This is a must see video for anyone who wants to get a sense of the irationality in our foreign policy of surging the troops in Afghanistan. We should instead be providing them with aid, building schools, etc. to win their “hearts and minds.” Pakistan and Afghanistan are the yin and yang of extremist organizations with one difference: Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
More evidence of the Bush Crime Family’s illegal and criminal actions (bring them to trial!)
• Government left ‘paper trail’ that Sadam was not a threat in build-up to war
• More facts still to come to light, says former envoy
The Guardian, Friday 20 March 2009
David Hencke, Westminster correspondent
A former diplomat at the centre of events in the run-up to the Iraq war revealed yesterday that the government has a “paper trail” that could reveal new information about the legality of the invasion.
Carne Ross, who was a first secretary at the United Nations in New York for the Foreign Office until 2004, told MPs: “A lot of facts about the run-up to this war have yet to come to light which should come to light and which the public deserves to know.” There were also assessments by the joint intelligence committee which had not been disclosed, Ross told the Commons public administration select committee.
He told the inquiry that the intelligence made it “very clear” that Saddam Hussein did not pose a significant threat to the UK, as was being claimed at the time by ministers, and that tougher enforcement of sanctions could have brought his regime down.
He said he tried to inform ministers about his misgivings over the developing momentum towards war, taking them aside during their visits to New York or having brief conversations in their car to the airport.
But he said he was aware that speaking out too often or too openly – even in internal debates – about his concerns about the government’s policy direction would damage his career by winning him a reputation as a “naive troublemaker”.
Ross’s evidence, by video link from New York, came days after Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time, used the first ministerial veto under the freedom of information act to ban the release of cabinet minutes on the decision to go to war.
“I feel very strongly that there has still not been proper accountability and scrutiny into what happened in Iraq,” Ross said.
“There should be a full public inquiry or parliamentary inquiry into the decision-making that took place. Hutton and Butler are by no means sufficient to that purpose and it is disgraceful that the government pretends that they are… if we had those systems of accountability and scrutiny then leaking and other more aberration behaviour from civil servants would be less necessary.”
He was one of four “whistleblowers” who yesterday gave evidence to the committee.
They also included Katharine Gun, a former GCHQ translator who revealed the organisation was tapping phones of countries that were against the Iraq war; Brian Jones, the most senior expert on chemical weapons at the Defence Intelligence Staff; and Derek Pasquill, a former Foreign Office official who leaked documents about rendition and Muslim groups who were hostile to the UK receiving government money.
Jones and Ross never leaked any information to the press. Jones instead complained to his superior that he thought the intelligence dossier on weapons of mass destruction was being exaggerated but was told that there was “one secret piece of information which could not be shared with [him]” because it was too sensitive.
He told MPs that when the WMD dossier was published and he saw the difference between the foreword by the prime minister and the contents he “thought the intelligence services were going to be crucified”.
But he instead he found that most MPs, with a few exceptions, supported the government. “I feel that you gentlemen [the MPs] have been either deliberately or accidentally misled and these incidents have not been followed up. I think that there has been a great laxity and that won’t encourage people like me or my colleagues to come to you,” he said.
Tony Wright, the chairman of the committee, agreed with the allegation. “I think you are absolutely right to castigate parliament, which I think has behaved abysmally in this matter – endless bleating about the need for an inquiry but a complete failure to insist upon one,” he said.
Gordon Brown has promised to look at an inquiry after all the troops come home from Iraq.
By Robert Freeman, AlterNet. Posted March 19, 2009.
The Right’s ability to capitalize on people’s sense of grievance must not be underestimated.
In early 1919, Germany put in place a new government to begin rebuilding the country after its crushing defeat in World War I. But the right-wing forces that had led the country into the War and lost the War conspired even before it was over to destroy the new government, the “Weimar Republic.” They succeeded.
The U.S. faces a similar “Weimar Moment.” The devastating collapse of the economy after eight years of Republican rule has left the leadership, policies, and ideology of the right utterly discredited. But, as was the case with Germany in 1919, Republicans do not intend to allow the new government to succeed. They will do everything they can to undermine it. If they are successful, the U.S. may yet go the way of Weimar Germany.
World War I left Germany utterly devastated. The landed aristocrats, industrial magnates, wealthy financiers, weapons makers, and the officer corps of the military that formed the locus of right wing power were completely discredited. Their failure in provoking and prosecuting the War was catastrophic, undeniable, and complete.
The economy was destroyed. Prices were at 800% of pre-war levels and rising quickly. Agriculture, pillaged for the War, lay in ruins. Social insurance payments for the War’s injured, to widows and orphans, and newly unemployed soldiers were astronomical. And all this was before the cost of rebuilding was even begun.
At the same time, Germany faced massive reparations payments to the Allied victors, France and England. But Germany’s foreign properties had been confiscated and its colonies turned over to the victors. The combination of these conditions, both domestic and international, made it extraordinarily difficult for the German economy to recover.
As a result of the failure of the right, the German people elected a moderately leftist government to lead the nation’s rebuilding. It was named the Weimar Republic for the city in which the new post-imperial constitution was written. The new government was led by Friedrich Ebert, head of the German Socialist Party.
But the country’s new parliamentary system had allowed dozens of parties to run, making it impossible for any one party to win an outright majority. Ebert’s party had achieved the highest portion of votes, 38%, in the first post-War elections, held in January 1919. Ebert would have to govern by coalition.
It was at this time that the right wing made its crucial decision. Despite its shocking, naked failure over the prior decade, despite the horrific devastation it had wrought on the German people, despite the discrediting of everything they had purported to stand for, they would fight Ebert, his new government, and its plans for recovery. They would do everything they could to make sure that the new government failed.
Their strategy was two-fold: first, stoke the resentment of the population about the calamitous state of its living conditions-no matter that those conditions had been created by the very right-wing oligarchs who now pretended to befriend the little guy. Rage is rage. It is glandular and unseeing. Once catalyzed it is easy to turn on any subject.
And stoking resentment was easy to do. Just before the War ended, the military concocted its most sensational lie: the German army hadn’t actually been defeated. It had been “stabbed in the back” by communists, traitors, and Jews. It was an easy lie to sell. It entwined an attack on an alien political ideology — liberalism — with the latent, pervasive myth of German racial superiority.
The second strategy of the right was to prevent the new government from succeeding. To begin with, success of the left would conspicuously advertise the failure of the right. Moreover, success by the left would legitimize republican government, so hated by the oligarchs of the right. Much better for the people to be ruled by the self-aggrandizing right-wing autocracy that had governed Germany for centuries.
So the rightists set out to do everything they could to make it impossible for the leftists to govern. They would use parliamentary maneuver, shifting coalitions, domination of the new mass media, legislative obstruction, staged public relations spectacles, relentless pressure by narrow but powerful interests, judicial intimidation and, eventually, outright murder of their political opponents.
Contrition for their abject failure, humility for their destructive hubris, compassion for their crippled country-those had nothing to do with it. All they possessed was a blinding, visceral hatred of the left and a masturbatory lust for the return to power.
Eventually, they succeeded. Every setback in recovery — and there would inevitably be many — was met with hysterical demonizing of the left wing government. The lie was repeated relentlessly that the government was run by communists, traitors, and Jews-the same furtive cabal that had purportedly stabbed the country in the back at the end of the War. They steadily chipped away at the efficacy and, thereby, the legitimacy of successive republican governments.
By the time of the Great Depression, Adolph Hitler’s ironically named National Socialist Party had become the biggest vote getter in the nation. The Nazis had once been derided as the lunatic fringe of the far right. But the “respectable” right-wing power brokers who had started and lost the Great War anointed Hitler Chancellor in January, 1933.
He immediately suspended the constitution, abolishing most civil liberties. He outlawed opposition parties, began a massive military build-up and a relentless propaganda campaign, and set Germany and the world onto the path of the greatest destruction it would ever know.
America now faces its own “Weimar moment.”
The failure of right wing policy and leadership over the past eight years, especially in matters economic, is comparable to Germany’s right-wing failure in World War I. It is catastrophic, undeniable, and complete.
Consider:
According to the World Economic Forum, forty percent of the entire world’s wealth has been destroyed in the recent financial collapse. In the U.S. alone, between housing and the stock market, more than $18 trillion in wealth has already been destroyed.
The private mega-banks that anchor the financial systems of the western world are bankrupt. This makes it all but impossible to jump-start the western world’s economies which are heavily dependent on bank-system credit to operate.
More than 10,000 homes go into foreclosure every day. More than 20,000 people lose their job every day. And the collapse is accelerating, developing its own self-reinforcing dynamic. Job losses breed foreclosures, reducing demand, leading to more job losses and further degradation of the financial system. None of the stopgaps designed to stanch the bleeding have yet worked. There is no bottom in sight.
Meanwhile, debt has risen to astronomical levels. Reagan and Bush I quadrupled the national debt in only twelve years. Bush II doubled it again in only eight. It is now ten times higher than it was in 1980 when Reagan was elected. Total public and private debt exceeds 300% of GDP, half again higher than it was in 1929.
The government’s unfunded liabilities, promises it has made to the American people but for which no payment source can be identified, now exceed $60 trillion, a literally inconceivable sum that can never, will never, be paid. Federal Reserve economist Lawrence Kotlikoff has suggested that the U.S. government is “actuarially bankrupt.”
The full measure of the nation’s plight is revealed in Hillary Clinton’s first trip as Secretary of State. It was to China, to beg them to fund Obama’s new fiscal deficits. Without loans from China, the U.S. economy cannot be revived. The significance of this cannot be overstated: the U.S. no longer exercises sovereignty over its own economic affairs. That sovereignty now resides in the hands of China, the U.S.’s greatest long-term rival.
Thanks to Republican policies of massive debt and shipping jobs abroad, the U.S. has technically become a colony of China. It exports raw materials and imports finished goods, together with the capital to make up the difference. Should the Chinese decide not to lend the trillions of dollars the U.S. is begging for, the U.S. economy will implode, plummeting onto itself in a World Trade Center-like collapse that will leave dust clouds circling the planet for decades.
Notwithstanding the destruction inflicted on the economy by Republican policies, the most devastating breakdown is in the intellectual foundation on which right wing economic ideology itself is premised. Free market doctrine, the secular religion of right-wing America, is in utter, irretrievable shambles.
One of the most lofty tenets on which free markets are premised is their claim for themselves that they are “efficient,” that is, that market prices always reflect “fundamental values” of assets. But if that’s true, how could the world’s largest insurance company, AIG, have lost 99.5% of its market value in only 18 months? How could the world’s largest bank, Citibank, have lost 98% of its value over the same period?
How could the world’s largest brokerage company, Merrill Lynch, have gone bankrupt and need to be bought by Bank of America? How could the world’s largest car company, General Motors, have lost 95% of its value and stand on the threshold of extinction? How could the world’s largest industrial conglomerate, General Electric, have lost 85% of its value in only 18 months?
If the largest companies in the world, those at the very heart of the capitalist system itself, can lose virtually all of their value in only 18 months, what is the possible meaning of the phrases “efficient markets” and “fundamental value”?
The other core tenets of free market ideology are equally compromised. Major actors are clearly not rational — a breakdown of theological proportions admitted by no less an avatar of the cult than its pope himself, Alan Greenspan. Free markets clearly cannot, will not, regulate themselves. It is precisely their innate, irrepressible propensity for sociopathic greed and predatory fraud that has brought the whole of the world’s economy to the precipice of collapse.
Free markets clearly do not align risk and reward, allocating capital to its most productive uses, as its promoters advertise. They clearly do not automatically return to equilibrium, but must be bailed out with trillions of dollars of injections from the shrinking coffers of the public to the ever-bulging coffers of a private priesthood of pillage and plunder.
And in perhaps the greatest indictment of all, one going back to its primeval roots in Adam Smith’s eighteenth century opus, The Wealth of Nations, the unrestrained behavior of self-interested individuals clearly, manifestly, does not “coalesce as if by an Invisible Hand to the greatest good for the greatest number.”
These are not peripheral premises that have failed. They are not tangential tenets. Efficient markets. Rational actors. Market equilibrium. Risk and reward. Self interest. These are the essential sacraments on which the entire free market system is founded. They are in tatters. And it isn’t that any one of them has been discredited by the glaring, merciless force of events. All of them have been. All of them together. And all of them at the same time.
Free markets have long been the basis for a legitimate — though rightly debated — economic policy framework. But they have become little more than a robotically-recited cultural catechism, a mindless mantra mumbled to mask the looting of the nation’s resources that is the true purpose of Republican economic policy as demonstrated by the staggering upward transfers of wealth that inevitably occur under Republican regimes. A more complete, conspicuous, catastrophic, and irrefutable repudiation of right wing leaders, right wing policies, and right wing ideology could not possibly be contrived.
So what is the right wing response?
They have adopted the strategy and tactics of the failed right wing plotters in Weimar Germany. First, stoke the resentment of the population about the increasingly dire state of its living conditions-no matter that those conditions were created by the very right-wing oligarchs who now pretend to befriend the little guy. Rage is rage. It is glandular and unseeing. Once catalyzed it is easy to turn on any subject.
Second, prevent the new government from succeeding in any meaningful endeavor. The Republicans have set all their efforts to doing everything they can to make sure the Obama administration fails. Rush Limbaugh’s infamous, “I hope he fails” pronouncement is only the beginning of the fomenting of hatred from the right. As Limbaugh said, “Let’s be honest. Every Republican in America is hoping for Obama’s failure.”
The same malignant hope oozes unadulterated from all the other Dogpatch Demagogues that rent themselves out to the Republican party to foment resentment against anything liberal: Joe the “Plumber,” Rick Santelli, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and virtually every other wing-nut operative whose intellectual stock in trade has been vaporized by the collision of right-wing policies with objective reality.
Equally so for the “respectable” members of the party, the all-but-three Republican members of Congress who refused to sign on to Obama’s first stimulus package and continue to grandstand against every effort toward any form of progress. Contrition for their own abject failure, humility for their destructive hubris, compassion for their crippled country-those have nothing to do with it. All they possess is a blinding, visceral hatred of the left and a masturbatory lust for the return to power.
And what else can they do? Bereft of ideas, bankrupt in ideology, architects of collapse, obstruction is all they have. If Obama is successful, it will not only advertise the full extent of their failure, it will provide a model of liberal governance that would render Republicans irrelevant for decades, much as FDR’s success left them out in the political cold for an entire generation. Liberal failure is a matter of life and death for Republicans.
And it’s not at all clear that the liberals won’t fail. No one should underestimate the task at hand. Never before — not even during the Great Depression — has the country inherited such a daunting, intractable set of economic problems: a debt burden so crushing; inequality so vast; a loss of financial sovereignty so constricting; an intellectual edifice so bankrupt; a private economy so uncompetitive; or an opposition so callously self interested in its own recovery and so cavalierly disinterested in the nation’s.
The economy has been so damaged, successful rescue requires threading a series of policy needles, each of them so complex in their own right that none could be solved by any administration of the past 50 years. This includes rehabilitating and re-regulating the nation’s banking system, restructuring health care, reducing national dependence on oil, reviving manufacturing so as to reduce the trade deficit, rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, dealing with a soaring national debt, trying to resuscitate a collapsing housing market, and all the while maintaining the safety net under 77 million baby boomers entering retirement with a net worth 60% what it was only 18 months ago.
Success will require much more than luck, hard work, brilliant policy, or soaring rhetoric. It will require cooperation and contribution from every American. It is those two offerings, cooperation and contribution, that Republicans are intent on withholding, the better to ensure Obama’s failure. Simply put, the Republicans hate Democrats more than they love America.
If they succeed in derailing Obama’s efforts, the cost will be incalculable.
After World War I, one of the consequences of the liberal government’s failure was Adolph Hitler. Hitler had a genius for exploiting the resentment of the German people for their condition. More than 80% of the Nazi party’s members were unemployed. It was these legions of idle thugs who made up the ranks of Hitler’s brownshirt militia, the SA. The right wing oligarchy that had set out from the beginning to destroy the Weimar Republic recognized the potency of resentment and Hitler’s genius at exploiting it. It was they who sponsored Hitler’s ascension to Chancellor in 1933.
Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology — even by its own standards — is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s.
The Republican propensity for fascism must not be underestimated. Witness their phony justifications for the war in Iraq, fanning the flames of nationalistic aggression, just as Hitler did with Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in the 1930s. Consider their symbiotic embrace of corporate interests in the oil, weapons, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, finance, and other industries-the same type of corporate interests that sponsored Hitler’s ascent to power. Look at their efforts to dismantle civil liberties with the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act. Or their relentless, pervasive propaganda laundered through their corporate-owned right-wing media machine.
These are the classic hallmarks of fascism. The strategy is to obstruct recovery, facilitate collapse, and then incite the faux-populism of public resentment to re-install a corporatist oligarchy which has failed, but which will not abide a reduction of its privileges or a diminution of its control. It is a fetid, seditious agenda, awaiting only its own latter day mustachioed messiah for its final fulfillment.
World War I was a once-in-a-millennium upset in the architecture of global power. In four years, it shifted the center of that power from Europe to the United States. But failure now by the U.S. will shift that center once again, from the United States to China, out of the western world where it has resided for the past 500 years. The psychic shock to the billion-odd people living in western civilization, with its liberal democracies, capitalist economies, and Enlightenment ideals, will be incalculable, irretrievable.
This shift may be inevitable and only a matter of time. It is quite possible that the damage inflicted on the western world’s economy by rapacious Republicans is already beyond repair. But it will be tragedy beyond measure if such a shift is consummated by the very wrecking crew that took us down the road to ruin, all the while so unctuously proclaiming “patriotism” as its crowning ideal. They are not patriots and their goal is not the revival of American power. It is the revival of their own power, even at the expense of America’s. They represent a very dangerous threat to the nation’s future.
Robert Freeman writes on history, economics and education.
more about "Jim Cramer Pt. 2 | The Daily Show | C…", posted with vodpod
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By Matthew Schofield, McClatchy Newspapers Matthew Schofield, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Wed Mar 18, 4:38 pm ET
BAGHDAD — The stench of human waste is enough to tell Falah abu Hasan that his drinking water is bad. His infant daughter Fatma’s continuous illnesses and his own constant nausea confirm it.
“We are the poor. No one cares if we get sick and die,” he said. “But someone should do something about the water. It is dirty. It brings disease.”
Everybody complains about the water in Baghdad , and few are willing to risk drinking it from the tap. Six years after the U.S. invaded Iraq , 36 percent of Baghdad’s drinking water is unsafe, according to the Iraqi Environment Ministry — in a good month. In a bad month, it’s 90 percent. Cholera broke out last summer, and officials fear another outbreak this year.
“Even if the water is good today, no one would trust it,” grocer Hussein Jawad said. He said that about 40 percent of his business was selling bottled drinking water, crates of which he’s stacked 7 feet high on the sidewalk. “We’ve learned to be afraid.”
The irony of bad water is lost on few here. When the city was founded 1,200 years ago, it was named Baghdad al Zawhaa, ” Baghdad the Garden,” because water was plentiful. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers formed the boundaries of Mesopotamia and fed the fields in the cradle of civilization.
Baghdad still draws its water from the Tigris, but even that legendary source is problematic. President Jalal Talabani flew to Turkey this week to discuss the diminishing water flow, because Turkey has dammed the river. Syria and Iran have dammed its tributaries.
Environment Minister Nirmeen Uthman said Iraqi waste-treatment systems were obsolete, and that the concentration of waste being poured into the Tigris had increased. It’s simple math: less river water, more concentrated waste. Each year the river is dirtier.
“Our most recent studies show the color is wrong, the smell is wrong, the pressure is wrong,” she said. “And that was a good month, a very good month.”
The list of reasons for the unclean water sounds like the recent history of this war-ravaged country. The saying goes: ” Iraq was busy with the sword and the flag.”
Baghdad’s water network was due to be upgraded in 1984, but Saddam Hussein went to war with Iran instead. Then he invaded Kuwait . The U.S. bombing campaign that forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait damaged the water system and cut the resources needed to fix it.
A decade of international economic sanctions impoverished Iraq , and the water got worse. The U.S.-led invasion six years ago led to wide looting of offices and the abandonment of purification systems.
During the sectarian and terrorist strife that followed, it was impossible to start improvements or repairs, much less complete them. Baghdad had to hire security personnel even for water projects. The U.S. military’s troop buildup starting in late 2007 also took its toll: One water pipeline was delayed for nine months because the U.S. built a blast wall across its path.
Since 2003, 500 city engineers have been killed, suspending hundreds of project plans, according to Hakeem Abdulzahra, Baghdad’s chief spokesman. Finding personnel to replace the dead also is never easy, he said.
During the war, displaced people flooded the capital, constructed shoddy new homes or camped out in abandoned government offices. They dug down and tapped city pipes, often using pumps to find water supplies. As a result, 6 million people use Baghdad water daily, but only 5 million of them use it legally.
“These people make quality control very difficult,” Abdulzahra said.
Take Falah abu Hasan, who’s among 625 families squatting in the old air force offices in central Baghdad , one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of illegal settlements around the city.
In the absence of adequate sewers, squatters run pipes from their bathrooms into the street, turning it into a standing cesspool. The water lines are poorly sealed, and as the pressure goes down, raw sewage mixes with drinking water, not only for the squatters but also for anyone who relies on that water main.
Looking at a block-long pool of dirty, trash-filled water, Hasan said that when pumps were in use to obtain city water, he’d seen the pools of sewage drop.
Ihsan Jaafar , Iraq’s director of public health, said the water had been bad for years but that it now carried cholera, typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis and other diseases.
“Clean water would be one of the biggest improvements in quality of life in Iraq ,” he said. “The people of the Mujamaa (illegal settlements) are the most vulnerable in our society. We must protect them, but they cannot live this way.”
The city has a 10-year, $6 billion plan to fix the problem, which involves shutting down the squatters’ settlements. However, there’s fear that shutting down the settlements would force families onto the street and reignite sectarian fighting; the settlements are a recruiting ground for Shiite Muslim militias.
So step one in the repairs for the city water department is putting together a security force.
“We fight, as if we were in the army, to bring people clean water and take away sewage,” Abdulzahra said.
Imam Mahnood al Bayati, a clergyman and a former engineer who’s worked on water systems, said that providing clean drinking water was a central goal for Baghdad , for Iraq and even for Islamic religious practice.
“We can’t even pray without water,” he said in an interview at the Hajia Sidaa Mosque. “Before we pray, we must clean ourselves . . . ,” he said, chuckling, wondering whether it’s even possible to perform an ablution with Baghdad water these days. “Well, the Quran allows us, if there is no water to clean with, to use the sand of the desert. There’s still plenty of that.”
(Schofield reports for The Kansas City Star .)
democraticunderground.com
Posted by Time for change Mon Mar-16-09
When the top 1% of individuals in a nation own 38% of its wealth and the bottom 40% own just 1% – when the average individual in the top 1% owns 1500 times as much wealth as the average individual in the bottom 40% – it is worth asking the question: Why? Do these people own so much more wealth than other people because they earn it by contributing to society in some way? Or are they predators? Or does the answer lie somewhere in between?
James K. Galbraith, in his book “The Predator State,” notes that the concept of a predator class is not new, and he introduces the concept by first discussing Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class,” published in 1899:
The leisure classes do not work. Rather, they hold offices. They perform rituals. They enact deeds of honor…The leisure class is predatory as a matter of course… The relation of overlords to underlings is that of predator to prey. Vested interests. . . live off the work of others by right and tradition, and not by their functional contribution to the productivity of the system . . . . Predators rely on prey for their sustenance, but they also require and must motivate their assistance. . . .
Some perspectives on today’s predator class
There are many economists and others who have written about the phenomenon of predation – with or without using that word. Here are some examples:
Jared Bernstein
In his book “Crunch – Why Do I Feel So Squeezed,” Jared Bernstein discusses the apparent paradox of why the financial situation of so many Americans during the Bush/Cheney years could be so poor in the presence of such healthy “economic indicators:”
Over the course of this highly touted economic expansion, poverty is up, working families’ real incomes are down…. By 2007, 44% said they lacked the money they needed “to make ends meet”…
If you feel squeezed, chances are it’s because you are squeezed. Most of the indicators that matter most to us in our everyday lives… are coming in at stress inducing levels, but GDP… keeps on truckin’. Something’s wrong, something fundamental…
The name of the problem is economic inequality… It’s a sign that something important is broken: the set of economic mechanisms and forces that used to broadly and fairly distribute the benefits of growth… unions, minimum wages… full employment… quality jobs, safety nets, and social insurance…
James Petras
In his book “Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire,” James Petras also discusses the disconnect between rising productivity of the American worker and our economic health:
Within the ruling class, the financial elite is the most parasitical component… One measure of the enormous influence of the financial ruling class in heightening the exploitation of labor is found in the enormous disparity between productivity and wages. Between 2000 and 2005, the US economy grew 12 percent, and productivity (measured by output per hour worked) rose 17 percent while hourly wages rose only 3 percent. Real family income fell during the same period… Three quarters of Americans say they are either worse off or no better off than they were six years ago…. The growth of vast inequalities between the yearly payment of the financial ruling class and the medium salary of workers has reached unprecedented levels….
Petras explains the process that has led to that disconnect:
A vast army of workers, peasants and salary employees produce value which becomes the basis for… speculative financial instruments. The transfer of value from the productive activities of labor up through the trunk and branches of financial instruments is carried out through various vehicles… credit, debt leveraging, buyouts and mergers… The financial sector acts as combined intermediary, manager, proxy-purchaser and consultant, capturing substantial fees, expanding their economic empires…. Finance capital has moved from exacting a larger and larger ‘tribute’ (commission or fee) on each large-scale financial transaction, toward penetrating and controlling an enormous array of economic activities…
Or, to summarize it in my unsophisticated economic language, producers produce goods and services and the financial elite, through a variety of complex financial mechanisms, find a way to have the money transferred to themselves.
Petras explains that the political basis for this process is rooted in the fact that the financial elites:
are linked to the judicial and regulatory authorities, through political appointments and contributions…. They organize and fund both major parties… They pressure, negotiate and draw up the most comprehensive and favorable legislation… They pressure the government to bail out bankrupt and failed speculative firms and to balance the budget by lowering social expenditures instead of raising taxes on speculative ‘windfall’ profits… Finance capital and its associated conglomerates wield uncontested political power in the US in comparison to their counterparts in any country in Europe…
Joseph Stiglitz
Joseph Stiglitz explains how predation has been at work in the bailout of Wall Street by the American taxpayer:
The TARP bailout has so far been a dismal failure. Unbelievably expensive, it has failed to rekindle lending. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gave the banks a big handout…The taxpayers put out $350 billion and didn’t even get the right to find out what the money was being spent on, let alone have a say in what the banks did with it.
TARP’s failure comes as no surprise: incentives matter. Bankers won’t restart lending unless they have a reason to do so or are forced. Receiving billions of dollars in bonus pay for racking up record losses is a peculiar “incentive” structure….
And yet, they’re still trying to get more:
The financial wizards are turning to tried and true gimmicks – the same ones that got us into the mess. One strategy is to hide the costs in nontransparent accounting… The other combines this trickery with the magic of leveraging and pretends that leveraging carries no risk… Long experience has taught us that when banks are at risk of failure, their managers engage in behaviors that risk losing even more taxpayer money. They may, for instance, undertake big bets: if they win, they keep the proceeds; if they lose, so what?–they would have died anyway…. Because the government is on the hook for so much money, it has to take an active role in managing the restructuring…
James Galbraith
Galbraith describes the takeover of our country by predators, the process that made it into a predator state:
In the late 1970s and 1980s… business leadership saw the possibility of something far more satisfactory from their point of view: complete control of the apparatus of the state. In particular, reactionary business leadership, in those sectors most affected by public regulation, saw this possibility and directed their lobbies – the K Street corridor – toward this goal. The Republican Party… became the instrument of this form of corporate control. The administration… of George W. Bush became little more than an alliance of representatives from the regulated sectors seeking to bring the regulatory system entirely to heel. And to this group was added… those who saw the economic activities of government not in ideological terms but merely as opportunities for private profit on a continental scale…
This is the predator state. It is a coalition of relentless opponents of the regulatory framework on which public purpose depends, with enterprises whose major lines of business compete with or encroach on the principal public functions of the enduring New Deal. It is a coalition, in other words, that seeks to control the state partly in order to prevent the assertion of public purpose… They are firms that have no intrinsic loyalty to any country… They assuredly do not adopt any of society’s goals as their own, and that includes the goals that may be decided on by their country of origin, the United States. As an ideological matter, it is fair to say that the very concept of public purpose is alien to, and denied by, the leaders and the operatives of this coalition… In the predator state, the organization exists principally to master the state structure itself.
None of these enterprises has an interest in diminishing the size of the state, and this is what separates them from the principled conservatives. For without the state and its economic interventions, they… could not enjoy the market power that they have come to wield. Their reason for being, rather, is to make money off the state – so long as they control it. And this requires the marriage of an economic and a political organization…
Some specific examples of predation
Health care
A major reason for the sorry state of health care in the United States today is the activities of predators. There is simply no reason for private health care insurance. Their sole purpose is to make a profit. In their attempt to do that, they spend vast amounts of money to screen prospective clients for pre-existing diseases, so that they are able to offer their services only to relatively healthy people, on whom they are likely to profit. Many of them are also are predisposed to deny benefits to their clients whenever they think they can get away with it. Yet, to dissuade Americans from supporting a program of government sponsored health insurance, the predators try to scare us by calling it “socialism” at every chance they get. James Galbraith explains the situation:
A major liberal goal is to extend the coverage of health insurance, particularly to children. The private insurance companies are opposed to this. Why? Because they stand to lose part of their existing clientele… Their economic function is uncomplicated: it consists in marketing to people who are relatively unlikely to need health care, while also not selling it to those most likely to get sick…
Does the country benefit in any way from… having any families under private insurance? No. To insure the whole population without screening would be economically efficient. It would save the resources now devoted to screening… More resources could then go to actual health care… Medical economists… estimated the bureaucratic waste from private medical insurance to be around $350 billion per year…
George Bush’s Medicare prescription drug law is another good example. There is only one conceivable reason for the specification in that law that our government may not negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies: It was a gift to the pharmaceutical industry, paid for by the American taxpayer, and delivered by George W.
Education
The Bush administration’s attempt to push the idea of school vouchers was just one more attempt to funnel public money into private hands, taking money from the public school system and channeling it to vouchers for private schools. Galbraith explains the tactics Bush used when that didn’t work:
The Bush team switched its emphasis to No Child Left Behind, a program that expanded federal spending on public schools while imposing an intense testing regimen on them. Forms of predatory free enterprise in which certain Bush family members participated quickly emerged. But the larger effect of NCLB was to foment middle-class flight from the system, for three reasons. First, the testing regimes cut deeply into the flexibility and creativity in the classroom, discouraging creative professionals from becoming teachers and demoralizing many who remained. Second, the emphasis on teaching to the test undermined educators’ attention to and the resources available for untestable programs… And third, the harsh evaluation regime behind the tests themselves worked to label, and therefore to stigmatize, certain schools as failing… A bad test result could have serious, even catastrophic effects on reputation and funding, precipitating middle-class flight from the system…
The Bush administration also funneled money from public student loan programs into the hands of predators:
At the university level, what had been a low cost, publicly administered student loan program was devolved onto private companies, whose marketing programs quickly assimilated imaginative elements of bribery (i.e. bribery to student loan officers to persuade them to choose their company).
Were the companies necessary at all? Was any efficiency gained? Was anything except private profit served by moving the provision of guaranteed student loans from the public to the private sector? Of course not.
Social Security
The destruction of Social Security would serve two goals for the predators: By privatizing the program it would create lucrative economic opportunities for them; and, by taking money out of the system, it would lower their taxes. Galbraith explains the predators’ goals and their strategies:
Social Security presents a target for predators on a far larger scale… Sharp private financial operators with good political connections have long seen the opportunity inherent in diverting the payroll tax into private investment accounts. Such accounts would create, overnight, millions of inexperienced investors, needing advice and other services that could be sold to them for a fee. A new group of players – expensive private providers of what had been a cheap public service – would be cut in on the deal. Correspondingly, a group of currently protected players would be cut out of the relatively stable retirement incomes that they can now rely on…
Efforts to cut benefits to the impending baby boom retirees are a way, simply put, of taking back the 1983 bargain (which included a major increase in payroll tax rates). If they were enacted, the very same people who overpaid their payroll taxes to “prefinance” their Social Security benefits would find that they had been given a dishonest bargain. Having paid a lifetime of higher payroll taxes, subsidizing the income tax cuts enjoyed by the investor classes of the 1980s and 1990s, they would come to the end of the rainbow and find the pot of gold empty… If that doesn’t sound fair, well – it isn’t. The issue however has nothing to do with any intrinsic crisis, except the ever-vigilant efforts of the influential to keep tax rates on themselves as low as possible.
Why then the talk of an “impending Social Security crisis?” Because… it is a means to an end: toward the privatization of the Social Security system. It is perfectly predictable that once deep benefit cuts are on the table, the “alternative” of private investment accounts will then resurface… to “ease the pain of the adjustment”…Social Security offers perhaps the clearest, simplest, and most transparent large-scale example of the Predator State at work on a long-term project.
The home foreclosure crisis
Galbraith describes the scams that brought on the home foreclosure crisis:
Here we see today, in pure and unalloyed form, the consequences… leading to rampant predation against both a public system and the public itself, and on a colossal scale. The housing finance system had been from the 1930s a protected sector offering low rate, long term mortgages to the middle class…
In the early years of the new century, a new type of home lending took hold, eventually exploding … This was the subprime sector, adjustable rate mortgages made to borrowers who would never under previous standards have qualified for a mortgage loan. Subprime loans were abusive, if not fraudulent, on their face, for they typically involved a low teaser rate that would reset after two or three years… Lenders knew, as borrowers did not, that in the wake of 9/11, short term rates were unprecedentedly low, and these conditions would not endure. They therefore deliberately substituted adjustable rate mortgages for fixed rate mortgages – with the endorsement of then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, to reassure the naïve public that the exercise was sound. Interest rates then rose, the mortgages started to reset, and hundreds of thousands of borrowers found themselves unable to meet the required payments.
When state governments stepped in to try to protect consumers against this fraud, the Bush administration jumped in to tie their hands. Eliot Spitzer was one of our country’s most vocal critics of this practice. He wrote in an editorial titled “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States from Stepping in to Help Consumers:”
For the first time in its history, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) was used as a tool against consumers. In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government’s actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 states… actively fought the new rules.
Shortly thereafter, the Bush administration exposed Spitzer’s relationship with a prostitute. William Engdahl explains, in an article titled “Why the Bush Administration ‘Watergated’ Eliot Spitzer”:
Curiously, Spitzer… has been not charged in any crime…. Prostitution is illegal in most US states, but clients of prostitutes are almost never charged, nor are their names usually leaked in a case in process…. underscoring the clear political nature of the Spitzer “Watergate.”
Galbraith characterizes the Bush/Cheney predator state in a nutshell
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a better concise description of the Bush administration than the one that James Galbraith wrote in his book. Here are some excerpts:
The second Bush administration simply and systematically nominated the most aggressive anti-environment, anti-safety, anti-consumer protection advocates it could find – business lobbyists in most cases – to every regulatory position that it could not afford to leave unfilled… The result was an empowerment not of business in general, but of the reactionary wing – the predatory wing – within each branch of business…
Under George W. Bush, a narrow coalition of the high plutocracy would rule, mainly from the resource industries… combined with big media, insurance, and the pharmaceuticals. For popular support, this alliance found itself entirely dependent on noneconomic issues: national security and the social issues directed at low-income working Americans through the one social institution that effectively reached most of them: their churches…
Today we live in a corporate republic, where the methods, norms, culture, and corruption of government have become those of the corporation… Republican (small r) government, with its checks and balances, exists to limit the abuse of power… Modern corporate decision structures exist, on the contrary, to permit senior executives to do what they want. This is the culture that Richard Cheney brought back into government from Halliburton, and that George Bush imbibed… The operational result is a government by cliques operating in secret, indeed with their very membership unknown outside…
The corporate propaganda machine
In the corporate republic, external review is suppressed. We have instead a governmental public relations apparatus whose purpose is not to persuade but to deflect, deter, and frustrate inquiry into the operations of government. These are the distinct characteristics of a corporate propaganda machine… easily identified by the inability, or studied unwillingness, to tell a truthful story that is consistent from one day to the next…
Elections in a corporate republic
In the corporate republic, elections likewise converge to their corporate counterpart… The outcome is predetermined… A common thread runs through the policies of voter intimidations, voter machine rationing, phony voter fraud investigations, purging of voter lists, caging of African American voters, ex-felon disenfranchisement… The common thread is to maintain political control for as long as possible… The rebellion of 2006 may possibly have signaled the defeat of this strategy, but time will tell. In any event, the work was done: without it, Al Gore would have become President in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004…
The purpose of the corporate predator state
The predator state is an economic system wherein entire sectors have been built up to feast on public systems built originally for public purposes… The corporate republic simply administers the spoils system… The business of its leadership is to deliver favors to their clients. These range from coal companies to sweatshops operators to military contractors. They include the misanthropes who led the campaign to destroy the estate tax… the “Benedict Arnold” companies that move their taxable income to Bermuda… They include the privatizers of Social Security… Everywhere you look, regulatory functions have been turned over to lobbyists. Everywhere you look, public decisions yield gains to specific private persons…. This is not an accident: it is a system. In the corporate republic that presides over the predator state, nothing is done for the common good… The concept of competence has no relevance: to be incompetent, you must at least be trying. But the men in charge are not trying… We are their prey. Hurricane Katrina illustrated this perfectly, as Bush gave contracts to Halliburton and at the same time tied up efforts to restore the city…
A variant of class war?
Is this class war? No. In a strict sense it is not, for not everyone who is successful under capitalism is a fan of the predator state… Many rich and successful people came to hate the Bush administration… Predation is the enemy of honest and independent and especially of sustainable business, of businesses that simply want to sell to the public and make a decent living over the long run. In a world where the winners are all connected, it is not only the prey who lose out. It is everyone who has not licked the appropriate boots. Predatory regimes are, more or less exactly, like protection rackets… They cannot reward everyone, and therefore they do not enjoy a broad political base…
The end result of the predator state
It is reasonably obvious that to tolerate the predator state is a formula for eventual national economic failure. It will lead, over time, to the crowding out of advanced, innovative, and useful businesses… by their reactionary and backward counterparts. Where the reactionary branches of business – the worst polluters, the flagrant monopolists… – are given control over the system and capital markets reward them, their more progressive counterparts will eventually give up, disappear, or move away. Bad business practices will drive out good… It is the race to the bottom, driven forward by government itself.
The “incompetence” label as a distraction from the real problem
Predators do not mind being thought incompetent: the accusation helps to obscure their actual agenda. But if the government is predatory, then it too will fail in every substantial way. Government will not cope with global warming, or Hurricane Katrina, or the occupation of Iraq, or Election Day chaos, or avian influenza, or the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Nothing will work, and nothing will be done about the fact that nothing works. Failure on that scale is not due to incompetence. Rather, it is intended…. Inside government, no one cares. The attention of the people in charge is focused on other goals.
Are we done yet?
It’s tempting to believe, now that we’ve elected a new President with infinitely more integrity than his predecessor, that he will simply kick the predators out and we will be free of them. But there are so many questions on that score. How much courage will it take to do that, when much of our news media is controlled by the predators? How much political skill will be required? What risks will be involved? Will it even be possible to accomplish in a mere four or even eight years? I can’t answer those questions.
A recent article by Robert Reich, titled “The Real Scandal of AIG.” highlights these questions. Reich notes that the real scandal is that “Even in a new administration dedicated to doing it all differently, Americans still have so little say over what is happening with our money”.
That poses an obvious question: WHY? Reich partially answers that question:
To whom should they be accountable? When taxpayers have put up, and essentially own, a large portion of their assets, AIG and other behemoths should be accountable to taxpayers. When our very own Secretary of the Treasury cannot make stick his decision that AIG’s bonuses should not be paid, only one conclusion can be drawn: AIG is accountable to no one. Our democracy is seriously broken.
So, if AIG, as well as so many of our other financial institutions, is accountable to no one, then what is our government for, and why is it pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of our money into their coffers?
www.alternet.org
By Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted March 13, 2009.
http://www.alternet.org/story/131201/
In spite of the fact that these killings have gone on unabated for over 20 years, most of the country doesn’t want to know why they’re happening — least of all the people in power.
If we study the motive for Michael McLendon’s shooting rampage Tuesday, which left 11 bodies across three towns in southern Alabama, and we look at the bizarre way that the causes of the shooting are being hushed up, you begin to understand why this uniquely-Reaganomics-inspired crime started in the United States, and continues to plague us.
But of all the inexplicable circumstances surrounding the murder spree, one of the oddest has to be the way Alabama authorities went from focusing hard on solving the shooter’s motive to suddenly dropping the issue like a hot potato and running away from the scene of the crime, as if they didn’t like what their investigation produced.
On Wednesday night, investigators announced that they had discovered the motive, and they would reveal it to the world on Thursday morning.
Investigators close in on motive of Alabama gunman
by Donna Francavilla
SAMSON, Ala. (AFP) — Alabama investigators said they were closing in on a motive for the U.S. state’s deadliest-ever shooting, in which a man killed his mother, grandmother and eight others before taking his own life. The Alabama Bureau of Investigations said there had been ‘very recent developments that we believe may direct us to a motive’ for the grisly rampage, but ABI was quick to dismiss earlier reports that a hit list had been found in the house of the gunman, identified as Michael McLendon.
But then something funny happened on Thursday. Alabama investigators completely reversed themselves: They were now claiming there was no way to find out the motive for the killings, and in fact, no motive ever existed in the first place.
“There’s probably never going to be a motive,” Trooper Kevin Cook, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Public Safety, said Thursday.
Even the list that provided so many obvious clues as to what sparked the shooting is now no longer the “hit list” or list of people who had “done him wrong,” but rather, “the kind of list you’d put on a magnet on the refrigerator door,” according to Cook.
Which is odd, because just the day before, Cook told reporters, “As to motive, what we do know is that his mother had a lawsuit pending against Pilgrim’s Pride.”
Why the bizarre about-face? We may never know, because Alabama investigators abruptly closed the investigation at noon on Thursday, sending home almost the entire team. Nothing to see here folks, keep moving along.
This raises a new question: What was it about McLendon’s motive that officials wanted hushed? Or better yet: What did Pilgrim’s Pride do that could have incited a man described by all as nice, quiet and respectful to unleash a bloody killing spree?
On the surface, the horrific details seem to suggest a straightforward case of a lone psychopath unleashed: Michael McLendon, 28, shot and killed execution-style his own mother and four dogs, then set their bodies on fire before driving to other relatives’ houses and killing them; he killed a deputy’s wife and baby, along with bystanders; and like so many rampage massacres over the past 20 years, he ended his life inside of his former workplace: Reliance Metal Products, in the small town of Geneva, Ala.
Authorities say they discovered a list — presumably a hit list — of people and companies whom McLendon felt had done him wrong. Popular culture tells us that the hit list and his grievances are themselves signs that he suffered from a persecution complex, like so many Charles Mansons. No need to actually look into who was on that hit list and why — the mere discovery of such a list should be enough to indict him, case closed.
But nothing’s solved, nothing’s closed; and if we’re serious about understanding the “why” of this massacre, as everyone claims to be, then that list is the best place to start.
As with so many of these rage massacres from the past 20 years, the more you look at Tuesdays’ killing spree, the more you see that the system we’ve been living under since Reaganomics conquered everything has created all kinds of monsters and maniacs, from the plutocrats who’ve plundered this country for three decades straight, down to the lone broken worker — McLendon — who took up arms in a desperate suicide mission against the beast that crushed him.
So far we’ve learned that McLendon’s hit list names the three companies he had worked for since 2003 — Reliance Metals, which makes construction materials; Pilgrim’s Pride, the nation’s number one poultry producer, where his mother also worked, until she was suspended from her job last week; and Kelley Foods, a smaller family-owned meat-processing company from which McLendon apparently quit just last week.
Even more striking to someone who has studied these workplace massacres, it appears that McLendon was bullied and abused at work. One clue as to why he’d end his spree at Reliance, where he hadn’t worked since 2003, could be that he was trying to kill the source of the pain: workers at Reliance used to taunt him incessantly, giving him the nickname “Doughboy.” Which basically means “fatso” and “faggot” combined: McLendon was 5 feet, 8 inches tall, but he weighed roughly 210 pounds.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but “Doughboy” is the exact same nickname that workers at Standard Gravure, a printing plant in Louisville, Ky., gave to a guy named Joe Wesbecker back in the 1980s.
Like McLendon’s case against Pilgrim’s Pride, Wesbecker also was locked in an ongoing labor dispute with his company, whose top shareholders had gone on an eight-year plundering spree, leaving little for the workers; the government backed Wesbecker’s case against Standard Gravure, and he “won” his dispute, but it was irrelevant.
By 1989, the culture had changed, all power went to the CEOs and major shareholders. Standard Gravure’s senior executives ignored the arbitration rulings and continued to treat Wesbecker however they felt, slashing his pay under a different pretense, which would require a whole new round of arbitrations.
Joe “Doughboy” Wesbecker finally cracked: on Sept. 14, 1989, he unleashed America’s first private workplace massacre, pitting aggrieved worker against vampiric company, borrowing from the numerous post office shootings that had erupted a few years earlier. The result: seven killed, 20 wounded, and the death of the company that drove him to the brink. And an unending string of workplace massacres by “disgruntled employees” ever since.
Next time any asshole calls a kid or a co-worker “Doughboy,” put the bully and the bullied on the top of your next Ghoul Pool list. Bullying in the workplace, like bullying in the schoolyard, is only now being recognized as a serious problem, with devastating psychological consequences — and the occasional rampage massacre.
Conventional wisdom used to say that victims of bullying should “deal with it” since it was “just the way things are”; nowadays, after all the workplace and school shootings, anti-bullying laws and codes are becoming increasingly common.
But let’s go back to Pilgrim’s Pride, the company that the Alabama investigator first named as the possible motive for the massacre. You might have heard of Pilgrim’s Pride before, not only because you’ve bought their chicken, but because of the notorious undercover video shot in one of the company’s chicken slaughterhouses in 2004.
When you look back at that video, and you place future-rampage-killer McLendon and his mother in that environment, the gory, sadistic details take on new meaning:
PETA says its investigator witnessed workers “ripping birds’ beaks off, spray painting their faces, twisting their heads off, spitting tobacco into their mouths and eyes, and breaking them in half — all while the birds are still alive.” In one shot, workers jump on live chickens with their entire body weight, sending blood and innards splashing on the lens of the hidden camera.
Mostly, the workers appear to have been acting either out of sheer boredom with their jobs or out of anger with management, sometimes for making them work too many hours. One sequence filmed on 6 April this year [2004], shows workers amusing themselves by throwing 114 birds against a wall, their stunned bodies collecting beneath it. At one point, a supervisor walks past and shouts “Hold your fire” so he can safely pass. Once out of the way, he tells the workers to “carry on.”
So this is the vicious world that McLendon spent some two years working in, and his mother far longer. The way the company treats its chickens is a good metaphor for how Pilgrim’s Pride treats its workers, shareholders and American taxpayers.
In 2006, Pilgrim’s Pride, then the second-largest chicken processor in the world, made a huge gamble that will seem familiar to anyone who’s been following the financial crash: the company borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars, leveraging itself well beyond its means, in order to acquire a rival company and become the nation’s No. 1 chicken processor, slaughtering 45 million chickens per week.
That might have given the executives a nice, big hard-on, but it also meant they would have to come up with more money to pay for all that debt. So the company did do what every post-Reagan company has done and gotten away with: They made the workforce pay for the executives’ mistakes. That meant squeezing them for more work for less pay, or in Pilgrim’s case, more work for no pay: In August 2007, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Pilgrim’s Pride accusing them of grossly undercompensating their employees. That same year, 10,000 Pilgrim’s Pride employees launched a class-action lawsuit demanding compensation for their work.
And this is where McLendon comes in: In 2006, the year of the acquisition, McLendon and his mother filed lawsuits and claims against the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Enterprise, Ala., charging the company with illegally denying them pay for the time it takes for workers to get suited up for the dangerous factory lines, and the time to take the protective gear off. Pilgrim’s Pride had decided to stop classifying that time at the job as “work,” now that they had a bunch of Wall Street bondholders to pay off. Other lawsuits also allege that the company forced workers to work overtime but only paid them regular hourly wages.
While all of this “cost-cutting” was ravaging thousands of workers at the bottom of Pilgrim’s wage pyramid, at the very top, things were very different for chairman Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim and his little pack of plundering wolves.
Despite the chairman’s disastrous acquisition, which eventually brought the company to bankruptcy in December 2008, and despite slashing the workforce’s already-low pay, Pilgrim rewarded himself handsomely for a job well done: in 2007, Bo Pilgrim paid himself $3.2 million and $2.1 million in 2008 for his work as “senior chairman” of the board. Pilgrim’s Pride also paid Bo $1.01 million for a contract with another firm he owns, meaning he signed on both dotted lines of the contract — a clear conflict of interest that is now the subject of a shareholder-fraud lawsuit.
There’s more: In 2008, Bo Pilgrim directed Pilgrim’s Pride to pay an egg-production facility that Bo owns $775,000 in rental fees; Bo’s son, Ken Pilgrim, was paid over a half-million dollars in both 2007 and 2008 as “co-chairman” of the board; another son, Pat Pilgrim, and a daughter, Greta Pilgrim-Owens, were paid a total of over a million dollars in 2007-08 by the Pilgrim-controlled board, and little Pat Pilgrim seems to have learned a thing or two from his father, earning himself an extra half a million dollars thanks to sweet contracts between Pilgrim’s Pride and his other company.
The only reason we know about all of this corporate malfeasance — so typical in the post-Reagan economy — is because of a shareholder lawsuit filed last year. Indeed, the trajectory of Pilgrim’s wealth-plunder is a microcosm of what went on all across corporate America: first Bo Pilgrim squeezed all he could out of the workforce, and when they were squeezed dry, he fleeced his own shareholders, the unter-plutocrats, before finally crying “bankruptcy” and turning to the American government and legal system to protect him and his loot.
Thanks to the “voluntary bankruptcy,” Pilgrim’s Pride is in a much better position against all the lawsuits against it. In fact, it’s in such a good position that the bankruptcy court even allowed Pilgrim family members to be hired back as restructuring “consultants,” on company pay. And in case they were having revenue problems to pay Bo, Ken, Pat and the other vampires, the USDA handed Pilgrim’s a contract worth tens of millions of dollars in January.
How did Pilgrim’s pay back the taxpayers for this little bailout? If you’ve read the news, you’ll know the answer: A few weeks later, Pilgrim’s Pride announced mass layoffs at three plants, devastating those communities.
If you’re wondering what the Reaganomics concept of “wealth transfer from the employee class to the plutocrat class” looks like, this is it. Multiply this story by just about every corporation out there today, and there you have America.
McLendon’s killings holds few similarities to that other massacre that transpired this week in a school in Stuttgart, Germany.
One major difference between the Europe’s and America’s school shootings is that they happen all the time in America, with a frightening regularity, whereas they’re still incredibly rare in Europe — two school massacres in Finland and two in Germany, all of them unusually bloody by American standards, but none of them appear to have sparked an unstoppable trend in Europe’s schools.
That’s what makes America’s modern-day school shootings so unique — they happen so frequently and predictably (and for every shooting you hear about, there are dozens of averted shootings, shooting plots, kids caught with hit lists and duffel bags, etc., much of it covered up because they’re minors). This was exactly what the most famous school shooters, Columbine’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, hoped for when they attacked their school: “We need to fucking kick-start a revolution here! We need to get a chain reaction going!”
But whereas they’ve found a huge cult following among American kids devastated by a culture that coddles the bullies, pushes them to the limits to compete and succeed, and pumps them full of prescription drugs because mommy and daddy are themselves being crushed at the workplace — outside of America, Columbine’s influence has been sparse, as a culture like Germany’s is different from ours on so many levels.
For one thing, Germany is much more humane to its citizens than America is: its teachers are much more respected than in America, where “people who can’t do teach,” while all citizens have free health care and certain employee rights — like, for example, mandatory paid vacation time (America is the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country not to mandate paid vacation time to workers).
The difference between a common maniac’s murder spree and crimes that result from intolerable conditions and injustices is that the maniac’s killings take place in a kind of vacuum, resulting in shock but not widespread sympathy and an unstoppable ongoing movement. In that sense, the two school shootings in Finland and the two in Germany don’t seem to be anything like what we have here.
Which brings me back to McLendon. Last week, Pilgrim’s Pride suspended his mother, 52-year-old Lisa McLendon, from her job. Pilgrim’s Pride won’t say exactly why they suspended her from her night shift, except to darkly note it was a “very serious matter.” So serious, in fact, that they told her she could come back to work in a week if she “resolved” the matter to their satisfaction.
So again, what was she suspended for? This is where the corporate sadism gets surreal: According to one report, she was suspended for overstating her work hours on her time card. In other words, given her lawsuit (now no longer such a threat to Pilgrim’s while it is “restructuring” under American courts), she very likely decided she couldn’t wait for the courts anymore and decided to clock in her time spent putting on and taking off the required protective gear.
Suspending her in such a case would be a classic example of illegal corporate retribution against a worker with a labor dispute — but what can a small-town Alabama hick do, with so little money and only so much resources, against a many-headed corporate beast like Pilgrim’s Pride? The fact that Michael McLendon had the names of so many lawyers written down on lists in a spiral notebook shows that he tried going the legal route, but I mean, really, who’s fooling whom? You think a small-town Alabama chicken-plucker has a chance in hell of fighting these oligarchs in the courts?
The lead attorney in the class-action suit against Pilgrim’s Pride explained the dilemma this way:
“What has been difficult for these workers, both because of the raids and that there’s been a lot of press about layoffs at Pilgrim’s Pride, a lot of workers are afraid of retaliation for coming forward, afraid of losing their jobs,” [Jenny Yang] said. “We are trying to make sure people are aware federal laws protect them against retaliation for participating in the case.”
But anyone who understands company-labor relations since Reagan knows that companies routinely flout these laws and retaliate at will, suffering at worst a minor slap on the wrist, usually getting away with it completely.
Now that the company is under bankruptcy protection, with the same Pilgrims running the show, what’s the worst that would happen for punishing a lowly worker who made a claim? Another lawsuit? Yeah, right.
So now we can start looking at the “motive” that Alabama investigators first broke, then hushed up: Last week, Pilgrim’s Pride suspended McLendon’s 52-year-old mother from her grim night-shift job as retribution for her demands to be paid in full for her work. Almost the same time that his mother was suspended from Pilgrim’s Pride, McLendon abruptly quit his job at Kelley Foods, a meat-processing company a few towns over. Add to this another corporate attack on the locals: In mid-February, Reliance Metal Products, the place where McLendon worked until 2003 and where he ended his killing spree, quietly started laying off its workers and pushing the lucky few who still had jobs into working longer hours.
You can glean some of the anger and frustration in unofficial forums, but there’s little information in the official realm: According to a report dated Feb. 18 from a local TV station, WTVY:
Local Prefabricated Metal Manufacturer Lays Off Worker
At one time, Reliable Corp., based in Geneva, Ala., employed 800. We’re being told by those who work there that fellow employees have been receiving their lay-off notices. Reliable Corp. has been manufacturing prefabricated metal products for more than 50 years. Over recent days, News 4 has received several calls from those who’ve been laid off.
They haven’t been told if it’s temporary or if it’s a permanent job loss. In one correspondence, we’ve learned that those who’ve been laid off will meet with a delegation of company and state officials early next month in Geneva. Following the loss of a body-armor company late last year, Geneva Mayor Wynnton Melton says any loss of jobs for his city is tragic.
News 4 was unsuccessful in getting a statement from reliable officials in Geneva. In the 1990s, Geneva lost more than 2,000 textile jobs as they went to overseas’ countries. At this time, we’re not being told if the layoffs are due to the national recession. We will continue to follow this story as details become available.
As the local news crew reported, it’s almost impossible to find out any news about the layoffs because Reliable was keeping quiet. You get some clues to the answer via the three lonely comments at the bottom of the WTVY story:
Posted by: Rudy Location: New York on Feb. 18, 2009 at 4:28 p.m. — My heart goes out to the layoff victims of Reliable Corp. I found immediate advice and strategies in an iTunes app called “Pink Slip.” It helped me know my rights and keep my head during and after the meeting with HR.
Posted by: Gwynn Location: Westville on Feb. 18, 2009 at 7:56 a.m. — I have been laid off from Reliable. I have not been informed of any meetings. We were told that the layoffs were due to lack of work and that if work picked up, we would be called back to work. If work orders didn’t, we would be terminated at the end of the month.
Posted by: RELIABLE WORKER on Feb. 17, 2009 at 10:35 p.m. — Company laying off employees and giving overtime to other workers is more of a losing battle either way you look at it! Employees were told if they were called back by March 2nd, they would have a job, if not, they no longer had a job! Cut out overtime and put people back to work, not only are you hurting your employees but the city of Geneva as well. Loss of income is a loss of sales for the city. Not many jobs in the city makes people seek new jobs elsewhere. Makes you think we should have voted wet on the wet dry ballot. That would have been a lot of tax money for the city, which is now being lost by loss of jobs!
What these commenters reveal is the same Reaganomics corporate approach at work as with Pilgrim’s Pride, only scaled down in size. Everywhere it’s the same: the company only exists as a vehicle for the top half a dozen or so executives and major shareholders to plunder as many suckers — workers, investors, taxpayers — as they can soak. We know a lot less about Kelley Foods, the last place McLendon worked before his killing spree. Divorce papers from 2003 reveal that the wife of Charles Kelley, one of the principal owners, accused him of having “engaged in domestic violence” against her.
We also know that, like Pilgrim’s Pride, Kelley Foods earns a substantial amount of money from American taxpayers: $1.36 million in food contracts with the Defense Department in just three years, 2005-07. For Kelley, that’s a huge amount.
So now we can go back to the question of motive, a question that Alabama investigators are running away from: rapacious corporations that cheat their workers and plunder the company wealth, a systematic bullying that extends all the way down to the way workers treat each other, and the sadism in the way they treat the chickens. It’s a snapshot of a vicious law-of-the-jungle world, and yet it’s just plain flat reality for most Americans.
Put in this context, McLendon seems a lot less like a maniac, and more like a victim of maniacs, who finally snapped and lashed out — killing many of the “wrong” people, although judging by his list and what authorities had said earlier, he had plans to kill the right people, too.
But this isn’t something Alabama authorities would want to expose: It would pissing off a serious company which is in the middle of choosing which plants to close, and it would mean creating some very confusing and potentially dangerous sympathy for McLendon.
While much of the massacre details are a repeat of similar “going postal” attacks over the past 20 years, the way he killed his mother and family suggests that a new pattern is emerging to go with the Great Depression 2: Now, killers take their families down with them.
In today’s rampage, the shooter began by killing his mother and torching her home, then driving to where other family members lived and killing them, before ending it all at his former employer Reliable Metals. This sequence strongly resembles a couple of other recent high-profile family slayings: one in Los Angeles, which left seven family members dead in January, and another in Ohio a few weeks later, leaving three dead. In those killings, the shooter and his family were left financially devastated by the Great Depression 2.
It’s interesting that McLendon began his attack by taking out his family, but ended it attacking the source of the pain — inside the company premises, where he ended his life. McLendon’s family murders were a bit more complicated than those in Ohio and Los Angeles, however: It appears that he was very careful and respectful with the bodies of his mother and four dogs after he killed them, placing the dogs at his mother’s head and feet the way ancient civilizations buried their leaders, before setting their bodies on fire as if in a funeral pyre — as if he loved her too much to have her endure not only the aftermath of his planned attack, but a world in which she was constantly being crushed by a vampiric corporation, and a culture that nurtured such corporations.
On the other hand, he seems to have had genuine scores to settle with other family members across town, whom he shot on their porch — reports coming out indicate that a nasty divorce some years earlier had led to deepening disputes with this side of McLendon’s family, suggesting that unlike his mother, they were killed for retribution.
For years, these shootings were considered “random acts” committed by people who “snapped for no reason.” Now, hundreds of dead victims and a massive financial collapse later, we know better: They’re reactions against corporate oppression. If the super-rich and the corporations constantly squeeze their workers of time, money and health, a few of their victims are naturally going to “snap” and fight back with guns. Call it a small price to pay for looting everyone’s wealth.
Will it end? With the current economic crisis, there’s a chance the playing field might even out a little, that our culture might finally learn to stop humping the plutocrats’ legs while they plunder us and instead start biting them to get our fair share.
Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond.
