May 29, 2011 at 03:58:34

Vermont Enacts Conditional Universal Healthcare Coverage

By Stephen Lendman (about the author)

Numerous previous articles discussed Obamacare, described accurately as a rationing scheme to enrich insurers, drug companies and large hospital chains in lieu of universal single payer coverage.

Obama hailed its March 2010 passage as answering "the call of history." In fact, Ralph Nader was right calling it a "pay-or-die system that is the disgrace of the Western world," costing double what other Western countries spend and delivering less, rationing care to enrich corporate providers while making a dysfunctional system worse.

Under it, junk insurance policies leave millions underinsured. Costs remain out-of-control. Insurers can still deny care by delaying, contesting, preventing or over-charging people from accessing it. Yet everyone must be covered or penalized if opt out, a provision many states are contesting as a lawless unconstitutional infringement.

Moreover, company-provided policies will be taxed as ordinary income, harming working households most of all.

After passage, Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) denounced it, saying the new law "enrich(es) and further entrench(es private insurers, forcing) millions of Americans to buy" defective coverage leaving most worse off than before at a cost of hundreds of billions of tax dollars given predators to game the system for profit, the public losing out. Moreover, 23 million Americans will remain uninsured, "translate(d) into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths annually and an incalculable toll of suffering."

In fact, Obama's centerpiece domestic policy scammed the public with a package of expensive mandates, new taxes, and sweetheart deals, creating a fragmented, dysfunctional, unsustainable system, denying Americans what they urgently need - universal coverage, an expanded, improved Medicare for all. Everyone in, no one out, what neither party or Obama delivered.

Vermont Perhaps Heading for Affordable Universal Coverage

After Vermont lawmakers passed the Universal and Unified Health System Act (H. 202), Governor Peter Shumlim, on May 26, signed America's first universal system, a measure heading state residents for full coverage with lots of hurdles to overcome to make it fair, equitable and affordable.

Nonetheless, Shumlin relished the moment, saying we're:

"here today to launch the first single payer system in America, to do in Vermont what has taken too long - to have health care that is the best in the world that treats (it) as a right and not a privilege, where health care follows the individual not the employer."

"This law recognizes an economic and fiscal imperative. We must control the growth in health care costs that are putting families at economic risk and making it harder for small employers to do business."

On May 26, Physicians for a National Health Program's (PNHP) National Coordinator, Dr. Quentin D. Young said:

"We salute the single-payer activists in Vermont and applaud their efforts. Although this is not a (true) single-payer bill, we will continue to support the struggle to achieve health care justice in Vermont and across the nation."

A PNHP press release said H. 202 "is much more modest in its actual reach than a (true) single-payer plan," providing universal affordable coverage as a human right, no strings attached.

"As of now, the federal Affordable Care Act prohibits states like Vermont from adopting their own models of reform until 2017." Shumlin and other Vermonters want it earlier in 2014. Other states, including California, are considering variations of single-payer.

Vermont's bill, in fact, falls short of universal, high-quality, affordable coverage by permitting multiple private insurers, able to game the system through "multi-tiered care, rising costs and needless waste."

Moreover, enormous administrative costs remain instead of eliminating them altogether under a single-payer system, removing the middleman so state officials can negotiate reduced prices for drugs and other health services.

Among other limitations, Vermont's bill establishes a state healthcare exchange called Green Mountain Care, managed by a five-member board. It interfaces with providers on reimbursement rates under a system leaving them largely in control, a serious flaw needing correcting. Otherwise they'll game the system to their advantage.

According to PNHP co-founder Dr. David Himmelstein:

Vermont's law "leave(s) the door open for burdensome co-pays, deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses that deter people from seeking timely care. (Moreover), to the extent the law permits, large for-profit institutional providers (may) allocate their profits as they see fit, (denying) the system (of) the ability to do effective health planning."

As a result, much more work needs to be done to make universal coverage a reality.

On Democracy Now, Dr. Deb Richter, president of Vermont Health Care for All and past PNHP president, explained the bill's shortcomings and need to change federal law. The goal, she stressed, is true universal coverage. Everyone in, no one out in a system excluding private insurers except for those choosing that option.

In fact, Vermont for Single Payer: Everybody In, Nobody Out's Statement of Principles is as follows:

"We support a universal health care system for the State of Vermont, one that includes all Vermonters, offers free choice of providers, is progressively financed, decoupled from employment, affordable for all, and pays for all necessary care out of public funds; a system which retains the private delivery of health care and has a publicly accountable budget process to ensure adequate capacity to meet the health care needs of all Vermonters."

Access VSP's site through the following link:

http://www.vermontforsinglepayer.org/

On May 26, Vermont took an important first step toward universal coverage. It's for Vermonters and other state residents to follow through for true affordable universality, establishing affordable health care as an inalienable human right no corporate predators or politicians can deny.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at Email address removed. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/ .

I was born in 1934, am a retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Let's Not Take America Back to Imperialism, Interventionism and Corporate Fascism

May 25, 2011 at 12:10:07

Let's Not Take America Back!

By Ricardo Levins Morales (about the author)

Wisconsin Power Blend by Ricardo Levins Morales

The Madison worker uprising shook up the US political landscape. State governments that were peacefully going about their business forcing workers and communities to pay for upper class gluttony are facing resistance on a scale they had not imagined. Instead of letting their fellow workers be picked off and destroyed sector by sector, a wide swath of the working public rose in support of Wisconsin teachers and state workers. This, in turn, has given new juice to efforts to challenge tax-dodging banks, defend school programs and resist corporate land grabs across the country. It has changed the discussion from "whose needs should get axed, since the money is gone?" to "Hey! Who stole the money!?" The assault on unions and the public sector is continuing unabated, however, and we'll need some serious strategic realignment if we wish to avoid the dystopian future that's been ordered up for us.

The prospects for any social movement rest on the presence of three essential elements: unity, capacity and clarity. Like some nutrients in the body they need to be in balance or they turn toxic. Clarity by itself leads to frustration since you can see what needs doing but can't get it done; unity alone results in missed opportunities, making it more difficult to rebuild unity down the road; capacity without its partners can deliver victories that slip through our fingers or that turn out to not be so great. How a movement defines what it is fighting for will influence the development of all three elements and will signal to other constituencies whether or not they have common objectives.

While the Wisconsin awakening was sparked by teachers and teaching assistants, the voices that have so far dominated the mic at rallies and press conferences have been union officials, elected Democrats and white populists united behind the slogan "Let's take America back!" This rallying cry has a strong appeal to working-class sectors that have seen the foundations of their world -- livable jobs, educational access and affordable home ownership -- collapse with the manufacturing economy and the consolidation of casino capitalism. "Taking America back" represents to them the return of a semblance of democracy and the dream of a rising living standard for each generation. In short, it appeals to a population that has a "reset" point, a time when things were not so bad, to which it can dream of returning.

The insecurity and repression being visited on the vaunted "middle class" are permanent features of life in communities of color. In these communities, the exhortation to return to "the good old days" does not hold the same magic. It represents a minor modification of a harsh status quo in which a timid white, liberal establishment would reclaim its old "seat at the table." Some folk's nostalgia is other folks' déjà vu.

What about this "America" we're supposed to be so eager to get back to? The relative security for white workers in the post-war era rested on a series of bad bargains that set the course for today's class massacre. Among these was complicity with an interventionist foreign policy designed to create "attractive climates for investment" for US corporations in the global south. This was accomplished through implanting repressive regimes that would gut their nation's public services and regulations, suppress unions, eliminate price controls on necessities and crush protest. Implemented by Democrats and Republicans alike with the support of the union bureaucracy, these policies prepared the greener pastures to which runaway manufacturing (and, more recently, many services) could relocate.

The outflow of manufacturing jobs coincided with the post-civil rights backlash against the gains of African-American workers. Management in agriculture, hospitality, meatpacking and other sectors moved systematically to replace Blacks with more vulnerable undocumented immigrants. As California hotel owners described it to researchers, Blacks were beginning to act "entitled" and were behaving too much like whites.[1] In other words they were acting as though they had citizenship rights and must therefore be replaced with workers who literally didn't. This echoed the WWII displacement of Japanese farm workers and family farmers at the behest of western ag interests, who campaigned relentlessly for mass, race-based internment under the mantle of patriotism. That goal accomplished, they immediately clamored for a Bracero program to fill the newly created labor void with a vulnerable, contingent workforce.[2]

The replacement of one workforce with another was again accomplished by means of mass internment. Where racial codes had once barred African Americans from many occupations, housing opportunities and the voting booth, now these restrictions would be reserved for "criminals." Criminal laws and police practices were dutifully adjusted to speed up the criminalization -- en mass -- of Black people. Simultaneously, immigration without documents -- a civil infraction under US law -- was re-cast as a national crisis of criminality necessitating its own parallel system of raids, mass detentions, incarceration centers and suspension of due process.

For some, the good old days are closer at hand. "If Wisconsin had done its job in the last election," quipped one of the fugitive state legislators upon their return to Madison. "None of this would have been necessary." It would have been necessary, of course; it just wouldn't have been possible. Electing Wisconsin Democrats in 2010 would have preserved a status quo in which worker and democratic rights are bargained away in a controlled, incremental process without the messy recklessness of the Republican onslaught.

The Democratic legislators from several states who went into exile to block anti-worker laws are to be lauded for their courage. They cannot, however, be expected to provide the vision that the moment demands. This reflects the realities of funding. Democrats can get behind targeting companies that contribute to Republican right wingers but are not down with identifying the corporate class as a whole as the problem -- especially with the financial arms race for corporate money unleashed by the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. But it is precisely the consensus of the corporate sector as a whole that is driving the restructuring of the global economy and the offensive against workers rights everywhere.

The Wisconsin bill which sparked the uprising is sometimes identified (including by Gov. Walker himself) as a "PATCO moment" for our time. It wasn't. PATCO was the air traffic controllers' union whose members' firing by President Reagan in 1981 unleashed a ferocious nationwide offensive against private sector unions. Today's PATCO moment came months before the Wisconsin governor made his move; in November, 2010, when President Obama announced a two-year freeze on federal workers' wages. This action -- negligible in its effect on the federal deficit -- affixed the presidential seal of approval to the strategy of handing workers the bill -- and the blame -- for the economic havoc caused by Wall Street fraud, corporate tax relief and war. As Dan LaBotz predicted in Labor Notes:

"Now, around the country, governments at the city, county, and state level faced with budget deficits and already engaged in layoffs and furloughs will use the president's position to justify their actions. Private industry -- which hardly needed encouragement -- will do the same."[3]

Obama's green light was not directed at Republicans or Democrats; it was a signal to management -- public and private -- and their pet politicians that open season on union contracts is in full swing. It's about class, not party.

Mass criminalization -- be it of dark-skinned citizens or immigrants -- is a lynch-pin for ensuring a divided and paralyzed working class. Its success is what permits the corporate class to move in for the kill. W. E. B. DuBois declared race the "Achilles heel" of organized labor. It is certainly a strategic blind spot to not recognize that repressive immigration policy and mass racial incarceration -- two pillars of US social policy -- are fundamentally labor issues as much as slavery was in its day.

The attack on public sector unions is part of the same strategic offensive as the decimation of public schools and services; corporate plunder of the treasury; subversion of climate policy; replacement of local government by corporate managers; "Free Trade" destruction of southern economies; and the assault on democratic communications. It is also linked to efforts to demonize and isolate sexual, religious and other minorities. The breadth of this attack overwhelms the go-it-alone strategy instinctively pursued by unions, non-profits and issue campaigns. The common wisdom is that if I allow my issue to get tangled up with yours, I lessen my chances of bringing home concessions (and, indeed, funders and officials reward lobbying to benefit narrow constituencies rather than broad efforts to improve things for everyone). This approach has yielded short-term benefits at times (when the elite were in a mood to share some goodies) but in the long run leaves us inexperienced and unprepared for the imperatives of broad-based, united struggle.

Everyone can feel the shift that is underway. A period of right-wing ascendancy is giving way to one of right-wing consolidation. Anything that stands in the way of capital accumulation has been targeted for elimination. The public square will either expand with a new wave of civic participation or it will shut down and sold off to the best-connected bidder. There's not much room for compromise. Under these conditions we need to make common cause among all sectors who are in the cross-hairs. Workers -- unionized, non-union and displaced -- citizen and immigrant; service providers and service recipients; cast-off veterans and cast-out homeless; and the discriminated-against of all flavors, are the basis for a coalition of the discarded. Such unity can only be forged under a program that embraces all of us; one that fights unapologetically for our common good.

In the early 19th Century Tecumseh worked to forge the tribes west of the Appalachians into a united confederation capable of blocking the expansion of the hungry, young nation on their east flank. He tried to convince them that the United States was determined to absorb all Native lands, and therefore, seeking individual agreements would be suicidal. Some Nations were not convinced. They opted to side with Washington or to remain neutral in the hopes of protecting their own threatened land bases. The moment Tecumseh was defeated, however, the accommodationist tribes suffered the same fate at the hands of Washington as the resisting ones. Tecumseh had read the signs correctly. Today we face a similar challenge. There are no concessions we can make that will mollify the corporate appetite in the early 21st Century; our only possible protection lies in a sufficiently powerful and united resistance.

Nostalgia for a lost era of relative comfort and merit-based upward mobility also the theme song of the Tea Party. They take it one logical step further, though: if the white "middle class" had a measure of success and security due to its own hard work, then it follows that those who didn't experience that security must not have worked as hard or been as smart. For them taking America back is explicitly a return to a time when the dark, the gay, the female and the foreign were kept in their place. Those days are not coming back; they lie crushed in the rubble of a crumbling superpower and the shimmering mirage of its casino economy. That's not a bad thing.

"An injury to one is an injury to all," is the most powerful organizing principle yet devised. It is a far cry from hawking white, middle-class nostalgia. Far more promising than the reactionary "Let's Take America Back," is the solidarity-building message "We've got your back!" It's a principle which, if applied boldly, can derail the corporate/right-wing game plan. But -- and this is our challenge -- it will need to be applied more broadly, more deeply and more courageously than is our custom in the United States. It will require joint campaigns, cooperative education and mutual support among the diverse targets of economic restructuring and social repression. Most important, it must be a unity that encompasses -- at its core -- the huge sectors of our people that have been targeted with criminalization. They have been declared off limits by the elite for a reason: they hold the key to working class unity.

It doesn't take prophetic vision to know that many of the leaders riding today's wave of worker resistance will do their best -- as soon as the chance arises -- to stuff the genie back in the bottle. They value their hard-won respectability and their imagined influence in the halls of power. The uncontrollable messiness of grassroots insurgency is outside their comfort zone. Our unions, mass organizations and elected representatives have a role to play, but their sails only fill when there's a strong wind blowing from the streets and shop floors. We cannot ultimately rely on leadership which acts boldly only when forced to and accommodates power when allowed to. This uprising -- and our broader capacity to resist the corporate onslaught -- will rise or fall on the strength of bottom-up initiatives, emerging leadership and the advent of structures of resistance that transcend economic sector, legal status and race. As in Tecumseh's day, the essential first step is to accurately identify the breadth and scale of the assault on civil society and human rights (in which our weakened labor organizations are the target du jour). That will simultaneously establish the necessary breadth and scale of our response.

As our conservative counterparts have demonstrated, language matters. How we choose to declare what we are fighting for plays an important role in determining who will recognize our fight as also being theirs. It will signal whether or not we understand that their fight is also ours. It matters. My Anishinabe and Lakota friends don't get a warm fuzzy feeling when they hear 20,000 mostly white folk singing "this land is my land." The "America" that the dark and poor hunger for is one that has never been.

The months and years ahead will be pivotal ones for our country and our world. The contest for the future will take twists and turns that are impossible for us to foresee. There's one point on which we should clear from the outset, though: we're not going back!

[1] Alienation and resistance: New Possibilities for Working-Class formation, Margaret Zamudio. Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and world Order. Vol. 31, No. 3.

[2] Juliana Pegues, "(In)Visible Workers and War: Links of Labor, Gender and Citizenship in the Mexican Bracero Program and Japanese American Internment "

[3] Dan LaBotz, Labor Notes, Dec. 2010

www.rlmarts.com

I am a movement artist and activist. I was born into the Puerto Rican independence movement and have been active in US social movements from an early age. I worked for 30 years in the Northland poster Collective which provided art services and (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

AlterNet.org

ECONOMY

AlterNet / By Bruce E. Levine

10 Steps to Defeat the Corporatocracy

The only way to overcome the power of money is regain our courage and solidarity. Here's how to do that.

May 20, 2011 |

Many Americans know that the United States is not a democracy but a "corporatocracy," in which we are ruled by a partnership of giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite and corporate-collaborator government officials. However, the truth of such tyranny is not enough to set most of us free to take action. Too many of us have become pacified by corporatocracy-created institutions and culture.

Some activists insist that this political passivity problem is caused by Americans' ignorance due to corporate media propaganda, and others claim that political passivity is caused by the inability to organize due to a lack of money. However, polls show that on the important issues of our day - from senseless wars, to Wall Street bailouts, to corporate tax-dodging, to health insurance rip-offs - the majority of Americans are not ignorant to the reality that they are being screwed. And American history is replete with organizational examples - from the Underground Railroad, to the Great Populist Revolt, to the Flint sit-down strike, to large wildcat strikes a generation ago - of successful rebels who had little money but lots of guts and solidarity.

The elite spend their lives stockpiling money and have the financial clout to bribe, divide and conquer the rest of us. The only way to overcome the power of money is with the power of courage and solidarity. When we regain our guts and solidarity, we can then more wisely select from - and implement - time-honored strategies and tactics that oppressed peoples have long used to defeat the elite. So, how do we regain our guts and solidarity?

1. Create the Cultural and Psychological "Building Blocks" for Democratic Movements

Historian Lawrence Goodwyn has studied democratic movements such as Solidarity in Poland, and he has written extensively about the populist movement in the United States that occurred during the end of the 19th century (what he calls "the largest democratic mass movement in American history"). Goodwyn concludes that democratic movements are initiated by people who are neither resigned to the status quo nor intimidated by established powers. For Goodwyn, the cultural and psychological building blocks of democratic movements are individual self-respect and collective self-confidence. Without individual self-respect, we do not believe that we are worthy of power or capable of utilizing power wisely, and we accept as our role being a subject of power. Without collective self-confidence, we do not believe that we can succeed in wresting away power from our rulers.

Thus, it is the job of all of us - from parents, to students, to teachers, to journalists, to clergy, to psychologists, to artists and EVERYBODY who gives a damn about genuine democracy - to create individual self-respect and collective self-confidence.

2. Confront and Transform ALL Institutions that Have Destroyed Individual Self-Respect and Collective Self-Confidence

In "Get Up, Stand Up, " I detail 12 major institutional and cultural areas that have broken people's sprit of resistance, and all are "battlefields for democracy" in which we can fight to regain our individual self-respect and collective self confidence:
• Television
• Isolation and bureaucratization
• "Fundamentalist consumerism" and advertising/propaganda
• Student loan debt and indentured servitude
• Surveillance
• The decline of unions/solidarity among working people
• Greed and a "money-centric" culture
• Fear-based schools that teach obedience
• Psychopathologizing noncompliance
• Elitism via professional training
• The corporate media
• The US electoral system

As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, "All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike."

3. Side Each Day in Every Way With Anti-Authoritarians

We can recover our self-respect and strength by regaining our integrity. This process requires a personal transformation to overcome our sense of powerlessness and fight for what we believe in. Integrity includes acts of courage resisting all illegitimate authorities. We must recognize that in virtually every aspect of our life in every day, we can either be on the side of authoritarianism and the corporatocracy or on the side of anti-authoritarianism and democracy. Specifically, we can question the legitimacy of government, media, religious, educational and other authorities in our lives, and if we establish that an authority is not legitimate, we can resist it. And we can support others who are resisting illegitimate authorities. A huge part of solidarity comes from supporting others who are resisting the illegitimate authorities in their lives. Walt Whitman had it right: "Resist much, obey little. Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved."

4. Regain Morale by Thinking More Critically About Our Critical Thinking

While we need critical thinking to effectively question and challenge illegitimate authority - and to wisely select the best strategies and tactics to defeat the elite - critical thinking can reveal some ugly truths about reality, which can result in defeatism. Thus, critical thinkers must also think critically about their defeatism, and realize that it can cripple the will and destroy motivation, thus perpetuating the status quo. William James (1842–1910), the psychologist, philosopher, and occasional political activist (member of the Anti-Imperialist League who, during the Spanish-American War, said, "God damn the US for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles!") had a history of pessimism and severe depression, which helped fuel some of his greatest wisdom on how to overcome immobilization. James, a critical thinker, had little stomach for what we now call "positive thinking," but he also came to understand how losing belief in a possible outcome can guarantee its defeat. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian political theorist and Marxist activist who was imprisoned by Mussolini, came to the same conclusions. Gramsci's phrase "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" has inspired many critical thinkers, including Noam Chomsky, to maintain their efforts in the face of difficult challenges.

5. Restore Courage in Young People

The corporatocracy has not only decimated America's labor union movement, it has almost totally broken the spirit of resistance among young Americans - an even more frightening achievement. Historically, young people without family responsibilities have felt most freed up to challenge illegitimate authority. But America's education system creates fear, shame and debt - all killers of the spirit of resistance. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and standardized testing tyranny results in the kind of fear that crushes curiosity, critical thinking and the capacity to constructively resist illegitimate authority. Rebel teachers, parents, and students - in a variety of overt and covert ways - have already stopped complying with corporatocracy schooling. We must also stop shaming intelligent young people who reject college, and we must instead recreate an economy that respects all kinds of intelligence and education. While the corporatocracy exploits student loan debt to both rake in easy money and break young people's spirit of resistance, the rest of us need to rebel against student loan debt and indentured servitude. And parents and mental health professionals need to stop behavior-modifying and medicating young people who are resisting illegitimate authority.

6. Focus on Democracy Battlefields Where the Corporate Elite Don't Have Such a Large Financial Advantage

The emphasis of many activists is on electoral politics, but the elite have a huge advantage in this battlefield, where money controls the US electoral process. By focusing exclusively on electoral politics at the expense of everything else, we: (1) give away power when we focus only on getting leaders elected and become dependent on them; (2) buy into the elite notion that democracy is all about elections; (3) lose sight of the fact that democracy means having influence over all aspects of our lives; and (4) forget that if we have no power in our workplace, in our education and in all our institutions, then there will never be democracy worthy of the name. Thus, we should focus our fight more on the daily institutions we experience. As Wendell Berry said, "If you can control a people's economy, you don't need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant."

7. Heal from "Corporatocracy Abuse" and "Battered People's Syndrome" to Gain Strength

Activists routinely become frustrated when truths about lies, victimization and oppression don't set people free to take action. But when we human beings eat crap for too long, we gradually lose our self-respect to the point that we become psychologically too weak to take action. Many Americans are embarrassed to accept that, after years of corporatocracy subjugation, we have developed "battered people's syndrome" and what Bob Marley called "mental slavery." To emancipate ourselves and others, we must:
• Move out of denial and accept that we are a subjugated people.
• Admit that we have bought into many lies. There is a dignity, humility, and strength in facing the fact that, while we may have once bought into some lies, we no longer do so.
• Forgive ourselves and others for accepting the abuser's lies. Remember the liars we face are often quite good at lying.
• Maintain a sense of humor. Victims of horrific abuse, including those in concentration camps and slave plantations, have discovered that pain can either immobilize us or be transformed by humor into energy.
• Stop beating ourselves up for having been in an abusive relationship. The energy we have is better spent on healing and then working to change the abusive system; this provides more energy, and when we use this energy to provide respect and confidence for others, everybody gets energized.

8. Unite Populists by Rejecting Corporate Media's Political Divisions

The corporate media routinely divides Americans as "liberals," "conservatives" and "moderates," a useful division for the corporatocracy, because no matter which of these groups is the current electoral winner, the corporatocracy retains power. In order to defeat the corporatocracy, it's more useful to divide people in terms of authoritarians versus anti-authoritarians, elitists versus populists and corporatists versus anticorporatists. Both left anti-authoritarians and libertarian anti-authoritarians passionately oppose current US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Wall Street bailout, the PATRIOT Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the so-called "war on drugs" and several other corporatocracy policies. There are differences between anti-authoritarians but, as Ralph Nader and Ron Paul have together recently publicly discussed, we can form coalitions and alliances on these important power-money issues. One example of an anti-authoritarian democratic movement (which I am involved in) is the mental health treatment reform movement, comprised of left anti-authoritarians and libertarians. We all share distrust of Big Pharma and contempt for pseudoscience, and we believe that people deserve truly informed choice regarding treatment. We respect Erich Fromm, the democratic-socialist psychoanalyst, along with Thomas Szasz, the libertarian psychiatrist, both passionate anti-authoritarians who have confronted mental health professionals for using dogma to coerce people.

9. Unite "Comfortable Anti-Authoritarians" and "Afflicted Anti-Authoritarians

This "comfortable-afflicted" continuum is based on the magnitude of pain that one has simply getting through the day. The term comfortable anti-authoritarian is not a pejorative one, but refers to those anti-authoritarians lucky enough to have decent paying and maybe even meaningful jobs, or platforms through which their voices are heard or social supports in their lives. Many of these comfortable anti-authoritarians may know that there are millions of Americans working mindless jobs in order to hold on to their health insurance, or hustling two low-wage jobs to pay college loans, rent and a car payment, or who may be unable to find even a poorly paying, mindless job and are instead helplessly watching eviction or foreclosure and bankruptcy close in on them. However, unless these comfortable anti-authoritarians have once been part of that afflicted class - and remember what it feels like - they may not be able to fully respect the afflicted's emotional state. The afflicted need to recognize that human beings often become passive because they are overwhelmed by pain (not because they are ignorant, stupid, or lazy), and in order to function at all, they often shut down or distract themselves from this pain. Some comfortable anti-authoritarians assume that people's inactions are caused by ignorance. This not only sounds and smells like elitism, it creates resentment for many in the afflicted class who lack the energy to be engaged in any activism. Respect, resources and anything that concretely reduces their level of pain is likely to be far more energizing than a scolding lecture. That's the lesson of many democratic movements, including the Great Populist Revolt.

10. Do Not Let Debate Divide Anti-Authoritarians

Spirited debate is what democracy is all about, but when debate turns to mutual antipathy and divides anti-authoritarians, it plays into the hands of the elite. One such divide among anti-elitists is over the magnitude of change that should be worked for and celebrated. On one extreme are people who think that anything is better than nothing at all. At the other extreme are people who reject any incremental change and hold out for total transformation. We can better unite by asking these questions: Does the change increase individual self-respect and collective self-confidence, and increase one's energy level to pursue even greater democracy? Or does it feel like a sellout that decreases individual self-respect and collective self-confidence, and de-energizes us? Utilizing the criteria of increased self-respect and collective self-confidence, those of us who believe in genuine democracy can more constructively debate whether the change is going to increase strength to gain democracy or is going to take the steam out of a democratic movement. Respecting both sides of this debate makes for greater solidarity and better decisions.

To summarize, democracy will not be won without guts and solidarity. Risk-free green actions - such as shopping from independents, buying local, recycling, composting, consuming less, not watching television and so on - can certainly help counter a dehumanizing world. However, revolutions that truly transform fundamental power inequities and enable us to feel like men and women rather than children and slaves require risk, guts and solidarity.

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist. His Web site is www.brucelevine.net.

How to Get Up and Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite

AlterNet.org


BOOKS

Chelsea Green Publishing / By Bruce E. Levine

Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite

Author Bruce Levine describes how government-corporate alliances have created a passive populace, and how Americans can recover dignity, unity, and the energy to do battle.

May 13, 2011 |

The following is an excerpt from Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011) by Bruce E. Levine.

How many Americans believe that their voice matters in determining whether giant banks, insurance companies, and other “too-big-to-fail” corporations get bailed out? How many Americans older than twelve believe that they have any influence over a decision by the US government to invade another nation?

There are a slew of books and articles out there providing analyses of the profound problems of American democracy and offering recommendations aimed at improving matters. However, these analyses and recommendations routinely assume that Americans have sufficient personal energy to take action. Instead, what if many Americans have lost confidence that genuine democracy is possible? When such fatalism sets in, truths about economic injustices and lost liberties are no longer enough to set people free.

While a charismatic politician can still garner a large turnout of voters who are angry with whichever party is in power, the majority of Americans appear resigned to the idea that they have no power over institutions that rule their lives. At least that’s what I see. I was curious if what troubled me also was troubling others, so I wrote an article titled “Are Americans a Broken People?” It was republished on numerous Internet sites, and I read more than a thousand reaction comments (some of which are included in this book). I was swamped with e-mails and received several media interview requests to discuss the article, which had apparently touched a nerve among those who identify themselves as progressive, libertarian, or populist. They too wondered why so many Americans have remained passive in the face of attacks on their liberties and their economic well-being. Some of the questions that I first raised in that article and will answer more fully in this book are:

• Has “learned helplessness” taken hold for a great many Americans? Are many Americans locked into an abuse syndrome of sorts in which revelations about their victimization by a corporate-government partnership produce increased anesthetization rather than constructive action?

• What cultural forces have created a passive and discouraged US population? Have so-called right-wing and so-called progressive institutions both contributed to breaking people’s resistance to domination?

• And most important, can anything be done to turn this demoralization and passivity around? Is it possible for people to rebuild their morale and forge the connections necessary to support a truly democratic populism that can take power away from elite control?

Elitism—be it rule by kings or corporations—is the opposite of genuine democracy. It is in the interest of those at the top of society to convince people below them that (1) democracy is merely about the right to vote; and (2) corporations and the wealthy elite are so powerful, any thought that “regular people” can achieve real power is naive. In genuine democracy and in real-deal populism, people not only believe that they have a right to self-government; they also have the individual strength and group cohesion necessary to take actions to eliminate top-down controls over their lives.

If people lose sight of what democracy really is, or if they lose hope of the possibility of attaining it, then they lose their energy to fight for it. The majority of us, unlike the elite, will always lack big money, so we depend on individual and collective energy to do battle. Without such energy, the elite will easily subdue us.

Get Up, Stand Up is, in large part, about regaining that energy. There exist solid strategies and time-tested tactics that people have long used to battle the elite, and these will be detailed. However, these strategies and tactics are not sufficient. For large-scale democratic movements to have enough energy to get off the ground, certain psychological and cultural building blocks are required. With these energizing building blocks, it then becomes realistic—and not naive—to believe that large numbers of people can take the kind of actions that will produce genuine democracy. The belief that their actions can be effective provides energy to take actions, taking actions strengthens the faith, and an energizing cycle is created.

Historian Lawrence Goodwyn has studied democratic movements and written extensively about the Populist Movement in the United States that occurred during the 1870s through the 1890s, what he calls “the largest democratic mass movement in American history.” Goodwyn concludes that democratic movements are initiated by people who are not resigned to the status quo or intimidated by established powers, and who have not allowed themselves to be “culturally organized to conform to established hierarchical forms.” Goodwyn writes in The Populist Moment:

Democratic movements are initiated by people who have individually managed to attain a high level of personal political self-respect . . . In psychological terms, its appearance reflects the development within the movement of a new kind of collective self-confidence. “Individual self-respect” and “collective self-confidence” constitute, then, the cultural building blocks of mass democratic politics. [emphasis added]

Without individual self-respect, people do not believe that they are worthy of power or capable of utilizing power wisely, and they accept as their role being a subject of power. Without collective self-confidence, people do not believe they can succeed in wresting power away from their rulers.

What today, culturally and psychologically, has destroyed individual self-respect and collective self-confidence? One goal of this book is to examine this question. The good news is that answers to it provide, within the ordinary daily events of people’s lives, a road map of opportunities to regain individual self-respect, collective self-confidence, and real power.

The elite who maintain a hold on power are few; even with the support of some non-elites who share an ideology of hierarchical control, this group is a small minority. Those of us who believe in genuine democracy—of, by, and for the people—far outnumber the elitists, but we are divided. The elite’s strategy of “divide and conquer” is one that routinely works, but not always. Their strategy fails when we recognize that the divides among us pale in significance compared with a common desire to have our fair share of power. And so Get Up, Stand Up is also about unifying people who oppose elite control so as to focus on our common desire for genuine democracy.

Forging an Alliance among Populists

The corporatocracy uses its money and power to try to persuade Americans that it is “populist demagoguery” to even bring up the subject of a class war, and that populism means pandering to destructive prejudices. Fortunately, despite the corporatocracy’s great efforts here, many don’t buy it.

In March 2009, a Rasmussen Reports poll reported that “55% of Americans Are Populist.” They defined populist as trusting the American people’s judgment more than America’s political leaders, as seeing government and big business as political allies working against the interest of most people, and as seeing the federal government as one more special-interest group that is primarily looking after its own needs. While 55 percent of Americans were populists, only 7 percent trusted an elite ruling class. According to this measure, 52 percent of Democrats, 62 percent of Republicans, and 51 percent of those not affiliated with either major party were populists.

Today in the United States, unlike the end of the nineteenth century, there is confusion about populism. While all self-identified populists continue to reject control by the elite, there are different views of exactly who the elite are and what form of anti-elitism would be best. There are populists who most emphasize “liberty and freedom,” and there are those who most emphasize “social and economic justice.” And a major difference among many modern populists is their view of “government” and the “free market.”

Today some self-identified populists—unlike nineteenth-century Populists—believe it is naive to trust any government, including one created in the name of the people, because such a government will be taken over by an elitist cadre. In contrast, other modern self-identified populists—similar to those nineteenth-century agrarian Populist rebels—believe it is naive to trust the unbridled free market because concentrated economic power (inevitable in an unregulated market economy) can be just as dangerous as concentrated political power, in no small part because those holding concentrated economic power can too easily acquire undue political power for themselves; and therefore, the people must take control of government to counterbalance economic power run amok.

Populists also differ on what’s most important to wrest away from the elite, and they can differ on their views of human nature. Some self-identified libertarians are more focused on liberty and autonomy and believe that people are essentially competitive and motivated by self-interest. Some self-identified leftist populists may also care deeply about liberty and autonomy but stress more the need for economic and social justice, and they believe that human beings are essentially cooperative and altruistic.

In the late-nineteenth-century Populist revolt, insurgent farmers would have seen it as “plumb silly” to debate whether people are essentially competitive or cooperative. As historian Lawrence Goodwyn notes, “Populists thought of man as being both competitive and cooperative,” though they tilted toward cooperation as they desired a generous rather than a selfish society. In a democratic, non-elite society, people would respectfully listen to one another’s views of human nature and ideas about the kind of society that brings out the best and worst of people.

A large divide between populists has to do with their views of the US government. Libertarians see the US government as the tyrant, and they seek to drastically eliminate the government’s power so that “We the People” can regain liberty. Left populists see giant corporations as the tyrants, and short of eliminating this corporate elite, they seek freedom and social and economic justice by taking back control of government and using it to ensure that the corporate elite will not tyrannize them. While some self-identified libertarian populists rail only against “governmental tyranny,” and some self-identified left populists rail only against “corporate tyranny,” other populists get that, in the corporatocracy, Americans are being ruled by a corporate-governmental partnership.

Real-deal populism is hurt by those self-identified populists who ignore the reality that the US government is the junior—not the senior—partner of the corporate elite in the corporatocracy. The corporate elite relishes the role of the US government being seen as the tyrant. Every tyrant wants to demonize some other entity—be it an institution or a people—so as to deflect rebellion against itself. In reality, one major role of the US government in the corporatocracy is to serve as a scapegoat to deflect rebellion against the corporate elite.

All anti-elitists need to realize that what they share bonds them much more than anything that divides them. It is true that not all anti-elitists have the same views of human nature or the same exact solutions to self-government. In genuine democracy and real-deal populism, people will continue to disagree on issues. However, if we want to defeat the elite, we must come to realize that listening to one another and ironing out differences can be individually strengthening as well as galvanizing for us as a whole. I encounter real-deal populists across the political and ideological spectrum, and I believe it is quite possible for us to learn from one another and work together. In my experience, as long as I listen and speak with respect, other populists and I almost always find more to agree about that is substantive than remains between us as difference—and sometimes we can iron out our differences.

In addition to agreeing on the general principle of opposition to elite rule, both left and libertarian populists agree on many specific issues. Both opposed the Wall Street bailout; and similar to most left populists, many libertarian populists oppose the US government’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well its war on drugs.

There are of course issues that divide many left and libertarian populists, but I believe it’s possible to have discussions around these issues that create greater unity. To do so, we must keep in mind that some of these issues are fairly emotional ones that need to be addressed with sensitivity.

Gun control is one such personal issue that divides populists to their detriment. Many libertarian populists will tell you something like, “Hang out in rural America, and you’ll see that a gun is just a tool, no different from a hammer or a chain saw, and even among those of us who have stopped hunting, we have fond memories of hunting with our family and buddies, and gun-control liberals are screwing with something very personal here.” For many left populists, gun control may also be a very emotional issue, and they might tell you something like, “My dad killed himself with a gun when the bastards took away the job he’d had for twenty years, and I have two close friends who have had family members who also did themselves in with a gun when they probably would still be alive without such an easy way of committing suicide, and, not living in rural America but in urban America, what I see is people using guns not to hunt deer but to hunt one another.” However, when both sides stay respectful, I have also seen them reach agreements on reasonable gun policies that don’t deprive people of either liberty or life.

Often the most emotional divide between left and libertarian populists is the divide I noted earlier on their view of human nature. All of us have a tendency to focus on one aspect of human nature at the expense of others. Not only can respectful communication on the multiple dimensions of our humanity help unify populists, but it can also strengthen individuals, marriages, families, and communities.

Hillel, the great Jewish scholar who lived around two thousand years ago during the time of the Roman Empire’s domination, respected both the libertarian and left understandings of human nature and, in a sense, challenged people to respect both aspects of their own humanity and unify them so as to gain strength. Specifically, Hillel said:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am only for myself, what am I?

And, if not now, when?

So libertarian populists are right when they say, “If I don’t financially take care of myself and my family, then I will not only lose my self-respect but will be a burden to others.” But left populists are also right when they say, “If I am only for myself, then I am some kind of sociopath, like a Wall Street banker ripping off everybody, and if everybody acted completely selfishly, we could never have the cooperation necessary to defeat the elite.”

It’s my experience that when individuals follow Hillel’s advice to care about both self and others, they gain greater wholeness and strength, and they are more capable of uniting with others.

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Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist. His Web site is www.brucelevine.net.