radio, Public Enemy, Ronald Reagan, Steve Fraser, The New York Times, Tompkins Square Park, transcript

Malcolmxm1carbine3grLUMPENPROLETARIAT—Although we live in a post-Occupy Wall Street world, where most people understand that the bottom 99% of the people are exploited and oppressed by the ruling class, or the 1%, we also live in a post-9/11 world, in which even John Lennon‘s “Imagine” can be effectively censored from corporate radio, not to mention Rage Against the Machine and other emancipatory music deemed worthy of censorship by our corporate thought police.

We now live in a time where bourgeois artists, such as John Mayer (b. 1977) have a hit song like “Waiting on the World to Change“, which our corporate masters are all too keen to keep on perpetual rotation.

“Waiting on the World to Change” is a far cry from John Lennon‘s “Imagine” or “Working Class Hero“, or the Civil Rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome“, or Public Enemy‘s “Fight the Power” or “Shut ‘Em Down“, or you name it, “Get Up, Stand Up“.

“Get Up, Stand Up” (1973, 1980) by Bob Marley and The Wailers

But this all seems to reflect a burgeoning apathy and surrender to the powers that be, as the last vestiges of public people of conscience, such as John Mayer and other mealy-mouthed liberals in the public eye, squander their access to mass media.  As the 1960s counterculture generations, inspired within the context of revolutionary uprisings in many economically-developing nations around the world, fade into the past and COINTELPRO, followed by the Reagan/Thatcher 1980s, backlashes pummel the working classes, popular culture has somehow grown incredibly stagnant in terms of its socioeconomic and political consciousness.  This reflects the general decline in civic engagement in the USA, as chronicled in Robert Putnam’s flawed, but important best-seller, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.  Somehow, American life has become increasingly isolated and alienated.  And all of this is despite the mass protest movements, such as the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter, and sundry environmental campaigns, which flare up periodically to protest, but not question nor challenge, the prevailing political order.

While we seem willing to be activists insofar as we are willing to campaign and demonstrate, our contemporary generations seem unwilling to question the prevailing wisdom of the political status quo.  So, most of us accept a cartel-like two-party dictatorship oligopolised by the Republican and Democrat parties, which collude to keep out alternative political parties.  And most of us, even activists, uncritically accept the capitalist mode of production.  Most of us uncritically accept capitalism, lacking the imagination to imagine alternatives.

It seems much of our current generation’s political and socioeconomic apathy comes from a lack of awareness of a people’s history and the struggles of working people to provide lives of dignity for their families and communities.  Professor Steve Fraser reminded us earlier today on free speech radio of our oft-forgotten people’s history of collective resistance to socioeconomic injustice, as he discusses his 2015 book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. [1]  Listen (or download) here.

STEVE FRASER:  “You know; a depression broke out in 1873, just when Twain published his Gilded Age book, and it continued for four long, miserable years.  And it was mass unemployment all over the country, and mass evictions, and so on.  And that was, particularly, the case in New York City.  Demonstrators gathered in Tompkins Square Park, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and that demonstration was met with violence by the City Police Force.  And, forever after, Tompkins Square would be remembered as one of those critical moments of class confrontation, which characterised the era.”

“You know; it’s very hard for us, living in the times we live in today, the acquiescent times, if you will, to imagine what life was like a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago.”

Messina

***

THE NEW YORK TIMES—(16 MAR 2015) For two years running, Oxfam International has traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to make a request: Could the superrich kindly cease devouring the world’s wealth? And while they’re at it, could they quit using “their financial might to influence public policies that favor the rich at the expense of everyone else”?

In 2014, when Oxfam arrived in Davos, it came bearing the (then) shocking news that just 85 individuals controlled as much wealth as half of the world’s population combined. This January, that number went down to 80 individuals.

Dropping this news in Davos is a great publicity stunt, but as a political strategy, it’s somewhat baffling. Why would the victors of a class war choose to surrender simply because the news is out that they have well and truly won? Oxfam’s answer is that the rich must battle inequality or they will find themselves in a stagnant economy with no one to buy their products. (Davos thought bubble: “Isn’t that what cheap credit is for?”)

Still, even if some of the elite hand-wringing about inequality is genuine, are reports really the most powerful weapons out there to fight for a more just distribution of wealth? Where are the sit-down strikes? The mass boycotts? The calls for expropriation? Where, in short, are the angry masses?

Oxfam’s Davos guilt trip doesn’t appear in Steve Fraser’s “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power,” but these are the questions at the heart of this fascinating if at times meandering book. Fraser, a labor historian, argues that deepening economic hardship for the many, combined with “insatiable lust for excess” for the few, qualifies our era as a second Gilded Age. But while contemporary wealth stratification shares much with the age of the robber barons, the popular response does not.

As Fraser forcefully shows, during the first Gilded Age — which he defines loosely as the years between the end of the Civil War and the market crash of 1929 — American elites were threatened with more than embarrassing statistics. Rather, a “broad and multifaceted resistance” fought for and won substantially higher wages, better workplace conditions, progressive taxation and, ultimately, the modern welfare state (even as they dreamed of much more).

To solve the mystery of why sustained resistance to wealth inequality has gone missing in the United States, Fraser devotes the first half of the book to documenting the cut and thrust of the first Gilded Age: the mass strikes that shut down cities and enjoyed the support of much of the population; the Eight Hour Leagues that dramatically cut the length of the workday, fighting for the universal right to leisure and time “for what we will”; the vision of a “ ‘cooperative commonwealth’ in place of the Hobbesian nightmare that Progress had become.”

He reminds readers that although “class war” is considered un-American today, bracing populist rhetoric was once the lingua franca of the nation. American presidents bashed “moneycrats” and “economic royalists,” and immigrant garment workers demanded not just “bread and roses” but threatened “bread or blood.” Among many such arresting anecdotes is one featuring the railway tycoon George Pullman. When he died in 1897, Fraser writes, “his family was so afraid that his corpse would be desecrated by enraged workers, they had it buried at night . . . in a pit eight feet deep, encased in floors and walls of steel-reinforced concrete in a lead-lined casket covered in layers of asphalt and steel rails.”

Learn more at THE NEW YORK TIMES.

***

“War” by Bob Marley and The Wailers

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Letters and Politics.]

LETTERS AND POLITICS—[26 OCT 2015]  “Good day; and welcome to Letters and Politics.  I’m Mitch Jeserich.  During a 15-year period between 1870 and 1920, there were thousands of violent skirmishes between workers and the state, the state meaning whether it be the military, the national guard, state troopers, or the police, and there have been throughout the United States.  This period encompasses what is known as the Gilded Age and the rise of industrial capitalism.

“Many say, today, that we are living in a second Gilded Age with the rise of financial capitalism and the automation of the workforce, displacing many workers today, just like what happened during the first Gilded Age.  But in the first Gilded Age, there were 40 people’s armies formed, just between 1893 and 1894, that set out to march on Washington, D.C.  All but one of them were put down violently before arriving.

“Today, we’re gonna compare and contrast the first Gilded Age and the so-called Second Gilded Age.  My guest is Steve Fraser.  Steve Fraser is a labour historian and an award-winning writer.  He’s the author of the book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power.  He joins us via Skype from New York City.  Steve Fraser, it is my good pleasure to welcome you to this programme.”  (c. 7:34)

STEVE FRASER:  “Thanks.  It is my pleasure to be here.  Thanks for having me.”

MITCH JESERICH:  “As we begin, let’s talk about the term Gilded Age itself and what it means.  It was first coined, wasn’t it, by Mark Twain in a book called The Gilded Age?”

STEVE FRASER:  “That’s correct.  It’s Mark Twain’s first best-seller, published in 1873.  And that’s where we get that rubric from.  It’s still, today, a hilariously funny book, which makes fun of what, today, we would call the crony capitalism of that era.  That is to say the kind of incestuous relationship between big business (back then, which meant railroads and mining companies and banks) and the government.  And the roster of corrupt politicians ranged all the way from the Vice President through the Senate, all through that Congress, into the Cabinets of the Presidents, who ran things in those days.

“And Twain meant it to mean, both, crony capitalism and the kind of obsession with wealth, with what clerics of that age might have called Mana worship and the way it corrupted democracy and undermined the egalitarian ethos that America was supposed to be dedicated to.  So, that’s where we get that term from.  [SNIP]  (c. 27:35)

“[SNIP]  There are a lot of similarities, people who say, Look, you know, this is the same old; it’s déjà vu all over again, have a point.  That is to say there is the same gross maldistribution of income and wealth.  There’s the same kind of obnoxious, extravagant flaunting of great wealth.  There’s the same kind of socially Darwinian callousness today.  If you don’t make it big, you’re a loser.  Then, you are a kind of casualty of the survival of the fittest.  There is the same kind of crony capitalism or corruption in politics.  There’s the same undermining of all democratic institutions, that are supposed to protect the people against the powerful and the wealthy.

“These things are all similar.  There’s no question about that.  But there are these striking differences.  One, of course, is what we’ve been talking about, the extent of resistance, which is far, far less in our own age.  A second is this lack of a kind of alternative vision or set of visions of what might replace a system, which has shown itself in the last 30 or 40 years to be kind of heading back to the future.  That is to say we now have an economy, which more and more is characterised by sweat shop labour.  30 to 40 million people work a full time day and make less than poverty-level wages.  That’s a scandal.

“The sweat shop back around the year 1900 was considered an aberration, a kind of obnoxious departure from capitalism.  Now, it’s, increasingly, in the age of neoliberal, flexible capitalism considered the norm.

“Also, in our Second Gilded Age, we are experiencing a developed country—that is to say, the United States—undergoing a process of underdevelopment.  That is to say, the general standard of living has, either, stagnated or declined for millions of people over the last 30 to 40 years, despite the gaiety that is common in the precincts of the 1%.

“During the first Gilded Age, brutalised and exploited as it was, there was, instead, a general and slow gradual uptick in the standard of living for most people.  [SNIP]”  (c. 29:58)

“[SNIP]  But what we have today is the de-fanging of all those protections, the stripping away of all the welfare state provisions.  The National Labor Relations Act has become a joke.  Nobody obeys it.  No corporation obeys it anymore.  The chances of getting a free and fair election at a work site are minimal.  The law is used by corporate America to delay interminably the resolution of grievances or demands, to engage in collective bargaining until workers who have no choice give up, go elsewhere, work elsewhere.

“There are millions of low wage workers in this country today—and there are numerous reports that document this—that are working at wage levels, for hours, and without health and safety benefits, that are proscribed by law.  But business in America, today, uniformly—or, if not uniformly, widely—ignores that law ‘cos there’s no enforcement mechanism in place.  All of the social welfare provisions, that you’re referring to, was the culmination of that resistance to that first Gilded Age.”  (c. 31:06)”

MITCH JESERICH:  “Not just the New Deal?”

STEVE FRASER:  “Yeah, created during the New Deal have been slowly and more rapidly whittled away.”

MITCH JESERICH:  “But you’re saying, though, that these protections, that really sort of came in the 1930s, this is part of—what?—a 60-year effort?  A 50-year effort—”

STEVE FRASER:  “Yes.”

MITCH JESERICH:  “—all the way back to the 1870s?”

STEVE FRASER:  “Yeah, some of it, like, for instance, anti-sweat shop legislation begins to emerge around the turn of the century, long before the Great Depression and the New Deal.  And safety legislation begins to emerge.  States begin to pass minimum wage and maximum hour laws.  All of that is, in my view, a function of this upwelling of resistance, which had characterised the country and alarmed so many people for decades by that point.

“Moreover, when you get to the ’30s and you face what, I guess, arguably, is the second most traumatic moment in American history, the Great Depression, you don’t have only a President who’s open to the possibility of significant reform, you have a population, which is ready to demand in a variety of ways, so that there are mass strikes all around the country.  There’s a San Francisco General Strike.  There’s a Minneapolis General Strike.  There’s a textiles strike, which puts 450,000 textile workers on the picket lines.  There are sit down strikes in the auto industry, in the rubber industry, in department stores, in the meat-packing industry.  You have farm or labour parties emerging all through the midwest and even in New York state.  You have mass unemployment demonstrations, some of them met with violence, as in the case of the Ford Motor Company in 1932.

“You have movements to stop, forcibly stop, evictions, both, from farms and from people’s apartments and homes.  You have people actually seizing idled utility plants and coal mines, that is transgressing the holy of all holies, private property, and starting them up themselves, so that they could survive.  So, there’s a general atmosphere of anti-capitalism, which fuels the political, which informs the political atmosphere of that moment and makes the New Deal reforms possible.  The New Deal is not a function of a kind-hearted Hudson River patroon, which is what Roosevelt was, feeling—”

“—feeling the pinch.”

MITCH JESERICH:  “And it’s not just a reaction to, which I think a lot of people think it is, to the 1929 crash.”

STEVE FRASER:  “No.  It’s not.  And it draws on this long reservoir of anti-capitalism.  (c. 34:00) [SNIP]”

[SNIP]  (c. 59:59)

Learn more at LETTERS AND POLITICS.

[This transcript will be expanded as time constraints, and/or demand or resources, allow.]

*

[From KPFA website] Steve Fraser is a labor historian and author of several books including Wall Street and Labor Will Rule, which won the Philip Taft Award for the best book in labor history. He also is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. His latest book is The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power.

About the book:
A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished.

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege.  Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy.  Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism.  But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished.  Why?

The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery.  Steve Fraser’s account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today’s delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear.

Learn more at LETTERS AND POLITICS.

***

THE NATION—[2 APR 2015] This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

What We Can Learn From the Workers, Activists, and Even Politicians Who Tore Down the First Gilded Age: Americans were furious at the inequality of their country 200 years ago.  Could they get as angry today?

by Steve Fraser

The following passages are excerpted and slightly adapted from The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little, Brown and Company).

Part 1: The Great Upheaval

What came to be known as the Great Upheaval, the movement for the eight-hour day, elicited what one historian has called “a strange enthusiasm.” The normal trade union strike is a finite event joining two parties contesting over limited, if sometimes intractable, issues. The mass strike in 1886 or before that in 1877—all the many localized mass strikes that erupted in towns and small industrial cities after the Civil War and into the new century—was open-ended and ecumenical in reach.

So, for example, in Baltimore when the skilled and better-paid railroad brakemen on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad first struck in 1877 so, too, did less well off “box-makers, sawyers, and can-makers, engaged in the shops and factories of that city, [who] abandoned their places and swarmed into the streets.” This in turn “stimulated the railroad men to commit bolder acts.” When the governor of West Virginia sent out the Berkeley Light Guard and Infantry to confront the strikers at Martinsburg at the request of the railroad’s vice president, the militia retreated and “the citizens of the town, the disbanded militia, and the rural population of the surrounding country fraternized,” encouraging the strikers.

The centrifugal dynamic of the mass strike was characteristic of this extraordinary phenomenon. By the third day in Martinsburg the strikers had been “reinforced during the night at all points by accessions of working men engaged in other avocations than railroading,” which, by the way, made it virtually impossible for federal troops by then on the scene to recruit scabs to run the trains.

By the fourth day, “mechanics, artisans, and laborers in every department of human industry began to show symptoms of restlessness and discontent.” Seeping deeper and deeper into the subsoil of proletarian life, down below the “respectable” working class of miners and mechanics and canal boat-men, frightened observers reported a “mighty current of passion and hate” sweeping up a “vast swarm of vicious idlers, vagrants, and tramps.” And so it went.

Smaller cities and towns like Martinsburg were often more likely than the biggest urban centers to experience this sweeping sense of social solidarity. (What today we might call a massing of the 99%.) During the 1877 Great Uprising, the social transmission of the mass strike moved first along the great trunk lines of the struck railroads, but quickly flowed into the small villages and towns along dozens of tributary lines and into local factories, workshops, and coal mines as squads of strikers moved from settlement to settlement mobilizing the populace.

In these locales, face-to-face relations still prevailed. It was by no means taken for granted that antagonism between labor and capital was fated to be the way of the world. Aversion to the new industrial order and a “democratic feeling” brought workers, storekeepers, lawyers, and businessmen of all sorts together, appalled by the behavior of large industrialists who often enough didn’t live in those communities and so were the more easily seen as alien beings.

It was not uncommon for local officials, like the mayor of Cumberland, Maryland, to take the side of the mass strikers. The federal postmaster in Indianapolis wired Washington, “Our mayor is too weak, and our Governor will do nothing. He is believed to sympathize with the strikers.” In Fort Wayne, like many other towns its size, the police and militia simply could not be counted on to put down the insurrectionists. In this world, corporate property was not accorded the same sanctified status still deferred to when it came to personal property. Sometimes company assets were burned to the ground or disabled; at other times they were seized, but not damaged.

Metropolises also witnessed their own less frequent social earthquakes. Anonymous relations were more common there, the gulf separating social classes was much wider, and the largest employers could count on the new managerial and professional middle classes for support and a political establishment they could more often rely on.

Still, the big city hardly constituted a DMZ. During the mass strike of 1877 in Pittsburgh, when 16 citizens were killed, the city erupted and “the whole population seemed to have joined the rioters.”

“Strange to say,” noted one journalist, elements of the population who had a “reputation for being respectable people—tradesmen, householders, well-to-do mechanics and such—openly mingled with the [turbulent mob] and encouraged them to commit further deeds of violence.” Here, too, as in smaller locales, enraged as they clearly were, mass strikers still drew a distinction between railroad property and the private property of individuals, which they scrupulously avoided attacking. Often enough the momentum of the mass strike was enough to win concessions on wages, hours, or on other conditions of work—although they might be provisional, not inscribed in contracts, and subject to being violated or ignored when law and order was restored.

Learn more at THE NATION.

***

MOYERS & COMPANY—[19 DEC 2014]  “Why Have Americans Stopped Resisting Economic Privilege?  by Steve Fraser

The following excerpt is from the introduction to Steve Fraser’s new book, The Age of Acquiescence.

Marx once described high finance as “the Vatican of capitalism,” its diktat to be obeyed without question. Several decades have come and gone during which we’ve learned not to mention Marx in polite company. Our vocabulary went through a kind of linguistic cleansing, exiling suspect and nasty phrases like “class warfare” or “the reserve army of labor” or even something as apparently innocuous as “working class.”

In times past, however, such language and the ideas they conjured up struck our forebears as useful, even sometimes as accurate depictions of reality. They used them regularly along with words and phrases like “plutocracy,” “robber baron,” and “ruling class” to identify the sources of economic exploitation and inequality that oppressed them, as well as to describe the political disenfranchisement they suffered and the subversion of democracy they experienced. Never before, however, has the Vatican of capitalism captured quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that recently ran the country for a long generation and ended up running it into the ground. Even political consultant and pundit James Carville (no Marxist he), confessed as much during the Clinton years, when he said the bond market “intimidates everybody.”

Occupy Wall Street, even bereft of strategy, program, and specific demands as many lamented when it was a newborn, nonetheless opened up space again for our political imagination by confronting this elemental, determining feature of our society’s predicament. It rediscovered something that, beneath thickets of political verbiage about tax this and cut that, about end‑of‑the ­world deficits and ­missionary-minded “job creators,” had been hiding in plain sight: namely, what our ancestors once called “the street of torments.” It achieved a giant leap backward, so to speak, summoning up a history of opposition that had mysteriously withered away.

True turning points in American political history are rare. This might seem counterintuitive once we recognize that for so long society was in a constant uproar. Arguably the country was formed and re‑formed in serial acts of violent expropriation. Like the market it has been (and remains) infinitely fungible, living in the perpetually changing present, panting after the future, the next big thing. The demographics of American society are and have always been in permanent upheaval, its racial and ethnic complexion mutating from one generation to the next. Its economic hierarchies exist in a fluid state of dissolution and recrystallization. Social classes go in and out of existence.

Nonetheless, in the face of this all­sided liquefaction, American politics have tended to flow within very narrow banks from one generation to the next. The capacious, sometimes stultifying embrace of the two­-party­ system has absorbed most of the heat generated by this or that hot­-button­ issue, leaving the fundamentals intact. Only under the most trying circumstances has the political system ruptured or come close. Then the prevailing balance of power and wealth between classes and regions has been called into question; then the political geography and demography of the nation have been reconfigured, sometimes for decades to come; only then have axiomatic beliefs about wealth and work, democracy and elitism, equality and individualism, government and the free market been reformulated or at least opened to serious debate, however briefly.

A double mystery then is the subject of this book. Speaking generally, one might ask why people submit for so long to various forms of exploitation, oppression, and domination. And then, equally mysterious, why they ever stop giving in. Why acquiesce? Why resist? Looking backward, the indignities and injustices, the hypocrisies and lies, the corruption and cruelty may seem insupportable. Yet they are tolerated. Looking backward, the dangers to life, limb, and livelihood entailed in rebelling may seem too dire to contemplate. Yet in the teeth of all that, rebellion happens. The world is full of recent and long-ago examples of both.

Learn more at MOYERS & COMPANY.

***

[1]  Steve Fraser is a historian, writer, and editor. His research and writing have pursued two main lines of inquiry: labor history and the history of American capitalism. In his first book, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (1991), he examines the relationship between the New Deal and the rise of the modern labor movement. His later works, including Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace (2008) and Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (2005), explore the ways American society and culture reacted to the presence of powerful economic elites. His newest book is The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (2015). He has taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University. He has also worked as an editor for Cambridge University Press, Basic Books, and Houghton Mifflin.

***

[29 OCT 2015 20:30 PST]

[Last modified 09:01 PDT  12 MAY 2016]

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